There were moments in her life Willow wished she could quarantine, like virus-infected files on her computer. Not get rid of them entirely, because who knew when studying them might be useful. Just cordon them off in little partitions of their own, where she could observe them--preferably via a completely different operating system--without actually running the executable. Moments preserved like specimens in formaldehyde, like Jesse’s death, or the tropical fish incident, or her parents’ realization she hadn’t aced the SATs after all--cross-sections of time under glass, tinted to show off their most interesting features.
It was fifty-fifty whether or not this was going to be one of those moments. She was sitting in a cave a little too deep into Sunnydale’s maze of caverns for comfort (she had taken the right-hand fork when the tunnel split, hadn’t she?) It was the wrong side of midnight on a Friday evening, and Tara could be waking up at any minute and wondering where the hell she was. She’d just summoned up something that looked like a Balrog on steroids, and last but not least, Willow Rosenberg, Wicca Supreme, had acquired a crowd of truly wiggins-inducing groupies.
The eyeless men shuffled into the cavern, gaunt Blair Witch stick-figures with leathery skin stretched over gangly limbs, filthy rags draping their bodies like Spanish moss. They carried staves hung about with bones and feathers and small sickening dried things the color of old blood. Their withered eyesockets were sewn over with a double X of coarse brown twine, but they padded across the uneven floor of the cavern with never a pause or stumble. Bare feet scuffed and whispered against the stone. Twiggy fingers reached out for her, straining to be first to touch her hair or grasp the hem of her sleeves. “The vessel,” they murmured in chorus.
Willow’s face twisted in revulsion, and she slapped the eagerest hands back with a fizzing shower of blue sparks. “Hey! No touchy!”
The eyeless men cringed away, some prostrating themselves, others raising their staves and beginning a reedy chant. The thing she’d summoned laughed, and dwindled down, splashes of red and green and alabaster blossoming out of the darkness. “Bad puppies,” her vampire self crooned, flicking a riding crop at the nearest supplicant. “No treats for you. Down.”
“Is it vitally necessary for you to look like that?” Willow asked. “It’s ooky. And if the purpose is to unnerve me, hey, already existing in a nerve-free void.”
Color leached away and the clear heartless peal of laughter deepened and roughened as the phantom scent of tobacco smoke tickled her nose. The thing inclined its bone-and-ivory head, regarding her with luminous blue eyes. “I can look like anyone, pet.” Another shift--her mother’s distant, accusing face looked back at her, a little frown pinching her perfectly penciled brows. “It’s just a phase, Willow. You need to work through this stage and return to a healthy phase of ego development.”
“Stop that!”
Her own chirpy grin returned. “Givin’ you the wiggins?”
Willow unzipped her duffle and began pinching out the wicks of the half-melted candles, stuffing them back inside beside the Ziploc bags of frankincense. “You’re trying to scare me? OK, I’m scared. Woo frickin’ hoo.” She grabbed another candle and yanked it free of the spot where its own drippings had welded it to the stone floor of the cavern. The scent of melted wax and licorice made the still air of the cavern seem stuffy, despite the underground chill, and she wondered if licorice was maybe an extra-evil scent, candle-wise. “I’ve been scared pretty much twenty-four-seven for the last six years straight and fought vampires and demons and hellgods and furthermore given oral reports in front of the entire class without fainting and all this stuff I do while shaking in my high-heeled boots, so you may as well just give it up and head back to Dodge, because scaring me? Waste of time. I did what you wanted me to--you’re all manifested and everything. I’ve got my magic back. I’m happy, you’re happy, everything’s coming up sunshine and puppies, so we’re finished, ‘kay? No more little voices in my head, no more oogy visions, no further doorstep-darkening of any variety on either of our parts.”
Vampire-Willow perched on an outcropping of stone and swung her legs back and forth. “Aw. Don’t you like me, Snuggles? We could have lots of fun. But if you don’t want to play--” Her hand described a languid circle in the air, a gesture which Willow was morally certain was just for show. As the pale fingers completed their revolution, she felt... void. Her insides drained away into nothingness, and the raw dry ache as the power leached out of her soul was unbearable. She knelt on the cold stone, gravel digging into her knees--the center of her being was a vacuum; how could nothingness torment her so? With physical pain, at least she could point to it and say my hand hurts . “Bye-bye now,” Vampire-Willow said, waggling her fingers.
“What did you do?” Panic drove Willow’s voice to an undignified squeak. The muscles in Willow’s hands spasmed and she dropped the candle she’d been about to toss into the duffle; it hit the ground with a waxy thump and rolled away into the darkness. Some bean-counting part of her mind which had become too thoroughly caught up in Buffy’s budget woes thought grouchy thoughts about the waste of a perfectly good candle, though it really was kind of gross-smelling and if licorice-scented candles were extra-evil it wasn’t like she could recycle them in another ritual.
“No-thing,” her alter ego sang. “Nothing at all. I stopped doing.” She got up and slink-strutted over to Willow with a sly, I’ve-got-a-secret smile, slapping the riding crop against her palm. “You don’t have your magic back, clever witch, you have my magic back.” Her lashes fluttered. “And you can keep it as long as you do me little favors. I like people who do me favors.” She flicked the riding crop out, just short of tapping Willow on the nose, and power rushed back into the void within. Magic surging through all the empty channels of Willow’s soul, monsoon rains following on the heels of a summer drought, sparkling, effervescent, limitless, bubbling up to soothe every ravaged nerve.
Willow moaned in near-orgasmic relief as the nameless, bodiless ache dissolved before the flood, but the relief fled before a desire to scream like a frustrated two-year-old. It’s not FAIR! I want my magic back NOW! She dug her nails into the surface of the nearest candle, leaving little crescents in the wax. OK, fine, Willow doesn’t get what she wanted. Again. Big news, not. Repress, retreat, regroup, the Rosenberg family motto. She snuck a look at her alter ego. It couldn’t hurt to ask. “What kind of favors?”
Vampire-Willow draped herself across a boulder and sucked on the tip of her index finger. “Ooooh, lots of terrible, naughty things... or not. Who knows? Right now, three things, and if you do those, I’ll let you do anything else you like until I need you again. That’s not a bad bargain, is it, to have your wings back?”
“No, it sounds pretty suckified, in an open-ended, indentured-for-life kinda way.” Willow crossed her arms and sat back on her heels. “But from the absence of any overwhelming zombie compulsion to go and work your naughty will, I’m beginning to get the idea that you can’t make me do anything I don’t want to. Aren’t you going to, like, slap a lien on my soul or something?”
The image writhed, and now it was the lean, tired countenance of Daniel Tanner looking at her. “Souls are highly overrated as a medium of exchange. Why don’t you see what’s required of you? Your first task would be to restore the minds of the people living in the landfill.”
Willow blinked. She’d been expecting a request for roast babies or something. “I was going to do that anyway.”
“You see? I’m not unreasonable.” Another shift of light and shadow, and Giles was standing there before her, wearing his old librarian’s armor of tweed and reserve. “My second request is also simple.” Flicker. Dawn’s gangly form stood in his place. “Use the girl as the power source for the spell.”
“What?” Darn. Here it comes, the soul-sucking evil part. “Dawnie? I can’t do that!”
Dawn’s image reverted to Giles’s again. “Indeed you can--you’ve thought of it before now. No harm will come to her from it, I give you my word on that.” Modifications to the spell she’d been working on leaped into her mind full-formed. “The Key has tremendous power, enough to open every gateway between every world simultaneously. To siphon off a tithe of that power to heal the minds of so many will harm nothing.”
She could see it unfurling in her mind’s eye, the elegant way that Dawn’s latent power could be transformed into the mental energy necessary to repair the damage done to Glory’s victims. When she’d designed her revamped version of the spell to draw energy from an external source, could she truthfully say she hadn’t been thinking about something like this? “If you’ve got all this vast cosmic power, why do you need me?”
Faux-Giles shrugged and began to polish his glasses. “It’s all rather torturous, really,” the measured English voice said, reflective. “I was, er, evicted from this little corner of reality some years previously. Since then my associates--” he waved at the huddle of eyeless men-- “have recouped their numbers, and recent events have made it possible for them to grant me access to this plane once more. Mr. Tanner became, quite accidentally, the focus of an incident which, while insignificant in and of itself, proved to be the proverbial straw which broke the camel’s back. I suppose you know there are two forces at work in the cosmos--Good and Evil, Light and Dark, Order and Chaos, Creation and Destruction--call them what you will. At present the balance between them is threatened, and I am doing my small part to restore it.”
Willow frowned. “So you’re kinda like that guy Buffy met back when Angelus was on the rampage? Whistler?”
An expression of distaste crossed the Giles-face. “Not precisely. But you might say we’re in the same line of work. In any event, my associates established a rapport with Mr. Tanner, and Mr. Tanner was able to perform a few minor services for me--in the main, putting me in a limited form of contact with you. However, he is neither skilled nor stable enough to perform the ritual which you just performed, which now allows me to channel my not inconsiderable powers through you to affect the material world. I have power; I desire agency. You have agency; you desire power. What is more logical than that we ally and benefit one another?”
Willow plucked at the strap of her duffle, fiddling with the frayed spot where the buckle rubbed, little fuzzy nylon fibers frizzing beneath her fingers. It couldn’t force her to do anything. Check. It would give her the ability to use magic again. Check. And it hadn’t asked her to do anything in the roast baby category yet. Check. “Ok. What’s the third thing?”


