Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

 

Chapter 19: Alice Down the Rabbit Hole

Having re-warded the house and everything appertaining thereto, making it a hermetic bubble not quite synched anymore to the outer world, which left her sweating and wrung out, Willow joined the others in the swap party at the end of the tunnel and they all went through. Xander, who'd begged off work to come along, handed her a lantern. They went last, to not interfere with Spike's dark-sight, Xander with the stake bag over his shoulder and a medium axe in his hands, the kind that could be swung in tight spaces without slicing up your companions.

When Willow stumbled wearily, Xander's hand was there, catching her up by an elbow, squeezing her arm reassuringly before letting go. Then Giles dropped back, offering a hand without comment, with different meaning. Willow gratefully clasped it and sucked up a draft of raw power, energy taken from many sources and stored the night before.

A slight bit squicky, using Giles that way, but he was so gravely calm about it all that Willow tried to be matter-of-fact about the implicit ick of it, the way Buffy was about Spike living off her, pretty much, nothing anymore in the refrigerator so you had to figure. They didn't talk about it, just how it was, so Willow tried to be similarly offhanded about making herself a sort of life-energy vampire.

But after that first pull, she disengaged, smiling weakly and waving fingers in thanks. Giles' power was for containing Rayne, helping her bind the mage, and she didn't dare draw too much lest it not be there when she most needed it. Because she'd be pretty much alone in that. Anya had supplied a bushel of crystals, herbs, magical implements and artifacts (on loan, payable only if they were broken or used up, which was pretty generous because, well, Anya) but wasn't coming within a mile of the house today because, well, Anya. Willow would have to do this pretty much on her own. She'd studied all night, learning the spells designed to cage Chaos within Order, if only for a time.

She wished she had a nice, hot espresso. Several. Triple sugar. That gave her a thought and she hustled a little faster, passing Giles, Dawn, and Buffy, to fall into step with Spike, in the lead. "You have any of those pills on you? The waker-uppers?"

She knew he did: she could see the effect in the unnatural alertness and the pause it took him to process anything said to him. Like Casa Summers, he wasn't quite synched to the normal anymore.

He gave her a narrow, dubious look. "You'll pay for it, later on."

"I know. But that's later. Give." She held out her hand and waited out the pause while he thought about it and decided, producing and uncapping the vial, tipping one of two remaining pills into her palm. She bit her lip. "You're almost out."

"Doesn't matter," he responded, putting the vial away. "Use what you got while you got it."

Buffy was watching and overhearing but making no comments about not needing two pill freaks in the party, Buffy knew about accommodation and necessity, so Willow swallowed her uncertainty and guilt and the pill, swallowing hard until everything went down. She meekly stood aside to let everybody pass her, rejoining Xander at the rear.

Xander was telling Dawn, "What is it--about an hour or so? Not counting the going and coming, of course. Piece of cake. What can go wrong in an hour? Wait, don't answer that."

Dawn didn't even smile, strolling along in pink corduroy overalls and a plain white long-sleeved mock-turtleneck with a droopy white sweater on top, her hands stuffed deep in the pockets.

"Just trying to cheer you up a little," Xander offered, starting to chuck her under the chin, but she winced her head away.

"It's OK, I'm good with it," Dawn commented, pulling a fist from a pocket to rub at her eyes. "Notice the not-screaming-and-complaining of me. It's only a swap to secure the meeting. Just like last time, right? Except without the kidnapping part, and we get a good swap in exchange, not Digger's skanky ho. So all plus and with-it-ness here, no problemo."

She lied like a rug, she was scared to death, but it wouldn't do any good to say so, so Willow kept shut, just admiring Dawn's shaky courage.

"Might even be candy again," Dawn added, pulling a smile out of someplace it'd been stuffed down tight, folded, and full of wrinkles. It wobbled, but she wore it. "Double points for candy, since it's a proven fact that chocolate solves everything."

Willow noticed Dawn was wearing a double necklace: the shield against mental influence/intrusion, in its locket, and the pierced fang on a thin cord--the keepsake of her defeat of the dragonlike taskin, something Willow thought she was secretly proud of; but since the Road Trip from Hell, Willow had never known her to wear it. All her defenses, magical and otherwise, conspicuously in place.

Willow asked, "Do you have your taser?"

Dawn shook her head, smooth hair flying. "They'd only take it. Can't expect even a vamp to be that stupid about the same thing twice." She shrugged. "It will be all right. Nobody's gonna hurt me. I'm only of use virgo intacta and all that." Another shrug. "And like Xander says, it's only for an hour or so. What could go wrong?"

Willow hastily made a sign against ill-omen, that was supposedly also good against the Evil Eye, but the whole thing was superstitious nonsense, not a proper ward at all. Still, it made her feel better.

She didn't like the bit about virgo intacta, since that only applied to the conditions of blood magic and maybe Dawn's Keyness, since bloodletting had been involved in that, too. Both highly dangerous and waaay from the Dark Side of the magickal spectrum, too risky even to know much about, let alone use. But Rayne wasn't gonna be there, he'd be under ward at Casa Summers as a counter-hostage, so maybe it was nothing.

With Giles' help and the Council's resources, she'd considered and consolidated every recorded way of locking down a mage and disabling his powers. She just had to trust in that. As Dawn did. Surely Buffy and Spike wouldn't have agreed to the exchange unless they were sure it would work, right?

Ahead, Spike had stopped short of the junction of a cross pipe, so everybody stopped behind him, fanning out a little into fighting formation, just like on patrol except with Dawn protected in the middle. Willow understood: you took your stance at a defensible position, where nothing could come at you from the sides, and having secured your retreat. That was Xander's job, mostly, and he stayed a few paces back, attending to the pipe they'd come through.

"There's a ladder and a cover," Spike said, lighting a cigarette, then crumpling and pitching the pack, "about halfway back to the last junction. Everybody notice it?"

"Yeah," said Buffy, for all of them, though the fact was that Willow hadn't noticed.

In a rush, she felt the pill take effect: better than a double espresso, tingling with wide-eyed alertness. She recalled it was roughly three o'clock on a sunny afternoon, and with Spike gone on ahead to the meeting, all they had to do--

"All you have to do is get topside," Spike was continuing, "if this goes sidewise, an' then run like hell. No vamp's gonna follow you. But I dunno that vamps is all Digger's got to call...." Voice trailing off, he looked away, up the pipe, head lifting. Glancing back, he'd gone to game-face, stark and bronze-eyed. "Showtime."

**********

Ethan Rayne strolled clear of his vamp escort as though he hadn't a care in the world. He paused by Spike to whisper something Spike recoiled from: snarling, indignant. The mage laughed, patting Spike companionably on the shoulder (another flinch) before coming on and linking an arm through Giles' and starting to turn with him before Giles stiffly removed the too-familiar appendage like an offending dead fish somebody had draped on him. They squared off a moment, heads cocked alike but Rayne's face open and pleased and Giles' shut and forbidding. Giles held out a hand stiffly to Willow, and she took it, weaving the power to lock temporary wards that weren't absolute since they had to move Rayne back to Casa Summers and weren't about to carry him unless they had to. But the wards prevented movement in time and dimension except for a limited oval she'd extend as needed to get where they were going. Once inside the heavily warded house, she could be more specific and absolute in her controls.

Spike had already moved off, out of sight; Buffy hugged her sister close, refusing to surrender her until Willow declared the counter-hostage secured.

Having prevented him from moving except within a restricted range, Willow proceeded to cut Rayne's connections to the ambient magic he might otherwise have drawn upon, undistracted by his claim, "Ooh, that tickles," or Giles' demanding the mage turn out his pockets. Willow found surprisingly few nodes of active connection (apparent in his aura) and concluded he'd expected this. No matter, what he'd expected: Willow sealed them all grimly, methodically, the active and inactive. That required touching them, something Rayne could have made salacious and embarrassing, since they included the genitals; but he just watched, dark eyebrows high as though interested and amused, judging her procedure, until she put a thumb to the "third eye" space in the central forehead. He shut his non-mystical eyes at that, looking momentarily drawn and grim, commenting, "Now that's a deprivation. But I suppose I must endure it for the good of the team and all, since I'm your prisoner."

Blinking, rousing, he laid his hand on top of Giles' and Willow's. Giles shook off the touch impatiently: such power-sharing could only be done by consent. Rayne couldn't tap into it uninvited, though Willow could feel him trying.

"Ah, well," he said. "What can't be cured must be endured. Shall we be all evening about this, Ripper? Not that I don't adore being your guest, but I'm a bit peckish. There's tea laid on, I hope? I trust we needn't be totally uncivilized about this--I did volunteer for it, after all. Some minimal courtesy would seem indicated."

Giles didn't reply, festooning the mage with a variety of charms and sigils on chains or cords. Then Giles secured Rayne's wrists behind his back with the very latest in handcuffs: sturdy plastic strips, the sharp end poking through the loop end and pulled tight, locked.

Not being a natural material, plastic (vinyl, really) was extremely hard to manipulate magically.

Rayne said, "Ah--now at last we know how the Dormouse was suppressed. Are you going to do me here, dear, or not until--"

Giles silenced the babble with a length of silver duct tape, smoothing it into place with fastidious fingertip touches, from one cheek to the other, covering the wide, smiling mouth. Rayne's eyes were still bright with mischief and amusement. Giles stepped back, head bowed, arms at his sides--disengaging, withdrawing.

Willow asked carefully, "Are you OK?"

Giles muttered what sounded like sodding prat. Looking to Buffy, he declared formally, "I believe the pax bond is secure."

Hands on Dawn's shoulders, Buffy gave her taller sister a searching, enquiring look as if to say nothing was required, Dawn could still back out if she wanted, which of course wasn't true, not with Spike already gone on and surrounded by now, on enemy ground and undefended except for the exchange of the pax bonds.

Dawn said tightly, "Yeah." Pulling out of the tight hug that followed, she turned and walked steadily away to join her waiting vamp captors, who hustled her off without any formality of binding. Obviously, none was needed: she was only a slender child, with no power she herself could draw upon. Like a princess surrendered to the Visigoths as tribute, Willow thought.

Buffy watched them out of sight, then turned, remarking harshly, "Let's get this show on the road."

Xander went first, with the lantern. Buffy was behind as rearguard. Between were Giles and Willow, and compliant Rayne moving amiably between them. Bound with magical and mundane restraints though he was, Willow still had the sense of leading a pacing tiger on a string--controlled only as much as he consented and pretended to be, content to play this game for awhile, as long as it was entertaining.

Unnerved but incredibly alert, extending the free space ahead and pulling up behind the area in which Rayne could move, Willow stood ready to slap him down at a second's notice. If she got a second.

**********

Buffy didn't like it. She didn't like any part of it whatever, not even a little. She hated operating on nothing stronger than faith: nothing she could confirm with touch, nothing she could shove or hit.

Standing in the hall while Willow and the mage, Rayne, found places to sit in the front room and Giles went past to arrange tea in the kitchen, Buffy was on guard, on watch--against what, she didn't know, and didn't like that feeling.

Rayne was constrained mainly because Willow was plainly convinced he was. Wary, anxious, even a little belligerent, of the "You better watch yourself, Mister!" variety but not expecting anything to happen right now. Buffy had to take Willow's unspoken word for it that this minute, right now, Rayne was not an active threat.

Spike was away, in the middle of the danger, because he'd maneuvered and contended to be so. She had to believe he knew what he was doing, even though "Spike has a plan" was a phrase to rouse dismay in the most confident of hearts.

Spike's plans had a tendency to exhibit major suckage. Either he'd overlooked something, or he got bored and lunged into action any old how, or something went egg-shaped, and the result bore no resemblance to the prediction. For example, the conspicuous fiasco that was the smell.

But they'd talked, after the class. For quite a long while, actually. In front of the Civic Center, after they'd stowed the pads away in the SUV, Spike had paced and smoked and flung his arms, and she'd called him names and actually bopped him in the nose once, but since it all came down to Buffy's concern for him and her uneasiness at feeling shut out, the radius of Spike's circles grew smaller and his gestures less grandiose, their glances longer and more assessing. They ended standing in each other's arms, foreheads touching.

"This is mine, now, pet," he'd told her quietly. "Mine to see to. You can't take it from me or do it for me. Can't make it go away."

"But I get the hard choices! I'm the Chosen One, not you!"

"And so you are, love," he'd agreed, nuzzling her cheek with his poor bopped nose, then leaning back a little to smile uneasily into her eyes. "And brilliant at it, too. But this isn't a thing a Slayer can fix. Took on the ending when I took on the beginning: claiming the rights of Master Vampire of Sunnydale. This comes with the package. Have to leave me to it, love. To do it the best I can, to stop it so it won't come back and bite us in the ass again down the way sometime. Keep the Hellmouth shut and locked so tight, next idiot comes with an itch to open it will see how hard it's shut, how well it's guarded, and not even bother trying. If I don't manage, you'll have to. So I'll manage," he'd promised earnestly, grimly--wanting her to believe, stroking her cheek in reassurance. "Not how you'd do it, fair fight an' all. How I do it. How vamps do things. Different way of thinking, love. This part, this is for me and Bit to settle, 'cause she's a part of it, too. Always the Key."

"But you're hurt," she'd protested, "and confused, and it's all just a mess, with the Lady, and Digger, and Rayne, and Mike all mixed into it, and now Dawn--"

"And you. All coming from different directions, but it all comes together. I can see how it moves, love--how it has to be. You can't be there. It's vamp business. Mage business. Not Slayer business...until afterward. Just have to trust me on that."

As Giles returned with tea things on a tray, Buffy looked hard into the hall mirror, pulling her collar aside to confirm that the mark still showed.

It had always been her fear that Spike could be dusted somewhere and she'd never know. Just an absence, a lack. In their talk, Spike had reminded her that as long as the mark, his visible claim on her, was there, he was still in one piece, still fighting to get back to her. Only at his final death would it fade.

Considering the scar, her worried reflection, Buffy took some reassurance from it...but not much.

She wanted the confirmation of his presence, his body, his stillness and his suddenness. She wanted his voice and his eyes and how he tasted, how he was; his offhand shy gentleness, his stubbornness, and his volcanic temper; the way he looked when he came to her and when he came, the astonishment in his face every time, above her or beneath her, no matter, when they were together in that way. She didn't like it that he had a life apart from her, independent, that she couldn't know or take part in.

But however grudgingly, she accepted it: as she did with Willow, and Giles, and Xander, and Dawn--the other people that she loved. Love wasn't ownership. Spike wasn't hers exclusively. This whole business of Master Vampire of Sunnydale had made her feel that most keenly--that Spike had his own priorities, his own choices, separate from her.

And she accepted that, mostly. But she didn't have to like it.

Rubbing her neck, Buffy turned from the mirror and resumed her sentry duty in the hall.

An hour, maybe two. Then she'd have Spike back, Dawn back, safe and close. Then there'd be time to make a plan that actually had some chance of working. Something they could all contribute to and do together.

**********

Turning his teacup (his wrists had been freed--after all, inside the house, and nobody was gonna feed him, for Goddess' sake) and then lifting it to take a sip, Rayne shot a glance at Giles, asking casually, "Is this the part where you try to teach me the error of my ways?"

"I shouldn't have been surprised," Giles replied aridly. "You've worked for demons before: Larconis, the baby-eater."

"No, I was employed by the vampire, Trick. Ah--oops. Does rather prove your point, doesn't it? Creature of habit, then, it seems. But they do come up with such inventive plans, vampires--completely mismanaged and unlikely of result. Need a firm guiding hand, as it were." Rayne displayed a hand, fingers spread, and waggled it theatrically. "It's really too bad of you, Ripper, to deprive me of my newest pet just when I was getting him nicely trained to come to my hand for...certain things. Jealous, are we? Or merely playing dog in the manger? Is nobody to have fun in your vicinity?"

"We are not discussing this," Giles declared, setting his cup down on the low table between them. He folded his arms. "You were better than this. You at least had conviction and were pursuing something real, however misguided. You--"

"With a passion. So I was. But you know what, Rupert? After you really get in to it, all the way, Chaos is pretty much all of a muchness. Random, and occasionally terrifying of course, but not particularly distinct. As a steady diet, even the best porridge eventually palls. I've found the best antidote is the particular. Taking on someone else's purpose, something they're all passionate about. All that delicious energy and purposefulness and want. The bright glitter and intensity. Vampires never do things halfway, do they? Throw themselves into sensation completely, utterly.... But oh, pardon, we're not to talk of that. I forgot. Your ground, your rules. After all, I'm the hostage here, in obedience to their banal customs.... They even pay me, not realizing that their refreshing linear muddle-headedness would be quite enough reward in itself."

