Part 7

The Bronze wasn't too crowded on a Tuesday night. Standing on her toes in the doorway and craning her neck, Anya was able to survey almost the whole club. Neither Willow's red nor Spike's white-blond head stood out in the scattering of people milling about on the dance floor or congregating around the tables. She was about to say as much to Xander, but he'd caught sight of other familiar faces, and was already wending his way through the dancers to their table. "Hey!" Xander yelled over the noise of the other patrons. "Doug! Lenny!"
Doug and Lenny, along with a few other guys from Xander’s crew at the construction company, were seated around one of the little circular tables, which was littered with the remains of an appetizer platter. The two of them looked up from their beers and waved back. "Hey," Doug greeted them as Xander wove his way through the crowd to his table, Anya following along in his wake. "What's up? Want a beer? We got a pitcher. You're not usually here this late on a work night." He gestured towards a vacant seat. “Take Joe’s chair, he’s trying to pick up some college chick at the bar.”
"Thanks, bud, but we can't stay long, we're on a manhunt." Xander slid Joe’s chair over for Anya and grabbed another for himself from a nearby table. "You know my friend Willow? The redhead? Has she been in here tonight?"
Doug frowned and exchanged looks with the others. "Haven't seen her, man. She's the cute little d--" Lenny tossed a warning shot of peanuts at him and he cut himself off before swallowing any more foot. "No. Hasn't been in."
Xander gave him the eye. "I believe the current in term is 'woman-loving woman', oh politically correct poster boy. How about a blonde Brit about so tall, black leather coat, really annoying?"
Lenny scratched his stubbly chin and leaned back in his seat. "You mean Spike? That pool-playing friend of yours?"
The description of Spike as a friend of his seemed to throw Xander for a loop. Anya couldn’t remember having seen him look quite that disgruntled in awhile. "He's no damn friend of mine," he snapped. "Have you seen him or not?"
"Shit, Harris, bite a guy's head off, why don't you?" Lenny grumbled. "No, I haven't seen him. And I’ve been keeping an eye out. He bummed a cigarette off me last week and then ripped off the whole pack when I wasn’t looking."
Xander sighed and shoved the hair off his forehead. "Sorry, Lenny, I'm on edge.”
“It's important we find them,” Anya said. “Family emergency.” That was vague enough to cover anything, especially if you never made it clear which family the emergency was in. She pulled a pen and notepad out of her purse and wrote down a number. “If you see either of them, give us a beep, please. Here’s my pager number."
Lenny shrugged. "Sure. Smack him one for me when you find him."
“We’ll do that.” Anya gave Lenny and Doug what she hoped was a sincerely grateful smile. Faking sincerity was difficult, but, she thought, worth the trouble, especially since she was counting on Xander’s work friends to provide the bulk of really good gifts at their upcoming wedding. It wasn’t as if Dawn or Tara or Willow had any income to speak of, and Giles was the world’s worst shopper, and if Spike showed up for anything more than the free food and alcohol she would be mightily surprised. “Thank you both.”
She got up and took Xander’s arm, tugging him towards the doors. He slouched out to the parking lot behind her, hands shoved angrily into his pockets. He didn't say anything until they got into the car and the doors slammed. He sat gripping the wheel for a moment, then burst out, "Since when am I the Pulseless Wonder's keeper? If Lenny's gullible enough to leave anything in reach of that goddamn deadbeat vampire he deserves to get burned!"
Anya buckled her seatbelt. "Lenny doesn’t know Spike’s a vampire,” she pointed out. “This is one of those things where you're mad at Spike because you don't want to be mad at what you're really mad at, isn't it?" That was as close as she wanted to come to direct criticism of Willow; that never went over well with Xander.
"No," Xander replied irritably, glancing over his shoulder and throwing the car into reverse. "It's not. I'm well and truly mad at Spike on his own merits. I'm just also mad at me for being sap enough to slack off on hating him.”
“You can’t help it. Men run in packs. It’s a hunter-gatherer thing.”
“Can we lay off the hyena metaphors?” He pulled out into traffic. “I guess we’ll hit the Fish Tank next. Dammit, this is hopeless! They could be anywhere!"
"Not anywhere. We know they aren't in the places we've already looked," Anya said, stroking his arm. "Should we check back in with Tara and Giles?" The other two had remained in Giles' apartment to try working a location spell, but Anya had little expectation of them succeeding. If Willow were up to something wrong, she was more than capable of screening herself and her activities from the sort of magics Tara and Giles could muster.
Xander tossed the hair out of his eyes. He was incredibly sexy when he got that resolute, determined look. "Nah. Not till we've checked out every place we can think of. We've been to the library, and the Magic Box, and Spike's crypt, and Will's parents' house... when we find them I swear I'm gonna pound Spike's face in."
“If he’s at the Fish Tank someone may have done it for you.” In contrast to the trendy brew pubs which sprang up like mushrooms over by the UC Sunnydale campus, downtown Sunnydale had exactly three night spots worth checking-the Bronze, the Fish Tank, and Willie’s, in descending order of seediness and demon-haunted atmosphere. The latter two were long shots; Anya couldn’t imagine Willow going to either of them, and these days Spike only went to Willie’s when he wanted to beat someone up, and to the Fish Tank when he wanted to get beaten up. Anya considered. "But that's safer than trying to pound Willow's face in," she said at last.
Xander faced her suspiciously. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"Exactly what I said. If you have to release your anger and assert your dominance in a display of physical violence, hitting Spike is a better idea than hitting Willow. Willow could damage you severely and Spike can't. Or we could have rough sex later. Or both. I don't mind."
He regarded her for a long bemused moment. "I see your ‘I don’t mind’ and raise you an ‘Ew.’ If you’re trying to turn me off the idea of pounding faces, you’re succeeding. Doesn't this piss you off even a little?"
"Only because it makes you angry."
Xander didn't take that one any further, and remained quiet for the rest of the drive over to the Fish Tank, only the occasional furrowing of his brow providing evidence of his thoughts. Anya looked out the window and watched him out of the corner of her eye. The fact that Willow and Spike were probably doing a dangerous spell didn't bother her in itself. She didn't trust Spike around her money, but otherwise she was as indifferent to him as he was to her. Willow she put up with for Xander's sake, but that was all. If the two of them blew themselves up, Anya didn't think she'd be very sad about it.
But Willow was Xander's best friend, and Spike was, despite Xander's oft-professed loathing of vampires, his only current male acquaintance who both shared a few of his interests--though usually only to the point that they could argue about who was right for hours--and who was in on Xander's secret life as Assistant Slayer, First Class. Either of them getting blown up would upset Xander a great deal. And she didn’t want another funeral. There had been too many of them lately. So if Willow and Spike were doing something that hurt Xander, they had to be stopped.
The Fish Tank and Willie’s both proved to be busts; no one had seen Spike at either place for days, and as Anya suspected, no one at either place had ever seen Willow. They’d been cruising Sunnydale’s remarkable selection of graveyards ever since. Xander kept checking his watch; it was almost three. He couldn’t stay out much longer; he had to work tomorrow, and running heavy machinery on four hours’ sleep was something Anya tried to avoid encouraging him to do. He’d be living on No-Doz for the next day as it was.
Her pager buzzed as they took another futile turn down Main, and Xander pulled over to a corner pay phone. She slipped coins into the slot and punched in Giles’ number. “Hello? Giles?”
His voice on the other end of the line sounded tired, but he’d obviously gotten some news. “Yes. I just received a call from the police. Apparently Spike and Willow showed up at Mr. Summers’ apartment shortly after midnight...”
A few minutes later she nodded. “All right. We’ll meet you there.” She hung up the phone and dashed back to the car. “Go to Hank Summers’ place,” she directed. “Spike and Willow were there, and took Dawn someplace a couple of hours ago. Giles wants to see if he remembers anything they said about where they were going.”

