Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: R
Setting: Post-Gift /AU Season 7
Pairing: B/S all the way, baybee!
Distribution: Ask and you shall receive, I'd just like to know where it ends up.
Synopsis: Buffy. Spike. Angelus. Nuff said.
Author’s notes: A sequel to "Necessary Evils," which is a sequel to “A Raising In the Sun.” Previously: Willow brought Buffy back to life using Dawn's blood and William's soul, creating an imbalance which allowed the First Evil to use Willow to take over the world. Spike and Buffy narrowly defeated the First, resulting in the de-Keying of Dawn, the permanent closure of the Hellmouth, and Willow's death and resurrection as a souled vampire. As always, thanks to Jane Davitt and the Redemptionista Writers Group, betas extraordinaire.

If fate were kind, Rupert Giles thought, it would be in a room such as this that he would die. The very air was redolent of knowledge--leather and ink and aging paper, and the lingering tang of lemon oil rubbed painstakingly into dark gleaming walnut panels. There were books, of course: rank upon rank of them, towering to the beams of the ceiling, titles in gold and scarlet and black. No uneasy tingle of power from grimoires or spellbooks in this sanctuary, just the unsullied power of the written word. An old-fashioned globe stood in the corner, its faded blues and greens and pinks a mosaic of obsolete borders. Outside the tall bay windows, squadrons of bees hummed about the garden, but the scarlet hibiscus nodding against the windowpane rather shattered the illusion of Shropshire in Pasadena. The hills visible against the smog-hazed horizon beyond the window were parched and brown with the breath of summer, the hot dry Santa Ana winds hissing down from the mountains. The sight was oddly comforting. He had lived in California long enough to miss it when he left. Dreadful thought.

A bee in its livery of black and yellow lit on the lip of the nearest blossom and crawled into its blazing heart, to emerge a moment later bathed in a golden haze of pollen. "Africanized," said the very old man seated behind the desk. He waved a gnarled hand at the window. "So-called killer bees. No place in the Southwestern United States they haven't invaded. The European honeybees were dying out. Mites. The killer bees are immune." He smiled, putting only the minimum necessary humor into the expression. "And for the most part, humanity lives cheek by jowl with them, none the wiser. Very like our own situation, in some ways."

"There are certain parallels," Giles agreed. He was in an agreeable mood. Good company, good Scotch--a trifle early in the day for it, but this was something of a special occasion--and every prospect of finding the information he'd come for. He leaned back into the sinfully inviting armchair. "But the bees serve a useful purpose that I dare say most vampires do not."

"Who can say what purpose all things serve in the great balance?" Bernard Crowley rose to his feet and crossed to the bookshelf, his thin knobby hands crab-walking over cracked spines and foxed corners until they found the book they sought. "You are an ambitious man, Mr. Giles." Fingers closing pincer-like on the leatherbound volume, he drew it from the shelf and returned to his chair, also leatherbound and nearly as ancient as the books which surrounded it. "I don't believe I've heard of anyone attempting such an in-depth study of a single vampire before."

Giles shrugged and took a sip of his Scotch. "It's been an enormous project, to be sure, but I've had very able help and the inestimable advantage of having access to a willing subject. I hope to make the finished work as much an ethnography as a biography, though the latter would be task enough. We know so little about the creatures we hunt." He offered a small, professional smile of his own. "Which is why I decided to complete the project despite my, er, recent parting of ways with the Council. Who knows when another such opportunity will arise?"

The lines bracketing Crowley's mouth flexed in disapproval. "I heard something about your recent disagreement with young Quentin. You have a publisher, then?"

"A correspondent of mine in New England has connections with the Miskatonic University Press, and..." Giles waved a deprecating hand. "But that's of no moment now."

"Mmm." Crowley eased forward and laid the book open across the desk. He flipped the pages over, one by one, and yellowing ghosts of newsprint past fluttered in the breeze of their turning, clippings and photographs of a New York more than thirty years gone. He looked up, eyes glittering in their setting of pouched and wrinkled flesh. "Given your falling out with the Council, why do you assume I might be willing to jeopardize my pension by helping the notorious renegade Rupert Giles?"

"I've achieved notoriety so swiftly, have I? Standards for villainy are non-existent these days." Giles set his glass down and met the older man's inquisitive gaze. "For one thing, because the accumulation of knowledge is an end in itself. And for another..." He hesitated. "I know something of you as well, Mr. Crowley. Your relationship with the Council was also rather strained in its day. You know what it is to have a Slayer in your charge form...attachments."

Crowley adjusted his glasses and gazed down at the pictures before him. Giles caught an upside-down glimpse of a young woman, a young man, a baby...brilliant white smiles in dark handsome faces, moments of joy captured and pinned like butterflies to the page. "Indeed I do. Though not, I may say, in so colorful a fashion as your Buffy Summers has managed."

The crumpled-parchment face gave away nothing, but there was a gleam in his ink-dot eyes, and Giles was unsure if anger or mockery predominated. The old man had earned the right to either emotion in ways someone like Quentin Travers never could. Choosing his words with the care of a man picking his way through an unfamiliar swamp, Giles said, "On occasion, a little too colorful. Which is why I would be everlastingly grateful for any independent corroboration of events you can offer."

Crowley leaned back and steepled his fingers, gazing down at the book full of memories. At length he said, "There are no substantial inaccuracies in his account of Nikki Wood's death that I can see. I never had the misfortune to run afoul of him myself, but Nikki encountered him several times before the end. She was a very observant woman--I assume you've read my official Watcher's diary for 1977? And later, of course, the witnesses who saw him leave the subway station after he'd killed her gave the police a very vivid description." There was no identifiable emotion in his voice, but his fingers were shaking as with surprising delicacy he coaxed a photograph sketch free of the fasteners attaching it to the scrapbook. He leaned forward, offering it to Giles. "Her neck was broken. A clean kill. He never set fangs upon her, nor violated the body." He rasped to a halt; the effort it took for him to continue was palpable. "Such terrible things to be grateful for."

Giles took the photograph. Nikki Wood's dead eyes stared up at him from the floor of the subway car, her head canted at a grotesque angle, her hands curling limp and helpless at her sides. She did not look asleep. "He has...spoken of her. He said..." Would this only make it harder? Would he want to know, in Crowley's place? "He saw her as a warrior. An equal. Not as...food, or a plaything." He laid the photograph reverently back upon the desk. "I don't suppose you have any contemporary photographs of..." "Only this." Crowley held up another piece of paper, a copy of a police sketch. Even in the clumsy lines of the police rendering, there was no mistaking that face. Giles undid that catch of his briefcase and pulled out the photograph to compare. Beyond superficial differences of clothing and hairstyle, the high brow and aquiline nose, scimitar cheekbones and angular jaw were all the same, facing off across a quarter-century's gap. Across the room the old man's wrinkled throat worked, and the tremor in his hands increased. "That is the...subject?" Crowley inquired, a note of living pain in his voice as fragile as the old clippings in his lap.

Giles looked up, acutely aware that for the man before him, this was no matter of idle historical curiosity. "Yes. This is Spike." He passed the picture over: a slightly overexposed night shot of a small crowd of people standing around a bonfire on a sandy beach, making faces into the camera. At the forefront was a small, lithely-muscled man in a Union Jack t-shirt, out-at-the-knees blue jeans and scuffed black Docs, his thumbs hooked loosely into the waistband of his jeans. He had a slightly startled grin on his face; the flash had bleached his short spiky hair to an even more shocking white than the peroxide had, and stoked the pupils of his blue, blue eyes to a glowing demonic red. An even smaller woman in white shorts and halter top stood beside him, her arm around his waist, her summer tan dark against his ivory skin. The photographer had caught her in the act of looking up, her eyes sparkling and her mouth half open, her hair a raw-honey blur whipping across her shoulders. "The woman with him is Buffy Summers."

Crowley stared at the photograph for a long time, running his fingertips across the images. "William the Bloody. No Angelus, but...sufficient unto the day." He looked at Giles, voice under control once more--but a control no longer effortless. "Was it destiny, you think, that brought him to the bed of a third Slayer, having sent two before her to their graves? And if destiny drove this creature to love a Slayer, why this one, do you suppose, and not..."

And not the one you loved? "Buffy is a remarkable young woman," Giles said, as if gentling something wild and wounded.

"They are all," Bernard Crowley replied, "remarkable young women."

He stared at the photograph for a while longer, and turned it over to read the inscription on the back, in Buffy's careless scrawl. Jul 4 2002 Dear Giles: Fireworks pretty. Had clambake after. S called everyone bloody Colonials till I clocked him. Wish you were here. Love, B.

"And your Nikki more so than most." Giles put all the sincerity he was capable of into the words. "She was the longest-lived Slayer in this century, was she not?"

"She was twenty-five when he killed her," Crowley said, expressionless. "How much of his past does she know of?"

It took a second to realize Crowley had changed 'shes' in mid-sentence. "More than I do," Giles admitted. "Spike refused to tell me anything about his life before he was turned, but a few things Buffy's said lead me to believe he's confided in her. And she's seen all my notes." He swirled the melting ice cubes around in the bottom of his glass. "She is not associating with him out of ignorance, if that's what you're asking."

Crowley's mouth spasmed around a sound which might have been a curse or a prayer. He handed back the photograph of Spike, and wiped his fingers on his sleeve before picking up Nikki's and returning it and the police sketch to their places in the scrapbook. "He never made an attempt on my life, or on the lives of Nikki's family. Not out of any concern for us, or any sense of honor. You must understand, Mr. Giles, that we were unimportant to him. He had come to slay the Slayer. We were...irrelevant. Food, as you say, or playthings. Had we stood between him and her death, he would have killed any of us, gladly and without a second thought."

There was such a freight of scorn in those clipped, precise words. Giles could hardly reproach him for it; it was a marvel, all things considered, that Bernard Crowley had agreed to meet with him at all. "I understand, Mr. Crowley. Believe me, I never forget what Spike is. And neither, I think, does Buffy." He felt the inadequacy of the words even as he spoke them--what precisely was Spike these days? "He has changed, or perhaps...reverted, but it would serve none of us to pretend that he was human."

The old man stood, and returned the scrapbook to its place on the shelf. "I find myself too weary to talk of Nikki any longer today. Forgive an old man his weakness, and accept my best wishes for completing your work."

The tone of dismissal was plain, and Giles suppressed a sigh and rose to his feet, following Crowley's shuffling steps out of the study and down the long hall to the front door. There was little to be gained in pressing the matter. "Perhaps I might call again, when you're feeling stronger?"

Mr. Crowley smiled, bland and inscrutable, holding open the screen door. "I fear that I expect to be very much occupied with other matters for the forseeable future."

Giles made his reluctant farewells and walked down the winding path from the house to the street, brushing aside the drooping dusty fronds of the pepper trees, back to the rented Jaguar he'd left parked at the foot of the driveway. When he looked back, the old man was standing on the front stoop watching him go, dwindled to a bent scarecrow figure of twig-thin limbs and wispy cornsilk hair. Bernard Crowley's was, Giles thought, the fate of all Watchers: to survive one's Slayer and live on, surrounded by books.

Perhaps, if the fates were kind, he would not die in a room like that after all.

It was an hour short of closing time, and there were a dozen people in the Fish Tank when Evie walked in. She discounted half of them right off. The two tired-looking women in garish spandex and cheap wigs were in the same trade she was, though they were offering different goods, and she'd never had much luck picking up women anyway. She inhaled, teasing individual human scents from the general miasma of sweat and despair, spilt beer and salt water that permeated the bar. Time was when the anticipation was almost as good as the kill, but these days her ribs were far too close to her skin for Evie to play around with her dinner. The old guy slumped in the corner booth, arthritic hands cupping a squat glass half-full of amber fluid--he might be looking for a moment of oblivion, but he was eaten out from within by something neither magic nor medicine would cure; she could smell the rotted-lilies scent of his illness. No, she wasn't that desperate.

Evie ordered a Michelob--she might as well get the cheap crap, since it tasted exactly the same as the expensive crap to a vampire's palate--and sauntered to the end of the bar. She leaned back, elbows propped against the bar rail, and sucked on her longneck, eyeing the crowd around the pool tables. Two big grizzled men with tattooed forearms and leather jackets gaping over beer bellies faced off over the expanse of worn green felt against a trio of slim brown pachucos with impeccably slicked-back hair. Possibilities there. Her eyes sized each one up in turn, looking for the telltale signs: a hint of pallor beneath dark skin or redneck tans, a crescent scar on the wrist or above the collarbone. Nothing. Nothing obvious, anyway. Her stomach growled resentfully and she took another swallow of beer to silence it. God, was she going to have to seduce some virgin?

