Dawn threw out one arm as she raced up to the corner. Whang! the aluminum pole of the street sign slapped into her palm, and muscle-shock tore up her arm to her shoulder as her weight swung over, out, around--she was Sheena of the Jungle, legs scissoring over the curb as she used the sign to slingshot around the corner. She took off down Main the moment she touched ground again, her feet pounding down the narrow stretch of sidewalk, breath ripping in and out of her lungs. Anyone chased by monsters on a regular basis really should go out for track. That stupid story from second period English kept running through her head, the one about the magic of getting new sneakers. She could use some magic sneakers about now. When had Main Street gotten so long? It was only a block or two from the corner of Main and Laramie to the Magic Box, but it was a block or two that stretched for miles...there!
The mouth of the alley was choked with people--Spike, Buffy, Tanner, three more crazies. Her sister's small lithe body blocked the sidewalk on one side, and Spike loomed opposite, boxing the crazies in. In two more of Dawn's flying steps the tableau broke apart, the crazies charging Spike, Buffy lunging for the one in the blue cap. Dawn saw an opening in the melee and swerved for it just as Blue Cap flinched away from Buffy. His head came up, and his rheumy eyes widened with childlike delight as they met Dawn's. He lurched forward, reaching out to embrace her with a gap-toothed grin. Dawn made a futile effort to un-swerve--Spike and Buffy performed impossible maneuvers all the time, surely she could straighten out one turn--but momentum was not her friend. She felt herself losing control, one body part at a time: feet skidding out from beneath her, arms flailing, center of balance shifting disastrously to the left.
She slammed into Blue Cap full-force, bowling him over and falling backwards onto her butt. He hit the pavement with a pained grunt, a flailing tangle of limbs and Salvation Army-reject clothing. Still reaching for her, even now--gnarled fingers with black half-moons of nails pawed her ankles. Dawn kicked free and was on her feet again with a clumsy roll-and-scramble, clipboard clutched to her chest. Buffy sidestepped her to get at Blue Cap, but otherwise neither she nor Spike gave her a second glance. Time to dump this thing. She made to skim the clipboard away frisbee-style, but a voice shouting "Dawn! Over here!" interrupted her.
Half-way down the alley, Willow leaned out from behind a pile of boxes on the loading dock, hopping up and down and waving an arm. The auburn flag of her hair burned against the backdrop of alley-grunge. Dawn dove for cover behind the dock and Willow yanked a stove-sized box emblazoned SCRYING BASINS, 1 DOZ. THIS SIDE UP in front of the both of them. She burrowed into the corrugated cavern, utterly unfounded relief flooding her as the scent of glue and cardboard evoked childhood secret hideouts, where the monsters couldn't come. She tossed the clipboard aside, drew her knees up to her chest and hugged them, trying to catch her breath.
Willow nudged her knee with the corner of the clipboard. "Keep it," she whispered. "Just in case."
"It doesn't work on them!" Dawn whispered back, making frantic beating motions in the direction of the crazies.
Willow sat back on her heels and gnawed on her lower lip. "Shoot. I never thought of that. They can see your Keyness. Stay here. We should have them under control in a minute." She started backing out, then paused, her eyes shifting from emerald to onyx. "I really need you to keep hold of that clipboard, Dawnie."
She was off, and Dawn sat there in a long-legged heap for a minute or so, trying to decide if she should just stay where she was or sneak out and try to get inside the Magic Box. Either option involved scouting, so she grabbed the clipboard again (because, really important) and crawled forward on hands and knees, peering around the edge of the loading dock.
Willow was crouching beside Tara, who was kneeling beside Tanner's crumpled body. Dawn suppressed a shudder; Tanner's breathing sounded like the drugged-up wheeze of a patient she'd had to pass on the way to visit Mom in the hospital last year. One day the bed had held a sheet-swathed lump surrounded by machines that went ping, and the next it'd been empty.
The crazy in the blue cap was sprawled on the sidewalk, and Giles had the older one in the yellow windbreaker backed whimpering against the alley wall opposite Tanner. Xander's car was just pulling up to the opposite curb, and Xander and Anya piled out and raced across to grab the third crazy, a non-descript, balding man with no convenient identifying clothing, before he could take advantage of Buffy's distraction and escape.
And Buffy was big-time distracted, but why? Dawn felt like the clue bus was coming and she'd lost her transfer. Spike knelt on the sidewalk in front of her sister, his head thrown back and throat bared like some out-take from Animal Planet, the vampire propitiating his mate. Buffy stared down at him with big frozen eyes, and Dawn didn't think she was just stupefied by the sight of that dorky striped sweater he was wearing.
Xander, still wrestling with his crazy, cleared his throat loudly and nodded at Blue Cap, who was beginning to stir. "You know, if you and the undead Marcel Marceau here can spare an invisible room to put these guys in, or even just lend us a hand--"
Buffy came to life and hushed him with a gesture. She dropped to one knee to bring herself level with Spike, the glint in her eye indicating that she was having a National Geographic moment of her own. Her hand fumbled at the clasp of her purse. Her gaze never left Spike's face as she pulled out--ohmigod, a stake, Mr. Pointy no less, you could tell because it was slimmer and sharper than the ones Xander turned out on the lathe, and sort of twisty, because for all her virtues Kendra hadn't been any great shakes at whittling, and was she going to she wasn't going to--she was going to!
"Buffy!" Dawn screamed. But no one noticed.


There were eleven heartbeats thumping away within hearing distance, and he could match each one to a name each one without even thinking about it. Jim, Blue Cap, and the Third Murderer (well, he had to call the bloke something), erratic with terror. Tanner's, slow and labored. Xander's, racing with the exuberance of youth; Giles's strong and steady but with less resilience than his younger companions'. Willow's, a wild triphammer of anticipation; Tara's, sweet and smooth; Anya's bird-quick and fierce. (And someone else? Younger, been running hard?)
The only one that mattered was Buffy's, three feet in front of him. You'd think hers would be another bird-flutter in that tiny chest, but no--the Slayer's pulse was as deep and powerful as that of the earth itself, strong enough to shake him to the bone. His sensitive ears caught the rustle of clothing as she dropped to one knee, and his whole body quivered as something hard and sharp jabbed him in the abdomen. The wooden point didn't penetrate the skin. "That's not my heart, love."
"Shut up." Her voice was brittle with tension. The stake-point slipped under the waistband of his jeans and tugged the hem of his pullover free. "Why didn't you tell me?"
"Tried," he gasped. "Couldn't." The muscles of his stomach twitched as the sharp point snaked its way upwards, pulling his shirt with it and drawing cool night air across his exposed skin in its wake.
"How long has it been?" Buffy whispered.
Spike swallowed, one convulsive bob of his Adam's apple, and heard her breath hitch. Never could see the sense in her fixation with his throat. "I can't tell you that."
"Did you get it taken out?" She leaned towards him, straddling his thighs. Her scent was a ravishing medley of blood and sweat, anger and arousal. Her pert little breasts brushed his bare chest through her thin rayon blouse. The stake-point traced its way higher, up over the vault of his ribcage, digging into his flesh slightly with every irregular panting breath he took. "Or did it just stop working?"
Hoarsely, "I can't tell you that either."
"Can't?" The deadly sliver of wood traveled up and down the line of his sternum, then wandered across to his left pectoral, drawing ever-tighter circles around the fading scar where Glory's fingers had dug through flesh and bone. His nipples went taut and he unsuccessfully tried to stifle a groan. Buffy's warm breath, smelling of orange Tic-Tacs and the second-hand traces of his cigarettes, caressed his cheek. "Or won't?" The stake-tip flicked his left nipple, then dug in a few inches above it, imprinting its mark on his skin. Right over his heart. Oh, God in Heaven, he was either going to die or come in his jeans, and either one would be a relief.
To hell with tradition; his eyes flew open to meet Buffy's. "Can't! I've tried! Tried with you, tried with Dawn--the words won't come, I--"
The stake disappeared. Buffy surged upright, taking her weight off his knees, and something small, oblong, and black rushed towards his face at supersonic speeds. Thwack! The purse smacked him across the nose and Spike lost his balance and toppled over backwards. "Next time," Buffy hissed, "try a little harder!"
Spike lay spreadeagled on the sidewalk, blinking up at her. Hey, Slayer, I can see up your skirt from here didn't seem to be the cleverest segue to a new topic of conversation at the moment. "Not going to kill me, then?" he croaked.
Buffy grabbed Blue Cap by the scruff of the neck and hauled him to his feet, hustling him towards the alley. "Maybe tomorrow."
Thus speaks the Dread Pirate Buffy. Spike sat up and got to his feet, yanking his pullover down over his middle and slapping the worst of the sidewalk grit from his duster. "You didn't ask--" The big question, the do-I-need-to-stake-you question, the question that should be first and foremost in a Slayer's mind when she finds out her demon lover has his bite back.
Buffy turned. The anger had fled, leaving her face grave and quiet. She looked up at him, moss-agate eyes searching his. "If you've killed anyone?" She'd worn that look the night she died, the night she said Come in, Spike. "I didn't think I needed to."
She turned away and Spike followed her, chest drum-tight with an emotion too deep and terrible to be joy. There had to be something he could kill, just so he could lay it at her feet.


Willow's hands clenched as Buffy leaned forward, pressing the stake to Spike's chest. The air in the alley went heavy, glassy, an oily heat-mirage shimmer of emotion. Her own appalled gasp, Dawn's shriek of warning, were both stifled under the weight of an alien anticipation. Tara sensed it and looked up from her preparations, trying to pinpoint the source of the disturbance. Then Buffy was on her feet and Spike was flat on his back and undusty. The tension ebbed away in seconds, and Willow felt the anticipation give way to a philosophical acknowledgment that something which seemed too good to be true usually was.
When are you going to tell me what is this all about? Willow demanded.
You will know within the hour .
Willow probed further, but her only answer was quelling silence. Her bravado was starting to fray around the edges. Much more of this and she was going to dissolve into a puddle of nervous goo.
Spike caught Willow's gaze as he and Buffy herded the crazies into the alley, his own still asking Why? Willow turned away, digging into a heaping helping of feeling crappy with guilt sauce. She couldn't give him whys when she didn't have any herself. She hadn't yet been able to get the vampire alone to cast the forgetfulness spell on him, and she had the awful feeling that he'd recognized the Lethe's bramble for what it was in the Magic Box. They all tended to forget that while Spike didn't normally trust magic, Drusilla'd dabbled in it. He'd helped his one-time vampire love conduct more than a few dark rituals in his day.
She couldn't even say Trust me. He would, she knew. He'd charge through a crowd of foes he couldn't fight, up a tower to meet an imminent sunrise and an unknown menace of indeterminate strength just because she asked him to. Because she was Buffy's friend, or because on some weird post-geek supernatural creature level, they shared an understanding? Or because Spike was, or had been becoming, her friend?
And she was betraying him.
Maybe. There wasn't anything intrinsically bad in keeping her role in the chip removal a secret, she reassured herself. There had to be a good reason for it, something to do with the crazy-curing spell, maybe. Maybe everything really was for the best in this best of all possible worlds, and she wasn't just playing Pangloss to her vampire Candide. She squeezed her eyes shut and breathed in, gathering calm to the center of her being and tacking it down with a stapler.
When she opened them again, Tara was draping the silver chain over Tanner's head. Her love centered the medallion of twisted silver wire and amethyst on the unconscious man's chest. Sitting back, she drew her athame from the pocket of her sweater and pulled the sheath from the short triangular blade, whispering a few words of sanctification. She held it up and pricked her forefinger, letting a single drop of blood fall on the central crystal (probably, Willow thought, the darkest spell Tara'd ever ventured) and placed the funnel over it. "With silver I find you, with heart's blood I bind you," Tara whispered. "Be sealed in this covenant till I release thee, on the names of Maktiel, and Abdiel, and Alekh-Madab." She grasped Tanner's limp shoulders in both hands and cried,

Powers of the mind, and heart, and soul!
