SECTION FOUR: STRATEGY

Chapter Fourteen: Adjustments and Evasions

The night before Angel was due to arrive, Spike lined his minions up on the small front lawn of the house on Livingston and looked them over. Then he pointed and said, “Gonzo, come here.”

Gonzo looked uneasy and stupid, but he always looked that way. He moved prompt, did exactly as he was told, and Spike couldn’t stand the sight of him.

“Gonzo, you’re a pitiful excuse for a vampire.”

“Yes, boss.”

“Shut up and listen here. I got a war coming up and I need to clear out the useless stuff. So you’re gone.” Gonzo looked so terrified, and maybe Spike had halfway meant him to, putting it like that, that Spike sighed in exasperation and clouted him across the head. “Not that, idiot. Gone from here, gone from me.” Spike reached in a pocket and pulled out folded bills, all fresh twenties. Anya’d got them for him, exchanging the wrinkled singles and fives for fresh clean bills at the bank.

The two vamps, not counting Mike, he’d spared in the hospital fiasco, he’d dismissed after the party with the instruction to stay out of his sight. He owed them nothing--their lives were gift enough. But a minion who’d served awhile was due something for services rendered. Spike figured if all he could offer for leavegeld was small money, it should at least look nice.

Spike dragged out Gonzo’s hand and slapped the twenty into it. “You most likely won’t last to spend it, you’re such a fucking fool, but it’s yours any road for adequate service. What’s your proper name, Gonzo?”

“Rudolph, boss.”

“Hell, you’re better off with ‘Gonzo.’ But that’s your call. All right, Rudolph, you gave adequate service as required. Take back your life now from my hand. Bugger off.”

Dewey’s name proved to be Frank, and Spike turned him off pretty much the same, a useless waste of the space. Then he called Huey forward.

“What’s your name, Huey?”

Huey shrugged. “‘Huey’ does well enough.”

“Now don’t you make me regret what I got thought out here. What’s your fucking name, mate?”

“Egbert.”

“Well, that’s terrible, you’re right. Anyway, Huey, you got some kind of glimmer of a brain and you might actually see out a century with moderate luck. If you ask Willy, he’ll probably give you a job bartending now he’s short a man. Not that you couldn’t do better, but good night jobs are hard to come by. Huey, you done me good service and we’re quits. Take your life back from my hand now and good luck to you.” Spike counted out into Huey’s hand five twenties, which pretty well broke the bank, but such things had to be done properly, or as near as possible.

Huey considered the bills, then looked up remarking, “There’s generally a good game at the Wander Bar, a few nights a week. This is a good enough stake to sit in for a hand or two, anyway. See what develops. Any overage, maybe that could buy some more tasers, something.”

He was a tall narrow vamp, with lank fair hair tied back and a gloomy, creased Scandinavian face, like a Michigan farmer getting news of weevils in the wheat. Spike hadn’t much bothered to look at him before, except what was necessary.

Surprised by the offer, Spike started pacing, pulling a hand through his hair, back to front. “Well, I can’t support you anymore, now can I? Told you, Willy’s all brassed off I hit him, not that he didn’t have it coming, the clueless bleeder, an’ he’s given me the toss. So--”

“I can fend for myself,” Huey responded. “Good pickings in a dying town. But don’t like them Biters much. Like to see ‘em taken down. If I can chip in to a war chest, kill a few more of ‘em, I won’t be displeased. If there are developments, I’ll be in touch.”

“All right,” Spike responded. “In that case, you just might want to drift up to Willy’s a bit later. Might be some challenge fights at decent odds, considering I’m not real popular with the cousins just now. Amazing, how some people will let their guts rule their sense.”

“That’s a fact. I just might do that.”

As Huey started away in long strides, Spike faced Mike, all healed up proper and looking altogether pathetic, frightened, and woebegone. Obviously expecting to be turned away too. Of course he’d think that. Spike hadn’t considered that far.

“It’s all right, Michael. I still got considerable to teach you, considering I haven’t even started.”

Mike dropped down on the grass, set his face in his hands, and sobbed. Spike sat on his heels by him patiently. Finally Mike lifted his tearful face and asked, “Why is it like this? Never was like this before.”

Spike lit a cigarette. “Well, I broke you proper. That means you truly gave your life into my hands. That’s what you feel now, inside you: that you don’t have control over yourself anymore. It’s pretty much knocked you back to being a fledge--heart of a child, mind of an adult, and aimless passions of a demon. Mostly the demon running things again because you surrendered control over it. Not moderate creatures, demons. With the demon in charge, every moment and every feeling seems gigantic--like that’s all there is, all you know.

“This, between us now, is an attachment and an addiction and a strong dependency. Right now, you need me and have a powerful appetite for my notice and care. So the notion I might abandon you is frightening and you got noplace outside it to stand and look at it.”

As little as Spike felt like explaining typical Aurelian emotional excess to what was very like a new-raised fledge and childe overwhelmed by confusion and the demon, it was the necessary thing to do and a duty he’d accepted with Mike’s submission. And it steadied him because this was about the only connection he was still certain of.

The present situation had a lot in common with sitting in a locked burning house having a calm, rational discussion with your dog. But no need to further frighten the lad with notions like that.

Spike said, “So long as you do what I tell you, as quick and as best you can, I’m pleased with you. If I’m not pleased, you’ll be in no doubt. So be easy with yourself about it, Michael. It’s always this way.”

Michael reached out and touched Spike’s cheek, announcing blithely, “I love you.”

Spike shut his eyes. “No, you don’t, Michael. That’s a different loss of control. Easy mistake to make. But you can’t know that yet. Maybe you’ll come to know the difference. But now, it’s just another way to try to hang on. Need, mostly, with maybe some liking mixed in. I’m not angry with you, Michael, but it’s no good for you to confuse things more than they already are. So leave off about it.”

Need, with some liking. Spike held himself still until that had seared all the way through. Because that was himself, mostly. And that was Buffy. But not Dawn. She had no need of him, so the liking was freed. If Angel would only leave him Dawn, he might yet endure this.

Mike asked, “Can I feed off you some more?”

“No, Michael. Vampires can’t do for one another that way except now and again.”

“Then I want to hunt. The pigs’ blood is crap.”

“I know it is. Don’t have that figured out yet. Be patient a little longer.”

“Not patient,” Mike corrected. “Hungry.”

“Well, you’re gonna have to wait, aren’t you? Now shut up about it.”

Mike subsided: obedient, unhappy, and trusting.

A bit of a trial but still mostly a sweet-natured lad, as he’d been from the start. And it’d been this or dust him. So if the time wasn’t altogether convenient, it wasn’t Mike’s fault.

Spike spent another few minutes being terrified. For much the same reasons as Michael. But Spike hadn’t given over control of himself, not altogether. Not to Buffy. Not to anyone. Even the First hadn’t had that from him, not steadily. Right or wrong, he was still making his own choices, and even wrong was better than helpless.

He stood up, remarking, “Come on, then. We’ll go over to Willy’s and pick some fights.”

“Can I fight, too?”

“Maybe. A Monday crowd’s not much, generally. But if there’s more than what I can take, you can have some, too.”

**********

As usual, after breakfast Dawn went over to Casa Spike to visit and catch up on the night’s news. As usual, the SITs were doing weapons drill, and as usual Spike was on the porch, watching them judiciously from time to time. But instead of making stakes, he was counting money with bruised, swollen hands.

He was sitting slightly crooked, too: the way he used to before his back finally healed. Looking critically, Dawn saw other bruises either just blooming or just fading, she wasn’t sure which.

Dropping onto the step, she inquired, “Busy night at Willy’s?”

Spike took the cigarette out of his mouth to respond, “Well, yes and no. Yes, quite a busy night at Willy’s, once it got goin’ and word got around. But no, not the way you mean. That’s done. I don’t work there no more.”

“What were you doing, then? Besides fighting, of course.”

Spike smirked. “More fighting. Let a few cousins try to get a good piece of me if they paid for the privilege. Profitable. And that also sort of required that I could hit them back.”

Dawn grinned knowingly. “And you liked that.”

“Oh, yes. And it seems some idiots were fool enough to lay bets. Dunno why I ever bothered tryin’ to work for it.”

“Well, there’s less wear and tear,” Dawn commented, drawing two fingers down the back of his left hand. He sat quite still for a moment, then went on sorting and turning the bills to the be same way around.

“How’s Michael doing?”

“He’s a good lad. Just now it’s sort of like getting lumbered with the pup of one of those big breed of dog--St. Bernard, maybe. Or mastiff….” Another still pause, his eyes lifted to something faraway.

“What?”

“It’s just that sometimes he puts me in mind of his sire. Long while back, maybe. Before I knew him. But that’s foolish because I expect Darla brought him up right sharp.”

Dawn fingered around that new and unexpected fact like an ice cube left melting on a countertop. And the fact Spike had never mentioned it before and decided to mention it now.

“I don’t know Angel,” she commented after awhile.

“You will.”

“Well, that sounds grim.”

Although she’d smiled, she got no smile back. Spike said, “You shouldn’t mind. I don’t expect he’ll notice you at all. It was Dru, that noticed children…. Anyway.” Spike stubbed out the cigarette, then began stacking the bills neatly in descending denomination. “Might be a good thing if you stood clear a ways. In terms of me. Till we see a bit more of how it’s going, an’ all. No need for you to take sides.”

“No,” Dawn agreed. “That’s already done.”

“Yeah. All right. What I mean is, he dislikes me something terrible, and it’s not that I ain’t given him cause lately. Go back awhile further, though, maybe I have some cause, as well.”

“Spike, spit it out, for heaven’s sake.”

“Right. If he figured I was fond of you, might be he’d hurt you some way to bother me. Not on account of you at all. Not that he won’t come right at me, too. He plays all the angles and he’s a bone mean son of a bitch and I don’t want you hurt, ever, on my account. So don’t you come back here, visiting like you do, until we know--”

“--how it’s going to go, yeah, I got that. Not gonna do it, though, Spike. I’ll just tone it down to sneaky. I can do sneaky. And I’m not likely to be the one he’ll be watching, after all.” Dawn explained, “I asked Buffy about it last night. You want to know what she said?”

“No. Don’t want you bearing tales. Hard enough to understand as it is without somebody running between and making it worse. Things go to bad farce real fast then. ‘M not in the mood for farce.”

“What are you in the mood for?” responded Dawn, insinuatingly innocent, and got a sharp glance that became a frowning glare. “Well, it’s your mind, Spike: I didn’t say anything.”

“Let be, Bit. ‘Tisn’t funny.”

Dawn eyed him critically. “If I hug you, are you gonna go all weird?”

“Too late. I’m all weird already and I don’t expect--”

Dawn hugged him, and that shut him up. For all that he kept his distance with her and the SITs about the same, he had a powerful hunger to be petted, held. Dawn considered that a good thing to know about him, like his being ticklish. That could be bait, or a lever.

If what she’d heard so far about Angel was anything like accurate, Angel tried to keep the two sides of his nature, human and demonic, antipodal distances apart. There was Angel, and then there was awful Angelus, and never were the twain allowed to meet, ick, uck, foul unclean, get thee behind me evil soulless thing and all that. Spike refused to make that kind of distinction: all Spike, all the time. But the distinction was still there in subtle ways. Dawn thought it was the human side that hungered for simple touch, contact. And it was his awareness of his demon that kept him wary of initiating it.

Like how he’d behaved, introducing them to stoned mummy-headed Michael, at the party. Knowing things could go real bad, real fast, yet fond and accepting of the younger vampire. Just making sure the necessary limits were observed so nobody got hurt.

She let him go with a quick arm pat, to not test the limits of extreme hugging, which was unlikely to become an Olympic event. So no extra points for extension or endurance. Or grace in the release. She told him quietly, “Maybe it won’t be as bad as you think. But even if it is, I love you and that doesn’t depend on anything but you and me. So nobody else gets to touch it. Nobody comes between.”

He was breathing rather hard and had turned his face away, giving her only his blinking profile. But he hadn’t gone weird or fallen to pieces, either. He was managing. “Yeah,” he said, and then looked around and stroked his bruised, swollen knuckles down the side of her face, a quick, shy gesture that she supposed was very brave of him, under the circumstances.

Dawn decided she was really quite prepared not to like Angel at all. She also decided that to live up to his advance billing, he’d have to be King Kong.

**********

Returning from the High School a little past four, Buffy bypassed Revello to turn on Brown and parked in front of Casa Spike. Dashing inside, she waved off the greetings, comments, and questions from the SITs she passed, in a hurry to get downstairs and tell Spike the wonderful idea she’d thought of, idle in her cubicle through the afternoon. Actually, ideas: several. And most of them mutually exclusive. But certainly one or another of them would do to quiet her frantic anxiety about Angel’s arrival.

Unlike Spike’s ancient DeSoto, currently on blocks awaiting repairs, Angel’s vehicle apparently wasn’t sunproofed. He wouldn’t be setting out until dark. So it would be nine or later before he got here. Still plenty of time, she thought, skipping down the stairs.

As she’d expected, she found Spike naked and asleep: sprawled prone with his head turned aside, arms and legs spread wide, suggesting he’d splatted from a height. Dim white-on-white in the basement’s enforced dusk: more guessed-at than seen. And really deep asleep: he didn’t stir while Buffy lit two of the candles of the collection locked by their dripped wax to a tray on the low cabinet nearest the bed. Neither of them liked the track lighting.

Turning, starting to say his name, Buffy was surprised to find his back and flanks mottled with innumerable bruises. Grey to purple patches along his spread arms and the visible side of his face, as well. No wounds, though; no scabbing or blood.

Given vampire healing, the marks looked barely hours old. Which would mean it’d happened in daylight. Puzzling.

Sitting on the edge of the bed he hadn’t managed to occupy didn’t rouse him. She kissed his ear and then, as an afterthought, licked it and blew onto it, thinking about the old joke.

An arm twitched. Then he blinked and scraped a hand slowly down his face. “Yeah,” he said, but it was an automatic word. He was drifting off again.

Buffy tried to find an unmarked place on his shoulder to grasp and shake. “Spike. Wake up. I have an idea. We could--”

“Bright. All shining.” Muzzy, blurred voice.

“Spike--”

A jerk of deep startlement, breath coming quick and hard; staring.

Buffy shook his shoulder again. “Spike, wake up.”

“Hell. Another one.”

“Another what?”

“’Nother fucking dream. Goddam.” He rolled to sitting beside her a moment, both hands rubbing at his eyes, then pushed through his hair. “Damn it to hell.” Abruptly he was off to the bureau, yanking on fresh clothes. T-shirt first--the reverse of usual. First priority covering the marks.

“I already noticed,” Buffy mentioned dryly.

“Yeah,” he said, his back still to her. “What time’s it got to be?”

“Going for five. Did you have some trouble in the tunnels?”

“Willy’s. Damn. Now what’s that got to do with anything?” Jeans zipped and fastened, he turned, but he was away someplace inside his head, staring at nothing and still breathing hard. Buffy resigned herself to the fact he wasn’t gonna attend to anything else until this was dealt with.

She prompted, “What was the dream about?”

“Well, you gave me this sort of necklace thing,” he said, as though she should remember it, unconsciously miming putting such an object around his neck. “Thin serpentine chain, a kind of medallion suspended…. An’ it meant something. There was a reason for it. Special. Something I could do with it. What the hell was it.” Hand still clasping the invisible dream-pendant, he bent his head, eyes tight shut, fighting to retrieve the memory. “I could draw it, I think--the medallion. Setting. Maybe Red…. It was for the Hellmouth. Close the Hellmouth. Yeah. If I drew it, maybe Red or Rupert could figure out--”

He bolted up the stairs, and Buffy thought she knew what he’d gone in search of: a battered green spiral notebook where he attempted his systematic thinking. She thought she remembered seeing it in one of the cabinets. She checked, found it, and had it waiting when he came back down. He immediately grabbed it and the pen she also held and dropped straight down on the floor, completely intent.

First he jotted notes along one side of the page, staring into space between entries. Then he tried to draw it. He got as far as a serrated circle, then crossed that out and tried again. After three more tries he flung the pen away in frustration. Then he made himself get up and retrieve it and tried yet again, this time a side view.

The object he drew was dome-shaped, convex. The point of the dome was a separate protuberance, smoothly rounded. That apparently was what he’d been unable to render to his satisfaction in a frontal view, because the back of the object came quickly, a squared off serrated edge roughly drawn and a bit lopsided but evidently good enough because he set the pad on the floor and considered it without trying to improve the sketch further.

“Like a chrysanthemum,” he muttered. “Clear jewel in the center.” He added that to the notes, and then silver-colored. Finally, when he could find nothing more to add, he looked up and noticed Buffy watching.

Buffy settled onto the floor, facing him across the notebook. “How long have you been having prophetic dreams?”

She didn’t think she needed to say the rest of it: and not telling me about it? That, she figured, was implicit in the question, and in her having to ask at all.

“Long while. Years.”

“Before the dream about the alley?” She named the only such dream he’d admitted to, and which she’d therefore assumed to be unique.

“Yeah. Some. More, lately. You have Slayer dreams sometimes. Do I ever expect to tell me about them?”

“No,” Buffy admitted steadily. “Because I’m the Slayer. It’s part of the job description. So is telling them to everybody.”

“Well, I’m not the Slayer, am I? So what I dream is my business.” He repeated the gesture of rubbing his eyes, then pushing both hands through his hair. “Mostly it’s all bollixed up, tangled….” His hands rolled and twisted, demonstrating the tangling. “An’ they’re personal. And most of ‘em are bad, all right? No point goin’ on about them. And who’d pay any attention anyway?”

“I would have. If you’d told me.”

“Oh, yeah, that would have gone over real good: ‘Well, Giles, you see I been fucking this vampire and sometimes he has strange dreams.’ Sure, I can see you sayin’ that. ‘Willow, last night Spike an’ me took down a wall, having a boff, and he had this dream’--”

The sarcasm was bitter and brutal. The only thing that kept Buffy from smacking him was the awareness it was justified. She hadn’t realized, though, that such bitterness was still alive in him from those days. She’d thought it all reconciled, put away.