It didn't used to be like this. Who knew she'd end up missing Whip's crappy run-down rat-trap someday? Shit, she'd cheered the night the Slayer torched the place, and skedaddled for L.A. and greener pastures when Whip and the others stormed off to take the Slayer on. Got no pride, Evie? Whip had sneered. Gonna let a human run us outta the sweetest setup we've ever had? To which the only possible answer was Fuck, yes! She couldn't afford pride--if she could, she wouldn't have been working for Whip in the first place. And it wasn't like she could have fought the brass-haired, brass-balled little bitch in her condition, anyway. Whip and all the others had been dust in the wind for years, and she was still undead and back in Sunnydale. Again.

She inhaled again. Oh, yeah, there. Male, prime of life, healthy. Evie shifted position, checking out the man at the other end of the bar. Wearing a battered leather jacket. Tall, heavy-set, dark-haired, face a scrimshaw of hard, wind-carved lines. Dude had eyes like a gravel quarry, some dark, indeterminate color between brown and grey. Probably played a mean game of poker. Evie stared dead center at his bowed shoulders and put some mojo into it--it was bullshit, but she liked to pretend she had some of that thrall thing going for her. The guy didn't twitch at all, but after a moment he turned. Just his head, no excess motion. Stony eyes looked her over.

They always wanted something more, the ones whose eyes looked like that. Something to make them feel for a second. Dinner is served. "Hey," she said. "That seat taken?"

The man held her gaze for a second longer, then returned to the contemplation of his beer foam. The hitch of his shoulders might have been a shrug or a come-on; Evie plumped for the latter and swivel-hipped it down the length of the bar. The two off-duty whores whispered behind scarlet-clawed hands as she passed them, but Evie didn't bother sorting their crow-chatter from the background noise. Focus on the meal, here.

She slid onto the stool beside him with a practiced wriggle. She hadn't seen herself in a mirror for seven years, and what she'd seen the last time she looked hadn't been all that and a bag of chips, but anyone playing shark in the Fish Tank wasn't fussy. About anything. Evie tossed her hair over one shoulder--long and glossy and black, her one good feature--and took a long swig of her hops-flavored soda water, then set the bottle down on the bar, running the tip of her index finger around the rim. "They serve any food here?" she asked. She was still stalking her prey. Not the way she used to do it in the old days--and don't even think about the old days, the power and the blood and the hunt, only three years gone and might as well be a hundred. She was still a hunter. Hell, this was better than working for Whip, even if she did go hungry more often than not.

Another grunt. "Don't ask me. First time I've been here."

"New in town?" That might be good or bad. "I grew up here. Lived in L.A. the last couple years. I just got back." She injected a little hesitancy, a little concern, into her voice. "You wanna be careful after dark, mister. You wouldn't think it from the Leave It To Beaver vibe, but there's a lot of weird shit goes down in Sunnydale."

The man actually barked out a laugh. "Believe me, sister, I can take care of myself.”

Evie smiled, assessing the heft of his shoulders with a sidelong gaze. She could have lived off this one for a month, in the old days, if she'd been careful...but she hadn't needed to be, then. He was wearing some kind of necklace made out of...wolf's teeth, maybe? Bitchin'. Though human would have been more of a turn-on. This guy was more than he seemed, maybe, but that could be a plus. She grinned, slow and saucy, letting her tongue-tip trace the curve of her lower lip. "Bet you can. But I'm still hungry. You know anyplace around here where I might get a...bite, at this time of night? I promise I don't eat much."

She let the gold blossom and fade in her eyes, just obvious enough to make it clear what she was to someone in the know. His eyes reflected a smile almost as devoid of humanity as her own. "Yeah," he said. "Come to think of it, I do."

The streetlight outside the bar was broken, and the alley behind was impenetrably dark to human eyes. Her meal ticket glanced out at the street for passers-by before fading into the shadows of the rear entrance. He must have been back here before, Evie decided, picking her way through the maze of rotting garbage. The night air was close with the odors of stale urine, the dead-fish reek of the nearby docks, and things even a vampire really didn't want to think too much about. Rats scuttled away behind the piles of splintered wooden pallets, their sharp vicious chittering echoing off the brick and concrete. Evie shouldered up to the wall, folding her arms across her chest, unfolding them in irritation as she realized the defensiveness of her posture. Her prey kicked aside a packing crate. Would he want her to fake giving a shit? No, not this one. "You want a quickie, it's fifty bucks. You want me to make it last, it's a hundred," she said. Businesslike. "It's easier if you roll up your sleeve."

His flint-shard eyes swept her up and down, frank and impersonal as a man buying a racehorse. "I want it in the neck," he said. He pulled a wallet from his hip pocket, counted out five bedraggled twenties, and tossed them to the ground at her feet. "You'd better be worth it."

"Traditionalist, huh?" Evie shrugged her purse off and set it down in the cleanest spot she could find. She knelt to pick up the bills--this was part of the show she gave, letting them think they were in control, that their money meant something. She stuffed the money into her purse and straightened, smoothing her palms along her thighs and letting the gold rise in her eyes again. Her fangs made pinprick indentations in her lower lip. "Fine by me. You want it to scar?" She'd had fetishists ask for weirder things.

He opened his arms with a scary-ass smile. "Surprise me."

Evie's fingers closed on the heavy folds of leather and pulled him down, big broad shoulders kitten-helpless in her grip. The scent of dust and creosote hung about him, sweat-soaked leather and hot pulsing blood. Dizzy with hunger and need, Evie's lips parted and she set fangs to skin, fighting the urge to rend and tear--had to be oh so careful now, think good thoughts, how she wasn't going to kill this guy, wasn't going to rip through skin and cartilage and gorge herself on his fountaining blood. No. Slow. Careful. Because he wanted it. And it was OK if he wanted it. Stubble beneath her lips, salt beneath her tongue, God so good, careful, careful, careful...

It took a second to realize that the dagger-sharp pain was in her chest, not her head. "It's an oak dowel with a sharpened steel core," the flat voice whispered in her ear. She could feel the vibration of his vocal cords against her frozen lips. "It's slimmer than a wooden stake and far stronger, and I don't have to be a Slayer to push it all the way through your ribcage with no problem at all. What I want you to do is step back against the wall--no, you leave your demon face be. That's what I need, girl. Mind me, and maybe you won't be dust after I've finished."

A growl of outrage forced its way up her throat. What the hell was he up to? Was he gonna try to rape her? How goddam dare he? She was the hunter here. She would fucking kill this sonofabitch, if it made her head explode to do so. Later, when he didn't have twelve inches of wood stabbing her in the heart to make up for the three-inch floppy he probably sported elsewhere. Evie took two wary steps backward, until cold slimy brick pressed against her shoulder blades, and he followed, step for step. Most humans had no conception of how fast a vamp could move when they had to, but her captor (no, her dinner, damn it) kept that high-tech stake right to her ribs, right above the place her heart should have been hammering against. He'd torn her blouse and broken skin. She could feel blood she couldn't spare starting to seep into the fabric.

One-handed, he fished a pair of weirdly-curved pliers out of a coat pocket and limbered them up, click-click. She saw the silhouette of his upraised hand, black against black, and then the motion-sensitive light over the Fish Tank's rear entrance flooded the alley with its sickly glare and half-blinded her. "Open your mouth, girlie. And keep your face on. You drop it, or scream, or bite me, you're a pile of ash."

Evie blinked back light-tears. Christ on a crutch, he was going to go all Marathon Man on her. He was so goddam dead. She flung her head back, away from his looming backlit figure, lips skinned back in a snarl. Her skull cracked against the bricks, and she welcomed the pain as one more reason to hate. The man chuckled. "That's the ticket. Open wide." He levered the pliers into her mouth, forcing her jaw wide. The flat savorless taste of her own blood flooded her tongue, and the chill metal bruised her gums and split her lower lip as the pincers locked around her lower left canine.

Most humans had no conception of how keen a vampire's ears were, either. Someone was coming. She could hear the approaching footsteps, two pairs, man and a woman, and...no heartbeats. Fuck. Only another couple of vamps, and she'd be lucky if another vampire would so much as pause to snicker at her demise. On the other hand, maybe they'd take down Dr. Scrivello here just for the fun of it.

"--got to learn some time," the man's voice said. "Not every town's got a twenty-four-hour butcher on premises, you know." Light, sardonic British-accented baritone--she knew that voice. Double fuck. Spike. Not just any vampire, a completely fucked-up insane vampire who'd allied himself with the Slayer. On the other hand, Spike had some kind of hero complex these days. Maybe she could take advantage of it.

"But it's bunnies!" the woman countered, beseeching. "Cute little flop-eared bunnies. From a Make-the-World-Safe-For-Anya standpoint, OK, I can see it, but can't we start with something that's got less personality? And fluffiness? Scales would be good. And beadiness of eye. Frogs, maybe--or wait, not frogs, they make me nervous. Lizards. Or maybe not lizards, because, skittery? Not a good trait in a breakfast food."

"Won't do, Red. 'S got to be warm-blooded." Spike sounded as though he'd given this particular lecture before. "What, d'you think pig's blood generates spontaneously in plastic bags? Someone's got to nail the pig between the eyes with a whacking great mallet, string it up on a meathook, slit its throat and let it bleed out." A snort. "Thinking about it's the only way I can get the stuff down, some days."

The guy that smelled of the desert didn't hear; his face was a mask of impassive concentration. He wasn't even getting off on this, and how sick was that? He wrenched hard on the handles of his pliers and the thin bone around the tooth went snap-crackle-pop. Evie gagged reflexively on blood, fingernails clawing gory gouges on the brickwork behind her as her canine was jerked free of its socket. Steel cracked against the incisor beside it. Her jaw was on fire--no throbbing, because no heartbeat, just a steady agonizing nuclear burn. "Help," she choked out. No human being would hear her more than a few feet away, but what was coming down the sidewalk wasn't human. "Please. I need help."

The stake point grated against bone. "One more word, girlie, you'll be beyond help." Her captor dropped the crimson-smeared fang into his coat pocket, hooked the pliers around her upper left canine, and began working it free in a brutal back-and-forth sawing motion. Her lips were numb. A viscous glistening delta of bloody saliva drooled over the corners of her mouth and down the front of her shirt--adding insult to injury, her stomach was still knotting with hunger. She was going to scream. Then the chill sharp weight against her chest would sink in and she'd dissolve into nothingness and that would be a relief. That was it. Scream, and it would all be over.

"AAAAHHH!"

Evie got a glimpse of a pale elfin face, distorted by ridges and fangs, and auburn hair flying--mother-of-pearl framed in dried blood. Pliers and steel-cored stake clattered to the filthy concrete, and the man who'd held them flew backwards against the stack of pallets, eyes white-ringed with startlement and pain. Wood splintered and collapsed beneath his weight. Her nemesis rolled to his knees, gasping and clutching his right hand to his belly. Small fingers encircled the man's left wrist with an audible crunch of bone grinding against bone and hauled him upright.

The little redhead glared at the man in the wolf's-tooth necklace, her thin chest expanding and contracting in jerky heaves. "Mr. Cain, I presume? You know, I'm really, truly getting to not like you at all."

Vampire, obviously, but there was something off about her, something weird in her scent and the tone of her voice, an alien light in the fulvous gold of her eyes. Evie turned and hotfooted it for the street. A shadow peeled off the wall as she reached the mouth of the alley, and strong hands caught her by the elbows, whirling her for an instant into the halogen glare of the light and back again into the darkness. Platinum blond hair and black leather jacket, knife-slash cheekbones, incongruous midsummer-blue eyes caught in nets of laugh-lines--Spike, grinning, Harlequin in moonlight and ebony. "What's the hurry, pet? Party's just starting."

"Let me go, chupacabra!" Evie howled, bucking against his grip. Spike chuckled and cuffed her across the mouth, and forked lighting jagged from the raw socket of her missing tooth all the way down her spinal cord. He flipped her off her feet and toted her back into the alley; Evie struggled, but the arm pinning hers to her sides might as well have been muscled with steel hawsers. Spike wasn't the oldest vampire she'd ever met, but he was up there, well into his second century, a hell of a lot stronger than she was and totally loco to boot, what with living off goddam animals and fucking the Slayer and helping close the Hellmouth and saving the world and all. Loco. Catch her running to humans and drinking the blood of dead pigs after...it happened? No fucking way.

Cain was down on his knees in the muck, staring up at the redhead with smoldering resentment, the first real expression Evie had seen on his face. He jerked his head in Spike's direction, his lips twisted in a rictus of disdain. "Spike."

"Cain." Spike stopped a few paces away, head cocked, regarding the confrontation with amused interest. "And now the traditional exchange of manly monosyllables is complete, I can't help but notice you're still in town. What part of sod off and die don't you understand?" He looked to the redhead, scarred eyebrow at half-mast. "I take it you're acquainted with this bloke, Will?"

Will transferred her grip from wrist to the necklace, yanking Cain's head down hard. The cord snapped with a high-tension ping and a dozen yellowing fangs rained to the ground, the fragile old bone shattering on impact. "He tried to kill Oz once." Her voice was Waterford crystal, clear and sharp, and Evie, listening, decided that maybe Cain had more to worry about from this Will than he did from Spike.