It had been considerably easier checking into a hotel in the middle of the night back in the days when he could just eat the desk clerk and take over the presidential suite. On the other hand, Spike had to admit that Hank Summers’s impressive credit limit proved almost as effective as raw terror in securing them a room despite their disheveled state. One impassioned wheedle of the hotel laundry staff and a very long, hot shower involving several brilliant shags later, they’d arrived at that drowsy, almost-sated point where giving it another go and lying there and falling asleep were equally attractive options. Spike made yet another mental note: Install shower in crypt immediately if not sooner. He supposed they could use the one at Buffy’s place, but the Niblet’s banging on the door and yelling at them to hurry up in there would be something of a mood-killer.
A tsunami of applause burst from the television. “Oi, that’s a cheat if I ever saw one!” Spike aimed the remote at the screen like a weapon and zapped the Iron Chef into cable oblivion. “The challenger had it locked up! That simpering little bint’s probably shagging Morimoto on the side--explosions of happiness in her mouth my arse!”
“I refuse to take sides,” Buffy said. She was curled up beside him on the rumpled expanse of the hotel bed, wearing an oversized t-shirt in bright pink emblazoned with I SAW THE STARS COME OUT IN HOLLYWOOD in gold glitter--not exactly high fashion, but when one was trying to find replacement clothing at eleven o’clock at night, it didn’t do to quibble about what presented itself in the hotel gift shop. “To do so would be to admit that sea urchin is a real food. What else is on?”
Spike began power-flipping through the channels. “Got to be something on with explosions in it.”
Buffy made a half-hearted attempt to snag the remote. “How can you tell if it’s any good when you never stop on one channel for more than half a second?”
“Superior vampire eyesight and fifty years of telly-watching savvy. It’s a knack.” He brought the remote to a screeching halt on John Cleese banging a stuffed parrot on a counter. “There’s quality multicultural programming for you.”
Buffy rolled her eyes and settled back at his side, holding up one foot and wiggling her toes in front of the glowing screen. “So, this waking up together thing--if it becomes a habit, will you still love me when I’ve got leg stubble and a dead cat on my head?”
Apparently she’d failed to notice the post-shower exploded poodle on his--though from the way her fingers kept sneaking up to play with the curls he was beginning to get the horrid suspicion that she liked it that way. If so, she was in for a disappointment; not even the Slayer could come between him and his century-long love affair with Brilliantine and its chemical descendants. I draw the line at looking like sodding Little Lord Fauntleroy. “Pet, I’ll even let you borrow my razor. Greater love hath no man.”
Buffy laughed and Spike grew thoughtful. Short of that first night in the Magic Box and last night at her father’s place, they’d not had much opportunity to wake up together--one or the other of them always had to drag themselves out of bed and back to their own domicile in the brightening dawn. And it was only going to get more inconvenient come summer when the nights grew shorter...
Somewhere in the back of his skull, Manly!Independent!Spike grabbed Soppy!Romantic!Spike by the lapels and gave him a good smack across the chops. Bloody hell, you’re not thinking of moving in with the chit? Well, of course--who was he kidding? Soppy!Romantic!Spike would have been picking out rings and composing pathetic speeches about having a man in the house and making an honest Slayer of her by now if it were an option. Just seeing her wear that old ring of his around her neck made him burst with possessive male pride. Manly!Independent!Spike was reluctantly forced to agree that this was a bit of all right, and when Insatiable!Horndog!Spike chimed in with the point that shared quarters would allow for a lot more quality shagging time, Manly!Independent!Spike threw up his hands and retired to the cerebellum for a good sulk.
Not that his moving in was really an option either, given the vigilance of Dawn’s social worker. But there was a middle ground here, wasn’t there? “Or bring your own--I can spare a drawer.”
Buffy’s hand, which had been playing idly across his stomach, tracing the muscles up and down, stopped dead, and she said in a small quivery voice, “You’d give me a drawer?”
He sat up and looked into her welling sea-green eyes and ran a thumb over the sweet curve of her lower lip, bewildered. They didn’t look like unhappy tears. “Sure, love. A whole dresser, if I can find one good enough to cart home.”
She gave a little gulping sob and threw her arms around him; Spike had no idea what it was he’d said, but apparently it had been very much the right thing to say. Buffy pressed him down into the nest of hotel pillows as her mouth sought his, her fingers splayed across his chest to cover as much skin as possible: All this belongs to me. Spike shifted beneath her and ran a hand over the curve of her hip, up the rising slope of her body. His palm cradled the soft weight of her breast, her mortal warmth seeping into his flesh like liquid gold. Buffy made a kitteny little “mmmm” noise as his thumb drew lazy circles on the crinkling aureole, and she squirmed most gratifyingly as he tweaked the firm little nub in its center. Why was it that copping a feel under the t-shirt was somehow sexier than doing the same thing when she was stark naked?
Though stark naked had its own advantages. One small warm hand crept down under the covers and started to demonstrate a few of them, and when she had him thrumming like a high-tension wire in a hurricane she crawled astride his hips and sank down, engulfing him in a series of lascivious little wriggles. “You’re blocking my view of the telly, woman,” Spike growled, mock-severe. Buffy gave him a smug little smile and rocked forward, pulling the t-shirt over her head oh so slowly, revealing slim hips, flat belly, twin cherry-tipped ice-cream-scoop breasts... Oh, yeeessss. Golden hair cascaded round her shoulders as the shirt came off altogether, and the muscles in her belly and thighs went taut as she tightened her internal vise-grip on his cock. His voice went hoarse and his hips bucked involuntarily. “And you can keep right on doing it.”
In the prosaic sixty-watt glow of the bedside lamp her eyes held him mesmerized with their changes: storm-tossed green, misty grey, every shade in between. Her hand brushed his cheek. “Talk to me, Big Bad,” she whispered. It was an order.
He laced his hands behind his head--he’d obey, oh, yeah, but he’d take his time about it. “Yeh? What about?”
That sinful little pink tongue-tip darted out for a second, and her cheeks flushed a matching pink. “You know.”
“Oh?” He bucked again, deliberate this time, caught her around the waist and held her there for a second in mid-air, half-impaled and gasping, before letting her sink down on him again, the sweet slippery-warm friction making him groan. “You wanna hear what a naughty bitch you are?” She nodded, a fractional bob of her head, still drowning him in those eyes. “How walking down the street watching that sweet little arse of yours twitch makes me want to throw you down on the sidewalk and fuck you raw right there? Someday I’m gonna do it, and you won’t be able to stop me--you won’t want to stop me.” She was writhing slowly against him now, every movement sending little shudders of bliss through both of them. “We’ll be screwing on the sidewalk come morning, and the sun won’t be able to bloody touch me ‘cause you’ll have sent me up in flames already. Oh, yeh, love, just like that, wring me dry...”
Buffy said very little when they made love--when pressed she retorted that he talked enough for the both of them--but she listened, oh, she listened. She made an epic of their lovemaking, scribing the lines with teeth and nails across the ivory parchment of his flesh, her hands moving incessantly over his body, seeking out every sensitive inch of him, memorizing the planes and curves of muscle and bone. She reared above him, his golden goddess, his lost little girl, his Slayer--moist and warm, lips half-parted, a trickle of sweat drawing a path between those small perfect breasts. She rolled beneath him, her body the violin to his bow, seperately mute but together drawing forth the music of the spheres until they arrived at the coda together, and then--then at last she cried out Spike! Just that, as if his name were the most important thing in the world, the only possible thing to say at the moment when all the universe stopped, breathless, waiting upon the fulfillment of their pleasure.
Afterwards she lay panting across him, her ear pressed to his chest as if the silence within were music, and his own breathing slowed and finally segued into a low growl--absolutely, positively, definitely a growl, since chip or no chip he’d rip the lungs out of anyone who suggested he was capable of anything so nancified as a purr. “So does any random offering of used furniture get me this kind of treatment?”
Buffy giggled. “No, just drawers. It’s a long story. Damn it!” She sat up, misty romantic Buffy instantly replaced with pissed-off Buffy. “Anya’s wedding shower is tomorrow afternoon!”
“And?” Possibly there were world-threatening and shag-interrupting implications in a gaggle of demon bints and assorted members of Sunnydale’s Business and Professional Women Association getting blitzed on wine coolers and regaling Anya with dirty jokes and a variety of embarrassing underthings, but if so, Spike failed to see them. Hmm. Focus on the embarrassing underthings.
Buffy made a wry face. “And it’ll look pretty shoddy if I don’t have a present for her. Especially since her maid of honor is another vengeance demon, who, for all I know, specializes in non-present-givers.” She crawled over to the edge of the bed and leaned over, scrabbling for the t-shirt. “I have the wedding present budgeted, but I completely space on the shower, and--”
Her backside bobbed enticingly in the air, a perfect, luscious peach just waiting for someone to... Insatiable!Horndog!Spike took over and he lunged, wrapping his hands around her waist, just above arch of her hips--she was such a tiny thing; he could almost circle her waist with his fingers--and had her back on the bed and pressed tightly against him in one effortless heave, his rapidly hardening cock resting in the warm cleft of her ass. He drew a fingernail lightly down the side of her neck and rasped into her ear, “Still got your Dad’s plastic, don’t you?” Buffy gasped and nodded, momentarily incapable of coherent speech. “And you’ve got to take the dinner togs back anyway, so--just--aahh, you like that, Slayer? I thought so--pick up something then.”
“It wouldn’t--” Her eyes closed and she broke off into a high-pitched whimper as he slid into her again. “Oh. God. Spike. Ohhhh...” And she was arching forward to allow him better access to that impossibly tight velvet warmth, drawing him deeper and deeper...
Some considerable time later, the TV burbling on unwatched in the background, Buffy mumbled, “...be right to use Dad’s card,” into the pillow. She opened one eye and perked up slightly. “You know, I really think we’re getting the hang of the not wrecking the furniture thing. Everything’s still flat. No saggy spots.”
Spike spat out a strand of her hair and propped his head up on one hand, cocking an eyebrow at the bed, which, while not a complete loss, looked rather the worse for wear. “That would be because we’re on the floor now, pet. But if we straighten out that leg and prop the wastebasket under that corner they won’t notice a thing.” He rolled over, spooned up against her and began kneading her shoulders. “No sponging off Daddikins, then--I think this conscience business is highly over-rated.” He sucked in his cheeks and thought for a moment. There was another possibility. “I know you haven’t been keen on it in the past, love, but--assuming no one’s gotten to it already--we could stop back by the restaurant and prise out a few of those Rudnark teeth. They’re not stunningly valuable, but a dozen or so of ‘em would fetch enough on the black magic circuit to pay for a present that wouldn’t make Demon Girl give you the fish-eye the moment her magical ability to divine price tags comes into play.”
Buffy stirred uneasily against him. “Black magic circuit? What are they used for?”
He shrugged. Why was that any concern of theirs? “This, that--curses mostly, I think.”
She was frowning--tempted, he could tell. “So we’d be selling something that someone else could use to turn someone into a frog or afflict them with ever-growing nose-hair?”
Spike chuckled. “More like excruciating pain in the gut until they fall over frothing blood at the mouth and--” Buffy’s shoulders locked solid beneath his hands. Bloody hell. Idiot. Does it never occur to you to lie to the girl? No, it didn’t, and it wouldn’t matter if it had; the two of them could see through each other’s deceptions as if through clear glass. He wracked his mind for something to make it right again, but rights and wrongs were hopelessly mixed up in his sex-muddled brain at the moment. Surely there was some rule about it, like not going swimming for half an hour after a meal--no man should be required to think for thirty minutes after an orgasm? It was hard enough to mix and match the things his mind labeled good and bad with the often diametrically opposed things which brought a glow of satisfaction to his heart under ordinary circumstances. “Which would, uh, be a bad thing?”
“A very bad thing,” Buffy said through clenched teeth. She sat up and wrapped the sheet around herself, looking small and cold and forlorn for all the anger in her eyes.
“Well... it’s not like we’d be cursing people ourselves,” Spike offered. That was good, wasn’t it? Buffy gave him a withering look, and he began to get irritated. Couldn’t she see he was trying here? Did she have any clue how difficult it was to navigate your way through life backwards, fighting your basic inclinations every step of the way? “Oh, come on, love, Demon Girl’s got a wagon-load of things for sale in the Magic Box that’re the dog’s bollocks for cursing! It’s all right for her to do it because she’s got a soul and a tax number?”
The mule-stubborn look crept into Buffy’s eyes, and Spike knew with sinking certainty that it didn’t matter what got said from here on in, he was battling for a lost cause. “Giles and Anya don’t sell anything that can only be used to hurt people!”
Well. Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb. Gonna learn sooner or later, love, demons live for a good fight. “Right. I’ll wager ‘only’ doesn’t matter a lot when you’ve been a sodding rat for the last three years.”
“Don’t bring Amy into this! She did that to herself and Willow’s been trying--”
“Oh, yes, Willow’s been very trying.”
“Don’t change the subject!”
“And what is the bloody subject, Your Majesty?”
“You trying to talk me into selling dangerous demon parts on the black market! It’s wrong!”
“‘It’s wrong!’” Spike mimicked. “Well if they weren’t bloody dangerous they wouldn’t be worth selling, would they? You seemed happy enough to consider it when you thought they were only good for frog-curses, but--”
“Oh, shut up!” Buffy turned away and huddled under her sheet. “Why do you have to be so--so--”
Spike cursed under his breath; she looked ready to burst into tears, and if she did he’d melt as usual and end up petting her head and agreeing with anything just to get her to stop. “Evil? Sorry, love, it comes with the fangs.”
She sniffled. “No! If you were just evil I could kill you! But you have to be s-so damned g-good to me at the same time!” She wiped her nose on a hank of sheet. “I was halfway to talking myself into it when ‘excruciating pain’ came up. And I shouldn’t have been. Frogs aren’t any more of the good than frothing blood at the mouth.” Her eyes were haunted for a moment. “There really is something dark in me.”
Spike sighed. “Yeh, but that’s not it, pet.” He stretched out a hand; after a moment she scooted over and curled into his arms. “Observe. Buffy Summers considers selling nasty demon bits to the unscrupulous: result, wracking guilt. William the Bloody, Esq. considers same: result, mild irritation that B. Summers won’t let him go for it.” She shot him a heartrending look and, as predicted, the remains of his ire dissolved faster than an ice cube on a Sunnydale sidewalk in July. “Ah, love, I’m sorry I brought it up. I haven’t gone daft enough to care about people who aren’t us yet, but I could do a better job of pretending.”
“Don’t.” Her voice was tight and hard. “Don’t ever pretend. You promised.”
“So I did. It cannot be said I’m a flattering honest man, but I am a plain-dealing villain. I’m trying, love, I just--” How was it he could face down Rudnark demons without blinking an eye and be so helpless in the face of her tears? “When it gets past ‘Eating people bad, Buffy pretty’ I don’t even know where to begin sometimes.”
Buffy cast her eyes down, as much to hide her smile as anything else, twisting the sheet in her fingers into little horns of fabric. If he could get a grin out of her, he couldn’t have cocked up too badly, could he? “That’s the important thing, I guess,” she said, sounding as if she were trying to convince herself as much as him. “That you’re trying.” Then her mouth firmed and she looked up, meeting his eyes again. “No. The important thing is we’re trying.” She reached up and ran a finger down the acute angle of his cheek, tracing the intersecting curve of his lower lip. “It’s just... every now and then it hits me. You’re not just pretending, or trying to annoy me. You really, truly don’t get it, here.” She placed a hand over his heart. “Sometimes it’s as easy as breathing, loving you. Then a minute later it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
“I could say the same, and for some of us breathing takes a little extra effort.” Spike pulled her down into the pillows again and held her close. “But I’ve always done things the hard way.”
He wondered if he’d ever get it. Angel could afford to believe in miracles; Spike was grateful for a lack of disasters. Did he really want to? Angel’s getting it hadn’t been a pretty sight. In his clearer-eyed moments he could see that his moral existence from now on would likely consist of a Red Queen’s race to stay where he was now. With Buffy a warm, sleepy, comfortable weight in his arms, where he was now did not seem such a bad place to be. They lay there together, wrapped up in each other and their own thoughts, until the hotel’s wake-up call startled them back to the world again.