"You batten on them. Like a leech."

Rayne tilted his head, considering. After a minute, he said, "Psychic vampire? Hadn't thought about it precisely that way, but I suppose. You always had to be the dominant one, putting names to things, thinking that would control them, limit them to the names and natures you assigned. But it doesn't, dear heart: reality always transcends names, is finally ungovernable. Do you know that even a little, now? Have you begun to discover the limits of Order, as I have of Chaos? Is there finally a middle ground, where a rapprochement is possible?" He bent his head, looking at Giles through his lashes. "I'd so much rather batten on you."

"No."

"And you'd like it," Rayne rushed on, unheeding. "You know you would. I've learned things, connections, enhancements of the most profound kind. Break you right out of your stolid shell into ecstasy unending." Rayne made a wry face. "Except to eat, now and again. That sort of thing. We're still mortal, after all; and the years have touched us. Let me show you. Just let down your wards one instant, let me through, and I'll show--"

"No, Ethan. You may not have access. You're not trustworthy. For the right inducement, you'd abandon Digger and his plans in an instant. I know quite well what you are--now we're merely haggling over the price."

Rayne giggled, then outright laughed. "I was your whore first, dear heart, so it's not really kind to throw that in my face. But you were very seldom kind. I liked that in you, actually. Something to fling myself against, cling to.... The intensity of your angers and your passions, flailing about. So delicious, even though I didn't then know half what I do now about how such intensity can be shared. Enjoyed.... You ground me, I free you. An equal partnership--does that have no appeal? Dear heart, the dark is coming down whatever we say or do. Why not warm one another with our opposites while we can?"

Willow had been embarrassed for some time. It was plain both men had forgotten her completely, deep in the throes of what was obviously a heartfelt courtship, at least on Rayne's side. She'd had the vague impression there was old subtext between them. She hadn't been prepared to have it become overt text, and present--in Ethan's cajoling; in Giles' stormy eyes and expression.

Willow, the conspicuously and outspokenly gay, had in principle no objection to that kind of subtext. But it made her feel all squirmy that two old guys, and one of them Giles, should be making doe-eyes at one another and openly acknowledging passion past and anything but dead or forgotten by either of them, whether to invoke it or refuse it.

It was almost as bad as having to listen while your parents had sex. Supremely ooky.

"I knew," Rayne continued, "that if I answered the advert and came here, it would draw you. Out of the new routines you've been trying so hard to impose, to remake the Council into something more humane and workable, less rigid, paranoid, and insane. The irony: instead of bringing Order out of Chaos, Ripper trying to instill a bit of healthy Chaos into a fossilized and moribund Order. Oh, yes, I know about that. The news went out instantly, within the general demon community, when the Council was decimated. So I was eager to find a pretext to put myself in your way. Or what would surely become your way, if I presented an...inconvenience to your Slayer. You're the reason I'm here, dear heart. And the only reason for me to leave is your company. I could be so useful to you! And I would! And we'd be happy--"

Willow leaped from her seat and went to join Buffy, glowering in the hall. Safely out of earshot of whatever reply Giles made.

"What're they talking about?" Buffy asked, frowning, meaning  Why is it taking so long?

Willow was reasonably good at translating sideways Buffy-speak.

She shrugged elaborately. "British guy stuff. Order and Chaos, blah, blah, blah. We don't have to worry about Giles, though. He's tweed all through."

"Why don't they just get on with it, then? And why would we worry about Giles? Are they talking about Spike?"

"Not exactly."

"Not exactly? Are you going all commercial on me? What's that mean--not exactly?"

Willow was too frazzled to be circumspect. "It means they're using him for code, for things still too sore to talk about. For who and what they used to be."

"Giles was a vampire?" Buffy blurted, horrified.

Willow's eyes were drawn by motion. Setting down his cup, Rayne rose from the couch and bent to place a sudden, dry kiss to Giles' forehead. Then, like a soap bubble bursting, he was gone.

**********

Spike had got Digger onto the subject of the wholesale turning and recruiting of fledges, and Digger was being coy about it and blustering, when he felt the witch in his mind, announcing frantically, Rayne's gone!

Spike hadn't paid much attention--any, really--to the two robed humans in the back of the chamber. So he hadn't noticed them gesturing and muttering, except to be sure the hands held no weapons and weren't pointing in his direction. All the same, he wasn't surprised when Rayne materialized between them, dusting off his arms with a look of frustrated distaste.

No, Spike replied. He's here.

A retrieval spell. Must have been. I stopped anything he could do, didn't think about somebody else retrieving him. I'm so sorry! What should I do?

Turning, Rayne looked at him, showing a foxlike, welcoming smile, his eyes bright and feral.

Everything went golden, sweet, and slow.

With a sense of relief, like stepping off a cliff, Spike fell into the shining eyes.

**********

Dawn had won $ 11.47 at poker from her two vamp captors (neither an itchy fledge, fortunately) with only minimal cheating and was holding trip queens when another vamp leaned in and gave an obviously prearranged signal. The two vamps grabbed her, one complaining, "But I had aces! Aces!" as they hustled her back into the pipe from the alcove they'd used as a holding area.

Dawn thought Oops! but she wasn't truly surprised. Couldn't hold Rayne, most likely. And with the cross-hostage free, nothing to prevent Digger from collecting her into more secure custody, valuable virgo intacta and all.

She tripped, and one of the vamps smacked her, and she stabbed him good with the taskin tooth dagger before backing away. "I'm to be delivered! Delivered, you moron! Digger will likely dust you for that!"

"Then I got nothing to lose, do I?" the vamp countered, grabbing her wrist so she couldn't stab him again. The other vamp intervened half-heartedly, preventing his chum from closing with her. Dawn twisted at the end of her tethered arm.

At close quarters, the vamps stank. Like wet moldy dirt and old blood and nameless filth. Spike never smelled like that. Because he paid attention to himself and had people to remind him if he forgot. People who cared about him. If she was here, what was happening to Spike?

As the two vamps bickered about the merits of eating her, another bunch came up from behind and swept them acrimoniously along, apparently in haste lest the Slayer get between them and the lair before they were safely inside. A couple of times, there was what seemed to Dawn a sudden change of direction, and she imagined Willow doing a location spell on her and the van careening around corners with Buffy at the wheel, trying to reach a good intercept point. Or maybe it was Spike, maybe he'd had warning and got clear in time and was coming after her, he'd never abandon her to this, it was possible--

She fell and skinned her knees and scraped her hands and thought that was it, she was gone, because some of the party around her were fledges and the bloodsmell sent them completely insane. She curled up tight while the fight proceeded over and around her, thinking about Frodo in Minas Morgul and the orcs falling out over looting his mithril chain mail, maybe she'd have a chance to run but she was just so scared and could barely see and before she could even uncurl she'd been grabbed and draped over a vamp's smelly back, and they were all running, full-out, the way vamps rarely had to, that almost felt like floating, arrowing along through the dim tunnel.

When the smell changed to dirt, the darkness was complete, and the pace slowed to a shambling lope, Dawn knew that the run had been the final sprint to home and safety and that doors were now shut between her and any who followed. There were shafts recklessly descended by rope, kicking off the walls to land in different passages, some of them lit with candles or torches on the walls, always descending. When she began to notice shoring overhead and to the sides, she remembered how the basement passage had been supported and reinforced, remembered Mike telling her that the core of Digger's lair was a long-abandoned mine from pioneer days. Silver, he'd thought, which was ironic, given that silver was an antagonistic element to all unnatural creatures--some more, some less. Didn't bother vamps particularly unless it was blessed or enchanted. Maybe whatever traces remained helped to keep the more ferocious demons away, since vamps were pretty low on the demonic prestige scale according to Anya, who wasn't prejudiced about that, not at all....

Dawn was dumped onto her feet and roughly steadied until she found her balance, then forced forward just by the pressure of the vamps behind--fewer than there'd been before, she thought, though some might have peeled off. Since none attacked her, no undisciplined fledges were left in her escort anyway. So her situation had stabilized that much, at least--she wasn't gonna be drained and discarded, some vamp's fortuitous dinner, before being delivered. She moved along as fast as she could, to reach Digger and Rayne, maybe, that knew her true value--nothing separable from her, like a mithril shirt--and could be expected to take good care of her on that account.

When her escort burst through an open doorway into a largeish room lit with lanterns, dazzlingly bright to her eyes, she was unsurprised to hear a voice that she remembered rumbling, "Well, Missy. So you've come to be my guest again."

Digger.

Blinking, she made out the frog-faced old vamp: seated at a table. As her escort dispersed, Dawn brushed at herself crossly with her stinging palms. "If this is how you treat your guests, you don't deserve to have any!"

"Fetch water," Digger ordered someone curtly, and they left through a different door. Of course he'd noticed the blood, right away. Vamp. Duh. "We'll get you fixed up in a minute, right as rain," Digger said cordially, pushing out of his chair and coming to guide her into it, then turning it sideways to the table so the vamp returning with a basin and a cloth could get at her properly. And it was Mike--game-faced and sullen, not lifting his eyes as he took each of her hands to pat them clean of blood, dirt, and grit.

Still, Mike. Something frozen inside her relaxed. No matter what went on between him and Spike, Dawn had never had the least fear of Michael. It was hard to be afraid of somebody you'd sat through whines and tears and misery with, nodding and commiserating with the cell pressed tight to your cheek.

When he paused, clearly debating how to clean her knees with the impediment of her torn overalls, Dawn reached and patted his hair, feeling greatly daring. He jerked back, finally looking her in the face, his own all transformed and fangy, golden-eyed. "You're so dumb," he declared. "Never thought you'd be so dumb as to do it anyway. I made it so you wouldn't have to. Now look what you got yourself into." With fingers and thumbs, he took the overalls at the seam, near the rip, and tore the fabric jaggedly apart above the knee with no more effort than if it'd been a paper towel. Simple: impediment gone. Then he rocked and settled, staring at her bleeding knee. Breathing deep.

Not so simple.

Dawn found herself saying, "It's OK. It will heal better if you do, anyway."

As Mike started to lean, Digger belted him, then followed and kept hammering at him. Grabbing a rock off a shelf, Digger used it to hammer some more. Arms wrapped around his head, Mike took it, curling into himself protectively but making no move to defend himself. Dawn had never seen him submit to Spike so unconditionally...but she'd never seen Spike go after him that way, either--with the fury of a Master Vampire disciplining a subordinate.

Methodically bludgeoning Mike, Digger was pointing out that Mike fed only when Digger said, only when Digger gave him leave, not otherwise, and Digger would beat him back to a fledge if he had to, to remind him of that basic fact of vampiric life.

Dawn itched to jump in and pummel the old vamp, stab him painfully if not usefully with the taskin dagger, but knew enough of vamps to know that would only make it worse, prolong the discipline. Not impossible that Digger, distracted, might lash out at any interruption, and that would likely bring Mike actively into it, defending her, and it could get awful real fast.

Spike had dusted crew for open insubordination. And he'd broken Mike to incoherent, uncontrolled fledge-hood once, rather than dust him: done what Digger only threatened. And Spike was relatively benign, as Master Vamps went.

She wouldn't be helping Mike, getting in Digger's way. It was a vamp thing. Hard as it was, she had to leave them to it.

Bending, she picked up the damp cloth and began patting gingerly at her skinned right knee, trying not to hear the noise of the beating. If vamps didn't dust, they healed. And if Digger had wanted to dust Mike, he would have done it to begin with. Mike would heal and be OK. She repeated that to herself several times, a mantra of shaky reassurance.

It was Rayne who came in and stopped it--scooping the stone from Digger's upraised hand, tching over its bloodied condition. And Dawn realized then that it wasn't a stone: it was the Stone, with Chaos forces roiling within it beyond anything she could sense, that Digger had grabbed as a casual hammer. As Digger straightened, gulping down his fury to present a controlled face to the mage, Rayne passed the stone back, directing, "Best if it were cleaned. Quickly. Don't want nasty vampire all over my implements."

Digger cast a glance at the pink water in the basin, decided against, and kicked Mike in the stomach. "Clean it," he directed, setting the Stone on the floor. It took two tries, but Mike managed to collect the Stone and rise, wavering toward the farther door where apparently the water was.

Leaving Dawn alone with the Master Vampire and the Chaos Mage.

"Well," said Rayne, considering her amiably, acutely. "Bloodied but unbowed, I see. Which am I entertaining? The maiden or the ancient?"

Patting at her other knee, Dawn responded clearly, "Go fuck yourself."

"Ah. My best regards to the Lady, then, in hopes of her continued absence. She must have found this plane...uncomfortable. Limiting." He continued studying her awhile, then said, "Amenities. Are you hungry? Need to use the...facilities? There are facilities, aren't there?" he inquired of Digger, in a mildly menacing fashion, as though there'd be trouble if there weren't. "Since someone has been so unkind as to obliterate all my places topside in a fit of petty spite, I find myself in need of temporary accommodations. And now for my guest, as well."

"If this is how you treat your guests--" Dawn began, figuring he hadn't heard her use that snark before.

"So you've read Wilde!" Rayne responded, unnervingly quick. "How delightful! We'll have to get together a discussion of that fine old fop. You. And Spike. And I."

So Spike was in it too. It had all gone to hell. Dawn was disappointed at how unsurprised she was. She hadn't had much hope to begin with. But Spike had said it was important, and necessary, to risk her the same as he would himself. And now it had all collapsed, and he was caught in it too. Conscious of Rayne watching for her reaction, she only shut her eyes for a minute, then looked at the mage steadily. "Where's Spike? Is he hurt?" She couldn't imagine he wouldn't have gone down fighting.

"Quite the contrary. He's having a bit of a lie-down now--seems the first proper rest he's had in ever so long, poor pet. Have to get him all rested and glossy, for us three to be about our work. You to power, and him to guide. To open the Way. The Hellmouth, as you call it here." Glancing again at Digger, he repeated, pointedly, "Facilities? Food?"

"I'll get something put together," Digger responded, and ambled off through the main door, bellowing for "Star."

Dawn granted herself another eyes-shut moment, trying to assess how bad things really were. When she looked again, Rayne spread his hands apologetically as if to say  What could you expect? Vampires, after all.

Dawn was not charmed. "Where's Spike? I want to see him. See that he's OK."

"That wouldn't...be advisable. He's not entirely himself at the moment, if you take my meaning. Mightn't be altogether safe."

"You want my cooperation?" Dawn challenged. "Then humor me. Keep me happy. Show me Spike."

She wanted to see if he'd relapsed to the rocking and head-banging stage: if he was reachable at all. See what Rayne had done to him.

"You're under a misapprehension. I don't need your cooperation. Only your certified virginal Key blood. And that will be shed only when and as I direct." Rayne's eyes were as hard and flat as nickels. "So, no: much as it pains me to refuse a young lady, you will not be allowed within striking distance of my pet until he's fed, and to repletion. He's not terribly discriminating at the moment, and I'd hate for there to be an accident. To either of you. I've gone to some pains to secure you both. If it's any solace, your captivity will be relatively short: only until midnight, tomorrow. And be certain, I'll take excellent care of you both until then."

Somehow, Dawn didn't find that reassuring.

************

She was fed cold take-out from Mickey D's, with flat soda, though a clueless vamp offered her some vodka: she knew it by the smell and judiciously accepted, though it tasted wretched and made her cough and she couldn't see why anybody without banged, hurting knees and no aspirin would tolerate it. After awhile, though, it was warm and made her head swimmy, and she considered that an improvement.

She'd been allotted what looked like a storage chamber not far from Digger's main quarters, with a heavy, lockable door--as much for protection, she thought, as for confinement, considering all the fledges wandering around. At least she wasn't being quartered with the pitiful cows she knew had to be around somewhere, to supply all those ravenous fledges. That would have been just too horrible. But maybe Rayne had been leery of "mistakes" and had her allotted a private room. Or at least semi-private: there was a vamp on watch outside the door, and sometimes he told her the things he'd like to do to her. In graphic detail.

It wasn't, she found, anything like Spike's stories. Because she was in the coal bin now, and all that was keeping the vamp out was the certainty that Digger would dust him if he tried anything. About ten, by the backlit face of her watch, she heard Rayne's voice outside--a final check on things, she guessed. And then she was left to the mercy of the vamp's voice again, detailing what interesting things could be done with eyes. She was determined not to be afraid: he'd smell it, and she didn't want to give him the satisfaction. But it was hard to be brave alone in the utter dark, with the vamp outside getting anatomical and obviously from personal experience.

