Tara climbed the stairs, the =Sibley Guide= a talisman clutched hard to her chest. It had taken her almost a week to nerve herself to this, in and around researching the First Slayer and taking care of the spell of confusion Buffy'd requested she cast on the Initiative equipment--only a simple glamor, but working out how to cast it at a distance, and integrating it into the workings of the machinery had taken several days. She paused in the hall outside the door to Spike's office, reluctant to intrude uninvited. Instinctive tact prompted her to grant him the same privilege over her that the inexorable laws of magic granted her over him. A man in a household of women, no less than a vampire in a household of humans, needed a cave to retreat to now and then.

The room was small enough to feel cluttered even though there wasn't much in it: desk, chair, bookshelf, and a turntable perched vulture-fashion atop an assembly of milk crates crammed full of vinyl records in flaking, rat-nibbled sleeves. A Manchester United poster adorned the wall behind the desk. The only light was the glow of the computer monitor and a few strategically placed candles; the single window had been boarded over and now served as the frame for a surveyor's map of Ventura and Santa Barbara counties, covered with cryptic Post-It notes on demon activity Spike didn't feel like entrusting to the computer.

Invitation wasn't long in coming; Spike spun his chair round, cell phone tucked in the crook of his shoulder, and waved her inside. "Look, just wake her up and tell her it's Sunnydale calling, or I'll jump a mail plane and rip your sodding--oi, Faith? Spike. Who's the wanker?" Tara couldn't catch Faith's response, but Spike laughed, a wine-dark vampire chuckle no creature of the night ought to be sharing with a Slayer at three in the afternoon. "Christ, love, pick a bloke with a brain in at least one head, can't you? Nah, business. Your replacement showed up the other night. Right. Proper kick in the teeth she is, too. Problem is, she's only got half a tank of demon juice, or whatever it is gets your mojo rising. Yeh, tragic. So, you perpetrated any dark rituals of vengeance of late...?"

Tara picked her way to the straight-backed chair more or less reserved for supplicants--rather less than more at the moment; it was half-buried under a jackstraw pile of swords, axes, and sundry pointy objects. After a moment of study, she managed to ease a double-bitted axe to one side without toppling the whole assemblage, and sat down to pretend polite ignorance of Spike's half of the conversation.

"Right. Thanks, pet, and give the missus a fillip for me." He set the phone down and settled back boneless in his chair, hands draped casually across black-denim thighs.

"She hasn't...?" Tara's stomach clenched in dismay. She hadn't realized until this moment just how much she'd been hoping that Faith would provide them with some kind of clue. She had no false modesty about her abilities; she was a skilled though not particularly powerful witch--in some respects, more skilled than Willow. But the Ritual of Restoration had stretched her magic to its limit and beyond. This spell would be, in its way, even more difficult. Many an overconfident wizard had discovered to their sorrow that constraining and dismissing a great power safely was not nearly so simple as summoning one up.

The upwards tick of Spike's eyebrow was far too knowing for her liking. "She hasn't," he confirmed. "Power to burn." He hooked the heel of one scuffed black Doc on the handle of the bottom drawer of the desk--said drawer, according to Willow's report, containing a pack of cigarettes, a black-and-white photo of Drusilla in a beret, a half-full bottle of Jack Daniels, and a modest collection of porn which Willow had declined to investigate further. A pretty paltry collection of vices, all things considered. "What's cooking, kitten?"

She laid the Sibley down on the desk between them, flipped it open. "Have you ever run into one of these?"

"Mohra demon?" Spike did battle with the fine print for a moment before admitting defeat and retrieving his glasses from their Coventry atop the monitor. "Heard of 'em. Bigshot warriors of darkness, soldier boys for the Lower Powers with a perpetual hard-on for, guess what, ending the world." He snorted in mild disdain. "They while away the hours till that happy day taking down the shiniest white knights they can find. And they eat salt. Why?"

Tara swung one foot in a circumspect arc, mindful of the collection of steel blades an inch away from her ankles. "Have you heard anything about their blood having regenerative properties?"

That got her twenty-five degrees of head-tilt, inquisitive but unworried. "If you mean do they pop merrily back to life if you kack 'em wrong, sure. Higher grade of immortality than I was issued, that's for bloody certain." Both feet thumped to the floor and Spike leaned forward with a gesture of illustrative violence, glasses sliding down his nose. "What you've got to do to kill 'em, see, is gouge out the gem in the center of their--"

"So--so Mohra blood really does regenerate dead flesh?"

Spike froze mid-gouge, head-tilt thirty-two point five degrees, or 'Tell me you're not after something as daft as I think you are.' "Yeh," he said cautiously. "If you're a dead Mohra."

Some internal chord relaxed; another tightened to the humming-point. Her emotions were badly in need of tuning. "I th-thought that might be it. There's so many warnings in the healing spells that use it, to make sure it's always diluted..." Tara reached within for the calm center of self--it seemed she had to stretch farther every day. "Nothing will happen unless Willow wants it to. I swear that on my name and my life. But I want to give her a choice." It was an effort to get words out; her breath solidified in her throat. "I'm not absolutely positive of any of this yet. Magic theory is Willow's thing, not mine. But the demon that animates a vampire, it's not...not...there's no self there--it's formless, mindless. Like water, taking on the personality and memory of whatever body it's poured into. Something like the Slayerness, in an evil way."

Spike shifted uneasily in his chair, and Tara hurried on. "Vampirism spreads through a very specific ritual. You have to drain them, they have to drink some of your blood, and they have to die within a few minutes of that happening, right? Every time you sire someone you're performing a blood sacrifice and ritually preparing the corpse for possession."

"Takes all the romance out of it, putting it that way." The ghostlight of the monitor cast alien shadows in the hollows of Spike's cheeks and leached the crimson of the football jerseys behind his head to grey. This preternatural stillness wasn't a good sign; both enthusiasm and anger set Spike bouncing off the walls. Total quiescence could only mean he was undecided and thinking hard--and though he was surprisingly good at it when pressed, Spike hated thinking hard. He and Buffy had that in common.

"If the bond between the demon and the body created by that ritual is broken," Tara said very carefully, "Then the demon isn't able to inhabit the body. Usually the only way to break it is to damage the body in a few magically significant ways--a stake through the heart, or burning or beheading. But the demon can't thrive in living flesh--it can only seed in a dying body, and flower in a dead one. So I think...if the body came back to life...that would break the bond, too. The demon would spill out, dissipate, just as it would when a vampire is staked." She couldn't be uncertain. Hands, chin, voice, everything strong and steady. "Do you see where I'm going? This isn't a cure for vampirism. If you gave the blood to a normal vampire, you'd probably just end up with s--some kind of empty meat puppet--the demon would be gone, and Mohra blood can't call back a soul. But Willow's already got her soul. I--I think that if she took Mohra blood it could make her alive. Make her human again."

Spike catapulted out of the chair, snatched up the Sibley and strode over to the bookcase, shoving it between The King In Yellow and Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. He turned, took one liquid menacing step towards her. "How're you planning on testing this little theory out? Spoonful of sugar to a few unwilling test subjects?" He leaned forward and grasped the spindles of the chair-back. His forearms grazed her shoulders, muscle and bone as hard as the oak behind her. "I suppose you want me to fetch you a few of these Mohra blokes?" He was up and away before she could answer, circling the desk in a flutter of displaced papers. "P'raps it's slipped your mind. Bloody Vengeance Inc. doesn't deal in sentient demons--in order to keep you lot with souls happy, among other reasons. Ta ever so and don't let the door hit you in the arse on the way out."

"No! I don't--I thought--" Truly, she hadn't thought that far ahead at all. "I love her so much." Her only chance of convincing him lay in remembering that Spike did, too. Tara folded in upon herself, origami in reverse, head bent, hands tucked beneath her chin. "And I can't bear to be near her. I know you think that's my problem. But I damned her when I put her soul back, Spike, and that's not all. Magic's just a tool to you. You pick it up when you need it and put it down when you don't. But magic was Willow's life. Now it's gone--I thought that was only just, last year, but I'm not sure any longer. You can't have only justice, can you? There has to be mercy sometimes, or--"

"Has there?" Spike's eyes were the blue heart of a flame. "What mercy made the likes of me, love?"

She had to quench that heat. "You must have thought about what it means, a vampire loving a human? In the long term? In the really long term?"

"There is no really long term." Spike sank down in the chair behind the desk with an expression dangerously close to brooding. "I've always featured myself bound for hell. Proud of it, in fact. Me an' Dru, we'd liven the place up, I thought." One knee started up a nervous jog. "I talked to Angel some bit last summer, whilst he was wringing out the salt water. Said Darla'd told him, after those lawyers brought her back, that she didn't remember... anything, after he staked her. No flames, no torments. Nothing." The muscle in his jaw leaped, then turned to steel. "Rather be damned than nothing."