“You could have told me,” she insisted.

“You’re joking. Don’t you remember that talking was about all we didn’t do?”

“I thought we were talking now. I thought--”

“Well, ‘s’not retroactive, pet. I never asked you nothing about Angel. And you never said. Never asked how he came to mark you, and yes, I know his mark when I see it. Never asked you about anything, really. And you’re not a great one to volunteer. We get by with now, and how’s the children, and what happens Tuesdays.”

She said, “I guess what happens Tuesdays is that you remember all the reasons you’re angry at me and throw them in my face.”

“Well, you asked, pet. This once, you asked, and I told you. So now are you pleased?”

His furious eyes were blue, almost to black in the limited light. His tense face was smooth, not bulged into brutal forehead, fangs. That meant nothing, Buffy thought. He’d loosed his demon against her, blunt and ruthless, and that was what she was confronting now.

“All right, I’m asking, then. How did you manage the decorative beating you’ve been hoping I wouldn’t notice or comment about?”

“Wasn’t a beating, because I won. Challenge fights, up at Willy’s. Because I don’t have a job there anymore. I raised a little over four hundred fucking dollars. Enough for tasers for all the children, an’ they’re on order now. Have ‘em by the end of the week. And some extra to kick in to the bank, same as always. I pay my fucking way, Slayer. You know what else you don’t know? Wasn’t Rupert’s idea to bring in Angel. It was mine. Knew you wouldn’t listen if I brought it up. So I asked Rupert to do it for me. You pay attention to what he says. Not like me. And sure enough, Angel’s due in a couple of hours, just like I expected. You got regard for Rupert. Not much for me. You know what else? I haven’t touched that disgusting dead blood since the children, Amanda, brought it up. Can’t tolerate it no more. I been hunting. But you wouldn’t ask me about that neither. Might have told you if you’d asked, but you didn’t. Because you didn’t want to know the answer.”

Buffy was hurt, appalled, demoralized. She was also toweringly angry that he’d dump all of this on her when she was strung tight to breaking over the prospect of having to deal with Angel again. Which he knew. After she’d backed his idea about trying out the joint patrol that’d gone so wrong. After she’d wrenched her principles practically asunder, consenting to his feeding from the SITs. When she’d forgiven and more than forgiven his feeding from her.

Which, she suddenly thought, he’d done not only because he’d wanted to. Not only to mark her, in defiance of Angel. But in the expectation she’d blow up and throw him out. As she was so close to doing now.

Not bitterness, she thought. Or not only that. Not necessarily untrue, but calculated for effect. What he was flinging at her was provocation.

And the part that didn’t fit was the bruising.

“So you went up to Willy’s and picked fights last night, right?”

“Yeah. Not gonna live on charity here.”

“And you’ve been hunting, you say,” Buffy pursued.

“Yeah.”

“So not the SITs.”

“That was a stupid idea,” Spike responded sullenly…and evasively.

Her ear was tuning now. Hearing not just what he said but what, by deliberate calculation, he avoided saying. “All right,” she shot back, “then tell me why, if you’re hunting to your heart’s content, after all the fine live blood, you’re so drained that you haven’t healed from surface injuries twenty hours old?”

For the first time, he looked aside. He really was a terrible liar. Terrible at keeping whatever he felt off his face, out of his body language. “Well, that Michael. He needed.”

“You’ve been letting him feed from you, haven’t you. That’s where the blood has gone.”

“Well, I couldn’t hardly let him go out hunting on his own, could I? He--”

Spike saw that pit before quite falling into it. Buffy saw it. “Because he’s an ordinary vamp with no self-control. And he would have drunk them dry. Killed them, because that’s what vamps do. Except you. You say you’ve been hunting. What’s the total kill, Spike? How many people have you killed to feed your new pet?” He didn’t have anything ready for that blunt question and tried to make silence his answer. But Buffy heard it for what it was: another evasion. “None, Spike. You haven’t killed anybody.”

“Believe what you like,” Spike said sullenly. Which wasn’t an answer either. It wasn’t working even a little now.

“I think I will. Nobody, Spike. You fed from them like you fed from Kim. Barely anything at all.”

Very softly, he said, “There was no need.” He’d withdrawn the blustering demonic boogey man. This was only Spike.

“And what’s the need of this, now? Why pick a fight and throw all this crap at me to.…” Then she saw it, because she’d seen it before. He’d bitten her because he’d intended to. His own reaction had blindsided him, but that didn’t change that he’d offered to turn for her in the expectation that she’d have a monumental fit afterward and throw him out. Then he’d seized on the opportunity of the SITs’ mini-rebellion but that hadn’t gotten him thrown out either. So now he’d put together this big collection of misleading facts and half-truths and dumped them on her, still pursuing the same dogged purpose: to provoke her into rejecting him.

Buffy leaned and took his hands. She felt a twitch, but he didn’t pull away or refuse the contact, the connection. Because he never did. It wasn’t in him.

He’d lost his job. Ended the arrangement with the SITs, separating from them too. Buffy would have bet he’d made some attempt to drive Dawn away. And now her. Trying to leave no hostages that could be used against him or he could be used against, either way.

Already feeling she knew the answer, Buffy asked gently, “Why not just leave, Spike?”

“Because I can’t, love. Never could. And that will just make everything worse, an’ he’ll hurt you on my account, and that’s not right, that you should be caught between and feel you have to defend me to keep faith. And either way, it’s terrible: if you do, or if you don’t. Send me off, love. For your own sake. I’m nothing but harm to you here.”

“Do you want me to?”

His face was full of love and helpless misery. And asked directly, point-blank, he answered her as he always had: with the truth. “No. I’m fucking terrified of it, love. But you should.”

“Well, you’re right,” Buffy said. “Your being here will make everything harder. But your not being here would make it unbearable. If it’s hard, then it’s hard. I need you here. Don’t leave me to face this alone.”

“Never could do that. Unless you said. Don’t want you hurt for me. ‘Tisn’t about me. Shouldn’t be. But it will be because he’ll make it so. Can’t help it. And neither can I. ‘Cause he’ll do everything he can to make me turn loose of you and I won’t. Not never. And I couldn’t contrive to make you do it neither. Damn stupid useless git.”

“Maybe we don’t talk as much as we should,” Buffy said, and ruffled his hair with her fingers. “But you don’t fool me much, and I don’t fool you much, and maybe that’s enough. Let’s be terrified together. Let’s give him something to really get furious about. There’s time: want to have noisy, smelly sex?”

“Hell, yes.”

Chapter Fifteen: Hail and Farewell

Studying the pitifully childish drawing Spike had given her was much more interesting to Willow than angsting over when Angel would arrive. Just another dumb vamp, after all. She’d already resouled him once and would again if need be and give him a whole lot better reasons for not attaining “perfect happiness” than the spell’s original makers had built in. Blinding pain, for instance, as the accompaniment to an erection. That should tend to break the mood.

Spike’s marginal notes referred to the setting as being like a chrysanthemum. Well, a traditional Egyptian representation of the solar disc wasn’t exactly the thing you’d expect to spring to a vamp’s mind. And the crystal would therefore be unfaceted and clear--either quartz or, Goddess help us all, diamond, depending on whether it was a low amulet for an ordinary priest or a high amulet made for the High Priest of Ra. In either case, the setting would almost certainly be the blended metal called electrum. Silver in color, as Spike’s notes specified. Now practically extinct, electrum had once been held in higher repute even than gold for fabricating magical implements.

Definitely an interesting object to pop up in a vamp’s dream in such detail that Willow could recognize and put a name to it even though she’d never heard of such a thing or seen its representation.

Pretty much Indiana Jones territory here, but not the headpiece of a staff this time. Same purpose, though--focus sunforce on an object. While worn. Not, it would seem, a useful accoutrement for a vamp, given that vamps tended to go all flamey in daylight conditions other than major overcast or absolutely killer smog. So what was this amulet to him, or he to the amulet, that he should dream of it?

Refocusing her eyes, Willow determined that Spike’s weird aura was still fully flared, thank you. Apparently he’d done something permanent to himself in the Reconstruct Dawn spellcasting. Actually it was a little embarrassing to watch him pace, since it was so evident he and Buffy had either recently had sex or else should, right away. The limits of his pacing were the limits of where their auras converged. He didn’t lose contact, not for a second. When he paced close, his aura swarmed all over Buffy’s, enveloping and enclosing it, full of magenta flashes of tantric energy. While Buffy’s aura just ticked over its unchanging red-tinged rose pink: all Slayer, all the time. Pretty impervious to outside influence, was the Slayer. Probably not all that great in bed. Maybe that was why she chose vamps: requiring that kind of hungry single-mindedness to get through to her, physically or emotionally, at all.

Not like herself and Tara, whose auras had been steadily, harmoniously in tune, peaceful and loving. Except when Tara had rejected her, left her; but Willow now remembered only the good times and the intolerable loss.

At least he wasn’t assaulting Dawn’s aura, or Amanda’s, in that blatant fashion. Which in its way was odd because going by his aura, he was into serious blood debt. He was plainly healing from something and that depleted the blood energy faster than normal. Amanda and Dawn and probably Willow herself should represent major snackage. But he wasn’t paying any of them any heed. Only Buffy. Walking circles and figure eights, in orbit around her, in the front room of Casa Summers. Willow decided not to get within grabbing distance anytime soon. And she called to mind the sequence of a freeze spell that would stop him in his tracks. Always best to be prepared.

He must have channeled aetheric energies way past what a vampire normally could, to result in a permanent extension of the aura. That or contacted something so large and powerful that the contact itself was the operative cause of the change. Maybe both.

The amulet was a focus. And he’d become a channel. Although it would probably fry him from the inside out to use it, he had likely become an appropriate conduit for whatever the amulet put out by way of energy. And Somebody now was hinting to him about it by way of dreams.

Close the Hellmouth, he’d said and written in his absurd Victorian cursive in the notes. Maybe so. Somebody was clearly interested in matching up the two of them, the vampire and the amulet.

The amulet was so highly identifiable an object that no extensive search should be required to turn one up. Willow had a number of sources for Egyptian antiquities, and Anya had even more, suppliers for the Magic Box. And with a currently worthless metal as the setting, it was possible the crystal wouldn’t be recognized for what it was because of its lack of faceting. So it might even be possible to come by one cheap.

Sight returning to normal, Willow was trying to figure how to make acquisition of this object the means of prying out of Spike the knowledge she required: the knowledge of how to bring Tara back. Not the contrary, rejecting aspects--just the loving ones. Surely he couldn’t be stupid or suicidal enough to actually want the amulet. He had just sense enough to guess it was magical and therefore to dutifully turn his drawing over to a witch for investigation. Not enough sense to have the least idea what it actually was or how it worked. So maybe he was stupid enough. If so, Willow might have a lever.

There was a knock at the front door, at which point it occurred to Buffy that Angel hadn’t been in the house since the last round of wards and protections and therefore needed an invitation from a resident to enter, and dashed off to answer the knock. Sullen and watchful, Spike trailed along behind.

As Angel came in and stood gravely listening to whatever Buffy was babbling, his expression changed and he saw Spike. Pushing Buffy heedlessly aside, Angel went after Spike, immediate and ferocious, so nobody could have mistaken him for anything but a vampire though he didn’t go game-faced. His first blow knocked Spike half the length of the hall. Spike came up game-faced just in time to be hit again and flung back into the cellar door. Then they were both at it, Angel shoving Buffy off when she tried to intervene, staying bare-knuckles Marquis of Queensbury style, throwing big roundhouse punches, murderously direct, enough to break bone when they landed. Spike used a different style, dropping onto his hands, reversed, and uncoiling to kick Angel’s knee. The kick connected but had no effect on Angel’s advance. As Spike tumbled away, Angel got in a kick of his own, to Spike’s ribs. That stopped Spike long enough that Angel could lean down and grab him by the scruff of the neck, haul him into the air, and fold arms before and behind with the plain intention of breaking Spike’s neck and wrenching his head off. Then it stopped. Angel fell straight backward with a crash that rattled the remaining windows. Spike rose shakily, leaning against the wall, bent as though guarding broken ribs. In his left hand was a taser.

He said, “Welcome to the new century, Peaches.”

Then he collapsed, coughing blood.

**********

Before Angel could move he could talk and he did. “Buffy, you know what he is. How could you let a thing like that corrupt you?”

Somehow Buffy managed not to hit him or apologize and beg his forgiveness, his approval, both of which she wanted intensely to do. “That ‘thing’ kept me alive almost a whole year, despite the fact that I beat him up every chance I got. And he took it. Because he loves me.”

“I noticed that. You stink of him. How could you let that little grinning weasel into your bed? Let him feed on you? God!”

Buffy clapped a hand to her neck. She couldn’t help it. As if she could conceal the evidence that Buffy was Not a Nice Girl.

Sitting leaned back against the staircase, Angel tested out muscular control of one arm, then the other, like his almost infinitely slow Tai-chi routines. He rolled on, “Whatever he’s done to get his hooks into you, it ends now. Don’t worry, Buffy. I’ll take care of him.”

“You’ll do nothing of the sort. He’s mine, and under my protection. You leave him alone.”

Angel gave her a hooded glance. “Oh, is he hiding behind women’s skirts again? I might have expected that. Just give me a few more minutes and I’ll go pay him a call. See if he’s man enough to answer me and come for his whipping. I’ll take that little toy away from him first this time and then see how things go.”

Senior-Prom Buffy was all distressed and demoralized. As she retreated, the Slayer came to the fore. And the Slayer looked at Angel with different eyes. “Angel, I asked you to come to help prevent an apocalypse. We have them here from time to time. I died in the last one, as perhaps you recall. Not counting the one Willow almost set off, of course. If you can’t get your mind out of my pants and off my neck long enough to consider stopping the end of the world, stopping the First that tried to make you commit suicide not so very long ago, then go back to L.A. because you’re no use to me. Anybody who helps me with this is my ally. Anybody who gets in my way is my enemy. Which do you want to be, Angel? Go after Spike again and he won’t have to stop you: I will. My allies are not allowed to murder each other. Now is any part of that not clear to you?”

Angel regarded her admiringly. “Buffy, you’re magnificent when you’re ruthless. What you say is fine with me, just as soon as I get this one little piece of unfinished business out of the way.”

As Angel rose, towering over her by more than a foot, big and dark and intractable, Buffy reached up and closed a hand around his throat, lifting him onto his toes. Guys really hated it when she did that. Showing him the stake she’d collected from the bag by the kitchen door, she told him flatly, “Leave Spike alone.”

His dark eyes stopped being admiring. They no longer held any human expression at all. “Fine, then. As long as he leaves you alone.” It probably wasn’t easy to talk while suspended by the throat, but Angel managed without seeming effort. “The next time I see him, the next time I smell him on you, the next time he obliges me to notice he isn’t in hell where monsters like him belong, I’ll remedy that oversight. I’ll add to that. I don’t smell him on anyone I come in contact with. I don’t hear his name. His wretched existence is not to be acknowledged in my presence. Leave helping you out of it: those are my terms for not dusting the bastard.” He looked down at her. “A nice show, Buffy, but you are not going to stake me over that contemptible weasel and we both know it. Now go get clean. Cleaner. Then I’ll be glad to discuss the situation. I’ve dealt with one damaged Slayer. I’m willing to deal with another.”

Buffy had been braced against Angel’s disapproval. But she hadn’t been prepared for his blunt, visceral disgust. Because he declared her dirty, she felt so and knew that no arguments would persuade him otherwise. All there were, were feelings, and Angel considered feelings a weakness and a danger. The one time he’d given in to them, it had nearly destroyed them both. It had only been by shutting out and denying passion that he’d left her.

It was just about impossible to maintain her own convictions against someone so absolutely convinced of his own righteousness. Especially when he was speaking Received Truth: what she herself had believed unquestioningly until the persistent and finally unavoidable fact of Spike had forced her away from certainties into exceptions, distinctions, justifications. Until, however unwillingly, she’d started thinking and judging and feeling for herself.

Buffy let Angel go and started dully up the stairs to shower.

**********

Naturally Spike wasn’t being merely difficult. He was being impossible. In wincing game face, lying on the front room couch at Casa Spike where Dawn and Amanda had brought him, he wouldn’t let any of the SITs near him, yelled at them when they approached, and broke down into more bloody coughing afterward, so they stayed back, not because of the yelling but because of the coughing. Dawn figured that one of the broken ribs had punctured a lung.

That wasn’t a serious injury by itself. But healing required extra energy, extra blood, and he wouldn’t take it from any of them. Didn’t trust his restraint, to stop before he’d taken too much. Which again wouldn’t have been a problem except that he refused the stored pigs’ blood, too. Dawn made up a mug, heated it and everything, and he slapped it across the room.

Dawn looked at the resultant mess, then her empty hand. “Spike, you look like shit. You have to--”

“Doesn’t signify. How I look,” he responded, on just enough breath to get the words out. “Let me alone. Little while. Get myself gone.”

And probably it was true: whatever didn’t kill him outright would heal eventually. But if he didn’t feed, it would take halfway to forever and he’d be a good part of the way to starving by then. Dawn had never seen a starved vampire. As gaunt as Spike’s face had already gone, she didn’t think she wanted to, either.

He needed quite a lot of blood and he needed it now. And Dawn could think of no way to make him drink the pigs’ blood if he continued to refuse.

Then Suzanne came from the kitchen with another mug. She went straight to the couch and sat on her heels there, holding the cup out. Spike shut his eyes a moment and then took it, downed the contents, and handed it back, directing softly, “Get away.”

Rising, backing off, Sue remarked, “Well, it was my turn next anyway,” as though daring anybody to argue with her. Dawn then noticed Sue had a paper napkin taped to her left forearm.