"Ah. You want to off him, then?" Spike sounded excessively cheerful at the prospect. "Dog-boy was a bit of a wanker, but--"

"Oh, for God's sake, Spike, it's just a damned vampire," Cain rasped. "Vermin even to other vermin. What's it to you if I take the saleable parts before your girlfriend dusts it? And speaking of your girlfriend, does she know you've got minions beating up humans for you?"

Spike extracted a slightly battered cigarette from an inside jacket pocket and tucked it in the corner of his mouth, flicking a glance in Willow's direction. The flare of his lighter picked out a starfield of sweat droplets on Cain's brow. "Interesting question, that," he drawled, drawing the cigarette to brilliant life. "Pity you won't get a chance to ask her. 'Sides, our Willow's not exactly a minion. More of a protege, like."

"You don't even remember me. Or Oz." Willow's voice quivered, but it wasn't a quiver that implied weakness. "I remember every single person I've tried to kill, Mr. Cain. And I don't feel like remembering you. You--you should leave. Now." She dropped Cain's wrist as if it were something fouler than alley-scrapings, and Evie realized in a burst of revolted clarity what was wrong with her.

"She's got a soul!"

"That being why Frank Buck here's still got his delicates intact." Spike plunked Evie down at his side and allowed her to get her feet underneath her. He turned the wolf-grin on Cain. "However, yours truly's not burdened, and Christ only knows when my killer instinct's going to overwhelm the extreme boredom inspired by the sight of your face. I don't care what you're after or why, Cain. Hellmouth's closed, and Sunnydale's my territory. You want bits and bobs, hunt 'em elsewhere."

Cain's breath hissing in and out through his clenched teeth was the only sound in the alley for a long moment. He hooked an elbow over the top of the nearby stack of pallets and pulled himself upright in ungainly no-hands-Ma lurches "You ride me out on a rail, Spike, and you're in deeper shit than you can imagine. I told you, I'm not freelance any longer. I've got backing from the big boys. Your pissant little operation's just in the way." "Yeh, you've got backing. I've got nice sharp teeth. Your boss isn't around to wipe your arse right now, but I'm right here to wipe the floor with it." A chainsaw rumble rolled up from the bottom of his chest and Spike's eyes shaded from blue to predatory yellow beneath gnarled ridges of bone. Willow hastily followed suit, baring her fangs in a somewhat unconvincing snarl. "Thinking you'd better be off, Gib old mate."

And he was, staggering out of the alley with his torn coat-sleeve hanging askew. Willow watched him go with a cold light in her eyes, and then shrank in on herself like Styrofoam in a pressure cooker. "Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God..."

"Snap out of it, Red. Time for that later." Spike gave Evie a little shake. He'd already shed his game face. "You. What's your story? You couldn't break loose from a berk who was practicing home dentistry with one hand and trying to keep you pinned with the other?"

Evie glared after the departing Cain with fervor exceeding Willow's, shaking with hunger and fury. He was her prey, damn it, she'd hunted him down and caught him--so she was using words instead of fangs, so what? She spat in Spike's face, or tried to; it didn't get very far. "I don't talk to goat-sucking, human-loving traitors. Stake me or turn me loose, chupacabra."

"Delighted. Will?"

Willow snuffled and scrubbed the heel of her hand across her eyes, wiping away the fangs and ridges. With a deep shuddery breath she reached over for a length of broken pallet. "Splintery or extra-splintery?"

Evie gulped. "He...got me by surprise."

"I'll bet. You look familiar. Dalton's get, aren't you?" Spike exhaled a thoughtful plume of blue smoke, examining her at greater length. "Worked for me for awhile, few years back?"

Evie shrugged, sullen. "Yeah. Before the Slayer kicked your ass, Angelus stole your girl, and you hightailed out of town with your tail between your legs."

Spike cuffed her again, hard enough to stagger her back a pace. Evie clapped a hand to her jaw and spat incomprehensible profanities as Spike licked her blood from his knuckles. "Fair cop," he said with surprising mildness. "But that was long ago and in another country, and besides, the wench is dead. Not that I hold that against her." His hand dropped and he dug a thumb into her ribs. "You're turning tricks, you're skin and bone, and you let that arsewipe pin you." The corner of his mouth took on a self-satisfied curl, and he laid a finger to his temple. "Got it. Initiative, Class of Double-Ought?"

"Fuck off."

"She's got a behavior-modification chip? Like you used to?" Sonething took a whetstone to Willow's dull gaze, and the eyes that rose to meet Evie's were keen with interest. "I always wondered what happened to Hostiles One through Sixteen. I thought you were the only one who got out when the Initiative lab got all destroyed. You mean, she's harmless?"

"I'm not harmless!" Evie snarled. "Better a chip in my head than a fucking disgusting soul crawling around in my gut." Willow flinched, guilt displacing her momentary animation, and Evie turned the snarl on Spike. "Maybe I can't bite, but at least I'm living off human blood instead of human charity."

Spike snorted. "And living so very well, too, by the looks of you." Evie tried to smack his hand off her shoulder, with a signal lack of success. Not just because he was stronger than she was, either; she was getting dizzy from hunger and pain and blood loss. Right now she probably couldn't have fought Willow off. Willow was looking at her, all big sad puppy-eyed compassion. Fucking sick-making, her and her soul, standing there all clean and shiny and well-fed. "Nah, you're not harmless," Spike went on, a needling tone creeping into his voice. "Bet you've sussed out a way to kill even with the chip in your head, haven't you? Laid traps. Set houses afire. Beat the crap out of a demon or two, made them kill for you--" At the look on her face, he broke into incredulous laughter. "Bloody hell, you silly bint, you never even tried hitting a demon?"

"The chip only works on biochemistry native to this dimension," Willow put in helpfully. "It's got really interesting heuristics. I'd love to study one in detail." She eyed the back of Evie's skull with rather alarming avarice.

"Like you did all that stuff instead of hiding behind the Slayer's skirts, you big undead pussy?" Evie flung back at him. "Fuck you and the horse you slurp through a bendy straw, I'm out of here."

She yanked herself away and Spike let her go, his wicked blue eyes a-glitter with amusement. Evie made it three steps before one high heel went out from under her, and she collapsed beside her purse. Hundred bucks. She had Cain's hundred bucks in there, and that would buy...three, four bags of Willy's best at the Alibi Room. Enough to keep her mobile for another week if she'd been uninjured, barely enough to fuel her healing body for a day in her current condition. Evie looked down at the blood and spit smearing the front of her blouse. Assuming someone didn't just roll her as the easy prey she was, and steal the whole thing. She drew a ragged, determined breath, stowed the purse under one arm and forced herself to her feet again. If someone dusted her, she was taking the money with her.

"You're not going to make it a quarter-mile," Spike said behind her. "But happens we've got business in that direction."

Evie stopped, her head hanging. Screw it. Pride hadn't hit the sale table yet. "Yeah? I should care why?"

Spike sauntered over and sucked in his cheeks. "Got a word to have with Rack. Take us to his place, and I might feel generous later."

Evie blinked. The block or so surrounding Rack's place was prime hunting territory, a smorgasbord of half-dazed magic junkies too zoned on stolen power to run. She generally avoided it--too much of a fight to get a good spot. It wasn't far off; in fact, she'd passed it by on the way down to the docks, slinking past with lowered head, careful not to project any kind of challenge towards the three older vamps who'd staked out the entrance. But with these two with her...maybe she'd get a decent meal tonight after all. "Sure. Come on."

Spike and Willow followed her down the street, Spike vamp-silent, Willow walking almost as noisily as a human. Spike hadn't taught her shit about hunting, assuming he was her sire and responsible for such things. Or maybe she just didn't want to learn. Willow still looked haunted and unhappy--a soul thing, Evie guessed; Spike didn't say anything, but now and again he'd look down at her with a bewildered concern that was, in its way, even more deeply wrong than the soul business. Evie felt a sudden weird nostalgia for her own sire. She hadn't thought of Dalton for years, but he'd been all right. He'd looked damn funny when the Judge torched him, too.

Once they left the Fish Tank and its surrounding straggle of parked cars behind, the street was mostly deserted at this late hour. Evie tried to think through the hot-coal aching of her jaw. She wasn't going to heal fast, or at all, till she got a little blood in her, and she wasn't going to get any clientele till she healed. Her face felt lopsided and swollen. "Is it gonna grow back?" she asked.

"Eh?"

"The tooth," she said impatiently. "You're old and you've lost enough fights--do they grow back?"

Spike grinned--teeth sharp, white, and all in perfect working order. "Give it a week or two. Won't give you odds on a finger, though. Never tried that one."

That was some comfort, if he was telling the truth. Evie frowned, taking the next turn to Rack's place automatically. If she bought animal blood, her money would last longer, but fuck, she'd managed to avoid that ultimate humiliation for so long, and it chapped her ass to fail now. She'd been down, but she'd never been reduced to drinking warmed-over pig like the fucking sellouts behind her. Not that it seemed to have hurt them any. Neither Spike nor Willow were exactly the heavyset type, but she could tell from their previous close encounter that his ribs were sheathed in a healthy layer of muscle, and she was acutely aware of her own gauntness in comparison.

"You're the only one I've run into," Spike said abruptly. "From that place. Heard tell a few more made it out, but I never met any of 'em."

Evie shrugged. "There was another guy got out with me, during the big fight. He couldn't take it, not being able to feed. Walked into the sun after a month." She threw a defiant sneer over her shoulder. "I saw you there when the place went smash. Killing off your own kind."

Spike didn't look particularly chastened. "Takes some amount of brains, surviving as long as you have with no bite." The smirk that never entirely left his face when dealing with her intensified. "If you call what you do surviving."

"I do OK," Evie snapped. Almost there. Rack's entrance would be right off the next alley; she could feel it in her bones. They passed an old man huddled on the stoop of the Navy recruitment office, and her stomach rumbled in protest. Her feet slowed down of their own volition, and Evie looked at the crumpled heap of humanity longingly. He was drunk and stinking, and she'd regret it in the evening, but she couldn't bear the black hole in her gut any longer. "Wait up. Lemme get a bite from this guy." If she did it carefully enough, he might not even wake up, and the chip might not fire at all.

Spike halted, interposing his deceptively lean frame between her and the bum. "Bloke's veins are running eighty proof, you nit. Two swallows and you'll keel over." He shucked off the motorcycle jacket and handed it to Willow, extending one bare arm, wrist up. "Well, come on, can't stand here all night."

Evie blinked down at the pale, blue-veined wrist before her. The streetlights gleamed off the curve of Spike's shoulder, where the dark fabric of his t-shirt strained over the muscles of his upper arm, and gilded the dusting of light brown hair on his forearm. "This doesn't make me your fucking minion or anything," she said.

"Good, because minions are suck-arse wastes of hemoglobin," Spike rejoined. "You do a job for me, I pay you, we go our separate ways."

Still Evie hesitated. She chin-pointed at Willow. "You made her. I can tell."

"No!" Willow looked quite shocked. "I made me. I mean, I made him make me. Kind of. I was in a place. But he's been a really great sire, a little on the cranky side maybe, but we deal, you know? And--"

"You gonna drink or not?" Spike demanded.

It occurred to Evie that if the two of them had come straight down Alembert to the Fish Tank, there was no way in hell they could have missed Rack's. But somehow, as she sank her remaining fangs into the vein and sucked down mouthful after avid mouthful, it didn't matter all that much.

Willow tilted her head back as she walked beneath the big wrought-iron arch of the main gates to Restfield Cemetery, watching the topmost branches of the elms claw at the moon overhead. It was a few days past full, a tarnished silver coin sailing across the clear, cold January night, and it bathed the cemetery in ghostly radiance. "You don't get it," she said. "I really, really wanted to kill him."

Spike, striding along at her side and keeping a scowling eye on the back of Evie's head, snorted. "'Course you did. I keep telling you, Red--vampire with a soul's still a vampire."

"But it wasn't like that." Willow kicked at a drift of dead leaves by the side of the gravel path, disconsolate. Becoming a vampire should have made it all easier. "I didn't want to eat him. I was mad because he hurt Oz. This was me. Willow-me."

"Who were you expecting it to be, Wendell Wilkie?"

"I don't know. I thought..." She'd thought that she could label all her bad naughty urges demon and wall them off in a corner, all very Cask of Amontillado. That there'd be Good Willow with a soul, and Evil Willow without. And instead it was just all one big tangled mess of Willow. She jammed her hands into her coat pockets--she didn't need the coat for warmth these days, but you had to have somewhere to put your hands, right? "Do you remember what it was like? Having a soul?"

"Do I remember being a pathetic sodden mess?" Spike scoffed. "'Oooh, I'm sorry,' and 'Oh, how could I?' twenty-four-seven? Of course I--" He trailed off and crushed out his cigarette on the nearest tombstone, distance clouding his eyes, like a man trying to recall the words to a once-loved and long-forgotten song. "S' a little like remembering a dream. I felt things...try to get 'em back, sometimes. They don't make any sense to me now." He rolled his shoulders, shrugging introspection away. "You remember what it was like the five minutes you didn't have one?"