She used the facilities, that consisted of an improvised chamber pot, then curled up miserably in the pillowless mound of quilts and comforters with which she'd been provided. Finally she poked a hole in one of the quilts with the taskin dagger and pulled out enough stuffing to wad into ear-plugs. Didn't shut up the vamp, but at least she could no longer hear him.

It wasn't as though she was a real person, after all. Manufactured by monks. Not much different from the pitiful bot that had never truly known it was a bot, heartbreaking in its mangled perkiness and devotion to Spike, who couldn't stand the sight of it during that summer: when Buffy was...gone. Maybe it had never been real, his love for her. Just a habit and one he didn't need anymore, once he had Buffy again. He'd had Dawn poetry painted into his skin when the Lady had taken her back, but vamps did outrageous things like that and anyway the tat was gone now: Rayne had erased it somehow. Maybe erased more than that, if Spike hadn't even bothered to check on her, that she was OK, which she decidedly wasn't. The fries sat like lead in the bottom of her stomach and she was uncomfortable however she tossed and turned, placing and replacing the bedding and finally resting her cheek on her bent arm.

All well and good to say she had a bit of his soul, but what did that matter when she couldn't feel it?

She must have slept because she woke in a panic because there was a big hand clamped over her mouth. Cold. Clean vampire smell, that was nearly no smell at all.

For a second she thought, hoped, it was Spike, warning her not to make a sound. Come for her finally, after all. Then he moved, more awkwardly than vamps generally did: settling beside her, stretching out on top of the covers, the other hand brushing hair away from her face in the blind dark. And without a sound and no glimmer of sight, she knew it was Mike and knew what dangerous action was on his mind.

She just hung onto him convulsively, gone all liquid in relief that somebody cared for her enough to come, though it really changed nothing and he was nearly as much a prisoner as she was.

Touching his brow, his mouth, she knew he'd dropped game face and knew he was looking down at her with that stillness that was particularly Mike.

She whispered, "Where can I hold, that won't hurt?" Not hearing herself made her remember the ear-plugs. She hastily pulled them out and pitched them away.

"Don't matter," he muttered back. Barely words. Barely breath. "Won't hurt you more than I can help. But it's...what you are, they want you for. Change that, they won't have no more use for you."

"Fine," she whispered into his neck, right under his ear, exasperated, "then they kill me. Or keep me for a cow, to get some use out of me. And then kill me."

"Maybe could get you out first. I know this place. If I was fast--"

"But you're not: you're hurt. And I'm not fast--not like a vamp, or a Slayer." She petted his smooth forehead. "You're dreaming, Mike."

"Could slow 'em up a bit. Digger, he don't know everything happens at the edges of things. Planted some charges. Collapse the main shafts. Bring the roof in on him. He'd be years digging out again. Could try, Dawn. Can't leave you to this. If they didn't want you, couldn't use you, maybe there'd be a chance...."

He was dreaming, but it was a powerful dream. Not what she'd ever dreamed of, but full of kindness and caring and desperation...and she felt that doing the sex thing with him, giving up her hateful virgin status, would somehow make her real and solid--not a construct, not an un-person, not a mystical Key to anything. Just a girl, afraid in the dark, facing impossible choices and offered something like escape. Something like solace. Something very like love.

She made up her mind to do it, because surely the consequences couldn't be any worse than what was certainly ahead and at least the Hellmouth would remain shut, and because he'd settled on his elbows over her to kiss and taste her and it felt so good, so comforting, all blind sensation, the solidity and strength of him so protective over her, even though Spike had told her not to and asked her solemnly to stay just as she was. It wouldn't be breaking faith with Spike, she thought rebelliously. He couldn't have known this would happen, the fear (and the French fries) whooshing around in her gut like clothes in a washer and yet the warmth gathering there too, which was so strange considering Mike wasn't warm at all.

Tremulously, she lifted to his mouth and kissed him: probably awkward and not at all what he was used to, but that didn't matter because what they were doing wasn't about that. Yet she wanted to be good for him--the way Buffy was good for Spike, you could tell when he wandered downstairs in the morning, still barely awake and deeply happy, all loose and carelessly bed-headed, swooping in to tickle her or just looking long out the kitchen window into the sunlight....

Well shagged, he'd say when she commented on his good humor, smiling with his eyes and everything, not shy about it in the least.

She found Mike's bare shoulders with her fists and pushed hard until he lifted, breathing, waiting.

"They'd not only know what--they'd know who. When Digger smelled you on me--!"

"Don't matter," Mike responded in a muzzy, sleepy voice, bending his mouth again to silence the argument. But she jerked her head, put the point of her elbow into his cheek, shoved and twisted in the covers until no way could he not know her flailing refusal to have him sacrificed on the altar of her virginity, that she knew was as sure as sunrise if she gave in now.

He wouldn't force her. Not even to save her. Rolling clear, he lay beside her on his back, breathing hard; and she had the strong suspicion that he wasn't wearing any clothes at all.

"You always smell so good," he said, all soft acceptance. "So nice. Always liked that about you."

She pushed his arm. "Get out. Before you're caught. Digger would dust you so fast--!"

"In a while. Sleep now, rest easy. When you wake up, I'll be gone." She felt him turn to look at her, felt the phantom warmth of his gaze. "Would have been worth it. Just so you know. I'll just think of something else, that's all. Some way, I'll get you clear of this, even if you were dumb enough to let yourself get talked into it. You just rest and let me think on it some more."

His chest was nicer than a pillow. Still quietly lifting and falling as he breathed her in and out. Leaning into his loose embrace, the puffy soft layers of the bedding still between them, she felt solid and definite, centered within herself. Even though they hadn't transformed her into a dud virgin. Huh. She asked, "You do the vamp on the door?"

"Sort of had to. Nobody I had any use for."

"Good. Had a nasty mouth on him."

"I expect. Didn't like it, that he scared you. Could smell it.... Took him real fast, before he even knew."

"Yeah."

Snuggled close and safe, Dawn slept.
 
 

 

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

 

Chapter 20: Midnight

Shortly after slipping unnoticed out of Dawn's room and pulling his clothes back on, Mike found himself sent off to attend on Rayne.

It was past midnight: the lair was bustling with activity, since that was vamps' normal time to be most alert and active, their wake/sleep cycle the reverse of humans'. As usual, he passed bored sentries, packs of dirty fledges digging/repairing/shoring the main passages, vamps setting out to hunt by twos and threes, pairs of mature vamps delivering cows for the larder (fledges weren't to be trusted for that and anyway weren't allowed out until they could demonstrate minimal control of trueface and therefore their demon), single vamps tending the occasional lights, and couples fucking or fighting as the mood struck or thinking there was social leverage to be had from it.

Overall, Mike found it a relief to fall back into traditional ways. Spike's penchant for doing things in the daytime meant that Mike hadn't had a good day's sleep in months. And then the sweeps through half the night, on top of it. Besides aching from the evening's beating, he was exhausted. Since returning, whenever he could get clear of Digger's supervision, he'd slept every chance he could get.

Though Digger was keeping him on a very short leash, that was normal and expected, almost reassuring--Mike knew precisely where he stood: under Digger's orders, every minute (or nearly), dancing attendance and under the elder vamp's critical and highly suspicious eye. Watching for any sign of willful independence and raining down punishment whenever Digger caught or imagined one...or just for no reason at all except exerting a Master Vamp's prerogative to pound on the juniors in his regime. Mike didn't mind, particularly. It was normal--what he'd been brought up to, as a fledge here. It was Spike's freethinking ideas that were a puzzlement and an annoyance. The rules changed from one day to the next. Confusing and tiring. Coming back to Digger's predictability had felt like coming home.

Not that he wouldn't do the old bastard anytime he saw a good chance. Which of course Digger knew and expected. How vamps were, mostly. Again, it was Spike who was the aberration--wanting and expecting connections other than force and dominance; socializing with the food and letting himself be swayed by their opinions and expectations. Mike had accepted it, but he'd never understood it.

Simpler, lots simpler, just to be a vamp and not yearning after things that made no sense. Live in the moment and the hell with the rest.

Except for the problem of Dawn, Mike would have been reasonably content.

But that was a big except and probably a deal-breaker, once Mike came up with an alternative plan.

Rayne had been assigned quarters near the surface. Humans didn't like the dank, entombed air of the deeper passages or the darkness or the imagined weight of all that tunneled earth a tremor could collapse in a smothering, crushing mass, burying them alive. California shook itself frequently; and Sunnydale sat on the deepest fault line of all--the Hellmouth, with not only tectonic but dimensional torques at work, forces actively engaged and at only uneasy and temporary equilibrium.

Hauling himself out of a vertical shaft with some difficulty because of the stiff joint of a dislocated and swollen shoulder, Mike limped along the passage, passing a couple of sentries, not giving the least damn what Rayne wanted. Merely going where he'd been sent.

The chamber was a natural cavern partitioned into a maze of bays. Likely been used for equipment storage and a staging area for the deeper levels, back in the day. The wooden partitions were hardly more than head-high, with the cave's rocky, irregular ceiling maybe twenty, thirty feet higher than that, so the place had the feel of a stage set, not an actual dwelling. A partial toy house set up in, and dwarfed by, an immense and inimical surround not made by hands.

Following the scent of prey and the petulant rise and fall of Rayne's voice, Mike wandered through bare "rooms" like abandoned boxcars, rooms with shelves, and rooms with stacked crates some way along in the process of collapsing into dust until he reached an opening he found he couldn't pass. Bespelled. Supposed he should have expected that.

Calling, "Digger sent me," Mike waited with perfect indifference to either be let in or not.

"Oh, come on," Rayne directed in an annoyed voice, and a poke of Mike's fingers informed him that the barrier was gone.

Climbing three metal stairs and sliding back a door brought him into what actually was a train car, a caboose--about 30's vintage, as a guess. Mike could smell the wheels rusting. It was bright inside: half a dozen lanterns were hung between the blank and mostly broken windows, two to a side, that framed views of the surrounding dark. The enclosed space stank of blood and magic, an uneasy combination. Easy to tell where the bloodsmell came from: a grimy, keening cow, a malodorous woman, was handcuffed to the handle of a fold-down cot just inside the doorway. The cot on the opposite wall had also been pulled down. Spike was stretched out on his side there in what looked like black satin sweat pants or pajamas, maybe, giggling and twisting around but not fastened down that Mike could see. Trueface coming and going, plainly completely off his head, wide no-color changing eyes wandering unfocused, babbling something about being Queen of the May.

Kneeling beside that cot, Rayne was trying to get Spike to lie flat so Rayne could finish fingerpainting symbols on Spike's torso and arms in some kind of thick, slateblue clay. Spike was behaving as though he was being tickled, and Rayne looked all put out with him.

Without even glancing around, Rayne directed, "Hold him still," reaching for a wide, shallow bowl on the floor about half full of the blue stuff. That was the source of the magic stink, then.

Going to the head of the cot, Mike set his hands on Spike's shoulders and leaned. No stinging oil. Would have interfered with the clay markings, maybe.

Mike had it clear in his mind that it would take a triangle to make this go: the mage, the monster, and the girl. Take any away, and the thing wouldn't go. So while easily holding Spike down (Spike twitched and giggled and tried to roll as Rayne resumed his fingerpainting, but didn't offer any organized resistance) Mike gave some thought to twisting his head off. At least slow things down, maybe give Mike time to think of a way to get Dawn out before Rayne could come up with a replacement. But although it'd be done, and Spike gone to dust, before Rayne knew or could stop it, Mike thought his own chances of surviving the next entire minute were pretty low, which would leave Dawn with no protection whatever. So regretfully Mike set the idea aside for now.

Eventually rising, wiping his hands on a towel, and stowing the bowl in a built-in cabinet at the rear of the car, still not having spared Mike a glance and turned half away from him, Rayne remarked, "He won't feed. He did before. What's the problem?"

Then Rayne looked around, and there was something about his eyes Mike didn't like at all. Straightening too, Mike stuck a hand in the pocket where the watch was and closed his fist around it, hoping it could keep Rayne out or prevent the mage from throwing any goddam compulsion at him.

Rayne said, "You're his claimed get, so I presume you know him as well as anyone does. Enlighten me. Why won't he feed?"

Mike shrugged, holding the watch hard. "He's always been weird about that. One way or another. Slayer's his cow. Could be, it's spoiled him for anything else."

"Well, I happen to have no Slayers on hand," Rayne rejoined, irritated, "and he must feed to be ready for tonight."

"Don't know what to tell you, then," Mike replied, holding tight within himself the knowledge that there was no difference worth noting between Slayer blood and what ran in Dawn's veins. Though Mike had never tasted the Slayer herself, just by the smell, you knew. Wasn't a thought he wanted to put into the mage's head.

Spike had had Dawn's blood a time or two and had even marked her once, but it hadn't gone well. Mike didn't think Rayne would think of it for himself, intent on Dawn's blood for another purpose altogether. As magic, not as food.

And Rayne seemed not to have picked up the knowledge from him. The watch worked. A good watch. Spike had donated the watch itself; Willow had provided and activated the charm inside; and Dawn had given it to him. Mike felt the watch as a set of powerful and puzzling connections that opened some doors and shut others. A good watch. It even kept time.

"You're human," Mike observed dryly. "He gone for you yet?"

Rayne just maintained his cold stare, indicating he wasn't on the menu.

So Mike said, "Maybe he's not hungry. Been known to happen."

"I think you should find a solution. I think you should find it very quickly."

Thing to do was make feeding a non-issue, Mike decided: get Rayne's mind off it altogether.

Mike didn't blame Spike for not wanting to feed on the trull--cows didn't improve with keeping: at the last, they weren't even very afraid, so the dregs were flat and bland, not properly charged with terror. But whether or not Spike was hungry, Mike was. Digger kept him short in that respect, too. Short rations slowed healing and made it hard to focus on anything else. Mike was proud of himself that he hadn't even asked for a taste at Dawn and hadn't let the cow distract him.

He took her fast, the killing bite to the jugular, and locked jaws into the bite as she pumped her life into him. The taste exploded into his mouth: she was fresh enough to be frightened, though without the strength to struggle as he drank her down. In a few minutes, he had the last of it. Letting the body drop onto the cot, Mike turned, stalling a moment, feeling the blood working in him, diminishing the soreness, knitting bones. Then, while Rayne watched impassively with arms folded, Mike set fangs to his own forearm and presented the hot blood of the fresh kill to his claimed sire. Immediately Spike went to trueface and latched on, drawing powerfully. At least he wasn't too crazy for that.

Behind him, Rayne said, "I thought vampires couldn't feed from one another."

It was like the tribute again, in the hospital parking lot: the deepest of connections. Mike shuddered with it and shut his eyes. "Don't know a lot about vamps then, do you?"

When Spike lapsed back without sealing the wound, Mike lifted his bloodied arm and did it himself. Spike hadn't taken even half what Mike had acquired by the kill: he felt the healing progressing, felt strong and clear-headed.

"Wait outside," Rayne directed, again kneeling by the cot. "I may want you for something later."

Dismissed and as good as ignored, Mike did as he'd been told. Hunkering down within call, he used the time to faithfully wind the watch and reconsider all the options.

Short of taking up with a Slayer, Mike figured this was the stupidest thing Spike had ever done. Up to Mike, it seemed, to make it right.

**********

Spike's demon was happy.

When he eventually woke in the golden fog, from dream into dream, there was nothing to worry about or plan, nothing to do but hazily relax into the pleasure with no objection from soul or self, that seemed not to have wakened yet or taken notice of the mage or this new, interesting smelling lair deep underground, so no need to think about sunrise, except that there was something about the idea of midnight he shied away from and forgot as quickly as possible. Easy to forget, and just be, lost in sensation.

When the mage said words to him he paid no attention, not with all the splendid fucking pleasure rolling into him and over him like a tide, nothing to do but just enjoy it, which was all very well but you couldn't live off it. Finally coming out of the deep crash he'd fallen into when the pills wore off, he was hungry. Well, no surprise--he was hungry all the time: he was a demon. The surprise was that he felt no constraint on how the bloodthirst could be satisfied.

Rolling over, pushing clear of the golden fog enough to notice, he eyed the mage speculatively, weighing the likelihood of losing the pleasure (without knowing how he knew, he was aware that the mage commanded the pleasure: thin stuff, as such things went, but abundant and here and the demon wasn't particular) against crunching down and gulping hot, fresh blood. Being considered with a predator's unblinking stare made the mage nervous: he had a cow delivered, but Spike's demon wasn't interested in such. If he went for her, soul and self would wake and give him bloody hell about it and it was so much nicer as it was, being dominant without interference (except what the mage was doing to him, of course, not that he objected), just idle, silly, floating, drifting--like being zoned out on opium.