Sunlight was filtering through the blinds, gilding the sedimentary layers of books and papers spread out before him. Giles excavated his saucer, took another sip of lukewarm tea and laid his glasses down on the page before him. He’d heard the morning paper thump against the door half an hour ago, but hadn’t gone out to retrieve it yet. Xander and Anya had begged off on him hours ago, and he was left the sole defender of a play-fort of paper and calfskin. He rubbed the bridge of his nose, feeling the grit under his eyelids. Fit as he kept himself, his fiftieth birthday was looming nearer and nearer, and he no longer possessed the resilience to bounce back from all-nighters with nothing more than a pot of tea and a cold shower. He’d have to get more sleep before tomorrow if he and Tara planned to attempt to contact any of the powers which seemed to be circling Sunnydale like sharks.
The last few days had been too late to bed, too early to rise, too many journals to pore over, and frustratingly little gold sieved from the gravel: a handful of volumes out of the stacks of dozens of bound Watchers’ diaries which barricaded the kitchen table. Accounts of those few Slayers who’d survived as long or longer than Buffy Summers, four hundred years worth of observation and expertise--to go back further he’d have had to contact the Council Library in London, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to let anyone else know the direction his researches were tending yet.
Even in light of the cursory reading he’d been able to give each case history so far, there was a definite pattern emerging. Slayers who lasted four or more years followed one of two paths: For most, increasing emotional isolation and intense focus on their slaying, sometimes to the point that they were barely able to function outside a combat situation. In a smaller number of cases... well, in Buffy he would have called it normal behavior--rebellion against Council strictures, over-reliance upon emotion, increasing independence. Most of this smaller group, he noted, shared Buffy and Faith’s history of having been missed by the Council’s screening processes, and had grown up without the years of indoctrination concerning their destiny. They often had families, ties to the world of the living.
And almost without exception, they had ended as Faith had: going rogue, succumbing to the dark lure of their own power, throwing off their Watcher’s guidance and striking out on their own. He scanned the list of names on the legal pad, checking it against the books he’d pulled. A dozen girls, a dozen lives. Could he read between the lines of the dry, scholarly reports, discern which of these rebellions were the perfectly normal result of a young woman realizing that her life was not her own, and which were true descents into darkness?
Hannah Griesenger, Salzburg, Called 1623, died 1628, avenging the deaths of her family against the counsel of her Watcher. Maria Lupe Hernandez, Mexico City, Called 1732, disappeared 1737, reappeared and died 1739 in a battle with reawakened Aztec jaguar spirits. Kathrine Allston, Edinborough, Called 1868, died 1877, turned rogue, slain by Council forces in an attempt to restrain her. Linnet Almont, Marseilles, called 1904, died 1911, staked by her Watcher Vincent Marron after being turned by the Master of Marseilles...
He got up and stretched, walking a few paces round the table and feeling all his bones creak in protest. Some future Watcher, no doubt, would be reading about him: Buffy Anne Summers, Sunnydale, Called 1996, died 1997, 2001 et al., drove Watcher Rupert Giles to drink with a succession of vampire lovers.
There was so much left to do before he left--complete the interview project with Spike, give Buffy all possible information relevant to Travers’s hints, complete the paperwork signing over the Magic Box to Anya... not to mention the personal packing and sorting he had yet to take care of. He gazed nearsightedly about the room, allowing himself a short wallow in mild despair. How he was to complete it all by the New Year he had no idea...
You could always stay.
He walked back to his chair and sat down, sliding his glasses back into place. Spike’s advice was nothing he hadn’t thought of himself, lying awake in the night in the weeks after Buffy had returned from the dead. He had no doubt that Spike had meant it from the heart, however bluntly it had been phrased, and as far as it went, it was true. But Spike, at heart, was a pack animal: for all he played at being the cat who walked by himself, he craved a place at the hearth with the same intensity he craved blood--though having attained it, he’d grumble loudly about how much better it was to walk by his wild lone. Giles, on the other hand--he’d been thrust by circumstance into the center of a group, but while he loved Buffy as a daughter and looked fondly upon Willow as a protégé, he couldn’t exactly call any of them friends. There was a reserve between them, a gap of age and attitude bridged more easily by a hundred-and-fifty-year-old vampire than by a forty-some-year-old introvert.
It wasn’t only emotional cowardice which drove his flight, he argued, addressing the silent, skeptical presence in the back of his skull. He’d never asked to become a father figure, and felt himself ill-suited to the task. He was homesick for green fields and fogs and buildings that were older than he was and an ocean that was grey and stormy rather than blue and placid. He wanted a life of his own again, and conversations with people who had both personal recollections of the world prior to 1980 and a pulse.
The phone rang. He sat there through three rings, debating whether or not to let the answering machine get it, and finally rose and picked it up on the fourth. “Giles,” the voice on the other end said. “It’s Angel.”
After four years his fingers still tightened painfully on the receiver at the sound of that voice. ‘How nice to hear from you’ seemed inappropriate somehow. Giles could think of only one reason for Angel calling at this particular time, but if Buffy hadn’t confessed yet, it wasn’t his place to give the game away. “You sound perturbed.” Keeping his voice neutral around the vampire was second nature by now, because he was an adult, and a compassionate man, and Angel was not Angelus. Not at the moment, anyway. “I hope nothing untoward’s happened to Buffy?”
There was a nervy edge to Angel’s normally laconic delivery. “That depends on your definition of untoward. Are you aware of--has she--” Giles realized that in some odd way the vampire was trying to spare his feelings, and felt a reluctant gratitude. “Buffy and Spike seem to be very... close. Closer than--I’m worried about her.”
Giles picked up his teacup. There must be a technical term for the defensiveness roused by an outsider questioning one on a decision which, until that moment, one might have been willing to admit was less than optimal. “Yes, I’m aware of the situation. I’m no more pleased about it than I was about her liaison with you, but in the end, I trust Buffy to do the right thing. And oddly enough, I trust Spike to do the right thing for Buffy, if not the right thing in general.” Enough to leave the two of them together half a world away? Manifestly so. How very peculiar.
Angel’s laugh was bitter. “I guess Spike’s not the only one who’s fallen into bad habits. Giles--Buffy told me the purpose of her trip down here was to convince the Council to give her and Faith a salary. Do you think that her... liaison with Spike is going to impress the Council? You know it’s going to get to them sooner or later.”
Giles swirled the dregs of his now-cold tea around in the bottom of his cup, watching the erratic orbits of the flecks of tea leaf. Jenny had read tea leaves--for fun, she’d said; they were utterly useless as a method of divining the future. “No. I think they’ll be appalled, with good reason. I expect threats, ultimatums and possible attempts on Spike’s, er, life. And in the end...” He found that he was smiling, ever so slightly. “I expect Buffy to win, because that’s what Buffy does.”
Angel was silent for a long while. “I don’t think I expected you to be taking it this calmly.”
“Neither did I, really, but apparently I have hidden depths. And if she must be enamored of a vampire, I find the current situation vastly preferable to the two of them sneaking about behind my back.”
Silence again. A hit, a palpable hit... “I suppose you’re prepared to stake him the moment there’s a sign of anything going wrong?”
“You suppose correctly. And Angel--I hope it need not be said that while the Council will find out about this eventually, later is preferable to sooner?”
Another bitter chuckle. “Well, remember this, Giles--with Spike, the moment you realize something’s gone wrong is already far too late. I speak from personal experience.”
And with that he hung up, leaving Giles to the contemplation of his tea leaves. A hat, was it? He rotated the cup. Or a boat? Giles set the receiver down and took the cup into the kitchen, rinsed it out, and put it into the dishwasher. With another weary stretch he left the kitchen and started up the stairs towards his bedroom.
So much depended upon one’s point of view.