"Yeah." And it all made perfect sense. Willow shivered. "The scary thing? I wasn't someone else."

Spike chuckled, low and conspiratorial. "Terrifying, innit?" His scowl returned. "You think it would help to talk to the L.A. branch of the family..."

"Hey." Willow patted his arm. "Why? You've got me this far, right?"

Spike gave her a look, half startled pride and half reflexive sarcasm. "Guess I did."

"Hey! Spike! You said I could hit demons, right?" Evie hopped off a tombstone up ahead. She was all hyped up on the blood Spike had given her--vampire blood wasn't anything you could live off, but drinking from a vampire Spike's age was a little like mainlining Red Bull.

"You can try," Spike started, and then his eyes widened. Evie's foot was poised above a scaly, tight-coiled blue-black thing about the size of a bowling ball. "Oi, you daft bint, leave that be!"

Evie gave the whatever-it-was an energetic punt. It sailed over the tombstone in a graceful arc and landed with a squeal and a meaty thump fifty yards away. She threw back her head with a whoop of glee and tore after it. Spike muttered an imprecation that would have melted lead and sprinted off after his giddy not-a-minion. Willow shook her head and suppressed a tiny and wholly unreasonable flare of jealousy as she pulled out her cell phone. Reception was always lousy inside Restfield, but she'd promised. She punched in Tara's number and strolled towards the crypt as the line rang, and rang, and rang. Just before the voicemail recording kicked in, Tara picked up. "Whas marrer?"

Tara's bedroom voice, drowsy and molasses-sweet. Tara sprawled out all golden and silky-soft on the bed, tangled up in blankets and smelling like sun-warmed rosemary and girl-musk--the very thought made her feel all toasty and purrsome inside. "Tara? It's just me, honey--you wanted me to call before I started home?"

"Mrrmf." There was a muffled scraping noise, then, "Willow? It's three in the morning. I went to bed hours ago. I have morning classes tomorrow, remember?"

"Oh." Willow's face fell. She'd known that. "I'm sorry. We--I lost track of time. You know, Spike's been having trouble with this guy cutting in on the business, and he heard through the grapevine that someone was downtown tonight harvesting vampire teeth, and he asked if I wanted to come along when he took care of it, and you'll never guess who it turned out to be! Gib Cain!"

"Who?" Tara sounded as if she was starting to drift off.

"That werewolf hunter? That Buffy--never mind. I can tell you about it tomorrow."

"Well...it's good you found the guy. Did...did Spike really need you along tonight?"

Willow opened her mouth, shut it, and tried to keep the hurt out of her voice when she finally answered. "He wanted me along. He asked. He's my sire."

A sigh. "I know. And I'm...it's just that I worry. I mean...this isn't slaying. It's..." The voice on the phone sounded small and sad and confused now. "I know I've b-been...I haven't always been easy to be around, and sometimes...Never mind. I miss you. Come home soon."

Why? The Willow you miss died a year ago.

No. That wasn't fair, was it? Tara was trying, trying really hard. Willow's hand dropped to her side, cell dangling loosely from her fingers. A far-off voice piped "Willow? Willow?"

Spike had told her, back at the beginning, that being her sire didn't mean anything, but of course it did. She just couldn't define that meaning in human terms, and every time she tried she just ended up mumbling, "He's my sire," as if that could explain everything, and of course it could--to another vampire. Who would understand perfectly why she'd immediately accepted the casual offer to come along tonight, or why she resented the attention Spike gave the minions--despite Spike's crochets on the subject, she didn't know what else to call them--even though it was business and nothing to do with her.

It wasn't like she was out every night gadding about with Sunnydale's vampire set, she thought with a resentful scuff at the gravel. As Spike's get they accorded her grudging respect, but she wasn't one of them, nor did she want to be, really. She had a soul. Teensy social barrier, there, when she couldn't get into hanging around the water cooler and swapping tales of slaughter. Spike, who pursued humanity with such ferocious determination, made it easy to forget just how great the gap was, but sometimes she found herself staring even at him across an unbridgeable gulf.

Willow stuffed the plaintively cheeping cell phone back into her pocket and started to walk, fast, barely noticing where her feet were taking her. A year ago, Willow Rosenberg had plans. Big plans. OK, she'd burnt out her magic to the point it might never come back, she'd come within an inch of destroying the world, she was teetering on the edge of losing the woman she loved, she was kind of a vampire, and worst of all, she'd gotten two Cs on her mid-terms. The goblins might just as well come and carry her away. But she'd rallied. She was going to turn things around. She might be a vampire, but she had a soul and she was going to use her vast powers for good and noble purposes. Like Angel. Helping the helpless, befriending the friendless, and defeating the defeatless. Just maybe not so much with the hitting, because contrary to popular belief and to Willow's secret disappointment, becoming a vampire did not instantly endow you with a black-belt level command of every martial art known to man. The third or fourth time Buffy sent her flying across the training room and into the wall, Willow decided that increased pain threshold or no, this was not on the Fun List.

No, she should follow her strengths. Study. Research. The acquisition of forbidden knowledge. She had an unparalleled in now. She could mingle with demons, find out stuff no human investigator could ever discover. She could be the Dian Fossey of the demon world. Visions of papers co-authored with Harriet Doyle danced in her head, for about the ten seconds it took to discover that demons could smell the soul on her like stink on Anya's favorite Brie, and were even less than inclined to talk to such a freak of nature than to a human.

So a year later, here she was, risking life, limb, and spontaneous combustion for her degree in the afternoons, pitching in with occasional slayage in the evenings, and tagging along after Spike trying to build up her demonic street cred at night. Neither world fit her any longer, and unlike Spike, who didn't give a damn what world he lived in so long as Buffy existed in the center of it, she had yet to find her balance. The Rosenberg outline for So You Want To Be A Vampire had been refined down to a single word: Don't.

Spike's pale head re-materialized among the carious teeth of the tombstones. He had one hand clamped firmly on Evie's shoulder and was marching her ahead of him at arm's length. A horrible reek preceded them, the unholy mating of rotten hamburger and week-old socks. Willow gagged and exhaled quickly, trying to get the nauseating smell out of her lungs. "...and that," Spike said through tight-clenched jaw, "is why we don't kick the Vernex demons despite their ever-so-tempting resemblance to a football, you buggering little cow." He threw an exasperated glare in Willow's direction, Please, God, tell me I was never this thick at her age implicit in every bristling line of his body.

Evie's manic grin got wider at the sight of Willow. She pumped her fist in the air. "Fuckin' A, I can kick demons!"

The iron-grated windows of Spike's old crypt spilled welcoming golden light across the close-cropped lawn as they came crunching single-file up the path. Spike flung the door open with a crash and swept inside. "Heads up, children, we've got company."

The homey clutter of furniture the crypt had once sported was long gone, cleared out to make room for counters and shelves and bins and an enormous old roll-top desk. Willow had honestly never thought Spike would be able to make a go of his demon-hunting business--he might be great at the killing part, but dealing with clients and taxes and paperwork wasn't exactly his idiom. Spike had solved that little problem by delegating the clients, taxes, and paperwork to someone else at the earliest opportunity. If he wasn't good at fiddly details, he was stunningly good at motivating people who were, as long as the motivation in question involved the occasional boot to the head. It shouldn't have been a surprise; after all, he'd made his Sunnydale debut by taking over the Master's old gang lock, stock, and sepulchre, and running it pretty darn efficiently until Buffy'd dropped the organ on him. The 'employees' currently in residence rose hurriedly to their feet as Spike ushered Evie inside--balding, phlegmatic David, who craved numbers as much as he craved blood and had taken payroll and accounting over from Anya when it got to be more than a part-time job; small, fierce Nadia and her slim fey brother Denny, who looked after inventory and packaging, and never explained why they'd killed their own sire.

"Gah, Spike, don't tell me you kicked that damn Vernex demon again!" Nadia complained, pinching her nose.

"Shut your gob or I'll kick it down your throat next time," Spike replied amiably. "New bird's Evie. She'll be joining our merry band of outlaws. David, take her downstairs, fetch out the Lincoln green, and give her a feed--yeh, it's pig, and you'll drink it and like it."

Evie followed David over to the ladder leading downstairs without protest--too wiped out to argue, probably. She'd fit in, Willow was pretty sure. It was uncanny, the way Spike could pick them. The weirdos, the misfits, the geeks; he homed in unerringly and went for the jugular. Spike couldn't have known Evie was chipped. But he'd seen something, some weakness, or some strength. Maybe it was just that a century and a quarter's worth of experience in cutting out the vulnerable loners from the human herd could apply just as well to the vampire herd.

Or maybe it took one to know one.

"I'm gonna take off," Willow called across the room. "I kinda promised Tara I'd be home, um, three hours ago."

Spike glanced up from the pile of receipts David was showing him. "I'll be along in a tick, pet. Car's by the front gate; I'll give you a lift if you want."

"Sire's pet," Nadia whispered with a sly grin.

Willow grinned back and walked out into the night, shutting the crypt door behind her with a smugness as unreasonable in human terms as the earlier jealousy had been. She headed back towards the street, swinging along the path with something approaching good cheer. She'd make it up to Tara. When she got home, she'd catch a nap, and then take a really hot shower just before her beloved woke up, and duck into bed before the borrowed heat could dissipate. And she'd remember to breathe the whole time, and there would be snuggling. Severe, unrestrained snuggling.

A staticky crackle issued from her pocket. Drat, had she forgotten to turn the phone off? Way to waste weekend minutes. She pulled her cell phone out, about to turn it off, when something made her pause.

She wasn't all that great at the hunting thing, and she knew it. The raw ability was there--she could see in the dark, she could hear faint, mysterious crunching noises at fifty paces, she could pick Tara's clothes out of a pile of laundry blindfolded by the scent...but telling one mysterious crunching noise from another was another matter. It wasn't that Spike hadn't tried to teach her, but...she'd slacked. With verve and determination. Left to his own devices her sire would certainly have lost patience and resorted to the Angelus Method ("You don't learn, you don't eat") on her, but there was Tara. And Buffy. And she was a noble vampire, living in a town with a twenty-four-hour butcher, and no intention of snacking on infants, so: slackage emerged triumphant. And probably? Better all around that way, because deep down, the thought of her fangs tearing into living flesh stirred an excited little flutter in her stomach, and she couldn't help wondering just a tiny, ultra-miniturized bit how much richer and better and warmer that lovely blood-taste would be coming straight from the vein. Which was bad. Very bad.

Except now that she really needed the skills for a virtuous enterprise, she didn't have them. What Spike had said about relaxing into the night, becoming part of it? Willow stood still and allowed the nocturnal symphony to wash over her, wind and distant cars and the defiant late-night song of a mockingbird. She could still hear voices from the crypt, and Denny'd tuned a radio to one of his everlasting salsa stations, but this had come from the other direction. The faint crackle of vegetation crushing beneath stealthy feet, or just a stray ground squirrel? She sniffed the breeze, but whatever it was was staying safely downwind of her.

Maybe it was Cain, come back to cause trouble. Definite possibility there. Spike was way too cavalier about Cain. Maybe he did have friends in low places. Spike's business was small, true, but since the Hellmouth had closed, Sunnydale wasn't attracting the huge number of exotic demons it had in the past, and competition was getting tougher.

She was confident that she could handle Cain. Maybe she even wanted to handle Cain. Willow pulled her jacket tightly around herself and started off in the direction of the mysterious noise, moving as silently as she knew how. A stand of junipers loomed before her, dark upright sentinels clustered around a weatherbeaten mausoleum. Was something moving beneath the shadows of the trees? Willow faded back into the shadow of the marble walls and flattened her shoulders to the cool stone, holding her nonexistent breath. Not that she wanted to impress Tara, but...OK, she wanted to impress Tara. Spike hadn't just asked her along to be nice, because Spike, nice? Sheeyah. Maybe she wasn't UberWitch any longer, but she could still use her semi-awesome, why-didn't-I-listen-when-Spike-tried-to-teach-me-this-sneaky-predator-stuff powers for good, darn it. She could--

A dark figure cannonballed out of the underbrush, striking Willow in the midsection and rolling her over backwards on the damp grass. After a second's panic, Willow dredged up her lessons and made a clumsy left-handed grab for her attacker's arm--clumsy, but faster than any human could block.

Her attacker blocked it. Her cell phone tumbled across the grass, buzzing. Willow dug her heels into the turf for leverage and flopped like a gaffed salmon, but a pair of slim, muscular thighs pinned her arms to her sides and a stake-point sharp and deadly as desire pressed down against her heart. Long dark hair lashed her face and flipped back over her attacker's shoulders, revealing a delicate, olive-skinned face with almond eyes and a wide, generous mouth.

"Hello, cutie," the girl said with a triumphant grin, bracing to ram the stake home. "I'm Kennedy, and you're dust."