Prospect of a fight would have made him rouse completely and would have been nice if didn't mean surrendering dominance to the other consciousnesses with which he shared the body. Better to do without, not risk it. He was too lazily content.

The mage said more words, still nervous and vexed, too, that the demon hadn't taken the offered prey, which left his scrawny self still potentially on the menu. Spike's demon was mildly amused. Might still taste him a little when the one appetite overruled the other, and soul and self likely wouldn't object if he didn't drink to completion--the death of the prey. They seemed to have an agreement about such things now. But at the moment the demon was too lazy and sated to bother.

He felt the Red Witch stirring at the edges of his consciousness and mentally snapped at the intrusion. With something like an eep of alarm, she pulled away, and well she should. Had no business messing with his head. Nobody liked it. Bad enough to have the mage glancing in every now and again. Then he vaguely recalled something the self had laid on him, to tell the witch if she came , and sullenly contemplated it when he felt her creeping back. Silver. He kept the shine of it in his mind, how it nestled raw in seams in the rock like tinder carelessly scattered about. Didn't mean a thing to him, but that was what the self had required that he do whenever he felt the arrival of the witch's immaterial presence. Didn't like the thought: it connected somehow to the midnight he wasn't thinking about in the pleasant now. But it had been laid on him, and he did it, long enough anyway that the witch surely caught it if she wasn't a total moron.

Mage didn't notice the exchange, pottering about with powders and stinks and liquid in a bowl. Nothing interesting to the demon until the mage started painting stinky magic onto Spike's front. Unlike the pleasure, it was an actual touch--real. It tickled and opened and bound him in uncomfortable ways. He giggled helplessly, unable to focus enough to resist. Wasn't supposed to resist. Only supposed to let things happen however they would, relax into the amber wash of stoned, drunken pleasure and let things become.

Mage had no respect for him anyway. Some uneasiness but no fear, expecting the steady wash of pleasure to keep him quiet and malleable, as it had before. Show only the expected and the mage wouldn't guard against what was held in reserve, still deep asleep. Wouldn't know there was more to Spike than the evident demon luxuriating in the abundance.

Another demon came and was present, sizzling and yet somehow aloof, like a color. Blue, maybe--bright and controlled. Oh: Mike. So that was all right, then.

When Mike suddenly took the cow, drank her straight down, Spike's demon didn't like it. The cow had been his to eat or not, not Mike's. But it seemed Mike knew that because he immediately offered the kill second-hand in deference. That was allowed and accepted. After all, the cow was already dead, and Spike's demon was hungry and nothing if not pragmatic.

When the blood began to cool and change, Spike's demon found he'd had enough of it. The charge of Mike's deference, the meaning of the exchange, was strong and vital enough to make up the difference.

Bloodthirst quieted, though not fully satisfied, there remained no reason to bother holding on to consciousness. Happy and content, he lapsed into passive dream.

Midnight was still far off and maybe the burning would never come.

**********

"Well?" Buffy demanded anxiously as Willow roused from her trance of concentration.

Willow shook her head. "Not much there--he has his demon to the fore, and the demon doesn't exactly think much. Maybe it's deliberate--to present a surface with nothing much to read. I don't know. There was one thing, though...came through clear. But I don't know what to make of it."

Buffy said, "What?" and Giles looked attentive, the three of them sitting around the kitchen island. It was nearly four in the morning and Buffy had been pacing and frantic the whole time since they'd lost Rayne and therefore Spike and Dawn. But Willow had simply tipped over and conked, completely wiped, and Buffy could only shove a pillow under her head, toss a blanket over her, and wait impatiently for her to wake up.

Willow still had dark circles under her eyes. Even her hair looked limp and dispirited. She kept brushing it absently out of her eyes. "Silver," she reported, puzzled.

"As in Hi-yo Silver, away?"

"I don't know. I don't think so. Just plain silver. Metal-y. I mean, not jewelry or anything like that."

"What, are we dealing with werewolves, now? What's with the silver? What does it mean?"

"Well," Giles ventured, "silver is a magically sensitive and conductive metal. Might Rayne's spell somehow involve it?"

"Maybe." Willow spread her hands helplessly. "That's all I got. Silver. In the ground, I think. Just plain old silver."

"Wait," said Giles, and the two women watched while he fussed with his tea and visibly concentrated. Finally looking up, Giles said, "Thinking about its being available to Ethan...in sufficient quantity to help power a spell...but no. There's no affinity between silver and a portal spell. That I've ever heard of. I could research it--" Giles started to rise, then settled again. "Insufficient time," he commented bleakly. "We have only approximately eighteen hours to come up with a way of blocking the spell. Or preventing it from being cast at all. Since you're still able to contact Spike," he said to Willow, "might you be able to, well, incapacitate him? Sufficiently that Rayne couldn't use him?"

Willow made a wry face. "He's already incapacitated. High as ye proverbial kite. Nothing but pretty basic stuff going on." She tapped her forehead. "Not much higher function at all, that I could tell."

"But Rayne will need him cognizant, competent, when the time comes. Could you interfere then?"

"Rayne will have wards set. I'm surprised he hasn't set them already. To punch through those wards and then affect Spike at all, that would be about like doing brain surgery in boxing gloves. And blindfolded. And I've never even attempted that level of control. Giles, I'm certain I'd screw it up. Do permanent damage."

"Nevertheless," Giles responded steadily, "it would disable the spell. Lacking a viable alternative, I believe we must consider it."

"No," said Buffy, folding her arms. "I don't care what you throw at Rayne. But Spike and Dawn, they're mine. We protect them. We don't hurt them. We don't even consider it."

She leveled a glare at Giles because he was the one who'd advocated killing Dawn to stymie Glory's plans. Not acceptable. Not then, and not now.

"Rule out magic," Giles responded tartly, "and what's left? Force? Harsh language?"

Buffy lowered her eyes, sighing. "No, I've already given up on the idea of barging in with Super Soakers full of holy water. It's a big, dark place, and none of us know it. And with only three SITs left, that won't get it done. Direct assault is out."

"There might be some of Spike's crew left, that haven't defected," Willow mentioned hesitantly.

Buffy shook her head. "I wouldn't trust any of them at my back. It would be like going in already surrounded. They'd be stupid not to go where the power is. And if they're that stupid, I don't want 'em."

She was angry, frustrated, and jealous. Oh yeah, despite Willow keeping decorously mum, she knew perfectly well what Spike was addled with, and his retreating to let the demon enjoy it didn't make it OK by her. But that made her mind cast back to how earnest and serious he'd been about her not mixing into it, in their talk-and-hit-and-talk conversation in the Civic Center parking lot. How it was a vamp matter, and vamps would have to settle it.

What had changed, since then? Except Spike and Dawn captured and irretrievable, of course. He'd meant Mike to blow up and leave, to be in place when Dawn arrived. Therefore, improbable as it seemed, he might have meant this, too. Might mean it wasn't the disaster it seemed but was in fact intended, all along, to get everybody (except her) within striking distance of Rayne and inside Digger's stronghold.

Trojan horse sort of thingie. Maybe.

If it was, her bursting in and disrupting it would be the last thing Spike would want her to do. What he'd so earnestly argued against, there in the parking lot. He'd want her to trust him to make the running and hold back on the response he'd known she'd otherwise reflexively make, diving in headlong, unprepared, and underpeopled as though force were the only answer she was capable of.

Buffy could do trust. Buffy could do subtle, if somebody banged her head against it solidly several times first.

"OK," she said abruptly, "here's what we do. We make a show of force with the SITs and anybody I can collect, but not to the point of actually getting inside. Because that's what Digger and everybody will expect. So we show them that. A feint. Meanwhile," she continued, looking at dispirited Willow, "you and Giles figure out how silver comes into it. It does, because Spike said so. He didn't explain because then Rayne would know--pick it out of his mind. He's depending on us to understand. For once, we play this Spike's way. It's his thing, he knows what he's doing. He's the lead, we're the backup. So that's what we do."

Giles looked at her over his glasses' tops. "Buffy...do you really consider that wise?"

"No, but it's what we're gonna do anyway." She hopped off her chair to go collect her cell phone: she had a lot of calls to make. Turning in the doorway, she added, "And as soon as I have things rolling, Giles, you're gonna tell me what this frickin' Venusburg thing means!"

**********

Spike woke to Rayne's voice inquiring if he'd had a nice nap.

He woke not because he wanted to but because he had to: Rayne's voice had acquired the power to compel him. Rayne had cut the pleasure off, too, the bastard--probably to force Spike to be something like coherent, something like aware.

Spike resented missing it, but the fact was, he ached to have it back, have it flood over him again. Had felt so good to let go and let himself be engulfed, everything coming in, drowned in sensation.

Waking felt like being tossed out of a tawdry second-rate heaven--everything too bright, too sharp, too solid. A little, maybe, like Buffy had felt after Red and the others had called her back from the real thing.

Cut-rate heaven of the senses, bloody Venusburg, was likely as close as a vampire would ever get.

"Yeah--good one: don't remember it," he said, offhanded despite being forced to answer because it'd been a direct question. Mage seemed to have set some kind of truth spell on him, but Spike knew his way around those: just pretend he was Anya and drown the asker in meaningless details until they gave over asking or offer the Cliff's Notes version, so brief and compressed it was as good as a lie. "So why'd you wake me up?" he grumbled.

"I want to ask you...about the Initiative." Rayne sounded almost shy, as though the topic embarrassed him. He smelled angry, though.

Spike didn't give a fuck. Since it wasn't a question, he wasn't forced to respond and didn't.

Swinging his legs over the side of the cot, he sat up, scrubbing fists into his eyes and yawning, reaching to a pocket for cigarettes. No pockets. Right. No shirt, no jeans, just silky pajama-bottom sort of togs like he was gonna appear as a rent boy in a grade Z porn flick. Right.

And stuff painted over his chest and arms. Well, an improvement over it being cut into him, he supposed, like the First had done, deep enough that the scars still showed in certain angles of light....

Stank of magic. Wards, most like: keep the witch out. Too late, on that—already done. And compulsions, as noted. Have to see how that went.

"Have a nice cuppa." Rayne was holding out a mug of strong tea, sweetened almost to syrup. Had another, the same, in his other hand. "Though lacking most of the amenities, the service here is excellent."

Spike closed his hands around the offered mug but only held it on a knee, savoring the heat and the odor, looking around.

Fucking caboose. Well, he'd known Rayne was a back-door man, but shacking up in an ancient caboose did seem a bit over the top, symbolically. If one went in for symbolic, which Spike did, lately. On account of the fucking dreams, mostly--trying to figure them out. Paradigms and patterns and such....

He still felt muzzy-headed and drifty, but that was all right. Not time yet to be anything else, only a few hours past daybreak by the felt angle of the sun.

Dead cow on the other cot. That came back to him hazily, and Mike here awhile but gone now by the smell. And the fact of his absence, of course, as Spike blinked and looked around. Spike remembered feeding from him, and no least trace of Dawn in the mix. Apparently Mike was still minding his manners in regard to her; so that part was all right.

Spike was fed and rested, for once with no dreams of burning (that he remembered, anyway); the crazy was close but still a little way off. Not bad for someone who'd been cored out like an apple, pulled apart like an orange, then shakily reassembled as if by somebody who'd lost the Japanese instructions.

Taking a mouthful of the scalding, intensely sweet tea, Spike reflected you could get used to just about anything, even being off your head and hallucinating in Technicolor and SurroundSound more than half the time. At least, he thought bleakly, he didn't seem to have killed anybody or delivered any severed hands.

Rayne had settled into a wooden folding chair by the foot of the cot, sipping tea and regarding him over the mug like a squirrel with a nut. "The Initiative," Rayne prompted. "How did you escape?"

"Oh. Yeah." Spike twitched a shoulder dismissively. "Took the first chance and scarpered." That was true...as far as it went.

"Someone didn't rescue you? Buffy, for instance?"

Spike laughed. "Not hardly. Wasn't on that kind of terms with the Slayer then. She didn't even know I was back in Sunnyhell, to miss me."

"Or Dawn?"

Spike had trouble not admitting that Dawn hadn't existed in those days, except for faked retroactive memories. "No," was still true, and enough to satisfy the compulsion. "'F I was on fire, none of the Scoobies would have pissed on me to put me out."

Hadn't meant to say that, or at least not quite that way. Have to put a better curb on his tongue.

Holding the mug to his chest, Rayne prompted, "Ask me how I escaped."

"So how'd you escape?" Spike responded obediently, startled to realize those wankers'd had Rayne too, apparently.

"I didn't," said Rayne brightly. "Thanks for asking." His twitch of a smile wasn't the least convincing. Rage was coming off him like smoke though his face didn't admit it. "I gave him every opportunity to ask, inquire after my three fucking years in hell, three years of unremitting torture. I waited for it. Practically pleaded for it. Some least recognition of what he'd done to me. Even without an apology, I would have forgiven him. But quite plainly, it wasn't merely a prison...or a laboratory, for that matter: it was quite literally an oubliette--a forgettery. He handed me over to those military savages...and never once troubled to wonder what had become of me. If I'd died, or gone mad, or been carved up into specimens for boffins to gawk at."

There were, Spike observed, different compulsions, and Rayne was in the throes of one. "That'd be after you'd turned him into a Fyarl. Good one, that," he added objectively.

"I thought he'd lose a few inhibitions. Have to admit to raging insecurity and anger at how he'd caged himself away from his true feelings, his true nature. I thought it would be instructive, as well as amusing."

"Slayer nearly offed him. But she does that to most of her friends, so it's nothing special."

"There, you see? The merest prank. For which I was dragged off to that obscene place, and tortured for the greater good of science, and forgotten. For three bloody years!"

Spike stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it. "So how'd you get out, then?"

Rayne had a hand to his mouth, biting at the knuckle not quite hard enough to make it bleed. After a moment, he said, "I didn't. I didn't escape. Was never rescued, never freed. The whole place was forgotten, it seems. Abandoned. It took me at least a week, after the food was gone and the water became undrinkable, to think to try the cage door. Standing was an issue, you see. And forget about walking. I crawled, and couldn't remember if the door opened inward or outward, and wasted absolute hours trying to push it when all I needed to do was crawl clear of the swing and pull." With another rictus smile, Rayne added, "I won't bore you with the other tiresome details, dear boy. You've been in their hands: you know."

"Yeah. I do. Haven't much liked hospitals, anyplace white with bright lights, since. Smell of--"

"--Betadine. Yes. We know." Rayne tipped his head up, drawing a long, strangled breath. "And not for putting me there but for forgetting, for not even bothering to care what had become of me, when the Hellmouth opens all the ways and dimensions, I intend to find the most painful and chaotic dimension, possibly Quar'toth. I shall drop him into it and then seal the gate for all time. See how he likes being forgotten, with all his Council airs and authority and his priggish denial of everything vital and real in him! Wouldn't you like to help me, dear heart? You can have no great affection for the Council in any of its incarnations; and Rupert merely tolerates you because Buffy gives him no choice. We're natural allies, you and I: both children of Chaos, after our own fashion. Wouldn't you prefer to be free? Help me willingly?"

Spike had to admit the idea had some appeal, if only to see the expression on Rupert's face. Soul didn't like it, insisting that Rupert had changed, showed him proper respect lately. Even helped get him out of the fog he couldn't have escaped on his own, though that was mostly the Lady, stuffing the soul back into him, so the soul was bound to put a favorable spin on it.

Rayne wanted comradeship here. Wanted willing cooperation based on shared misery. Which was rather a stupid thing to want of a vampire.

"Oh," Spike drawled, "so I have a choice about it, then? An' Bit, Dawn--does she get a choice, too?"

"You are missing the point!"

"If you say so."

"Are you expecting the Slayer to come and rescue you? She won't. She can't. You're here at my pleasure as long as I have use for you. And you'll come to accept it. Like it, even. Or do you like it enough already, that the thought of being without it forever sends shockwaves through your lovely, delicious system?"

It was lucky Spike couldn't answer all the parts of that at once. The jam of competing responses gave him time to choose what to say and how to say it. He lifted a shoulder in a negligent shrug. "Slayer will come for me. I know that. Wish she wouldn't, it will only bollocks things up, but she will. It's what she does. No matter how I've failed her, fucked everything up.... Just how she is, how she does. Won't work, I know that already. And as to the mindfuck, demon likes it well enough. Probably could get him to roll over and beg, if you haven't already, just for chuckles. As for me, I'll do what I have to and what I can, just like always. Not quite to the rolling over and begging stage because the sound track is bloody awful and the visuals make my eyes ache. So I expect--"

The wave crashed in and took him away into half-resented bliss. Piss 'em off, that's the ticket, he thought dimly, look how well it worked with that hellbitch Glory, in the instant before there was no more thought, only the demon roaring satisfaction.