“I’m sure we rolled these up last year.” Dawn hauled another olive-green tangle Christmas lights out of the box and tugged on one of the looser coils, which had the effect of drawing three other loops more tightly about each other. “We always roll them up.”
“Maybe you forgot,” Tara said. “Last year was pretty hairy, with your Mom sick.” It was more likely, she thought, that Joyce had rolled them up every year; she remembered all the little things which had inexplicably gone undone after he own mother’s death, things she never could remember seeing her mother actually doing. She pulled out another box of ornaments--like most of the others, missing at least one ball. Dawn took it from her and stared at the fragile glass spheres, tracing the curve of one, then another, with her index finger. When Dawn had come into existence, had some of them disappeared, to correspond to the ones a small child would have broken over the years? Or had memories rearranged themselves to give half of the young Buffy’s breakage quotient to her new sister?
If Dawn still thought about things like that (and Tara imagined she did) she didn’t share them with anyone, save perhaps Spike. Now she set the red and gold balls aside, flicked her hair over her shoulders and dove back into the cardboard box, pulling out another rat’s-nest of lights and frowning at it. “This is totally skanked up. All the sockets are, like, corroded or something. Maybe we should just buy new ones. They’re only three or four dollars a string these days.”
“Just remember, money spent on lights is money that can’t be spent on presents.”
Tara felt a wave of relief which dissipated as soon as she realized that the speaker wasn’t Willow. Buffy was standing at the top of the basement stairs, with Spike right behind her, gazing curiously over her shoulder at the sea of ravaged boxes covering the basement floor.
“Buffy!” Dawn dropped the coil of wire and leaped to her feet, her face lighting up. “You’re home!” Suddenly self-conscious, she tossed her hair again and affected indifference. “Not that I care or anything. Hey, Spike.”
“Hullo, Bit.” Spike looked askance at the holiday wreckage. “Now I’ll grant traditions may have evolved, but in my day we decked the halls, not the floor.”
Tara held up a plastic holly wreath and peered through it, suddenly nostalgic for real evergreen boughs and pine scent that didn’t come from an aerosol can. “We decided on a post-modern, deconstructionist Christmas this year. I’m so glad you’re back,” she said, getting to her feet. “Did everything go all right?”
Buffy paused at the foot of the stairs, posed, and made a ‘voila!’ gesture with both hands. “I didn’t kill Faith, Angel didn’t kill Spike, everyone’s still in the correct body, it’s all good.” She walked over to the nearest box and dropped to her knees. “Oh--Aunt Caroline’s bells!” She pulled out a set of spun-glass bells which had fallen out of their tissue wrapping and held them up to the light, inspecting them for damage. “And here’s Norton the Christmas Moose--” Spike, looking slightly ill, mouthed ‘Christmas Moose?’ at Tara, who shrugged. Buffy extracted a rather moldy-looking plaster moose with a tatty green pipe-cleaner wreath in its chipped horns. Her face fell. “Dawn made him for Mom in fourth grade--he’s lost all his sequins! What happened to this stuff? It wasn’t like this when I died, I know it!” Her expression was more tragic than one sequin-less moose seemed to warrant. “Dawn?”
Dawn, distraught as if the lack of Christmas ornament continuity were her personal failing, rummaged through her own box for something salvageable. “The pipes down here burst a month or so before you, uh, got back, and the basement flooded, and the people who were gonna buy the house backed out before Dad could get them to close, and Dad had to get the whole house re-piped before he could put it back up for sale--boy was he mad! But anyway, all the stuff we had stored down here got soaked. I tried to dry out as much as I could before we had to put all the furniture into storage, but Dad wanted to--and I--and it’s all wrecked--and--”
Buffy hastened to assure Dawn that none of it was her fault, and the two of them went into serious Christmas triage mode: “Here’s those grotty plastic ones--of course they survived--Oh! It’s Grandma’s old bubble lights! but they didn’t work anyway--Here’s the ones Mom bought when we moved here--The glass ones should be all right if we can clean off all this moldy tissue paper--Have you looked at the tree yet?”
Tara backed off with a certain sense of relief and sat down on the lowest step of the stairs; it was a little weird poking through the remnants of another family’s past. Spike sidled over to her as the sisters exclaimed and commiserated over the various unearthed ornaments. “Where’s Will? We didn’t see her about when we got in.”
“She’s upstairs. Asleep. She--she was gone all night. Meditating, she said.” Tara bit her lip. “Something to help her recover her magic. She’s been conked out all day--what time is it?”
“About eight.” It was occasionally handy having a vampire around with an absolute sense of the sun’s position. “We left L.A. around five-thirty, soon as the sun started going down. Red hasn’t been up at all?” He sounded a little concerned, and Tara felt slightly less paranoid; if Spike was worried, she had a right to be panicked.
“She got up around noon and had a peanut butter sandwich and went back to bed. I’m getting really worried about her, Spike. She’s been--”
“Sleeping,” Willow said, appearing at the top of the stairs in her turn, wrapped up in a robe and what she referred to as her Anya-freaking fuzzy slippers. Tara’s breath caught; Willow looked... looked... glowing, her hair aflame in the light of the bare hanging bulb overhead. “Sorry for not hopping onboard the Christmas spirit choo-choo, but still technically Jewish here.”
Tara scrambled to her feet and grinned, deciding that Buffy and Dawn had the ornament situation covered. “Christmas trees are a pagan tradition. I’m reclaiming them in the name of Wiccan Liberation.” She smoothed her skirt around her knees and started up the stairs. “You feeling better, hon? You want me to fix you some soup?”
Willow smiled back, the cheerful pixie-grin Tara hadn’t seen in far too long. “Oh... all right, twist my arm.” She turned and all but skipped off towards the kitchen. Tara followed more sedately. A glance in the direction of the living room showed her Buffy’s luggage and a large shopping bag stuffed with wrapped packages--probably Christmas presents from Dawn and Buffy’s father--heaped haphazardly over the armchair.
Willow went over to the kitchen table and opened up her laptop, running her fingers over the keyboard as if greeting an old friend. Tara pulled a saucepan from the cupboard, ran a little water into it and set it on the stove to boil while she began rustling up ingredients--chicken stock from last night’s dinner, a handful of rice, leftover vegetables from Thursday, a dash of salt, a pinch of garlic... might as well make enough for everyone. It was mildly wiggy how Willow and Buffy and Dawn, children of affluence, regarded her ability to cook and sew and clean house as something as mysterious and astonishing as her ability to cast spells. When they went shopping, Buffy followed her around the grocery store in a state of bewildered gratitude, nodding blankly as Tara dispensed domestic wisdom--Buffy could follow a recipe, but somehow she’d never learned how to cook. Leftovers are your friend , the McClay mantra. It was weird when such prosaic skills put her in demand. “So... do you think it helped? The meditating?”
Willow rested her chin in her hand and looked extremely pleased with herself. “Yup. It really did.” The laptop cheeped at her. “Darn it, I have a hundred and eleven e-mails and I’m a week behind on Sluggy Freelance.”
“Really? I mean about the helping, not the e-mail. You’re on your own there.” Tara checked the refrigerator and yelled downstairs, “Spike, we’re out of pig’s blood--do you--?”
A muffled bellow from below--“Got some in the boot of the car. Keys are on the coffee table.”
“Thanks.” She glanced at Willow. She looked so much better; relaxed, happy, that little pinched stress-line gone from between her brows. It was wonderful--almost too good to be true. “It’s not too--too draining, is it, honey? The meditation, I mean. You seemed pretty wasted this morning, and you never mentioned what kind of techniques you were trying--”
A flash of irritation was there and gone in Willow’s eyes. “Oh, nothing special, a little chant here, a little incense there, stretch the ol’ magical muscles, om mane padme e-i e-i om... you know--eclectic.” She kicked back in her chair and waggled the toes of her slippers so that the bunny ears flipped back and forth. “I don’t think the major Willow zone-out will be happening again. I got a little bitty bit carried away with the whole one-with-self-and-universe-ness, is all. All better now. And looky--” She waved a hand and Spike’s car keys came zipping through the air from the living room to land in her palm with a jingle. “No stress, no strain!”
“That’s great!” Tara tried to quash her unease in the face of Willow’s proud grin. It wasn’t that she suspected Willow of taking dangerous shortcuts, but, well, Willow had been known to take dangerous shortcuts. “Just don’t take it too fast--”
“Will!” Buffy’s face appeared in the doorway to the basement, atop a box full of assorted Christmas junk. She maneuvered the box out into the living room and dumped down in front of the television. “Wow! You’re back with the magic-slingin’! Tres cool! Are you going to be up for the big loony hunt?”
Tara started to object; no matter how beneficial Willow’s new exercises might be, there was no way she’d be prepared to cast spells at that level so quickly. Before she could say anything, Dawn bounced up the stairs with another boxload of decorations, a disgruntled Spike following with an armload of metal struts and faux greenery which must have been the tree. “...goose,” he was growling. “Turkey is a Yank abomination. And none of these poncy little lights, either. Candles. At least then you’ve got half a chance of the house burning down and injecting some fun into the holidays.”
“Yeah, yeah, vampire, evil, bah humbug,” Dawn said. “For a rebel you’re sure an old fogey. Now put it over on the couch.”
“Hey, guys, check it out,” Willow said, following the parade into the living room. Tara, a feeling of inexplicable dread curling her toes, turned the heat down on her soup and tagged after. Willow took a stance in the center of the living room. She gestured dramatically, sweeping both arms in a wide circle; in the long-sleeved blue terrycloth robe there was an unfortunate echo of Sorcerer’s Apprentice to the motion. “Arise, O Tannenbaum!”
“Oi!” The scruffy green plastic boughs jerked to life and Spike dropped them as if they’d been dipped in holy water. He backed hastily away from the couch, wiping his hands on the seat of his jeans. “Give a bloke some warning, Red!”
Willow just grinned at him, and gestured again. Like some stop-motion animation, the central support of the tree twitched into motion and planted itself in the base, telescoping up to full height. In a flurry of artificial needles the branches assembled and rooted themselves to the trunk, whish-click-whish. Everyone stood open-mouthed until the topmost branch clicked into place. The tree leaned drunkenly to one side; Willow bent her fingers and it shivered and straightened, then shook like a dog emerging from a pool. Before their eyes the shabby old branches grew green and fresh, and the scent of pine which Tara had been missing so a moment before wafted through the living room. A shimmer of golden light washed over the boxes of ornaments, and twenty years of scuffs and chips and dings disappeared; Norton the Christmas Moose glittered with his full complement of sequins, and every single ball reflected back the light in pristine glory. One of the strings of lights reared into the air, an electrical cobra, and began to interlace itself through the branches.
“Wait, wait!” Dawn cried. “Don’t!”
“Halt!” The string of lights pattered lifeless to the floor and Willow looked a little disappointed. “What’s the matter? I’m not tired. Not even a tiny bit. Rarin’ to go.”
Dawn shuffled her feet and cast a beseeching look at Buffy. “It’s just... I like decorating it. You know, by hand.”
“Wow,” Buffy repeated, obviously impressed. “Wills, I can’t--I mean, wow. Thank you. But I think we can take it from here.”
“That’s half the fun,” Tara said with a pointed look at Willow, who was starting to look pouty. “Besides, you should save your strength for the, uh, loony hunt.”
“Oh, all right.” Willow flopped down on the couch and surveyed her work with a beaming smile. “But I’m pretty sure that’s not going to be a problem any more.” She aimed her finger at the tree and made a trigger-pulling motion. “The big gun is back.”