Cunning of the fingers and cunning of the tongue!
Be ye a spring dried, a wind stilled
Be ye a fire quenched and a field made barren!

Thus I command ye, and what I say three times is so.
Thus do I bind the strength of Daniel Tanner
Thus do I break the staff of Daniel Tanner's power
Thus do I drain the virtue that lies within Daniel Tanner.
Be it so, be it so, be it so!

Light flared from Tanner's body all around the necklace, swirling into the mouth of the funnel and out through the nozzle. Tanner's eyes shot open as his body convulsed in Tara's grasp. For a full thirty seconds his rigid body was wreathed in witchlight, and then all went dark as he sagged back against the bricks. Tara's head fell forward to rest against Tanner's, and for another few seconds both of them were totally limp. Then he stirred, and Tara drew back. His mouth worked for a moment, and he wet his lips. "What... what did you..." He lifted one hand to the necklace. Sparks flared and the scent of ozone filled the air, and he snatched his fingers away.
"I've bound your magical abilities, Mr. Tanner," Tara said. "Just for the time being. We couldn't risk you doing what you did to Willow again." She ducked her head, a little embarrassed at being the focus of everyone's attention. "We really do want to help you."
The corner of Tanner's mouth quirked, halfway between bitter and humorous. "And you couldn't just toss me some spare change, or a temperance pamphlet?" He squinted up at Willow, as if she were out of focus. "Rotten. The heartwood's rotten... you silly girl, I had nothing to lose. It'll betray you. That's its nature." The dark mad eyes flicked to Spike. "Ask him. He knows. He's part of it at the root, the roots go deeper, deeper, digging into your brain and all the little moles... mole-runs in your head..."
"Is this the pointless, insane rambling, or the creepy, prophetic rambling?" Xander asked. Spike shrugged, looking baffled.
"Never got the hang of the difference, myself."
"Either way," Willow said, "we're here to go Sigmund Freud on its tookus." She turned to Tanner. "I can fix you. And them." She waved a hand at the other three crazies. "Do you get that? I can make you all better, for good, and you won't have to live like this anymore." She dropped to a crouch beside Tara and put a hand on her shoulder. "I remember what it was like, when Glory did this to her. I remember what it was like when you did it to me. It's horrible, and I want--I need to fix this. You can make it easier by helping, but one way or another I'm going to do it." Because Buffy is depending on me, and this time I won't screw it up.
Tanner stared at her for a long moment, and then his thin shoulders began to shake. He broke into a thin, scary chuckle that choked off in a half-sob. "Honor among thieves," he gasped at last. "Oh, God, kid, go ahead. Why the hell not? I should get my thirty pieces of silver, shouldn't I?" He braced himself against the wall and began levering himself painfully to his feet. "Spread the wealth!"
Willow let out a breath of relief. "Let's get cooking." She clapped both hands together. "'Get these three onto Tiphareth... that's the sephira in the center of the tree... right, that one there. See how everything comes together there? It'll all flow through that center point."
"This isn't all of them," Anya pointed out as Xander grabbed the crazy in the windbreaker and dragged him over to the central sephira. "There are more. Should we find them first?"
Willow forced herself to stop worrying her lower lip. At this rate she was going to own the west coast Chapstick monopoly before midnight. Anya was right; this wasn't even half the band, and she'd promised to cure all of them. Maybe she should have pushed for a raid on the dump after all; it would have been much easier to do all of them at once that way. Now she was going to have to come up with some other scheme for getting Dawn in position to cast the spell a second time. And speaking of which--
"If this works, I'll get you the others," Tanner said. He hobbled over to the edge of the tree-of-life diagram, wincing a little at each step, and looked down at it, frowning in uncertainty. "Spiderweb," he whispered. "Spinning, spinning..." He took Jim's elbow and urged him forward. Jim whimpered and balked, and Tara got up and came over to help. Together the two of them coaxed the three men into a loose huddle around the centerpoint of the tree. Jim tried to follow Tanner when he stepped away.
"Be still," Willow said, laying a finger on the man in the windbreaker; caught in coils of power, Jim froze in place and stood shaking on the sephira of rebirth. She wished she'd learned a little more Hebrew than was necessary for her bat mitzvah; her translations, she was certain, sucked the big one. She swallowed her nerves and stepped back. "OK, everyone--almost ready. When I call you, come stand on the sephira I point to. I need a minute to, uh, meditate." She backed over to the loading dock; Dawn was leaning against it, making a futile attempt to comb the wind-tangles out of her hair with her fingers while still holding fast to the clipboard.
"I'm such a feeb," Dawn snarled. "I totally suck."
"Dawnie," she whispered, "You don't suck. I need someone to stand on Kether. That one right there at the top. For balance. I was going to have Tara do it, but I think that first spell's pretty much drained her." She was only half fibbing there; Kether had been intended for Dawn all along, but Tara was slumped in place, her face the color of oatmeal. Dawn looked doubtful, and Willow gave her a companionable nudge. "Please? I really need someone in the top spot. It's necessary to the spell, and if you don't do it I'll have to, and it'll work better if I'm free to--"
Willow saw the doubt in Dawn's eyes vanish, replaced with determination to make up for her big scaredy running away-ness. "OK. I'll do it. Do I need to do anything or say any--?"
"Just step up when I call, and stand there," Willow assured her. "I'll do all the rest."


Dawn fidgeted beside the delivery door, twisting a strand of hair around one hand while Willow walked back over to the chalk diagram. The others formed a ragged circle around the edge. She wished she could chuck the clipboard and really participate, but somehow she just couldn't seem to get up the nerve to drop the thing. There'd be Buffy freakage, and there'd be questions, and the squirmy possibility that her sister would realize she'd been following them when they'd gone all Roman Polanski on the street corner. At least this way she could do something useful tonight.
Willow stopped at the top of the tree, bowed her head, and said something in Hebrew. Then she straightened and held her hands high overhead. "AIN SOPH AUR, from whence all things proceed, I invoke thy blessing! Addonai Elohim! I invoke the Supernals! I call on the Crown, the First Emanation! I call upon thy virtue; thou partest the veils of nonexistence. Kether!" She made a discreet beckoning motion with one hand, and Dawn edged nervously past Giles to stand on the sephira at the pinnacle of the whole design. A tingle ran through her scalp as she stepped onto the symbol, and the hairs at the back of her neck lifted.
This wasn't the first major ritual she'd participated in. She'd helped Willow raise Buffy from the dead, and she'd been hanging out around witches for years now--Dawn knew a few things about magic. The Raising had taken hours, and involved all kinds of repetitious chants and waving of hands. She and Spike had had detailed lists of instructions telling them where to walk, where to stop, what powder to sprinkle and what words to say when they got there. The description of the loa-summoning had sounded like a lot of the same thing. But here--Willow was just waving people into place willy-nilly. It felt weird, with none of the intricate buildup of word and gesture and symbol Dawn had grown to associate with really big magic.
But this was really big. She could feel the vibrations in the long bones of her arms and legs, like when she was six and her Dad took them to LAX and they parked under the flight path of the jets. Willow was already moving on. "I call upon Wisdom, the Second Emanation! Great Father, the giver of life! Through thee is creation engendered. Chokmah! I call upon Understanding, the Third Emanation! Great Mother, the nurturer of life! In thee is creation made manifest. Bineh!"
As Giles and Willow in turn stepped into place, completing the Supernals, Dawn felt the tingling surge downwards, lapping over her shoulders. Willow's singsong chant continued: "Addonai Elohim! I invoke the days of Creation! I call on Mercy, the Fourth Emanation; in thee is the Law with ruleth the universe, and from vengeance shall you forge mercy. Chesed!" Anya took her place, and the electric-wintergreen feeling skittered down to Dawn's elbows. Was this right? Was it normal? Willow hadn't exactly told her what to expect.
"I call upon Severity, the Fifth Emanation. Thou art the destruction that cleanses, that we may create anew; from thy chaos shall we forge order. Geburah!" Spike stepped gingerly into his place, and Dawn's fingers jerked as if she'd touched a light socket. Verdant sparks dazzled her eyes for a moment. "I call upon Harmony, the Sixth Emanation! Thou art the balance of all things, thou art the rebirth of the spirit. Thou restorest what is broken to wholeness! Tiphareth!"
Many-layered strata of censer-smoke drifted past, teasing Dawn's nose with the heavy drugged scent of incense. Willow was really into it now, her eyes like jet in her pale face. "I call upon Victory, the Seventh Emanation! Thou art the power of the heart; in thee we feel, in thee we love! Netzach!" As Xander moved in, Willow herself stepped onto the next sephira. "I call upon Splendor, the Eighth Emanation! Thou art the power of the mind; in thee we think, in thee we reason! Hod!"
Dawn gasped, trying to hold herself upright; her backbone was a T1 cable carrying a million jolts of energy a second. All the lines connecting the sephiroth were glowing neon serpents in rose and gold, and she couldn't tell if it was her eyes or if they were really moving. Willow's voice was inexorable. "I call upon the Foundation, the Ninth Emanation!"
Tanner, his drawn face and blank eyes making him look deader than Spike, stepped into place, and Dawn almost fell to her knees as the jolts of energy converged down there. Was this the feeling that made Buffy jump Spike on a street corner? She'd felt bits and pieces of this, thrills when giggling over Teen Beat with her friends, sweet liquid fire in her first taste of cool male lips. This was bigger, this was dangerous, the kind of danger you'd do anything to taste again. Appalling, intriguing thought: If I'm made of Buffy... Was something in her drawn to that kind of danger, too?
Willow kept going. "Thou art the channel whereby enlightenment passes from Heaven to Earth; thou art the sign of magic and of the sacred union. Through thee shall pass all things! Yesod!"
A vast soundless roar battered at Dawn's ears, or perhaps she was the vast soundless roar. The censer-smoke was underlit with green now, and in the eerie light--where was it coming from? Not Willow. She could see the whites of everyone's eyes, a sickly, glistening cerise. Willow's voice rose--or did it? It was no louder, but it filled the alley from gutter to the bruised-indigo vault of the sky overhead. "I call upon the Kingdom, the Tenth Emanation! Queen of the Underworld, thou rulest the Manifested Universe, That Which Is! Malkuth!" Buffy took a step forward and as her feet touched the last of the sephira, a circuit closed and power surged from Dawn's head to her toes.
"By this Key let every gate be opened!" Willow cried out, "Let the fire of heaven descend to Earth, and be these men healed thereby!"
And something within Dawn blossomed like a terrible flower. Her blood had razed the walls between worlds before, but then she'd felt nothing but the pain of the knife-cuts in her side. Now she was light. She was sound. She was nothing and everything. Worlds without end, an infinity of infinities, tesseracts of possibility nested one within the other--all the worlds that ever were or ever could be, and she was the reality beneath the reality from which they sprung. Power beyond measure, beyond imagining, was hers--not to command, for no Key could turn itself--but to channel.
Torrents of emerald light lashed outward, the raw unformed stuff of creation, crackling through the net Willow'd woven to trap them. The rays shot down from Kether through Chokmah and Bineh, seared through Chesed and Geburah to collide in Tiphareth and lance out again through Netzach and Hod, converge in Yesod and finally in Malkuth, and from Malkuth shoot back to Yesod once more. The Tree lit up like an insane pinball machine, energy racing from point to point and back again, growing in power and intensity with every new circuit.
In the past Dawn had wondered, idly, how things would have turned out if the monks had made her a toothpick or a Porsche or a grain of sand in the Gobi desert instead of a human girl. Would Glory ever have found her? Would the ritual for using her still have required blood, or would it have magically revised itself to suit whatever form she was assigned? She'd never know the answer to those questions, but she knew this: a toothpick or a grain of sand wouldn't feel like she did now.