Impossible to imagine that someone as fiercely vital as Spike would someday just...vanish. But it made sense; when the mystic bond which melded mindless, formless demon to undead flesh was broken, that flesh would crumble to dust, taking with it self and memory. Tara felt a sudden intense pity. Willow's path, and Angel's, was closed to him; his soul was gone beyond recalling, a willing ransom for Buffy's return to life. Nothing of Spike was imperishable, for all his immortality; he might live five hundred years, but in the end he would be nothing but the foam on the waves. "It doesn't have to be either. Not for Willow."

Spike scowled, fingers drumming the edge of his desk. Tara waited. He had more than once been kind to her, in his fashion, and that was a small marvel. It wasn't anything so simple as Buffy serving as his conscience that allowed him to sit there and regard her as something other than lunch--it was a complex tapestry of relationships and responsibilities stretching out through all of Sunnydale and beyond, anchored on the warp-threads of his own bloody-minded determination. He'd put it together one clumsy stitch at a time, and if you looked too closely it was full of snags and snarls.

But it was what they had. In a weird, backwards way, he'd become their conscience: every action got filtered through Am I setting a bad example for the vampire?

Am I?

Spike stiffened and half-rose from his chair, ears pricked.

"What?"

"Hush." He whipped off his glasses and tossed them on the desk, intent upon some distant sound, paying no attention to her. "Stay here. Upstairs." She rose and started to follow, and Spike grabbed her wrists with bruising force and all but shoved her into the desk. "Mind me!" he snarled. "You don't want to see this."

And he was gone.

Sunlight pried at the edges of the blackout curtains and slunk away, denied entrance. Willow lay belly-flopped crossways over the bed, waving bunny-slippered feet in the air as she scrolled down the list of ingredients on her laptop's monitor.

"How come you have all this crap when you're writing on the computer?" Kennedy waved at the small stationer's supply worth of pens, pencils, and color-coded notebooks scattered across the bed.

Willow selected a felt-tipped pen from the multicolored array at her side. "You can chip a fang trying to nibble thoughtfully on a keyboard," she murmured. "And I like the paper smell."

Kennedy heaved a sigh and began prowling the room again, boldly going where no man was going, ever. The funky New Age-bohemian decor was beginning to get to her. Wasn't there a law about having this much batik in one place? She wandered over to the small cage sitting on a wicker table. A brown rat almost as bored as she was hunkered inside, gnawing on a piece of corncob. Kennedy poked a finger through the wire mesh. "Hey, Scabbers." The rat stared up at her with jet-button eyes and twitched its whiskers, then decided her finger was tastier than the corncob. Kennedy jerked her hand away with a yip. Crap. Why had she come over? Some vague idea about making sure Willow was doing the spell up right, but how the hell would she know? She was going nuts in here.

The itchy, twitchy, feeling between her shoulder blades wasn't helping. The Slayer in her, reacting to the demon in Willow, circling like a pair of those magnetized dogs. Did it bother Willow, too? Maybe not, if she was used to having Buffy around all the time. Kennedy snuck a glance across the room. In the diffuse marmalade light the vampire's skin was luminous, pearl and chalcedony, as if she and not the candles were the source of the room's illumination. Her hair parted along the pale perfect line of bowed neck, falling in sheaves like the leaves of her namesake. One slim hand tucked the errant strands of burning auburn behind an ear and dropped to the mouse. Point, click, highlight. Kennedy looked away, her heart pounding, and poked through the girly shit on the dresser. An unopened bottle of OPI Romeo and Juliette was gathering dust in the back, lost amidst the litter of Baby Oh Baby and Almay. Distraction, yay. Kennedy held the nail polish up to the light: ruby so dark it was almost black. Not exactly Willow's style, and sure as hell not Tara's. "You mind if I borrow some of this?"

"Go ahead. It's a relic of the short-lived vamp fatale phase. I have a leather bustier somewhere in the closet, but I forgot there's really no bust to tier." Willow tapped the pen against her chin. "Myrrh is out. Backspace the myrrh."

The mental image of Willow in a leather bustier was, um. Very um. With, perhaps, thigh boots. "What's wrong with myrrh?"

"It's all sacrificial and penitent and stuff. The First Slayer's all about the death, but not so much with the penitence. And Wise Men are not in the budget."

"I knew that." Kennedy sat down cross-legged on the end of the bed and unscrewed the lid. The polish went on in smooth, glistening strokes, and she held up a hand to admire the effect. Sweet. She looked good today: strappy sandals, capri pants, and (completely by coincidence) a low-cut cream-colored silk blouse, the simple lines of which showed off a curve of shoulder and the column of her neck. Not that anyone was noticing. Not that she'd intended anyone to notice.

Willow erased myrrh, her lower lip protruding with a fierce kittenish concentration, and typed a hesitant acacia in the blank line. The moving cursor, having writ, just sat there blinking at her. She erased it again, replaced it with yarrow, erased that, growled and banged her forehead on the keyboard.

"Huh." Kennedy waved her hand to dry the nails. "I don't know a lot about magic, but I'm guessing 'Hjb4mlpn' won't cut it."

"It's a work in progress." Willow glowered at the screen. Kennedy scooted over to peer over her shoulder.

"No offense, but that looks more like my grandma's recipe for turkey stuffing than dark arts. Ritual cleansing bath? Come on, that's lame. If the First Slayer's such a badass, maybe you ought to kick it up a notch."

For a second her fingers tightened on the laptop, and Willow's eyes were tawny in the dim light. "This has to be a spell Tara can cast," she snapped. "She's not as powerful as I...used to be. It took her months to recover from putting my soul back."

Kennedy snorted and waved a drying hand at the screen. "If that's her speed in magic, no wonder it didn't stick."

Willow clenched fists and jaw. "You don't know anything about it!"

"How much do I have to know?" Kennedy grinned, hard and mean. "I can see you've got sharp pointy teeth and I can see Tara's got a big hole in her neck, so it looks to me like the 'vampire' part trumps the 'with a soul' part."

Willow was across the bed with bewildering speed, her eyes crackling with nascent gold. "You have no idea what you're talking about," she hissed. A white hand closed on Kennedy's blouse, bunching the thin silky fabric, and Willow's voice was as cold as her fingers. "Do you have any idea what I did with a soul? Before I died? There was a man. He was old and sick and stinky. I put my hand on his chest, and I reached in, and I stopped his heart. I pulled it out of his body, and I felt it grow cold in my hand. Then I took a knife in that same hand, and I slit him open, and I pulled his skin off, inch by inch. It was hard, and I kept poking holes in the thin spots. His blood ran over my feet and gunked up between my toes. I stuffed his skin with nettles and crumpled-up newspaper, and sewed his heart back inside with thread dyed in his own blood."

The vampire drew a ragged breath, her nostrils flaring to drink in--what? Fear? Screw that. Kennedy grabbed the laptop, holding it up like a shield. "Back off, or the computer gets it."

Willow snarled, "He was the first. There were others. Vampires just kill people. I destroyed them. Ground their bones to make my bread. They're gone. Biting Tara? Stupid beyond belief, yes. Evil, no. I know from evil." She was right in Kennedy's face now, backing her into the headboard, the living woman's ribs heaving against dead ones, the beating heart hammering double-time for the silent one. The laptop slid to the bed. "When I kick it up a notch people get burned. In the 'nothing left but a greasy ash spot' way. Or they did before--before..." She gazed down at the laptop, and to Kennedy's horror a fat tear rolled down her nose and plopped down between 'qwerty' and 'uiop.' "You're right. It's lame. I'm lame. I'm a pathetic old horse who used to be a thoroughbred but got sold to pay off the family's gambling debts and broke her knees pulling cabs and ought to be put down but everyone's too sorry for me--"

Her narrow shoulders twitched, shuddered, and collapsed in on themselves. "Oh, God, I'm sorry," Kennedy stammered as Willow melted into a blubbering heap against her collarbone.

"I used to be able to feel it!" Willow wailed. Ivory fingers raked the air, reaching for something elusive and mutable.

"It's okay, it's--oh, geez, stop it! I didn't mean it, it's a great spell!" Kennedy hauled the lachrymose vampire upright and gave her a little shake. Willow was as far as possible from inhuman perfection at the moment, all straggly hair and wet red eyes and snuffly red nose. Her mouth wobbled, pink and vulnerable. Fresh sobs shook her, and somehow Kennedy was holding her close, doling out shoulder-pats and inane, mumbled reassurances. Willow snorfled, her nose buried in the cleft of Kennedy's breasts. She looked up, flower-eyed and miserable, and the only possible solution was to kiss her.

So, kissing. Deep frantic kissing, lips and more lips and damn, she wished she'd put her tongue stud in, and she should stop this. Because there was someone...oh, yeah, that Tara chick. But hands. Hands hungry like the lips, arms holding her close and tight, and her whole body was zinging and thrilling with vampire! but it was a funny thing that when you turned those magnetized dogs around, you couldn't keep them away from each other, and God, Willow had the sweetest little tits, all shy and tender pressed against hers, little sugar-lump nipples in a demitasse cup of softness...