Vi said to Amanda, “Get the roster.”

So without any more discussion, that was how they did it--in turn, according to the roster. Dawn would fill the mug a quarter full of pigs’ blood, then a SIT would cut herself and fill the mug the rest of the way. And apparently the mixture remained tolerable. Although Spike almost certainly noticed, he didn’t remark on it, just drank it down. And though nobody required it of her, Dawn took a turn too, last of all. And with that mugful in his hands, still untouched, Spike looked until he found her, hanging toward the back. He kept looking at her while he drank it. Dawn didn’t know what to make of that look, but anyway he didn’t seem mad or inclined to pitch a fit about it, which was really all she cared about.

Spike set the mug on the floor. When he looked up, the gauntness was gone from his face again, he’d shed game face, and no bruise-shadows remained either. “Here,” he said, and they all knew to gather to that command. “Hoped this wouldn’t happen. Not surprised it has. The mission is still the mission, children. Don’t you be foolish about this now. Don’t have to like the man to mind him. Just ‘cause he won’t spoil you like I done, give in to all your vapors and your whims, he’ll still use you right. Be sparing of you. If there’s anybody values Slayers nearly as much as me, it’s Angel. So you mind him. Don’t dispute with him. He won’t put up with it like I do. He’s here because I wanted him here. Because he’ll do things I can’t. So you behave for him. All right?”

Amanda, closest to the couch, set her hand on Spike’s arm and he didn’t object. Amanda said, “What are you gonna do, Spike?”

“Well, you call in a bloke to do a job of work for you, a plumber or a carpenter, first thing you do is get out of his way. Let him do his work. And if he didn’t do things different from me, there’d be no use to calling him in, now would there? So you keep what you know, and still you learn whatever you can because Angel, he’s a true master when it comes to beating things down and seeing that they stay beat down. You learn from him every way you can, even if some of the things, what you learn is that you never want to do them again. That’s useful too sometimes. So come take your leave of me, children. An’ then wash, so he won’t smell me on you and make a big noise about it like he does.”

The SITs went one at a time and knelt by the couch and Spike clasped hands with them and kissed each one on the forehead, something he’d never done before, so quite a few got pretty emotional about it. When Kim came and knelt, Spike touched her neck and told her, “He gives you any grief about this, say it was my fault. Say I snuck up on you.”

“Won’t say what’s not true, Spike.”

“Then best to say nothing, let him think what he pleases. But don’t you take any blame ‘cause there’s none due. You all been fine children and I have no complaint of you except that you’re bossy and willful, and I never yet knew a fine lady who wasn’t, so no matter. And you been kind to me more than any like number of humans I’ve ever known in this life or that other, that was before. Don’t you let anybody make you ashamed of it. We know what’s so. That’s enough.”

When he’d finished with all of the SITs, he gave Dawn a look and she gave him one right back because she wasn’t going to take part in his little leavetaking ceremony. Absolutely no frelling way, José.

Although it took him two tries, he got up unassisted, and Dawn followed right along to the door and then out. And waiting outside was big, looming Michael, which startled Dawn a bit. Michael took Spike around the shoulders and pulled him a little to leaning, remarking as they walked on, “Didn’t want to interrupt. Besides, I couldn’t get in. Didn’t like to ask. All those girls. They still yours, Spike?”

“Far as you’re concerned, yes.”

“And Dawn too?”

“Dawn too. Specially Dawn.” Looking around at her, Spike added, “Bit, I never wanted to smell you as food. Now I do. Wish you hadn’t done that.”

Since it was done, Dawn saw no reason to say anything about it. Anyway it wasn’t as if she’d made him drink it. “What is with that Angel, Spike? He hadn’t even gotten his hellos finished!”

“Well, part of it’s me. I don’t deny it. He could tell your sis and I had been together an’ he don’t like that at all. But part is that he hates his demon. I expect that when he got that soul, it went to war with his demon and he sided against the demon and has never made peace with it since. Dunno, actually: I wasn’t there. Didn’t learn about it till years afterward. Calls his demon by a different name. Pretends it’s got nothing to do with him, with Angel. Shuts it out, as best he can. Maybe it’s the kind of soul he got, I dunno. The curse, so he’s either all one, or all the other. Me and my demon get on fine, most of the time. It’s reasonable. I let it have what it needs and it doesn’t give me much grief, by and large, so long as I give it due respect. Soul trying to horn in now, take over the whole doings, but I won’t agree to that. So I expect because I done different, didn’t settle down to a menu of rats and moping for a hundred years before finding a Slayer I wanted to dance with, he figures I’m like his demon. Needing to be put down hard and kept down. Don’t like his demon much myself. They’re both mean, cruel bastards, only Angelus enjoys it more. Should have just taken off. Not been there. But Buffy wouldn’t have that. Tell me not to do nothing dumb, Bit.”

“Don’t do anything dumb, Spike.”

“That’s real good advice. I’ll try hard to keep to it.”

Mike said, “This Angel. Angelus. He’s my sire, right?”

“Seems so. Wouldn’t bring it up to him if I were you, though. Might make him try to think up a third expression an’ die of the strain.”

“And he’s your sire,” Mike pursued.

“On about two bounces. But yeah, as near as makes no difference anymore. Let me down here a minute, lad. Need to collect myself.”

Collecting himself apparently consisted of sitting on the grass at the edge of the sidewalk with knees tucked tight, arms laid across them, and head bent on top. After awhile Mike took a crosslegged seat on the sidewalk, and Dawn settled next to Spike and claimed the tatted arm, that was hers, cheek tucked tight against it. And after they’d all sogged and been furious or forlorn or quietly miserable, or whatever they were being, for awhile, Spike stirred to light a cigarette, remarking, “No punishment like getting exactly what you asked for. Could be worse. He could have dusted me dead. Or I could have done the like to him, and Buffy, she’d never have forgiven me that. Still has a fondness for old Peaches, she does. Girl never forgets the vamp who first sets his mark on her…. If he turns her from me, I’ll do ‘em both. Fire, maybe. No, they might get out. Taser ‘em first, then. Tie ‘em down. Afterward set the fire.” He glanced at Dawn. “Figure that’s dumb, Bit?”

“Thinking about it’s OK,” responded Dawn judiciously. “Doing it would be dumb.”

“Expect you’re right. And don’t you pay me no mind, Michael. Don’t go off and do something I only talked about, figuring it’s what I want. I’ll tell you plain what I want. You won’t be in no doubt whatever about it.”

Mike said, “Since he’s your sire, and mine, what does that make us to each other?”

Spike looked at him, then drew on the cigarette and breathed out smoke. Apparently the punctured lung had sealed itself although the ribs were still probably no treat. “Nothing whatever. What you are is my minion because you submitted and I accepted. An’ you’re a bit more awake than you were, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. Hard to tell. How about we all go someplace, get drunk.”

Dawn couldn’t help it: she giggled. Maybe the tone of voice, or the absolute seriousness. Or the notion of getting drunk for the very first time in the company of two vampires to whom she smelled like food.

“Wouldn’t be much fun for you, Bit. Just watching, an’ all.”

“They have cards at the Bronze,” Dawn replied, stifling her disappointment that she wasn’t to be allowed to drink anything but soda. She thought she might be able to sneak something from Michael, who probably wasn’t anything like as strict as Spike, being less socialized and still largely submerged in his demon. “We could play Crazy Eights. Or even poker, on credit: penny, nickel, dime. You both would end up owing me vast fortunes. If I go home, Spike, I’m going to end up hitting somebody and getting squashed like a bug. Buffy has Willow, and probably Xander, and probably Giles by now, he told her to phone when Angel got in. Big Scooby conference. She doesn’t need me there too. I’m not going home, Spike,” Dawn finished in a dire tone that let him know it was an ultimatum and he’d better take her seriously or he’d suffer the unspecified but severe consequences. “But if I come, no vamp face, and no fights unless you take them outside, otherwise I’d be sooo mortified!”

“See what you mean,” Mike remarked to Spike. “Bossy.”

“Well, all fine ladies are, so I expect it’s a mark of quality. Bit, you go on back and tell the children where you’ll be and have them pass it along quiet to the Slayer, so she won’t be worrying about you. We’ll see if my old bike will carry three. I figure it should if you don’t jump around too much.”

Dawn made a high-pitched whee noise and ran off to do as she’d been told.

**********

Dawn already knew vamps drank liquor almost exclusively for effect: to quiet the nervous energy continually boiling in them when that energy had no other outlet. Spike hated any kind of fruit schnapps, but he’d drink it when there was nothing else. Sober, vamps were jittery, bad-tempered, and impulsive--in a kind of permanent attack mode. The times Spike had gotten into serious trouble weren’t the times he was drunk but the times when he wasn’t.

And vamps were hard-wired oral aggressive. Dawn suspected Spike smoked as a kind of elaborate nervous tic: something to do with his mouth, with his hands. Vamps bit. And they drank. And they talked. Endlessly.

Which was absolutely fine with Dawn because she almost never had gotten a chance to see Spike in the company of another vampire. And the talk was hair-raisingly, eye-poppingly blunt. Apparently vamps weren’t big on innocuous chat. As in most things, they went straight for the throat and worried and tossed the thing until they’d wrested every drop of juice from it. Then they’d go on to something else and do the same.

Having settled themselves at one of the Bronze booths (Dawn and Spike on one side of the table, with Dawn on the inside, and Michael opposite), Spike bought a bottle and a Cherry Coke, and ordered food, never taking his eyes off Dawn for a second. When he came back, with completely humorless application, Mike and Spike (Dawn had to giggle, because it sounded like a TV series about a couple of cartoon animals) threw back successive water-tumbler sized shots, at least three apiece in under fifteen minutes. Then, with the energy boil apparently reduced to a comfortable simmer--what Dawn, from long observation, had come to think of as “coasting”--the two vamps eased back, started in on the spicy wings and blooming onion that were Spike’s favorites, settled themselves more comfortably, and talked.

The topic was Michael’s wanting to know why he shouldn’t eat Dawn.

Out of politeness, both of them were in human face. But Dawn had not the least moment’s doubt she was sitting in the middle of a couple of vamps. Big-eyed and fascinated, she pulled soda through the straw, knowing her life was absolutely on the line here and at the same time that she was in more danger from invading rabid wombats than from Mike because Spike would kill somebody--if necessary and available, several somebodies--to keep her from harm.

And that was where it started, Spike’s first reason: “Well, because she’s mine, an’ I said no.” He didn’t sound the least annoyed. Just explaining. It made Dawn shiver, mostly happily.

“But now, suppose she wasn’t. Just suppose,” Mike responded, frowning in a way some older girl might have found really adorable. Forehead wrinkled up but not in a vamp way, brows drawn, wide eyes thoughtful, not angry at all either. Seriously handsome and maybe even cute, if somebody were an older girl. “Suppose I was just to come across her, before. Maybe she’d still be yours, but I wouldn’t know that, and you wouldn’t have forbid me. Why not then?”

“Well, you tell me why not, Michael.”

“Don’t know any reason. That’s why I’m asking. Because your forbidding me doesn’t forbid you. I don’t see why you don’t eat her. Since she smells so nice.”

That presumably was a compliment, because a look and an approving smile came with it. Definitely shiver-worthy.

Spike stopped eating long enough to wipe his fingers on several napkins, poured his tumbler half full and drank some. “Well, all right, Michael, we’ll play your pretend game awhile. Tell me: do you like Dawn?”

“Certainly do. Smells really nice. Bet she’d taste nice, too.”

“Not the same thing. D’you like her this minute, just sitting here and having her soda, all peaceable. Nobody hunting, nobody escaping.”

Mike considered. “I suppose. Could always eat her afterward. Could be looking forward to that.”

“But then she’d be gone, y’see. No more Dawn, never again.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Then I’d look for the next one.”

“But all that’s Dawn except her blood, all that would be lost. How nice she looks, and how her eyes get big when she’s listening real hard, hard enough to stop jabbering herself, and how glad I am to see her, and how fine it feels to have her sitting right here next to me, all warm an’ happy an’ just the least bit scared but no more than what’s fun, and everything about Dawn that’s not about me at all, that I don’t even know but might someday come to discover…all gone to make a meal for a vamp. Terrible waste, Michael. Disproportionate, all that she is, compared to all you want of her. Like you get an ice-cream cone, say, and toss out the ice cream and just eat the cone. You missed the best part.”

“I hear that,” Mike responded, still frowning, “and I know what you mean by it, I understand. But that doesn’t change that she’d be fine eating, and that’s what I want from her. All the rest, that’s no concern of mine.”

“Well, we’ll take this from another direction because I know how brave Dawn is, we’re not truly scaring her at all. And I know it’s a fair question, that you truly want to know. I’ll match your question with another here. Is there anybody at all, you’re glad just to see them? That whatever you’re doing is better, just because they’re there, even if what you’re doin’ is pretty much shit? That you’re not thinking all the while how to do ‘em or eat ‘em or start a fight with them, no plans for them at all, just there in the same time and place, and that’s so fine you feel like you could just bust apart with how really brilliant it is?”

Mike bent his head, then displaced energy into pouring and downing another drink. They were both very like cats in that, Dawn thought: motions aside to send the impulse some other way, not straight ahead into conflict. She wondered if they were aware of it that way or if the impulse to turn aside just came and was taken at face value, without the meaning. She’d ask Spike later.

Mike said, “You said I was to let that be.”

“For now, I take that back. You go ahead, whatever it is.”

“You.”

“D’you want to eat me, Michael? Because it would be natural enough. You fed off me several times now. You know you can, that you can make food of my blood. Not exactly the same as Dawn here, but sufficient. Not that I’d let you, I’d have you down on your back again so fast your head wouldn’t know when it came off. Just pretending here.”

Spike said that so comfortably, in such a friendly tone. And Mike looked visibly relieved to be assured that even if killing Spike was something he truly wanted, it wasn’t going to happen. Reassured by the limits.

“Sometimes,” Mike admitted. “When you won’t let me hunt. When I’m hungry.”

“Again, that’s natural. Get ‘em hungry enough, even humans will eat one another.”

“Donner Pass,” said Mike immediately. “Been there, heard that story. Yeah…but then again, not really, because I know you’ll see I get to feed some way. You won’t forget me. I never been as hungry as all that, that I’d really want to drink you dry and then dust you so’s you couldn’t come back at me for it, after.”

But he’d thought out the stages, Dawn noticed. The steps that would be required. Dawn suspected that was the demon of it.

“Well, why not, Michael? I’m food to you, not all that different from Bit, except not nearly as good.”

“Got you now,” said Mike, grinning and happy, and grabbed Spike’s tat hand. “Because then you’d be gone. I see that.”

Spike patted Mike’s hand before calmly removing his own to tear off some more sections of onion. “These ain’t much good when they get cold.”

Thus instructed, Mike pulled some apart for himself and scooped them onto his plate.

“You’re a bright lad, Michael, and it’s a true pleasure to watch you comin’ out from underneath the demon the way you are. I like seeing that.”

Mouth full and hands occupied, Mike nodded to indicate he’d understood.

Spike went on, “If I was to make a meal of Bit, here, drink her up, every drop, likely I’d need nothing else for three, four days. Maybe as long as a week. But I’d miss her forever. And there’s no proportion to that, Michael. And the truth is, she don’t belong to me. That’s just a way to say. The truth is, I belong to her, and that makes me happier than I can tell you. There was a time, since we knew each other, you and me, that she was gone, an’ there was nothing I wouldn’t have done to get her back, safe. If me walking into the sunlight would have done it, I’d have done that in a second, and been all kinds of glad about it too, if it meant she’d be back, even if I was not to have her company.”

That called for a real hard hug, and Dawn made sure that need was supplied. And Spike hugged her back, as unself-conscious and frank in this as in discussing the prospect of turning her into dinner. Dawn ignored with determination the fact that his fingers were sticky and left marks. And her orientation changed. She was no longer sitting with a rectangular table between her and possibly dangerous Michael: she was sitting next to Spike, and suspected she took almost as much gladness in that as he’d said he did.

When the hug was done and they both felt like letting go, Spike went on, “Before I got mine back, I sort of had the idea that the soul was a thing that would yell at me don’t do this, don’t do that. That it was into forbidding, like I’m doing with you for this time. An’ sometimes, it does do that. Don’t have it properly tuned and accustomed to being in a vampire, I expect. Instead of that, what’s come to me from it, so far as I notice or understand, is a very sharp sense of proportion. What a thing costs, compared to what it’s worth. A meal’s not worth a life, Michael. It doesn’t fit, and it’s not fit. I’ll do somebody in a second for crossing me, or even for being in my way, that’s just their bad luck. But not for a meal. I’ve come to understand that, and may understand more when the damn soul gets itself settled in and figures out I’m a vamp and not apt to change that anytime soon, which I really wish it’d get the hell done, because it’s been making a terrible nuisance of itself lately. Anyway.” All the buffalo wings were gone, and Spike cleaned his fingers again by dipping them in the water glass (the one with actual water in it) and then rubbing them hard with the remaining clean napkins. Then he lit a cigarette, which the Bronze still allowed. “So despite Dawn smelling all kinds of good, like she does, she’s not food to me, nor a meal. Just Dawn. And because I know I’d miss her something terrible if she was gone, and because that’s what I’m for, I’ll keep all harm from her every way I know and every way I can, while I last. And in most ways, harm is what she calls harm, not what I judge it as. Because I belong to her and not the other way around. And I’d be real pleased if you got to where you could see it like that too, Michael. But I wouldn’t have you say anything but what’s so.”

Copying Spike, Mike also cleaned his hands. “I miss you when you’re gone,” he told Spike. “I’m scared. Don’t know how to do. Go and do some damn stupid thing right off. Don’t like it when you’re gone.”

Spike reached across and ruffled Mike’s hair. “You’re a good lad. You’ll do fine. And I won’t leave you for long nor turn you loose until I figure you can manage and go on from there on your own. Not if there’s any way I can help it.”