Seven o' clock, Sunday morning, cold as Southern California allowed and slightly foggy; earlier, before the sun had come up, breath had been visible on the still air. Daniel Tanner shuffled down the sidewalk and turned into the alley behind the Doublemeat Palace, heading for the dumpster where, if he were lucky, he'd find the leftover burgers tossed out by last night's closing shift, still safely ensconced in their greasy wrappers. A careful walk down the center of the alley, one foot before the other in the grimy trickle of condensation. Not too close to the doors, not too close to the watching huddles of trash or the looming metal bulk of dumpsters--mouths had teeth, teeth to bite with.
Lizzie had died in the night, slipped out of herself through the hole in her crushed skull and danced away with never a word, and he'd spent the rest of the night bullying a terrified Jim and Ramon into helping him move the body out of the landfill.
There was no end. There was no cure. They'd lied, the eyeless men, opened their dead mouths and spat out maggot-words that meant nothing. "There are rules," he muttered, and knew with some small part of his mind that the words were too loud, too angry, that if people heard him they would shy away. "There are limits and bounds." There were laws that circumscribed the greatest of forces, promises that had to be kept or unmake their guarantor in their neglect. He'd kept his half of the bargain, and he would see, if it meant his dissolution, that the eyeless men did likewise.
As soon as he raided the dumpster. Vengeance was a luxury reserved for those with full stomachs.

Willow Rosenberg woke to the certainty of power and the sweet weight of her lover's head upon her shoulder. With her fingers she parted the netted swath of honey-blonde hair concealing her beloved's face, exposing to mortal view the shuttered eyes, the stubby dark blond lashes lying upon the silken cheek. This was Tara in a nutshell, some part of her forever aloof, forever hidden. Not by design or desire, but simply because there was always more of Tara, the farther in one went. Tara hid her serene face behind a curtain of hair, Tara hid her unfashionably lush body behind baggy sweaters, Tara hid her iron will behind a facade of diffidence. There was always one more veil to pierce, another hope that this was the final curtain and behind it the white limbs of the goddess would rise from the pool, sky-clad and radiant, and rather than striking the intruder blind would fold her to her bosom... Now am I special enough to catch your eye? Now do I have the power to hold you?
Tara's eyes opened, blue-grey, the color of distant mountains. Tara's lips curved, no less sweet than the curve of her hip beneath the blankets, the succulent weight of her breasts pressed against Willow's slim body. She could nestle into the comforting softness of Tara's arms, worship at the altar of her body, bury her face in the well of delight between her thighs, and Tara would cry out in joy and weep in ecstasy beneath her lapping tongue...
But there was always one more veil.

Dawn Summers lay awake watching the moving shadows on the ceiling, and thought bitter thoughts about the coming appointment with her social worker. Her existence was built on a foundation of sand. The photographs hanging in the stairwell and tucked into little stick-on holders in the photo albums, bright fleeting images of vacations past. The box of report cards (A's, A's, and more A's; until last year, the good sister, the smart sister, the sister who didn't burn down gymnasiums). The chess set under the bed with the broken black rook, chipped against the wall when she'd thrown it at Buffy when she was six--all, all a sham. She hadn’t existed before last fall, the chess set hadn’t existed. They told her it didn't matter, they told her that they loved her anyway, but in the dark hours of morning when she stared at the ceiling and thought Who am I? it did matter, because they'd been made to love her.
I steal, therefore I am.

Buffy Summers dreamed.
She didn't want to examine the darkness too closely; something prowled back there. She could hear the pad of feet on floorboards, the low growl... but she couldn't stay in bed; Willow was calling and she had to go downstairs again. She got up, her long white nightgown trailing on the floor. She took up the candle from her bedside in her hand, holding it high overhead. "Boy," she said, "Why are you crying?"
He looked up from his cross-legged seat on the bare wood floor, moonlight curls tumbling over the high forehead. Silver tear-tracks marked his cheeks. "I've caught it," he said, "but I can't hold on forever." His shadow stretched away into the darkness, black as jet; in its arms a bright shape struggled.
The thing in the darkness crept closer, and its growl muted to a pleading whine. It slunk up to rub against Spike's knee and he reached down, ruffling its fur and crooning to it. She couldn't see its face, but she could hear its claws kneading the floor. "Send it away," she whispered.
"Can't do that, love. It's not mine. Here--you have to take this." He held out the bright shape; it flickered in his grasp and darted away into the shadows. She gasped, snatching for it, but the beast was faster, leaping after the shining figure with a snarl.
Spike was gone, replaced by a bespectacled young man in antiquated clothing. A green-scaled, razor-fanged demon crouched at his side. He held a hand to his mouth, hiding an apologetic cough. "I realize our situations are not precisely identical," he said. "But sooner or later one has to come to an accommodation." The demon growled agreement and bumped its nightmare head against his arm; he scratched its spiny ears fondly. For a second they looked at her with identical pairs of blue eyes before blurring together into Spike once more. The beast trotted back from the shadows, the shimmering figure held with tender care in its jaws. Spike smiled proudly and patted it on the head. "There's my girl." He looked at her. "Blood and a little kindness--best feed it, pet. They get stroppy when they're starved." He took her shadow from the beast's mouth and held it up. "Well?"
"Soap won't do," she said. "It must be sewn back on." She sat down on the edge of the bed, wincing in anticipation, and lifted one bare foot. He sat down tailor-fashion and pulled a needle and thread out of his duster pockets and held them up; the needle glinted bright and wicked as a dagger in the candlelight. Spike began to sew her shadow back on. She scarcely felt the first needle-pricks, but as he continued to work, the pain increased. Blood ran down his fingers, and every few stitches he stopped to lick his hands.
"They'll never be clean, you know," he said. "And this--" He lifted one hand up, pale tongue flicking out to capture a crimson rivulet before it reached his wrist, and pointed to the limp rag-clad heap in the corner-- "Is your fault."
The heap of rags was a body. The dead woman's face was pale and waxy, and the hair around the depression in her skull, smashed in as if by a length of pipe, was matted with old blood. Tanner crouched over her, looking up at Buffy with fathomless dark eyes. "Her name was Lizzie."
They were all looking at her, the dead woman, the living man and the undead one. The beast growled softly, uneasy. She should have known the name. "It's in a good cause," she said, hearing the weakness of her own words. "Isn't it?"
Spike shrugged. "We won't know for certain until it's too late, will we?" He held out his hand again, palm cupped; it was full of tiny blood-red droplets. Pomegranate seeds. "Here. You get this out of it, anyway. I can't promise they'll taste good."
She took the handful of seeds and regarded them doubtfully. Had she heard this story before? She could throw them away, crush them underfoot. "What about you?" she asked.
"Ah, I've eaten already." He patted his stomach. "Came off the other tree, and I think it was green. It's given me a hell of a bellyache. May take awhile to digest."
Could she afford these? The budget was so tight. She felt a blunt head nudging her elbow from behind, and a warm damp tongue tickled her fingers. She wasn't ready to look it in the eye yet, but... hesitantly, she stroked the beast's muzzle. She stuffed the seeds into her mouth, crunching down hard on the pips as the juice ran down her throat, red as life's blood, red as fire, and heard the beast break into a rumbling purr. The pain wasn't in her feet any longer, but in her gut. With every stitch, the needle dug deeper, the thread grew stronger. It hurt. It hurt. It...