For Dawn, getting into the DeSoto with its blacked-out windows was like stepping into another world, a tiny private universe smelling of old upholstery and stale cigarette smoke and spilled whiskey and the not-unpleasant earthy scent of vampire. She’d done it dozens of times over the course of the summer, before her Dad had showed up. She’d stayed with Willow’s family while Social Services tried to contact her father, in Willow’s old room, which had a convenient private door leading out onto their back porch. Dawn had invited Spike in, but he’d seldom taken advantage of the fact unless he needed patching up after a fight. Instead, once or twice a week, he’d appear out of nowhere and tap on the panes of the window, and she’d slip outside and into the big black gas-guzzling dinosaur. And they’d go places.
Spike adamantly refused to take her patrolling with him, but otherwise he was perfectly willing to take her anywhere--scavenging at the dump, or on one of his shoplifting excursions, or back to his crypt to watch bad late night movies on his snowy old television and make rude comments about them, or even once or twice to Willie’s, where he let her have a sip of his blood-and-bourbon just to see what it was like (really gross). Now and again they’d run into demon trouble, because it was Sunnydale, after all, and she’d get a forcible reminder of just how savagely efficient a fighter he could be when the chip wasn’t interfering. He was, in short, a horrible influence and Dawn loved every moment of it.
She hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it after her father had arrived and taken her in. Of course school had started now, and that would have meant a curtailing their midnight jaunts anyway. But now, tearing out of the parking lot, it was almost like old times again. Dawn sat in the back seat and listened to Willow and Spike arguing over putting the Ani DiFranco she’d brought or the Butthole Surfers in the portable CD player (Willow claimed to draw the line at bands named after body parts one couldn’t show in public) and reaching a devil's compromise on John Cougar Mellencamp. In a few moments they were roaring down the interstate at one in the morning, the headlights of oncoming cars growing, blazing into their eyes, dying away, Spike singing I fight authority, authority always wins at the top of his undead lungs as the passing headlights turned his pale hair into a burnished silver halo. Dawn laid her head down on the windowsill. This moment was perfect. She never wanted it to end.
But the future kept rolling towards her an inexorable one second per second, and all too soon the highway gave way to surface streets and the DeSoto was lurching to a halt in the shadow of the old warehouse. Spike and Willow got out and stood there in the rank grass beside the car, staring up at the rotting hulk of the building. Dawn got out of the back seat and stood a little behind them, watching the tension build in the way they held themselves. She herself was beyond nervous, in some kind of state of lucid shock which allowed her to think and act and not deal with the fact that they were about to bring her sister back from the dead.
Spike was the first to move; he went round back and opened up the trunk, and he and Willow started pulling things out. Big things, a couple of hibachis, it looked like, and a bag of charcoal and some lighter fluid. "What happens if it... goes wrong?" Dawn said, picking up the charcoal. Fire King. Dad used Fire King charcoal for cookouts, back when she was a kid. Maybe Buffy would like that being what they used to bring her back... Her voice sounded harsh, older in her own ears. "If she comes back and she's..." She didn't want to say =Like Mom= with Willow there. Spike hadn't actually seen the results of the spell he'd helped her get the ingredients for... nor had she. Hearing them had been more than enough.
Willow looked lost. Spike looked a million years old. "Then I kill my third Slayer," he said.
Willow closed her eyes and nodded. "And I make sure she won't be in any condition to bring back ever again."
Dawn's skin twitched all over, like a horse plagued with flies. “You couldn’t--”
The vampire sighed. “Dawn, love, if I couldn’t I wouldn’t need to. Think about it.” Spike picked up the hibachis and the two of them started off for the factory. It took a moment to penetrate. If Spike were able to kill Buffy, it would mean she weren't quite human. Dawn felt sick for a moment. She hugged the charcoal as if it were a lifeline and ran to catch up.
The factory and adjoining warehouse were deserted, though evidence of the Van Guys’ stay remained in the shape of a radio and a cooler full of melted ice and beer bottles in one of the sheds. Broken glass and scraps of metal crunched softly under Dawn's sneakers, louder under the soles of Spike's Doc Martens, as they circumnavigated the building. Willow looked questioningly up at the route Spike and Xander had taken inside; Spike shook his head. "We’re not dodging anyone, we can get in down here." The doors on the ground floor were locked, but there were plenty of broken windows, and knocking the last few scraps of glass out of one took only a few moments. Spike went in first and lifted the other two through after him.
Once on her feet again, Dawn looked around The interior of the warehouse was still much as Spike and Xander had described it several nights ago. She pulled a palm-sized flashlight out of her fanny pack and clicked it on, shining it around the cavernous space. Five sketchily painted symbols in red were still visible in the clear area in the middle of the floor, though drifts of greyish brown vampire dust partially obscured several of them. The chains which had held the captives lay in several tangled piles nearby, just as they'd fallen from the disintegrated vampires' limbs. Spike bent over and picked one set up, scrutinizing them with a tight-lipped, unreadable expression before tossing them aside. They hit the concrete with a loud clank.
Willow had set her duffle down on one of the sagging old tables and was pulling things out--a small brass censer on a chain, some packets of incense, a silver-handled knife, several quartz crystals, a small bowl... she was all business now, nerves subdued to the necessity of getting everything just right. "Dawn, take the censer and light some of this in it." She handed Dawn a couple of small charcoal briquets and a packet of incense. "Don't put the incense on yet, I just want to get the coals going. Spike, where's your lighter?"
The vampire handed it over silently. It wasn't one of the throwaway plastic Bics Dawn was used to seeing; it was big and heavy and made out of some silvery metal... probably silver, duh. After a moment of fumbling with the unfamiliar striker, Dawn flicked it on and held the little flame to the charcoal until a red glowing rim of ember spread around the edge. She handed it back and Spike went over to the half-melted mess of candles on the table on the other side of the room and began lighting them one by one. The growing light did little to dispel the room's overall gloom.
Willow took out a sheet of paper on which several complicated symbols were sketched. She studied it for several minutes, comparing them to the ones on the floor. Coming to a decision at last, she walked over to one of the half-completed symbols on the floor. "We'll use this one." She began scraping at one of the other symbols with the toe of her shoe, and grimaced when this made no impression on the paint. "We'll have to get rid of these. They'll mess it up. Is there any more paint lying around?"
After several minutes of searching they discovered the paint bucket, and Dawn set to work painting over the symbols which Willow pointed out as unnecessary. Willow got out a large piece of crumbly, reddish chalky stuff and began marking off a large circle around the remaining symbol, pausing to draw complicated little sigils every few feet. “Spike, set one of those hibachis up to the north and one to the south of the circle."
It took at least half an hour to set up the ritual circle, and when everything was ready, Willow got to her feet and wiped her hands on her jeans nervously. She pulled a thick sheaf of printouts out of the duffle and began passing them out. "The original ritual was written to be performed by way more people than we've got. I've made a lot of changes." Willow passed each of the other two a sheet of paper. "Here's your parts. Uh... Dawnie, give Spike the one in the large type. This one’s yours. It’s a long ritual, at least three hours, and once we start we can’t stop. Also, Vespasian and his people will be arriving in the morning, and us still being here when they get here would be bad. So be ready to suck it up if you get tired."
Dawn studied her lines in the candlelight, then glanced over at Willow. "When do I have to get... get cut?"
Willow held up the silver knife and tested the blade on her thumb. "To start with... right now." She picked up the shallow bowl. "I need enough to complete the symbol."
For a moment, standing there, Willow's familiar features were replaced by Doc's. Dawn felt lightheaded for a moment, and she took one lurching step back, grabbing the edge of the nearest table. "I--"
"Dawn..." Spike said quietly. "It's not too late to stop this."
Spike almost never used her real name. Stupid vampire could hear how fast her heart was beating. Dawn swallowed. "No," she got out, thrusting her arm out towards Willow. She could still see the long, thin white scar from where she'd inexpertly sliced her own wrist last winter. "Do it."
"We have prepared a holy place in the darkness, and we have anointed it with oil..."
Dawn tipped the small vial and let three precise drops of almond oil fall on the center of the symbol, and walked back to her station on the easternmost edge of the circle. Her palms ached under the neat gauze bandage; Willow had had to make several cuts to get enough blood to complete the complex swirling pattern. Her legs were tired, too. It felt as if they'd been doing this for hours. They had been doing it for hours. There'd been the invocation of the Powers, there'd been the consecration of every item involved in the ritual, there'd been the careful placing of the quartz crystals at the nodes where the sigils were drawn around the edge of the circle...
Willow paced its circumference slowly while swinging the censer. The smell of incense was heavy in the air. Spike was standing at the westernmost point of the circle, holding the Orb of Thessula cupped in one hand. The braziers smoked sullenly to either side. Willow's chant continued. "We have been granted the blood of the living, and we have summoned the living dead..."
Shaking smoking censer, Willow left the edge of the circle and began spiraling in counterclockwise towards the center. Her voice was hoarse, but steady. "As it was written, they shall prepare the way and the very Gates of Death shall open..."
Dawn felt it through the soles of her feet, a deep subterranean rumble which swelled and intensified with every heartbeat. The original line had been 'the gates of Hell'. Willow had changed it, but that line had still troubled her. Angel had fallen through the Hellmouth. He'd never said what it had been like there, but he'd been crazy for weeks after coming back.
There was no chance that Buffy was really in there. She wasn’t sure where Buffy was, or if she was anywhere at all, but she knew it couldn’t be there. Their family had never been religious, and she wasn't even sure which church, if any, either of her parents had ever belonged to. Still, the whole picture that she'd pieced together from things Buffy and Angel had dropped about Whistler and the Oracles and the Powers That Be didn't sound like the stuff you always heard about what God and Heaven were like. The Oracles had sounded like total snots, for one thing, and the Powers That Be sure didn't care about the falling of a sparrow. They were only interested in the big picture, the balance between good and evil, and tough beans to anyone that got squashed in adjusting the balance.
"...that which is above shall rejoice; for that which was below shall arise. And the world shall know the Slayer; and the Slayer shall know the world.” Willow was now standing directly in front of Spike. "One is without breath..."
"Yet I live," Spike responded tersely. He sounded funny, and Dawn realized that his accent had changed slightly, lost the working-class inflection.
"One is without time..."
"Yet I live."
"One is without soul..."
"Yet I live."
"One is without sun..."
"Yet I live."
"One is dead..."
"Yet I live."
Spike and Dawn both advanced to the center of the circle, meeting Willow there at the end of her spiral path. Spike held the Orb out over the symbol. "Animam meam dono pro beneficio amicae carae, et ille sacrificum est."
Dawn pulled off the bandage from her palm, and Willow extended the silver knife, its blade stained rust with the earlier bloodletting. She couldn't restrain a whimper when the blade bit into her palm again, lengthening and deepening the cut. "Sanguinem meum dono pro beneficio amicae sororis, et ille sacrificum est." She reached out and took Spike’s hand, covering the glowing Orb with her bloody palm, and squeezed, hard. Rivulets of crimson dripped between their clenched fingers and spattered downwards upon the symbol like rain upon parched ground. Willow threw her arms up and her head back, bloody knife rending the air, her eyes as dark as the sky outside. Her voice rang out,