Mike’s face turned anxious but he didn’t say anything.

“However,” Spike went on, “gonna have to leave you a little while. Can leave you here, if you want, or back at the other place. It’s coming onto midnight, an’ time I got Bit home or she’ll catch hell.”

The look Mike gave her made Dawn figure she’d graduated from lunch to rival, which she supposed was one step up the food chain but not much improvement from her point of view. She thought Mike was jealous of anybody who took any substantial part of Spike’s attention away from him. But Spike had warned him off in terms not even a fledge could misunderstand, and Dawn kept her taser about her at all times, so Mike’s momentary resentment didn’t worry her. Tomorrow she’d see him and he’d have forgotten all about it, be some different way. He changed almost while you watched.

After a precautionary visit to the restroom, Dawn returned to find Mike grousing about having to be left anywhere and Spike being patient but offering only the two options. Mike decided to stay, so she and Spike left together.

Because Mike had stayed, Dawn got to ride behind instead of straddling the engine housing, which could get pretty hot. Behind was better. As Spike turned the key and kicked the engine alive, Dawn finished tying her hair back (Spike had forgotten to make her wear the helmet), then hugged him around the waist, the signal she was ready. Maybe mindful of his helmetless passenger, he made no great speed and took the corners slow, easy, and wide. Dawn enjoyed leaning into the turns and the motion and the rush of air, even though it prevented conversation.

She was a little surprised to notice he’d gone long, all the way to the end of Brown, before taking a cross street onto Revello: dropping to a walking pace and doing something to the controls so that the bike made twice the noise. Then Dawn knew and began pounding his shoulder because he was so fucking sneaky and hadn’t said word one about it to her. As a figure came running through the dark adjoining yard, Spike braked hard. Dawn did a floundering dismount as Buffy sprang to the back saddle so hard and fast she nearly knocked the bike over but Spike gunned the engine just the same and took off, something like 50 from a standing start with the bike still tilted and Buffy not even properly in place and not wearing a helmet, her hair all streaming out behind her. Like some sort of fucking circus act. Like acrobats. The red rear brake lights flashed at the corner and then they were gone except for the attenuating growl.

SECTION V: INTO THE DARK

Chapter Sixteen: Penultimate Arrangements

Spike put a good pad of distance between them and Revello. Letting the bike run full out, he visualized it like a map in a movie and a red line lengthening to show distance and direction when in fact the actors were just trudging a few feet from soundstage 13 to soundstage 14--from one set to the next. Because only the distance was important, not the destination. Because the fact was, they weren’t going anywhere. The fact was they were going Nowhere. So anywhere would do.

There were still some farms, mostly long abandoned, at Sunnydale’s margins. Spotting a dirt track winding off, he slowed and took it, headlight showing only a few yards ahead, blocked by tall patchy stands of weeds as the track twisted. He slowed more to navigate among the numerous deep potholes. Bike’s suspension needed work. Well, maybe sometime.

He didn’t know how far away Angel could sense or even smell him, but this should be enough distance that following would take awhile; and the wretched track would jar the hell out of a big car like Angel’s convertible. Spike would hear anything like that coming long before it arrived. Spotting the dark sag-roofed mass of the farmhouse, he turned toward it, slowed to stopping, and just let the bike heel over, tumbling to get his left leg clear but otherwise not caring how he landed, Buffy more graceful about it with likely a keener kinesthetic sense of the bike’s motion, so she’d felt it tipping before he’d actually decided to just let it drop. His careless tumble was made more fluid by Buffy’s elegant tuck-and-roll, like the whole thing was a planned and practiced maneuver, bit of a trick, and should have a Ta Da and maybe a hand-holding joint bow, applause, at the finish.

She even thought, gathering herself against and across him, not to lean on the ribs. Then her splendid hot mouth came down, and his arms found the strength after all to lift and clasp her, and it was good like that. Good any way at all.

So many things not in need of saying. How he’d done the slow, loud approach just in hope of her. How she’d recognized the sound of the bike and yanked a knee-length sleeping T over the whatever or the nothing she’d had on, and down the roof and the tree the old way and running, the sound of it hope to her too, all like something planned but none of it planned, just one of their frequent magical convergences.

Standing still, he often floundered. But in motion he was seldom wrong and then the affinities of motion took over and she was there, as often as not, no need and no use to explanations, that’s just how it was: the inevitabilities of their coming together when they were both moving right. Always converging or on their way to converging, even when he couldn’t see it. After all this while, he should have some faith in it but he never had anything more than hope and wishing and so lonely for her.

They’d landed on a slight slope. Not with the motion of the fall but a new motion, more by their own internal momentum than by gravity, they did a slow rolling tumble to the bottom, she still somehow putting no weight on the sore ribs when she was at the topside of the roll and holding the almost-no-distance and supporting him above her as the roll took her underneath. Favoring the ribs as he did himself, seemingly with no thought, just automatic and a part of the motion. So kind in her strength. So thoughtful and easily aware.

When they came to rest that second time, she was weeping, sobbing, her tears more on his face than her own, so that he wasn’t sure if he was crying too or not. He stroked the lovely soft hair back from her face making soothing noises, some words, some not. And so strange to be all humming inside with that small sup of Slayer blood and it not hers, as though he’d been obscurely unfaithful and yet not, since it was Dawn’s; strange to be all fed up well and yet so emptily exhausted that he wanted only to lie like this, clasped in her arms and kissing her, do nothing else, out until the end of his forever.

“--go,” she was muttering, “and keep going, not ever come back, can’t we do that? Just run and run and never stop--?”

“Of course we can, love. Got all we need right here, enough for gas as far as Canada maybe, an’ I don’t need much, hardly anything, there are ways an’ it’ll all be for you, fine food and fine clothes and quiet all about, nothing to make my princess sad--” Then he had to stop because that was soothing-Dru-babble, he could always come up with that, some fantasy or another spilling out, didn’t matter, anything but outright unconscious he could do that but Buffy wasn’t a lunatic to be placated with soothing lies, she deserved better, she deserved sense--

“Hush,” she said, although he’d already gone silent. “Hush, we don’t have to, we can’t, I know that.” She began stroking, patting his face, saying, “Spike, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry--”

Knowing itself betrayed, his demon wanted to flash out at her, sweep her out of living fast and hard. He felt the change begin in his eyes: as if they heated, sharpened. Sharpness and suddenness starting to flow from that all through him. But he held himself from it. Because he was fed up so fine, his demon didn’t have the extra leverage of hunger and had to submit. The change receded and even with her hand touching his face, she wouldn’t know, wouldn’t have felt there was still within him anything not altogether humbled and obedient to her.

“Sorry, so sorry,” she still was wailing.

A huge wave of sadness lifted up in Spike and he thought he knew its name. He had no soothing noises to answer that. When at last she stopped apologizing, he said, “I know you tried your best, pet. So what conditions has he set, then, for me to not breathe his air?”

“I tried. I did. But it’s not fighting and I can’t…can’t keep believing that this is right. That we’re right.” Her hand closed into a fist and she pounded the ground just beyond his head. “Can’t, without you there. When it’s just me.”

And yet she’d come. Heard the bike and come running, all barefoot, across the dark grass. That was need, though, not love. He knew that well enough. And likely only love would have let her hold fast, given her a place to stand.

With her fist still hammering down, Spike said softly, “You can hit me, love. I’m what’s making it hard for you. Except for me, it would all be simple again.”

Her fist uncoiled and patted more aimless apologies against the side of his head.

He guessed the Slayer in her also was angry, also felt betrayed. Also was being restrained and deflected from striking at him: guilty of abandonment and of being the proximal cause of her misery, as she was guilty of weakness and irresolution. And the conflicted punishing anger swallowed down, refused, as it nearly always was now because the will to cherish, protect, and forgive was so much stronger, such a steady ache of self-surrender and longing that the fleeting irrationalities had no power and only harmlessly flashed and faded. All layers, complications. Nothing simple anymore.

He kissed her to say he knew that and accepted it. And she kissed him back to say she knew and it didn’t help. That she could not hold fast and yet would not let go. And their hands on one another therefore snatching and desperate, unable to take good hold and be at peace in the contact.

Well, it was all pretty much what he’d expected, after all. Hoped for better but not expected it. So this line was all run out. Have to do that other, then.

Spike got up and extended a hand. Buffy took it and he pulled her up. They turned together back to the bike humming on its side.

**********

Spike ranged along the row of identical doors until the scent told him the right one. He rapped twice sharply and then stood away. Back by the bike, Buffy stood wide-eyed and waiflike in the long T and her bare legs, hair all tumbled by the wind.

In under a minute, the door opened. Maybe the Watcher had heard the bike.

Spike took another retreating step, eyes downcast, hands stuffed safe into pockets, shoulders hunched and tight. “Rupert. Sorry to trouble you again.”

“Spike.”

“Wonder if you might take Buffy home. Don’t want to cause no further trouble. Won’t happen again.”

Silence. Then Giles asked mildly, “Do you want to come in?”

Spike backed another step. “No need. But…I’m gonna work something out. A truce, of a sort. With Angel, if he’ll have it. If it’s OK, I’ll just slide it under your door when it’s done. Then maybe you could pass it along, next chance you have.”

His demon was enraged with the Watcher: for assisting Angel’s advent and for what Giles had yet to do, that Spike had just now asked of him. The Kill the Messenger impulse. Completely irrational and fiercely strong, and Spike with less conviction to withhold himself from it. So he kept himself backed away and controlled the furious demon within him as a hooded falcon that bated and raged.

He flinched, startled, at the Watcher’s hand dropping onto his shoulder. But the hand pursued past the flinch to rest, heavy and quiet, where it had been sent to go. Giles said, “I’m sure this is horribly difficult. For you both. Certainly I’ll help in any way that I can. And I value the confidence you’ve placed in me.”

“Yeah. Thanks.” Spike immediately wheeled and returned to the bike. To Buffy. “You’ll go home with the Watcher. Maybe that will keep Angel within bounds. I’m gonna send him an offer of truce, like. An’ that may take a bit, working out. So don’t you worry if you don’t see anything of me for awhile. I imagine that will be one of his conditions, to consider it at all. I’ll come to you when I can.”

Buffy hugged him. “I’ll wait. And try not to let things get worse in the meantime.”

“Yeah. Right. You go on, now,” Spike said as Giles came out again, shut the unit’s door, and went to stand by his stupid ugly car in the second row of parking slots.

Spike watched them out of sight, then went to Giles’ former place: where Spike had written the letters DAWN on his hand, trying not to lose that too. Determining nobody was alive inside that unit, Spike quickly broke in and wedged the door shut with a wad of tissues. Having shut all the drapes, he turned on the desk lamp and settled there, pulling the sheaf of complementary stationery out of the drawer and finding a pen.

Once he had a cigarette going, he was as ready as he’d ever be to compose what probably was his own death warrant.

The first draft began, You barbaric lout That went into the wastebasket immediately. The next draft contained fifteen synonyms for idiot but was discarded not for that reason but because Spike tried to put in condolences about Darla’s reported newest death, and that got complicated because he’d really hated the bitch by the end and pretty much all along, actually, and the words and phrases looked to him like exactly what they were: hypocritical cant. So he pitched that too.

The third draft began, Angel, I’m sorry I had you tortured over the Gem of Amarra. If you want something done properly, you have to do it yourself. I should have done it myself but that was always your preferred art form you great bleeding nance

Since the level of discourse rather went downhill from there, Spike added that draft to the rejects, plowed his fingers through his hair a few more times, reviewed most of the reasons he knew he had to do this, took a fresh sheet of paper, and began again.

Angel, I hope you recognize this as an impasse. I don’t want to be at war with you. It’s a waste of energies required elsewhere. Since I know you’re not apt to make accommodation, it falls to me as usual. I mention that I am now ensouled only because some people ascribe some value to it. This news will probably not please you, but it was not you I had in mind in any fashion whilst I did it. If it inclines you to read through this missive to the end, it will have served all my present purpose in informing you.

Probably there is too much between us for anything to be simply said or entirely believed. We have lost any semblance of civility. For my part, I am quit of you and satisfied to be so. Yet that is not entirely true either. I remember the misfortune we had following Gordon’s slaughter at Khartoum and how splendidly you handled that. And so of course I knew this present situation would also be best directed by you and not by me, an opinion in which you appear to concur. If it is offensive to you that I speak of you and of Angelus, that you were to me us at that time, making no distinction, I assure you that no offense is meant. I know little of Angel. It is Angelus that I knew. I assume the skills of the one are the skills of the other. Intention is always a different matter. So we shall never be quit whilst we remember. Which means until this strange unlife ends for us both, whenever that should be. When I remember, you are there. I assume it may be the like for you since Darla since Drusilla

A way exists to resolve such an impasse as this. It was formulated and used among those who, like us, are of the Elder Blood; few in this time remember it. I saw it done once in Russia, where perhaps the old ways held longest. I have been told that the Line of the Tepes, in the Balkans, also had recourse to it. Supplice d’Allégance. The Absolute Submission. I believe you may know of it because it is cruell but if you do not, no matter, since its form is according to the whim wish of the Master performing the ritual. I believe it is my right to require this of you, my Master and my Sire, however estranged, as the acknowledged and unquestioned Junior of our Line. If you accept my invocation of this rite, I will come to the place that you name and put myself into your hands for whatever may satisfy you of my fealty, that I may serve some purpose in this present matter. I place no conditions, implicit or explicit, upon how the ordeal is to be performed or what the outcome shall be.

I mean nothing here, or very little, beyond what I say. There is no buried cipher to be worked out. I will not willingly be shut out of this and cannot further tolerate the impasse in which we find ourselves, perhaps to the ruin of all else. This is the only solution I have found to end it. Besides, you’ll enjoy it.

Rupert Giles, C.O.W., has kindly agreed to carry this message for me in the my expectation that he has earned and won your respect as he has mine, and in the hope that you may therefore grant to him, if not to me, the courtesy of reading it. He knows nothing of the contents or of what I am proposing. Your oral answer to him will suffice. Nothing more need be written. If you accept, inform me where I am to go and I shall be there. You may give any reason you choose for my absence; or I shall give any you direct and none but that. I offer in honor that it may be received in honor.

I submit myself to your will and wait to know it. You may test my obedience in whatever way seems good to you.

Spike turned that draft over and sat staring at the blank reverse side for several hours. Then he turned it face up, reread it, added a few words, a few more strikeouts, and methodically made a fair copy. He signed it
Yr Childe,
William of Aurelius

Having folded the letter, he slid it into an envelope he then sealed and addressed. Only as he was about to slide it under the door of Giles’ new efficiency did he realize what he’d written was To Angelus of Aurelius. For a second, he thought to change it. Then he poked it the rest of the way and rose. No matter.

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

The hillsides east of Sunnydale were good stone with numerous water-cut caves of varying depth and complexity. There’d once been a nest of Hrath’najaur demons who’d preferred the isolation but Spike found no current sign of them. He chose that cave to lair in because it had room to wheel the bike inside. The remaining time before sunrise he spent checking the surrounding area for any sign of habitation since many sorts of demons and other creatures were not constrained by sunlight as vampires were, and he didn’t want any happening on him when he was asleep. Finding nothing amiss, he kicked and spread loose sand over the bike’s treadmarks, then retreated into the deeper dark.

He could still vaguely smell the Hrath’najaurs--not an unpleasant odor, and it gave an illusion of company as cemeteries did. Spike had no fondness for unmodified Nature and little for solitude. The Hrath’najaurs’ sleeping area was deep clean sand--they were burrowers--and Spike settled there. For a while, arms behind his head, he thought about what he’d need to do, in what order, when he woke. A little after sunrise, he slept and eventually woke to a redder light, the last of the sunset, blessedly with no memory of dreaming.

It might have been good to have some vision past what was ahead. But he hadn’t expected assurances.

Toward the rear of the main cavern, there was a spring of fresh water gathered still and cool in a catchpool. Spike drank from cupped palms, then ducked his head a couple of times and sat back on his heels. The water soaking into his shirt felt good. So he pulled off the shirt and had a soapless wash with it. Seeing that twilight had fallen, he returned to the bike, pulling the wet shirt back on. He wheeled the bike out, swung on, and started slow down the crooked ground toward the nearest road. Only when he’d reached it did he notice that the assorted bangs and bumps of the descent hadn’t bothered his ribs. That much less clutter to complicate his thinking and doing.

Coming in, he’d taken note of a convenience store likely to have a phone. Returning there, he found his guess confirmed and poked in coins and dialed the motel’s number he’d written on his hand last night. Getting an answer, he asked for Giles, who answered on the second ring.

“Giles here.”

“Me, Rupert. Any word?”

“Yes. And yes. Spike? Is there anything else I might do? Spike? Are you--?”

“Keep the whole bloody thing from coming apart, I s’pose. Assuming anybody can do that…. No, nothing more I know. Obliged to you, Watcher. Goodbye.”

So Angel had agreed. Spike hadn’t seriously doubted he would. His childe served up on a plate to play with as he pleased and as long as he pleased, now why would Angel say no to that?

So proceed to the next thing, then. Mounting the bike, Spike went fast into town, checking the most likely places as he came to them. The Bronze. The dying theater (the mall multiplex was drawing too much custom) and streetside shops, still open at this hour, mostly college children abroad. Then Willy’s, a quick look inside finding Huey bussing tables. Spike caught his eye and went back outside, waiting until Huey joined him.

“How was the poker?”

“Decent. Betting was better, though. A decent stake. You fight pretty, Spike. Bet Willy would take you back if you ate some crow.”

“Well. Other things to do. An’ I never did like crow…. Gonna be away awhile. Could I send Michael to you? Look after him, whatever he needs? I’ll leave the bike with him. Could sell it, that’d be enough for his keep for awhile. He’s not fit to be on his own yet. You know.”

“No. He’s not. And I can’t do for him, Spike. He’s not gonna mind me.”