The human shell that was Dawn Summers screamed and clutched at her head as the forces ripped through a form never designed to contain it, scouring her mind to the bedrock. Memories flashed past, a jumble of precious lies, things that had never happened but which defined the scope of her manufactured life. She tried in vain to grasp them before the floodwaters bore them beyond her reach. Scenes from her childhood, scenes from her teens--backyard cookouts, Buffy and cousin Celia tying her to the tree while playing Power Girl and forgetting her, the spelling bee, lying awake in the night and listening to Mom and Dad argue while Buffy held her tight, the divorce, moving to Sunnydale, Angelus's mocking eyes and sharp fangs--whirled away from her one by one and sucked into oblivion by a savage undertow of power. She was dissolving, eroding from the inside out, and no one could see her, no one could tell.
She didn't see the man in the Dodgers T-shirt stumble around the corner of the alley and stand there swaying back and forth at the sight before him, a bubbling moan rising from his throat. She didn't see Spike, staring at her through the humming beams of light, his dark brows twisted in an expression of desperate confusion. Dawn Summers was beyond seeing anything at all.
"!la muchacha verde del sol!" wailed Ramon, rushing towards Dawn and enveloping her in a bear-hug. His weight staggered her, pushing her off the sephira, and at once the net of power snapped and collapsed in a tangle of hissing green loops. Dawn, rag-doll limp, sagged in Ramon's arms while he hugged her and babbled broken prayers and entreaties in Spanish. A bone-chilling snarl of rage split the night, thin and small after the music of the spheres still ringing through Dawn's head, and a lean black-and-ivory blur tore Ramon away from her.
"Not this time, you sodding bastard!" Ramon's garbled entreaties became a scream of terror, choked off short as Spike slammed him into the pavement, fingers clamped around his throat--the grip that could snap a human neck in an instant, long before Buffy, at the opposite end of the alley, could reach him. If Buffy and everyone else hadn't been jarred off their feet by the unexpected breaking of the spell. If Buffy and everyone else weren't blinking and trying to figure out what Spike was doing with the... something, someone, nothing important.
She was still carrying the stupid clipboard, and couldn't for the life of her let go.
The vampire's eyes were flat golden coins in the dim light of the alley, and his fangs gleamed. "Spike!" Dawn choked out. She couldn't get up and stop him. All her joints were on fire. She was dizzy and aching, her whole body a taut rind of pain surrounding a ringing emptiness which yearned after the very power which had nearly destroyed it. But even before she spoke, something in his stance changed, lapsing from immanent slaughter to a relaxed predator's stillness ready to explode into violence again at any moment. His free hand went to the inside pocket of his duster for a second, and his eyes dropped to Dawn's. "He hurt you, pet. Shall I kill him?"
His tone was utterly conversational, as if he were commenting on the weather or asking her if she wanted sausage or pepperoni on her pizza. She'd fantasized about this, hadn't she? Her own pet vampire--better be nice to me, or he'll bite your head off. Only now it was real, and Spike was looking down at her with those terrible eyes and Dawn knew without a single doubt in the world that if she said yes Spike would rip Ramon's head right off, slam-dunk his skull in the dumpster and use his severed carotid for a drinking fountain. And the only possible thing that would stop him would be Buffy saying no a little bit faster, but Buffy was still shaking shards of green light out of her head and crawling over to see if Willow was all right. And the worst thing was seeing the eager, vicious light in his eyes and the way his tongue curled over the rending points of his fangs and knowing, also without a doubt in the world, that her good pal Spike was really, really hoping she'd say yes.
"No," she rasped. "No, he didn't... he kinda saved me, I think. The spell..." Her knees wobbled, and in an instant Spike had dropped Ramon and was at her side, holding her up.
"Dawn-love, you're--" He placed one palm, chill as the air around them, on her forehead. Felt so good, like pressing her face to an air-conditioned window-pane in summer. "Burning up! What're you doing here?" His eyes, blue again but no less deadly, scanned the alleyway. He glanced down at the clipboard and raised an eyebrow, then yanked it out of Dawn's hands before she could object. "Who gave you this?"
"Willow," Dawn said. Spike growled, a sound like a jaguar swallowing a rusty buzzsaw, and flung the clipboard across the alley with force enough to shatter it against the far wall. Uh oh. Willow would be pissed. Dawn's head felt muzzy. I just saved a man's life. Ramon would be little shredded bloody lumps right now if I'd said 'yes.' All Spike's cool stories about little girls in coal bins had happened to people as real as Ramon was.
"Dawn!" Buffy shrieked, scrambling to her feet. "What are you doing here? Are you all right?"
The world was starting to spin. How come she always ended up fainting just as things got exciting? It wasn't fair. "Spike..."
"Yeh, snack-size?"
"You're evil."
His face didn't show anything, and that in itself was unusual for Spike. "'Fraid so." He gave Ramon a kick in the head to make him stay down, whipped off his duster and wadded it up. "Here, have a lie-down."
Part of her wanted to protest that no, she wasn't going to lie down, this was important, but Spike's big cool hands felt so wonderful on the hot papery skin of her cheeks, and it was easier to sink down onto the cushion of worn black leather, breathe in the comforting smell of bourbon and smoke and close her eyes.
She heard her sister’s anxious voice from a million miles away: “Give her here--oh, Dawn, oh, God, Dawn...” Buffy reached for her, taking her from Spike's arms and cradling her to her chest. Small and slender as Buffy was, Dawn felt insubstantial in comparison, translucent enough to see through her own flesh to her bones. Spike gave her hand a last squeeze and got slowly to his feet.
A swirl of dislodged memories fluttered down onto the surface of her consciousness: Spike slumped in the beanbag chair in a mute, inexplicable fury, the emberglow of Willow's hair in the basement light, and the prickly-musty scent of crushed herbs. Dawn had a moment to think Waitaminute, the chip-- And then there was darkness, and it felt awfully good.


When the veils of everyday reality were stripped away, the world was a CGI wonderland of interlocking lines of force. A vast matrix of mystic lines of force, indigo, black, and violet, swirled round the vortex of the Hellmouth. Crumpled sheets of shimmering bronze and copper underlay them, power of the earth itself, too vast for any single wizard to bend to his will. The trace-lines of a thousand thousand spells cast in Sunnydale over the last century wove and tangled throughout, glowing in mauve and azure and gold: old spells, new spells, spells of ward and guard, spells to lure, spells to deceive, spells to find money and love and power, all paling before the new-cast glory of the spell she was weaving now.
Tides of magic surged through and around her, and Willow reached out, grasped them bare-handed and wrested them into the shapes she desired. No clumsy approximation of word and gesture here, no dithering over whether toadflax or motherwort would produce the effect closest to what she wanted. She was working directly with raw magic, fresh from the heartspring of the universe.
Auras shone around her--Buffy and Spike in gold and ebony, Tara in pale springtime green, Xander royal blue, Anya violet, Giles a startling black-shot scarlet. Dawn outblazed them all, a pure and endless paean of brilliant emerald light radiating outwards in all directions. Willow trapped the power in the rose and gold net of the sephiroth, bound it, shaped it, sent it singing back in complex chords of emerald and olivine. Without the strength provided by her silent partner, she could never have hoped to control this wild floodtide of power. It would have burnt her to the bone in seconds. But with it--with it she was Morgan Le Fay, Titania, Endora, all rolled into one.
She could see the traces of Tanner's brainsuck spell as sluggish bruise-colored whorls in the auras of the crazies, and of Tanner himself. The flaws in his technique were obvious, as was what she'd need to do to repair the damage to her minds for once and all. With complete assurance Willow plucked a strand of light here, tweaked a node of power there, calling on the green just as she'd called on Glory's stolen power to heal Tara. Malachite arpeggios and with descants of aquamarine danced from node to node along the net, meeting and parting and meeting again in cascades of creme-de-menthe sparks. Tanner first. Child's play to send verdant cascades of light down the ley-lines of power, focusing the energy she commanded on Yesod and illuminating a mind cloaked in the shadows of madness. The torch of her power banished the horrors back to the sub-basements of thought they'd crawled up from, forging new paths from axon to dendrite in a springtime glow of renewal.
She could sense Tanner's connection to the three crazies within the compass of the spell, and all the others as well, bonds forged of a long summer of shared misery. Willow's senses telescoped out along the lines of power. Three more in Weatherly Park, six more back at the dump, and a lone figure shambling down Main Street, goal-less and forlorn. Ramon. She knew his name, his history, could see in the mangled remnants of his mind a wife, a daughter, a life--he'd been an auto mechanic in the Chevron station on Fourth an eternity ago. And she, Willow Rosenberg, was going to return him to all that. Fix him. Fix all of them. She could do that.
So simple, so easy, to take up the reins from Tanner's lax grasp and make them her own. The spell-cords binding the crazies to Tanner lit up like a bundle of glow-sticks at a rave as she sent power flooding through Yesod and into Tiphareth. Come to me! Her partner was pleased with her; she could feel its dark rejoicing thrumming through her veins. Could she go farther? Do more? Could she just reach out, like so, reel in the cords and draw them all here...?
The cords resisted her efforts. Impatient, Willow called on more power, and it answered her summons willingly. The universe could well spare this tithe of its substance in a good cause. Somewhere someone was crying out in pain, but no matter--she'd fix that too, in good time. It would take too long to wait for the crazies to come here, she decided. Why not send healing to them directly? First to the six in the dump, then...
Without warning the spell snapped with all the force of an axe-cut hawser, and Willow howled in agony as it lashed her mind in a whip-crack of thwarted power. NO! screamed the black voice. Too soon! She was supposed to die! The Tree of Life contained and deflected the worst of the damage as Willow tumbled headlong from the exalted heights of pure magic, falling back into the confines of her own body with bone-jarring force.
At first she thought it was the black voice again, but no, it had come from outside her head. Willow realized she was lying face-down in a heap in the alley, her nose mashed into the oil-spattered concrete. She fumbled with her hands--she couldn't remember exactly how to work them for a minute--got them underneath her torso and shoved herself upright. Groans and whimpers reached her ears from all sides; only Buffy and Spike were still more or less standing, courtesy of supernatural muscle, but everyone seemed to be moving. A warm trickle crawled down her neck and her fingers came away smeared with crimson when she rubbed at it. Something had gone wrong. The crazy she'd called--darn, he hadn't been bound by the spell, and he'd blundered into Dawn, wrecking the whole thing. She'd have to start it all over to take care of the rest of them...
An inhuman yowl of rage interrupted her meandering thoughts. Seeing Dawn in physical danger must have been enough for Spike's natural vampiric resistance to spells of mental confusion to kick in. For a second he crouched over the terrified crazy, a hawk over a rabbit, his duster mantled like great black wings. A second later he'd abandoned his prey to rush to Dawn's side, and a second after that, the clipboard spun past Willow's ear and smashed into three pieces against the bricks.
Oopsie.
Buffy, just putting a hand to Willow's shoulder and ask if she were all right, froze as she realized what had been going on in front of her eyes for the last several minutes. She took off towards her sister like a scalded cat. Willow groaned and buried her face in her hands. It was all going wrong!
The chill black voice demanded, Renew the spell. Do it now, while all is still prepared.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, Willow protested. Do you fail to notice the mass disruption, here? Buffy freakage? General debilitation and achiness? No way can I put this spell back together right this red-hot minute. And what's this about the dying? No dying! Maybe we should all just take a juice break or something and calm down--
You blind, stupid little fool, the dark voice said. The Key's mortal form was to be destroyed in this spell. The vampire would then turn on you as the author of her demise, and the Slayer would be forced to destroy him. Or he would destroy her--either outcome would have been acceptable. Thus would the Balance have been restored. But now the Key lives, and-- It cut off as Willow looked up and saw Spike rise and begin a fluid stalk towards her, murder burning in his ice-colored eyes and every lineament of his body. But perhaps, it continued rather more cheerfully, all is not yet lost.