They broke away from one another at the same moment, Willow hyperventilating even harder than Kennedy was. "Okay. Okay. Spotting now. I mean, stopping. I mean, I would apologize, except this Did. Not. Happen."

Kennedy shook herself, too stunned to react. "It didn't! I mean, it did, but that's not me. I mean, I don't--" Her eyes widened with outrage. "You! You put a thrall on me or something! You made me--"

"I did NOT!" Willow scuttled to the far end of the bed, narrowly missing knocking the laptop to the floor. "No! No thrall! There is no thralling! It's a fluke. A fluke sans evening wear. And flukes lead to badness and anguish and someone getting rebar through the liver and I am not going there again and I love Tara, do you understand? We're going through a bad time right now and it's my fault and I'm not going to make it more my fault so if you do that again? I'll--I'll kill you! I will!"

"--not a poacher and there's no way I'd kiss you unless you put some kind of vampire whammy on me, because you're an evil dead monster and I don't care if you've got a soul! And if you so much as look at me cross-eyed again I'm gonna stake your ass to the floor and--"

"--tear your throat out and hide your body in the sewers and Spike will help me because he's evil and sometimes that's really handy and you think I'm joking but I'm not because I'm really not a nice person and I have no idea why Tara stays with me but she does and I will NOT hurt her, do you get that? DO YOU?"

Willow was approaching a panicky screech only dogs could hear by the end of her rant. Kennedy jumped to her feet and stormed towards the stairs, flinging over her shoulder, "The whole fucking neighborhood got it, you--oof!"

Kennedy whipped around, prepared to tear the cool solid thing she'd collided with into shreds small enough to make meatloaf. Spike looked down, regarding her with the eyes of a leopard sizing up the traffic at the waterhole. "Well, well, if this little tableau doesn't bring back fond memories. Only thing missing's a broken nose."

Willow sat on the edge of the bed, plucking at the calligraphic streaks of polish that the young Slayer's half-dried nails had left on her blouse. Great. Hester Rosenberg, at your service. Kennedy had fled the field--quickly, and angrily, and shakily, and she'd have to go to Lolly's for more adverbs soon. Spike was at this very moment seeing Kennedy out the door, apparently under the impression that she might compound her amorous crimes by making off with the family silver on the way out. Any minute he'd come stalking back down the stairs--Spike could stalk very loudly when he put his mind to it--but she didn't intend to look up. She knew what kind of outraged disappointment she'd see in those eyes: murder, pillage and card-sharping might be all in a day's work in Spike's book, but failing to stand by one's woman was an unforgivable sin.

Booted feet assaulted the stairwell. "What the bloody hell was that?" Spike demanded.

There was no point in denying anything; he could smell the desire in the air as well as she could. In a way it made things simpler. "It's not my fault." Willow's lower lip plumped into a trembling pout. "All vampires are naturally polymorphously perverse, or something."

Spike rolled his eyes. "Bollocks. You don't see me stepping out on Buffy. And when I was with Dru I never fucked anyone else. At least, not that I didn't kill after, and I don't see the Mini-Bitch's head decorating the bedpost."

Willow drooped, her whole body wilting. "She touched me. No. She wanted to touch me. And I..." She ran out of air at the same time she ran out of words, and sat rocking back and forth, limp and miserable and silent, until Spike's sigh reminded her to breathe. She still had to remember to breathe sometimes; sometimes Spike had to remember not to. The bed creaked as he sat down beside her; a hand feathered down her neck and settled on her shoulders, stilling her with a touch. Willow slumped against his side and let him gather her in, inhaling cool comforting sire-scent as an antidote to the warm, seductive odor of humanity still all too thick in the air. Once you fought past the seventeen layers of snarly, snarky, prickly, and just-plain-mean, Spike gave good hug, at once muscle-y and yielding. She didn't particularly miss the whole penis thing, but guy-hugs? Nice. "No one wants to touch me anymore, well, except you right at this very minute, but by 'touch' I actually mean something naughtier, and by 'no one' I actually mean 'Tara.'"

"Figured."

"She tries so hard, but every time we're together it's like she's wearing a full-body condom. I miss the naughty touching." Willow wiped her nose on his t-shirt. Once upon a time she'd fondly imagined that being a vampire ensured freedom from icky bodily fluids. Ha. Not that Spike seemed to mind all that much; she suspected that he reveled in the role of manly consoler amidst a flock of excitable females. "I love Tara. I barely even know Kennedy, but she made me feel..."

Spike stared off into the blind alleys of the past. "Like lighting just struck and the sun's come up at midnight. Like your skin comes to life where her hands pass."

Willow fingered the crusty nail polish. The spray of red was unpleasantly reminiscent of Tara's blood specking her robe. The room had grown very small around them, close and still and musty with the scent of dried lavender and rosemary and chamomile, the sweet smell of dead things. "When did you know?" she whispered. "That Drusilla wasn't...wasn't the one...?"

Storm clouds of memory darkened his eyes. Spike would cheerfully relate tales about his adventures with Dru back in the day, but of the year between his leaving Sunnydale and his return he seldom spoke. "Round about the third time she left me for someone else. Listen up. I'll admit it, I wanted to fuck Buffy from the first moment I saw her. Maybe I was a little bit in love with her from that first minute, too. But I wouldn't have done, not unless I planned on bringing Dru a nice fresh Slayer for breakfast the next morning. Because--" His hand tightened on her upper arm, fingers digging into flesh till she squeaked, and he emphasized each word with a little shake--"It would be wrong. You don't treat your lady like that."

"Oh, yeah, Mr. I-Haven't-Had-A-Woman-In-Weeks?"

Touche. Spike could muster a fairly impressive pout himself. "Doesn't count. We were on a break, nothing happened, and I'd most likely have killed you anyway."

He released her arm, and Willow immediately buried her face in his shoulder. His casual violence didn't frighten her any longer--what difference did it make between vampires, when the bruises healed almost before they could form? "Tara hates what I am, and how can I blame her when I've got this thing in me that thinks she's a hemoglobin-flavored Slurpee?" Her voice was a scratchy whisper. "I love her. I do. Why do I want to bite her?"

"You want to bite her because you love her, pet," Spike said tenderly. His fingers made scarlet ribbons of her hair, looping it round his palms. "We devour what we love, we vamps. Take it. Make it part of us. Make it ours. That's the way it works for us."

"But that doesn't make any sense!" Willow wailed. "You don't want to bite Buffy! Why? Why can't I feel like that?"

Spike cocked his head, reflective. "Dunno. Used to. Outgrew it, I expect. Never really thought about it." He shrugged, indifferent to the mysteries of his own psyche. "I finally got through to Faith, by the way. She's fine."

"So the hoop's in our end zone." Willow glared over his shoulder at her laptop. "God, I'm so pathetic! I can't even put a simple spell together anymore! I can't do magic and deep down I want to kill my girlfriend. I can't even wish I were dead, 'cause hey!"

Spike's capacity for dispensing tea and sympathy was distinctly limited. "Yeh, love, you're a quarter past useless. Stakes are in the weapons chest if you want to end it all." His body went as tense in her soggy embrace as Kennedy's had been yielding, and when she looked up, his frown had returned, chiseling the lines in his brow deeper. "Would you wish you were alive?"

Willow pulled away with a sigh. "There's no good wishing." There had to be something that would give the summoning teeth, something that would tie it all together and make it--Oooh! Tie it all together! Willow dove across Spike's lap for the nearest pen of the half-dozen scattered across the bed, and scribbled bind smudge stick w/3 strands of vampire hair, add 3 drops Slayer's blood to-- on her left wrist. She looked back over her shoulder at his pale face--set and yet agitated, like the marble bust of some particularly dissolute Roman emperor. "I did this to myself, right? I've just got to...live with it. Ha ha."

Spike sucked on his teeth, looking as though he didn't much care for the taste. "Seems there's two minds about that."

"All that stuff about turning human again?" She felt a pang of disappointment--would any of them ever really believe she'd learned anything from her past mistakes? "It sounded good on paper, but when I got into the nitty of the spells required it was awful gritty--"

"Tara found something. Special kind of demon blood. Thinks it might turn you human, on account of you having a soul. I suppose it'd work on Alley Oop, too, come to think." Spike looked, if possible, even less enthused at the prospect. "If you wanted it, I could..."

He ground to a halt, seemingly unable to finish the sentence, and Willow felt the gap that always lay between them yawn to Grand Canyon proportions. She rolled the rest of the way off his lap and sat up. "Spike..." She laid a timid hand on his shoulder, thinking perhaps that he was the one who needed a hug this time. It would all change again. She'd lose this, this mentor-brother-father-friend sire thing which was unlike any other relationship in her life.

"'Love is not love, Which alters when it alteration finds.'" His voice was soft, and for the first time it struck her that Spike would lose something, too. Willow gave him a look askance, but the moment of vulnerability, if that was what it had been, was gone, and the trademark Spikey smirk was firmly in place once more. "Don't make much of it, pet. I once had a front-row seat when Dru killed herself a poet."