Spike shrugged. “Keep him from getting hurt too bad, then. Can’t take him with, that’s not an option.”

“He’s not my get, Spike. I won’t do him no harm, but past that, I can’t say. Can’t just swap a fledge around like that, minion or not. You know better.” Huey’s long Scandinavian face was serious. Not hostile. Not really anything.

“Yeah. I s’pose. See you, then.” Spike turned back to the bike and headed to the last place he knew to look: the house on Livingston. Although he could tell Michael had laired there through the day, he was gone. Spike stood awhile in the yard. Coming up with a possibility he didn’t like, he started walking, not wanting the bike’s noise to announce him.

Approaching Casa Spike, on Brown, he felt the awareness of a whole lot of suitable prey inside, that was the SITs. And through that, not quite lost in it, the low-level prickly awareness of another predator in the vicinity. Spike went on slowly, by feel rather than by sight, making no attempt to conceal himself. When he was pretty sure he was close, he stopped. “Come here, Michael.”

Out from behind some trash cans at the side of a garage, Mike straightened and came, sullen and resentful. No good answers and no good time for talk. Spike just turned and walked back to Casa Spike, Mike trailing along behind.

At the head of the walk, Spike stopped. “Michael, go ring the bell. Ask ‘Manda and Kim to come out here. Then come back.”

When Mike and the two SITs came, Spike sat down on his heels, and the SITs did the same. Mike stood glowering and unhappy.

“’Manda,” Spike said, “you know I been looking after Michael, here. Can’t do that now. And I know you can’t be responsible for him. But look after him how you can, all right? Nobody never asks him inside. Never. And nobody never lets him feed from them. And Michael, they’re still mine, even when I’m not here to say so, all right?” Spike looked up but Mike refused to meet his eyes. “Michael, you look at me when I’m talking to you.” Obeying, Mike went yellow-eyed and vamp-faced. Spike said anyway, “That’s fine. Michael, you trust these children. All of ‘em. You know them all. They won’t do you no harm. You need something, you can ask them. And Bit. Something you don’t know, you ask Dawn. ‘Manda or Kim, here, they’ll go fetch her if there’s need. And tell her what I said. Whatever Dawn says, you do, she won’t tell you wrong. She knows, the most of anyone, how it is for us. You still lair back on Livingston. But you don’t hunt anyplace nearby, right? Just like I told you, just like before. I know you’re mad at me, Michael. I thought we’d have longer. ‘S’not my choice, to leave you.” Another thought occurred, and Spike added, “Don’t you hunt me, neither. It doesn’t concern you. You stay clear or you’d be hurt. You hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“Michael, my bike is back at the other place. It’s yours. Use it or sell it, whatever you please.”

“Don’t want your bike.”

The lad was at the thin, vibrating edge of control. But it wouldn’t do for Spike to let on he knew that.

“It’s yours, all the same. Now you gonna do what I told you, Michael?”

“Maybe. What d’you care, if you’re not gonna be here?” Mike challenged.

“Michael, I want to provide for you. Be easier not to: can you see that? Be easier just to walk off, let you all go your ways. But you’re a good lad an’ I don’t want to do you that way. And these children, they been kind and kept faith with me, and I know they’d look after you without me even asking. So I believe this can be, and no one hurt, and--”

Mike swung at him. Spike saw it coming and leaned away in lots of time, then stood fast, balanced right, the children ducking and quickly getting clear.

“Spike, don’t,” said Amanda sharply. “We’ll cope. Truly. Don’t.”

It wasn’t right. A disobedient minion was not to be tolerated. Let alone one who’d raise a hand against a master.

Not looking anywhere except at yellow-eyed Mike, Spike said, “If he don’t mind me, he won’t mind anybody. You’d have to do him, soon or late.”

“Then we will. If we have to. But not you. Not now. Leave him alone, Spike. Please.”

Spike told Mike, “Now you hear, how they speak up for you? You hear that? You know what’s due, Michael.”

Vamp-face flowed and was gone as Mike sank to his knees. “Dust me then, what do I care.”

“I would, except they claimed charge over you. And I’m gonna allow that. So you submit to them, Michael. And you never, ever cross them or they’ll do you, and you know they can. Just like I could. Now you do it, Michael. Right this minute.”

“Don’t want you to leave me,” Mike exclaimed, finally starting to cry.

“Well, that’s not up to you, is it? Nor me, but there’s no help for it. You give them your submission, Michael, and be a help to them like you been to me. ‘S’not the best, but there’s nothing else. No other way. Michael!”

“All right. I submit.”

“We accept your submission, Michael,” said Amanda, coming into Spike’s line of sight. And Spike was proud of her because she’d listened, at the hospital, in spite of all else that’d been there. She knew the proper words. “Take your life from our hands. We’ll keep you and look after you and no harm coming to anyone from it.” Approaching Mike, Amanda had her taser in her hand, and she moved light and careful, but once she’d gone down on her heels by the lad, likely she couldn’t have stopped him if he’d decided to turn and take her. But this time, at least, that didn’t happen, and Mike allowed the tall, thin, homely girl who would barely have made a whole meal to clasp him around the shoulders and hold him so.

So Spike obeyed the glance she flashed him, to be gone with no more fuss about it. Spike headed off, as quick and quiet as he could, through the yard and through the hedge. That was Michael seen to, anyway. And they might find a way to be, Mike and the SITs, and maybe better than Spike for all that no human he’d ever heard of had asked for or accepted submission from a vampire. Nor any vamp who’d offered it, neither. None of them knew the rules. Which maybe was for the best, since they therefore had no expectations and would make it up as they went. Like he and Buffy had. There were no rules for that neither. And it worked well enough, or had….

Put things together whatever way they fit, whatever way he could. Try to make them come to sense, even if it was no sense anybody else would confirm or agree to. Tradition was a steadying thing: hard to hold against and a support perilous to discard. Without it, everything had to be thought out and decided, minute to minute, and nobody could live like that forever. Some things had to be understood, simple, or the complexities and uncertainties would multiply into an infinite fishline backlash tangle you’d finally have to cut through to free yourself of it. And then the hook, last of all.

Standing quiet under the maple tree, Spike thought that he’d cut through all the line and arrived at the hook end of things. All the complexities were set aside and no more choices to be made.

After awhile Angel came out to him and they faced each other. Spike almost asked what was required of him, where he was to go, but didn’t, realizing there was no need. Angel would specify. So Spike just waited. Angel turned with an abrupt summoning gesture. Spike followed along and got in on the passenger side when Angel slid in behind the wheel of his big convertible, that Spike sometimes had derisively thought of as the Angelmobile. But that didn’t signify anymore. Spike leaned back and shut his eyes.

When the car stopped, Spike got out and again followed, entering one of the anonymous, characterless abandoned houses. This one had been completely cleaned out to the bare walls. Angel led him through to what was probably the living room. A largeish room, anyway. That was good because Spike had never liked small enclosed spaces since his rising, finding himself trapped in a cheap deal coffin. Nothing he couldn’t control, but at least it seemed no immediate part of the ordeal.

Again they stood and faced one another.

Angelus would have gloated and insulted him. Called him boy, if not worse. Told him how stupid he’d been to enter into such an open-ended agreement, one that few, historically, had ever survived. Which wasn’t meant to be survived. Which was, in fact, a form of tradition-sanctioned murder from its earliest beginnings: instituted as a method of dealing with intractable, ambitious juniors and subordinates.

Angel did not allow himself gloating or insults. He said only, flatly, “Declare.”

So he did know the forms. That should make things simpler.

Spike replied, “I, William of Aurelius, do submit myself to the Supplice d’Allégance, my Master and Sire, as test and proof of my fealty.”

“I accept your submission. Your life is in my hand, to determine whether you be my true and obedient childe, to keep fealty against all hardship and temptation, even in extremis.” Angel scratched an eyebrow, then went on less formally, “All right, Will. Would you have it slow or fast?”

“Fast.”

“Then my command is stand.”

Spike found and took a steady stance. He didn’t flinch or move when Angel went to vamp face and the wide jaws closed at the junction of Spike’s neck and shoulder. The dizziness wasn’t too bad at first. Only after Angel began spitting the blood aside onto the floor did the swimming in Spike’s head become severe. Blinking as he was drained, Spike concentrated on his stance. If the dark room seemed to tilt and start spinning slowly counterclockwise, at least he still knew how he stood. Passing out wouldn’t count as refusal. Only refusal counted as refusal.

Easier to start drained than wait to slowly become so. Quicker, then, to the point of involuntary refusal. It was after that, that the really bad part would begin.

Chapter Seventeen: Polling

The first night of Angel’s arrival, Buffy practically dragged Anya aside after the meeting while the others were gathering in the hall preparatory to leaving. Anya looked from Buffy’s face to Buffy’s gripping hands and back to Buffy’s face again, bright and birdlike and curious, like Jeff Bridges in Starman but not so winsome. Just birdlike and alien, then. Buffy asked her, “Really, Anya. What do you think? About Spike and, and me?”

Anya was the good one to ask first, Buffy thought, because Buffy figured Anya knew him the best, since they were both part-demon. And since Anya’d had conspicuous covertly televised sex with him on the big table in the Magic Box. Must mean you knew somebody pretty well to do that, right? And this was horrible. Embarrassing and utterly horrible. Buffy felt like hiding and never coming out again.

“Well, I have a good many thoughts about you,” Anya responded judiciously, “and a good many about Spike. We’d be here several days if I were to tell you all of them. People don’t usually ask me questions that open-ended because I tend to be literal. You may have noticed. So I sometimes get the impression that I offer considerable information beyond what they’d initially expected. Would you care to narrow that question down?”

Buffy was going to strangle her and then curl up and die. “Spike and me. Together. As a couple.” Oh, she was going to hell for that, certain sure. She’d said together. She’d said couple, which was another way of saying sex when it was a verb, and Spike was practically all verb, had to pry the nouns out of him by brute force.

“Again, that’s a pretty broad topic. And why wasn’t Spike here tonight, by the way? It’s not like him to forget. He doesn’t usually say much of anything, but putting in an appearance has to count for something, for being responsible.”

“He’s not here,” Buffy gritted, “because he and Angel were at each other’s throats from the second Angel set foot inside the door. Round one was inconclusive. More or less a draw--some damage on both sides. Round two is likely to be quite a bit more messy. And end in dust. So I guess he ran, got out, rather than face that. Force that, I mean.” (And abandoned me, the rat! Abandoned me to face it all alone! He knows I’m lousy at that, I hate that! And he still ran!) “OK, no to the vagueness here. Spike and me: are we right? Or are we both kidding ourselves and this is never gonna work, it’s really just a mutual insanity, it’s just the really great sex and how come I always end up with the vampires? Why is that?” Buffy yanked at her hair fretfully.

“The really great sex part, I’ll take on faith,” Anya responded, giving the matter serious thought. “Because he’s skilled, no question: he might have trained as a sex worker except there was no such profession, and therefore no training for it, until very recently, except for the court of Catherine the Great, which was another thing entirely. And you’ve nearly ruined him for that, I must tell you, Buffy. The great thing about vamps in bed, beyond the nearly non-existent refractory time, of course, is that they’re almost impossible to distract. They really give it their all. Drunk and miserable and distracted, they’re pretty pointless, but of course you go on, you don’t want to hurt their tiny feelings or their tiny anything else. Now, Xander--”

“Thanks, Anya. I appreciate your frankness,” Buffy interjected hastily before Anya could launch into (Gak!) Xander’s deficiencies in bed or anywhere else. Buffy did so not want to know!

“Well, it’s about time someone did,” Anya replied tartly, patting her hair, which was champagne blonde at the moment.

Xander was the next target for horrible, embarrassing interrogation but in a way, Xander was safe. Xander had hated Spike from the first moment, when Angel had offered him to Spike as a snack (all a deception, of course, and it hadn’t worked), and had never seen any reason to change his opinion since although as far as Buffy knew, Xander had never seriously attempted to stake Spike, which was more than could be said for her.

“Xander, c’mere.” Buffy drew him away from a conversation with Angel, whom Xander also loathed, into the small alcove between the basement door and the back of the upstairs staircase. “Look, just tell me: Spike and, and I, we’ve been a public item for awhile now. What do you think of it? Really?” Buffy looked him anxiously in the eyes.

“I think your getting it on with Charles Manson would be a considerable improvement. Ted Bundy. And this is the blank where you fill in the lucky mass murderer of your choice. Are you insane, Buffy? No, the question is how insane are you? The idea of shaking the guy’s hand gives me goosebumps and a world of ick. The idea of--”

“Thanks, Xander. I get the idea.” Buffy propelled him back down the hall in the manner of a shopping cart. When he was on the porch, Buffy said firmly, “Good night, Xander.”

She turned and Angel was there, looking down at her somberly. Angel asked, “Is this a poll? Can anybody vote? Can we mark None of the above? Are you the prize in life’s box of Crackerjacks and Spike just got lucky, stuck in his nasty little fingers and there you were?”

“You don’t do sarcasm well,” Buffy shot back and why did she have to always be looking so way up at him? Spike was taller than she was and he didn’t make her look up that way, always hunkering small on the floor, or sprawled low in a chair, or tilting his head pretending to be smaller than he was and why couldn’t Angel do good things like that? Why did he have to make such a point of looming? “That’s Angelus’ shtick and he’s better at it.”

“Buffy, why ask when you already know? Is a quick vote of confidence from his fifteen closest friends--oh, sorry, I forgot: he doesn’t have any friends--going to change that slaughterous foul-mouthed twerp into something fit for human society? Much less yours?”

“He does too. Have friends. He’s changed. He has a soul. Too. And it wasn’t forced on him, either. Which is more than some of us can claim.”

Angel looked thunderous and perplexed. Then perplexed went away. “He must have stolen it. It certainly hasn’t noticeably cramped his style, after all. And that’s what souls are supposed to do, Buffy: make him sorry for being a backstabbing ungrateful bastard I should have squeezed into dust a century ago. You don’t even claim to love him. So why bother trying to defend him? Habit? If he’s been useful, I’m more useful. And I’ll take care of you, not exploit you. Not corrupt you…any more than I already have. And if I knew how to be any more sorry about that, I would be. Because I know Spike would never have been able to get his claws into you, or anything else, except for me. Making you think that vamps were OK. Vamps are not OK, Buffy. We’re demons and we deserve to be dead.” Angel gave her Sincere, Loving Look #22, that had always melted her and still did, dammit, continuing, “As long as I’m among the semi-living, I’ll make it up to you however I can. Now leave it. He’s not worth another minute of my time or your thought. And I’m not going to hear any more.”

After he’d passed her, Buffy muttered rebelliously, “The Emperor has spoken.”

“I heard that,” Angel said over his shoulder, waving a cautionary finger, descending the front steps.

He was staying at a hotel downtown. No room for him at Casa Summers, even if all the SITs were to be bundled together over at Casa Spike. And besides, it wasn’t to be thought of that Angel would stay under the same roof as her, the attraction of his undead charms and huge shoulders might have been too much for them both to resist and presto-change-o, you got Mr. Compleat Ugly Angelus who far outdid anything, even unproven and hypothetical, Spike had ever managed by way of gleeful evil, and the no-friends he attributed to Spike went double, triple, quadruple when it came to Angelus. Absolutely nobody liked Angel’s worse half--not even Angel. So no question of his staying here.

And then, preparing for bed and for reading Dawn the riot act for letting herself get dragged off to a bar, for God’s sake, by the non-comedy team of Spike and Mike, and probably even having the Mystical Green Energy Thing cojones to actually have fun when life had become utterly unbearable for big-sis-who-hadn’t-been-asked-to-escape-to-said-bar, hearing the bike, yanking on the sleepshirt and running, after a bit of a chaste tumble and mutual misery and being delivered, still all chaste and miserable, for Giles to deliver home as if she were a ten-year-old runaway, self-consciously yanking the hem of the sleepshirt over her knees for the fifteenth time, Buffy still managed to scrape up a small puddle of courage to ask, “Giles, you’re nearly always civil to him now. So what do you really think? About Spike and me? Because Angel’s being an utter brute about it and Spike won’t back me up, he just runs, and I’m all alone here, Giles. And it’s so awful….”

Without looking away from the road, Giles passed her a handkerchief. She was too ashamed to get snot in it so she just used it to dab at her eyes and took big sniffs.

Giles said abruptly, “Spike believes that you don’t love him. Would you consider that an accurate assessment?”

So Giles wasn’t gonna be on her side either. Might in fact even be inclined to side with Spike, the traitor! And Rupert Giles doing the male solidarity thing with Spike was absolutely beyond belief, beyond all the odds of oddness.

Buffy wiped her eyes again wearily. “It’s hard for much romance to bloom when I’m always taking all this goddam criticism for boinking the evil undead. Past and present. Nobody backs me up, Giles. Nobody says, ‘Buffy, go for it, be happy, and who cares if he has a pulse.’ It’s hard getting up in the morning or wanting to. But Spike. He helps. He tries so goddam hard and nobody, absolutely nobody, gives him any credit for it. He’s been a real partner to me, Giles, and I can’t face what’s coming, I can’t even face now, without him. So is that love? You tell me.”

“It sounds, at most, like your loving his loving you. And that’s a very poor substitute, Buffy, for the actual thing. Of late and since the soul, I’ve developed quite a lot of respect for Spike. Given his handicaps, he’s done at least as much as Angel, the acknowledged Champion of the Powers That Be, has actually accomplished. At times, perhaps, the flesh is weak, but the spirit certainly is willing; and the same could be said of me, or of any of us. I know if I were in Spike’s position, I would have despaired at the way you blow hot, cold, and icy, never giving the same set of signals for a whole hour at a time. I would have simply given up, Buffy. And I wouldn’t blame him if he did. He’s been trying to accomplish something quite independent of you. He’s been trying, quite creatively, to come up with some effective opposition to the First. Which is supposed to be your mission. Not his. But he’s committed himself to it…again, apart from his commitment to you. I think at this juncture I will be betraying no confidences in telling you that the idea of summoning Angel--”

“--was his. Yeah. He told me.”