**********

Drinking herbal tea and trying to find the calm part of awake, thinking blankly silver, silver, silver, Willow slapped her forehead and dashed for the den...and the laptop, sitting open on the table, just as Spike had left it. It was turned off, though (Better be, she thought rancorously, since if left running, it would have exhausted the battery by now). While waiting for it to boot and load, she ran back to the kitchen for her tea, set it down to the left of the keyboard, and then forgot it altogether while mousing and punching and frowning at the screen, navigating the levels and branches of the Council of Watchers database until she located Spike's directory. She'd set it up, but that had been months ago, and she'd forgotten.

Naturally, it was password-protected. But it was Spike. Her third guess, Ramones, opened the file listings to her and she was off and running--specifically, running a search on Silver. Five entries. Five of the documents Spike had translated. The first one was nothing goop on the completely fanciful effects of silver on vampires, which was nothing, nada, as Spike had annotated in the drop-down commentary box with scathing, profane glee. The next one concerned a magical artifact, the Mirror of Aelron, whose polished silver surface supposedly displayed the future if viewed under particular conditions, with elaborate preparations. That one worked, Spike commented, except that, like Dru's visions, what one saw was completely incomprehensible without the surrounding context...which the mirror did not show. Without being able to read the meaning, the visions were pretty...meaningless. Magical but useless, was his conclusion.

Before diving into the next file, Willow stepped back mentally and realized that Spike apparently had been concentrating on documents involving silver--choosing them rather than other files to work on. And he'd made a directory called "REF." She went into that and found about thirty discussions of the alchemical properties and uses of silver from the Council's main archive: just scanned in as-is, some with handwritten commentaries from earlier scholars/alchemists/mages, in a wild variety of languages. Likely the ones she couldn't read, Giles could, so she picked the ones in languages she knew fairly well--her Medieval Spanish wasn't that great, but with the heavy Latin influence, she could make out the gist of things—know whether it was a spell or a recipe for stewed chicken. She half rose, intending to call Giles (napping in the front room's big chair), then forgot as she'd forgotten the tea, intently reading through a discourse on the fundamental nature of unworked, unspelled silver. Raw in the ground: the impression she'd gotten from Spike's demon, she recalled, now that she saw it in pointy Gothic capitals.

Ten minutes later, she was shaking Giles' shoulder, and he was blearily reaching for his glasses, set aside on the chair's broad arm.

Willow blurted, "I know what it is, what to do. Earth magic!"

**********

When Mike insinuated himself as one of her guards, moving up the slant of the corridor, Dawn asked him sourly, "And how was your day?"

By her watch, it was just past eleven o'clock, and despite all the sleep--there was nothing to do in the wretched storeroom--she was achy, dirty, sore, thirsty, and miserable. And scared. Mustn't leave out scared.

This was it, then: Rayne was gonna cut her. Her own fault: she was still a stupid virgin. Having refused Mike, she'd had no other opportunity. She wondered if he held that against her.

He was wearing a blue tee tonight with the slogan "Happiness is a warm puppy" and a picture of a young, floppy Dalmatian on the front, all big feet and big eyes and flocked white spots. On the back was the name, phone number, and website of the Animal Rescue League. Mike paced beside her silently--maybe assigned to her escort by Digger; certainly wouldn't be here without Digger's knowledge and consent.

Last night, he'd been implicitly willing to be dusted for her. Now, by his silence and the way he didn't look at her, he'd distanced himself from such pointless impulses. Distanced himself from her.

She sort of guessed he hadn't come up with an alternative plan.

She imagined he felt really bad about it. Might feel really bad about it for a century or longer...when he bothered to remember...whereas she'd be rendered into her constituent elements and energies in less than an hour. It didn't seem fair.

They brought her at last into a cavern only slightly smaller than an airplane hanger, all cut up with partitions she would have blindly banged into except that her escort could see really well in the darkness and steered her around the turns with sudden jerks that made her flinch and stumble. They carried no flashlights or lanterns because they didn't need any; and making a frightened human girl more comfortable wasn't on anybody's agenda.

The only light she could see was a dim splotch on the ceiling. Then her escort turned another corner and it was like finding a campfire in a clearing in the woods--sudden brightness but so much smaller than the surrounding dark. Lanterns were hung at the corners of the big bay, and a flickering green-tinged flame burned in a brazier in the middle of it. Rayne was finishing drawing chalked lines to define the magical space, with an obvious corridor left open to let Dawn and her escort come in without touching any of the lines.

She saw Spike then: sitting on the ground in the dark circle below the brazier. Head and torso slumped forward onto arms folded over his knees, just the pale curve of his bent back showing. Not moving, not looking at anything. Not even rocking. Just puddled there like some street-corner beggar or homeless person too beaten down to even lift his eyes to the passers-by. If somebody was looking for a model for "hopeless despair," there he was, all set.

When Dawn recalled him doing the power walk entering the gym, that first time, all swagger and self-assurance, like he was the king of the world and cheerfully slumming among the peons with his entourage of SITs and crew fanned out behind, all in sublime, arrogant synchronicity, it made her stomach hurt and her eyes sting.

She dropped down on her knees beside him, flopping to sit with her legs tucked next to her before the knee scabs and bruises could protest too much. Patting his elbow tentatively, she greeted him hoarsely, "Hey."

Her touch startled him. He flinched away, huddling even tighter into himself.

"It's just me," she explained, lifting her hand, uncertain. "Only the star attraction, the headliner. The unique soon-to-be-bloody-sacrifice-Summers, appearing for one midnight only." She rested fingertips on his temple, stroked down the edge of his ear. "Your not being all charged up and rah for this makes me wonder if I should be worried. Spike?"

He wasn't taking it in, wasn't reacting. Seemed oblivious to her presence.

Rayne came then and gripped her elbow, raising and pulling her off to the inside periphery of the chalked circle. While one of the attendant vamps held her from behind with one hand gripping her shoulder and the other bent under her chin, around her neck, Rayne briskly secured her ankles, then fastened her wrists in front of her with narrow, very tight cord. It didn't budge when Dawn experimentally pulled against it. As he stooped and bobbed, checking his handiwork, Dawn barely restrained the impulse to knee him in the chin, mainly because she couldn't. With her ankles lashed together, all she could have managed was a small bunny-hop quickly followed by a humiliating falling-down.

When Rayne straightened, she took some satisfaction finding herself taller by at least an inch. Just the right height to spit straight into his face. Her mouth was dry: by sucking her teeth, she'd saved up spit against this opportunity. "My sister is so gonna get you for this!"

"Doubtful," Rayne said, going to a small table set up by the brazier and returning with a potato-sized crystal he moved here and there before her like a light meter. It shone yellow, whatever that meant. "Fine. Exactly as advertised...." Strolling back to the table and fussing with the stuff there, Rayne continued, over his shoulder, "I'm told that the Slayer has already made her appearance, about an hour ago, at one of the lesser-used entrances, and been soundly beaten back. Strong and fierce, but not wise, with her little party of inept followers. Threatened bloody mayhem, but couldn't deliver on it. I'd think even she would now be persuaded of the futility of trying to interrupt our ceremony. But she's welcome to try as many times as she likes...in the small time remaining." Bringing back a wet cloth, Rayne proceeded to remove, with small, precise dabs, what Dawn guessed were smudges on her face, squinting critically like a cosmetician applying makeup. Or a technician preparing a clinically eviscerated corpse to be pretty for public viewing.

Dawn shut her eyes, unable to prevent tears from leaking from under her eyelids.

Buffy's try at rescue had failed. Spike was practically comatose, withdrawn, and probably crazy. Mike had no plan except blowing everything up and bringing down several gigillion tons of ceiling on them, which really wasn't likely to help. Nobody was gonna save her. She hoped Spike was fucking happy she'd maintained her fucking purity on his say-so, done what she'd promised despite all misgivings. Herself, she didn't take much satisfaction in it. It was all such a waste....

With her wrists tied and without a tissue, she couldn't even blow her nose.

Bent over Spike, Rayne roused him enough that when Rayne proffered the rough, irregular globe that was the Stone, Spike accepted it and set it in his lap, clasping it in wide-spread hands. Head raptly thrown back, Spike was in game face: stark, beautiful, and alien in the flickering illumination. Serpentine blue markings down the tensed muscles of his arms shimmered and seemed to crawl.

Although Dawn could sense nothing of whatever opening arpeggios he was performing through the Stone, the vamps around were reacting, dragged a pace toward the center: hunched forward in palpable desire, their faces more bestial and feral, their yellow eyes wide and seeming moon-blinded; close pairs turned on each other in sudden indignation, snarling, squaring off. Things nearly blew up then, Dawn wildly hoped they would, only belatedly realizing, as Rayne angrily hauled the Stone away from Spike (who didn't want to let go and let himself be dragged rather than release it), that if all hell broke loose, she would be one of the first casualties. So she supposed it was just as well Rayne did something to Spike that made Spike lose his hold on the Stone and collapse, arms still outstretched.

Again, Dawn could only infer the cause from the effect.

Stalking to the table, Rayne thumped the Stone down there and then proceeded to scuff-erase enough of the containing circle that the vamps could pass through, single file. Vamps could have jumped to beyond the circle without even a running start; but clearly Rayne didn't know that, just as he plainly hadn't anticipated the vamps' reaction to the siren Stone.

When he'd remade the circle with quick strokes, and only the three of them were left inside, Rayne strolled slowly back to look down at Spike, arms folded. "That wasn't very nice."

Raising himself on braced arms, Spike lifted a fanged vampire grin, and the two of them regarded each other for a long moment.

"Why did you do that?" Rayne inquired--as though he took it personally, as though he really wanted to know.

Spike's features shifted to his human countenance. No longer grinning, he looked sullen, weary. "'Cause I could. 'Cause it shuts out that other, that you keep pushing in on me. Takes up a bloke's whole attention, making that rock sing. 'Cause while I do that, you're not cutting Bit."

"But you don't want to miss the moment," Rayne responded, as though reminding Spike of something they both knew. "You dread the alternative."

The defiance slumped out of Spike's pose. He turned his face away.

Rayne went on gently, "You've ruined, killed, or corrupted everything and everyone you've ever touched. You've sown Chaos on a scale worthy of admiration...but you take no joy in it anymore. You perceive it as failure and let it hurt you when you should glory in it as the creature of Chaos that you are. Succeed at this and you will be freed--"

"No. I'll burn."

Going down on one knee, Rayne stroked and soothed Spike's face with his hands, saying something to him that was to Dawn only a murmur. Then, all sincerity and solicitude, he leaned and kissed Spike on the mouth, which Dawn considered fairly ewww but wasn't all that surprised at, everything considered. Everybody reacted to Spike passionately, one way or another. Nobody was indifferent. Spike wouldn't tolerate it. He cultivated extremes.

She'd been concentrating on doing a little heel-and-toe sidewise maneuver that inched her to the innermost line. She scuffed and broke it, then heel-and-toed herself back to about where she'd been, standing straight and innocent, like when Buffy challenged her about the doneness of homework. Dawn had no idea what effect breaking the line would have, but whatever it was, Rayne would be caught in it too, and Spike, well, Spike could survive anything. And with Rayne gone, Spike would be himself again--wouldn't want to lean against the mage and be comforted and convinced.

Still holding Spike's face in his hands, Rayne said, "We must do this now, dear heart. Or we'll miss the moment. Are you going to be good for me? When I can't allow you to be distracted?"

Whatever he saw apparently reassured him, or at least he acted as though it did--going to collect the Stone, then formally offering it as he had before. Rocking to sit upright, Spike took it and bowed over it, immediately absorbed in whatever effect he and the Stone were having on one another. It was like music, Dawn thought, that only he could hear. But he was done fooling around: this was a Working, and this time, Dawn could feel it as an uneasy jitter in her bones. The vast shadows seemed to twist and loom eagerly. And Rayne approached her, chanting, with glittering eyes. In his hand he held upraised a large, simple dagger, without ornament or markings--as stripped to its sole purpose as a vampire's fangs or the taskin tooth swaying uselessly between her breasts.

It was like one of those dreams where you couldn't run. Except, of course, that it was real. Forgetting her bonds, trying to back away, Dawn fell, scrabbling with her heels on the cavern floor, still trying to push herself away. Rayne bent to take a fistful of hair and braced a leg behind her. She couldn't move, couldn't breathe. The frantic beat of her heart was all she could hear until, at Spike's shout, everything went still.

Instantly, Rayne released her to go to Spike, who was curled up tight, arms wrapped around his head, sobbing. The Stone had rolled away, ignored as Rayne tried to determine what the problem was and Spike, plainly devastated, got out that the Stone had "kicked back at him" somehow, locked him in an agonizing feedback loop of some sort with no outlet. It was everywhere, sucking him out of himself, he couldn't help it, the harder he tried, the worse it got....

Seeming to accept Spike's incoherent explanation without the least question, or perhaps with confirmation beyond the words, Rayne looked around the cavern, then made a gesture and spoke a Word. Everywhere, tiny lights appeared. Like thin, still lightning bolts threaded through the rock. The cavern shone with its own eldritch luminescence.

"Bloody hell!" the mage cried, sounding very like Spike in a rage, as the lights began to fade. "Ashteroth damn her to the uttermost stinking pit of the Hell of Tulips! That never to be sufficiently vilified witch has charged the native silver! It's become one huge magic sink, prepared to absorb anything within its range, interfering-- It could hardly be worse if she'd blessed it, but that would have taken actual power whereas the rankest amateur-- Here, it's all right, dear heart. You were not to know--it wasn't your fault. I know it meant a great deal to you for this to go well, for us not to be forced to the fallback. You tried your best. It was a flawless beginning, truly. I could almost feel the universe trembling on its hinges and beginning to open." Blurting reassurances, Rayne was down on his knees again, cradling Spike inconsolably sprawled in his arms.

Definitely ewww, but Spike always had been a sucker for anybody who treated him kindly, acted as if they liked him. Never having had much occasion, he'd never had much defense against it, and had lost most of that, what with Buffy and everybody, even Xander, treating him at least civilly. Some of them outright loving him.

And Rayne was obviously a sucker for hurt/comfort. The more Spike hurt, the more irresistible Rayne found him. Vaguely, she wondered if Spike had noticed that.

By her watch, it was 12:06.

Yay, Willow! Dawn thought exultantly, lying trussed on the floor, aching with relief and the buzzing aftermath of terror and panic. She wasn't saved, wasn't rescued, but Willow had bought her a twelve hour stay of execution. Rayne had missed his "moment," and as she recalled, the next opportunity would be mid-day...when Light was ascendant; away from the perpetual midnight of the magic-sink caverns and shafts, the impregnable fortress.

Change the rules, change the game, maybe change the outcome.

But Spike, so puzzlingly strange, so far beyond her reach...that worried her.
 
 

 

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

 

Chapter 21: Noon

All the trace silver had been wakened. No longer neutral and inert, it hungrily absorbed all magic within its range; and its range grew as it fed.

That was no direct problem to Spike, but it was to Rayne, who found, before the night was over, that he could no longer generate the pleasure he used to keep Spike distracted and reasonably cooperative. The silver created static and added the energies to its charge. And losing the distraction--and insulation--of the pleasure, Spike was bored and uneasy. He slept...and dreamed of burning.

He woke with a yell, up and on his feet in an instant, shaking and disoriented.

The next second, Rayne recovered himself from the corner of the caboose where Spike had unthinkingly flung him and was back, holding Spike tight and close from behind, arms around Spike's chest, making soothing sounds until Spike was fully awake and surrendered to the embrace, still shuddering.

That had been a bad one. The worst yet. Heat and flame as deep as he went, and he'd felt himself starting to disintegrate into exploding incandescence. His demon was practically shrieking in terror and he wasn't too sanguine about it himself. No use telling himself it was only a dream, with the certainty of the noontime ceremony before him.

Dreams like that weren't a warning. They were a certainty; and he felt that certainty all through him, fragile and full of dread.

"We can't stay here," Rayne reflected, leaning forward to kiss the hinge of Spike's jaw. "We have to move now, not later."