"You lied to me, Red." Half a dozen swift steps covered the distance he'd taken in a single leap going the other direction. "Told me Dawn wasn't going to get hurt. " Willow was still on hands and knees in the alleyway, looking up at him with her hair all wild about her pale, shocky face, her sweet little strawberry of a mouth hanging open. She swayed to her feet, alley dirt all over the knees of her hippy-dippy Indian-print skirt and the top that almost but not quite didn't match--never was a clotheshorse, was Red, not in her high school days, not now. Spike kept coming, step by step, backing her up against the alley wall, slapping palm to the bricks behind her and blocking her escape with his outstretched arm. She shoved at him, but she might as well have been shoving brick and steel; no one without Slayer strength could hope to budge a vampire who didn't intend to be budged.
"What happened to 'I can kill you,' Red?" He lowered his face to hers, nose to nose, and he knew it was a hell of a lot scarier that his features remained perfectly human while the look in his eyes was anything but. "Dr. Evil leave you a bit short on the old mojo?" She was bleeding from a scrape on her temple, and scarcely noticing what he did, Spike drew a finger across her cheek, held it up to the light, and licked it clean. Always suspected Red would taste divine.
Willow cringed back against the bricks. "No! I didn't mean...I never thought... Spike, you--you like me! You wouldn't--you said you wouldn't--!"
His voice dropped to a rasping growl. "I like lots of people, Red. Doesn't stop me from getting a grin out of their messy demise." He wasn't enjoying this nearly as much as he should have. Bugger. "Bloody hell, Will, you sodding near fried Dawn! What the fuck are you playing at?"
By the time he'd finished the sentence there was more bewilderment than threat in his voice, and the face before him changed. There was no other word for it; panic and confusion and horror drained away, replaced by a hard, calculating smile in a transformation as complete and profound as if she'd switched to game face. "I'm not playing, Spike. Your mistake if you think I am." Her eyes went onyx, and she drove both small fists at him simultaneously, a blow he'd barely have felt had it only been physical. The stink of ozone bit his sinuses, and black-violet lightning arced from her hands to his chest. Needles of fire and ice exploded throughout his quiescent heart and Spike reeled backwards with a scream of agony. Willow took to her heels and ran.
For future reference, Spike old lad, if Will says she can kill you, she means it. If she hadn't been weakened from the backlash of the interrupted spell, he'd be ash right now; power that could send a Harrier packing could incinerate a vampire in seconds. Hugging the excruciating throb in his chest, Spike turned for a quick look at Buffy; she was talking to a still-groggy Giles about the pros and cons of taking Dawn to a hospital or just getting her home to bed. She caught his eye: Take care of it, Spike.
For a moment he thought of bringing Tara along; she might be able to reason with Will where nothing he could say would penetrate. But Tara didn't look much better off than Dawn was, huddled in a sick soft heap on the ground with Anya fussing over her. Xander was trying to keep Tanner and company from panicking. Well, then. Looks like the cavalry is you.
Tracking conditions on Main were terrible--cold dry air that didn't hold a scent well, and hundreds of competing odors to confuse the trail. But Willow'd passed this way only a minute or two ago, and creature of the sodding night, here. Spike vamped out and stood still as death, listening with ears that could hear worms crawling in the ground below the sidewalk. He took a deep breath, held it, testing the air--Yeah. That way--and took off running, following the distant drumbeat of running feet and the fugitive scent of cinnamon.
She'd been smart, taken a corner as soon as she could to get out of his line of sight, but it wasn't enough; he caught and cornered her against a parked Mercury within three blocks. This time he didn't press his luck, keeping a wary distance between them. "Don't want to hurt you, Will--"
"Oh, don't you?" Willow said with a wild laugh. "Sure looked like you wanted to back there! And I didn't see Buffy the Vampire Layer rushing in to save me, either!"
"Bit occupied with her sis, don't you think?"
"It wasn't supposed to happen this way!" Willow's resolve face peeled away, revealing bone-deep misery beneath. "You don't get it. You can't get it. I couldn't let her down again! You don't know what it's like to be this--this boring, ordinary, mouse of a person, when everyone else around you is magic! When you'd do anything to be special, make them notice--"
Spike threw up his hands with an eye-roll that would have done Buffy proud. "Oh, give it a rest! I'm a fucking vampire, Will! How'd'you think I got this way, sent in boxtops?" He schooled his restless body to stillness again and tried for coaxing. "Come on back with me, pet, tell us what's going on and all's forgiven--you know that."
"With you? After that little performance in the alley? Incendiere!" Willow gestured and red and gold flames blazed up in a ring all around her, scorching the paint job on the Mercury, and Spike fell back with a surprised yelp. "How stupid do you think I am?"
Spike, you're evil. Well, so he was, he'd never made a big secret of the fact. "Stopped, didn't I?" he demanded. "Both times. D'you think Buffy would've sent me after you if she thought--"
"Stopped?" Willow laughed. "Come on. Got stopped, you mean. Wittle Dawnie got upset. Well, Dawn's not here, and Buffy's not here, and you don't care quite as much about the rest of us, do you?"
His hand moved towards his duster pocket, tracing the outline of the flat stiff rectangle within. "As a matter of fact--"
Willow's face underwent another transformation, from desperation to wicked amusement, unnerving in its swiftness; for a second Spike was reminded of expressions Darla used to get. The ring of flames parted for her like the Red Sea, and Willow swayed towards him. "Didn't you want to kill me there for a moment, when you thought I'd hurt your precious little Dawn? And you do like me, Spike. I can tell." Her voice had grown low and sultry, almost teasing, and her eyes were orbs of polished jet against the pale, flawless skin of her face. She walked straight up to him and slipped her arms around his waist; Spike, stunned into immobility, made no move to stop her. "Maybe it hasn't sunk in yet." She reached up and tapped a finger to the tip of his nose. "No. More. Chip."
She arched her neck, exposing the pale, perfect line of her throat, and the roots of Spike's fangs began to ache; he could feel the points of his canines digging into his lower lip. "You know you want it," Willow whispered. "It would be easy, right now, when I'm not so much with the big magic. You could bite me right here. Bite me, take me. Up against the wall. I'd scream. You'd like that, wouldn't you? How long since anyone's been really afraid of Big Bad Spike?"
Oh God in Heaven, far, far too long. Hypnotized by possibilities, his head dropped towards the delicious angle where her neck met her shoulder, lower, lower. "That's right," Willow crooned. "This is what you're meant for. You're so tired of fighting yourself, aren't you?" The blood-scent was fresh and maddening, far more so than such a small cut should have been. "You want this. You ache with every fiber of your being for the simple, sure days when you were Death incarnate, clad in power and glory. You don't have to pretend any longer. You can take what you want again. I'd be afraid," she whispered. "I'm not really into boys any longer, but you're very pretty, and maybe I'd even--"
Her scent rose up around him like an herb garden in summer, mint and cinnamon and rosemary and Willow , warm and living. Willow who'd given him a cookie to wash the Buffy-taste out of his mouth. Spike shoved her away with frantic strength. "No," he gasped, chest heaving like he'd just come off a marathon. "No."
Willow fell back through the flames and banged into the door of the car, face twisted in fury. She slammed her fist against the hot metal, heedless of the blistering paint. "Who do you think you're kidding, Spike? You want this! I can feel desire coming off you in waves!"
Spike shook himself, drawing the back of his hand across his mouth. "Sounds awfully familiar, this. Someone gave me a pretty speech just like it once before. Blah-de-blah, beast who must and will be free--soon as you do what I want you to, Spike, soon as you play fetch and carry all over Robin Hood's barn, Spike, soon as you change the leash you're wearing for the shiny new one I've got behind my back, Spike. Well, tough on you, the chip's out already and you've no more cards to play on me. And maybe I still have a yen for slaughter now and then, but you don't. You're not Will. I don't know what--"
"Oh, I'm Willow, all right," she sneered. "You think anything but what Willow wanted, what Willow decided was best, got us here tonight? This is the way it always works. I suggest, I explain, I point out the obvious--but it's always they who act. But you?" Her voice dripped scorn. "You were magnificent, once. You were an extraordinary monster. Now? You're pathetic, pretending you're on their side when everything in you cries out to be on the other. You can try for the rest of your damned existence and you'll never be good, never be more than a killer on a leash--and your leash is gone, Spike. You say you know what it is to want more? Well, more's right here." She yanked the collar of her blouse down. "All you have to do is reach out and take it. Because you can."
Spike stood trembling. That was the only reason he'd ever done anything, when it came down to it--because he could. Two years, two long years defined by can'ts-- can't hunt, can't feed, can't so much as kick someone in the shins without calling a firestorm of pain down on his head. Over now, and had it really sunk in yet? He could kill. "No."
Willow smiled, licking her own blood from her chin. "Give me one good reason," she whispered, "why not."
Spike squeezed his eyes shut, seeing the face of the woman he loved, the woman he'd live for, die for, kill for-- not kill for. I didn't think I'd need to.
In that moment he almost got it. Almost, not quite--as close as a creature of sodding darkness could come, maybe, on short notice with the smell of blood and smoke in his nose. Spike opened his eyes, and his hand went to his duster pocket again. He pulled out the envelope Lisa had given him that morning, slightly dog-eared now, and flipped it at Willow. The uprush of heated air caught it and sent it dancing across the flames for a moment before it fluttered, dipped, and burst into flame. For a brief second the bright colors of the card within showed through the charring envelope, and then they too were gone.
"Because I’ve gotten a taste for being treated like a man, Will. Or whatever you are. Found I quite fancy it. And if I want to be treated like a man, I'd bloody well better act like one, hadn't I? What the fuck has a century of being evil gotten me? Dru left me, Angelus betrayed me, Darla--that bitch never gave me anything but grief to begin with! At least I know the white hats'll stand by their own."
Willow flung back her head and laughed, a completely delightful sound. "Act like a man? You mean pausing to ask permission of a fifteen-year-old girl before eviscerating a man for... what, exactly? Being in your way? All that stands between you and total carnage again is the whim of a couple of children less than a fifth your age. Spike, Spike, Spike--if this is the best imitation of a man you can manage, what happens when they stop treating you like one?"
With that she brought both hands together with thunderclap force. The ring of flame roared up, twenty feet tall and red as blood, then winked out, taking Willow with it. Spike stood alone on the sidewalk, staring at the ring of charred pavement and blistered paint which was all the evidence left that Willow had ever been there at all, ran a hand through his soot-streaked hair and muttered, "Bloody hell. Knew there had to be a catch to it."

There was a monster in her bedroom.
Dawn lay in bed, watching him through her eyelashes. The monster had been sitting in a straight-backed chair, reading The Maltese Falcon in the dark, but at some point in the night he'd fallen asleep and slumped over sideways onto the foot of her bed. Pearly predawn light washed over the curve of his shoulder and spilled into his pale hair--another half-hour and he'd be in big trouble if he didn't wake up. His mouth was open slightly and the wire-rimmed reading glasses he fondly imagined he'd kept hidden from her over the summer were askew on his nose.
Monsters drooled in their sleep.
She felt like crap. Someone had vacuumed out her insides, and there was a weird crawly feeling in her stomach when she looked at Spike. It took her awhile to pin it down. It wasn't fear. It wasn't disgust. It wasn't shock or horror or any of the things she really ought to have been feeling while looking at a monster. It was just... the knowledge that he was a monster, a hot, embarrassed how-could-I-be-so-stupid feeling akin to the day she'd realized that Santa Claus really was just Dad in a funny suit, except with massacres. If this was adulthood, it sucked.