"Et ille qui est mortuus vivet
Dum vita et mors non duas res
Sed una est...in tenebris lux!
Buffy Anne Summers, Surge! Surge! Surge!"

Dawn felt the Orb shatter in their dual grasp, fragmenting into a rain of impossibly fine shards, each lurid with her blood, each glowing with its own internal light. The blood met the cloud of crystalline motes and the shaking of the earth intensified again. The ground buckled beneath them. Dawn staggered. Out of nowhere a howling wind sprang up, sucking the remains of the Orb and the blood droplets into a raging whirlwind. All three of them drew back involuntarily, barely able to keep their feet against the pitching and yawing of the ground. The dust of the Orb and the blood swirled together, red and silver, in a whirlwind around the symbol, rising, falling, wheeling about some invisible centerpoint, plunging into nothingness at its heart.
For a long moment nothing happened. Dawn stood there trembling. Had it worked? Had they messed something up?
And then she heard Spike scream.

A maelstrom of blood and moonlight revolved overhead, centered on a pearl of incandescent light. An uncanny wind whipped their hair, and aftershocks jolted through the old building. Willow was still caught up in the rhythm of the spell when the vampire's scream broke her concentration. She tore her eyes away from the swirling nexus of magical energy in time to see Spike let go Dawn's hand and collapse to the blood-splattered concrete, his face drawn in a rictus of agony. Dawn grabbed for him as he fell, but he was too heavy for her and she could only break his fall a little. She clutched her hand to her chest and stared from him to her bleeding palm, then turned on Willow. "What's happening to him?"
Willow fought down panic. Events were slipping away from her. "I don't know!" That wasn't quite true--it was pretty obviously a repeat of whatever had gone wrong back in the crypt, but worse. This was a completely different spell. It didn't make sense. Her eyes were drawn back to the vortex; the brilliant sphere in its heart was the size of a baseball now. The spell was working--or was it? Her research on the original spell had led her to believe that the Raising would be almost instantaneous, not drawn out in slow motion like this. She'd made so many changes, and it wasn't as if she could have tested them... "It shouldn't be doing this!"
Dawn dropped to her knees by the vampire's side, her bloody hand hovering fearfully over his shoulder. Spike was lying in the middle of the (now somewhat smeared) symbol, with his knees drawn up to his chest and arms wrapped tightly around them, curled into a tight, shivering ball. "Spike. Spike! Can you hear me?"
He twitched a little at the sound of her voice, but his only answer was a strangled snarl. Dawn looked up at Willow. "We've got to stop, it's hurting him!"
White-faced, Willow stooped and picked up the scattered pages of the spell that Dawn and Spike had dropped, and began riffling through them. Her greatest successes in magic had always been driven by emotion, not reason, but there was no place for impulse here. She had to think. What had she missed? "There has to be some connection," she muttered, thinking out loud. "Both spells went wrong in the same way..."
Dawn laid her hand tentatively on Spike's shoulder and his shivering abated slightly. "Both spells?" she asked, but Willow ignored the question.
"OK, the obvious--both spells involve Spike's soul. But one was to summon it, and one was to dismiss it. Opposite effects, right? And neither one should have affected him at all, since the soul... wasn't...really... his... Oh, no." Willow scrabbled through the pages of the spell again, checking, double-checking, her heart sinking.
"Soul?" Dawn interrupted, her voice rising to a shriek. "What soul? What are you talking about? Was that what that glowy thing was? You said all we needed was some of my blood!"
"Um. That was all we needed from you." Willow rested the pages on her knees, staring at the printouts, two voices ringing in her ears--Spike, asking Is there any law says it has to be your soul? Her old high school computer science teacher, Jenny Calendar, saying Remember, always define your variables. "I know what the problem is." She pointed to the final lines of the spell. "It just says 'I give my soul.' And it's, like, with vampires, we always say 'soulless' but really, the demon takes the place of the human soul. With the summoning spell, I'll bet it latched onto the demon first because it was closer, but I'd defined the variables better so it stopped when it found the right one and slurped it up into the Orb. But this spell, it's all about substitutions--your blood is Buffy's blood, so Buffy's death is your death. So Spike's soul is, well, his old one, but also--"
"The demon."
"Yeah. That's pretty much it." Willow avoided Dawn's eyes and wondered if she looked as miserable as she felt. "The spell's pulling Spike's demon out of his body."
Dawn's eyes went wide with horror. "That will kill him!"
"Well... uh... yeah. Since the demon's the only thing keeping him from being a corpse, if it gets pulled out all the way he's probably going to go all dusty on us."
"Then make it stop!" Dawn yelled, balling both hands into fists.
"No."
The word was no more than a hoarse growl. Spike had uncoiled
himself, and was now pushing himself up off the pavement, holding himself rigid against the shudders which still wracked his body. "No. If it's working, you bloody well keep it working!" He lifted his head, slowly and painfully, and Willow's stomach crawled a bit as the planes of his face finished shifting and settling. The candlelight glittered in his golden eyes and threw the ridged brow and permanent snarl of his vampire countenance into horrific relief. Willow wasn't even sure he realized he'd slipped into game face, though it made sense; that would give the demon a surer hold on the flesh it inhabited. Dawn didn't seem to notice either; she just kept holding on to his shoulder. Spike grabbed her arm and leaned into her shoulder for support, baring his fangs in a grimace of pain. After a moment he drew breath enough to continue, "You get her back. That's what we came for, to get her back or to make damned sure no one else can. You keep--aaahh!" He doubled over again.
The incandescent sphere was swelling overhead now, a miniature sun. Willow hesitated. "Look, if we can get her through I think it'll stop. It did get the one soul, after all, so that should satisfy the conditions of the spell. But I don't know how long it'll take! It should've happened much faster than this, and if it goes on too long--"
Spike snarled up at her, "You think I didn't mean it when I said I'd give my soul for her? Either of 'em! Finish the bloody spell already!"
Dawn whimpered deep down in her throat. Willow closed her eyes, lifted her arms, and began the chant once more.

There was a moment Spike had witnessed hundreds of times. Sometimes it went flashing by in an eyeblink, sometimes it stretched itself out long enough for the shocked victim to look down, to realize that the moment had come and that it was too late to avoid it. It was the moment when one of a few select kinds of physical damage--fire, a wooden stake penetrating the heart, the removal of the head from the body--irreparably severed the connection between human body and demon soul. When the moment was over, a vampire dissolved into ash.
None of those things had happened to him, but he was caught in that moment nonetheless, infinitely prolonged. The agonizing, undefinable pull he'd felt during Willow's earlier spell was magnified a hundredfold. He was being torn ever so slowly in two, and somehow he had to hold on to himself.
Concentrate. On the hard concrete floor. On the gritty layer of dust under his hand, on the smell of Dawn’s congealing blood. Here. Now.
He needed the demon. He'd known that from the first night, in the moment in which his first human prey ceased to be 'the woman' and became simply food. He remembered staring down at the ragged crimson mess he'd made of her neck in his eagerness, expecting to feel guilt and horror and anguish, and instead feeling... pleased. And still hungry. In the flush of his new power he’d challenged Angelus for his own kill, and the older vampire had clouted him in the head hard enough to send him spinning across the alley and smash into the wall opposite. He should have been terrified. He should have backed down and begged pardon, crawled away and nursed his humiliation helplessly, in private, as he had all his life. Instead he surged to his feet with a roar and launched himself at Angelus' back--and his grand-sire turned around, smashed him methodically into jelly and left him lying there until Drusilla came flitting by just before sunrise and carried him back to the lair. Angelus, satisfied he'd learned his lesson, ignored him--and never really understood why, the whole time, the newly-risen William had been laughing.
Here. Now. Willow’s voice rising and falling, certain as the tide. Taste of his own blood where he’d bitten the inside of his cheek falling.
That was the real gift the demon had given him: not immortality, nor strength, nor supernatural keenness of sense, but rage. Pure, killing rage that swept fear aside and lent sinew to every other passion he owned. It wasn't true that he had never feared anything again after that night--he'd feared plenty. But the fear didn't matter any longer. He was transformed. The demon fit into the hollow place within him where the guilt and horror and anguish should have been--good riddance to them--as if he'd been born to it. So seamless was the meld that it was easy to make himself believe that the demon was all he was, and look back with scathing contempt, when he cared to look back at all, upon the mediocre life and times of William the Bloody Awful Poet. He needed the demon to be Spike.
Light swelling overhead, so bright it hurt even through eyelids shut tight. Here. Now. Not enough. The world was fading out around him like a photograph left too long in the sun.
He was slipping out of his own grasp, catching desperately at fraying scraps of memory--Standing on the Slayer's front lawn, ducking his head to hide the grin of embarrassment. “I want to help save the world.” Sitting in the Slayer's kitchen, pouring out his heartbreak about Dru's desertion to Joyce Summers over hot cocoa--and miraculously finding purchase.
Steeling himself to crawl to his mortal enemies rather than let himself starve to death after the chip had gone in. Finding excuses to hang around Sunnydale and run into said mortal enemies. The horrible realization that his obsession with killing the Slayer had mutated into something very different. Storming up to her doorstep, shotgun in hand, determined to end the whole farce. Ending up trying to comfort her instead.
The spell didn't pull at that part of him. Had his humanity been only a fading collection of century-old memories, the demon might have been ripped out entire by now, clawing uselessly at a mooring of sand. But the line between William and Spike had always been dangerously fuzzy. He held onto every scrap of weak, aberrant, human behavior he could muster, held on for dear unlife. There wasn't any stake in his heart and there wasn't any fire charring his flesh and his head was still on his shoulders and buggered if he was just going to let go.
Watching 'Passions' with Joyce in the crypt. Helping Dawn steal Giles' journal. Playing pool with Xander. Telling Dawn stories about his past while she listened with horrified relish. Siding with Buffy against Dru after his disastrous attempt at revealing his feelings. The queer hitch in his throat when he finally heard, third-hand, of Joyce's death. Helping Dawn with the ill-fated attempt to resurrect her. Hanging in chains from Glory's penthouse ceiling. The wash of shame when he realized that Buffy knew about the robot. Hiding Dawn in the sewers. Stealing the van. Grabbing the sword. Finally reinvited into Buffy's house, looking up at her as she ascended the staircase. “I know I'm a monster.”
The world sharpened around him again, sound and scent and vision coming back into focus. He needed the demon to be Spike. He was beginning to realize how much he needed William to be Spike, too. Dru, bless her mad murderous heart, had been right about one thing. You were born to slash, and bash, and oh! bleed like beautiful poetry...
He'd stood up to a bloody goddess once. She'd creamed him, of course, just as Angelus had, but he'd taken everything Glory could dish out and then some, and still scraped up the stones to force his beaten, bloody self to stand up when those elevator doors opened, prepared to do it all over again. Had he been all William, he would have been blubbing everything he knew after three minutes of Glory's idea of fun and games. Had he been all demon, he wouldn't have been in those chains in the first place. The one couldn't, the other wouldn't, fight some fights.
Spike wasn't one or the other. He was both at once, and right now it was inconceivable that Spike do anything but fight.