They weren't supposed to be cute, damn it. Scary or seductive or sleazy, that was OK, but they weren't supposed to wear patchwork suede jackets over baby-doll tops with silly little dancing giraffes appliqued along the collar. They weren't supposed to wear Raspberry Ice lipstick. They were supposed to smell like open graves and decay, not fresh-turned earth and strawberries, and they were definitely not allowed to look up at you with big glistening green eyes like a person. Because if vampires looked like that and smelled like that, you might hesitate for a second before plunging the stake between their ribs and into their silent, demonic hearts.

And if you hesitated that one moment, they'd get you. Or, in this case, something else would.

A panther-scream ripped the night. Kennedy's breath caught and her fingers tightened on the stake, and she whipped around to see another vampire charge out of the trees. No inexperienced fledge, this one; he was lean and mean and--shit, almost on top of her already. In the split second before she could decide to stake the redhead or go for the new threat, a small blonde whirlwind somersaulted over the mausoleum and rammed a three-inch heel into her elbow with the force and accuracy of a Mississippi mule, transforming every nerve in her arm into a strangling creeper of pain. The stake skidded from her limp fingers and buried itself point-first in the damp grass, and the redheaded cutie was out from under her with a squirm and a scrabble, prudently taking the opportunity to put the bulk of the mausoleum between herself and the combatants.

The whirlwind resolved into a girl in a peach-colored bolero jacket and slit-up-to-there skirt--small and curvaceous, with huge grey-green eyes and tawny waves of hair. Her chin was too small, her mouth was too wide, and her nose had a funny bump to it, but the sum of those imperfections was a quirky and strangely familiar beauty. The onrushing vampire gathered himself for a leap and soared over the blonde girl's head as she hit the grass and did a shoulder roll, a pas de deux out of Bob Fosse by Jackie Chan. The vamp came down on all fours between Kennedy and the rapidly retreating redhead, fangs bared, eyes like Japanese lanterns beneath a shock of scruffy moonlit curls. The blonde girl bounced to her feet with impossible resilience, and then both of them were circling Kennedy with the feral intensity of wolves defending their lair. The vampire held up both hands and crooked his fingers, almost dancing. His angular face was alight with a savage, tongue-curling grin. "Ready for a go, pet?"

"In your dreams, breeder boy." Kennedy lashed out with a vicious kick to the vampire's head. Her foot grazed his temple and the vamp caught her ankle--damn, but he was fast!--and heaved, flipping her over. Kennedy twisted in mid-air, coming to a shaky but upright landing.

"You're good. You may be able to take him," the little blonde observed, brushing a dead leaf off the shoulder of her jacket. Kennedy wasn't used to thinking of other people as small, but she could look down on this chick. "You might even be able to take me." Blondie swung. Kennedy dodged the punch, barely, and delivered a sharp right to the nose. Blondie rolled with it and came right back with a piledriver blow to Kennedy's solar plexus, knocking her back on her ass. Not quite as fast as the vampire, but Blondie was stronger--shit, shit, shit, this must be Buffy Summers! Her hair was a shade or two darker and her figure a shade or two lusher than the Council's outdated file photos, but that face was unmistakable. Which meant the platinum-haired vampire was Spike, and the redhead...who the hell was she? Kennedy scrambled to her feet and swallowed a curse. Summers wasn't even supposed to be back in Sunnydale until tomorrow.

The redhead shouted "Occulo ardent!"

Kennedy's vision dissolved into a Fourth-of-July explosion of red-white sparks, and Spike's fist tore through the glittering haze and cracked against her jaw. Before she could recover her balance, Buffy pounced, grabbed her arm, twisted it up behind her, and slammed her up against the mausoleum wall. "But I'll guarantee you can't take both of us, and if my brand new jacket stains, you are paying for the dry cleaning. Now, I'm going to assume that you're a mild-mannered model citizen, possibly with a secret identity and a butler, trying to rid the world of bad evil things, and the choice of stakee is a tragic accident. Willow's got a soul. She's a good vampire. Grasp the concept?"

"Bull!" Kennedy yelled. "The vamp with a soul is a big dark broody guy in L.A." This was all wrong. All she'd wanted from tonight was a quick slay to take the edge off, and now everything was fucked up. Well, she'd unfuck it, then. Too many lives were riding on her ability to pull this off. She could do this. She could do anything she set her mind to. No use in trying to convince them she was just your everyday schmoe now; no human being could have taken those punches and stayed conscious. The truth as far as it goes, then. She struggled for a second, muscles straining, but no joy. Well, that was why she was here, wasn't it? "You're Buffy Summers," she croaked. "I know all about you."

Buffy's hold on her wrist eased slightly, enough to restore circulation. "That's what's on the nametag. Willow's the other vampire with a soul. They come in multiples these days."

"Like Terminator III," Willow piped up from behind the relative safety of several tons of stone. She sounded absolutely wiped, and looked even paler than the marble. "Smaller, and with girl parts. Who are you?"

"You working for Cain?" Spike asked.

So there were other players on the scene. Great. The more the merrier. "Cain who? I don't work for anyone but the Council of Watchers. I'm Kennedy." She managed a scathing glare at Buffy despite her position, took a deep breath and bet the deed to the ranch on one throw. "The Vampire Slayer." She glanced at Spike and Willow. "With an 'S.'" The dig might cost her, but Jesus, Mary and Joseph, this was ridiculous.

Willow crept cautiously around the mausoleum, her movements slowed more by exhaustion than fear. "You're who got called when Faith...?"

"Died? Yeah."

She felt Buffy shift position behind her, but the grip on her wrist didn't slacken any further, and Buffy's voice grew no more inviting. "'Kay, I'm not sure if you skipped orientation week or what," Buffy said, "but Council lackeys? Unwelcome. Extremely. I warned Travers what would happen if he sent you here."

"Who said Travers sent me?" Kennedy snapped. "I came here on my own, because I thought you could help me."

Buffy stilled, then, slowly, eased up on the choke-hold. "Talk."

Kennedy tamped down her relief and stepped away from the wall, shaking the numbness out of her arms and affecting insouciance. She wasn't home free yet. "I've been in training to be a Slayer since I was eight. The last year or two, my Watcher's been dropping hints: Kennedy, you know how rare it is for anyone to get called past the age of fifteen? Kennedy, you know how small the chances of Faith dying in prison are? Kept saying how great it would be if I started studying for a Council position...trying to let me down easy." She lifted her chin, meeting the older Slayer's eyes defiantly. "I didn't want to be let down, hard or easy. I decided--if I didn't get Called, I was gonna...do what I'd spent the last ten years training for, you know? And then one morning last winter I woke up." She took a deep breath and flexed her hands, unable to suppress a grin at the memory of that incredible realization. "And I had the power. I dusted my first vampire that night. It was the best damn day of my life." No need to fake the passion and sincerity in her voice; this was all gospel truth. "So now I'm a Slayer. Dream come true, right?"

Buffy crossed her arms over her chest and regarded her with inscrutable grey eyes. "If you say so."

"But there's a problem." Kennedy walked over to a nearby tombstone, knelt and braced her elbow against the top, holding her open hand up and beckoning to Willow. "C'mere. I won't do anything. Scout's honor."

Willow looked dubious, but at Kennedy's further encouraging noise, she left her safehold and walked over. She dropped to one knee, facing off on the opposite side of the tombstone, and set her hand to Kennedy's, palm to palm, pale cool fingers curling around warm brown ones. A strange frisson went down the back of Kennedy's neck at the impress of that alien flesh, something electric and a little frightening. She'd never touched a vampire she wasn't hitting before. She'd owned a king snake as a kid, slick and black and shiny, with a flickery little tongue and jet-button eyes. Willow's hand reminded her of the snake--not the black, scaly part, but the cool, supple inhuman aliveness of it. She jerked her hand away and wiped her palms on her jeans. Willow drew away with an unhappy little noise.

Screw that. She wasn't about to let something as remedial as touching a fledgling vamp wig her--was she eight again, and scared of cooties? "No, no, give me your hand back. It's OK. I won't bite if you won't." She grinned, and was rewarded with a small return smile. Was there something in Sunnydale's water that made you flirt with vampires? But it was a cute smile, you had to admit. She clasped Willow's hand firmly this time. "Ready? Go!"

Caught by surprise, Willow's arm dipped, but then she grimaced and threw her shoulders into it. Their hands wavered upright, Kennedy's knuckles whitening as she increased the pressure. For almost a minute they struggled, Kennedy forcing Willow's hand down, Willow forcing it back up again--Willow never able to gain an advantage, Kennedy never able to gain a decisive victory. Sweat started to bead on her brow and she relaxed, letting the startled Willow overbalance and shove her hand down into empty air. "See? I can't beat her. If I hadn't got the jump, she might have beat me. And she's just a little baby vamp."

Willow let go of her hand. "Toddler," she said a little huffily. "At least."

Kennedy tugged her blouse straight and faced the older Slayer. "I got the power, yeah, but not enough. Something stole part of what I should have. I want it back."

Buffy had watched the whole performance through eyes gone narrow and hard as olivine. Her expression was unreadable; she did stone-faced better than old Travers. "And you think I can help?"

Kennedy shrugged, not surrendering an inch of ground. "You did it, didn't you? You or that Faith chick, but she's dead and you're all the lead I've got left. I know all about you. How you quit the Council because of him." She indicated Spike. "They say you brainwashed your own Watcher and killed half a dozen Council ops, but..." Here it came; how well could she sell this? "I don't believe that. You've never stopped fighting for what's right." Yeah, sure. You may call yourself a Slayer, Summers, but you're sure as hell not getting the job done any longer. She didn't believe the crazy rumors--the Council would never have let Buffy Summers live if they were true--but the Hellmouth had been closed for a year, and Sunnydale was still crawling with vamps. Kennedy had sensed half a dozen nesting in this cemetery alone, way too many for her to tackle on her own. "I need that power. I can do my job--our job--without it, but I can do it a hell of a lot better with it. So I'm asking you--whatever you did to cut me off, undo it. People don't deserve to die 'cause you're pissed off at Travers."

"Me? Whatever I did?" Pure astonishment blossomed in Buffy's eyes. "I didn't do anything! For once."

"She couldn't," Willow said. "None of us could." She spread both hands. "Slayer power is deep magic from beyond the dawn of time. I helped tap into it once, and honestly? Not looking forward to an encore. It gets snappish, and it's got bigger teeth than I do. Maybe I could have figured out how to control it eventually, but I don't have that kind of power anymore. I don't know anyone who does--I mean, it's not just the magic you'd need, but the knowledge of what Slayer power is. If the Council doesn't know that, I don't know who does."

Kennedy didn't try to keep the desperation from her voice. "But... who else would want to mess up the Slayer succession?" They couldn't be telling the truth--if they were, if they really didn't know squat...she wasn't just screwed. She was wrenched, hammered, and nailed.

"You want a list?" Spike asked.

"Even if I can't cast spells at that level anymore, I know how they work," Willow broke in. "Tara and I, we can help, I'm sure of it! She's really good at auras and things, and if there's a blockage, or a curse or something, she can find it and I can figure out what's causing it and then you can go to someone who does have that kind of power and they can fix it." She turned eagerly to Buffy, who looked doubtful. Willow's face was aglow, her eyes importuning. "I know what it's like to--to lose something like that. I can help. Really help, this time. I know I can."

The plea in Willow's eyes, the worry in Buffy's, the watchfulness in Spike's, all of it hinted at a backstory a lot more complex than her own personal hill of beans. Kennedy didn't care; she couldn't have asked for a better turn of events. She pulled out the biggest, brightest Colgate smile she owned. "Could you? Really?"

Buffy worried her lower lip, and she exchanged a long, subtext-heavy look with Spike. "Um. It couldn't hurt to try, I guess. Where are you staying?"

Kennedy let her shoulders droop. "Around. I'm not sure yet. I just got into Sunnydale this morning. Is there a Motel 6? Or something, uh, cheaper?"

Willow was practically tugging on Buffy's sleeve, like a kid begging for a puppy. Kennedy did her best to look forlorn and abandoned, which was hard to do when three of her Dad's credit cards and a couple of thou in traveler's checks were burning a hole in her wallet. "Come on," Buffy said at last. "You can sleep on the couch till we find you someplace."

Score. Kennedy did her best to look grateful.

Spike scowled; he'd lost the game face some time back, but Kennedy was pretty sure she hadn't just become his very special friend. "Then she'd best mind where she flings her pointy sticks. Strangely enough, I don't fancy waking up a big pile of dust, nor finding one in Will's room." He made a sweeping dramatic turn on one heel, a move he'd obviously practiced with a billowy black cape in mind, and strode off towards Restfield's main gates. Buffy rolled her eyes and went after him; a second later they were trading heated glares and low whispers. Kennedy strained without success to catch a few words of the argument as she trotted after them.