"Gonna burn," Spike muttered, shutting his eyes and making himself not reach for calm, letting the desperate, involuntary breaths he was pulling in make him dizzy. He too was using distractions, presenting the demon's mostly unreflecting terror or appetites to keep Rayne from looking sharper, deeper than the surface. Spike wasn't sure he could keep doing that--letting his demon have free rein. Couldn't sort the confusion like that. Couldn't keep watch on the patterns, see the convergences he needed, to know what to do and when.

He'd just about lost himself into the demon--the definition of a fledge--when the silver had sparked back at him, interrupting his channeling of the Stone. Couldn't have that. But couldn't risk losing that camouflage, either. He didn't know what to do.

"No you won't," Rayne insisted urgently, hugging him tighter, breathing warm against his cheek. "I won't let you. I'll protect you. But I can't do that here... Come--sit down," Rayne said, pulling and guiding him back to the cot and sitting beside him there, all concerned and consoling, offering his warmth in place of the memory of fire as though he knew how terribly cold Spike was deep inside, with only extremes to choose from.

Helplessness was cold. Fear was cold. Everything that wasn't the consuming fire was cold, even though he dreaded it. Fire and ice, he thought, his mind spinning away into the poetry of apocalypse. He'd always found poetry a refuge, even though he couldn't write it worth shit. Needed it now, to focus, but Rayne had taken it away, the green words on his arm, that he rubbed absently, missing the certainty of what had been written there....

"Would you like a drink?"

"God, yes!"

"I'll have some brought," Rayne decided, getting up as though he really didn't want to, was afraid of Spike bursting completely apart without Rayne's embrace to anchor him. "Won't be but a moment, dear heart," he added anxiously, not leaving: waiting for something from Spike. Agreement, reassurance, maybe.

Spike didn't know, didn't care. Could only feel the formless waiting and expectation. He was seeing in Picasso jaggedness, Monet blurs again. Edges and corners of things that were themselves undefined and unrecognizable. Wrapping arms tightly around himself, he began rocking. That had pattern and made him feel marginally better.

It wasn't Rayne's warmth he missed because it didn't mean anything. A touch from Buffy or from Bit, that would have warmed him all the way through. But couldn't have that now. Had to be away from them, separate, to do what he must. But he hadn't known it would be so dreadfully cold to put himself beyond their reach, except in his mind....

He didn't notice Rayne leaving, but after an unknown, uncounted time noticed him back, pouring liquor into a glass. Spike left him the glass and grabbed the bottle, putting the contents down in long, desperate gulps so that the inside would match the outside, what he felt and what he saw, all blurred incoherence. Couldn't have enough of that, soon enough. Couldn't keep control or fully lose it, neither one.

Wasn't up to this. Really wasn't. Terrible idea to begin with but he was in it now, and had pulled Dawn with him. Hoped she was all right and would forgive him but that was Mike's now, to see to her, and he supposed the forgiving didn't matter since he wouldn't know about it, the one way or the other, until he could hold out his hand to her and await her answer as he'd dreamed of doing so many times--sometimes with one result, sometimes with another, but always the burning. No variation in that. So maybe it didn't signify whether she forgave him or not since it all came out burning in the end.

Holding the glass, Rayne was watching him uncertainly, a small perplexed frown between his brows. With a sort of shrug, Rayne took a sip, then made a face of distaste. Spike didn't care: he was interested only in effect. Rayne watched him again. They were having a dialogue of motions, gestures. How nice.

"Don't get too impaired to walk," Rayne advised, as though the alternative worried him.

Spike quit swallowing long enough to assert, "'M never too drunk to walk." Anyway, it was only a pint: not enough to get properly snockered with.

Rayne continued to look worried and uncertain, then went outside to talk to whatever runner was posted there. Spike could feel the vamp, knew it wasn't Mike anymore, and beyond that didn't care. Rayne was ordering up an escort, his little gaggle of fire mages, and making security arrangements for moving Bit, who'd be needed later. Be simpler with a phone, but Digger, traditional vamp that he was, didn't do phones. Likely didn't know how. Or maybe in the deeps, reception was crap. What you didn't depend on couldn't fuck you up when it failed. Maybe Digger had the right of it, after all.

Finishing the pint, Spike pitched it away. He could feel the chemical warmth start to flow out from his center. Not anything real, and not what he needed, but it would do for now. Drunk could also be good camouflage. Not likely Rayne would look past that, if Spike made himself obnoxious enough. And he'd never had much problem with that.

**********

The kitchen timer went off. Both Buffy and Giles glanced around as Willow, with sleepy concentration, poured the used scrying powder, the materia, off the map onto a saucer, then started preparing the map for the next location spell. Since she'd been methodically checking every hour, the thrill was pretty much gone for the observers: after a sip of tea Giles resumed his explanation of Tannhäuser, and Buffy propped her chin back on her fist.

She said, "So I get that this Venusburg is a sort of operatic whorehouse, and this poet/singer/knight Tanhouse--"

"Tannhauser."

"--Tan-whatever gets himself enthralled there and then he's sorry. But what's that got to do with Spike? I mean, he has a nice enough voice, and he argues about who stole from who about the Billy Idol look, but he's not a glam rock star or anything. It's just the look. The image."

"It's all about image, really. Contrasting images. The pleasures of the flesh," Giles went on, looking so prissy and teacherish that nobody would suspect he knew any except from a report, long ago, "as opposed to the exaltation of the spirit. Carnal love as opposed to holy, chaste love, with the Venusburg the exemplar of the former. Tannhäuser tried to embrace both, and it killed him. But the pope's staff bloomed, you see, so it seems God accepted Tannhäuser's repentance and forgave him, as the pope could not. At least according to the legend."

Buffy fiddled with her Diet Coke can. "But this Tan-whatever, he was happy there, right?" She was remembering Spike collared and oiled, stretched languorously by the fire at the mansion.

"Tannhäuser was a git. No matter where he was, he was unsatisfied. In the arms of Venus, he wanted holiness. In respectable society, he proclaimed the primacy of carnal ecstasy."

"That's like sex, right?" Buffy formulated dubiously.

"One presumes so."

"So why throw that up at Spike? He's never wanted to be holy. Far from it!"

Giles considered her with an expression suggesting he was thinking about all sorts of embarrassing implications he wasn't gonna actually say out loud. "He wanted you. Quite consistently and absurdly. Perhaps that's his version."

"Of what?"

"Of heaven."

Buffy felt compelled to blurt, "Giles, I'm not holy!"

"Perhaps you are, Buffy--from the viewpoint of a vampire. Which he insists on being and refuses to even try to repudiate. After his fashion, Spike also wants incompatible things. Wants to be, and remain, the Big Bad, and also to be a righteous and honorable man. Your champion and lover, and also the Master Vampire of Sunnydale, with all that entails. Finally, he cannot be both; and I believe he knows it. So in referring to the Venusburg, I suppose I was teasing him a bit about his inconsistencies...and because I knew that he'd understand the reference but probably wouldn't admit it, from assumed lower-class snobbery. Also, it was apt, given the manner of the enthrallment and the absurdity of a narrow ferret like Ethan cast as a blowsy, Teutonic Venus...." Giles made a quick open-handed, dismissive gesture. "Small pedantic joke, of no great moment or profundity."

"Huh."

Lifting her head, Willow announced, "They're moving," and both Buffy and Giles leaned to study the map, which now showed a bright red dot a finger's breadth from where it'd appeared before.

Buffy demanded, "Where?"

"Well, I can't tell yet, can I?" Willow exasperatedly puffed a few strands of hair away from her face.

"Do it again, then."

Willow shook her head. "If they're in a car, with Spike stuffed in the trunk or something, they'd be wherever they're going before we could get mobilized. If they're walking, they'll have to zig-zag because, well, pipes. So all I'm gonna get is the general direction until they stop."

While Buffy considered the kitchen window, bright with dawning, Willow continued, "It's still early. Either this ritual takes a whole lot of prep or the earth magic, charging the silver, has made Rayne too itchy to stay holed up in the Great Underground Empire. In which case, yay us! We've forced them into something like the open, which I doubt was the original plan. Grues, I mean vamps, aren't too keen on sunlight."

Reminded and grimly reflecting for a moment on Spike's dreams of burning, Buffy decided, "If the opposition's moving, we should be too." Sliding off her stool, she waited a second for all the creaky joints to get in gear, then headed for the front room where the SITs were variously sleeping or readying weaponry. When the awake ones registered her presence, Buffy said, "Saddle up."

Rona asked plaintively, "Breakfast first?"

After a moment's grudging consideration, Buffy nodded. "But we'll grab it on the way. As soon as we know where we're going."

*********

When Spike came out of the fog enough to realize where they were going, he found it irresistibly funny. Flopping on the walk-rim of the tunnel, he put his head down on his arms and laughed until tears came, ignoring attempts by the escort Digger had assigned to haul him back to his feet. Then he demanded more liquor. Demanded smokes. Then he started punching out the nearest vamp, just on general principles. Rayne wanted Chaos? Spike would give him Chaos. And random, he couldn't be read, so he was as random and contrary as possible until the fog swept back in. Wasn't hard: he'd had decades of practice pissing people off. Came naturally, pretty much. No thought required.

When next he came to himself, he was actually there: in the factory. Michael had certainly made cats' meat of it, just as Buffy had said. Most of the windows broken: vast slants of morning sunlight blazing in, whole large tracts of the floor it would be flaming death to cross. Rayne was looking around, dismayed. Likely expected the defensive fortress Spike had made of it, not the wreck Mike's anger had left.

But the back, behind the barricade of dead machinery, was still pretty much intact, and no windows there. Coming through from the only tunnel access, back there, seeing the brightness beyond, none of the dozen or so vamps of the escort had ventured past the wall of machines. No wonder: Spike's demon was having a bit of a fit, exposed in the open with so much light sizzling just beyond his fingertips. Just Spike and Rayne and Rayne's three fire mages out on the factory floor.

Slowly, head tilted, Spike experimentally extended his right hand into a sunbeam. There was warmth, then pain, then his fingers starting to smoke. With a cry, Rayne noticed what Spike was doing. Rayne grabbed and shoved him against one of the machines of the barrier hard enough that Spike reeled and stumbled, rebounding. Rayne caught and shoved him again, into the vamps, who manhandled him through the gap into the safer darkness, a few taking quick shots at his middle because they could and Rayne might not catch them at it. Had a fair collection of bruised, aching places, he noticed as he went down. Uneasy, nervous, vamps lashed out. Just how it was. A few kicks, too, before they backed off to let Rayne through.

Hands on hips, glaring down at Spike slowly trying to right himself, Rayne demanded, "Are you insane? Are you five? Can't I take my eyes off you for an entire minute without your getting yourself into trouble?"

Spike didn't answer, getting unsteadily to his feet, favoring a knee he wasn't sure would hold him. Rayne whipped a suspicious glance around the vamp escort, who backed off farther, idly picking up bits of trash from the floor and looking as innocent as game-face allowed.

Spike started limping a wandering path toward the back left corner. "Knackered," he said to nobody in particular. "Gonna have a bit of a lie-down." Since nobody prevented him, and the fog held off, he veered around the trashed remains of the office and the spill of broken glass (barefoot, he missed his boots) roundabout to the square pit of the freight elevator shaft. He stood a minute, considering it. No elevator in it anymore: should be a clean drop. Might be rubbish piled at the bottom, though; and he couldn't be sure about that knee. Couldn't make up his mind. Then felt Rayne rummaging around in his head, checking if there was an exit down there (there wasn't), whether Spike had hatched some plan (he hadn't), whether Spike needed to be thrown back into mind-fogged restraint. Spike waited out the periodic inspection dully, just feeling blank and tired, hurting in assorted places.

Released so Rayne and his mages could begin setting up for the ritual, Spike blinked at the black shaft, absently licking the back of his hand, then decided the hell with it and stepped into the hole, turning to catch the edge one-handed for a second before completing the drop. There was trash--crates, scraps of broken furniture. He landed in a crooked sprawl. Face to face with Sue.

**********

Rayne's cowled, robed mages didn't come for Dawn until mid-morning, and no way was getting out of school worth it. After miles of ascending passages and being hauled up sheer shafts in rope slings, they exited from a shed beside a rusty railroad track overgrown with weeds and overlooked by a water tower like a teetery striding alien just about to succumb to the plague. Dazzled and disoriented, Dawn winced and shaded her eyes, trying to get used to there being a sun up there and light all around and a chilly breeze that made her shiver and hug herself. She felt like some grotty blouse stuffed in the back of a drawer and forgotten--smelly and creased with unappealing wrinkles.

A battered old Ford pulled up, mostly red, coughing smoke in the last stages of automotive emphysema. The mages bundled her into the back seat between them, the third one sliding in by the driver, a nervous teenaged boy. Dawn thought the teen had been hired for the job, on the cheap; his zits did not convey an impression of blinding intelligence.

On the principle of "Nothing ventured, nothing gained," Dawn was about to wail that she was being kidnapped, as though three robed guys hauling a grimy high-school-aged girl around an abandoned rail line didn't have a high enough weirdness factor to make anybody blink, but when she opened her mouth, all that came out was a wheezy squeak. She tried again. Not even a squeak, this time. Some way, the mages had stolen her voice--like the creepy Gentlemen she partly remembered but mostly had heard about. She looked around wildly, pointing at her throat and fish-gasping mouth as though she thought it was some terrible oversight, an unintended mistake they'd correct if she could just make them realize. Which was dumb, she admitted to herself, when she could stop hyperventilating and sagged back between the two mages, arms sullenly folded and bottom lip quivering.

Being kidnapped was almost ho-hum compared to being voiceless. Dawn felt singularly deprived and pitiful, to be dragged to her doom not even able to complain.

She wasn't surprised when the car passed the mall without turning: too many people, too much activity. The high weirdness of ritual sacrifice might be noticed, even in Sunnydale, in broad daylight even though the mall's interior was vamp-friendly and therefore there were usually a few vamps around, hunting. Even in Sunnydale, somebody might be inclined to try to interfere or at least report it to mall security. There could be complications.

But her eyes opened wider when the car turned off the highway onto the potholed industrial drive. Could they be headed for... Yes! she shouted inwardly as the Ford bumped uphill, turned, and nosed in near the familiar sentry-post alcove of the factory. Spike's factory.

She didn't know why the sight of it made her feel so much better, so much more hopeful that she didn't even struggle or kick, being hauled out of the car and inside, with the protesting teenager being hustled along right behind her.

Nobody on duty at the sentry post, check. And the inside like the aftermath of a tornado, heaps of junk, broken windows, and parts of the sheet-metal roof gone so the sunlight came right in, all the shadows pitch black by contrast, that she was being forced toward.

On the far side of the barrier, a couple of vamps took the teenager off the mages' hands. He was unceremoniously eaten. As Dawn winced away, the mages let go of her: obviously, there was no longer any place to run.

Automatically, Dawn continued toward the office--not realizing, in the dimness, that it'd been battered into flinders until her shoes crunched on glass. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the tumbled heap that used to be wall supports, a desk, the broken shells of molded pink fiberglass chairs... Off to her right, halfway to the tunnel access hatch, Rayne and his mages were drawing the containing circle on the concrete floor by the light of a lantern a vamp was holding high like a really ugly, oversized lawn ornament.

No sign of Spike, which was puzzling but not worrying: his presence was required, as hers was. When the time came, Dawn knew he'd be there. All the same, she wanted to see him, see if he was right in the head yet, find out what he planned to do when push came to shove.

Because all of this had to mean something, right? Spike, who never left off fighting, never gave up, caving so easily to capture and deep bewilderment--there had to be a reason, right? Had to be a reason why he'd as good as asked her to stay in prime, pure sacrificial condition, not that she'd really intended otherwise, but it wasn't normally the sort of thing she and Spike talked about. So why bring it up if he didn't have a plan and that was something needed to fit into it?

Unless the plan had gotten lost as he had, with the craziness and the rocking....

Figuring he was probably on the lower level in the erstwhile fledges' dormitory, since that was about the only other place to be, she carefully circled the spills of glass until she bumped into one of the steel elevator supports and hung on there. She tried to call his name before remembering she had no voice, and made a wry face. She thought a moment, then took hold of the taskin fang on its cord, intending to bang on the support and at least make a noise that way. A voice quietly saying her name made her turn.

In game-face, Mike was laying out fast-food clamshell containers on the floor. As Dawn hesitantly approached, he remarked, "Vamp that was supposed to fetch you breakfast sort of forgot. Sort of had an accident. So Digger, he gave me leave to bring it. Don't want the Lady to have no complaint, how you were treated. Mostly cold. Couldn't help that. Think I got some of the things you like, anyway...." Laying out plastic cutlery in a twist of napkin, he stopped, stilled: head still bent, features still downcast, an ill-trimmed wing of hair falling over his forehead. "You mad at me, Dawn? That I ain't got you out of this yet?"