Part 8

Willow's voice was lost in the explosion of light which followed her words, light so intense it was palpable. It knocked her stumbling back against the nearest table. She felt the sharp stab of hot wax burning her palms as she grabbed wildly for purchase amidst the candles. The smell of burning cloth assaulted her nose and she croaked out a spell of quenching; immediately all the candles went out. Afterimages writhed through her field of vision against the darkness, green and scarlet blobs like battling lava lamps, and her ears ached though there'd been no sound. Someone was growling, very softly.
"Willow?" Dawn moaned. "It's still there."
Willow squinted. The blobs weren't all afterimages. The vortex was still spinning slowly in place, shot through with ugly pulsing knots of power. "Ignite," she whispered. A few candles flickered back to life.
Spike was still coiled up in the middle of the circle. The growling noise was coming from him. Every now and again he jerked as if fighting some invisible battle. Dawn was crouched over him protectively, her eyes huge in her pale, strained face.
In the aftermath of the light-burst there was a third figure lying there, a small, slim body in a crumpled heap on the concrete, thin limbs splayed and fair hair tumbling over her face. Willow's breath stopped and she lurched forward.
"Buffy!" Dawn cried, breaking into tears in earnest. She lunged over to her sister, grabbing her shoulder before Willow could utter a word of caution. "Buffy! Wake up!"
Buffy Summers stirred. Her head whipped up and she looked from one side to the other, taking in everything at once. In her eyes there was only confusion, pain, and anger.
"Buffy... it's me," Dawn said.
Buffy's feral gaze fixed upon her sister, and she moved like quicksilver, grabbing Dawn's shoulders in both hands with painful force. She stared into her sister's eyes for a long moment. Her brows knit and her lips parted slightly. She lifted one hand to trace the contours of Dawn's face. Was there a spark of recognition in her eyes? Heedless of her nudity she rose to her feet and stalked over to Willow, repeating the inspection, then returned to the circle and crouched down beside Spike. She sat back on her heels, studying him with apparent puzzlement. Even accounting for the effect of the candlelight he looked ghastly. Buffy reached out to touch him, but drew back and cocked her head up at Willow, her attitude saying more plainly than words What's wrong with him?
Oh, God. Was this just the post-resurrection confusion that Wesley had mentioned, or was something more serious wrong? Willow searched the blank, wild eyes for any trace of her friend. "Buffy," Willow said. "Do you know where you are? Do you remember Dawn, or me?" She reached out and Buffy snarled and flinched away from her hand. "Look, we brought a blanket. It's one of your old ones. Can you put on the nice blanket?"
Buffy just hunkered down, her eyes darting suspiciously from one
to the other of the three of them. Willow tossed the blanket to the floor a few feet away from her and stepped back. After a moment Buffy's hand shot out and grabbed it. She turned the blanket over and over in her hands for a moment, looking perplexed, then shook it out clumsily and tried to drag the half-folded result over Spike. "Oh, god, Buffy, that won't help!" Dawn said, her voice half a sob. She pointed up at the vortex. "Willow, why hasn't that thing gone away? Buffy's back!" Dawn's fingers were digging into Spike's shoulder hard enough to have left bruises on a living body, and she sounded as if she were teetering on the edge of hysteria.
"I'm getting really tired of I don't know, but I don't know!" Willow took a deep breath and shoved her hair off her face. "I'm going to try and close it."
She didn't know what else to try, so she began a standard spell of dismissal, throwing all her waning resources into it. The vortex began to twist and wobble, throwing off fat crimson arcs of energy, and Spike howled. Buffy gave vent to an angry wail in response and clawed at the air. "STOP!" Dawn screamed. "You're making it worse!"
There was a crash from the window they'd entered by, and a shower of fresh glass hit the warehouse floor. Both of them whirled to face it, hearts in their mouths; Willow let go the printout of the spell and the pages scattered in the wind of the vortex. Headlights blazed through the opening, a pair of tall, looming figures backlit in their glare. At the sight of the intruders Willow's face twisted in a snarl almost as horrific as Spike's and she drew back a hand to strike; here was something safe to vent her fear and frustration on--
"Willow!"
"Giles!" she squeaked. The swiftly aborted spell fizzled around her shoulders in a shower of burning poison-green sparks. Willow staggered under the weight of the unwrought magic as the looming figures broke into the feeble candlelight and revealed themselves as Giles and Xander, and behind them Tara and Anya. Tara's eyes were huge as she took in the circle, the sigils about its perimeter, the glowing braziers, but mostly the tableau of Dawn and Spike and Buffy beneath the whirling red and silver vortex.
Tara dove to her knees and began grabbing the scattered pages of spell responses, reading through them as fast as she could. The look in her lover's eyes when she looked up was one of such horror and reproach that Willow almost broke into tears then and there. Half a dozen things flashed into her head, but the only one which made it out of her mouth was "I can explain!"