Willow thought about the battered and much-scribbled-in notebook which was the real reason she'd refused to snoop--ahem, investigate--further in The Vice Drawer. Some things were sacred. Of the same order as Doogie Howser fanfic. She gave him a secretive grin and flashed him a Vulcan salute. "Hail, geek-brother."

Spike cuffed her affectionately across the ear. "You want the trouble of a heartbeat again or not? Anya'll be gutted with me for losing a sale, but I've got a way round the company policy. Bloody Vengeance doesn't deal in sentient demons, but we kill 'em all the time when we're slaying, right? Long as we don't charge Tara, it's all right."

To be alive again, to have Tara in her arms and magic (maybe) in her grasp, to walk across the campus in full sunlight, to not have to explain to her bewildered father and disbelieving mother one more time that no, this was not a neurotic reaction to their deficient parenting skills... To be vulnerable to illness and age and weakness, to know that no matter how much you crammed into a day there wasn't enough time, there would never be enough time to learn it all... Willow's chest constricted and she swallowed hard. "I--I guess it wouldn't hurt to see if we could find some. Just to see--"

Spike nodded, the corners of his mouth tightening. "Yeh. Just to see."

"Red Three, do you copy?" The answer was a blast of static. Sam Finn grimaced and adjusted her headset. "Red Three, Red Five, acknowledge."

"Roger, Red Two. We're in position."

"Proceed to checkpoint. Red Three, hold your position." Sam cut the com unit and came out of her crouch. Urban demons were proving surprisingly wily. The Vartoq they were chasing tonight had eluded them twice already, but this time they had the slimy little bastard right where they wanted him. "Red One, I'm moving out."

She jogged down Main past the Sun Theater, eyes on the blip of golden light in the center of the scanner screen. A few onlookers turned curious heads at her passing, but to the uninitiated she was only an overdressed runner with an unusually elaborate iPod. Within three blocks the scenery degenerated from quaint downtown to the grimy squalor of the docks. Riley had described Sunnydale to her so thoroughly and so often that she could have run the whole town blindfolded, but it still felt unnatural to be chasing demons through small-town California. The hunt and the kill were meant for blinding sun and sucking mud and the sultry green mosquito-whine of the jungle, not Starbucks and decaying warehouses.

Sam punched the magnification tab and the red dots of the other teams materialized on the scanner screen, spinning a web of blood to catch a particularly vicious fly. Any second their quarry would hear them coming, and...yeah! There it went, scurrying into a maze of dockside warehouses and abandoned storefronts. The Vartoq might try to get away along the surface streets, but there was a convenient manhole only a block away, and if it followed the pattern it had established in their previous attempts... "Come on, take the bait, fish-face," she muttered. And there it went, down the rabbit hole. Unless the Vartoq could body-surf through a sewage treatment plant, they had him. "Red One, target has gone to ground. Red One, do you copy?"

"I copy, Red Two." Riley's voice sounded strained, but the crappy connection made it hard to tell. "I'm with you. Keep on it."

"Switching to subterranean view." Streets vanished, replaced by the Sim City representation of sewer lines and electrical tunnels. The yellow dot was zipping full-out along the sewer main, heading the for the sluiceway into the bay. Sam yelled, "Red Four, Red Three, mobilize!" and the red dots converged to cut their prey off from its avenues of escape, hounds on the trail of a treed cougar. Yellow reversed course, scrambling for the only clear exit. Sam whooped in triumph and slammed her fist against a mailbox as she raced past. "Cornered!" She broke into a pounding run, around the corner and down the alley towards the manhole cover the Vartoq had gone down.

Evrett's voice crackled in her earphones, distorted by spooky echoes. "Red One, this is Red Six. We have lost contact, repeat, we have lost contact!"

The yellow dot zigged where the sewer line zagged, and winked out like a will-o'-the-wisp. Sam skidded to a halt and struck the scanner with the flat of her hand, but the only thing on the screen was their own people milling about in confusion. "Red One. Come in, Red One!" No answer, not even static. Reception in Sunnydale was for shit, like the concentrated creepy-crawlies messed up the airwaves somehow. "Red Six, initiate standard search pattern from the target's last recorded position. Red Three, assist. Red Five, continue to checkpoint and keep an eye out. It can't have gone far."

"Roger, Red Two. Can we get the telemetry on that last sighting?"

Sam sighed, did a log capture, and uploaded the information to the com system. "Sending now." It wouldn't do any good--it hadn't the last four times this had happened. "Keep us posted, Red Six. Damn it, Gunnarson's checked the scanner relays half a dozen times."

Tiny cat-feet picked their delicate way up the back of her spine, and she whirled. No one, nothing, only a scrap of Doublemeat wrapper spinning in a vagrant breeze. Sam muttered a word her mother would have gotten out the soap for and searched rows of dark, grimy windows for movement. The wild pursuit had taken her several blocks off Main, and though it wasn't yet four o'clock, the insufficiently converted warehouses looming overhead left the narrow, grimy street in deep shadow.

What had Buffy said? The good news was that Sunnydale's vampire population was down. The bad news was that the remaining vamps seldom hunted alone. There was at least one established nest dockside, and though it wasn't likely that any of them would be out and about at this time of day, but...she caught movement in the corner of one eye. Double-dipped shit on a stick. Something told her that the dark figure slouched in the doorway halfway down the block wasn't after spare change. "Red One. Come in, Red One. Riley, dammit, this is important!"

Nothing. Sam started walking with the swift, confident stride of someone who knew exactly where she was going, one hand unobtrusively loosening her taser in its holster. She hadn't gone five yards before she heard the footsteps behind her--which meant someone wanted her to hear them. Wanted her to get scared. Wanted her to run, to beg, to scream, to piss herself. You don't always get what you want, buster. The footsteps grew closer, closer--if the thing had possessed breath, she could have felt it on the back of her neck. Three paces behind, two, one... Sam spun around on one foot, opposing heel connecting solidly with her pursuer's jaw.

The vampire's head cracked against the dirty concrete. It shook its head, snarling, and kicked off the sidewalk with the power of an Olympic swimmer. Sam blocked its clumsy jab at the last possible instant, technique just barely beating inhuman speed, punched it in the throat hard enough to crush a human's larynx, and fell back to grab some much-needed breathing space. Her attacker was gaunt and shabby, its eyes bestial with hunger. Most vampires weren't especially skilled at hand-to-hand combat, just several times stronger, faster, and more tireless than the average human. A well-trained human fighter could take one down, maybe even two, but..."I just want to talk to you!" she panted. "Information. We can pay. We're looking for a Bracken demon who goes by the name of Susie..."

That got her a snarl and a roundhouse swing to the head. Sam pulled her taser. A second vampire, reeking of old blood and sewer funk, plummeted from the fire escape overhead and cannoned into her. Cold, dirty fingers clamped around her own, crushing hand and taser together. Her bones would break before the high-impact plastic would. Something twinged in her wrist and her fingers spasmed. The taser fell, skittering across the dingy concrete. Shabby's steel-toed boot ground down, and a second later the weapon was a smashed electronic beetle, case cracked open and its transistorized guts spilling out across the pavement.

Sam gritted her teeth and jammed her knee into Smelly's gut, using her free hand to work her sheath knife free of its boot-top confinement. The short blade plunged into the vampire's side, and its head snapped back with a wolf-howl of agony, but its grip never loosened. Fangs snagged in the tough fabric of her flak vest, and Sam strained for the wooden pallet leaning against the wall a few feet away, her heart pounding the drum solo from In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. If she could tear free just one good-sized splinter...

Smelly leered, blackened lips peeling away from fangs almost as yellow as his eyes. "The old ones say you government types were something to be scared of once. You don't look scary to me, bit--"

Her fingers curled around jagged wood and the splinter ripped free with an adrenaline-fueled crack! Eight inches of yellow pine buried themselves in Smelly's back, sending him up in a poof of startled dust. Sam heaved herself off the wall, brushing the gritty remains of her assailant off her vest. "Yeah, well, you're not too bright." She turned the makeshift stake on Shabby, who yipped, leaped for the wall, and scuttled up and away roach-fashion. Why some vamps could do that and others couldn't Sam had never figured out.

"Samantha!"

She turned. Her errant husband was tearing down the street towards her, legs pumping, knuckles ghost-white around the stock of a repeating crossbow. Big enough to hunt bears with a switch, her father had said when she brought Riley home for the first time, and from the look on his face, right now the switch was optional. He was at her side in half a dozen long strides, and the guilt and anguish in those his eyes almost--almost--made her forgive him then and there. "Oh, God, Sam--you're bleeding. Let me see. Big warm hands cradled hers, and Sam realized, somewhat to her surprise, that her palms were pricked with red from a dozen tiny splinters. "God, Samantha, I'm so sorry!"