The dream dissolved into shreds and tatters, leaving the bittersweet richness of pomegranate juice on the back of her tongue. Buffy lay there, unwilling to open her eyes and admit she was awake just yet. She could feel the twinge deep in her belly as her body grudgingly followed her mind into wakefulness. Damn. Cramps. It was a good sign, she supposed. Her first period since coming back, proof that all the plumbing was in working order. It was difficult to feel disassociated from reality when your uterus was tying itself in knots. She got up, checked to make sure there was no blood on the sheets, and shuffled across the hallway and into the bathroom to ransack the cabinet drawers for a tampon.
Suitably fortified, Buffy faced herself down in the mirror, scrubbed her teeth (dutifully turning off the water during; a Slayer was conservation-minded, except when engaged in hour-long hot shower orgies with the undead--but, she assured herself, it had been with a low-flow shower head) and did fearless battle with the horror that was bed hair. So this is the face of a girl who sleeps with vampires. Funny how it didn't look that much different from the face of the girl who violently repressed any desire to sleep with vampires. Where was the mark of Cain, the scarlet letter that she could flaunt defiantly? Not even an incipient zit. Buffy bared minty fresh teeth at her reflection, spat toothpaste foam into the sink, and went back into the bedroom.
The starkness of her room dissatisfied her. The furniture was still the same--the white-painted iron bedstead, her dresser, the chairs. Dawn had saved her diaries and Mr. Gordo and one or two small things as mementoes, and Spike had rather shamefacedly returned a few photos he'd snatched after the funeral, but everything else had been thrown away or given to charity after her death: posters, knickknacks, stuffed animals, clothes, all gone. When they'd moved the furniture back from the U-Stor-It, the week after she'd returned to the land of the living, she hadn't cared. The monastic austerity of bare walls had been soothing. She went over to the suitcases she’d left behind the bed last night, opened her overnight bag, took out the copy of the Rubaiyat Spike had given her, and put it on the bookshelf. It was a start.
Buffy pulled open the curtains and let the morning light flood in, looking out the window into the branches of the oak tree where another vampire had so often crouched in the wee hours of the morning. Spike just used the front door. He was a ghost in the house this morning, a blanket-stealing, bony-kneed, tobacco-breathed, too-chilly-for-December phantom with tousled platinum hair--curled at her side when she woke, standing beside her in the bathroom, sleepily scratching his chin and expounding on the art of shaving without a reflection. In a little while he'd follow her downstairs and gross out Tara with his disgusting bloodsoaked mess of a breakfast and fight with Dawn over the comic section.
If she was going to be haunted it might as well be by the real thing. For better or worse, she'd wrestled the earthshaking ethical dilemmas of their situation to a temporary standstill, and now they were left with the hard stuff. Question: how exactly does one unemployed vampire slayer, sister and mortgage in tow, put together a life with one vampire of infinite heart and limited ethics? With a shake of her head she went over to the dresser, pulled out the top drawer and started tossing things onto the bed. Answer: One drawer at a time.
"Hey, are you coming down to breakfast or not?" Dawn asked, poking her head around the door a minute later to find her sister sitting on the edge of her bed surrounded by piles of clothes and gazing blankly at the now-complete disarray of the dresser. "Tara's making pancakes. Are you zoning out again?"
Buffy picked up a pile of sensible slacks, all calculated to assure an interviewer that this, by golly, was a reliable team player, and eyed them with loathing. "I do not zone. I engage in clothing feng-shui." At one halcyon time, she'd owned six-count'em-six pairs of leather pants, seven if you included the pair that didn't quite fit because she'd lost ten pounds the year before starting college but couldn't bear to get rid of because Angel had once admitted to liking them. Maybe she could find out which thrift store had gotten the bulk of her pre-death wardrobe and buy it back at bargain prices.
Dawn looked from the clothes to the empty drawer hanging out of the dresser, and back to her sister. "Earth to Buffy!"
She was not going to blush; there was nothing to blush about. "It's for Spike. Here, hold these." Maybe if she moved the underwear to the bottom drawer... There wasn't much, mainly because half of it had been ripped to shreds in the last week and now resided in Spike's squicky-flattering collection of Stuff That Smelled Like Buffy. She was going to have to talk to him about that, though it might be a good idea to hide that t-shirt of his she’d snitched before she did so.
"Ohmigod!" Dawn squeaked, clutching the uninspiring slacks and bouncing up and down. "Is Spike moving in?"
"No!" Jump the gun much? "We've only been...um...for a week." Buffy shoved some t-shirts to one side and scrunched the slacks in beside them. "This is purely for slaying emergencies, so he'll have some things on hand if he can't get back to the crypt before sunrise." Maybe she ought to hunt up an ashtray--for the porch, because no amount of great sex was going to buy him a ticket to smoke in the house.
"Riiiight. Riley never got a drawer.” Dawn flopped across the bed on her stomach and propped her head up on her hands. “You’re, like, serious now, right? I mean, you’re having sex. That’s serious, isn’t it?” At Buffy’s stunned-deer expression she scowled. “Don’t go all Mom-like on me. You’re not Mom, you’re my sister. We’re supposed to talk about boys. It’s in the manual.”
Buffy sat down beside her. “I know, it’s just--” When had Dawn gone from ‘eww, boys’ and safe, chaste crushes on Xander to using the word ‘sex’ in a grammatical sentence? “Yes, it’s serious. In a way. It’s--” She shifted sideways, pulling a knee up on the bed and taking Dawn’s shoulders in her hands. “Complicated. Dawnie, please don’t pin all your hopes on--I know you like Spike a lot, but there’s all kinds of... issues. It may not work out. Things could happen--”
Dawn snorted. “No way can he lose his soul more.”
“As if--I’m sure the next Buffy boyfriend disaster will be something entirely new and original.” Buffy picked up one of the least objectionable sweaters and began re-folding it. “I just don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up for an ever after here, much less a happily.”
Dawn regarded her with the smug and infinitely irritating wisdom of a younger sibling. “Then you should stop with the happy every time his name gets mentioned. So what’s it like?”
“What?”
“Sex. Does it hurt? Is it like in those books where the--”
Buffy dropped the sweater and clapped her hand over Dawn’s mouth. “Aaahh!” Deer weren’t big and stunworthy enough for this expression--elk, maybe, or wildebeests.
Dawn rolled over and crossed her arms. “Geez, Buffy! It’s not like I’m a quivering virgin or something--I’ve kissed!”
“You have? Who? Who have you kissed?!”
“It was over the summer. This guy I met at one of Janice’s parties. Spike killed him.”
“WHAT!?” Visions of Spike-as-chaperone, gleefully strangling some pimply and presumptuous suitor while Dawn stamped her foot and complained that he was embarrassing her swam through her head.
“Willow helped!” Dawn went into a defensive sulk. “He was kind of a vampire, and no, I didn’t notice, it’s not like I’m Miss Slut-Bomb 2001 with vast experience of what a vampire doesn’t kiss like. Unlike some people I’m related to.”
Buffy was overwhelmed with the feeling that the world in general and her sister in particular had breezed past her. Dawn lay there glowering at the ceiling, the treads of her sneakers shedding tiny flakes of dried mud onto her older sister’s quilt. Fifteen was still a little kid, wasn’t it? At fifteen she herself had been... stealing lipstick, shaking her pom-poms at any member of the football team whose eye she could catch, cutting class to kill vampires. OK, bad example. “Valiantly attempting to be the cool yet authoritative older sister here, but you can’t just drop the whole sex talk thing on me like that. I have to prepare. Work up a speech. Find some hand puppets.”
Dawn’s eyes revolved, blue but not so innocent. “I know how it’s done, doofus. We had the whole ‘put the condom on the banana’ demo in health class. I just want to know what it’s like . It’s not like you guys were exactly quiet that night on the couch--which is still all creaky and weird to sit on, in case you care.”
“Um...” How the heck did you answer a question like that? Great, until your boyfriend loses his soul and tries to destroy the world? Way to give your impressionable sister a complex. “I guess that depends on who you’re doing it with. And why you’re doing it. If you’re with someone you love, who loves you, it’s...” She bit her lip. “Life-changing. So be darned sure you want your life to change.”
Maybe that had sunk in; there was a thoughtful moment before Dawn smirked in a manner entirely too reminiscent of certain vampires. “I think I'll tell Mrs. Kroger that my juvenile delinquent behavior is due to being exposed to my sister's perverted love life. Unless I get something like, say, an XBox for Christmas to drown out the gross smoochy noises in the middle of the night--"
Buffy threw a rolled-up sock at her and Dawn disappeared down the hall, cackling.



The house was filling with the heavenly odors of coffee and Tara's pancakes when Buffy came downstairs a few minutes later, mingling with the pervasive pine-scent of the Christmas tree. Buffy stopped to give it a wondering look on the way into the kitchen--decked out in tinsel and lights under Dawn's exacting artistic direction, it was the most perfect tree she'd ever seen; it could have been torn from a Currier & Ives print. She ran her fingers over the needles, plucked a few off, bruised them, held them to her nose; tiny drops of resin oozed from the broken flesh. It looked, felt, smelled... alive, and yet it was growing up out of the same old tree stand. Was it all just an illusion, or had Willow really transformed their scroungy old fake Douglas fir into the real thing? Buffy had managed by dint of great effort to avoid learning anything about magic theory over the past six years, but whether this was just a fantastically detailed glamour or a real transformation, it argued serious power.
And raising you from the dead doesn't?
"Hey, Buff!" Willow was sitting at the kitchen table with Dawn while Tara stood over at the stove, pouring another dollop of batter into the skillet. "You made it! We saved you a few pancakes. Anya e-mailed me a copy of the ceremony we'll be doing." She passed Buffy a sheet of paper. "We're meeting at the Magic Box at nine. You get to be the la-place, whatever that is."
Buffy gave the printout a cursory glance. "I'll assume that's a good thing to be. I'm going to have to talk to Giles anyway--I think I had a Slayer dream last night."
Willow's cheery expression morphed into unease. "You think? You don't know for sure?"
Buffy shrugged and poured a generous helping of syrup over her pancakes. Mmm, buttery goodness. "As prophetic visions go, it was low on predictiness, high on annoyingly cryptic symbolism."
"I'll bet it predicted lots of broken furniture in your bedroom," Dawn said. "Ow! You can't hit me, I'm normal!"
Buffy bestowed an angelic smile on Dawn, who was rubbing her arm with an exaggerated look of agony. "That's debatable."
"Kind of a Brunel thing, sans slashed eyeballs?" Willow didn't wait for an answer, but got up and started rinsing off her plate. "I've got to head over to the Magic Box now and help Giles set up--oh, and don't take the lid off that saucepan on the back burner, cause Miss Kitty getting into it would be of the bad, unless we want a pet hermit crab--nothing against hermit crabs, they're kinda cute, but no fur, which makes the petting thing problematical--"
Buffy interrupted the babble-stream before it could develop into full-blown free association. "Dreamwise, we have death, small amounts of gore, and formless guilt. The usual." Self-analysis came about as naturally to her as the milk of human kindness did to Spike, but it didn't take Sigmund Freud to figure out that part of her was expecting cosmic retribution any minute now. Good girls didn't sleep with soulless vampires. "Do you guys have the spells online for tomorrow night? I've got a job interview before lunch, and that appointment with The Kroger after lunch, but I should be free by four."
"Online, on board, on track--we are the essence of on. Be vewy quiet, we're hunting cwazies." Willow grinned, waved, and was out the door.
Buffy leaned back in her chair and watched her all but skipping down the driveway, then eyed Willow's coffee cup. "Maybe it's time to have that talk with her about decaf again."
Tara flipped the last of the pancakes onto her plate and brought it over to the table. "I think she's just jazzed about having her powers back." She didn't meet Buffy's eyes.
Well, that was understandable. If being unable to cast spells had felt anything like the dull grey misery she'd recently clawed her way out of, Buffy couldn't blame Willow for being the extra-bouncy human superball now. She felt moderately bounceable herself. She speared herself another bite of pancake and swirled it around in the pool of syrup. Plus--lucky Wills!--she wouldn't be battling the persistent worry that her recovery was bought at too high a price.
"So, what's my part in the ritual?" Dawn asked, snatching the printout and scanning it for her name.
"Right there. 'Dawn Summers, staying home and being grounded for her sordid life of crime.'"
"What?" From the tone of her sister's anguished wail, Buffy might as well have said 'Stay home and have your liver removed without anesthetic.' "That's completely unfair! I'm so telling The Kroger you abuse me!"
"Oh, yeah, you do that. 'Mrs. Kroger, my mean old sister won't let me participate in dangerous Satanic rites!' Did it ever occur to you that mystic Keys to the universe and rituals to open doors to the spirit world might possibly not be mixy things?"
"Good point," Tara said. “Though strictly speaking, Satanism isn’t anything like... oh, never mind.”
Dawn shot her a look of wounded betrayal. "I'll bet you just made that up."
Buffy sipped her coffee and adopted her best Sphinx-like-adult smile. "Since you're not going to be there, we'll never know, will we?"