“And weren’t you at all surprised by that? Knowing them long-time antagonists, not even considering their history together, which is, to put it mildly, remarkably savage and perverted?”

“Didn’t think about it all that much,” Buffy admitted. “He was being dumb, and that was just one more dumb thing in the middle of all the other dumb things. How in the world did he talk you into that? Into pretending his idea was yours?”

“By painful frankness, when he clearly would be the loser by it if the plan proved successful. He’s a wretchedly bad liar. But he is also impossible to doubt when he speaks the truth, because he spares himself not at all. Which you have a tendency to do, Buffy. ‘Truth cannot be said so as to be understood, and not be believed.’”

“That’s poetry,” Buffy accused.

“So it is. Blake. I gather we share a fondness for Blake, Spike and I--one of the true philosophical revolutionaries. As close as I am ever apt to come to understanding chaos in the service of order. Destruction as part of the Natural cycle. Breaking it all down so it can all be built up a different way, and perhaps a better.”

“So you don’t figure he’s evil anymore?” Buffy asked hopefully.

“I now disqualify myself from judging him at all. He’s beyond my ken. But whatever his means, I believe his ends to be good; so I will continue to offer him assistance in whatever way he requests or is willing to accept. Unless, of course, he loses his temper and kills me, which is always a lively possibility and makes dealing with him so refreshing.”

In the dash lights, Giles’ face wore one of his pursy little smiles. Then he glanced at her, actually taking his eyes off the road for a whole second.

“I know that love does not come on command, Buffy. And I believe that if Spike had no further hope of your returning his love, it would break him. He’s staked absolutely everything on it. So I cannot, in good conscience, tell you to send him away, even though that might be more merciful in the end. All I can say is that if you ever truly know you cannot love him, just as he is and is becoming, without conditions or restrictions, don’t ever say that you can or that you do. That would be the most wicked, cruel, and unforgivable lie I can imagine.”

“Wicked.”

“Yes, wicked. Evil from intended good is more pernicious than evil intended for its own sake. You must decide this for yourself, Buffy. And then stand by it, no matter who disapproves or disagrees. Even if the one disagreeing is I. This much I will say: that I don’t think that the fact Spike is a vampire, and you are the Slayer, has the least significance anymore, except as it may matter to you, and to him. You are never going to make a man of him. And he is never going to make a vampire of you. Your differences--your opposition, even--is part of what brought and now holds you together. You and he must come to terms with those differences in their full measure. But you are not purely Good, Buffy, and I mean that as no criticism, only the truth. And Spike is by no means purely Evil, if indeed he ever was. He is an individual who loves passionately and tries desperately and with very little hope. And I hope that would always earn my respect, no matter who or what the person was.”

“Person,” Buffy repeated.

“Yes, person. I have been considering your Boogey Man Credo idea in preparation to writing my piece, that you required of us all…what now seems a very long time ago. And that far, at least, I have come in agreement with your basic thesis. Vampires--mature vampires, at least--are individuals. Are people, in any conceivable interpretation of the word. Spike and Angel are persons, beyond question, quite independent of their ensoulment. And they hate one another from having been too close for too long. Such a long life surely has as many drawbacks as advantages…. And I don’t like to think what may be required for Spike to establish a truce, much less a true peace, between them. Because vampires have little interest in negotiations or concessions. Vampires, each and always, are concerned with power. With force and domination. And I don’t believe there is a moderate bone in any of them.”

“So you think Angel is gonna hurt Spike?”

“Oh, I’m quite certain of that. The only question is how much and to what purpose. And that, I should very much like to know.”

“Don’t ask him. Angel. Please. He’s said his condition for not dusting Spike is that we all shut up about him and pretend he doesn’t exist.”

“Very well. There are other avenues. And Angel’s remarks concerning the Hellmouth tonight represent really fresh thinking. He’s right: we’ve been entirely reactive and therefore very nearly helpless: dealing only with the effects, not the cause. Leaving the initiative wholly with the First. Spike’s judgment is validated, pending the result. Angel is the best leader, and one uniquely placed to be effective in our present circumstances, that we could have been fortunate enough to recruit. It’s a good thing, Buffy, that Angel is here. Though I’m sure it will only become more difficult for us all, day by day. And now you’re home.”

Buffy turned her head and sure enough, it was: same old Casa Summers. Giles popped the automatic lock and Buffy uncurled her legs from under her to get out. Standing holding the top of the open door, Buffy said, “Thanks for the ride, Giles. And the talk. And this is so not the crappy car that Spike and Dawn say it is. It’s actually kind of cute.”

“Cute. Yes, how nice. Well, you’re welcome, Buffy. And if I can be of any further help, please don’t hesitate to call upon me. And when you feel so terribly alone, surrounded by nothing but disapproval and opposition, I suggest that you talk to Dawn. She’s surely a powerful and admitted partisan of Spike’s. And if her remarkable claim is at all to believed, she has…ah, friends in high places beyond anybody’s ken, including mine.”

“Dawn? As in, Dawn that I’m gonna ground for a month for being out past midnight?”

“Even so,” Giles said, and sighed. “Surely this is an apocalypse. Too many contending powers have converged for it to be anything else. Ask Dawn. Your present memory of her is not all that there is, Buffy. And you loved her, once.”

“I love her now, but she’s still gonna get grounded!”

“Some loves are so easy to know and say. It’s a pity most are more difficult. I would very much like to have a long talk with Dawn myself. Perhaps that’s what I should do. In any case, she’s your sister as well as Spike’s partisan, and is as totally immoderate as any of the rest of you, so you should find her company comparatively soothing. Good night, Buffy.”

“G’night, Giles.” Buffy shut the door and backed away from the curb, and Giles’ car pulled away.

Trudging upstairs, Buffy found both Willow (her next target for polling) and Dawn asleep, naturally in separate rooms, and was so weary herself that she didn’t wake them…or the assorted SITs sharing their beds, some more innocently than others. Kennedy and Willow, specifically, on the not-innocent side. Not Dawn, JoAnne, Vi, Chloe, Cho-Anh, and at least one pink large teddy bear. Hadn’t meant that at all, rewind, reset, Take Two.

Damn: listening to Giles for any length of time really did whack to the brain.

So Buffy dragged along to her own room and her own pitifully solitary Spikeless bed, flopped face-down on the pillow, and was asleep within minutes.

**********

With Angel running the show, things pretty much ground to a halt during the day except for Buffy’s job, of course, and who really cared about that. Spike had planned it much better, Dawn thought: taking his sleep break from noon to about sundown, so the morning was filled--for the SITs, at least--with weapons drill and individual training. So far, Angel hadn’t shown up at all during the daytime (complicated, but not impossible, for a vamp), and just for an hour or two at night, conferring with the Scoobys and Giles.

Which was fine with Dawn. Angel’s good idea about the Hellmouth and involving some magical talisman or other that Anya was helping Willow locate, per Anya, didn’t square him at all in Dawn’s estimation. Buffy was whiny and wilted and miserable, and nobody had seen or heard from Spike in two days. Dawn was certain something underhanded that she ought to know about was afoot, and Angel had something to do with it. Fine: Spike had said, You bring in a workman, you get out of his way and let him work. But that didn’t mean Spike should give away his fucking bike, that he loved almost as much as the old DeSoto, full of dings, cigarette butts, and character (according to Spike). It didn’t mean giving poor Michael away, or as much as, according to what Amanda had told her, and the SITs knowing about as much about taking proper charge of a vamp as a pig did about Pythagoras.

That wasn’t what you did when you figured to take off for a day or two. That was what you did when you figured you might get seriously dead. It was a wonder he hadn’t tried to give Dawn away, but maybe he’d figured he didn’t have to since she was Buffy’s sister and that was pretty much as good as being given away, right there.

The teeny piece of Spike’s soul that Dawn had co-opted, quite legally and by permission, told her plainly that Spike hadn’t dusted, at least was extant someplace. But Angel’s prohibition was no way enough to keep Spike away, any more than it’d kept the Flying Finnegans act from departing on the bike, three nights back. And it was more than plain that Buffy hadn’t seen him since.

If Spike didn’t come, check in with Dawn somehow, even a phone call--Spike was a modern vamp, knew about tasers and phones and microwaves and everything--it wasn’t because he didn’t want to. It was because he couldn’t. Regardless of anybody else’s claim, he was hers: he’d said so. And nobody restrained or injured Dawn’s rightful property with impunity. Besides, Dawn was scared, but that was her own business.

Since Angel wasn’t anyplace around, or Buffy either, Dawn figured her being grounded only meant she wasn’t allowed to go out to a movie or the mall or anything. It didn’t mean she couldn’t go visit Casa Spike first thing in the morning, the way she always did.

She found a war council already in progress, out in the yard. Kim presided, which meant they were really serious because Kim would do things Amanda never would. If they chose Sue, who was really ruthless and cold-blooded, who was the chief of the no-bra brigade, and who maybe was just a little too interested in vamps, as war leader, that would be the sign that things had really come unglued.

Kim stopped whatever she was saying to wave Dawn to a place next to her. The SITs always did the circle thing, like Spike had taught them, instead of the teacher-class arrangement, the one and then the many. So the circle just inched a little apart to leave Dawn room.

As Dawn plunked down, Kim asked, “What’s the news from Casa Summers?”

“No word. No news,” Dawn said glumly.

“Well, we got this great idea. Tonight Angel’s supposed to review the troops, OK? Because I guess the tasers came in, Spike said they were due about now. One for everybody. So make a big thing of delivering them, and we do a couple drills, OK? All rah rah and fighty? So we’re gonna dog it. Trip over our feet, handle the weapons all girly and eek, is it gonna cut me? Maybe taser a volunteer accidentally-on-purpose. Show Rona some blood, so she can faint. She does real faints, no faking! And make us look like the biggest pack of sissy losers on the planet.”

Rona piped up, “I don’t want anybody but Spike sending me against no Turok-han. They’d waste our asses big time.”

“Yeah,” Kim continued enthusiastically, “and do formations of three, nobody in their right mind does formations of three, everybody bumping into each other--”

Dawn broke in coldly, “That is absolutely the worst fucking idea I’ve heard since New Coke. You know what you’ll do, if you do that? Make Spike look bad! Make Angel think Spike’s an utter incompetent, and you’re a bunch of noodles!”

“Now, that’s harsh, Dawn,” said Rona.

“I don’t care if it’s fucking severe, Rona. You make Spike look like a jerk and I’ll never speak to any of you again, so long as I live.”

“Yeah, and that’s apt to be a whole lot longer than any of us live,” chimed in JoAnne sourly. “Do you think this Angel vamp, or whatever he is, is gonna look out for us like Spike always did? He hasn’t even come to meet us, say Hi, how are all you fine lookin’ maybe-Slayer chicks today?”

“I’ve seen him,” Kennedy said in her usual flat way, not looking at anybody. “I think he’s bad news. Willow seems to put up with him well enough, though. Old Scooby tie or something. Slayer’s boyfriend from way back.”

Rona said, “Yeah, Slayer says come to Mr. Exaljente Generalissimo Grande, we ain’t gonna get to say go.”

“You’re forgetting,” Dawn said. “It was Spike who said come And the fact that I think something’s gone off about that doesn’t change that for all I know, Angel’s doing just about what Spike expected him to do. Wanted him to do. After all, I figure you get to know somebody pretty well in a hundred plus years. So I’m not about to start second-guessing Spike until I know more about it. And that’s what we need: to know more about it. We have to find Spike. Check with him before we do anything drastic. I can take the bus. Check the demon bars. See if he’s been around, and how long ago. There’s non-us people around in the daytime, just not vamps. And speaking of vamps: how scary has Michael gotten at this point?”

“He’s not scary, he’s cute,” piped up Sue, with a she-wolf’s grin.

Dawn groaned loudly, considering that major bad news. And Amanda told Sue, “Keep your chewed-to-the-quick claws off the baby vamp. Unless you intend to become lunchments. In that case, go ahead. Anything else, though, is absolutely off limits. We have enough trouble with Sulky Slayer without that. And from what I hear, E.G.G. Angel would definitely not be amused if you got your throat bitten out or anything else permanently broken, if you catch my drift. We’d have to disappear you. Say something got at you on patrol. Because Spike will definitely not be pleased at all if you get his baby vamp hurt or blamed for…anything of that nature,” Amanda finished prissily.

“And who made you the boss of me?” Sue demanded, rising and glaring at Amanda.

“I made me the boss of you, and in one more minute, I’m gonna demand submission. And I think everybody will back me up on it, too. And you really won’t like what we’ll do to you if you’re submitted, Sue. You’re not a baby vamp, you’re a bitch, and we’ll treat you like one and make you learn better. All right, as of now, you’re off the roster.”

Suzanne sat down real fast. “You don’t have to get all shirty about it, ‘Manda. I didn’t mean anything by it. I said he’s cute, and he is. Puppy dog eyes--”

“He’s probably a gazillion years old, it’s probably about his thirtieth fledgehood or whatever the damn word is, and cute boys with or without fangs is not what the mission is about, Sue! And having heard word one, I do not want to hear word two about puppy dog eyes. He wasn’t given to us as a chew-toy, all right?”

Or a fuckbot, Dawn thought but didn’t say, not wanting to take on the chore of explaining the now decommissioned Buffybot to them. Not one of Spike’s more shining hours anyway.

Instead, she held up her arm and said, “Here.” And they all attended. “Topic drift. Topic is finding Spike. I changed my mind. Sue can check out the demon bars. Any problem with that, Sue?”

“None whatever,” said Sue, grinning and inspecting the nails she’d been accused of biting.

“What I want to do,” Dawn continued, “is talk to Michael. He should be asleep now and therefore findable. Not too many--don’t want to make him nervous. Vamps have been known to do things when they’re nervous. ‘Manda, choose a deputation. Maybe three.”

Quietly, Amanda inquired, “Who made you the boss of us?”

“Spike did. Not in so many words, but he did. Because nobody cares as much about Spike as I do, and because he’s mine, and Mike will confirm that he said so, if you’re in any doubt. And because while you all were coming up with dumb schemes to make yourselves look like the queen Dorks of Dorkland, I was thinking that Michael is our best and maybe our only way to locate Spike and find out what’s happened to him. Does that satisfy you, ‘Manda? Are you happy with that?”

It wasn’t strictly true, there was another way to locate Spike, but Dawn wanted to keep that in reserve and use it only as confirmation, because that would mean going public to the adults. Specifically, to Willow. Anyway, Dawn had said “maybe.”

“Happy enough,” Amanda said, and shrugged. “OK, team is me, Kim, and Rona. Mark is Casa Minion. Casa Michael, I guess it should be. Everybody else on taser drill. If we’re gonna put on a decent show tonight, we need more practice. Vi, you call the drill.”

Heading toward Casa Michael, Amanda remarked to Dawn, “Well, you certainly have the Not-Backing-Off drill down pat.”

“I learned from the best,” Dawn agreed smugly.

**********

Coming up with a key, Amanda explained, “We keep it locked in the daytime. It wouldn’t 100% keep something non-us from coming at him, but it would at least give him warning.”

When the door opened, the first thing Dawn saw was the bike--not on its kickstand but leaned rather forlornly against the side of a staircase. They all got inside and Amanda shut the door to keep the bright out.

Amanda remarked, “I don’t know where he lairs. He has the whole house to himself, after all.”

Dawn called, “Michael, I’d like to talk to you. It’s Dawn.”

“Hi, Dawn.”

Dawn jumped and turned, and there he was, sitting on the lowest landing of the stairs, about six feet away. Well within striking distance. His eyes shone faintly in the shut-door gloom.

As the SITs backed off to a more appropriate distance, Dawn went closer and patted the bike’s rear fender, drawing attention to that hand because the other had gone into her pocket, onto her taser. “I’m worried about Spike, Michael. Nobody’s heard from him since he left, the other night. But first, how are you? Have the SITs been treating you all right?”

“Nothing to complain of. Why’d he leave us, Dawn? Didn’t we do right?”

Suddenly all Dawn could think of was how devastating it’d been when Hank Summers left. Michael’s “us” somehow connected to that. “No, Michael. I’m sure it wasn’t our fault.”

Mike’s eerie, soft, almost sourceless voice responded, “I went for him. I did. Thought he’d do me, right there. Would have made sense that way. This don’t make any sense, Dawn.”

“That’s because we don’t know. Why he went. And I think it’s bad, Michael, or he would have told us. And we’re kind of stuck here. We can’t tag along behind Angel, see where he goes. He’d know. But you’re a vamp. And he wouldn’t notice you. Well, he might, but he wouldn’t make anything of noticing a lone vamp cruising around because he doesn’t know about you. You could be our ace in the hole. Would you like that, Michael?”

“He said I wasn’t to hunt him.”

Amanda said, “That was because he was worried you’d get caught. If you just hunt and find and then come right back and tell us, that’s different. Could you come right back, if you find him?”

“Dunno. If it’s bad, might be I’d want to hurt somebody.”

Dawn said sharply, “That’s not good enough, Michael.” She crossed right in front of him and scraped at the wall to find the light switch, figuring Spike wouldn’t have chosen this house if the power had been shut off. When she pushed the three switches she found, lights came on everywhere throughout the downstairs. As she’d thought, Mike was sitting there in vamp face. Meeting his somber golden eyes, Dawn continued, “You’re not a child, not a fledge, to do the first thing that comes into your head, no matter what it is. You have choices what to do, or not. It’s about time you started to make some. For instance, do you really want to hurt us?”

“Might. But…it startled me, to feel somebody coming. I was afraid.”

“Are you still afraid of us, Michael?”

“No,” Mike admitted, and his face flowed and changed, and he was just a sad looking guy with untrimmed brown hair flopped over his forehead, sitting on the landing. Gaze averted now, dropped to his boots: no longer confrontational.