"Sorry and twenty-five cents will buy me a gumball," she interrupted, taut and angry. She yanked her hand back and nursed it against her ribs. "Where the hell were you? I expected you to back me up! This is the third time you've gone missing in the last week, and I've covered for you, but damn it, Ri, we're a team, or we used to be." A huge welling ache boiled up under her ribs, threatening to burst her open. "Tell me you're under secret orders, tell me you're sneaking off to see your old girlfriend--just..." Her righteous fury devolved into pleading. "...tell me something."

"Sam, I'm--God, I don't know what I can tell you. I screwed up. I got distracted. I ran off chasing shadows. It won't happen again."

Weird how such a big guy could look so small. Sam raised an eyebrow. "So it is the old girlfriend, huh?"

It was supposed to be a joke, something to lighten the mood. Riley didn't laugh. He looked away, hair falling across his eyes, shame and anger locking his jaw. "Come on. We'll go to the base. You should get patched up."

"No," Sam said shortly. "It's just a scratch. I'll be fine. Let's just go back to the hotel and get changed."

"Sam, I--" He caught her shoulder. "I'm sorry."

"So am I." And yet...how could she do anything but trust him, after all they'd been through together? She circled his waist with both arms, laid her head against his shoulder and closed her eyes. "You can't keep re-making this choice, Ri. You can't keep letting her come between you and your duty. We didn't just lose the Vartoq this time, it led us into a goddamn ambush. What are we gonna tell the Colonel, huh? Headquarters isn't going to be happy with our capture stats, and can you blame them?" She reached up and cupped his cheek in one hand, tilting his troubled face to hers. "There's one hostile we don't need to track down. One that would made Headquarters very happy."

"Spike's off-limits." Riley ground the heel of his hand into his brow. "God, I can't believe I just said that. But he's under Buffy's protection, and unless I can prove he's killing..."

Sam's mouth tightened. Riley Finn had kept a photo of the Slayer in his wallet for the first six months that Sam had known him. He'd take it out and show it to her, a battered, edge-worn 3x5 of the two of them standing together in front of Riley's dorm. The tiny, skinny blonde girl stared out at the camera with an expression both vulnerable and aloof, somehow not dwarfed by Riley's huge broad-shouldered presence. Riley's expression was goofy and adoring, Buffy's enigmatic, her smile as obscure as the Mona Lisa's, eyes and thoughts both elsewhere. Sam could have told him it was doomed from one look at that smile. "Buffy's protection," she said, her voice flat. "We both know she's got something to do with this. We weren't having all these problems with the tracking units before she showed up. I know she meant a lot to you, but...people change."

He sighed. "She's the Slayer, Sam. That doesn't change."

They talked little and touched less on the drive over to Buffy's place. They pulled up in front of 1630 Revello Drive at the last gasp of sunset, and Riley sat for a moment in the driver's seat of the rental Neon, gazing out at the rising tide of evening--shadows lengthening, melding, creeping across the street and lapping up the lawn. One by one, lights were going on along the street, checkerboards of amber and gold. Here, in the one neighborhood in Sunnydale where vampires walked openly among them, children rode crazy bike-circles in the gathering dusk, laughing and unafraid. Riley wasn't in any mood to appreciate the irony.

The vampire in question was out on the driveway, buried up to his elbows in the engine well of a tailfinned monstrosity of a car--bone-white hair rumpled, engine grease blackening his knuckles, the smoulder in his eyes matching that of the cigarette dangling from his lower lip as he did mortal battle with the spark plugs. Python-coils of muscle flexed beneath that second-skin t-shirt as Spike threw his weight against the ratchet. This was what he was putting his career on the line to save, undead rough trade with a...

"Really nice ass," Sam observed, slipping out of the car. Still getting back at him for this afternoon, Riley supposed, not that he could blame her. "Guess I can see why Buffy keeps him around. The big wrinkly critter I'm still trying to figure out." She nodded in the direction of the porch, where a plump middle-aged blonde woman was talking animatedly to a Sharpesi demon. "You gonna sit here and sulk all night?"

"I'm thinking about it." That got him a tiny hint of a smile, at least. Riley got out of the car and followed Sam up the walk, guilt fighting for belly space with a growing feeling of dread. He wasn't going to be able to keep her in the dark for much longer. Shouldn't have kept her in the dark this long, but oh, God, he'd wanted one thing in his life untouched by the shadow of Sunnydale.

It shouldn't have surprised him that Buffy would have met new people in the last two years, but somehow it did. The woman and the...thing...on the porch waved at them, and Riley managed a half-hearted hand-flip in return. Dawn Summers was draped over the DeSoto's fender, shoulder to companionable shoulder with Spike, waving one sneakered foot in the air. Xander Harris, sporting a pronounced limp and a shirt crying out for a Carson Kressley bitch-slapping, emerged from the house bearing a six-pack. He tossed one to Spike and one to a barrel-chested, mustachioed man in a wheelchair.

"The trick is to keep 'em in order," the vampire was saying as they walked up the drive. "Cylinder numbers don't matter so long as you...grrnh!" The spark plug finally gave in, and he popped it out and chucked it to Dawn. "Bloody buggering hell, who tightened these fucking things?"

"Someone with super-strength and a bad temper?" Dawn suggested, all blinky-eyed innocence.

Spike gave the ratchet an admonishing shake in her direction. "You're not too old to be buried in a shallow grave and left for the hyenas." He ground his cigarette out on the sole of his boot with a sardonic glance at the new arrivals, and unrolled the pack of from the sleeve of his t-shirt to select a fresh one. "Oooh, goody, it's Nick Fury and his Howling Commandette."

Xander broke into a huge, eager-puppy grin. "Riley Finn! My main military man!" Much testosterone-fueled backslapping ensued. "You look fantastic! A tad Heidelberg Academy, but--hey! So this is Sam, huh? Because it's your first time, I'm forgoing the jokes about nose-twitching and heading straight for the congratulations. It is congratulations, right?"

"Definitely congratulations." He returned Xander's grin gamely. For all his expansive good cheer Xander looked as if he'd aged ten years, not two--there were deep lines of pain around his eyes, and a fleck or two of grey in his dark hair. "I hear you've gone into the responsible adult business yourself."

Xander grimaced and slapped his game leg. "Yeah, well, not much choice there. The good news is that I now have so much metal in my body any vampire putting the chomp on me is gonna end up gumming his blood. But the only thing I'm fighting these days is Anya's nesting instinct. Which, come to think of it, is a damn sight scarier than most demons." He gestured at the man in the wheelchair. "This is my boss, Max Murchison--we used to work construction together, and last summer he started a custom cabinetry company just in time to hire the handicapped."

"Bitch, bitch, bitch," Max said, scooting around the hood of the car and hauling himself up to sway over the engine opposite Spike. "We still got you beat. You're just a gimp. I'm a cripple and bleach-boy here is dead." He squinted at Spike. "You gonna break down and admit I'm right about the carburetor?"

Spike shot a truculent glare across the top of the disputed carburetor. "Look, Speed Racer, who's been driving this car for the last forty-five years, you or me? I rebuilt the sodding carburetor just last month, and--"

Both of them turned to Xander, who raised both hands and took a step backwards. "What? Don't look at me, I'm just here for the beer and the manly scratching." He stage-whispered to the Finns, "Flee while you yet can. This can go on for months. Civilizations rise and fall."

"Well, they can rise and fall after dinner," Buffy said briskly, hopping off the end of the porch and navigating the scarce driveway space between the Cherokee and the DeSoto. Riley smiled and nodded while she performed introductions--the blonde woman was Max's wife Sandra, and the Sharpesi demon was Clem, some shady associate of Spike's. She stood tip-toe to deliver a kiss to the hollow of Spike's grease-smudged cheek, smacking his hands when he tried to reciprocate. "Nuh-uh! Hands that touch Slayer before they touch soap get removed." Spike slammed the hood of the DeSoto shut, crooked his grimy fingers into claws and lunged for Buffy's pristine outfit with a manic leer. Buffy shrieked and bolted for the front door, in more apparent terror for her wardrobe than she'd ever been for her life. "Come on in!" she yelled over her shoulder. "Willow made place cards!"

Willow had, in fact, gone a bit overboard with the place cards. There were little American flags decorating his. Giles was gone, Dawn was all grown up, Xander and Anya were married and working on a family, and Buffy was living with a vampire, but at least Willow was still Willow. "Good job."

"You really think so?" Willow asked, pleased. "We weren't sure if we should seat people boy, girl, boy, or human, demon, human, and also I couldn't find any stickers that were really soldiery." She passed him a heaping plate of barbecued ribs and potato salad. "And I wasn't sure what to do for Sam's at all, but then I thought, 'Hey, Hello Kitty is universal!'"

"Can't argue with that," Sam said, examining her card with a diplomacy worthy of Kissinger. She took the green beans from Clem. "Did you want any of the--"

"Oh, no," Willow waved the proffered dish away with a regretful shake of her head. "Just blood for me, thanks--the solid stuff gives me the collywobbles."

Riley blinked. "It what?"

Willow blinked back, and edged her chair a little to the left. "Um. Buffy did mention that I had a really bad hair day a year or so ago? Did it not come up that there was some slight fanginess involved?"