Realizing he was taking her silence as reproach, Dawn tapped his shoulder. When he looked up, Dawn made talky-mouth with her hand, slapped the other hand over her mouth, and lifted the talky-mouth hand palm-up, helplessly. She could tell, even in game-face, when he got it. His face cleared for a moment, then clenched into a scowl as he looked over his shoulder at the mages.

Dawn found it strange how the situation changed because Mike was in it. Nothing was different and everything was different. She was happy and at ease in his company. Maybe her body would be shed today. And maybe her being afraid of that was just a reflex. Habit. She was the least pinch of an awareness, and a force, perhaps as old as Time itself; and even bodiless, she'd still known the parts that were her, and collected them to her, and bound them with a bit of soul, and been herself. And Mike was a vampire--six, going on forever. She smiled at him fondly.

Then she tapped his shoulder again, recalling his attention. Leaning and reaching, she pulled at his upper arm, and he was willing but puzzled, not knowing what she wanted from him. She sank down and drew his big hand, palm-up, into her lap as though she were a gypsy going to read the lines. But with her fingertip she wrote on his open hand invisible lines for him to read: L I A R.

Because as close a watch as Digger had set on him, as close confined as Digger had kept him, there was no way Digger would have let him go waltzing out to mess into the Working his Sire was to be forced to perform, the Working whose centerpiece was the sacrifice of the human girl Mike had defected trying to protect. No matter how furious Mike claimed to be with Spike, Digger plainly had his doubts and reservations, and had put Mike on very obvious probation he'd openly violated in coming. Totally AWOL. When Digger found out, Mike either ran or he was dust.

They didn't have to talk, she found, to understand each other.

Mike's golden eyes had gone fierce and hot. The brow ridge seemed even heavier and more pronounced. Reaching out a careful finger, she stroked across his brows. Vamps liked that.

In a choked voice slightly slurred by fangs, he muttered, "Not gonna let them do you. Not Rayne. Not no one at all. But I don't know how to play it with vamps in the mix, and Goddam fucking mages. What does for one won't do for the other. They'd just take me down and go on. Ain't been able to figure how to manage it, all on my own."

Dawn tapped his forehead until he looked up at her again. Tilting her head toward the elevator shaft and rigging, she mouthed, Ask Spike.

For a second he was puzzled. Then the anger and frustration smoothed into his usual impassivity and Dawn wondered what he was thinking. Leaning in, he took a good deep breath by her neck, the bridge of his nose resting for a moment against her jaw. Then he rose casually, looked around to check who was attending to what, strolled to the shaft and vanished.

Dawn tore into the clamshells. She was starving!

**********

Mike wasn't much surprised to find that the remnants of Spike's crew had laired up here. It was a good enough place, he supposed...and where else were they to go, masterless, with no protection except each another?

"He'll tell on us," Sue muttered anxiously to Huey, but the three other vamps--dour Huey, uncertain Toby, and Mary who was about the only dangerous one among them--didn't move. Mike stayed where he'd landed, balanced, waiting until he was reasonably sure he wasn't gonna have to take on all four of them, then looked around until he spotted Spike curled up asleep in a pile of blankets and bedding.

As Mike took a step in that direction, Huey eased between, asking, "Digger send you?"

It was a pointed and delicate question. Mike thought about it a minute before shaking his head. "I'm here to get Dawn out."

Rousing, Spike sat up stiffly, saying, "Afterward. If there's an afterward. Not now."

He looked trashed and thrashed, but with him awake, the other vamps relaxed and went on about their business: stripping off the colors and sorting through discarded clothes for replacements.

Mike didn't like it, that Spike was still granted authority. Didn't like it that Spike still expected to call the shots after the way he'd fucked it all up, and the other vamps were letting him. Didn't like it that, having put Dawn in such jeopardy, Spike wasn't frantic to get her out of it. The way Mike was. Who had no plan, no authority, and no backup. Mike's hands closed into fists, and he was scowling, but he made himself say, "Got Digger's place mined, but then the party moved out, so that's no use."

Spike asked, "What time is it?"

Automatically Mike pulled out the watch and snapped it open. "Ten minutes of noon." Then he was annoyed at himself, to be so easily obedient.

Eyes shut and arms out before him, Spike had a slow, bone-cracking stretch. "Yeah, I can see that," he reflected softly. "You lot, you're Digger's and you came with Michael 'cause Digger had word the Slayer sussed out the move and is gonna try again to bust it up. Digger sent Michael to see to it. Huey, can you play that?"

"Slayer coming?" Huey asked.

"I expect."

"Keep her out?" Huey sounded dubious.

"Let her in. Toby, you take the sentry door. Don't expect anything to come that way--"

"They'll know," Toby blurted, "we weren't sent. Know we're not Digger's. Digger's vamps, the mages--"

"Hit him for me," Spike directed wearily, with a wave, and when Huey had clouted the smaller vamp off his feet, Spike slowly stood, working soreness out of his shoulders, twisting his back to one side, then the other. "What you're not taking account of," he told Toby patiently, "is how much they don't care. Digger said come, they came. While they're here, Rayne gives the orders, and Rayne wouldn't know one vamp from another unless they came color-coded." He looked down at himself--no duster, no shirt, no boots, just flimsy black harem pants--then sharply up at Mike, who prudently said nothing.

Mike had nothing, and knew it. Spike, maybe, had a plan or at least an idea. And supporters, who'd rather have the illusion of security that orders gave them than think for themselves. Mike would let Spike call it...until he saw a chance to get Dawn clear. Then all bets were off.

Mike was unimpressed: Spike was obviously making it up on the fly. What would Spike have done if the remnants of the crew hadn't chosen to lair up here, if Mike hadn't shown up? Taken on the opposition himself? More likely, caved into craziness and done whatever Rayne wanted. Let Dawn be sacrificed. Let it all go to hell, the way he had the sweeps, the factory, and the crew.

Spike was behaving as though everything was going as he'd expected. Mike didn't believe it for a second.

It was just a chance convergence, not a plan. Mike was going along with it only because he didn't have anything better.

Spike was continuing, "Michael, you're lead. Huey, you're second. Mingle. Don't start anything till the mages are distracted. Then do all the vamps, quick as you can."

Still sensibly on the floor, Toby whined, "How'll we know when the mages are distracted?"

Spike gave him a long look but didn't have Huey inflict more discipline. "Just don't you get distracted. Michael's lead, Michael calls it. When he--"

Spike went silent, and everybody else faded back, because a vamp was approaching the top of the shaft. Spike dove for the bedding. The vamp called down a summons from Rayne. Getting no response, the vamp jumped to the lower level. He had a leg pulled back for a kick when Mike's hand closed over his mouth, Huey held him, and Sue fiercely dispatched him with a piece of scrap wood.

As Huey brushed off his unbuttoned shirt, Mike mentioned neutrally, "You know we're outnumbered about three to one. Not counting the mages."

Rising, Spike was looking assessingly at the top of the shaft. "Don't count the mages. I'll do for them. Or they'll do for me, maybe...."

Jumping, Spike caught the lift rail about halfway up, then hitched himself the rest of the way to the top and over the edge.

"Wait," Mike told Huey absently. "I'll clear the hatch. Then you all drift along the back, make like you came in that way. Sue, you know best after me how Digger runs things. Anybody asks, you do the talking."

Standing beside Huey, Sue set her hands on her hips. "You turned on Spike. Now you're double-crossing Digger. Who you gonna turn on next, Michael?" Spike's way of referring to him was a snarl in her mouth.

That was rich, coming from her, after her Lady MacBeth night at the Bronze.

She was still only a fledge, Mike thought, moving to whatever wind that blew. He was the steady, consistent one, even though he couldn't have explained it to her and had no interest in trying.

If they hadn't been there, he would have dusted Spike without compunction, then got Dawn clear some way in the confusion. Spike, he thought, knew that perfectly well, yet had set him at lead.

Mike had no confidence in plans made by the certifiably insane.

**********

Spike swung out on the upper floor and stood for a moment, head bowed. Certainly not praying, proper vamps never did that, totally counterproductive: just being still, getting a clear sense of himself, settling himself to the thing at hand. Then he lifted his chin, sniffed in a short breath, and clapped his hands like a gunshot, stepping out briskly toward the others, hollering, "Let's get this bloody thing done, then. What's the holdup?"

The concentric circles were made, with their Nerfi and H'loon protection spells. Mages and Dawn inside, vamps outside; and this time the outer line of writing would keep them out: Spike was halted at the edge as if by an uncrossible doorway. The air stank of magic, the mix of junk burning in the brazier, and faintly, Dawn's fear. Her eyes were huge.

He couldn't think about that. Make a noise, pull all eyes to him to distract from Mike and the crew sliding out of the shaft in the dimness behind.

Spike spun on his heel (missing the duster's weight and swirl, missing his boots to come down solidly) and started pacing the rim, declaring, "You're gonna miss your time, wankers, an' all this for nothing." He locked his eyes on Rayne, holding the shut box. "So gimme the thing, trinket, bloody lawn ornament shot-put, hey?"

Rayne opened the box, revealing the Stone, and Spike could feel its unshielded keening like electricity everywhere, jittering on his last nerve. He didn't flinch, held himself still as Rayne came toward him with the Stone, kept an expression of bored and generally pissed-off, but Rayne wasn't fooled. Could see it in his eyes, maybe, or just know that if Spike had been human, he'd have been covered in muck sweat. Terrified to take the thing, attune himself to it and let it take him; terrified of what would come after--what he'd dreamed of so many times.

Stopping in reach, carefully between the runes, Rayne insisted softly, "It will be all right. The sun can't get at you. And there are four of us to protect you."

"Yeah, sure. Hand it over."

"You'll bring it all down. Glorious destruction. What you were made for."

"I was made by a bint with an itch in an alley. Ain't gonna persuade me, mage. An' keep out of my head now: it's distracting."

That was a thing Spike was depending on--that once he touched the stone, Rayne would have to leave him alone to do the Working, fearing to break his concentration, unable to tolerate the forces loosed by and through the Stone. Touching the Stone, he'd be free.

The dread and reluctance hid the eagerness banked like black fire within him.

Because he had to, smiling, the mage let the Stone's rough weight fall into Spike's hands.

Spike reeled back an involuntary step.

It was like being dropped into a storm, lightning and lashing wind, rain from every direction; like stumbling from silence into a rock concert blaring at full blast, so loud you couldn't make out the words, much less the tune. And beyond and above those was being pulled every which way simultaneously inside: terror and fierce exhilaration and hunger for more as strong as bloodthirst. For an instant, he was overwhelmed. But he'd always liked LOUD, and crazy was no novelty anymore. He steadied and joined the party, grinning.

**********

On the theory the opposition would expect them from topside, through the sentry post, Buffy opted for the sewer line. Hunched, listening, under the ladder with Willow and Giles as the SITs caught up and silently formed up behind them, Buffy was calculating the logistics of forcing the hatch when it opened, admitting dim light, and a voice ordered softly, "Stay put."

The weird thing was, she knew that voice. At once, without question. Mike. And the even weirder thing was, she relaxed from her crouch and straightened: accepting Mike's word, despite everything.

A moment later, Willow flinched against Buffy's back. "It's started."

Buffy heard, felt nothing. Huh.

Just as well, she supposed. No distractions from taking out all the vamps (well, maybe not Mike) to leave Willow and Giles clear to deal with Rayne.

There was noise, then: vamps howling, shouting. The noise didn't come closer, so it wasn't that they'd been discovered. Probably. When Mike's voice directed, "Come on," Buffy was already halfway up the ladder and pushing the hatch out of her way.

As soon as her feet were on the floor she moved aside to let the rest come up behind her, taking quick stock of the situation.

Vamps were fighting vamps on the near side of a large circle chalked on the floor. Inside the circle were Rayne and three mages, all robed in different colors, like the mages in the mall parking lot. All chanting and gesturing. Rayne held Dawn, whose arms were bound in front of her, both arms bleeding from long cuts, shoulder to wrist.

As soon as they were clear of the hatch, Willow began doing magic-y things, her left hand clasping Giles' to draw on his stored power. That was Willow's business, and Buffy left them to it, leading the SITs against the vamps.

It wasn't a general melee, she realized as Sue slid into place next to Rona, and another vamp--a strapping black woman Buffy vaguely recognized--joined the formation of Kennedy, Molly, and Amanda as the point of an unequal triangle, giving the SITs her back, engaging the nearest vamp with smoothly coordinated ferocity.

The remainder of Spike's crew--five, it seemed, counting Mike--going up against what therefore had to be Digger's vamps, and nothing so simple as colors to distinguish which were which. But fortunately, it seemed the SITs knew the difference, most of them having done sweeps with Spike's people for months, in and out of the factory almost daily. Out of the corner of her eye, Buffy saw Kennedy start to plunge a stake into the back of a lanky male vamp, then turn the blow enough to deflect against his shoulderblade and shove him aside to plow into the vamp he'd been engaged with. He joined the formation of Chloe, JoAnne and Lisa, and they adjusted to include him at lead just as though they'd drilled the change. Mike, fighting alone, suddenly had backup: all the SITs knew him, in game face or not. That part being handled, then.

Willow (with Giles) seemed to be managing the mages. One was down; another was tearing at his robes as though he'd been doused in itching powder.

Buffy spotted Spike when he moved: springing to the top of the barrier machines and from there to the nearest of the rafter beams no vamp could reach directly. Bare to the waist and white-pale against the dark as he jumped, he landed and stood in the open sunlight shafting down from a broken place in the roof. Face lifted to the blaze of light, holding the Stone in his two hands, he started to burn.

**********

He had it now. Or it had him--same difference. He'd cogged himself to it, could tune and alter its pitch and frequency. Like playing a bloody theremin, all the vibrations tuned by touch, a cacophonous music no ear could hear. Could only be felt, modulated, as it passed through him. Couldn't see the spectral "wings" Red had told him about but could feel his substance spread achingly wide to encompass and channel such huge and chaotic input, the narrow-point bottleneck between energized infinities.

As the mages directed and connected, like calling to like, Spike could feel the linked somnolent grumble of the Hellmouth waking as the dimensional torques that formed it began to shift in response to the Stone's song. A harmonic echo so huge that within seconds the Stone's cacophony was lost into it and Spike was wrestling with the waking fury of the Hellmouth itself, the Stone his point of contact. Like holding a ravening, bounding tiger by an ear, or maybe a whisker.

Wasn't gonna do it, too much for him to handle, but he'd known that, going in. He'd blow out like an overtaxed fuse and the Hellmouth would explode into this plane again, driven by the pressured impingement of all the dimensions it was potentially connected to separately or simultaneously. Needed more juice to mange something like that, someone who for all his century plus was finally as mortal as the next idiot.

He jumped for the machines and then on to the rafter where the sun was--a coherent force, all colors and no color, and it was enough. Streaming through him, pure and deadly, it pushed him out beyond what he could consciously control, stretched him to his absolute limits, and for a moment they were in balance, the natural sunfire and the unnatural tectonic howl of dimensions meeting and trying to slide into one another, open into one another, with him as the focal point. Then it was too much. He felt himself coming apart, losing coherence on a molecular level.

Couldn't hold such force together, much less wield it. Guessed it was time, then.

Opening his eyes to the dazzle, blind with it (he hadn't thought about that), he couldn't distinguish Dawn at all, or anything much. He could feel her, though, all stretched thin almost as air as he was: a single spark of green energy that was neither Hellmouth, Stone, nor sun. A connection, as immaterial as a skein of soul, between them. Enough, or had to be. Spike held out his hand, asking for what he needed along the connection of what was his, theirs, shared alike. Dawn wouldn't know, and wouldn't know how, but the Lady would, and he'd put himself where he was meant to be, to take it. She'd grant it, or she wouldn't: through Dawn, to him, already on the cusp of incandescence.

From the Lady of Doorways, the Lady of Dimensions, the power rushed along the thread of soul-stuff, sufficient to his need.

**********

To Mike, it felt like silence then. But it wasn't, because up on the beam, Spike was shimmering, burning, but unconsumed. Something was happening.