Willow had retrieved her cell phone, and her conversation was far more audible. "I'm fine, honey. Yeah, Spike got here--no, really, I'm...I know. I'm sorry. Look, when I get home...OK." She hung up and pointed to the curb, where a Jeep Cherokee was nosed up to the beat-up black hulk of a DeSoto Sportsman which had seen better decades. Possibly better centuries. "There's our ride."

Buffy, thwarted in her seeming desire to kick Spike's kneecaps in by the presence of outsiders, slid into the front seat of the Cherokee with a dagger-bright smile that promised mayhem at a later date. Spike, pissed off as he obviously was, stepped around to open the passenger door of the DeSoto with automatic courtesy--which appeared to piss him off even further when he realized what he was doing. Abandoning Kennedy to her own devices, he slouched behind the wheel and lit up a cigarette as ostentatiously as possible. Willow whispered, "Don't worry. They do that all the time."

"So the home life: Jerry Springer or Art Bell?"

"More like 'Tish! You spoke French!'" Willow, her hand on the door of the DeSoto, smiled up at her. "In the interests of informed passenger choice, I should tell you that Buffy runs things over by accident, and Spike runs things over on purpose."

"Yay," Kennedy muttered, sliding in beside her. "I'm reassured."

Tara sat on the (new, non-sproingy) couch in the Summers' living room and stared bleary-eyed into the dregs of her coffee, cradling the cooling ceramic mug with both hands. She felt numb and jittery. Caffeine and exhaustion--not a good combination. She ought to get up and clear away the remains of the location spell, still scattered across the dining room table. It hadn't been much use; the version she was most familiar with was tuned to the living, and picked up vampires faintly or not at all. In the end it had been plain old deductive reasoning that let her pinpoint Willow's location: recent escapades with Spike and spotty cell phone reception pointed to Restfield.

She'd called in the cavalry instead of riding to the rescue. That was practical, right? Not avoidy. It only made sense to phone Spike, who was already on the spot. Tara set her mug on the coffee table with a thump, sloshing tepid black liquid over the rim, and pitched over sideways on the couch with a groan. She'd thought it would get better in time, that she'd be able to take Willow's new status in stride. And it had. Sort of. She lay at her dead love's side without flinching, pressed her lips to Willow's cold ones, tried to adjust her schedule to accommodate a partner who risked immolation every time she went outside before sundown. And Willow tried so hard to please her as well, to act as if nothing had changed...

The latch on the front door rattled, and Tara started to her feet, coffee forgotten, as the door flung open and a small stampede of people poured into the foyer.

As a rule, Tara wasn't big on epiphanies. The road to Damascus was fraught with suspicious characters handing out pamphlets, and most of the revelations in her life had come to her piecemeal, built up from one painfully acquired moment of "Oh!" after another. But sometimes all it took was one moment to remind you that the supply of moments was a finite thing. Willow's face framed in the doorway, a sight she'd seen every night for the last year, was its own revelation: Some night, Willow might not walk in that door, and she would never know why or wherefore. One pile of dust looked much like another.

Willow saw the stricken look on her face, and was in her arms between one heartbeat and the next--maybe vampire speed wasn't all bad, after all. So strong now, her Willow, that she could pick Tara up and spin her about like a toy, but all that terrible demon strength could come to nothing at the point of a number two pencil in the right spot. Her beloved was as invulnerable and as fragile as a St. Rupert's drop, and Tara held her tight and willed herself to ignore the faint tinfoil-on-fillings sensation screaming dead thing! in the back of her skull.

She had to stop thinking of Willow as dead. Willow was right here, real and...room temperature, and...life-challenged. "You're all right?" Tara asked.

"Fine," Willow said with the sweetest smile possible, cupping her palm to Tara's cheek. Her cold palm.

Spike, and to Tara's surprise Buffy, entered hard on Willow's heels, tossing one another glances as incendiary as any hand grenade. They were followed by a dark-haired girl Tara didn't recognize. "Buffy?" Tara exclaimed. "I thought you were in L.A. till tomorrow."

"The peace and quiet was starting to give me the wig," Buffy replied, tossing her jacket at the coat rack. "So I took the early retirement option, and got this Slayer-y feeling on the way into town that I should stop at the crypt." She waved the dark-haired girl forward. "Look what followed me home! Can we keep her?"

The newcomer paused in the archway leading to the living room, and looked around with the air of one expecting to find dead bodies in the window seat. "Kennedy," she said, sticking out a hand. "I'm the new Slayer. You're what, a witch or something? You're alive, right?"

"Uh...right," Tara stammered, taking the proffered hand. "There's extra sheets in the under-stairs closet, we can make up the couch--"

"Terrible rude to spring houseguests on Tara in the middle of the night, innit?" Spike drawled. "Guess we'll have to turn Dynagirl here out on the street."

"I have bags in the car, Spike," Buffy said, planting both fists on her hips with a pointed look in the direction of the driveway.

"Yeh?" Spike slouched in the doorway and produced another cigarette, conjuror-fashion. He flicked his lighter on and off a couple of times without lighting it, making the flame dance. "You lost the use of your limbs, then?"

Buffy held the keys out with a wordless glower, which Spike endured for a good fifteen seconds before snatching them out of her hand with an exaggerated growl and stalking off. There was much bustle entailed in fetching spare sheets and settling Kennedy on the couch, with accompanying pep talks from Buffy on contacting Giles and how they'd research her problem as soon as possible. Spike returned laden with suitcases and shopping bags, and provided color commentary on the unpleasant things that would happen to Kennedy if she attempted to stake the resident vampires, open the curtains on resident vampires, or drink the imported beer of the resident vampires, which was intimated to be a far more serious infraction of house rules than mere staking.

Willow sidled up as Tara was taping a note to the television, explaining the presence of the strange woman on the couch to Dawn, and captured one of her hands. She bought it up to trace idle circles around the knuckles with one finger. "Since Kennedy's having trouble accessing the Slayer power," she said, "I thought maybe you could take a look at her aura tomorrow, or maybe we could try it together? I cast a glamour tonight!" she added, practically bouncing up and down. "Just a little teeny one, and it pretty much trashed me for the next twenty-four, but, hey, me, doing magic!" She smiled, hesitant but hopeful. "We always worked better together, didn't we?"

Tara looked down at the pale hand enfolding her own. Together. It had always been her gift to see and hear things others could not--the illness behind her mother's worn face, the promise of blossoms in the winter-bare branch, the fragmented wrongness in Buffy's aura when Faith's spirit had possessed her body. Finding in Willow someone who could share that vision had been the greatest joy of her life. Willow's light had mingled with hers, once, and banished all the shadows from her heart, but when she looked at Willow now, she saw darkness. When she touched Willow now, she felt death, lurking just below the skin.

The world's song wasn't always pretty; Miss Kitty tormenting a mouse was as much part of the music as the unfurling of new leaves in spring. Death and pain were necessary counterpoints to joy and rebirth. All were part of the circle. But vampires weren't born. Vampires didn't die. They were destruction, pure and simple. Human corpses, animated by demonic spirits, an unholy fusion, an abomination to human and demonkind alike. But she is not an abomination to me, Tara thought fiercely, even as her father's voice in the back of her mind whispered Filthy demon, unclean thing. Even with a soul, Willow's very being, the magic that prevented her from falling to dust, was anathema to everything Tara had been taught.

And whose fault is it that she's standing here?

Tara stared at her lover's glowing, excited face. "Yes," she said, hoping her voice wasn't shaking too noticeably. "We do."

Buffy heard the footsteps behind her as she rounded the newel post at the top of the stairs. He was taking them two at a time, as usual, with no attempt at stealth. It took all her resolution to keep her pace measured. Not to look back. Not to dash for the bedroom door. Running when a predator was behind you? Fatal. Back straight, eyes front, forward march.

The birthday weekend in L.A. had been three days of pure-grain, undiluted normality: shops, spas, and shoes, without a vampire in sight--once upon a time, her idea of heaven, and still pretty high on the not-too-shabby list. After a year spent crammed into one house with two roommates, a younger sister, and an increasingly live-in demon lover, Aunt Caroline's guest bedroom was a miracle of privacy and quiet. Visiting her aunt did bring the double dose of survivor's guilt, but it never lasted long when there were important matters of family gossip to attend to. Her new job, Dawn's college prospects, Hank Summers's girlfriend, all needed thorough dissection, and her own mysterious boyfriend needed careful introduction. She'd gotten as far as "He's English."

The first night had been total bliss. No icy toes nudging the backs of her calves just as she was drifting off, no cigarette smell working its way into her clothes, no milk jugs with two swallows of congealing pig's blood left in the bottom clogging up the refrigerator. The second night she'd walked into the bathroom and automatically moved to kick the damp towel on the floor across Spike's boots, a standard move in the silent and deadly battle of wills involved in getting him to pick up after himself, and felt unaccountably bereft when her toes encountered neither towel nor boots. The third night the bed felt out of kilter without the weight of another body balancing her own, and she realized there wasn't going to be a fourth night if she could help it.

The footsteps went silent on the hall carpet, but she didn't need to hear them to know how close he was. She could feel his presence, a cold fire up and down the column of her spine, centered on the exact spot where his eyes were burning into her shoulder blades.

It was almost four in the morning, and Dawn was sleeping only one thin wall away, so he wouldn't try anything in the hall. She tossed her head and put a little more sass into her walk. Behind her, just on the edge of hearing, a low, hungry rumble rose and fell with the taunting roll of her hips. He was close now; she could almost feel his breath on the back of her head. She put her hand on the doorknob. Cold brass turned under her fingers, and Buffy slapped the light switch and dashed into the bedroom, whirling to slam the door behind her. Not quite fast enough--Spike thrust a foot, then a shoulder between door and jamb. One blindingly swift lunge and he was inside, all brilliant blue eyes and manic Heeere's Johnny! grin.

His body collided with hers, and the fire blazed up joyful through all her bones as they careened into the bedroom together, knocking a chair askew and pinning her to the wall. "Are you out of your bleeding tree, letting her stay here?" Spike snarled. "God, I missed you!" His tongue flicked out, cleaning up the trickle of blood left from Kennedy's punch to her nose.

"You'd rather have her sneaking around town behind our backs with a crossbow full of Killer-of-the-Dead?" Buffy grabbed him and hauled him closer, relishing the lean hard weight of him against her breasts and belly. Oh, yeah, Spike was happy to see her. "Missed you too. And don't eat my nose blood, it's all crusty."

"I like it crusty. Don't trust... that little bint... farther than I can... toss her." Spike's teeth, still bluntly human, nibbled crescents of pain and pleasure down the line of her throat. "Council's got its claws in her or I'm a choirboy." He buried his nose in the cleft of her breasts and snuffled, nostrils flaring. It was completely gross that he preferred unadulterated Buffy, sweaty and ripe after a two-hour drive and a chick fight in a graveyard, to the product of an hour's worth of deodorizing and spritzing and douching. Gross, but primally sexy. Spike licked her nose again and made an obnoxious smacking noise. "Actually, I was a choirboy, but..."

"I want her where I can keep an eye on her till we can call Giles. If she's telling the truth--" His hair was finally starting to grow out again after last summer's rebellious shearing. Buffy tangled her fingers into the gel-stiff waves and tugged his face to meet hers, demanding access to his mouth. That mouth was her downfall, an addiction in itself, the upper lip so chiseled and firm, the lower so full and soft, the whole so eminently kissable, lickable, biteable. The heady taste of blood and nicotine surged through her--could you get addicted to cigarettes via kissage? Oxygen finally became a greater necessity than the cool virtuosity of his tongue, and Buffy broke away, gasping. "My fight's with Travers and the Council, not Kennedy. She didn't ask to be chosen any more than I did."

Spike combed his fingers through her hair, ignoring the mess she'd made of his. His eyes, though sparking gold with lust, were serious. "You made a threat, Slayer. If you're not willing to follow through..."

"Oh, there's follow-through. I follow all the way through. Kennedy's getting the whole Slayers-are-part-demon speech tomorrow, with twenty-five eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back. And if I find out Travers did send her..." The long cool fingers sliding up beneath her blouse derailed that thought faster than the Springfield monorail. There was t-shirt in the way of her hands when she wanted to be touching Spike, needed the ivory satin of his skin instead of cheap cotton blend against her own. Why did he have so many clothes on? Buffy gave the shirt an impatient yank, and the two of them tumbled to the bed--Spike's big, sturdy four-poster, transported from the crypt--together, shedding random items of clothing and kicking off shoes on the way. "...the mass-mailings will commence. Plus? I may fly to England and choke him with his old school tie."

Spike grinned. "And they wonder why I love you."