"Oh, never mind about that," Anya said, thumping a box of Franzia down on the sideboard. "She's got a soul, blah blah yadda yadda. Look! I discovered that it comes in boxes now. Economical and stackable."

"Stackability's always the first thing I check for in a nice Cabernet." Xander spigoted her a glassful with an approximation of a carefree grin. "Look at it this way, Ahn, it's a good thing the whole pee-on-a-stick thing was a bust or you wouldn't be enjoying the rectangular grape phenomenon as we speak."

"What's the matter, Harris?" Spike's entry into the grin sweepstakes was cheerily malicious. "Incipient patter of little feet making yours go cold?"

"No, he's been quite calm about it." Anya frowned and swirled her wine. "Too calm. I expected more hysterical blindness."

Sandra chuckled. "Wait till the rabbit dies."

"Oh, I'm looking forward to that part."

He wasn't very hungry, Riley decided. When Clem brought out the Pictionary, he escaped to the front porch and sat down on the front steps with his third beer of the night, paging through Buffy's photo album. Spike and Buffy at a carnival, standing in front of a neon-encrusted Ferris wheel. Dawn facing Spike across a bo stick in the training room at the Magic Box, disheveled and determined. Tara and Willow in gaudy sombreros, holding a plate of tacos. Xander tossing a pair of crutches into a trash can while Anya clapped. Spike and Willow at a table in the Bronze, mugging for the camera with goofy game-faced grins.

When all the faces in all the pictures began to blur into the one he least wanted to see, he closed the album and set it aside. Maybe Buffy had the right idea. Maybe once you let the vampires into your life, you could never really get rid of them, and your only hope was to stock up on pig's blood and make the best of it. But damn it, he couldn't accept that. There had to be a way free of...her. Riley took another pull at his beer, feeling leaden and fuzzy. He wasn't much of a drinker, not since leaving Sunnydale, anyway, and a couple-three bottles of Spike's Double Bock on a near-empty stomach left him...not drunk, but maybe a pillowcase or two to the wind.

He could see Sam through the front window, laughing, talking, charming the natives with recipes for plantain casserole and stories about demon-fighting in Belize. Tall and cool and confident, black-olive eyes and sleek dark fall of hair. His Amazon. Every moment made him more keenly aware of the distance between his body and hers. All he had to do to close that gap was get up and walk inside, reach out across ten feet of space and a million miles of explanations. It wasn't fair, damn it. He'd changed. He'd fixed his life, fixed himself, found a woman he loved who loved him back...and he was right back where he'd started.

The front door opened behind him and a blast of music and light and laughter swirled out onto the porch. "...you're the expert on the local demons," Sam said. "Any idea what's going on?"

Spike and Buffy exhanged glances. "Gib Cain!" Buffy said.

"Free-lance demon hunter," Spike elaborated, pouncing on the name. "Or used to be. Specialized in werewolves. 'Bout a year ago he signed on as an agent for a big black-market dealer out of L.A.." He smirked. "He's not got my sterling moral fiber, has our Gib, and the locals are skittish whilst he's in town, is all."

Riley snorted, loudly enough that Spike gave him a sharp look. Sam might not be as familiar with the vampire's threadbare bag of tricks and shifty little half-truths as he was, but she sounded skeptical nonetheless. "Cain, huh? Any idea who this employer of his is?"

The vampire shrugged. "Not so's I'd know him if I bit him. Some bloke calls himself the Doctor." He turned to Buffy. "Half a mo', pet, I just need to tighten those last two plugs."

Riley froze. He hadn't expected Spike to back up his cock-and-bull story with anything...real, but the Doctor was very real indeed, a black-market Moriarty with contacts in every major city from San Francisco to Mexico City. If Spike was involved with the Doctor somehow... Spike passed him by without a second glance and strode over to the car. Well, that was just great; he didn't even rate a snide comment any longer.

"Of course we'd love to help," Buffy was saying, "but Spike and I are in the middle of this big... project, and he's driving down to L.A. tonight, to, uh, meet a client. I can't leave her to fend for herself. Did I say 'her?' I meant 'it.' Itself. Because projects are gender-neutral. Anyway, this, uh, project could lead to us taking out a whole nest of upwardly mobile vampires of the unchippy variety, which kind of takes precedence over tracking down the chippy ones. But if I have any spare time later this week maybe I could ride shotgun again some night."

"We'll give you a call." Sam crouched beside him, arms folded around her knees, the umber silk of her hair falling across her forearms. She regarded him gravely for a moment, then, "Ri. You want to give me the keys?"

If she'd been angry, or disappointed, or...but she just sounded sad and a little tired, and it twisted his gut into shapes no three-dimensional object was meant to achieve. Tell her, tell her, tell her... But the words wouldn't come out, and Riley dug into his pockets for the car keys and handed them over in silence. Sam scowled, tossed her head and strode over to the driveway. "Hey. '59 DeSoto Fireflite, right? My dad runs a body shop in Des Moines, and he'd kill to get his hands on one of these babies."

Spike smirked up at her--she was an inch or two taller than he was. "Ah? We have something in common, then."

It took him a minute or two to realize that Buffy was still standing at the end of the porch, both hands braced against the rail, gazing out across the yard--not at the pair in the driveway, but at the darkness beyond: alert, watchful, sieving the night for prey. It wasn't that she was expecting trouble, he realized; she was just being the Slayer. Still. Always. The woman in front of him wasn't as blonde or as skinny as the one in his old photo, but that distance was still there, in the way Buffy held herself, the shadows in her eyes, the way she'd neatly separated herself from the rest of the party. For Buffy Summers, connection would always require a little extra effort.

But this time, this life, with Spike, she was making it, the effort she hadn't made for him. Ice-water realization hit him: for Sam he'd have to make the effort he hadn't make for Buffy.

Buffy straightened, fitting perky conviviality to her face so snugly that he might never have realized it was a mask, absent that unguarded glimpse. "Dollar sixty-seven for your thoughts. That's a penny, with inflation."

Riley picked up the album, riffled pages to the photo of Willow in game face. "So, when were you going to tell me that Willow was a vampire?"

"I never said she wasn't a vampire." Buffy perched on the railing, ice-cream cool in crisp white linen blazer and miniskirt over a black tube top. She took a dainty sip of her own drink--no Double Bock for her, just some girly ultra-light fruity thing. "Okay, okay, there just never seemed to be a good time to mention it. I didn't want you and Sam getting all stake-y and weird about it, and besides, Tara thinks she's found a way to change her back. So in a way Willow's practically not a vampire at all, so it wouldn't make any sense to tell you she was." Perfect white teeth nibbled her full lower lip. "She's like Angel. She's got a soul."

"Uh huh." From any sane perspective, Buffy's best friend had died, and Buffy was propping the corpse up in the living room, but it was hard to see Willow as other than the chirpy young woman enthusing over the place cards. Maybe that had been Buffy's nefarious plan all along. "Buffy..."

"I really am glad you and Sam could come tonight. I wanted you to see..." She made an awkward, inclusive gesture with her wine cooler. "It doesn't always have to be fighting." There was a pleading note in her voice, eerily similar to the one Sam's had held earlier. "I hope it wasn't too much at once."

"I can honestly say that I've never had dinner with a demon before--at least, not where I wasn't the intended main course."

"Clem's a sweetie. They're not all evil. I mean, most of them aren't good, but... even the ones who are..." Buffy's eyes went irresistibly to Spike's silhouette, black as pitch against the pale concrete. "They can change."

Riley dug the heel of his hand into his forehead. He could feel a headache coming on. Go to hangover, go directly to hangover, do not get buzzed, do not have a good time. Buffy was still the Slayer, but what was the Slayer? "Change is a two-way street."

Her small pointed chin jerked up, but then Buffy stilled, all her attention diverted to the driveway. Spike was wiping his hands on a greasy rag, tense in the face of Sam's enthusiasm. "...would really help if we could get data from a subject where the chip produced substantive behavioral change--we could learn so much--"

"Said no." Spike stuffed the rag into a back pocket with an irritated twitch of one shoulder. "I've been one of your lab rats, and I'd rather gnaw my own foot off at the hip than do it again."

"Dr. Walsh's project was dismantled. Our mission objectives are completely different. The neural scan's nothing to be afraid of," Sam wheedled. "Totally non-invasive--well, mostly non-invasive, and it would only involve a few days of testing. A week at--"

The vampire wheeled on her, eyes paling to gold in the uncertain light. "Look, Boudicca, no means I won't sodding do it, so--"

The bottle shattered and brown foam cascaded down the steps, filling the air with the scent of malt. Riley didn't remember dropping it, didn't remember getting up, didn't remember crossing the lawn. He didn't remember anything but foul demonic laughter and a sneering, yellow-eyed face, and Sam, white and strained against the brickwork as she clawed for a makeshift stake. He grabbed Spike's shoulder in a miraculous suspended moment and spun the smaller man around, slamming him into the car and splaying him backwards over the hood. He pressed the stake--of course he had a stake on him, this was Sunnydale--point-first into the silent chest beneath him. Spike wasn't the fine-boned, impossibly beautiful blonde he really wanted to kill, but he'd do, oh, yeah, he'd do. "This one's for real, Spike. I think you'd better watch how you talk to my wife."