The gym mats were rolled up against the walls, fat blue coils of tarpaulin and foam. The pommel horse had been dragged aside as well and sat watching the proceedings with cockeyed dignity from the corner. Willow and Tara sat on one of the rolled-up mats, the floor at their feet awash with books dragged in from the front room of the store. Xander sat opposite them, playing around with the drum they'd lugged up from the basement, a big-bellied, cowhide-covered instrument of uncertain provenance. In the center of the training room floor, Rupert Giles crouched beside a circle of white chalk, an unlikely houngan in sneakers and sweatshirt. His hand moved over the floor, dispersing a thin, even trail of yellow corn meal from between thumb and forefinger. In its wake the sigils grew like living things: the vèvè of Legba, a crossroads atop a stylized globe, crowned with a second globe, one arm pierced with a walking stick; and the vèvè of Ghede, a tau-cross atop a mausoleum, flanked by a stylized rake and shovel on one hand and a coffin on the other. Various other items for the ritual were scattered about the floor--a squeeze bottle of water, the dish of cornmeal, and a large gourd rattle.
Buffy knelt at the edge of the circle, taking candles as Anya handed them to her from the box and setting them up around the circumference. "...nineteen, twenty. There is no way that the people who come up with these things don't own major stock in a candle factory," she grumbled, setting the last of the fat white cylinders in place and rocking back on her heels. She was dressed in training gear--leggings, a pair of worn Nikes and a white tank top, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail.
Willow flipped through a few more pages of the book she was consulting. "Are we sure this will work without the... you know? 'A speckled cock for Legba--to be killed by wringing its neck, not cutting its throat.' Cute little fluffy chickies? We can't kill cute little chickies."
Tara wrinkled her nose. "Not to encourage the blood sacrifice concept, but you've never met any roosters personally, have you?"
"There are other acceptable sacrifices," Giles said, keeping his attention on the near-complete vèvè and carefully releasing another thin stream of corn meal from between thumb and forefinger. There was something ironic--or a touch frightening--in the fact that Willow had been more willing to sacrifice a human soul than a rooster. He sometimes thought that it wasn't entirely for the best that some branches of modern Wiccan practice had so thoroughly expunged the darker aspects of the craft; it left the practitioners with no sense of proportion. "Voudoun ceremonies are remarkably amenable to, er, customization. It's the thought that counts, as it were. I've even corresponded with a vegetarian Quabbalist Mambo."
Tara laughed. "You're kidding! I love it! Go syncretism!" Buffy and Anya exchanged blank looks. Tara looked as if she were about to launch into an explanation, then thought better of it and sighed. "I guess you have to be there."
"We are here," Anya pointed out. "And yet the humor escapes us."
"All things considered--" Giles propped a small wooden cross up in the center of the circle. "We should be grateful we're only dealing with the Rada loa. The Petro loa demand pigs, goats..." Occasionally people... He stepped over the ring of candles and out of the circle, careful not to disturb any of the cornmeal patterns. He contemplated the assemblage. There was something missing, the most important thing.
What were the questions he should be asking? The obvious, of course; what was drawing the powers to Sunnydale in the absence of Hellmouth rumblings, ill omens, or prophecies of any type, and what, if anything, ought they do about it? But if one was summoning up a being reputed to give unfailingly accurate advice, the temptation to ask a few personal questions as well was nigh-overwhelming. Or even, he thought, a few less-personal questions.
Candles disposed of, Buffy was limbering up, doing stretches by the weapons rack. She took one of the fencing sabers from the wall and began running through a few basic thrusts and parries, warming up for what was to come. She danced through the movements, graceful and deadly as the blades on the wall behind her, and Giles tried to put aside his personal affection and observe her with a Watcher's clinical detachment. She was near the top of her form these days, whipping through her training exercises with enthusiasm both gratifying and daunting.
Any casual observer comparing the Buffy of four or five weeks past to the girl before him now would have opined that her health, physical and emotional, had improved immensely, and the degree of improvement correlated closely with the amount of time spent with Spike. The question was, was this something which would have occurred on its own as the effects of the Raising spell faded? Was it, as a sentimentalist might have claimed, the effects of true love? Or was some other factor at work?
Buffy's exercises culminated in a full-extension lunge with the saber-tip pointing at the door. Spike appeared in the doorway a second later with a paper bag in the crook of one arm, looking sleepy (ten in the morning was an unholy time for him to be up) but unsinged; he must have come through the tunnels in the basement. Now the vampire raised an eyebrow at the sword leveled at his chest and waggled his free hand at Buffy. "Only five fingers here, Inigo." Buffy lowered the point of her sword with a grin and bounced to her feet, flinging her arms around his neck.
"They look good together, don't they?" Tara said.
"I'm not certain," Giles admitted. "I avert my eyes whenever it appears that physical contact is in the offing." Still, Tara was right; Buffy wasn't the only one who looked... he wasn't certain that one could apply the term 'healthier' to an animated corpse, but he couldn't think of anything more apt; Spike had quite lost the gaunt, hollow-eyed look he'd acquired over the summer. Giles adjusted the position of one of the candles by half an inch with the toe of his sneaker and risked a glance across the training room. Buffy still had an arm around Spike's waist and a proprietary thumb hooked through one of his belt loops, but the unseemly snog-fest had broken up and Spike was pulling things out of the paper bag: a pair of covered Styrofoam cups with the Kohlermann's logo on them, and a bottle of cheap white rum. "You have it?" Giles asked, walking over.
Spike nodded. "Yeh, buckets of it. Benny was glad to be rid of it; normally he can't give the stuff away. At least pig's blood's got body to it. Gave me a ten percent discount too, and don't mention that to his Dad--not that one, you git, that's my breakfast. Give over." He tossed Giles the other container.
Giles made a show of inspecting it, though he wasn't certain what he should be looking for; one pint of blood looked much like another to one unequipped to smell the difference. Blood from chickens of indeterminate sex and color, slaughtered at a civilized remove from the proceedings to spare the feelings of tender-hearted Wiccans; was there any virtue left in it, or would the loa dismiss it with as much disdain as Spike? Only one way to find out.
He picked up the bottle of rum, and took it and the chicken blood over to the circle of candles to join the other offerings: a plate of roasted peanuts and cornbread, a handful of pennies and a wad of pipe tobacco. He unscrewed the cap and poured a measure of the rum into a paper cup, ripped open a little restaurant packet of pepper, and dumped it into the liquor.
"This will, of necessity, be an abbreviated version of the full ceremony," he said, passing out photocopies of the responses as everyone took their places. "Unfortunately it wasn't possible to obtain the proper drapeau or--"
"And the model's not to scale and you didn't have time to paint it." Xander rolled his copy up and beat out an experimental tattoo on the drum. The resulting noise was startlingly deep, rolling through the enclosed space of the training room like tame thunder. "Spinal Tap, here I come."
Giles ignored him--ignoring Xander was often the only possible option--and picked up the rattle. "Places, everyone. Now, Xander." The drumroll sounded again, and Giles took a deep breath. "Annoncé, annoncé, annoncé!"
Buffy leaped into the center of the room, twirling the saber behind and before, dancing backwards round the ring of candles and central cross and then forwards, saluting the cardinal points of the compass on her way. Revolution completed, she brought the blade up, poised for an instant on her toes. Spike stepped into her path, weaponless, an anticipatory grin on his face. Buffy smiled back, and struck; Spike dodged, and they were off, two magnificent animals evenly matched in speed and nearly so in strength.
This was for show, only a shadow of the real battles they'd fought in the past, Giles knew, but even the shadow of that power and savagery was enough to catch the breath and speed the heart. Spike, of necessity, fought defensively, blocking, dodging, evading the lightning-swift darts of Buffy's blade. Now and again pain arced across his face as he made some move too aggressive for the chip's liking.
Giles had rather expected the glint of lust in the vampire's eyes, but it was unnerving to see it reflected in Buffy's face. Both of them were breathing hard, completely absorbed in their dance. Buffy lunged forward, the tip of the saber aimed straight at Spike's heart; she was not holding back now, as the mock-battle reached its culmination. He doubled over backwards, falling to his knees and avoiding the thrust. Spike knelt before her, visibly aroused and grinning ear to ear as she pressed the sword-tip to his chest, nicking the royal-blue fabric of his shirt. Her eyes never left the his. Slowly, Buffy lowered the sword, dropping the point to rest on the floor between Spike's knees. Just as slowly, still with his eyes fixed upon hers, Spike bent his head and kissed the hilt. A tremor ran through Buffy's body as he did so, as if the weapon were an extension of her hand.
Disturbing, very disturbing, but Giles couldn't afford to think about it just now. The spell broke; Spike rose, and the two of them backed away from one another, returning to the outskirts of the room. Willow and Tara, water bottles in hand, paced from opposite ends of the room towards the circle, pouring a stream of water behind them. As they passed, Giles intoned, "A Legba, qui garde la porte." Feet moving to the rhythm of Xander's inexpert drumming, the women pinwheeled out to the opposing set of walls and came back to the center once again, completing the crossroads of water. Giles set the offerings within the circle of candles, then knelt and picked up the dish of cornmeal, raising it overhead and drawing a crossroad in the air over the vèvès.

Papa Legba, ovirier barriere pour moi agoe
Papa Legba, ovirier barriere pour moi
Attibon Legba, ovirier barriere pour moi passer
Passer Vrai, loa moi passer m' a remerci loa moin.

He set the dish down and picked up a candle, repeating the gesture. "Aux Loa de feu au Sud." He passed the fingers of his left hand through the candle-flame, too quickly to take hurt, and held his hand over the vèvè.
"Ago! Ago-é!" the others chorused.
Giles picked up another water bottle, feeling a frightening elation. Save for the summoning of the First Slayer, it had been years since he'd been part of this kind of ritual, and in those days he'd been calling on beings far more dangerous, but oh, yes, the rush was still there, the feeling of being outside oneself, caught up in something vast. He poured out the libation of water at the cardinal points around the circle, calling on the proper powers at each one before swinging into the mind-numbing repetition of the lapriyè. By the time it was over, eyes were beginning to glaze. Giles picked up the gourd rattle--no proper asson, lacking the beads and snake bones, but it would do, would serve--and made a sweeping gesture over the vèvès, as if to fling aside a veil. "A l'Espirit surtout, royaume de Bon Dieu. Pour les Marasa, Jumeaux sacrés qui se refléctent de chaque côté di mirior." Water spilled clear and lovely from the lip of the bottle, the drops spattering the carefully drawn lines of cornmeal, but that was right and proper at this stage, and Giles felt no regret. All things passed in their time. "Ago! Ghede! Ago! Ghede! Ago! Ghede! Ago-é!"
Giles braced himself, took a mouthful of the peppered rum and spat it onto Ghede's vèvè; his mouth burned, but he scarcely noticed. Everyone except Xander shuffled into the center of the room to join the dance, and as they swirled round the ring of candles. Xander, still seated off to the side with the drum, was concentrating on keeping the beat, with no attention to spare for anything else. Willow and Tara stamped and swayed exuberantly, completely caught up in the rhythm of the ritual. Anya danced carefully, copying the steps he'd demonstrated earlier, as if she expected a test later. Buffy looked determined, and Spike looked embarrassed enough to combust on the spot, but this, Giles had made it very clear, was a participatory rite; there were no spectators. The drum rumbled on, counterpointing the slap and scuff of feet on concrete; each beat clear, very clear, each note distinct yet blending into an overarching framework of sound which permeated the room, the building, the world.

Bugger this.
It wasn't that he didn't like dancing, because he did, and he was bloody well good at it, thank you very much, but that was dancing--be it waltz or a foxtrot or free-form modern dance club writhing, the point was you were talking to someone, body to body, pure communication unsullied by words. Dancing was a primal shout--yeah, world, this is me! And this thing they were doing now, he didn't know what it was, but it was all about talking to something too big to listen, one with the hymns he'd suffered through in his youth, and what if there was a beat to it? The whole purpose was to sublimate the self, not express it.
Besides, how could he concentrate on some sodding ritual dance with the maddening scent of a Slayer on the rag in his nostrils? Blood and sweat and the hint of arousal, oh, more than a hint, she'd enjoyed their little dust-up every bit as much as he had and Christ he wanted to drag her away from this farce, spread those taut golden thighs and...
White.
He blinked, staggered. There was an illusion, when you stood on the platform at the back of a train while it pulled out of the station, that you were standing still and it was the world that was rushing away with ever-increasing speed, and it was like that now; everything was receding--well, why not, the universe was expanding at the speed of light... or something like that; what had he been thinking...? The drumbeat was a roaring in his inhumanly sensitive ears. His limbs froze, and he stumbled again. He was supposed to keep dancing. It was important. Giles had said so, and he respected old Rupert--didn't like him, of course, hello, vampire, and vampires don't like anyone and why the hell was he dancing again? And where was everything and everyone and who...
White.