Everyone was yelling. Dawn wished heartily that they'd stop. Blood loss and lack of sleep were beginning to get to her, and her head was spinning.
"This isn't Jenny's spell," Giles snapped. "Not even close. What is going on here?" He looked down at the three figures in the circle. "Oh, dear lord."
Tara sounded as if someone had kicked all the air out of her. "Oh, Willow, how c-could..."
"To save Buffy, that's how!" Willow shouted, suddenly furious. Giles took a step forward, equally furious. "That's what we do, save people, right?"
Giles' voice might have been carved from ice. "After all you've seen of evil in the last five years, of human folly in the pursuit of power--"
"SHUT UP! All of you, just SHUT UP!" Dawn scrambled to her feet, radiating fury. "I don't care how right or wrong it was to get her back, she's HERE! Deal with it!" She stabbed an index finger at Spike. "And Spike's still in trouble, so DO SOMETHING!"
Tara was still shuffling through the pages of the spell, frowning. After a moment she closed her eyes and swallowed hard. "Willow. What did you use for the sacrifice?"
Willow's expression said that she wanted to argue, to explain, to justify herself... but she didn't. "Dawn's blood. Spike's soul. I amped up the correspondences so they'd add up to one life, and tied it all back to Buffy's death," she said. "I kind of didn't debug the soul part enough. It's trying to take the demon along with his original soul."
Tara frowned. "Buffy's back. His original soul must have been enough for the spell to work. Once she returned to this plane of existence, the spell ought to have resolved." She glanced up at the vortex. "But it hasn't. There's got to be another connection. If it's not the soul..." Her expression became, if possible, even more horrified. "Um... Dawnie... did you ever... uh... let Spike... uh... you know?"
"'You know' WHAT?" Dawn yelled. "Why doesn't anyone ever say what they mean around me?"
"Drink from you," Tara mumbled, flushing.
"NO! Ew! You people are disgusting!"
"There's got to be some other connection between him and the sacrifice," Giles said, in the sort of infinitely reasonable tone which was one step away from snapping completely. "Disgusting it may be, but the commonest method of binding a vampire and a human via the blood is for the vampire to drink from them."
"Well, think of an uncommon method, 'cause Spike's never laid a fang on me," Dawn snapped. She sat down again, hard and abruptly. She felt woozy, almost as badly as she'd felt up on the tower... The others were arguing, and Buffy, beside her, was beginning to fret and keen in distress. They shouldn't have brought her back. Tara was right. Buffy was all wrong and Spike was dying and Dawn felt like breaking down and bawling, but that would take too much energy. Her palm was aching like crazy and she'd gotten blood all over the shoulder of Spike's T-shirt. That was OK, it was black, it wouldn't stain... was that why so many vampires had a thing for black clothing? She'd have to ask Spike when he woke up... if he... God but her hand hurt. The knife had gotten dull towards the end, silver was a sucky metal for holding an edge. Not like... not like...
"The knife!"
"What knife?" Willow seized on her words with the alacrity of
desperation. "The one we used in the ritual?"
"No," Dawn said. "Doc's knife." Why didn't they get it? Was she going to have to explain everything? "On the tower," she said, putting each word into place with laborious patience. "He stabbed Spike. And then he cut me. With the same knife. With Spike's blood on it."
She hoped, as she passed out, that the adults could figure out the rest of it on their own for once.

"Look, this is getting ridiculous." Hank Summers was scrunched in between Giles and Tara in the back seat. His reflection in the rear view mirror was strained, and his voice had the sound of someone pushing the limits of his ability to cope. "If you people are sure this is the factory they were talking about, we should tell the police."
"I assure you, Mr. Summers, there’s no need for that at this stage," Giles said. “The last thing Dawn needs is the trauma of dealing with the Sunnydale police force.”
Xander snorted softly. “Speaking as someone whose family has been dealing with Sunnydale’s finest for a good twenty years, I second that.”
There was a rumble, and the earth shook as Xander took the corner onto the weed-grown warehouse drive a little faster than he should have. The car jounced as the wheels scraped the curb. Xander forced himself to slow down. It wouldn't help matters if he ran off the road and punctured a tire on the jagged scrap in the factory yard. "Should've known they'd come back here," he muttered. "It's like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn."
He was still pissed off with nowhere to go. Despite his conviction that the whole thing was the vampire's fault, he had to admit that Hank Summers’ description of the 'attack' on him sounded a lot more like Spike going off half-cocked and dragging Dawn and Willow along for the ride than like deliberate villainy. I guess we didn't skip the insane-plan stage after all. And maybe, just maybe, it wasn't only Spike going off half-cocked. Anya had a point: Willow was powerful enough these days that it was hard to imagine anyone forcing her to do anything she didn't want to do.
It was impossible for him to get as mad at Willow as he wanted to be mad at someone.
"I hope you know what you're doing," Mr. Summers muttered. "That Spike guy needs professional help. You do realize he's convinced Dawn that he's Dracula or something?"
"Oh, no, Dawn knows he's not Dracula," Anya assured him.
Hank did not seem appeased. "I'm sure she realizes it’s a con deep down. She’s a smart girl. She's just getting a hell of a kick out of pretending he is, and your friend Willow seems to be buying it too. He's taking it awfully damned seriously himself. That was real blood he was drinking the other day--I know, I bought the stuff for Dawn when I thought it was for her biology class. He's not stable. He could lose it any minute and--"
Giles interrupted him. "Yes, well, the real blood would follow from his being a real vampire. Under most circumstances I prefer to keep our association with the supernatural clandestine, but frankly, Mr. Summers, we haven't the time to pander to your craving for normalcy. Spike is a vampire, Willow is a witch, Buffy was the Slayer. Do please attempt to deal with it, or have the grace to shut up while the rest of us do."
And the Watcher gets testy, Xander thought. Hank Summers looked cowed for a moment. "I just want my daughter back safely," Hank said after a moment.
"As do we all," Giles said, more kindly. "I don't think you need to worry about Spike hurting Dawn," he added. "Though that may be all one doesn't have to worry about in connection with Spike. He truly is fond of her."