The basement had been Xander's idea--part "You may be a bloodsucking creature of the night, but you're still my best friend," gift to Willow, part occupational therapy. It had probably kept him from going completely stir-crazy during the long weeks in the wheelchair and the longer months on crutches and canes. He'd planned the build-out, wrestled with the zoning variances, and put as much of his own labor into the construction as possible, even on days when three swings of a hammer sent him into an exhausted collapse. At the end of it all, the washer and dryer had been partitioned off into a separate, sound-baffled utility closet, a toilet and shower installed, and the basement converted into a vampire-safe studio apartment, complete with blackout curtains over the windows. The floor was saltillo tile in warm ochres and rusts; the walls were Navaho white, with Mission-style faux brick arches framing candle-niches. There were wicker chairs and hangings in bright Indian print and low-level lighting that wouldn't overstrain sensitive vampire eyes. There was a futon bed made exotic with bridal-veil canopies of mosquito netting, and a ritual space by the dresser. The room smelled of incense and beeswax and the herbs in their row of fat little clay pots high on the windowsill.

Tara loved it. Once the remodeling had been finished, she and Willow had spent several exciting days moving their furniture down from the master bedroom upstairs (when your partner could pick up an entire dresser one-handed it made moving day a lot easier) and redecorating. They'd thrown a basement-warming party, with tacos and salsa and chips and Dos Equis, and Willow had worn the gaudy yellow sombrero currently hanging on the side of the stairs. It had been the best of days, and the best of nights after, and Tara had been certain, then, that everything would be all right.

She lit the bank of pillar candles on the shelf by the foot of the stairs with a word and a gesture, and drew Willow down the last of the steps. Willow gave her a curious look; Tara wasn't usually so free with her magic. Tara returned a reckless smile. "It's a special occasion."

"It is?" Willow looked slightly panicked. "Did I miss a memo? Because our anniversary isn't till, you know, later, and your birthday's not--I mean, it's not now, not that it's not special--and St. Knut's Day was two weeks ago, and Candlemas? Not till the second--"

"It's International Vampire Appreciation Day," Tara said solemnly, slipping an arm around her shoulders and touching noses. Willow smiled--startled, guileless, at an utter loss. Tara felt a pang of guilt. How long had it been since she'd been the one to initiate a touch, a caress? "I thought maybe... if we're going to do a reading for Kennedy tomorrow...we should practice." She knelt down before the circle chalked out in red and blue and gold between bed and dresser, lit the small brazier in the center, and sprinkled a pinch of incense from the jar on the dresser over the coals. "It's a passive spell, a perception thing. It shouldn't...you know, wear you out."

"But...but...class tomorrow morning," Willow said, plaintive, holding out both arms as Tara stood and removed her coat.

"Shh." Tara pressed a finger to Willow's lips and trailed it down her chin. "I want--I want to see you." She knelt on the bed before Willow, who watched in breathless silence.

Once all they'd had to do was join hands to join power--to join souls. Every living thing had its own unique pattern of energy. It was that energy, connected at its heart to the whole vast web of life, which allowed a witch, aided by the proper words, the proper rituals, to reach out, pull a strand here and tie a cord there, and manipulate that web to her will. And what made doing so incredibly dangerous, because the smallest alteration in reality tugged on a thousand thousand invisible connections. The utmost precision and care were always necessary, and even so, for all but the simplest spells no one person could hope to foresee all the consequences. Major alterations of reality, such as the one which had created Dawn, required the participation of whole circles or covens, and layer upon intricately nested layer of ritual to safely channel the power where it must go.

And it was from this great web of life and living magic that Willow's death had severed her. No longer connected, she could no longer call upon power outside herself, and the power within her had been burnt away. Her undead body, so quick to heal merely physical damage, would never regenerate its own living energies. Vampires, like humans, could turn to elaborate ritual to compensate for the lack of innate ability--Spike had done magic, and fairly powerful magic, to heal Drusilla. But Willow's talent had never been for ritual; brilliant as she was at the theory, her execution tended to be slipshod and rushed. Her strength, and her danger, had always been in the raw power she could command, and that was gone.

Tara opened the eyes behind her eyes, and patterns of power sprang into being all around her. There were the intricately interwoven spells of warding and protection on the house, the gleaming scarlet threads of the cantrip she'd used to light the candles, the muddied remains of the location spell she'd cast upstairs. The pots of rosemary and basil in the window shone like miniature constellations. Even as the wooden beams overhead retained a ghostly signature of their parent tree, so did Willow's undead body retain the ghost of its living glory. Willow's aura was the dull, black-edged vermillion of banked coals, the light of her soul warped by the heat-mirage distortions of the demonic force animating her. Willow did not do magic. Willow was magic. If Tara could touch that power, could they somehow work as one again? Buffy had done it with Spike last year, and neither of them had had the slightest idea what they were about--but that had been in the middle of an unstable Hellmouth, under never-again-to-be-repeated circumstances.

Tara extended her arms, beckoning, and Willow swayed closer, trembling as Tara eased her shirt up and cupped hesitant hands about each small perfect breast. Her hands fell, fingertips gliding along the slim lines of Willow's torso, and undid the waistband of Willow's slacks with careful attention to each movement. The discarded clothing pooled about Willow's white, matchstick ankles, and she bent one leg flamingo-style, her toes curling as she kicked them aside.

Tara's breathing had fallen automatically into the deep slow rhythms of meditation, but this exercise was not in detachment from the world, but of absorption in it. Ropy blue coils of smoke corkscrewed towards the ceiling, collecting between the beams overhead. The pungent scent of sandalwood and sage pervaded the room, thick and sweet in the back of her throat. Her own blood surged and pounded in her ears. Willow stood before her, reed-slim and milky pale, her flawless porcelain skin stretched to translucence over delicate bones. Her hair was a firefall about her narrow shoulders, and hope and wonder sat upon her sharp-chinned pixie face and great-pupiled, jade-green eyes.

Rose-petal lips concealing tearing fangs. A vampire by Lladro. This is what you love.

Tara rose to her knees, took Willow's hands and pulled her through the Milky Way of netting, laying her down among the indigo sheets, in the heart of their private night. How Willow's shoulders trembled, and oh, the breath that fluttered like a trapped bird in her throat. It wasn't that they hadn't made love in the last year--they had, and sometimes it had even been good. But however close she lay, Tara was never easy with this body, or the thing which moved it. No more of that. She would face what Willow was, and love it.

Her hands glided over the sleek boyish frame, tracing the arch of hipbone and the curve of the ribcage, never quite touching the creamy skin. Energy rippled and eddied under her touch, crackling around her fingers like cat's fur in winter. Willow lay splayed upon the coverlet, her head thrown back and her lips parted in a quiet ecstasy as Tara's mouth descended to follow the sweet curves and tender valleys of her lover's flesh, never touching, but leaving letters of fire in its wake. Willow's fingers clutched the sheets, her limbs curling like the petals of some night-blooming orchid, milky white surrounding a heart of fire.

"Touch me," Tara demanded, and Willow looked up, her eyes dark with desire and confusion.

"I could hurt you," she whispered. It had been her fear all along, Tara knew. Buffy and Spike might occasionally appear at the breakfast table with sated grins and mysterious bruises, but Tara was human, Tara was fragile, and Tara's bruises would not heal and be forgotten in a night. Willow always took care, always let Tara set the pace. But there was no place for fear in this room tonight.

"Touch me!"

Willow obeyed. Eager puppy hands frisked over her, too long denied the freedom to romp. They were cold, but that was all right. Even good, when they touched the warm places, and little by little grew warmer. Willow's lips were soft against hers, alternating kisses with happy little whimpers. Willow's fingers fumbled with the buttons of her blouse and the billowing pleats of her skirt. An impatient little growl escaped her, and the numinous shadow surrounding her flared like magma in the earth's heart. Tara drew a sharp, involuntary breath and Willow's head came up immediately; anxious, guilty. "It's all right," Tara reassured her. "You--you can do that. I want you to."

Willow's brows knit, her face full of bewilderment. "I thought the growlies were a major turn-off." Tara ducked her head, not trusting words. Willow put her head to one side, a sparkle in her eyes that had been too long muted. "Maybe just a little Baby Bear grrr to start with? And work my way up to Mama Bear?"

Tara peered at her from behind a veil of hair. "Does that mean I get to be the Daddy Bear?"

"Ooh, who da butch?" Willow pounced, tickling, and Tara rolled over with a giddy shriek.

"Hey, I'm tough!" She gave Willow a mock-swat on the shoulder, and the demon-shadowed aura crackled with red and violet. Not anger. Something scarier than anger.

"You can be tougher than that." Willow's breath, when it came at all, was coming faster, and the hazel flecks in her eyes were rapidly kaleidescoping to gold. Her voice had gone husky, almost pleading. "Way tougher."

Buffy had told her, once, how big a rush it was, knowing that she could make a dead man gasp for air. Tara had never sought that kind of power, didn't know what she'd do if she had it. But this was what Willow was now, and if she couldn't accept it, couldn't satisfy the demon as well as the woman... Tara squeezed her eyes shut and quelled the flip-flops in her stomach by sheer force of will. "Sure I can, baby. Let's make some magic."

"Still don't trust the bitch," Spike grumbled, rolling over and retrieving one of the pillows they'd kicked off the bed in their initial scuffle. "Will could've been dustman's leavings if one of us hadn't shown up in the nick."

Buffy rolled her eyes and allowed him to prop it under her shoulders. "You're so cute when you're all sire-y. In an Ed Gein kind of way."

Spike stretched himself out full-length half on top of her, weight propped on one elbow. "Bugger, woman, that's nothing to do with it. Someone's got to be practical when you've gone all white-hat and idealistic, and don't change the subject." Knowing fingers trailed up her thigh, following the slit in her skirt. "Speaking of not staking people through the heart, Will and I picked up another lost lamb tonight. Bird name of Evie. I'll be giving her the Carrie Nation speech tomorrow evening if you want to drop by for a look-see." He insinuated his free hand up a little higher and squeezed her buttocks, kneading catlike. "Whose naughty little girl's lost her knickers?" he sing-songed.

"Now who's changing the subject? Evie, probation, review of troops tomorrow, check. I took them off in the car," Buffy whispered, flicking the tip of her tongue against his ear. "Because they were getting too...wet. Reached up through the slit in my nice new skirt and pulled 'em off and drove through downtown Sunnydale all nekkie underneath."

"You never," Spike growled, his pupils dilating, his body an overstrung crossbow in her grasp. "You don't have to worry about probation with this one. Chipped."

"I so did." Buffy ran lazy fingers up his arm and across the muscular arch of his chest. All those yummy biceps and deltoids and things were standing out in quivering relief. "I hid them, too." She tapped him on the end of his nose. "Finders keepers."

"Better start looking, then!"

With a lecherous grin Spike unleashed that vile, evil, sumptuous mouth on her, tonguing the now-damp silk of her blouse in decadent swirls around her aching nipples until she moaned and gasped and begged, "Don't... rip... eighty-dollar... blouse!"

Spike chuckled, low-down and dirty and had she mentioned evil? "I'm thinking someone scarpered off to L.A. without her birthday spanking, so she's due a forfeit." He vamped out, putting the brand new eggshell douppioni silk in immanent danger of fanging, and that, you realize, meant war. Buffy hooked bare toes into the waistband of his jeans and tugged. Spike yelped and jerked back as the already-tight denim constricted. He swatted her feet away, falling back on his knees to wrestle with the buttons of his fly as she (carefully!) wriggled out of her remaining clothes.

Then there was nothing between them at all, and Buffy wrapped her legs around his waist and let the full delicious weight of that neat, compact body sink into her. Oh, yes. This was homecoming. Slow and thorough, deep and strong, his cool body steel to her flint, stoking the sultry heat between her thighs to a wildfire blaze. Spike's face was a study in sublime concentration, and he was holding her with a force that'd leave bruises tomorrow. Rockets ignited within, huge multicolored bursts of pleasure building to a grand finale--Houston, we have lift-off! Buffy wailed in joy and raked her nails down his chest, leaving contrails of red across the flat planes of his belly. Spike's eyes flew open, as a man's who'd seen heaven might, and he went bow-taut, spending with a hoarse, wordless cry.

They rode out the aftershocks together, panting as the firecracker jolts of pleasure fizzed and sparkled through their bodies and finally faded away. Joint by joint, muscle by muscle, Spike relaxed, his body melting into her own. Buffy let go the breath she'd been holding in a long-drawn sigh, cradled his head to her breast and let her hands wander through his damp curls. His cornflower-blue eyes glazed over, and the growl throttled down to what would have been a raspy, ecstatic purr if vampires purred, which according to Spike they didn't, never, no way, nuh uh. "Birthday spanking, huh? You and what army of darkness?"

"Gimme a minute. Gathering my forces as we speak."

"A minute? You're slowing down in your old age."

"That's it, minx, you're over my knee. Soon as I can move."

They didn't talk about birthdays. Oh, they celebrated them, all right; Spike lost no opportunity to exercise his romantic streak on her behalf. But they never talked about what birthdays meant: that she was a year older, and he wasn't. She'd tried, once or twice, feeling duty-bound to bring the subject up--Angel had always fretted about it, after all. Spike had just shrugged. Any two people, love, one of them always dies first. We know not the day nor the hour.