Spike's gone.
Buffy whirled around in time to see Spike stumble and catch himself, breaking rhythm. Despite the fact that the familiar black-clad body was standing there right behind her, part of her remained absolutely convinced he was nowhere in... not sight, but whatever it was that told her he was here. Giles and the others broke ranks, piling up behind Spike. The drum faltered and fell silent as Xander realized that something had happened.
Spike, or whatever was inhabiting his body, looked at her and broke into a lascivious grin, tongue-tip dancing across sharp white teeth--Spike, but not-Spike. "It's you again!" she blurted out.
He bent over, and picked up the remains of the peppered rum, tossed it off and licked his lips. "You went and opened the door, ti-blanc," he said. It was Spike's voice, a touch more nasal than usual, but the intonations, the accent, were all wrong. "Why you so damned surprised when we walk through?" He stretched out one arm and examined it, twisting his hand back and forth so the muscles of his forearm rippled under the pale skin. "Fuck me, I got to get one of these. You smell good enough to eat, ma Cherie."
It had been bad enough when Tara had been the one ridden by the loa; this was somehow infinitely worse. An irrational and extremely pissed-off voice in the back of her head was screaming Give him back, give him back, give him back! Buffy forcibly muffled it and pulled away as Giles stepped forward, the gourd rattle still clasped in his hand. "Papa Ghede," he said respectfully, "please accept the offerings we've brought, and favor us with your advice on the questions which trouble our minds."
"There's offerings and offerings." Not-Spike grinned at Buffy again and grabbed his crotch. "You found the cock you was chasing, no? You had your mouth full of that drumstick often enough, Cherie; how come you still so hungry?" Buffy clenched her teeth and felt her face heating up; was it kosher to give the god you'd just summoned a good punch in the nose? Not-Spike just laughed and dropped to the floor cross-legged, grabbed the chicken blood and the roast peanuts and began crunching them down happily. "Good stuff. I like the barbeque flavor better, just so you know. So what's so damn important to ask Papa Ghede?" he said with his mouth full.
Giles, somewhat nonplused at the informality of it all, squatted down beside the loa. "Well... I suppose the most important question is why are you here? I don't mean here specifically, or you specifically," he added hastily. "In the last week or two there's been an unusually high concentration of... well, for lack of a better term, emanations of the divine in and around Sunnydale. And yet we can find no prophecy to explain this--no apocalypses appear to be on the schedule. What does this mean?"
Ghede finished off the chicken blood and took a pull from the bottle of rum. "The world's out of balance. Someone's got too many players on the field, and the other side's gone and bitched to the ref. There's rules, ti-blanc. There's limits and bounds, and someone's been stepping over them." He shrugged. "Something gonna snap soon."
Before Giles could pose another question, Willow interrupted, her voice unwontedly shrill. "You mean the Balance, right? That it's gone out of whack? And we should all be doing anything we can to make sure the good guys win, right? Because last time, Acathla, Hell, cats and dogs living together--major badness!"
Bright blue eyes darted to the witch's face, knowing. "You think Light should win? You try getting to sleep when the sun never sets. You think Dark should win? You try eating bread when the corn don't grow! You can't have a world without day and night both. Both sides, they fight like kids on a see-saw, but we in the middle, we know. The seesaw don't work without a weight on both sides. So we come to watch where the big fight is, and maybe we put a thumb on the scales... or maybe not." He winked, a conspiratorial grin lighting his face.
Giles wrested back control of the conversation. "If the Balance is indeed being upset, what can we do to restore it?"
Ghede threw back his head and laughed. “Take the extra players off the field--or switch the team shirts!" He finished off the last of the peanuts and began tearing into the cornbread. Possession didn't appear to make much difference in Spike's appetite. "Who are these extra players?"
Those eyes came back to her, sparkling with amusement. "You see one every time you look in the mirror, Warrior of the People."
A thread of panic entered her voice. Did someone mention cosmic retribution? "You don't mean--"
"What I mean, I say. Now I'll answer the one you don't ask Like calls to like, and opposites attract. Night and day make a world." He took a final swig of the rum and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. "Looks like you're out of peanuts, Cherie. Tell my horse he do okay for le mort ti-blanc."
Spike's face went slack and the blue eyes went white, rolling back in his head. The vampire collapsed, strings cut, and the bottle left his limp hand and clattered to the floor. Buffy dove for him, grabbing Spike's shoulders before his head could slam into the floor and pulling him upright again. He engaged in a brief struggle to sit up on his own, then melted woozily against Buffy, head cradled between her breasts. "What the bloody fuck...?" he croaked.
Spike's back, Spike's back, Spike's back... Anyone else would have been gasping in agony at the amount of pressure her arms were exerting; Spike just grunted a little and burrowed into her shoulder. "You're not going to throw up, are you?" Buffy asked. It would have been a lot easier to sound casual and unworried if her voice hadn't kept cracking. "Because if you are, I'm dropping you, right now."
Half a bottle of eighty-proof rotgut was barely enough to make an impression on vampire physiology, and Spike was a far more hardened carouser than Tara anyway. "M'fine, love. Not gonna sick up." He showed no signs of wanting to get to his feet any time soon; the possession itself seemed to have taken considerable toll. He aimed a bloodshot glare at Giles. "I've got you in my book, Rupert--if you ever snooker me into another--"
"It was rather fascinating, wasn't it?" Giles was watching the two of them with an inscrutable expression. "I could have wished for more time..."
"Well?" Spike hadn't grown any patience in his encounter with divinity. "What's the skinny then? Who do we kill?"
Giles sat down on the pommel horse and began polishing his glasses. Buffy looked him. Go on, say it . Giles was always the one to say the necessary and unthinkable. But this time, all he did was drop his eyes and say nothing, nothing at all. Buffy’s mouth tightened, and she hauled Spike to his feet. “I’m going to get him back to his crypt. Talk among yourselves.”


No sun penetrated the lower levels of the crypt, but there was always light. Splayed in the middle of the four-poster bed, Buffy was lapped in mellow candlelight. Her hair spilled golden over the pillows, her head arched back upon the rumpled sheets that smelled of cigarettes and him--of both of them, now. Spike lay cradled between her legs, as still as she save for the tiny, subtle movement of lips and tongue in the secret places of her body, millimeter strokings and sucklings, all that was needed to coax her to the crest of yet another melting rapture. He could have brought her to the peak simply by breathing on her; three, six, who-knew-how-many previous climaxes had left her whole body pliant beyond measure to his touch, held together only by breath and exquisitely sensitive skin. She had barely the energy to sigh as the warmth within her swelled up again and flooded out through all her limbs.
Good girls don’t sleep with vampires.
Spike’s moan of delight segued into slurpy noises of the sort Dawn would doubtless have parlayed into a new jacket or three. At last he raised his head from between her thighs, licking his bloodstained lips with a dazed, glassy-eyed smile. “Nectar," he got out, his voice husky with satiety. "Nectar and sodding ambrosia. God, to think you’ve been going to waste for years... we’ve got a new rule from now on. Once a month we go to bed and don’t get out for the next three days.”
Good girls don’t fall in love with soulless monsters. “Spike, you’re disgusting.”
“Yeh, and you love it.” He pulled himself up the bed, elbow over elbow, her demon lover, terrible as an army with banners. His body was lean and taut-muscled as a racing greyhound’s, arching over hers, hard for her again--perhaps Slayer’s blood really was an aphrodisiac. He kissed her full on the mouth, and the taste of her own blood and come on his tongue was as rich and wild as pomegranates. His whispered endearments filled all the empty aching places of her heart, as his cock filled all the empty aching places of her body--so good, so full and whole she felt with him inside her! Spike moved within her, slow and sweet and gentle, fangs teasing her neck but never drawing blood--what need had he to steal what was freely given elsewhere? His beautiful face transfigured as they approached completion together: man to monster and back again, every aspect of him rapt in her.
In the ruddy glow of candlelight his shoulders were scored beneath her searching hands, marked with swiftly-healing crisscross welts from the times before which had not been so gentle. Good girls don’t bite and claw. Good girls are very careful never to break their boyfriends’ bones or egos. Good girls save the world without wanting money for it.
“Love?” His hands cradled her face as her breath hitched and tears rose in her eyes, large, strong hands, hands which had slain their ten thousands. His arms encircled her shoulders, holding her as tenderly as a mother her child, while Buffy sobbed against his chest, as utterly abandoned in grief as she had been in love. “Shh, love, Buffy-sweet, it’s all right...”
Good girls don’t get turned on by sneaking out to kill things in the middle of the night. Good girls put duty above love, always. Good girls never, ever feel good about themselves.
“It’s not!” She tore the words ragged from her throat; they didn’t want to leave. “I have so much I need to do! I have to have the sex talk with Dawn. We have a tree now, I have to buy Christmas presents--I have t-to find a job, just in case! And I love you, I love you so much! I can’t--I don’t--I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die! Spike, I d-don’t w-w-want to--”
“Then you won’t!” Inhumanly strong fingers tightened on her shoulders, candlelight flared and danced in inhuman golden eyes and limned the serrated lines of bared fangs. Her beautiful monster, who had so much man in him. “I won’t let it happen. I’ll be dust before I let a one of them lay a finger on you or the Bit.” Her Spike, who would live for her, die for her, kill for her, whom no really good girl would allow herself to love for precisely that reason.
So you can't be a good girl, can you?
“Will you stop me, then, if I have to jump again to make things right?” Spike’s eyes dropped, unable to meet hers. And she, stupid girl, had thought the worst she’d have to face was the prospect of Spike killing someone else. “You know what it said. Tara said it was always right--” She pressed her face into his chest, feeling the cool firm muscle contract and shift beneath her cheek. “It can’t just be that there’s two Slayers, there’s been two Slayers for years. I came back wrong. That’s the only explanation. I came back wrong, and--”
“Bollocks.” Spike sat up, pulling her with him, stroking her hair as she had used to stroke Dawn’s when Dawn had had a nightmare. “I’d know if you weren’t Buffy. I’d know. There’s something else, and we’ll find it. Go home. Check on Dawn. Change for Anya’s party. You'll feel better.” He ran the pad of his thumb across her cheek, wiping away the tears, and his voice grew light and teasing. “Hell, pet, worse comes to worst I’ll turn you. You’ll have switched sides. End of problem.”
She punched his arm, and said “Asshole,” with the inflection that meant 'I love you'. Don’t you get it, Spike? I’m afraid that I already have.

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