The Corvair’s headlights revealed the DeSoto parked up ahead as they approached the warehouse, and Xander pulled in beside the larger car. Another tremor shook the ground as everyone began piling out, and off in the distance something crashed to the ground. Giles put a restraining hand on Hank Summers' shoulder before he could follow them. "It's best you remain here. There are other parties who intend to use this place for their own purposes later today, and they may show up to prepare at any moment. Keep watch." There was no expectation in his tone that he'd be disobeyed. "If you see anyone else coming, let us know immediately. If one of us doesn't return within half an hour, leave and call the police." He handed Hank a cross. "If a stranger does approach, for God's sake don't hesitate to use this, no matter how silly you think it makes you look. Give him your keys, Xander."
Xander did so, somewhat reluctantly, and Hank took them and the cross (despite Giles' advice, Xander noticed that he tucked it down on the seat beside him) and got in behind the wheel. They left him peering out uneasily into the darkness of the fields while the rest of them headed for the warehouse. Faint light was visible through the windows, and a little reconnaissance quickly disclosed the route that the three renegades had taken to get inside. The four of them peered in through the missing panes of glass, but there was too much clutter of old machinery and tables between them and the center of the warehouse to see anything except the glow of the candles and occasional flares of red or white light. Tara shivered.
"It feels bad," she whispered. "Really bad. Something twisted. Something stuck..."
"We'd better unstick it, then," Xander said. He shrugged out of his flannel overshirt, wrapped it around one hand, and bashed the last scraps of glass out of the window frame. He flung a leg over the windowsill. "Let's go."
A huge flashing vortex thingy pulsed overhead in the center of the warehouse. Xander had expected that--there was always a huge flashing vortex thingy; as far as he could tell it was some sort of requirement down at Wizards, Witches, Conjurers and Diviners Local 106. An eldritch figure limned in green flame stood in the middle of a sinister-looking array of magical paraphernalia. It spun to face them as they burst into the center of the warehouse, lightning clutched threateningly in one upraised hand.
"Willow!" Giles shouted.
"Giles!" the eldritch figure yipped back, and all of a sudden it was Willow, and the smoking braziers were Mr. Rosenberg’s back yard hibachis, and everything was suddenly a lot less impressive-looking than it had been a moment ago. Far from appearing a confident practitioner of the dark arts, Willow looked about three steps further down the road to Panicsville than Hank Summers had been. Dawn was kneeling in the in the middle of the floor beside Spike, who was vamped out and having some kind of fit. Buffy crouched on the other side of the vampire--
For a moment Xander’s brain froze up, taking the rest of his body with it. Buffy?
BUFFY!
NAKED Buffy! Look somewhere else!
Giles, focused on Willow and the details of the spell, hadn’t noticed Buffy’s deshabille yet. Maybe he hadn’t dared allow himself to notice Buffy, not really. Tara spared Buffy a glance, but she had other fish to fry. They plunged into a heated argument with Willow almost immediately. Xander didn’t hear a word of it. Buffy. Real live Buffy. Death did not become her; Xander realized with an unhappy pang that she looked exactly as soul-weary and exhausted as she had that night last spring, her eyes shadowed and her face too thin. What the hell had they done to get her back like this?
It would have been a lot easier to bust in and shower righteous wrath on the perps if Willow hadn’t been doing the quivery lower lip thing, or if Spike had been, well, conscious. Shaking himself back to life, Xander unwrapped his shirt from his hand, snapped it a couple of times to make sure there were no shards of glass on it, and held it out in Buffy's general direction while trying to keep his eyes averted. His eyes didn’t want to cooperate. “Buffy, you wanna, um, put this on?" I can't believe I'm saying that.
Buffy cocked her head and frowned at him. Her expression reminded him of the look that a smart dog got when it knew you were asking it to do something and it couldn’t figure out what. She reached out and touched the shirt tentatively, then drew her hand back. This is bad. This is oh, so bad. He tried to keep his voice calm and gentle. “Buffy...can you talk? Can you understand what I'm saying if you can't talk?"
Buffy’s mouth worked for a moment and she looked up at him with big uncomprehending eyes. Frustration grew in her gaze.
Anya took the shirt and studied Buffy critically. "Here, Buffy. Please put on this shirt. It's extremely unflattering, but that's a good thing right now." She took one of Buffy’s hands and tried to guide it into a shirt sleeve. There were scuffling noises. "Xander, help me."
"I don't think that's a good idea, Ahn." I can't believe I just said that, either.
It took a lot of coaxing and pleading, but Anya finally got Buffy into the shirt, by which time Dawn had stood up to join the shouting match. Buffy kept looking at them and making little worried whimpery noises. "It's OK, Buff," Xander said, patting her shoulder awkwardly. "It's OK." It wasn't anything of the sort. Was this really Buffy at all, and not some weird clone or changeling or zombie? “We’re going to get you home and...” And what? And home? What home? Hank Summers’ apartment? No effing way. Giles’ place, maybe; it was the most familiar.
Possibly-Buffy, swimming in the oversized shirt, looked down herself and examined the tips of her fingers coming out the sleeves curiously. She tugged on Xander’s hand sharply and pointed at Spike. “What, you want us to move him? I dunno if that’s a good idea, Buff...”
Buffy’s eyes flashed, and for a moment she was completely herself again, radiating determination. She looked as if she were about to get more insistent, but at that moment Dawn, who'd stood up for the shouting match, collapsed. Buffy’s eyes went wider and confusion flooded back in. She gave a little cry of alarm. The shouting match abruptly ceased.
"Get her off the floor," Giles said.
Two down, one to go, Xander thought sourly as he took Dawn’s ankles and Giles lifted her shoulders. The two of them picked her up off the concrete and carried her over to one of the tables. Buffy came after them, dragging the blanket. She held it out mutely, and after a moment Giles took it from her and tucked it around Dawn's shoulders. He could scarcely bring himself to look at her, and Xander had a feeling that it had little to do with Buffy’s state of undress. Seeing Buffy like this was killing him.
“She needs orange juice,” Willow gasped. “Or a cookie or something, that’s what they give you when you donate blood, low blood sugar, I don’t think we brought any orange juice--I have a Kit Kat bar--oh, everything’s gone wrong!” She dropped to her knees beside Tara, her eyes pleading.
Tara met her gaze sternly. No problem with righteous wrath for her, apparently, but she seemed to come to a decision to stick to the business at hand, for her voice, when she spoke, was neutral and unaccusing. "So the spell was supposed to amplify the connection between Dawn's blood and Buffy's, but it picked up on this other connection between Spike and Dawn, too."
Willow nodded. "Right. The blood thing was supposed to be a closed Dawn-Buffy feedback loop." She turned one of the printout pages over, pulled a pencil stub out of her pocket and began sketching a diagram.