The door to her room eased open a few inches and Buffy's right eye appeared in the crack, followed shortly by the rest of her, slim golden hands clutching a burqa of white terrycloth tightly around her torso. Her eyes, even sans eyeshadow and mascara, were huge hazel pools in her small, sharp-chinned face, her posture drawn in brushstrokes of apprehension. When she saw that Dawn was awake, she let out a small sigh and with it some of the tension. She slipped inside, caught Dawn's eye and held a finger to her lips: Don't wake him, walked over to the window and pulled the drapes shut.
"Why?" Dawn whispered.
Buffy gave her a duh look. "Not looking forward to explaining the burnt vampire smell to the insurance adjuster when I try to claim the charred carpet on our homeowner's policy?"
"Not that." Dawn struggled upright against the pillows. Her limbs were leaden, like she had bowling balls strapped to her ankles. "I mean... OK, today you love him. But you didn't used to. Why didn't you ever kill him?"
Her sister stopped beside Spike's chair and reached down to straighten out his glasses, smoothing his hair back from his high forehead. "I don't know," she said. "I tried. Just like he tried to kill me." Buffy tugged one wavy lock free, gel crackling as she wound it around her forefinger and let it spring back into its natural curl. "I guess our hearts weren't in it."
Buffy's heart hadn't been in killing Angelus, but she'd done it. "Did you ever see anyone he killed?"
Slim golden fingers, playing through hair the color of bleached bones. Buffy sighed. "You want a catalog? Dell and Dwayne Robichaud, throats torn out. Sherri Addison's dad, broken neck. Steve Laughton's dad, broken... everything. Sheila Martini--technically Dru killed her, but Spike's the one who brought home take-out. That was Week One." The moving fingers paused. "Dawn...is something--?"
"I was just curious." Dawn sank back down into the bed and
burrowed down under the quilt, poking Spike in the nose as her feet shifted beneath the covers.
Spike woke with a snort, losing his glasses entirely as he jerked himself upright. He stared wildly around the room for a moment, yellow-eyed with surprise, then broke into a huge grin when he saw she'd woken up. "Dawn! How're you feeling, Pidge?"
"I'm OK." This was where she should reach out and hug him, because she knew Spike loved getting hugged but was too much ultra-cool vampire guy to ever admit it. Her arms just lay there like slugs on the patchwork squares of the quilt. Dawn pasted a return smile onto her face, but she didn't know what to say to him any longer, and a second later his smile faltered.
He knew. Predator's senses or just reasonably perceptive guy, he could see the wariness in her eyes and feel the new distance stretching between them. Spike swallowed, picked up his book and got to his feet, not even bothering to get embarrassed about the glasses. "I'll just be off, then, let you get some more sleep."
A pang lanced her heart as she watched him leave, leaving a hollow ache behind. She and Spike had possessed something between them that he didn't have even with Buffy, and now it was gone. Should she call him back, tease him about the glasses and try to pretend everything was the same as it had been? Only yesterday she'd have known exactly what words to use.
"I'll bring you some breakfast later," Buffy said, pausing in the doorway with one hand on the frame. "And I'll call in sick for you at school. Assuming they're open again after the whole cafeteria demon thingy. Giles says you should just try to rest as much as possible today." A small vertical line appeared between her brows as she looked from Dawn to Spike and back again, aware that something was out of kilter but unable to ascertain what. Dawn rolled over and pulled her quilt up over her ears, and after a second of lip-biting, Buffy left.
Spike remained in the doorway a moment longer, a sweet wistful smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. "G'bye, Niblet."
"Goodbye, Spike," she whispered as he followed Buffy down the hall. Did she want to cry? She wasn't sure. In the end she just lay there, empty, too tired to feel anything at all. She should have asked about Willow, but maybe Buffy didn’t know.
It took her longer than she wanted to get back to sleep.


Three drops of ink squeezed from the eyedropper, one after the other, drip, drip, drip into the pie-plate full of Evian. Willow sat cross-legged on her old bed in her old room at her parents’ house, gazing intently at the makeshift scrying bowl balanced on the coverlet before her. She passed a hand over the water. “Reveal,” she whispered. The ink swirled, forming a fractal whirlpool of indigo on the surface of the water. The Summers house emerged from the coiling lines of ink, with Spike’s motorcycle parked in the driveway, in the middle of the oil spot left by the DeSoto. She made another pass over the water, and the image wavered, but she couldn’t bring up the interior of the house.
“Are you sure you don’t want any breakfast, dear?”
Willow chewed on her lower lip. “No, Mom,” she hollered through the closed door. “I’m not hungry. I’ll fix some cereal before I go to class.”
There was a pause. “You know, Willow, if you and your...um...friend had a fight, then opening an honest dialogue is paramount to--”
Willow ground the heel of her hand into the bridge of her nose and tuned her mother’s voice out. She’d spent half of last night in a frantic casting of spells of obscuration and concealment around herself, and twice already this morning she’d felt the feeble scratchings of someone trying to penetrate them--Giles, maybe, or Anya; it hadn’t been Tara’s familiar touch. She’d had five hours of sleep, had a pounding headache, and the more she thought about last night the worse things got. She couldn't be a bad guy, could she? No bad guy was so lame as to have to run home to Mommy and Daddy with some cheeseball story about a fight with Tara, begging for a place to spend the night. No, she just needed time to sort things out, that was all.
“...so if you’re questioning your ego definition on this level, honey, maybe it’s time to...”
“I’ll think about it, Mom. Aren’t you late for work?”
There were spells of ward and protection laid about the Summers house, too--nothing too fancy, just the old standards. They coccooned the house in an intricate cat’s-cradle of rose and saffron threads. Tara had cast them when the two of them moved in; Willow had been too weakened in the aftermath of Buffy’s Raising to help. Now she could rip right through them, but the idea of wantonly destroying Tara’s work made her ache. Willow reached out with something that wasn’t her hand and began picking the spell apart, thread by thread by thread, slowly insinuating herself into the weave and allowing her own power to flow through unhindered. “Reveal.”
The ink swirls, and she is drawn into the world it inscribes upon the quicksilver surface of the water.
Willow walks. It is not she who is the ghost, but the world around her; walls part like smoke, and misty wisps of brick and stucco cling to her skirt as she passes them by. Here is Dawn’s room with its teen-aged clutter of posters and books and clothes. The hidden corners are still drifted with toys, too childish to play with and too beloved to give away. Dawn lies on the bed, the human shell of her tossing in the restless slumber of innocence lost, the ageless heart of her being pulsing raw green power for any who dares grasp it.
The part of Willow still sitting on the bed drew a sob of relief. Dawn was alive. She hadn't burnt all her bridges yet. She'd lost her way in the woods, and though the slick black voice in her head was no Virgil, maybe Tara would still be willing to play Beatrice. She could honestly claim she'd had no idea that the spell would harm Dawn. Of course, then she'd have to explain where she'd gotten the part of the spell which tapped into Dawn's power...and worse, why she'd tapped into Dawn's power in the first place. She couldn’t just go traipsing back, not without knowing more about Buffy’s mood and what the others thought had happened. Another pass. “Reveal.”
Swirl.
Buffy’s room is empty. The window is open and the morning breeze lifts the curtains, carrying away the musk of sex and blood. The scents are old, and the walls carry no echo of soft cries and sharp pleas--the bed is rumpled, but there was no sporting in this room last night, nor any room. The top drawer of the dresser is open slightly, and there are a few pairs of newly-washed black t-shirts visible through the crack. In the bathroom across the hall, there is a third toothbrush in the holder.
The vampire stares blearily at the nothingness in the mirror (his sleep schedule has been shot to hell) and draws the razor carefully along the line of his jaw; when he flicks the shaving cream off into the sink, it abruptly pops into visibility. Being a monster, he cannot truly understand why the fact of his being so troubles the girl in the room down the hall. Yet her withdrawal pains him terribly, in a manner no monster should feel.
In the master bedroom, Tara lies sleeping, curled around the empty space where her absent love should be. Her beautiful face has none of its usual serenity. She moans and cries out as she feels Willow walk unseen through the secret places of the house, reaching out with her round soft arms, and Willow shies away, fearful of waking her, fearful of breaking the spell.
Buffy is downstairs. Worry and fear coil around her, a grey miasma, but she denies them power--she is cooking breakfast; waffles enough to feed a small army, and eggs and toast (there are no strawberries, and this is a source of vast unease, because there should, there should be strawberries with waffles, but they are out of season and they have no money and the lack means she is a bad sister, a bad friend and a terrible Slayer).
There is the ritual of breakfast for sick people: Buffy brings waffles on trays, and Dawn and Tara wake and stir and pick fretfully at their food, and demand newspapers or milk or whatever Buffy has forgotten to bring. Spike comes downstairs and he and Buffy eat the rest of the waffles, syrup on hers, pig’s blood on his. They talk about last night in low voices; Buffy has grasped that the removal of the chip was not something he sought, but she suspects nothing of Willow’s involvement, and the cobalt bonds of the geas still hold Spike mute. They move gradually closer as they talk, their auras sparking, red-gold and crimson-lit ebony--
A burst of unfocused tantric energy shattered the image into wild ink-squiggles and Willow fell back, almost kicking over the pie plate with one rabbit-slippered foot. “Whoa.” She shook her head and sat up. She shouldn’t have been surprised; two supernatural creatures of diametrically opposed natures making whoopie was bound to produce a few mystic aftershocks, especially when supernatural creatures in question acted like they’d spontaneously combust if they went for more than twelve hours without an orgasm.
Willow slumped a little and rubbed her eyes. Should she try the Magic Box? The shop had far more effective wards, though, and she wasn’t sure if she could hack them without alerting Giles. Besides, she had a mission: find out when Tara was recovered enough to talk. The squicky fascination of spying on your friends was just bonus material. She attempted to visualize the kitchen again and got one fleeting glimpse of Buffy licking syrup off Spike’s chest before another wild surge of static kicked her out again. It was impossible to spy effectively when she was constantly forced to pan to fireplace. I’m never, ever going to eat off the dining room table again.
Periodic checks in the scrying bowl over the remainder of the morning revealed that when Buffy and Spike were alone, they were groping each other 75.3% of time. Spike made another attempt to give Buffy grocery money, and the fifteen-minute argument over same culminated in the wig-inducing spectacle of Buffy taking the money and roaring off in the Cherokee. No wonder Spike used to get so disgusted when we foiled his plans. Possibly insane, power-mad witch on loose, Slayer on major shopping spree at Albertson's. When Buffy returned, Spike had thoughtfully cleaned and oiled her various implements of destruction, and was on the phone with Clem, having a mysterious conversation about customers and the fact that someone named Teeth wasn’t going to like it, whatever it was. The two of them spent the rest of the morning doing exciting things like dishes, laundry, and each other on top of the dryer, which shorted out the scrying spell again (and a good thing too). Even Slayers and vampires had to spend ninty percent of their lives doing everyday ordinary stuff, or at best supervising minions who did it for them, but watching them at it was boring beyond belief.
An hour later, Willow sat in the back of the darkened Art History 302 lecture hall, watching the slides of Rosso's "Descent From the Cross" melt into Parmigiano's "Madonna With The Long Neck" on the screen and listening to Professor Alpert drone on about the philosophical underpinnings of the Mannerist school of painting. She scribbled out 'Mannerism -- 1525-1600. Artist's inner vision supercedes twin authorities of nature & the ancients. Deliberate physical & spatial distortions employed to make aesthetic point.' She could relate to that. She felt distorted out of all recognition. She could look back over all the things she'd done over the past two weeks and see that each individual decision made sense as she made it, but when she put it all together, the picture was subtlely off. Pretty sure that begging Spike to kill me isn't normal behavior. Her fingers tightened on her pen, and Willow added, 'Kid in painting looks dead. Gross' to her notes.