Time crystallized around him, liquid to solid. Buffy was leaping the porch railing, grasping Sam's arm, holding her back. The beat of his own heart was as ponderous as Big Ben. The world was advancing at the pace of a glacier and grinding all before it into dust. Save for Spike's hands. Leisurely, graceful, inexorable, the vampire's right hand closed around the stake at the same time the left closed around Riley's throat. The lean, muscular torso beneath him convulsed, and Spike heaved them both off the car and stood up, holding him by the throat as easily as a man might hold a kitten--given the difference in their heights, not far off the ground, but far enough. He'd have bruises tomorrow, if there was a tomorrow. The vampire canted his head to one side, speculative. "There's a staggering number of people I'd feel bad about killing these days," he said. "You're not one of them. Understood?"

Riley glared down through a bruise-colored fog. Pain cleared his head; he could fight back--kick Spike in the nads, if nothing else--but he was too drunk to put up his best fight and not nearly drunk enough not to care. Spike tapped him on the nose with the stake, almost playfully, and released his hold. Riley's knees went out from under him as he hit the pavement and he thumped against the side of the car, drawing in great shuddering lungfuls of air.

The moment the Slayer let go, Sam was at his side, furious and concerned. "Damn it, Ri, you didn't need to--" She turned on Buffy. "You didn't stop him!?"

Buffy's eyes met Spike's, and her jaw clenched, mule-stubborn. "I didn't have to."

Riley rolled his head, working the vampire-induced kinks out, and fingered his aching throat. He should just have 'Sam is always right' tattooed on his ass and be done with it. "I... may have over-reacted. But dammit, Buffy...this is Spike we're dealing with. He's dangerous. You can't not see that. He hasn't got a soul, and sooner or later he's going to screw up, and screw up big."

Strangely enough, it was Spike who flinched. "Tell you a secret, Finn--sooner or later, so will everyone with a soul." His nostrils flared. "Thing about garlic is, it wears off. Might want to keep that in mind." He nodded to Sam with an unexpected courtliness. "No hard feelings, but make no mistake: you even think about putting me or mine in a cage again, and I will kill you--you and anyone else between me and the exit."

He spun on one heel and swaggered back up the walk, a move obviously left over from the days when he'd had the leather duster to billow dramatically behind him. Riley's brain sputtered into a panicked loop of He knows, he knows, he knows! and an absurd gratitude that Spike had half-strangled him, because now no one would think the tremor in his hands strange. Would anyone ask about the bruises when they went inside, or did Buffy's willful blindness extend to the rest of them as well? Sam held him, her body warm against his, and he yearned to bury himself in her and hide from the world, as he had in those first bad days.

Buffy looked at Spike's retreating back, took a deep fierce breath, let it go. "He's terrified, you know. Of what you did to him. Of ever being that helpless again."

Riley's bitter chuckle degenerated into a cough. "He's depraved because he's deprived? Somehow that doesn't make me feel any better."

Her face went beseeching. "Riley, it's not that I--Spike has to stop himself. You see that, don't you? Otherwise it doesn't mean anything. I'll help him any way I can, and that includes knocking him cold when he's too mad to think straight, but he's the one who has to..." She smiled, a hopeful, tremulous thing. "I can't make him what he isn't. I know that--God, do I know that. But I can help him be the best of what he is. And he is..." She hugged herself, small and savage in the night. "Worth it. I know what you're thinking, but three years ago you would have been dead right now. Can't you see how--how incredible that is?"

"Three years ago, he would have been dead right now." Or maybe not, thinking back on all the times Buffy'd had Spike in her sights and somehow failed to strike home. Was it more unnerving to realize that Buffy had changed, or to suspect that she hadn't? "You know there's going to come a day when whoever's in his way isn't someone he'd feel bad about killing."

Sam's hands bracketed on his shoulders. "Ri's right," she said. "He's a vampire, Buffy. A really pretty vampire, a really well-trained vampire, but just a vampire. An animal. Just like every other HST you've killed, every day for the last seven years."

The Slayer's big grey-green eyes didn't drop, nor her firm little mouth waver. "You're wrong. Spike isn't just anything."

"That went well," Buffy said as the last car pulled away. She closed the front door and surveyed the wreckage with satisfaction: Par-TAY had been achieved. The living room was a wasteland of decimated appetizer trays, beer bottles, poker chips, and assorted Pictionary scribbles--no matter what Xander said, that was not Secretariat. Maybe some kind of aardvark. Dawn sat cross-legged in front of the fireplace, sorting her fantastic riches (in the form of I.O.U.s for kittens) into pedigreed and non-pedigreed piles, and Willow and Tara cuddled up on the couch cooing "No, I love you more!" at tipsy intervals, having made considerable inroads into the Franzia. "Didn't that go well?"

Spike chuckled. He was sprawled out in the armchair, a restorative tumbler of something considerably stronger than wine-in-a-box balanced on one knee, the only hint that the Finn Encounter had rattled him more than he cared to admit. "Ducky. If you don't count Harris wincing every time the little woman mentioned potential spawn, and Finn's little--" He intercepted her warning glance, set his drink down and stretched, eyes a-crinkle with mirth. "I had a grand time."

"So it was a little awkward." Dawn shrugged. "No zombie gatecrashers, no broken furniture, minimal bloodshed--by Buffy standards, that's a great party." Her eyes sharpened with the predatory acumen of Dawn Summers, Very Secret Diary Finder. "Unless something innnnnteresting happened while you guys were outside?"

"No! Or--well--there was an incident. A minor incident."

"Finn tried to slip me a long hard one," Spike confided. Buffy lobbed a poker chip at his head.

"It's not funny. They're already suspicious about the scanners going all wiggy--"

"Me!" Tara waved a hand proudly. "That was me. I did it. All of the, the spell thingies." She leaned over and wagged her finger under Spike's nose. "No frowny faces. Happy faces for my beautiful Willow-tree."

"Happy faces, sweetie." Willow gazed adoringly at Tara. "Are you tired? Should I put you to bed?"

Tara giggled, sleepy-eyed. "Yeah, put me to bed. And tuck me in." She held out both arms with artless insistence, and Willow, with a delighted smile, swept her lover up Rhett Butler-style and headed for the staircase. Tara looped her arms around Willow's neck, snuggling against Willow's shoulder--how much of that was Franzia and how much was renewed hope Buffy had no idea, but Willow didn't appear to be in the mood to look a gift witch in the mouth.

Spike watched the two of them disappear in the direction of the basement stairs with a disapproving sniff. "Glinda doesn't need Will human, she just needs to get shitfaced more often."

"I hope Willow remembers Uncle Rory's patented hangover cure. She'll need it." They were all so used to Tara being the sensible one, the calm one, the one who kept her head when all about her something something. Maybe they expected too much of her. Tara'd been stressed out enough dealing--or not dealing--with Willow's change of life this last year, and they'd all blithely expected her to take up all of Willow's magical slack, too. Plus she had to keep her grades B-ish or risk losing her scholarship. Buffy nudged a dropped stake out from beneath the couch with her toe, flipped it into the air, caught it, twirled it. "So this Moro, whatsit, Mohra demon--is it hard to kill? Angel took one down a couple of years ago, but I didn't get much of a chance to check out his technique."

"You should call him again," Dawn said. "You could be missing vital information. Like if he got blood splashed on him when he fought it, did little pieces of him come to life? Did he go all Data and the Borg Queen?"

"Ew." Buffy wrinkled her nose. "I'll take my men dead or alive, thanks much, but not half and half."

"And on that disturbing note, I'm going to bed. Wake me if anyone loses a body part." Dawn shuffled her cattery in potentio into piles and deposited them on the coffee table. "No one mess with this, OK? It's a system, and everyone gets a share."

When her sister's footsteps hit the landing, Buffy toed off one pump and then the other and folded into the chair astride Spike's lap, wriggling a bit to accommodate the familiar bulge in his jeans. Only a courtesy hard-on, really; neither of them were particularly in the mood, but if she scooted an inch that way and settled against his chest just so...ah, yes, very nice. Cleanup, she decided, could wait till tomorrow morning. Right now there was the all-important task of teasing bleach-fried hair into curls, so he could growl and nip at her fingers and slick it down again. Spike raised his glass and offered her the last half-inch of amber fluid. What the heck; she wasn't driving tonight, and not finishing the glass was probably his concession towards virtue when he was. The whiskey seared its way down her throat and curled itself into a nice little coal-bed in her tummy. "Gah! Also mmmm. When are you leaving?"