“Can you make a promise and keep it?” Dawn asked him.

“Maybe.” Mike thought about it and Dawn kept still, letting him. “Yes, I think so.”

“If you can promise to look and come right back and report, then you can hunt him, Michael. Do you promise?”

“If he didn’t want me to hunt so I wouldn’t get hurt,” Mike formulated slowly, “that’s up to me. To take that chance or not. If it’s just me. So OK, Dawn. I promise.”

“Can you handle the bike?”

Glancing up, Mike showed her a lazy smile. “Oh, I expect. I was a merc ten years. I know most kinds of transport.”

Amanda asked, “A merc?”

“Mercenary. I got paid to kill people. Whoever wasn’t paying me, pretty much. Not so different from now. Except the company didn’t smell so good.”

Dawn said, “When you say things like that, it makes us nervous. We think maybe you want to hurt us.”

“Maybe I do. But no Dawn, never no more. Spike would be real sad, was that to happen. So I wouldn’t do that. Just funning you a little. Scare you a little, but not bad. You can scare me back if you want. Say you’re gonna dust me if I don’t do right and like I promised.”

“Don’t want to scare you, Michael,” Dawn replied soberly. “Not even for fun. We’re still too new to be certain what’s fun and what’s truly scary.”

“That makes sense,” Mike decided. “So come dark, I’ll take the bike and hunt him. Then I’ll report back. That all right?”

“That’s fine, Michael.”

“I’d sooner you’d make it ‘Mike.’ And I won’t call you ‘Bit.’ Because that other, that’s his.”

“Right you are. Hundred percent right, Mike.” Dawn thought a minute, then took the taser out of her pocket and held it out to him. He looked at it, then up at her. “You take it. In case you run into any trouble. A Turok-han, say. Or if Angel catches you, tries to hurt you.”

“Oh, he won’t catch me. And he wouldn’t want you to go without.”

Dawn had no trouble sorting out the “he’s.” “There’s more now. I can get another.”

Mike nodded. “Order’s in. Then all right.” He took the taser and held it cupped in both hands. “It’s good you trust me like this. Makes sense. Like you truly don’t want me to get hurt. That if somebody has to get hurt, it’s not me. That maybe we’re like friends.”

Very slowly and carefully Dawn reached out and touched his knee. Nothing personal, not his face, just his knee, and only for a moment. “I’d like to be friends with you. I like vamps, when they’ll let me. You vamps, you’re so downright. Direct. I like that about you.”

“Clean,” Mike commented, putting the taser away in a front pocket. “Like Lawrence said about the desert. That it was clean…. I like that about vamps, too. You children go on, now. I have to rest. And you think about how we could be friends, and we’ll decide about that. Some other time.”

The three SITs went outside, but Dawn lingered last to tell Mike, “When you keep your promise, Spike will be really proud of you when we tell him. That you’ve started choosing for yourself again. I know he wants that for you.”

“You love him. Don’t you. And he lets you.”

“Well, he’s mine. So he has to let me. He had my name in a poem tatted all the way up his arm, to show my claim on him. He’s proud of it.”

“I know he is. I wish he’d let me.”

“I think…we found the right distance. There’s nobody else standing where I’m standing, in relation to him. My sister, the Slayer, she has a different distance, and that’s hers. And the SITs, still a different distance than that. I think maybe you just need to find the right distance. That’s just yours. Not that many vamps he cares about, Mike. So there’s plenty of room.”

“Ahuh. I’ll think about that. You go on now, Dawn. I need to rest. Then I’ll hunt.”

Chapter Eighteen: Supplice d’Allégance

When Dawn came asking for a locator spell early on a Wednesday morning, Willow thought nothing of it. Such spells were routine. People were always losing things or each other.

And Dawn barging into Willow’s room, asking for something or just wanting to chat, was routine, too. Willow accepted her because everybody else did and because for months, Casa Summers had become a place where strange teenagers popped up and challenged you for bathroom rights as if they’d always been there. In most ways, on a practical basis, Dawn was just another. Willow didn’t pay much attention, just tried to avoid getting trampled at meals. The new improved reality that included Dawn was pretty much like the old reality that didn’t, and Willow was much more concerned about acing her Western Civ. midterm, in make-up coursework, than about Buffy’s unremarkable, tiresomely energetic, and possibly artificial kid sister.

Dawn was just Dawn.

Collecting the salt shaker filled with very fine red powder, the materia locus, Willow spread a topographical map of Sunnydale and environs out on the desk and sprinkled the materia lightly over it. Then Dawn touched it with the focus she’d brought: a small rectangular object made of silver metal.

Willow asked, “Isn’t that Spike’s lighter?”

“Yeah. Giles found it, I guess up at the motel. I thought I’d take it to him.”

Willow thought she vaguely remembered Angel saying everything was all super dandy fine, except Angel still didn’t want Spike underfoot at Casa Summers or anywhere in Buffy’s vicinity. So he’d parked Spike someplace and set him to investigating some practical aspects of the Hellmouth.

“Give it to Angel tonight,” Willow suggested indifferently. “I’m sure he’ll see Spike gets it.”

“I want to give it to him myself. I haven’t seen him in five days, and that’s a long time not to see somebody you’re used to seeing every day.”

Not caring enough to dispute the matter, Willow spoke the operative part of the spell, then shook the map to slide the materia locus across most of the middle. (If the middle had the X, there was no need to perform the trickier procedure of dusting the edges.) The materia adhered to the map in a single, jewel-like dot, marking an address on Albert Terrace, six streets away, in the middle of the block.

Having studied the map, Dawn trotted off, and Willow forgot the whole thing completely until Dawn caught her having lunch in the kitchen.

“Eew,” said Dawn, with an appropriate expression. “What’s that?”

“Sprout soup. Want some?”

“Thanks, but I’d rather live uninhabited by internal Triffids…. Willow, something’s not kosher.”

“Well, I’m the good one to tell, all right,” Willow responded amiably. “My credentials are a little out of date, but card-carrying Jewish person here. Wicca Jewish. So: what’s not kosher?”

Dawn leaned both elbows on the counter. Frowning, she slapped absently at her hair, which was showing too much of an affinity for Willow’s soup. “The map point, the locus, is one of the abandoned houses. Grass up to Yo.” Her flat hand put the grass at waist high. “When I knocked, nobody answered. I called that it was me, and still nobody answered. So I waited a little while, watched a mutt marking territory, and then knocked again and rang the bell and called, kicked the door, everything. And Angel came to the door. It’s one of those houses with a big porch overhang, like here, so he could do that and not go all flamey. And he told me Spike wasn’t there, which I knew perfectly well he was, and I showed the lighter, and he got a funny expression on his face and offered to pass it along. The lighter, not his face. Does Angelus look like Angel?”

Suddenly Willow decided she didn’t want any more soup. “Angelus looks exactly like Angel, except for real mean eyes. The only difference is on the inside. Angelus has eyes like a snake.”

“Well, if that was Angel, he has the mean eyes down cold. And I mean cold. Spike’s been gone nearly a week. Reasonable reasons were given. Except that they seem to have been lies. I don’t like it that Angel’s telling me Spike’s not there when he is.”

“Did you tell him that? That you knew he was lying?”

“Wednesday’s not my stupid day. I tried to look like the biggest idiot birthed, or not, since the last Ice Age and skipped off in my girlish way, tra la.”

“Well, Spike really doesn’t like me reading him. You know that.”

“Make an exception. Blame it on me, he hardly ever murders me when he’s mad. Just find out if he’s all right.”

“Go outside,” Willow directed absently. Catching Dawn’s indignant being-sent-away look, Willow explained, “Your watching is a distraction.”

As Dawn obediently zipped out the back door, Willow tried to decide the best approach: what she should do, as opposed to what she could do.

Willow was making up coursework because she’d spent six months of near house-arrest at the Devon coven penitentiary (literally) following her out-of-control attempt to end the world.

And she’d been penitent, all right: the coven had made her face her nerd arrogance, founded in the conviction of her own irrelevance, so whatever little trick such a powerless nerdy twerp could do must not count or matter, must be all right.

Like steal someone’s memory. Or refuse to recognize anyone else’s right to selfhood when it inconvenienced or displeased her or she simply thought she could make better choices for them than they could, walking in and out of their minds at will. Or perform dangerous blood magic to raise a friend from the dead…against that friend’s will and without her consent…and then get in a royal snit for not being thanked for it. Or try to make of her own personal grief a force to incinerate the earth. As if the power to do it, the pain to want to, and the self-absorption not to care who else she hurt absolved her of all responsibility.

Now, knowing herself to be a powerful witch dangerously lacking in safeguards, knowledge, or wisdom sufficient to render her harmless without also taking great care, Willow was very controlled and deliberate. She’d found terrifying the realization that she could do irrevocable things--things no amount of sorries and guilt cookies could make right again.

These days, Willow was much more respectful of the Law of Unintended Consequences and of trespassing beyond other people’s rightful boundaries.

Spike had told her to keep the hell out of his head, and she’d dutifully respected that. So she opened the connection now on the mental equivalent of tippy-toes, ready to retreat at the first sign of a yell.

Spike?
(slow, indifferent attention) Yes.
(no yell yet. hopeful/nervous) You mind this?
No.

Reassured of consent, Willow tried to interpret the tone, the intent of what she was getting. Because the mental voice didn’t, to her, “sound” like Spike at all. There were no overtones or undertones. No vague, swirly, smoky surround of emotional affect, the way there generally was with anybody. With Spike, that normally took the form of what she’d thought of as a “whiskey edge”: brown, strongly focused, with a bite to it, no pun intended. Instead, this was mechanical: like having a conversation with a computer fitted for voice commands and responses.

Something not kosher indeed.

Are you OK?
No. Yes.
Explain no yes--I don’t understand.
Doing what I must.
And what’s Angel doing? To you???
What he must. I think he enjoys it more than I do.
Dawn’s worried.
(alarm; effortful rousing concern) Keep her out of it. Away from it. Please.

Willow was shocked into staring at her soup: Spike had just asked her something Please!

She flipped her soup into the sink, then rinsed and refilled the bowl with tap water, all full of chlorinated goodness doing brave battle with the sewage residue. She set the bowl on the table. Staring into the smoothing surface of the water, Willow conjugated the Latin verb videre: all the forms of seeing. With the mental link as the center, like a camera mount, she saw in the water’s surface what Spike could see, like a reflection in a small round mirror.

In a slow pan from left to right, she saw a dark board floor and above it bare walls with the lighter rectangles where pictures had been removed. Crooked rough plywood that almost certainly covered windows. No direct sunlight, and nearly no light at all, was admitted to this room. Your basic empty house, refitted for vampire occupancy.

This had probably been the living room. She saw no doors leading outside. A doorless arch to a dining/kitchen area where someone was moving. Then, as the vision panned farther to the right, an open door and a hall beyond. connecting to some other part of the house.

The motion in the kitchen became Angel, broad-shouldered and solemn, intent on his task: setting up a small, cheap folding table. He returned to the kitchen and brought back a big Kool-Aid style clear glass pitcher filled with what had to be icy cold water, going by the condensation. He placed the sweating pitcher on the little table. Added a glass. Considered the arrangement, the effect.

Because there’d been an effect. An interior lock on a target: like an alcoholic seeing liquor or…what somebody incredibly, desperately thirsty would feel looking at a pitcher of ice water.

Willow had never been as thirsty as that. She could only guess. But she wasn’t in any serious doubt.

Angel said something, but Willow could only see, not hear. But because the perspective didn’t change, she knew Spike hadn’t moved. Not an inch. She tried to nudge his attention to himself, so she could see if there were ropes, restraints. But the lock on the pitcher was too strong, and his awareness of her intruding presence too dim, for her to influence.

She didn’t want to give Angel any reason to suspect her scrying. So she kept inner silence while Spike fought the pull of the water. Willow would have thought only blood could affect him that way. But apparently if you were dehydrated enough, water would do just fine.

Not that there wasn’t blood. When Spike finally broke the lock and let his gaze fall to the nothing that was the floor, Willow realized why the boards were dark. Blood. Lots of it. Some dried black, some fresh. A whole bunch of flies taking an interest in it.

As far as she could tell, there was nothing keeping Spike in place. Nothing to prevent him from taking the pitcher and drinking it all down. Nothing, in fact, to prevent him from crossing the room to wherever the outside door was and leaving. Except that he didn’t.

If Angel was still there, Spike had ceased to notice him.

Willow quickly grabbed her bowl and drank all the water. It tasted awful: bad city water--a tautology. She drank it anyway. Besides, she figured she didn’t have to see any more to know the meaning of what was going on.

(equivalent of whisper) Spike, why are you doing this?
Because I must. Don’t say to me anything you don’t want repeated.
(startlement, indignation) You’d tell?
If I’m asked. Yes.
(derisive) What are the chances you’re going to be asked if a witch is talking to you in your head?
Low. Ask what you must, then go away.
Why?
(slower, flatter) Because it’s a comfort.
(concerned, a little touched)It is?
Yes.
Then why don’t you want me to stay?
I am not to have comfort. This is not about comfort. It delays the end.
(startled alarm) What end?
(nothing: no reaction)
What end, Spike? How is this supposed to end?

Willow lost the connection in a blaze of static. Dawn had come back and was leaning on the counter again. Expecting a report.

Willow chewed on her lip. “Angel and Spike are having some kind of a face-off. Spike insists it’s necessary, and you should keep out of it. There’s bad parts to it but I don’t know enough to call it yet.”

“Did he yell? Throw you out?”

“He…has other things on his mind. He didn’t object.”

“So: if I go back over there and start yelling my head off, is that gonna make things better or worse?”

Willow shook her head. “He really, really, really doesn’t want you getting involved in this, Dawn.”

Dawn pensively bit at a nail-edge. “‘Really’ cubed. That’s severe. What if we tell Buffy? Is that ‘really’ cubed, too?”

“I don’t know. Not yet, Dawn. I got the strong sense that this is something he made up his mind to and is really-cubed determined to see all the way through to the end.”

“What end?” Dawn demanded.

“I don’t know yet,” Willow temporized. “I’ll monitor, as much as he’ll let me.”

“Willow. There’s something I’ve been looking for the chance to talk about with you. About me and Spike.” When Willow looked up, Dawn was leaning both elbows on the countertop and drawing idly on the surface with an index finger. So averted, so conspicuously non-confrontational, that it was faintly alarming. Dawn continued, “For the record, I existed independently before Spike recovered me. Actually, it was something we did together. The operational force was connection, not a spell at all. No template and no summoning were involved. There’s nothing in what we did that would be of the least use to anyone else. In reconstructing somebody, for instance. I’ve been waiting for you to bring it up, so I could get it out of the way. But you never have. I think what I think you’ve been thinking is a really terrible idea, but we don’t have to discuss it because it’s not possible unless you’re willing to settle for the equivalent of the Buffybot. And that, you could have done anytime. And you haven’t. So I think you know as well as I do that it’s impossible. What’s gone is gone. And I’m sorry, but that’s how it is.”

“Oh,” said Willow, feeling as though she’d been rammed by a truck she hadn’t even seen coming. “But….” She was thinking about Spike’s strange aura. But that would be accounted for by either opening up or being forced open by a complex and powerful aetherial connection--exactly what Dawn had described.

Finally lifting her large, implacable eyes, Dawn added, “If Spike’s in trouble and you’re the contact, I need to be sure you don’t think something could be available from him, or from me, that we don’t have. I don’t think this is a good time for private agendas. When Spike’s hands were hurt so bad, you tried to help. And you told me that was because you had history with him, even though all of it wasn’t good. You said he was a mensch. And I say, when push comes to shove, Spike is us. And Angel’s not. So you--”

On a different frequency, abrupt pain. Huge pain. Willow did the equivalent of scooting away fast, so as not to be overwhelmed by an onrushing tsunami.

“What was that?” Dawn asked, shrewdly attentive.

Willow fanned a hand in front of her face, then slapped it onto her chest, heart doing doubletime waltz, sitting jammed all the way back in her chair. “Let’s say…heavy duty hint that this isn’t the greatest time for company over there. I’ll check back in a while. When I figure out more of what’s going on, I’ll let you know.”

“All right. If Spike said wait, I’ll wait. But the minute he says something else, tell me. I’ll be at Casa Spike.” As Dawn sauntered outside, Willow thought of asking, Who are you and what have you done with Dawn? But (a) they’d already done that and (b) Willow wasn’t sure she wanted to know.

**********

Dawn ran to Casa Mike. Opening the door just a crack, she called, “Mike, it’s me. Dawn. Can I come in?” Because it was important for him to know she and the SITs weren’t just gonna come waltzing in whenever, during his sleeping time, into his own place. She’d done that with Spike, just burst into his crypt. She was ashamed, thinking back, how rude and thoughtless that had been. Vamps didn’t have much, maybe didn’t need much. But that was no reason to make them feel vulnerable and unsafe in the only place they had that was truly their own.

“Come in, Dawn.”

Mike was sitting in one of the big chairs, a little bleary, rubbing his eyes. Had probably been asleep but staying near the door, waiting for word. The same as all of them were.

Dawn perched on an arm of the adjoining chair. “Willow’s confirmed. She has it now. She’s talking to him. Spike doesn’t want us interfering.”

“Willow--that’s Red. The witch.”

“Right. She can talk to Spike inside his head. And I know he hates that, but he hasn’t shouted her out. So I figure it’s bad, Mike.”

“Well, we pretty well knew that,” Mike responded calmly. “If Angel meant him to die, if that was what this was for, he’d already be gone. And he’s not. So he’ll last awhile, until we come.”