Except...she'd wanted it. Even as she'd listened in horror to the words pouring from her mouth, something within her had exulted when Spike's fangs grazed her neck, and wailed in abandoned fury when he pulled away. You didn't want to bite me, I just happened to be around. But ugh, ick, blech, that couldn't be her! She didn't want to die!
Of course not.
The girl in the seat in front of her turned around and smiled at Willow with her own face gone ridged and fangy. "But you’re sure he wouldn't have left you dead. I work with what I'm given, oh Willow-titwillow-titwillow," she said with a pout. "Some little part of you wonders what it would be like to be immortal and invulnerable--is that my fault?"
Willow bent over her notes, and whispered, "One: Shut up. Two: Leave."
The ebony voice purled through her skull, closer than her skin to her flesh. Leave? As well tell your shadow to walk away. I am within you, I am of you, as you are of me. We are one now, of your own free choice. A choice that cannot be unmade. I have given you everything you desired, have I not?
It had. She could still feel it, a La Brea Tar Pit of dark power bubbling away beneath the surface of her soul. But she couldn't use it. She buried her face in her hands, grateful for the darkness of the auditorium. At least she'd completed her three tasks, and the bargain wasn't hanging over her head any longer.
An amused chuckle reverberated through her mind. Isn't it? There remain eleven of Tanner's people who are still quite mad. Until you have used the Key's power to cleanse their minds, your bargain remains unfulfilled and your power is only on loan.
"I don't want your stupid power anymore!" Willow hissed, attracting stares from her classmates on either side. Cheeks flaming, she oozed down into her seat.
"Does that matter any longer? You have it. And it cries out for use." Willow swallowed a shocked yip; Professor Alpert had been replaced by Jenny Calendar. None one else seemed to notice anything peculiar; the rest of the students were dutifully scribbling notes about the stylistic contrasts between Mannerist and late Renaissance art. Jenny leaned forward, arms folded against the podium, and smiled. "But let's not get hung up on details. What I want, Willow, is to restore the Balance. Have you forgotten that it's still in danger?"
Well, boo big flipping hoo, Willow shot back. I may be special needs girl for not figuring this out sooner, but the whole 'let's kill your best friend's sister for the good of mankind and if that doesn't work attempt suicide by vampire' thing kind of gave it away. You're not working for the same side Whistler was, and if you think I'm going to kill Dawn or Buffy or even Spike to fix your precious Balance, you're crazier than Tanner!
The illusion of her high school Comp. Sci. teacher sauntered over to the AV screen and tapped it with her pointer; the cool formalism of the long-necked Madonna was instantly replaced with an overhead view of Sunnydale. Jenny indicated the wreckage of the old high school. "The side I represent is irrelevant at this point. If the Balance isn't restored, then the Hellmouth will turn itself inside out in a matter of weeks. The forces of Light will over-run Sunnydale and slaughter the forces of Darkness, and anyone they see as having aided the forces of Darkness." She smiled, delighted by the prospect. "Do you have any idea how many demons live in this town, or how many people they deal with every day, all unawares?"
Willow gripped the arms of her seat and said nothing. Faux-Jenny continued, "Now, I'm not going to ask you to interfere on my behalf. Oh, no--that wasn't part of our bargain, and I always keep the letter of my promises. I don't even object to the slaughter. There are always more demons to be had. I'm just pointing out that our bargain is not complete, and at the moment, my advantage is your advantage. Unless you want to see your town laid waste... for its own good."
Luminous shapes with wings of light and swords of flame mow down students like wheat. The wind carries screams and the charcoal stench of burnt skin. She stands knee-deep in blood as arcane energies bath the skies overhead and bodies boil and explode from within like turkey giblets in a microwave. The campus is a demonic Arlington, an endless field of corpses human and otherwise, bloated and rotting in the pale winter sunlight. Flocks of ravens fight seagulls for the eyes of the fallen... She was hyperventilating and everyone was looking at her funny. You're lying.
"No. I may not tell the whole truth, but I've never needed to lie to you."
Oh, right. Like 'Dawn won't be harmed if you use her power to cast this spell,' which is totally true, except for the part about Dawn not being harmed?
Jenny sighed and tossed her dark curls over one shoulder. "Harm is such a relative word. The Key cannot be destroyed, only transformed. By all means let's wait and do nothing, Willow. Buffy waited, and that worked so well for me, didn't it?" Jenny's eyes bugged out and her smile split into a hideous death's-head grin, drooling blood as her head lolled broken-necked to one side. Willow jerked backwards, scrambling half-way over the back of her seat with a shriek.
"Hey!" yelled the boy beside her. "Take a pill, will you?"
"Silence!" Willow snarled, fingers crooking in menace, and the boy's words choked off. He clutched his throat in panic as she gathered up her books and ran out of the auditorium.


It was late afternoon when Tara descended the stairs, feeling as shattered as Picasso's nude. She'd slept off and on all day, rousing groggily when Buffy brought her sandwiches, but her brain was still floating several feet above the top of her head. Disjointed scenes from last night were starting to bubble one by one out of the foggy pit of her skull, brightly-colored blobs in a mental lava-lamp.
Buffy cradling Dawn in her arms, tawny blonde hair spilling across chestnut brown. The girl's body was frail and hollow as the shed husk of a cicada.
Dizzy kaleidoscope of buildings and streetlights flashing by outside the SUV's windows. Hands, warm and cold, hauling her out of the car and upstairs.
Spike limping up scorched and shaken, his pale skin flecked with ash and the diamond-sharp angles of his cheekbones blunted with soot, a charcoal sketch of defeat.
Power surging through her, far more power than Willow should have been capable of summoning up. Power recoiling as she realized to her horror that Dawn had been standing on Kether from the beginning of the spell.
Xander flying at Spike, demanding to know what he'd done to Willow, and Spike turning on him with a wild-eyed snarl. Giles separating the two of them with a sharp word.
A hundred desperate repetitions of Where is she? I have to find her! which no one would answer.
Voices drifted up to meet her, tone poems without meaning, Buffy's clarinet-crisp and light, Anya's staccato brass, Spike and Giles's tenor and alto sax... what was Xander? An accordion? A trombone? Tara repressed a giggle, afraid that if she started to laugh she'd never stop.
"...should've noticed sooner. Kept thinking there was something missing, and it turns out to be Dawn. What's the bloody good of..."
"None of us noticed." That was Giles. "Willow's an extraordinarily powerful witch, more than capable of tailoring the spell to affect you as well as the rest of us. It's difficult to cloud a vampire's mind, but not impossible. Especially one as, er, lacking in mental discipline as you are." Spike growled, but said nothing. "Dawn's young and healthy; she should recover, physically at least."
"At least?" There was a worried edge to Buffy's voice. "There's an other than physical?" There was a rustle and a creak, as of bodies rearranging themselves on furniture, and a soft indrawing of breath from Spike. "Does that still hurt?"
"Not so's it matters. She hadn't much juice left to hit me with, thank God for small favors."
She? What she? Couldn't be Willow. Not possibly, not Willow who donated to Amnesty International and had frog fear and wouldn't shop at WalMart and hadn't wanted to shoot the horsies. Willow didn't hurt things. No, no, no... "Second bloody shirt I've done for in as many days."
Tara rounded the corner into the living room. Giles was leaning up against the mantelpiece in a brown study, glasses in hand, studying them as if they were the last artefact of a ancient demonic civilization. Xander and Anya were scrunched up together at one end of the couch, and Spike was scrunched up next to Buffy at the other end. The no-man's-land in the middle was divided by a Maginot Line of half-folded laundry, stacks of black jeans, black t-shirts, and not-quite-so-black button-down shirts. The charred remains of Spike's striped sweater were stuffed haphazardly into the nearest wastebasket, and he was matching up pairs from a tangle of identical black socks. Every eye was on her, and Tara wanted to sink into the floor. Unfortunately she couldn't muster the magic to sink a toothpick into cream cheese right now.
"Tara!" Buffy leaped to her feet with desperate cheer. "You made it down!" Before she could protest, Tara found herself the target of a whirlwind of overwhelming Slayerly concern--Buffy wasn't exactly good at the whole nurturing thing, but she really, really tried. Five minutes later, she was ensconced in the armchair with Xander tucking one of Aunt Caroline's afghans tucked around her. "Here you go!" Buffy plunked a glass of warm milk (microwaved) a bowl of soup (Campbell's tomato, woefully lumpy) and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich down on the nearby end table with a bright smile.
"You shouldn't--" Tara started, but Buffy waved her objections away.
"No big. Your girlfriend's gone postal; the least I can do is provide comfort food. Is peanut butter OK? Do you need anything else? Green vegetables? I went shopping this morning, and I think some of the stuff I bought had leaves attached. Would you rather have chicken soup? We have cans; I can do cans--"
"And if you need a nip or two to set you up--" Spike indicated his hip flask and his heroic willingness to sacrifice the contents to her well-being.
"Um... thanks, but I already feel like I have a hangover." Tara picked up her sandwich and took a dutiful bite. If she didn't eat now she'd regret it tomorrow. Everyone was being extra-nice, even Spike, which always heralded badness.
After several minutes of furtive looks and strangled 'You!' 'No, you!' noises, Giles lost the battle for non-dominance and cleared his throat. "Tara, I'm sorry to press you on this so quickly, but is there a chance that you can cast a location spell to help us track down Willow?"
Tara held her sandwich in both hands and stared at the blob of grape jelly oozing slowly out from between the crusts of bread. Sugar and starch and protein, just what she needed, however unappealing the thought of chewing and swallowing was right now. "I... probably not for another day or so. I'm pretty much drained. You can't--?"
But Giles was shaking his head. "Anya and I made the attempt this morning. To make a long story short, we failed. All else being equal, Tara, you have a far more personal connection with Willow than I."
Once. Not anymore. Did she look as wretched as she felt? She had no idea who Willow was anymore. Had she ever known? And if she no longer knew Willow, who on earth was Tara McClay? "I--I'm not even sure what... I know the spell went bad. I don't know if Willow's..."
"She's fine," Xander said. Everything but his voice was screamed that Willow was anything but. "Fine." Anya squeezed his hand and for a second Tara hated them both, because they were all coupley and together and Willow was gone. "She was just... startled. By the end of the spell. She needs space. Spike went after her. Which is totally wrong. I should have gone. I--"
"I blame myself," Giles said, rubbing his eyes. He hadn't taken the kind of hit that Dawn or Tara had, but he did possess a modicum of magical talent and hadn't escaped the spell's backlash unscathed. "I should have supervised her more closely after--" He glanced across the Summers' dining room in the direction of the kitchen, where Buffy was attacking another loaf of bread as if it were all the fiends of hell. "The first... incident."
"You shouldn't," Tara protested. She shifted in the armchair, pulling the afghan closer around her shoulders against a sudden chill. "If anyone should have realized what was happening, it's me. I knew how hard she took losing her magic, I knew it was suspicious that she got her powers back all of a sudden--" A sob gathered in her throat and Tara forced it down with peanut butter.
"Ah, kitten, we all cocked up," Spike said.
"Some of us more than others," Xander muttered. "Captain Wrong-Way Peachfuzz here seems to have confused 'bring her back' with 'scare her off.'
Spike bristled. "Oh, sod off, Harris. Teleporting's not among my many talents. We'd better find her fast, though. Something nastier'n I am's got its hooks in her."
Tara ventured a timid interruption. "What happened to Mr. Tanner and the others?"
Xander glared, rubbing his temples. "They got away while I was helping Giles get you and Dawn into the SUV."
"Highly effective lot we are," Spike said with a derisive snort.
Xander honed his glare on the back of the vampire's skull for a few minutes, then accepted the lack of a direct attack as tacit truce. "Yeah. Finely tuned machine."