He didn't know, didn't care, what because Rayne had swung the knife high to plunge it into Dawn. Mike dove for the circle, past the circle, unquestioning how, and took them both down. Came up fast with Dawn in his arms and got her out the quickest way: by tossing her at the dark rafter next on from the one where Spike was perched. Couldn't nobody get at her there. That was what was important, not the knife plunged into his side, though that hurt like hell. Only metal, wouldn't do him no serious hurt, though it stank of magic and the pain flared up his whole side and he couldn't seem to find his balance.

Slayer, she had her arm up and was yelling, "Here! Now!" with the witch hanging onto her other arm, holding her in place, and everybody going for the called mark with dreamlike slowness. A different circle was building, shimmering almost into sight, a dome reacting to whatever Spike was doing up above. Best to get there, maybe, if the witch was half as scared as she looked. Mike took a second to slap the mage away and check that Dawn had made the rafter all right, hanging over it and scrabbling her knees around to get onto it, then crossed back over the circle and fell inside the dome a second before the vamps still outside went up like guttering candles and were gone.

**********

Like teasing open a knot, Spike unwove the dimensions from one another, easing them apart. Easy enough, when you knew how and could draw on infinite force to do it. Could identify each skein with simple knowing and tuck it back into itself, adjusting the dimensional imbalance.

The Hellmouth shuddered and finally collapsed into normalcy. Only dirt, rock, air, water left. However, there was considerable residual geologic force to dissipate somewhere. Spike knew right where he wanted it and shrugged it off that way: into Digger's warren. With knowing that came to him with the Lady's power, he felt the levels cascade onto one another, punctuated by occasional hiccups that were the charges Mike had set in the shafts, to bring it down all tidy and all at once. Spike liked that.

Expansive and full of joyous destruction, he popped portals open randomly. Dozens, then hundreds, winking into being, oval or rectangular with the light of otherwhere shining through or swirling blackness. He'd been studying the Council's collection of spells for months. He understood the concepts, could make the words become without even having to speak them. Drawing on the Lady's power, he could flick a portal into being with a thought.

He looked for vamps but found none except under a warning dome that had Red's flavor about it so he left that alone and looked elsewhere for prey. The remains of the office went away, and most of the back wall.

Some way, the protective circle had been breached--Dawn's blood touching it, felt like--and he found he had access. He popped a portal right over one of the mages still standing, then shut it on him like the mouth of a purse or a really large and fangy fish. And the mage was gone, except for his wailing cry left behind, a second or so. He'd done another the same way when he felt Rayne battering into his mind, to reassert control.

But Spike and his demon were no longer separate, and the soul was happily in touch with the infinite, totally blissed out on a level nothing mortal could normally contain. Rayne's blandishments of pleasure could find nothing to hold to, not in the full of the sunlight and the Lady's favor.

Spike ate a prone mage while trying to decide what special horror to open for Rayne. But there were so many and all he had was the least flavor and taste of each, and he felt his coherence slipping as he tried to know and encompass them all.

"I wouldn't really have done it!" Rayne protested in Spike's mind, with a strong impression of indignant you idiot! "I loved him!"

With all the madness he'd suffered and the passivity he'd endured, the violation and perversion of desire, with all the rage that it'd come to this instead of what he'd wanted, Spike threw the mage blindly into whatever opened to receive him. Let the Lady choose. Spike just wanted him gone.

When that portal clapped shut, leaving the floor empty except for the dome, the Lady was done and withdrew. Used beyond its capacity, the Stone crumbled in his hands. All the varied forces that had passed through and shielded him were gone and he was left blind and vacant in the sunlight.

As he'd known it would, the burning began.

**********

The idiot wasn't coming down, hadn't the sense to fall. Was burning already, as she'd seen a dozen vamps go, consumed in seconds.

Warned by the dreams, Buffy had brought a sheet of mylar to cover him but he'd put himself out of reach, and mylar didn't throw worth beans. It didn't unfold particularly handily, either.

Frantically wrestling with the crinkly silver stuff within the confines of the protective dome, Buffy bumped Willow, demanding, "Take it down. Now!"

"What? Oh, sure--"

Before Buffy could move, someone had gone past her. A vamp's agility and speed, onto the machines and then straight into Spike, carrying them both off the beam and both blazing as they fell. Buffy was right on it, tossing the far end of the mylar to the nearest SIT and pulling it into place over the two burning vampires, horribly afraid she'd see it collapse with only dust underneath. Back in the empty office space, up on the rafter, Dawn was screeching for somebody to come get her down, catch her, something.

The mylar held, tenting the shapes, smoke wafting up from underneath. So maybe she'd been quick enough, maybe....

They'd fallen onto a sunny patch of floor: Buffy didn't dare lift the mylar. Spotting a blue tumbling pad overlooked on her last visit, she ran and grabbed it, slapped it down next to the mylar, and got whatever was underneath rolled onto it by touch (nasty scary crackly sensation). Then it was easy to drag the pad back through the gap between the machines, with SITs holding the mylar in place, into the safe darkness or at least indirect light, considering that most of the back wall was gone.

Uncovered, they looked like mummies. Blackened bone showed. Now that she saw, Buffy didn't dare touch for fear something would break off.

"No, not yet," Dawn was snapping, running from the back to stand...and look...and bleed on the mummies. "Shouldn't go to waste," she commented absently, watching the steady drops fall from her wounded arms.

One of the mummies suddenly moved, lurched, and latched onto Dawn's arm above the elbow, feeding. Since Dawn did nothing but shut her eyes and stand there, Buffy uneasily let them alone. The blackened, crisped skin flaked off, revealing fresh, whole skin underneath, bone and muscle reknitting as they all stood around watching. Too broad-shouldered to be Spike. Spike must be the other one. That wasn't moving.

Amanda produced a knife and without hesitation slashed a forearm, then held the knife out blindly for someone to take. And she did, and did the same. Within a minute, all nineteen SITs were bleeding on Spike, making various wry, wincing faces but doing it just the same. After Amanda threw up and Rona fainted, the three volunteers from the class came and took the knife and offered their contribution.

They hadn't all come to Buffy's summons. One SIT was pregnant; three had too great a distance to come--Europe; Canada; New Jersey--to get there in time; one couldn't wheedle the money from her parents and tried to hitchhike. That hadn't gone well--she'd ended up having to conk the driver and been stranded, with a wrecked car, in downtown St. Louis. But all who could had come to Buffy's claim that Spike was in desperate need of help and backup.

Not for her, or for the Hellmouth. For Spike.

Who was nearly back and naked and mostly surrounded by underage girls. Buffy adjusted the mylar to waist-high and got a few oh, come on! glares for her efforts before the girls shifted their interest to Mike, likewise pantsless, now folded into Dawn's arm that Willow wasn't bandaging.

Spike's body was no longer absorbing the blood, it was just running off, so everybody seemed to agree that was enough. They paired off and began bandaging one another with supplies from Willow's kit.

Spike's hair was coming in sandy-brown and longer than he usually tolerated. Bemused, Buffy bent and touched it--soft, ungelled, slightly curly. She'd never seen its natural state. So she wasn't prepared when he came up at her, golden-eyed and game-faced, and sank his fangs into the join of her neck and shoulder.

It was euphoric. It was too much. It probably wasn't a good idea.

After he'd fed for a minute or so, Buffy held him, her cheek against his, rubbing circles on his back and telling him softly, "It's OK. It's OK," until, more aware, he licked the wound shut and just rested against her.

She'd be a little lightheaded from it, it was more than he usually took, but the blood would regenerate by morning. They were a good team that way, she thought.

**********

Spike woke vaguely, gradually, to the sound of familiar children's voices.

Dawn was saying, "--couldn't even yell 'Help! Get me down from here!' and bleeding all over the place--"

"You should watch that tendency to get sliced up," put in Amanda's dry earnest voice, the one she used when she thought she was trying to make a joke. "Not only will people start to talk--in a house full of vampires, you could get a reputation as a tease."

"It's not full of vampires," Dawn huffed. "Only one!"

"In residence, anyway." Rona's drawl. "The other one just hanging around, all mopy and lovelorn--"

General laughter and the sound...of a pillow being thrown. Took Spike a moment to identify it. Then Candy, of the top-knot and edible-looking unitards, piped up breathlessly, "Anybody else see it? I saw it, just like before, only, like, more so. Like he was made of light, and these big wings spreading out, past the walls and the roof, even.... He's an angel! Like totally!"

"Yeah, right," responded Rona, unimpressed. "And I'm Aaliyah."

Molly put in, "What's this business about Mike getting stabbed with an enchanted knife?"

"Oh, that was good," Dawn responded eagerly. "It wouldn't close, and you can't kill a vamp by simple blood loss, but he was all twisted around about tasting me, well, drinking from me, really, without my saying he could, and frankly, he was just a mess. Not even counting the burnage he was so disgusted about, he pretty much saved Spike's life, well we all did, but afterward? He's all, 'It's so dumb, doesn't know what got into him to do such a dumb thing,' so he won't have to admit why he did it, you know how he is."

"Lunkhead," agreed Sue fondly. "Pretty much always been like that. Decorative, though. Always thought so. Then, after I got vamped, I--"

"Nobody wants to hear about that, Sue," Amanda put in quellingly.

"I do," Kennedy objected. "Vamps got a right to talk, same as anybody."

"Leave it, Ken," said Rona. "Sue, full details of your disgusting love life later. In private."

"Anyway," Dawn said firmly, reclaiming the floor, "so you remember about the silver, about Willow turning it magic-negative, big magic suckage? Well, Buffy was there when she did it, and she had this sterling anklet, seveeere icky with a skull on it and everything--"

"From Spike," commented Kennedy. "No brainer."

"Well, what do you think? So it was affected too, see? Anyway, Willow made Buffy take off the anklet and laid it on the wound and it closed up, just like that. Right while you looked."

"Was this the same knife that cut you?" Amanda asked in a deliberate, puzzled voice, worrying at a detail. "They why--"

"Well, that's nothing," Dawn responded, sounding embarrassed. "Well, if you must know, I healed myself. I could have done it anytime. But I didn't. Because Spike, he needed the pure sacrifice and everything. To do what he was doing. For his plan. My mom was with me for a little while there, and she showed me how but it had to be later, you see, in case.... Well, in case."

"What are you going to do about him?" inquired Kennedy.

"About who?"

"Don't be cute. About Mike, of course."

"Is he an angel, too?" Candy gushed and was ignored, except for Dawn, who replied, patient sage instructing naive acolyte, "There are all sorts of spiritual beings. Maybe some of them are angels. Most of them...not so much. Not in Sunnydale, anyway. We get the fangy kind. The other kind move to L.A." (Some knowing snickers.) "As to Mike, I don't see that I need to do anything about him," Dawn went on in the tone that usually went with flipping hair. "He's fine just as he is. Doesn't need improving. We talked a long while last night on the phone, and--"

"Is he your boyfriend or not?" Rona demanded.

"Why does he have to be anything? We're what we are, and it suits us. Is Spike Buffy's boyfriend? Are they making wedding plans? Not hardly! They are, and they do, what suits them. I don't see why I can't do the same."

"That's not realistic," put in Amanda sadly. "You can't be seventeen forever."

A silence. Then Dawn said, "I don't see why not. Real is relative, 'Manda. And seventeen seems a pretty good age to be. Have it all and not give up anything. Anybody. When you get involved with vamps--"

"So are you?" Rona interrupted avidly. "Involved with vamps?"

"Well, of course: Spike! And I'm certainly not gonna leave him with nobody but Buffy to watch out for him. And Mike...well, he likes how I smell. And how I taste. Likes it a lot. Not high on the traditional boyfriend-o-meter, but it's important to him. When you hang out with vamps you have to be flexible about things like that."

"If you say so," commented Amanda dubiously.

Still mostly asleep, listening to the children's voices happily bickering and gossiping, Spike wasn't sure when he was. Couldn't make it fit together. Seemed as if he was back in Casa Spike, half the SITs quartered there and underfoot at all hours. But Casa Spike was gone, burned; and Sue hadn't been a vampire then. But he'd heard Molly's voice, and Chloe's, and others from that time that weren't a part of things anymore. Not Kim, though. He'd been waiting for Kim to chime in, laughing and blunt, the way he remembered her.... And Candy was from the class, didn't fit with a gaggle of SITs, yet here she was, vapid and visionary. All a jumble of past and present he couldn't make sense of.

Blinking slowly, he pushed up onto his elbows and saw he was in Buffy's room. In Buffy's narrow bed, alone in it, more's the pity. And starkers under the sheet, might as well be covered with fucking cellophane for all the good it did in a room full of children--

Who were crying, "Oh, he's awake! Buffy, he's awake!" and pounding out into the hall to lean over the stair railing to report such remarkable news.

Very strange.

Dawn was still here, though. He noticed as he reached down for the blanket, to put another layer between his naughty bits and the unaccountable audience of chattering girlflesh certain to note every detail. Once they came back, which he was sure they would. Unless prevented.... Dawn waggled fingers at him, saying, "Hi," like she expected him to growl and bark at her.

"What's all this, then?" Spike asked, sitting up now he was decently covered and pushing both hands through his hair, finding it in deplorable condition, every which way and too long and he didn't know how that had happened. Likely looked like a dandelion puff.

"How much do you remember?" Dawn asked cautiously. "Have you noticed your arm?"

Spike looked, and the green writing was back, spiraling around his left arm. The line of poetry that meant Dawn he'd incised into himself, that he'd meant for forever.

"I think it never really went away," Dawn said. "He couldn't change it, so he hid it. To make you feel alone, unconnected. But it was always there, between us. Like the soul. You gonna leave off about that now, Spike? Nagging me to get a different connection? Because I won't. Ever."

She watched him rub the tat, though there was nothing different to the touch. Not a whit magical. Pure symbol, pure meaning, deeply felt. A good antidote for all Rayne's powerful unreality that meant nothing, that he'd accepted but never believed.

"Fetch me some pants, Bit," Spike directed absently, thinking back. He could remember as far as the burning. Whatever came after, he knew nothing about.

So maybe those dreams would leave off, now. Maybe with no Hellmouth to tempt and roil things up, Michael would be able to manage things fine on his own. Spike wanted none of it back. And Buffy, she could have her escort service without half of 'em getting eaten the first night, and run her class...or whatever she pleased, didn't matter to him, so long as it was what she wanted. Vamp population should be manageable several years, anyway: take that long for any of Digger's lot to inchworm back to the surface and make anything like a nuisance of themselves.

And he could settle down to the translation so long as the fucking Council didn't renege, or renege further...and likely Rupert might be a help with that, if they could ever get the bloody wanker to actually leave and then stay gone.... And the odd challenge fight up to Willy's, just to keep things interesting and remind anybody who cared who the true Master of Sunnydale was even if he left the day-to-day matters to Michael.

Or just decide hour to hour, minute to minute, what he felt like doing. Be in the moment, like proper vamps were.

He was done with plans.

When Dawn pulled out a pair of folded black jeans--didn't have to hunt for the right drawer, he noticed: must have come across it in secret Buffy-clothes-borrowing reconnaissance--and set it on the foot of the bed, he said, "Now you clear out. Don't need anybody to teach me how to put m' pants on. Don't need an audience, neither."

"Not a morning person," Dawn observed wisely. "Just a second, then, before the thundering herd stampedes back. I understand now. About why you wanted me as the pax bond, why you had me taken. Because you wanted you taken, and it would need both of us to do it. We both had to be there."

Wrapping the blanket around him as he rose, Spike responded, "Yeah. So?"

"Well, I'm forgiving you, is what. You could at least appreciate it!"

"Morning?" Spike wondered, looking to the bright windows.

Buffy came in then, and came straight at him, and lifted on her toes to clasp hands around the back of his neck and pull his head down for a nice long snog, and Spike didn't notice when Dawn left or when he forgot about holding the blanket in place.

"It's Saturday," Buffy explained simply, when she finally had to break for air. "You slept all yesterday afternoon, and then all night. Nearly twenty-four hours of your famous horizontal funeral statuary impression. Not a twitch, not a breath. I was beginning to get a little worried."

Putting on pants didn't seem all that important anymore. Taking Buffy's arms at the elbow, Spike flopped back on the bed, pulling her with him.

As he started undoing the buttons of her blouse, Buffy pushed at his shoulder, not very hard, protesting, "But they're all waiting to see you. They'll know!"

"Hate to break it to you, pet, but they've known what we get up to some time, now. Why didn't you pick a sweatshirt, like a sensible woman?"

Buffy slapped his hand away, no harder than a kitten paw, and set to work on the buttons herself. Eyes downcast, she asked, "Are you back now? Really back back?"

"Let you be the judge of that," Spike said, and pounced her backward.

Popped buttons flew everywhere.
 
 

 

Finis