Dawn = Buffy

She frowned at it thoughtfully. "With Spike in the mix, it's not closed. He's kind of a... leak, or a short-circuit, bleeding energy out of the spell." She added a few more lines and held out the new version for everyone’s inspection.

Dawn = Buffy

Spike

Tara nodded. "So the spell can't resolve. We have to get him out of the loop.”
Xander folded his arms and looked over at Spike. The vampire’s eyes were open now, just a slit, and there was something weird about them--after a moment Xander realized that they were flickering blue. He’d seen Spike’s eyes go yellow and demony plenty of times when he was in human shape, but this was the first time he could remember seeing the opposite happen. “Could we just move him out of range?"
"I don't think it matters how close he is," Willow replied, nibbling on her pencil. "Taking him farther away may just speed things up. I tried a dismissal spell, but that made the pull worse." She glared at her notes. "Rats, rats, rats! Everything I can think of for getting him out of the loop ends up with a good chance of him getting dusty."
Xander mulled that over. No more insults, no more mooching, no more arguments, no more narrow escapes from situations arising from Spike’s smart mouth writing checks his chipped ass couldn’t cash... no more weekend pool games, no more scouring auto yards for parts for that damned DeSoto, no more ally in the eternal war against a full slate of chick flicks on video nights... no, wait, half the time Spike went for the gooey romantic stuff. Traitor.
No more Spike. Xander started to say “So what?” but somehow the words wouldn’t come out.
It didn't look like Tara was happy with that possibility either, but she was being Responsibility Girl. "Even so... we can't just leave it here. It could be very dangerous. If it comes to a choice between Spike and leaving it--"
“We act the same way we’d act if it was any of the rest of us,” Xander said. In the face of their stunned expressions, “What? He’s only half as annoying as Angel was.”
Willow’s mouth firmed. "We'll close it somehow. Resolve face. The thing is--oh!" Her eyes lit up.
"Oh?"
Tara sounded uneasy, but Willow, caught up in her new idea, didn't notice. "Oh! We're going at it backwards!” She gave a little bounce. “Look, the spell needs a nice neat closed loop, right, so what we should be doing is giving it one! We don't try to pull Spike out, we tuck him back in!" She retrieved her diagram and elaborated further.