Buffy returned with more sandwiches, which she started passing around like rations. "So, to sum up--Willow may or may not be under the control of something yicky which may or may not be providing her with her nifty new powers, but she absolutely for sure involved Dawn in a way dangerous spell which almost killed her. This after yanking me back to life without a permission slip, and nearly dusting Spike in the process." Her lips thinned. "I think I need to have a little talk with Will."
Giles replaced his glasses. "Spike, perhaps you'd better fill Tara in on the details of your final encounter."
The vampire's jaw clenched. His eyes never left the pile of socks as he ran through a brief description of his conversation with Willow, or whatever was wearing Willow at the moment. Tara listened with mounting horror. "You... you mean your chip's not...?"
"Gone the way of the dodo," Spike said.
"And you almost killed Willow." Tara found she was shaking, alternating waves of fear and anger racking her shoulders. "My Willow."
Spike finally looked up, his eyes bleak as Arctic ice. "Yeh. That about covers it."
"So excuse me," Tara said, her voice cracking with the effort to hold it steady, "Can someone explain why all of you are so worried about what Willow might do? OK, putting Dawn in that spell was bad. Really bad. But I know she didn't mean for Dawn to get hurt!" She flung off the afghan and swayed to her feet. "Willow's got problems, but she's a good person! She cares about people! She wants to help them, she wants to fix things, and sometimes she goes too far--" A beseeching look at Buffy, who was sitting stone-faced on the couch, her folded arms a barrier across her heart. "She does bad things sometimes, but she's good! And Spike--I'm sorry, I like you, you've helped us a lot, but--but--you're not. Willow almost killed one person last night--you almost killed two. So--"
"You know, she's got a really good point there, Buff," Xander said. "We got any guarantee the Peroxide Wonder here isn't planning out the week's menu with us as the main course as we speak?"
The iron bars of no argument slammed down in Buffy's voice. "That's enough, both of you! In case it's escaped your notice, Spike's the one here, helping--"
Spike rose from the couch, all lithe black-clad grace: ...black as the Pit, and terrible as a demon, was Bagheera ... He faced her, a terrible demon indeed for all that his face was as human as her own. He reached up and stroked her trembling cheek, his nostrils dilating as he drank in her fear-drenched scent. His fingers were cool and dry. He smiled, and the expression managed to be horrifying and heartbreaking at the same time. "No, pet," he said, and though his eyes never left Tara's he was speaking only to Buffy. "She's right. Just like Will was right. Clever birds, the both of them."
And he was gone, just like that, between one breath and the next. "Spike!" Buffy cried. She grabbed an armful of afghan from the back of the couch and was gone too, almost as quickly, and Tara was falling backwards into the armchair and Giles's and Xander's arms, sobbing as if her heart had not already broken.


Spike's motorcycle was still in the driveway, crouched in the shadow of the Cherokee, but he was nowhere in sight. Buffy ran down the front walk, her eyes going automatically to the oak tree where she'd so often caught him standing in the past, but there was no trace of him, not even a trampled cigarette butt in the grass. The last molten sliver of the sun was still visible above the horizon, but it would soon be gone, and the shadows were already plenty long enough for a vampire as indifferent to his own flammability as Spike was. Maybe she wouldn't need the afghan after all, but she wasn't taking any chances.
He couldn't have gotten far. The whole blurry-vampire-speed thing was only good for a block, tops. Had he taken to the sewers? Which way would he have gone--back to the crypt, or--? She didn't have to guess. Buffy closed her eyes and concentrated, and a thrill ran down her spine, out through every nerve and back again: not just vampire nearby but Spike, right there , magnetic north to the lodestone of her soul.
She found him beneath an olive tree at the edge of the little park on Cavenaugh, lazing against the treetrunk with hands in pockets, his head tilted to meet the gnarled bole. He was still as only the dead can be still, an unliving shadow among the silver-grey sprays of olive leaves, and though he was standing in plain sight, eight people in ten would have walked right past him. A cigarette smouldered between his lips, half an inch of ash undisturbed at the tip. A thin tendril of smoke curled upwards to wreath his head like some infernal halo.
Half a dozen children were racing around on the other side of the park, playing some complicated game of tag through the monkey bars. Their distant shrieks of laughter cut the air like the cries of tropical birds, a sound far more exotic to Buffy's ears than the roars of demons or the wailing of the damned. Spike watched them across the straw-colored expanse of dead Bermuda grass, and a shudder ran over his body, ravenous yearning and revulsion entwined too closely to distinguish. He didn't move, didn't speak as Buffy approached, but she was certain that he sensed her presence as surely as she'd sensed his. After a moment one languid white hand rose to his mouth, and she saw his cheeks hollow and his chest expand as he took a drag on the cigarette.
"I could walk over there," he said very softly. "I could walk over there, and I could kill them all before the last one had time to scream. Not going to. But I could."
All her senses were focused on the tremor in his voice, the glitter in his eye, the tension in his every muscle--once more Spike was the only real thing in a universe of shadows. Buffy folded her arms across her chest and regarded him, unafraid, but... watchful. "Spike, haven't we had this conversation?"
He turned to look at her, the corner of his mouth twitching upwards. "We will never stop having this conversation, Slayer." He peeled himself off the tree trunk and set off in an aimless zig-zag across the park, stalking along with his head down. Buffy followed, speeding up to keep pace with his longer stride. The few stars visible overhead were hard brilliant points of light, and the waning moon now rising over the rooftops to the east was still bright enough to paint long black shadows on the grass to vie with those drawn by the nearby streetlights.
"I keep thinking I've got the answer, you know?" Spike flung his cigarette at the nearest Requiescat in Pace. "And every bloody time I think I've got it pinned to the wall, the question gets more complicated. I didn't kill anyone last night! Supposed to be a good thing, right? What we're aiming for here, keep old Spike on the straight and narrow? But the Bit’s looking at me like I'm something a dog wouldn't roll in, Glinda's set to give me a mystic bitchslapping, and let's not forget Xander 'Stake 'Em All And Let God Sort 'Em Out' Harris--"
They'd left the park behind and were walking along the berm next to an irrigation canal. A five-foot wrought-iron fence ran along the bottom of the embankment, and ranks of stately junipers marched off across the manicured grass beyond, dividing the rows of headstones--no elaborate carvings or monuments here, just discrete flat rectangles of bronze or polished granite. She didn't have the disguise spell on, but as long as they were out, they ought to make themselves useful. She tugged Spike after her and slid down the embankment, and a moment later they were over the fence and strolling through the cemetery, alert for movement, though chances were that Spike's continuing tirade would scare off anything with ears.
"Yeh, if it'd been anyone besides Will last night, there's a chance I'd've killed them!" The vampire aimed a wild sweep of his arm and a belligerent glare at the nearest juniper, daring it to make a move. "You know how that makes me feel? Like dog's dinner, that's what, because it would tear you and Dawn to shreds if I had! But part of me's screaming 'Only a chance? What happened to rock solid certain?' and another part's off blubbing in a corner because it was Will and I almost did kill her--" His voice held a rising note of panic. "There's nothing I do feels right anymore! I know I've buggered things up with Dawn, but I don't understand why! It was so simple with the chip. Didn't matter what I felt, what I want, try anything with a human and I'm flat on my arse with a migraine, and now I have to bloody think about every sodding move I make!"
Spike strode over to the hummock of new turf which signified a recent grave, bent down and plunged a fist through the grass, halfway to his elbow into the soft earth below. He hauled the dazed fledgling who'd been in the process of clawing her way free up in a shower of damp clods. "I'm doing the best I bloody well can here!" Spike bellowed to the graveyard at large. "In fact, better! I've twisted my insides into a sodding pretzel, and it isn't good enough! Did it right, didn't I? Didn't do anything evil. Didn't kill either of 'em, and I wanted to--it's the wanting to, isn't it?" he snarled at the newborn vampire, who nodded her head in desperate agreement seconds before Spike ripped it off with a roar of frustration and tossed her disintegrating body aside like a rag doll. "Bloody buggering hell, I can't change that!"
"Damn it, Spike!" someone said in an aggrieved whine. "That was our minion! It took us a year to find a good one!"
A matching pair of older vampires materialized from the shadow of the largest juniper, looking more nervous than menacing. They were dressed in a patchwork of worn shirts and out-at-the- knees jeans, and one of them was wearing a knit green wool cap that made him look like an undead Michael Nesmith. Buffy choked back a squeak of totally inappropriate laughter--it was the same timid, scruffy pair of vamps Spike had dragged her after last winter, on the ill-fated 'date' preceding the whole Drusilla-and-chains incident. Damn it, she should have sensed them. There were disadvantages to having Spike's electric presence thrumming through her system twenty-four seven; other vampires were starting to pale in comparison unless they were right on top of her--definitely not a position she wanted to encourage. Buffy whipped her stake out of her coat pocket and dropped into a fighting stance.
"Oh, fuck, it's the Slayer!" Scruffy #1 took to his heels, and after a gape-mouthed moment Scruffy #2 followed his example.
"Right, I've had about enough of you pair of limp-dicked would-be wankers!" Spike howled. "You're for it, the both of you!" He tore off after them.
Buffy beseeched the heavens for patience or the ability to fake it, and dashed after, the red and blue pinwheels on the afghan flapping behind her. The chase led into an older part of the cemetery--the Scruffy Twins were heading towards the moonlit limestone bulk of an open mausoleum. Buffy leaped over a tombstone, plunged her stake between Scruffy #1's shoulderblades, and spat out a mouthful of vamp dust in time to see Scruffy #2 dive for the marble lid of the sarcophagus in the center of the mausoleum. Spike grabbed him by the collar, yanked him back and slammed a fist into his jaw. The other vampire made a wild swing at Spike which Spike didn't even bother to block. Lips skinned back over his teeth in an insanely joyful grin, Spike delivered three swift vicious blows to Scruffy's gut, grabbed him by both ears as he doubled over, and bashed him face-first into the sarcophagus. There was a wet crunch; teeth flew and a spray of dark crimson splattered across the pristine marble. Scruffy slid bonelessly to the ground in a smear of blood and mucus, moans of pain bubbling out of his ruined mouth. Spike licked his lips and stepped back, breathing hard, to survey his work. He looked up at Buffy and smiled, a heavy-lidded look of satiety. "Now this," he purred, "this is more like. I don't bloody think. I bloody fight and fuck and feed and beat the shit out of things."
As he met her eyes and saw the shock on her face, the smile vanished, replaced with sick self-loathing, and all of a sudden Buffy knew with complete and equally sickening certainty exactly what was coming next. Lips compressed to near-invisibility, she walked up the mausoleum steps, knelt beside Scruffy and drove the stake into his heart, ignoring the sudden wrenching emptiness in her own. She stood and faced Spike, fists planted on hips. "Really," she said, then realized she was still clutching the afghan--the Linus Van Pelt vibe had to go. She tossed it away and smashed a hard right into Spike's nose with force enough to rock him back on his heels. "'Cause I think we can do better than that.
"OW!" Spike reeled back and clapped a hand to his nose. "What the bloody hell was that for?"
"Got your attention, didn't it?" Buffy danced back on her toes, crooking a finger in a come-hither gesture. "I'm just a little bit pissed off right now, Spikey. Just a tad." She lunged forward and Spike leaped to the top of the sarcophagus, staring at her all wide blue-eyed shock, as if she'd lost her mind. She leaped after him. Spike blocked the right to his jaw, dodged the left to his solar plexus and fell for the kick which swept his legs from under him. He fell on his ass, hard, and immediately kicked out to sweep her own feet out from under her. Buffy leapt over his shins. Spike jackknifed up in one of those flashy moves everyone thought was a vampire thing but was more likely attributable to those two hundred crunches a day, caught her ankles in mid-leap and flipped her backwards.