"Midnight, or thereabouts." His hands rested lightly on the curve of her hips. There were inky crescents of grease beneath his close-bitten fingernails, and the smell of hot metal still lingered about him. His voice was the rumble of a well-tuned engine. "Carburetor my arse, the old girl's running like a dream. I used to keep her up proper, you know. Spit 'n polish. Only really went to hell on that drive up from Buenos Aires, after...didn't seem important, somehow, after that." White fingers delved beneath pleated white linen, strong thumbs stroked down the creases of her thighs to meet in the place where she lived. "Think if I got her steam-cleaned you'd see your way towards putting a new set of stains on the back seat?"

"You are so gross." Buffy squirmed, the better to fit his scratch to her itch. "Absolutely not. I don't know. Maybe." Under the layer of please-don't-tell-me crud, the DeSoto was incredibly hot, with the chrome and the tailfins and the whitewalls and the lightning-bolt side panels, but she'd always thought of it as the car he'd gotten for Drusilla. Making out in it was like wearing the old girlfriend's clothes, way too Vertigo for comfort. On the other hand, there was something to be said for claiming the territory of a rival. And that back seat was bigger than some hotel rooms. "You sure you wanna leave tonight?"

Spike pulled a sulky face. "No, but as the King of Pain seems to have gone off answering his phone--" He reached up to smooth away her frown-lines. "No worries, love. Odds are he's out having himself fitted for a new cape and tights, or he's nipped off to roger the cheerleader." He grinned. "Or both."

"FYI, if you ever want to get any again? Not loving the visual." It wasn't like her niggling little worry was a full-blown Slayer dream o' doom. Her track record for Angel-premonitions had pretty much sucked since he'd left Sunnydale, anyway. "You're probably right. But if there's anything wrong, anything at all, call me, OK? Getting into trouble without me? Not allowed."

"Wouldn't dream of it. It's not likely he'll be much help anyway. Mohras aren't thick upon the ground in these parts. Like as not Peaches offed the only one in North America, but I used to know this chap in Shanghai..." Spike trailed off, moody. "Love." There was real unease in his voice. "You've never said what you think of this idea of Glinda's."

"I don't know." She rocked slowly back and forth, the coal-fire in her belly settling lower. "If Willow wants it--if they're careful--I mean, putting Willow's soul back was the best thing I could think of to do at the time, but it would have been better if she'd never become a vampire to begin with. If this Mohra thing works, it's like a chance to make it never have happened, you know? But it did happen, and all these other things happened with it. I don't know if we can go back, Spike. What if we're not supposed to go back? That's what worries me."

Spike snorted. "What worries me is what if this stuff chases the demon out first, and Will falls to dust before it can heal her? How's any of us to know? I've done a spell or two at need, but I'm no wizard. If it's not sodding broken don't sodding fix it is my motto, but they're both mad to take a spanner to the works." His eyes dropped to the general vicinity of her bellybutton. "Gets a bloke thinking, though. Would you have me human, if you could?"

"What? No!" Where had that come from? "I mean, if you suddenly woke up with a pulse I'd deal, and God knows things would be a lot easier sometimes if you had a soul, but..." She'd dreamed about Angel becoming human, back in the day, rose-tinted fantasies about the life they could have if only. But Spike? They already had a life. "Would you have me human, if you could? 'Cause really not. I just play one on TV." She ground her damp crotch into his. "This is who I love, William. Right here. Right now."

Ah, there was that rumbly little growl, Spike on idle. Lips parted, tongues met in lazy feline caress. There was kissing, very vital kissing, important to the plot and full of necessary character development. The heady bite of alcohol mingling on their shared breath tickled her nose. He tasted of bad habits, of wild nights and lazy mornings, and screw Riley Finn and his two-way street, maybe she had changed, but better that than stay frozen in amber forever. That was the whole point with Spike: here and now. With Angel it had been forever, a changeless idyll where she was eternally sixteen and he was forever the brooding, mysterious lover in whose arms she wanted to die. She wasn't going to die in Spike's arms. No, her whole body came to quivering juicy life under his touch, so slippery-wet she was starting to make squishy noises. I love you. I don't have words for how much, so take this instead.

He fumbled with the top button of his jeans, eyes gleaming. His cock poked brazenly above the waistband, the heavy satiny head emerging flushed and dripping from the taut foreskin. It wasn't always hot and fast and frantic between them; sometimes it was like this, liquid and lazy, flowing and melting like quicksilver, like the globs in a lava lamp, till she couldn't tell where her skin ended and his began and it was her cock hard and aching, his clit slick and throbbing. The cold silver bite of rings against humid flesh made her gasp: one finger, two, three--my, what big hands you've got, Grandma. He growled, a primal, guttural note which went straight to her oh god can't even say the word how lame is that Spike says it makes it beautiful dirty good but I can't even think--OH!

She clasped his hips tight, those skater's muscles he loved bunching in her thighs, rolling his cock between their bellies. Taken by surmise, Spike echoed her soft startled gasp and milky spume geysered up between them, once, twice, and again. Not warm champagne exactly, but a very good year; she kissed the strong bitter spunk from his chest with needy little moans. When the tide finally receded, leaving her high and anything but dry, Spike was staring down at himself with wounded outrage. "That hasn't happened in--in--"

Buffy slid down his thighs and landed butt-first on the floor, loose and flushed and laughing. She undid a few more buttons and patted his flaccid cock as she'd stroke a puppy. "Poor Little Spike. I still love you." Little Spike, predictably, began to perk up under the attention, and Life-size Spike's dimples deepened around a sheepish grin. Another moment and they were both giggling helplessly, her head cradled in his lap. Out in the dining room the clock chimed midnight. Spike groaned. "Fuck it, I've got to get on the road."

He plucked at his sodden t-shirt and tugged it off over his head. Buffy squinted up at bare chest and JBF curls and half-hard cock spilling out of half-buttoned jeans, and buried her face between his knees with a whimper. "You could fuck me instead." The universe was definitely askew when Spike was the one yapping about duty and she was the one trying to keep him in bed. Or chair. Or floor. She wasn't fussy. "Oh, never mind. I'll give them one more call while you change. Maybe someone will be up."

She hit the Hyperion's number on the speed dial and sat back to wait for someone to pick up. Two rings, three... under normal circumstances they'd both be simmering nicely towards a second happy right now. She slipped one, then two exploratory fingers beneath her skirt, and jerked them guiltily back out. It would be the definition of tacky to bring herself off while waiting for her old boyfriend to answer the phone. Spike came trotting back downstairs, changed and reasonably presentable, though it was still fairly obvious that he dressed left and Mother Nature had been exceptionally kind to him. He smacked his lips when he saw the position of her hand, bent down and purred, "Mmm, finger-lickin' good. Gonna spend the night thinking of me?"

Buffy stuck her tongue out at him. "Oh, like you're not going to be jerking off in every rest stop from here to--shh! Someone's--hello? Wesley? Is that you? You sound hoarse."

"Buffy," the cultured voice on the other end of the line replied. "Yes, I've been indisposed, but I'm feeling considerably better now. Quite the best I've felt in years, in fact. Can I help you?"

All of a sudden her Slayer senses were pinging like a Geiger counter, and a night of polyurethane fun was the last thing on her mind. "I was hoping to catch Angel," she said cautiously. "We wanted to ask him some questions about a demon he killed when I was visiting a couple of years ago. Is he there? I haven't been able to get through on his cell."

"He's probably let the battery run low again," Wesley said with an indulgent chuckle. Oh, that wacky Angel. "I'll give him the message, but I wouldn't expect to hear back from him immediately. He's working on an extremely important case."

"Anything that needs our help?"

Wesley's voice had the thinnest and sharpest of stiletto edges. "I believe he intends to consult you eventually, yes."

"Ooookay. I'll try to call him back tomorrow." Buffy hung up, and stared up at Spike. "Something's wrong. Don't ask me what, but it's blowing the grading curve of wrongness."

Spike nodded and shrugged into his motorcycle jacket, all business. "Didn't mention I was coming, did you?"

"Suddenly I didn't think they needed to know." They looked at one another. "God damn it," Buffy said very precisely. "Because two crises at once just isn't enough. I can't come with you. If I leave town while Riley's still on his scavenger hunt, and anything happens to Susie, I'm going to blow all the street cred I've got with the not-so-evil-as-all-that crowd."

"I'll handle it, Slayer. But if I can't get back in time, you'll have to meet with Evie." He cocked his head, shadow slicing down the hollows of his cheeks. "You all right with that?"

"I'll deal." Until now the min--employees had always been Spike's to deal with, and there was a mantle of razor-edged responsibility here that she wasn't sure she wanted to assume. But Evie's opportunities to pass on the information she was gathering were limited, and if Spike were delayed... "I'm supposed to meet Susie's aunt or semi-cousin or whatever she is at Willy's tomorrow night anyway. Birds, multiple, stone, singular."

Buffy stood on the front porch as the DeSoto pulled out of the driveway, watching until the taillights guttered and winked out in the distance, then sighed and turned to go in and change for an impromptu slay. The trouble with change was you were never sure where it was taking you until you were already there. She licked her lips, tasting the ghosts of whiskey and Spike. One way or another, she was still going to spend the night thinking of him.

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