Dawn = Buffy
\ //
Spike

Tara frowned. "But--oh, no, Willow! No! You're not going to l-let him bite her!"
Xander looked equally alarmed. “I’m with Tara on this one, Will. The last time Buffy let a vampire bite her out of the goodness of her heart she ended up in the emergency room. The more Spike makes with the fangs the less I feel like saving his bleached hide.”
Willow rolled her eyes. "What is this thing everyone has with the biting?” She waved a hand at the near-comatose vampire. “Does Spike look even slightly bite-capable at the moment? There is no biting! All we have to do is get a drop or two of her blood and mix it with his. It doesn't have to be a big sucking thing." She glanced apprehensively over at the table where Dawn was lying. Buffy was pacing between Spike and her sister with occasional wary detours to examine her surroundings. Giles and Anya hovered to each side of her, trying without much success to convince to calm her down. "In fact, it’s better to do it with the knife, it’ll give it another correspondence with the way Dawn and Spike are connected. The problem is explaining it to Buffy." She got up and grabbed the silver knife. “We have to move fast.”
Xander followed Willow over to the table where Buffy was peering anxiously at Dawn’s pale face. “Buffy,” Willow said softly, “I think I know how to help Spike. We need to mix a little of your blood with his. I’d need to prick your finger a little. It’ll hurt, but only for a minute. Do you understand?”
Buffy’s ears pricked up at ‘help Spike’ and she seemed to be listening very closely, but it was impossible to tell how much she understood. Willow mimed pricking her own finger with the knife, then pointed at Buffy. “Help Spike,” she repeated.
Buffy’s brows knit and she looked from Willow’s hand to her own, then, carefully, brought the point of the knife over to her own hand. “H-help?” she said.
“Buff! You can talk!” Xander whooped.
“Yes!” Willow grinned with delight. “Come over here with me, Buffy, and we can help Spike. Tara?”
Tara sighed and nodded. Willow led Buffy over to the middle of the circle and crouched down beside Spike. Very carefully wiping the silver-bladed knife off on the hem of her pullover first, Willow said, “Spike, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m going to have to cut you a little. The blade’s gotten too dull to slice with so I’m going to stab you really quick. Here goes.” She rolled up the sleeve of his t-shirt and with one quick motion drove the point of the knife into the pale flesh of his arm. Spike gasped but otherwise gave no sign of feeling it. A little dark blood smeared the blade when Willow removed it, but the cut didn’t bleed to speak of. “Rats,” Willow muttered. “He’s too tense and his blood doesn’t really flow anyway... hand me that bowl. No, the clean one.”
Xander passed her the bowl and Willow pressed the rim to the vampire’s arm just below the cut. “Squeeze his arm, hard.”
“I want you to know this is way above and beyond the call of duty,” Xander grumbled, grabbing the vampire’s upper arm in both hands and following Willow’s directions. They managed to wring a trickle of blood and a pained snarl out of Spike before Willow nodded.
“That’s enough. Buffy... will you give me your hand?”
“It’ll... help?” Buffy sounded dubious.
“That’s a sentence! You did a sentence, Buffy! Yes, it’ll help. Hold still and--”
Buffy snatched the knife out of Willow’s hand. “No.”
“Buffy--”
“Me,” Buffy said very firmly. She held up her hand, hesitated for a second, and then drove the point of the knife into the ball of her left thumb. Blood welled up. She held out her hand over the bowl, wincing, and Willow pressed several drops into the bowl.
Willow looked at Tara. “What do you think?”
Tara shrugged. “Anything we do now is improvising.”
Willow sighed and nodded. She stirred the teaspoonful of blood in the bottom of the bowl with the knife and chanted, “A is equal to B. B is equal to C. Therefore A is equal to C. Thus be the circle completed.”
“Well, that’s quick and dirty,” Xander said.
“We can’t wait on lengthy and clean,” Willow replied. “OK, let’s close that sucker down!” She held out her hand and Tara took it. Both of them looked up at the vortex with matched expressions of determination. “The scale is balanced!” Willow held up the censer. “The flame is quenched!” Tara whispered a word and the piles of glowing charcoal in the hibachis went black and the candles went out, plunging the ritual space into darkness. Only the vortex was visible, spinning overhead. As they spoke its revolutions began to speed up perceptibly. Willow continued, “The earth is still, the stream returns to the ocean. Let it be finished. What we say three times be so: Porta claudatur! Porta claudatur! Porta claudatur!”
The vortex was a shimmer of motion now, whirling too fast to distinguish details. Its lurid glow painted every surface in the whole warehouse in crimson and silver, and the warehouse vibrated in sympathy with its pulse. It showed no signs of disappearing, and Tara’s eyes began to betray real fear for the first time. “We didn’t get it right!” she cried.
Willow’s face was twisted with insane determination, and her eyes had gone black. “Yes... we... DID! PORTA CLAUDATUR!”
The crackling whine of magical energies strengthened, deepened, acquired undertones and overtones, a neverending chord struck on a madman’s organ. All the light in the warehouse enveloped her for an instant, and she cried out, her voice lost in the roar of magic. The vortex revolved in upon itself, tighter, tighter, pulling back all the light it had scattered, and as the insane music reached its crescendo, spun itself into nothingness and disappeared.
Everything stopped. Light, sound, sensation, all fled, leaving numb darkness in their place. Slowly the world began to reassert itself. Xander realized he’d fallen to his hands and knees at some point. Someone--Giles--turned on a flashlight. “Is everyone all right?”
“Willow!” Tara croaked. Anya came over with another flashlight. Willow was sprawled on the floor, a puppet whose strings had been cut. Her breathing was shallow and both eyes looked as if someone had punched her; the bruises were already starting to darken and swell. Tara took her lover’s head in her lap and cradled it there, choking back sobs.
“Will?” Xander crawled over and looked down at his oldest friend’s pale face. “Oh, Will... damn you, Will...”
“Second that,” said a hoarse voice to the side. Spike was sitting up, looking like five miles of bad road. “I didn’t want... bugger.” He looked over at the table where Dawn was beginning to stir, and caught sight of Buffy. Half a dozen emotions chased across his face as his human features reasserted themselves. He got to his feet and walked over to the table as if she were the only object in the universe, but stopped short a few paces away, trembling slightly. “Hullo, love.”
Buffy looked up at him gravely and took a step towards him. She raised her hand and traced the contours of his face gently, as she’d done with the others earlier, and smiled. “Spike,” she said, very carefully. “Thank you. For Dawn.” She patted his cheek and turned back to her sister.
Spike looked as if he were about to collapse, or burst into tears, or both, but he was grinning like a maniac again. “Any time, love,” he whispered. He swiped at his eyes, turned round and glared at Giles and Xander. “Right, what’re we standing about for? Let’s get Dawn and Will out of here. Sunrise’s coming.”
A strange blatting noise from outside interrupted him, and for a moment all of them stared at one another in confusion before they realized that it was the horn of Xander’s car. They’d all forgotten about Hank. The vampire cocked his head to one side, listening. “Bloody hell. Someone’s coming.”
Xander exchanged a look with Giles and groaned. “Vespasian.”
"Damn," Giles said under his breath. "We need to get everyone out of sight, now. A fight at this point would be a disaster."
Spike jerked his chin in the direction of the back of the warehouse. "Stairs up to the catwalk are that way. Or there's Dru's and my old digs downstairs. It's a bit easier to get down there carrying dead weight, and it's got a connection to the sewers--"
"Uh, the connection to the sewers is currently a little more direct than I think we want," Xander said. "That staircase is less a staircase and more what we in the construction biz like to call a 'twisted pile of wreckage.' It collapsed when Cordy and Oz came to rescue me and Willow from your last fiendishly clever plan a few years back."
Spike sucked in his cheeks. "I can't leave you anywhere without you making a mess, can I?”
Xander gave him a look. "I meant to tell you -- you, writhing in pain on the floor back there? It's a good look for you."
Buffy smacked both of them on the backs of their heads, hard, and pointed upwards. Xander winced and rubbed his skull. "OK. Up it is."

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