Buffy landed on her back, twisted sideways to avoid Spike's grab at her wrists, and was on her feet again with a roll. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a glimpse of a shape in the graveyard beyond, a vast half-translucent figure like the shadow of Ghede which had followed Tara before possessing her fully. The woman stretched, her dark limbs gaunt and muscular against the sky. She rose from her bed of bones, her hair a wild veil across her face--was it slashed across with white clay? Behind her a male figure strode out of the night, pale as death and bearing at his side a drum. His footfalls and the slap of his palm on the drum-head were the sounds of cities falling to ruin. The woman held aloft the severed head of a slain demon in her left hand, and in her right the knife which still dripped with its blood. She threw back her head and laughed, red tongue lolling from her sharp-toothed maw. The necklace of skulls which was all she wore rattled like dead leaves, and the smell of burning flesh was on the wind as she danced to the pounding beat of her ash-white consort’s drum.
"What the hell is wrong with you, Slayer?" Spike yelled. He was on his feet again, skirting one of the corner columns of the mausoleum, and Buffy forgot the nebulous shapes in a fresh wave of fury. It was only another god sighting, and they never did anything but hang around looking portentous, so who cared?
"What's wrong with me?" She feinted right and aimed a devastating wheel kick at his head. "Listen to yourself! Pot insulting kettle's color scheme much?"
Spike rolled with the kick, blocked a follow-up punch and got a nasty jab to her stomach through her guard. "Better talk to myself than you," he said between clenched teeth, "I'm the only one in this bleeding conversation making any sense!" Buffy kicked him in the kneecap and dodged his two-handed blow to her jaw--not quite fast enough. She staggered backwards, faked a stumble, and flipped him head over heels. Spike dragged her down after him, slammed one size-12 Doc Marten into her belly and flung her halfway across the mausoleum. Buffy sprang to her feet, scarcely feeling the impact, and dove at Spike. He met her with an exultant snarl.
The fight developed a rhythm sensuous in its complexity, thrusting and blocking, striking and feinting. Buffy gave herself up to it. It was good to be pushed this hard and fast, good to watch the yellow light flicker in his eyes as they circled, good to watch the bunch and slide of muscles in his arms and chest. Either Slayer's blood was some kind of vampire steroids, or she wasn't the only one who'd put on a little extra muscle in the last month, because when he landed a blow, damn, it hurt. And that was good too, in the weirdest possible way. Sick as it was, she'd missed this. It had been years since she'd fought him, really fought him, and she'd forgotten how swift and deadly he was, forgotten that the only thing better than fighting with Spike was fighting with Spike, and the only thing better than fighting with Spike was... OK, hadn't forgotten that part, but oh, that was lost forever now because--because--
Vast inhuman shapes, light and dark, danced behind them, slashing patterns of horrible beauty across the night sky. For a second they broke apart, panting, and the divine shadows which mimicked them did likewise. "Is this about anything in particular?" Spike asked. "Or have you just gone off your nut?"
"Like you don't know!" Buffy gasped. "I have this one by heart, Spike! I can sing all twelve verses from memory! 'It's too haaaaard! I can't do it without the chip, or with a curse, or when I'm not super-soldier!'" She vaulted over the sarcophagus and drove both bootheels solidly into Spike's midsection; he went down with a strangled 'Oof!' grabbed her calf and yanked her after him. "So which is it going to--ung!-- be, the 'Guess I'll go evil' speech or the 'I'm no good for you' speech? Or hey, why not combine both? Then you ride off into the stupid sunset on your stupid Harley for my own stupid good, and I h-hope it fries you, you stupid, stupid... GUY!"
Spike caught Buffy's wrist, flipped her around, wrenched her arm up behind her back, and pinned her down on the lid of the sarcophagus, his whole weight thrown into keeping her off-balance. "Bloody right it's too hard," he hissed, and it was obvious he wasn't talking about life in general. "And for the mercy of Christ, it’s not a Harley, it’s a sodding Triumph Bonneville! Where'd you get the fuckwitted idea I'm going anywhere? Or giving up? What was the first thing Angelus told you about me, love?"
Buffy rammed an elbow into his gut and twisted free, glaring at him. "That once you started something, you..." She gulped, and Spike’s whole expression softened at once into that terrifying killer's tenderness as he took in the pain in her eyes. If her churning insides were any indication, a similar merry-go-round of emotion was whirling across her own face. "...you don't stop until everything in your way is dead."
"Yeh, well..." His voice had gone husky. "He was right, if you replace 'dead' with 'sorted,' and add in 'unless he gets bored or something good comes on telly.'" They stood there, eyes locked, frozen in place. Spike's hands slid from her upper arm, over one breast and down her stomach, fingers brushing lightly over her aching nipple, sending little jolts of fire through her. Spike watched the progress of his hand with hungry eyes, the tip of his tongue running slowly along his upper teeth. Her whole body throbbed under his gaze. She could scarcely breathe. Spike licked the trickle of blood off his upper lip and grinned. He tapped her playfully on the shoulder. "Don't feature you boring me ever, and there's bugger all on Tuesday nights. Tag, pet, you're it."
And he was off again, laughing, shadow-boxing round behind her. He spun into her reach and threw a right to her jaw--playful, now. She blocked the blow and aimed a roundhouse kick at him. Spike absorbed the impact and launched himself at her again, barreling into her like a guided missile and slamming her up against the nearest column. Somewhere inside Good Buffy was carping that there wasn’t time for this, that they should go home and make responsible Willow-finding plans. Good Buffy could stuff it.
She let her hands slide down his pectorals, mimicking his earlier caress, felt him take a deep, ragged breath as her thumbs swirled over his nipples and felt him let it go with a high-pitched whimper as her teeth closed on one firm little nub through the fabric of his shirt. There was a faint sheen of sweat across his forehead in the moonlight, but he wasn't at all hot after all that exertion. Holding him was like embracing a piece of the night made flesh. He kept on whimpering as her fingers undid his belt buckle and began working the zipper of his jeans, stroking their languorous way downwards. His cock thrust eagerly against her palm, yearning towards the wellspring of slick warmth between her thighs, pulsing--not to the beat of his silent heart, but her own. "How the heck do you manage to fight like this?" she asked, running a fingernail along the straining inseam of his jeans.
"Lots of practice," Spike gasped, fumbling with her zipper in turn. A shudder ran through him as his hand slipped into her jeans and caressed her warm flesh, and she realized his cheek was wet where it pressed against her neck, and not with sweat. "Love, I'll try till I'm dust, though it's you that makes me so, but I just can't care the way they want me to! I try. I try so hard. I look at some chit on the street and I think--I think 'There, she's Dawn's age, someone loves her like you do the Bit,' and it's all right in my head but there's nothing in my heart, nothing!"
Buffy ran the tip of her tongue along the acute angle of his cheekbone, tasting salt. "This is nothing?" she whispered. She kissed his eyelids, lipping tears from the long dark lashes--so unfair that lashes like that got issued to a man. "It doesn't taste like nothing. It doesn't feel like nothing."
"It's not enough!" he moaned, burying his face between her breasts. "Not enough for Niblet, not enough for Tara--how can it possibly be enough for you?"
When had what anyone besides her thought of him become something to agonize over, and should she be throwing a party? "I guess you know, then." Spike lifted swimming blue eyes to stare at her. "How you act. When they stop treating you like a man." She held his head in both hands, her fingers lost in the bleach-roughened curls, and let her own head fall to meet it, forehead pressed to forehead. She was dizzy, aching for him in every sense of the words, and far, far out of her depth. Words--Spike lived by words, great glorious piles of them. He needed words, and words were what she sucked at so very, very much. Couldn't she somehow make her hands and eyes speak for her, tell him what he needed to hear? Could he tell that the fact she was here, with him, and not with Xander and Tara, was an essay in itself? "Spike... you said once that I treated you like a man, but you’re wrong--it would be an insult to treat you like a man. You work harder at being human than any man I know. I treat you like a vampire, a vampire who's...who's reaching for something. Something you shouldn't even be able to see, something most of the people who're supposed to have it take completely for granted. You make me see how precious being human is, Spike, every day, and I need that to go on doing what I have to do. Even if you haven't touched it, even if you can’t, I love that you keep reaching. I love you."
He laughed, a wild, awful, half-sobbing sound, and leaned forwards, winter-sky eyes devouring her. His hand was on her cheek, stroking it-- not with the impartial gentleness he'd used with Tara, but with feverish intensity; she could feel his fingers trembling. "Help me touch it, Buffy. Help me feel it. Make me feel it. Beat it into me if you have to! When I'm inside you I can almost touch it--make me--"
"I can't," she gasped, "I can't ever make you anything." His mouth was on hers, teeth scraping teeth with the ferocity of his kiss, tongues sliding past and twisting together in sleek velvet caresses as he drank warmth from her mouth like blood. She moaned as he slid in and out of game face, fangs pricking her lips like rose-thorns. Her fingers tore the buttons of his shirt free of their holes.
Marble beneath her, hard, cold, smooth, and dry. Bas-relief olive wreaths cut into her shoulderblades through the scratchy warmth of the afghan; fifty years of weathering blurred the once-sharp edges of the carvings. Spike above her, firm, cool, smoother, hair escaping in sweat-dampened ringlets from its comb-and-gel-imposed order. Even she was not strong enough to dig her fingers right into the stone, though she tried, she tried, as his fangs nipped at her collarbone and up the swan-curve of her throat, pinpricks of ice and fire. The lean hard length of his body was molded to hers, belly to belly, and she lay back, trying to wriggle out of jeans and underwear (and she'd thought ahead for once--pads, this time) without losing an inch of contact with his skin. She kicked the clothing free, and dipped her fingers between her own thighs. She brought them to his lips, glistening with milky fluid shot with crimson. "Think it's ripe?"
Spike's growl vibrated through her body so violently that she bucked and gasped and almost came without another touch. He sucked her fingers deep into his mouth, the wet-velvet-and-steel of his tongue swirling around the pad of each one, His hands were on her shoulders, her body bounded by the rock-solid pillars of his arms, hips flexing together in relentless rhythm. Starbursts went off inside her with every stroke, building to nova intensity--oh God, he had been made to fill her, she’d been made to enfold him. Before the afterimages could fade she was atop him with one quick lunge and roll, his narrow hips captured between her thighs. Tonight she was going to push that non-existant vampire refractory period to the limit.
She spread both hands gloatingly across the muscled expanse of his chest, raking her fingers across the sharply defined pectorals, down the sheer planes of his abdomen while he arched and shuddered beneath her. Her nails traced the sparse line of hair leading from his navel to the dark nest of curls below, eliciting ticklish shivers. He was slick and warm still from her heat and moisture, and she took him in one hand, stroking lightly, then with greater firmness, playing with the foreskin and the sensitive flesh beneath. His body came to life again immediately, swelling beneath her hand--so soft, so hard, satin over granite. His eyes held hers captive, so dark a blue they seemed black. “‘Thou art my life, my love, my heart,’” he breathed. “‘The very eyes of me; And hast command of every part, to live and die for thee...’ Make me live, Buffy. Make me..."
"I can't make you anything," she repeated. "Except this." She bent and breathed on the head, her tongue flicking out to taste another kind of salt tears. Every slightest touch and movement of hers elicited some fascinating twitch or quiver from that beautiful pale body, some new expression of lust-drowned rapture on that expressive face. "I can make you come. All. Night. Long."
The wheel of the heavens turned above them, the earth groaned beneath them, and in the graveyard beyond, their dance was mirrored by the Black Mother, impaled in rapture upon the lingam of the Lord of Destruction. And in the labyrinth of passages deep below Sunnydale, Willow Rosenberg walked into an echoing cavern, took a deep breath, and announced to the assemblage of eyeless men, “OK. From now on, we’re doing this my way.”

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