It didn't mean they didn't both think about it, and treasure the time they had with a fervor that bordered on the scary. Yesterday she'd been trying on slingback pumps at Diavolina. Tonight a post-orgasmic vampire was lazily licking his own blood off her belly. Buffy Summers, this is your life.

Freaky, but her own.

"What the fuck?" Spike's head jerked up, his impromptu tongue-bath forgotten. Buffy wriggled out from beneath him, and then she heard it, too: in the basement, somebody was screaming.

Willow whimpered, teeth clenching. Tears of frustration tracked her cheeks, and her eyes were flickering from green to gold and back again; she'd been hovering on the edge for what must have felt like hours. To Tara's eyes her aura was shot through with lightings, a savage lacework of rage and desire. "Harder," she hissed. "Harder. C'mon, baby, make it hurt."

Tara almost wept with frustration herself--this had been a mistake, a horrible mistake. She'd called up a demon she couldn't lay, in any sense of the word. She reached out, matching palm to palm, trying once more for that effortless connection they'd once possessed, and the lucent green of her own aura intersected the dark fire of Willow's. Willow's face contorted, fangs and ridges springing to prominence. The auras mingled like the lights of the Two Trees, and power hummed and sizzled between them. A moire pattern of green and black shivered through the aether. Tara struggled for balance, and then just for control as the building energies fought for dominance, reeling farther and farther out of alignment.

For a second she had it. Everything as perfectly balanced as a spinning top, surging from her to Willow and back again in glorious harmony--and then the power wobbled and discharged with a whipcrack of searing blue-white light. Tara cried out, scorched but unconsumed, and dropped Willow's hand. Willow whiplashed forward and back with a strangled "Gnnngh!" and all the candles went out in an airless whoosh.

Tara lay back against the pillows, panting. One by one, half a dozen feeble candle-flames flickered back to life, lifting the canopy of darkness. Willow rolled over, dazed, her hair hanging in limp auburn hanks. Her thin chest was heaving, and a faint sheen of stress-induced sweat glimmered across the shallow curves of her breasts and belly. Tara could smell the earthy vampire-musk of her--not a human scent, but not unpleasant.

"It didn't work," Willow whispered.

"No," Tara shook her head. She felt scraped thin. This should have been a ritual that energized and renewed--where had things gone so wrong?

"And it's never going to work, is it? I'm sorry."

Tara scrubbed a hand across her nose; she felt uncomfortably tingly, as if a mystic sneeze were coming on. "No. No, it's not. But it's me, not you!" The tears that had been building for the last half-hour welled up in her eyes, threatening to spill over.

"Aw, baby, it's all right..." Willow crawled across the bed and gathered her into her arms. Tara looked up into eyes like moons aglow with reflected candlelight, and crescent fangs peeping from still-sweet lips. "It's the thought that counts, right? I mean...I can still do little spells. Glamors, floating pencils..." She managed a laugh. "I could put someone's eye out. And maybe rituals, if I don't try anything too big and ooky." She shook off her game face. "It's not like I'm...impotent, or anything."

"It's not all right! I want us to be together again. Really together." Tara's lips firmed. "I want you to bite me."

Willow stiffened. She hadn't heard those words coming out of Tara's mouth. It had to be some other words, like How about a sandwich? or Go, Mariners! or Can I mambo dogface in the banana patch? "What?"

"I want you to bite me," Tara repeated. "Th-that's how vampires connect with life, right? By taking it. But I--I know it can be done without k-ki--you know. Those...girls Buffy wanted to hunt down a few years ago? That bit people for money? I can't--the magic won't work. So maybe this, instead."

Something huge and dark and terrible surged up inside her, crying Yes! Oh, YES! Willow fought it down, forgetting to breathe in her panic. Tara lay supine in her arms, that lovely neck exposed and vulnerable. The rich scent of her sweat and the richer perfume of her blood pulsing just beneath the surface--oh, she'd longed for these things ever since wakening to her new state. She'd dreamed of sinking her fangs into luscious sun-kissed skin, drinking down Tara's warmth and strength and sweetness, and woken wet and aching, the sheet an agony against her overwrought flesh. Hating herself and what she'd become, and wanting it so very badly. "But that would be... wrong?" she squeaked.

"Would it?" Tara asked. Her voice was shaking, and Willow tried not to think why. "Doesn't it seem like Spike's kind of peppy for a guy on the pig's blood diet?"

"Well, yeah, but..." Willow squirmed, the peculiar tingling sensation that meant she'd be beet red if she possessed the circulation for it rising in her cheeks. Spike licked the occasional cut or scrape clean on patrol, to only token protests from Buffy, but she wasn't sure that counted. Besides, from his few obscure comments on the subject, a little Slayer's blood went a long way. "Even if he does? Slayer healing. Which you don't have. Besides, I've, you know, gotten a taste. At, uh, certain times of the month."

"Not that way." Tara looked almost feverish, hectic spots of color rising in her cheeks. "The sex--that's just bodies."

Willow drew back, hurt. "It wasn't just bodies to me."

Tara's hands clenched in the rumpled sheets. "I didn't mean--it's just I--I feel like every day you're drifting farther away from me, and I don't know what else to do to keep you close. I need to touch you again, really touch you. It could work. And if it doesn't, you can just... stop." She brushed the tangled strands of hair away from her neck and tipped her head back, exposing her throat. "I trust you, sweetie."

Willow gnawed the inside of her lip, shaking in every limb and trying to keep her fangs from extending. She loves me, she trusts me, I've got a soul. Just like Angel had a soul when he almost drank Buffy dry. Oh, Tara, don't ask this of me... She didn't want to do this, but she did, oh, God, she did. And Tara wanted it. And if it would make things better between them...could it be so wrong? She could stop, right? Angel had been dying when he bit Buffy, and she was in perfect health. Closing her eyes, she lowered her head and ran her tongue along Tara's throat, feeling the muscles work beneath her lips as Tara swallowed. There: that was the place, where the carotid artery throbbed behind parchment-thin layers of muscle and skin. That was the place where for years Buffy had carried the scar of the Master's fangs, and Angel's, and Dracula's (but not Spike's; no, nowadays that scar had faded to almost nothing.) The thought of Tara's neck so marred was repulsive and arousing.

She bit.

Blood flowed into Willow's mouth, a salt-sweet flood of life. It warmed her, filled her, exalted her. She was aflame. The first living blood she'd tasted--God how had Spike given this up? There was nothing like it, better than sex, better than food, better than acing a calculus test you hadn't studied for. The universe was contained in Tara's body, and she was become one with it, spiraling into a black hole where pleasure and pain compressed into a single substance. There was no thought of gathering what little magic she still possessed, and no time to do so; Tara bucked and went rigid in her arms. Her lover's scream pierced straight through Willow's heart, sending it to dust. She tore herself away from Tara's throat and scrambled back, alternating between scrubbing the blood from her lips and licking it frantically off her fingers. "Oh, God, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, are you OK, can you talk, can I call a doctor or 911 or, oh, God, I've killed her, I've--"

"No, no," Tara gasped, pressing her fingers to her wounded neck. Two ragged, sanguine crescents showed through her spread fingers, and thin streams of crimson trickled down her throat and painted her breasts. Willow couldn't force herself out of game face. "It hurts, it really hurts!" She buried her face in her blood-smeared hands. "It hurts," she repeated in a small bewildered voice. "I can't do this. I can't--"

Willow knew with queasy certainty where the sentence was going, but before Tara could finish, there was a crash as someone kicked the basement door open, and a thunder of feet on the staircase. Willow grabbed the first thing to hand, which turned out to be Tara's skirt, and flung it wildly over her head before Tara had time to yank the sheet past her hips. A second later Buffy and Spike appeared in the stairwell, Spike attired in half-buttoned jeans and Buffy doing a Nefertiti in a tastefully wound sheet. "Willow!" she cried, eyes widening in shock.

"What the bloody hell--" Spike started.

"It's not what it looks like!" Tara interrupted. "I asked her to! I made her do it!"

Spike glanced from Tara's state of gory dishabille to the scratch marks on his own chest, and sucked in his cheeks. "Ah. Never mind, then. Carry on."

Buffy flushed all the way up to her hairline. "Oh, God. I'm--oh, God. I thought Kennedy had...do you have any paper bags? Because I'm going to need one for my head."

"It's OK," Willow said dully. With an effort of will she returned to human face, grabbed her robe and shrugged into it, then skinned out of the skirt. The fuzzy pink fleece was speckled with tiny drops of scarlet, already drying to a dull brown. "Tara's, um, very tired, and--and needs medical assistance. And I should sleep. Elsewhere. Not on the couch, because taken, but if I stay up till Dawn goes to school then--"

She wanted Tara to protest and insist she stay here. But Tara was still clutching her neck, stunned and shocky. Buffy knelt and examined her throat. "The skin's torn, but there's no serious muscle damage. Do you want me to wake Dawn up so she can--"

"No!" Tara shook her head wildly, winced, and hunched her shoulders. "I'd d-don't--she's t-too young for..."

"Hey, I'm too young for this." Buffy looked at Spike with the Meaningful eyes. "Maybe I should stay with Tara for a minute and make with the band-aids."

Spike looked at Buffy with the No One's Dead, Why Can't We Go Back And Shag? eyes and heaved a sigh. "Come on, Red. You look like you need a stiffener."

The trek up to the kitchen approached the difficulty of scaling K-2. Spike remained thankfully snark-free for the duration, and once at the top of the stairs, he produced a jelly-jar glass from the cupboard and a half-full bottle of JD from the liquor cabinet and poured her a generous helping. Willow took it sullenly and sat down at the dining room table. She should be the one down there cleaning Tara's (yummy, delicious) blood off the sheets and making soothing there-there noises. She wrinkled her nose at the astringent scent of the whiskey and took a sip, coughing as the dark amber liquid burned its way down her throat. It wiped away the lingering flavor of Tara, and she wasn't sure whether to be grateful or forlorn.

Spike plunked himself down opposite her, propped both feet on the table, and took a swig from the bottle. "Right. We appear to be venturing into don't-try-this-at-home-kids territory without a map. I didn't think the Camille Paglia bit was Glinda's gig."

"It's not." But it may be mine. "Things just got a little... intense." Willow took another sip. Maybe they should have gotten completely snockered first. Then they could have both passed out before doing something so completely stupid. She looked up. "How do you...deal with it when you want to bite Buffy?"

Her sire blinked at her over the top of the whiskey bottle. "I haven't wanted to bite Buffy for years, pet."

"Not even a little bit?"

"Not even a little bit. I want to strangle her sometimes, but show me someone who doesn't." His gaze sharpened. "Seeing your Kitten all tearful and bloody get you a bit hot?"

Willow banged her forehead against the table. "No! I don't know! I never wanted to hurt her! I'm a big ol' vampire freak."

Spike snorted. "Hardly." He glanced over at the couch to assure himself that Kennedy was asleep, or at least faking it reasonably well, and dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Here, you ever tried eating pussy with her monthlies? Safe and tasty."

"You can stake me any time, you know," Willow mumbled into the maple.

"Just sayin'. That sort of thing's got the womyn-power seal of approval, dunnit?"

Buffy appeared in the basement doorway, trailing her 260-count percale fashion statement behind her, marched over to the table and smacked Spike's feet off. Willow watched in dull envy as Spike's arm snaked around Buffy's hips, and her hand trailed possessively along his shoulder. "Tara would like you to go back down. If you want to. No pressure. Total de-compressure." She hesitated. "Look, normally? None of my business. I'm the last person to get all Church Lady about getting your kink on, because people who live in glass houses shouldn't practice Kama Sutra in the living room. But you could have really hurt her."

Willow contemplated another sip of whiskey and grimaced. "You think that's not constantly running through my head in an unending litany of self-recrimination?"

"I wouldn't have put in it words of that many syllables. Tara knows you didn't mean to hurt her, and she knows how colossally dumb it was to ask you to do that. God, Spike and I don't even do that. But if we did? Not on a major artery!" Her eyes softened. "We love you guys. Both of you. We don't want you hurting. Or hurting each other."

"I don't love you," Spike clarified. "I just don't fancy the trouble of putting out a 'To Let' sign for the basement if the next time we come down here there's a bloodless corpse and a remorseful pile of dust. So keep your fangs clean and go be good to Tara, eh?"

"Let's hope I still know how," Willow muttered, and turned towards the stairs.

Tara was lying on the bed in a flannel nightgown, the chasteness of which would have done Jane Eyre proud, her hands folded across her breast. Willow half expected a lily to be clutched in her fingers. Buffy had applied gauze and antiseptic with enthusiasm if not artistry, and the bandage looked very large and white and accusing against the indigo of the sheets. Willow walked over to the bed and sat down on the edge, crossing her arms and tucking her hands under her elbows. "So," she said after awhile, "Now what?"

Tara held out her arms. After a moment, Willow crawled into them and laid her head on Tara's shoulder. She could still smell the blood under the tang of the mercurochrome. They lay there together as the last candles flickered and died out.

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