It had taken Mike two nights to identify the house on Albert. About three in the morning, Dawn and all the SITs camped out at Casa Spike had heard what they’d been waiting for: the sound of the approaching motorcycle. Before Mike could even dismount, they’d all run out to the curb, and he’d told them. Then he’d said, “I’m going back there now,” and started an argument because Kim had been worried he’d just break in, or try to go after Angel, or follow some other vamp impulse and ruin things. Mike had listened until Kim was done, then said, “I can wait. Wait just in range. So I can feel him, and he can feel me. Won’t know it’s me, of course, but if he’s scared, if he’s hurt, maybe it would be better to know somebody’s there. Steady. Not leaving. Don’t think you should forbid it, Kim.”

Then Dawn had asked in a small voice if she could come too, keep vigil, and Mike had told her that wouldn’t be good because Angel knew her, knew her smell, and well might notice something and come looking. “Best if it’s just me. Just some vamp he don’t know, don’t mean nothing to him.”

However reluctantly, they’d all accepted his judgment on that, so he’d kept the vigil alone that night and would again tonight, until Willow relayed the word it was OK to go and get Spike out of there.

Now Dawn asked, “Do you know what he’s doing? Why he’s doing this?”

“I’m only six years old, Dawn. In this life. Lots of things I don’t know. Maybe he’ll tell us. Afterward.”

Dawn slammed fists onto her knees. “I want to know now!”

Understanding it was impatience, not a real demand, Mike smiled at her. “When there’s nothing to do, you wait. It all comes around. You wait your chance, and it comes. Too bad you can’t be better at waiting. It frets you so.”

It tickled Dawn a little, to have Mike offer sympathy for her human shortcomings.

“I should get back now. And you need to rest. When anything happens, I’ll come tell you.”

“All right.”

Dawn got up and started to go, then looked back at him: so calm and quiet, so unlike Spike with his compulsive fidgets and coiled suddenness. Knowing she was still within striking range and he could easily take her before she’d know what was happening. Knowing that didn’t matter, any more than it did with Spike.

She’d seen Mike often enough in game face that it was easy for her to imagine it: the broad, overhung brow; the wide golden eyes and steady gaze. “You’re almost your own person again. Spike will be glad.”

“Yeah.” The simple word, simply accepting and agreeing.

“Sometimes I imagine Spike as a cat. Like a cougar. Sometimes he reminds me. Is it OK if I imagine you like a lion?”

“Can’t help what you imagine, Dawn. Don’t mind it, though. Lions aren’t like the pictures people have in their minds about them. But nothing wrong with the picture, if that’s what you want. Not a picture, though. I’m a vamp, Dawn. Be best if I remind you of that.”

“You’re right. Best as what you are. It only seems easier to imagine something else. Because I truly don’t know lions, either. It only seems more familiar. It isn’t, though, really….”

Dawn left then, carefully shutting the door tight behind her against the sunshine, and ran to Casa Spike to wait for further word.

**********

Willow made a cup of soothing tea and took it down to the basement. Spike’s cot was gone, wrecked, but there was a chair down there for waiting out laundry cycles. Willow put it where the cot had been to increase the affinity. Be in a place where he’d been, see what he’d once been accustomed to seeing.

She’d waited an hour before attempting contact, but found the pain still in full flood and yanked clear again. So she went up to the second floor and resumed her search for the amulet and actually got interested because there was something quite promising on e-Bay. Not enough of the right details to be certain. She put in a moderate bid, then checked on magical implements available on her other bookmarked sites and registered a couple of carefully worded searches on two of the supplier sites. When she next looked at her watch, another two hours had passed. So she took a bathroom break, then did the turns back down to the basement and the chair.

Pain still there, but just the wreckage after a flood had passed. She could move it aside, not be distracted by it, clear a different channel and focus only on that.

(soft, careful) Spike?
Yes.
What the hell was that?
I was not attending. I was punished.
(contrite) Did I distract you?
Yes.
(more contrite) Sorry.
(no response)
I can make it stop. I can make [u]him[/u] stop!
(rush of NO, anxiety, anger) No. Let it alone. It must finish.
But why? Why are you letting him do this to you?
It’s necessary.
(exasperated, concerned, worried) Necessary for what, Spike?
(flat; more distant) Necessary.
Why is it necessary for you to let Angel torture you?
Supplice d’Allégance.
Supplice d’what?
Supplice d’Allégance. Pain is the means. Not the end.
OK, what’s the end, then? What is this goddam for?
(slow, distant, objective) Vampires are not kindly creatures. Pain is a form of conversation. Angel and I are having a conversation. Finally I will give the right answer and it will be over.
What’s the right answer, Spike?
Angel is waiting for NO. I have not yet given him NO. He will force me until I do. Then he’ll break the NO and wait for YES. He won’t believe NO until he’s forced it. Then he may not believe YES.
(determined, trying to understand) What happens if he doesn’t believe the YES? Or you can’t give him the YES he wants?
Then he’ll keep beating down the NO until I can give nothing.
What I’m hearing is ‘until you’re dead.’ Am I hearing that right?
(no answer)
(pause: thinking; cold) And how far are you from the NO?
Very close now.
Am I in the way of that?
(immense black hole of exhaustion opening, widening, deepening, spreading out in every direction) I don’t know. It’s a comfort. I don’t know.
If I left you alone, could you rest?
I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. (echoes, endlessly repeating, diminishing until she could no longer hear them)
I’ll come back in a little while. Rest now, if you can.
(no response)

**********

Willow had something now, a handle: Supplice d’Allégance. Research mode. She dashed upstairs and got back on the laptop.

Although the Council of Watchers headquarters had been destroyed, along with nearly all the senior members of the council, the council library was in Oxford and hadn’t been touched. And one of the council’s projects for the last thirty-some years was scanning in the original old manuscripts, and the translations, beginning with the oldest and rarest of the documents, books, and codices. During her time with the coven, Willow had been allowed to assist this lifetime project, adding translations of some of the most frequently referenced texts. She still had access to the online archives. She thought there was a good chance a basic word-search would yield results.

Allégance, that was simple: something like allegiance, I pledge allegiance. Given vampire semi-feudal social arrangements, probably something closer to fealty. And supplice, maybe Norman French--

There it was. She had the whole phrase. Supplice d’Allégance. Translation, Ordeal of Fealty, with supplice having the implication of torture, trial by torture. Sounded like she was in the right ballpark.

She clicked on the link and was into a late 15th century manuscript about the semi-legendary exploits of Vlad the Impaler, known to his many friends as Dracula, who Spike claimed owed him eleven pounds and was a notorious tightwad. Of course Spike said that about anybody who wouldn’t loan him money….

Willow skimmed the translation.

It seemed that during that round of wars with the Ottoman (read: Turkish) Empire in the 1400’s in which old Vlad had made his bones, so to speak, and gained his first notoriety, one Strelzborg (or –berg or –bergen, etc.), a Lithuanian baron (read: Master Vampire, in spite of the waffling footnotes and cautious annotations) had arrived offering support and troops nearly equal to what Vlad himself could command. A desirable ally--assuming he’d stay bought. Vlad was never noted as a trusting sort. So he’d required the Supplice d’Allégance of this nice, helpful volunteer to ensure that Vlad would be able to depend on his loyalty. It had gone on for two weeks, or two months, depending on the translation, at which point the hopeful Strelz-something had conspicuously failed to thrive, and likely dusted, and Vlad had co-opted all his troops, and everything had been all hunky-dory and kittens and Christmas. Vlad had what he wanted without the annoyance of a possible rival or rebel. End of story.

One of the 18th century commentators, one Cedric Giles, shrewdly observed that although this was the only extant mention of the ritual, knowledge of vampiric social customs was so limited that the possibility of its being relatively common in the upper strata of vampire high-politik should not be discounted. The fact that the ordinary vamp quite possibly might never have heard of, much less observed or been involved in, such a formal ordeal didn’t mean it wasn’t well known by European Master Vampires of the time and possibly since.

Trust a Giles, Willow thought, to not take the received word as the last word, bless his suspicious quintessentially Giles-ish heart.

Likewise, Willow thought, the top levels of the international vampire hierarchy: the Old Blood, as it were. Like the Order of Aurelius. Of which the highest ranking members she knew of were one Angel/Angelus and one William the Bloody, more commonly known as Spike. Sire and childe. Kin and rivals almost every way there was, and neither of them missing any chance to slander the other, an antipathy almost palpable….

Willow had no question she now knew what was going on. Either Spike or Angel had initiated the damn ritual as a basis for their cooperation in the fight against the First, in which Angel had received a field promotion to general via Buffy upon arrival and Spike had no official standing at all and had even been forbidden Casa Summers altogether. Banned from the field. Whoever had first come up with the idea, Spike had consented to it to break the stalemate. Angel didn’t like him, didn’t trust him, and certainly would never depend on him. And Spike wanted in. Wanted it bad enough to go through whatever hell Angel’s nasty little paleolithic mind could contrive, to get in. Get finally to NO: involuntary bedrock resistance in extremis. A true ultimate NO beyond which was only death. And then maybe finally to YES--a surrender Angel could believe because it’d been forced, and forged, out of the worst pain one vampire could inflict upon another, willingly suffered, without ropes or shackles or any other constraint except the will to continue and endure, no matter what.

Angel, cynical bastard that he was, probably figured Spike would die in the process like the Sainted Strelz-whatever. And good riddance, it wasn’t Angel’s fault, no locks or handcuffs preventing Spike from walking out at any time.

But Spike wouldn’t have gone into a thing like that expecting to die, no matter what Angel’s expectations were. Angel, Willow thought, tapping a stylus against her teeth, quite likely didn’t know about Spike’s little vacation with the First. Six weeks of torment nearly as inventive and thorough as anything kin could manage. And Spike had come out of that all broken up but nothing that a week or two of healing couldn’t fix, and hardly any crazier than before, and time had taken care of that, too. Spike had already been to NO and back again. He might have liked his odds. He would have risked it.

If there was one thing Willow had learned about Spike, it was that he absolutely throve on crazy risks that would have taken out anybody less wholeheartedly committed. He’d remarked to her once that the trick of skating on thin ice was skate tast. In a figurative sense, of course, this being sunny non-freezing California. And Spike was the absolute king of skate fast.

Yeah: she was certain she had it now, the gamble to which Spike had committed his body and his sanity and his life, win or lose.

She waited until midnight before attempting contact again. The first time, she was whited out by pain. The next time, she found herself intruding on what felt uncomfortably like sex, so she backed right out of that too. A dream, maybe. Likely a dream. The third time, she made contact.

(softly, cautiously) Spike?
Yes.
Are you to NO yet?
Very close. Soon. Don’t stay. You’ll be hurt.
I know about the Supplice d’Allégance. I understand the game plan, I think. How can I help you get to YES?
Doesn’t matter. It will go as it goes. You’re not made for vampire conversations, witch.
Are you?
(no answer)
I don’t want to be a distraction. Is it worse in the day or in the night?
I don’t know.
Explain.
No comparisons. Only now. No duration. Only now. No day, night. (a sort of tingling silence)
And?
My sight has been taken. Harder to know, connect, without it. Go away, witch. You don’t want to know this. You’re not like us. It hurts you to know.
That’s my business, buster.
Is it night?
Willow blinked blurred eyes at the lighted face of her clock. It’s 2:45 in the morning. On Wednesday. I mean Thursday.
(attention; a feeling of turning, orientation, as though centering in an infinite amount of dark, empty space)

Interrupted by the onset of another siege of excruciating pain that Willow had to withdraw from. It was still going on when she fell finally asleep, to incredibly bad dreams of the naked-in-public and being chased by monsters variety. It was still going on each time she awoke. When she looked at her breakfast and thought it might as well have been a bowl of dirt, it was still going on. It was almost noon before it suddenly broke, ended, and that was such a relief that Willow burst into tears and had to spin Buffy a completely ridiculous and incoherent yarn about PMS and lack of exercise and something to do with newt’s eyes, she didn’t know how that’d gotten in there, but her explanation seemed to need a little more bizarrity and eye of newt was definitely it.

When she tried to contact Spike again, she suspected she’d completely blown out her capacity for contact. At least she got no response--not even attention. She hoped to hell he’d finally gotten to NO because she didn’t know about him but she wasn’t sure how much more of this she could take.

But each hour through that day, she tried again, just the same. Because if her immaterial company constituted a comfort, she wouldn’t have denied it to a dog dying in the road and she was wound up about as tight as she could get with rage at Angel.

That evening, he came by: talking to Buffy, sitting in the front room, walking in the yard. All solemn and big and seeming-simple. Willow couldn’t stand to look at him. She couldn’t have returned him a civil word if she’d tried, and just hustled off whenever she spotted him. If he so much as said one crosswise word to anybody where she could hear it, she was gonna do something unexpected and rather ugly to his throat from the inside and see how he liked her form of conversation.

She knew well that Angelus was the cruelest, most cold-blooded bastard who’d ever walked the earth. Until now, she’d assumed Angel was different.

After Angel left, Willow had a slight collision of priorities with Kennedy, who wanted a cuddle before setting out on patrol. Then Willow figured What the hell and gave in, she needed some touch-comfort after what she’d been through. Just out on the front porch on the glider, nothing intense that was apt to frighten the horses, the way they’d said in the coven, anything was OK as long as you didn’t do it in the street and frighten the horses….

Drowsily comfortable with Kennedy petting and occasionally smooching, her arms around sweet soft girlflesh, Willow reached out for another check.

Spike?
(vague bewilderment) It hurts.
Willow frowned and came to alert because it wasn’t the same clipped mechanical “voice” as before. It was somehow a child’s voice.
What hurts, baby?
(deeper bewilderment) Everything.
Did you get to NO?
I was bad. Took some wet from my arm. That’s bad. Not allowed to have the wet.

Trying to figure that out, Willow came up with the appalling picture of Spike biting his arm, trying to drink his own blood, and that was so awful she hoped to hell that constituted a NO because if it didn’t, she couldn’t imagine what he’d have to do before Angel would acknowledge it, finally, as a refusal, resistance.
Hang on, baby. A little longer. We’re coming for you. Don’t be afraid.
(no answer)

“What is it?” Kennedy demanded, seeing Willow’s resolve-face and maybe even knowing what it meant.

“Get Dawn here. She’s at Casa Spike. Phone her. Then the patrol: first point--

“The mark, yeah?”

“OK, first mark is 3650 Albert Terrace. Wait there, outside. As backup. But go call Dawn first.”

When Dawn flashed onto the porch, Willow told her, “Dawn, we’re going after Spike. Two things: you get Buffy. I don’t much care what you tell her, except don’t mention Angel. It’s the house on Albert Terrace. Second, no matter what you see, no matter what happens, don’t be scared. Nothing bad is gonna happen to you. But it may get real scary and you’ve gotta expect that, be prepared.”

“Scary,” repeated Dawn, perfectly dead-pan. “Right.” And she was gone again, on the run.

Willow went ahead on her own. She didn’t want to have to try to do explanations. In fact, she thought the fewer explanations, the better. Predictably, she found the SIT patrol already in place, on the sidewalk beyond the high, uncut lawn. In fact, Willow thought it was all the SITs: twenty-five, or however many of them there were now, she could never keep count.

She saw Buffy and Dawn coming from the corner, Dawn flapping her arms up and down, clearly offering some kind of explanation, circling Buffy like a tall, skinny yapping dog. Fine: that piece in place then.

Willow told Kennedy, “You’re with me. Everybody else stays here, as backup.”

Kennedy turned to say something to Amanda, then turned and moved, taking position at Willow’s left. Which left the right-hand position to Buffy, making the turn from the sidewalk and then down the walk.

“All right,” Buffy demanded of Willow, “what’s this about?”

“Spike’s in there. He’s hurt. I intend to get him out, and I thought you’d want to come with.”

Buffy frowned incredulously, but Willow didn’t wait for further conversation. She went to the door and gave it five good bangs without touching it. “Angel, it’s me: Willow. Open up. Now.”

Hardly a minute later, the door opened and Angel was there, looking at Willow and then doing a double-take at finding Dawn, Kennedy, and Buffy on the front step behind her. And then all the SITs assembled out on the sidewalk.

Having apparently taken in the essentials of the situation, Buffy brushed past him and he moved out of her way, trying to choose something to say as Willow and the two girls also went past.

Willow hadn’t seen the inside of the house from this direction, but when Buffy glanced a question in the hall, Willow pointed to the second door on the right.

“What’s this about?” Angel was asking mildly from behind them. “Buffy?”

There was no room to get past, so he disappeared, circling through the kitchen.

There was no lamp lit in the living room, no light of any kind, so Willow made a glow between her clasped hands and tossed it to hover near the middle of the ceiling. Then she started looking for Spike. But Buffy had already found him. Assuming what looked like a dirty pile of rags was Spike.

Crouched, Buffy swiveled with an incredulous, accusatory glare just in time for it to meet Angel, arriving in the kitchen arch and mostly filling it.

“Buffy, I can explain. It was necessary. A vampire thing, none of….” Angel’s voice trailed off. Apparently he could see his explanation wasn’t winning him any Buffy points whatever. But it seemed that he was at least as determined as Spike not to have the ritual aborted, incomplete. In a flat, resigned voice, he commanded, “Spike. Take Dawn.”

The pile of rags moved. It had two legs and bones and that was about all Willow could tell about it in that first second because it wasn’t recognizably Spike at all.

Willow threw at him, in her head, Do it! Now! She’s protected, just do it!

The skeletal thing that had no eyes went into a questing balance for a second, then flung itself straight at Dawn. Although both girls were armed with tasers, they had no chance to use them because Angel caught his creature up in his arms and flung it clear across the room into the far wall. Hard. It tried to rise, still trying to come, obey that last command. But Angel shouldered Dawn aside and strode across the room, ignoring Buffy, ignoring them all, looking as though he intended to pound the thing into powder on the floor. And again caught it in his arms and held it, dropping to his knees, gentling it with one big hand, saying quietly, “Enough, Will. That’s enough now. It’s all right now.”

Willow shut her eyes, breathing hard. Spike had made it to YES.

Buffy was standing, hands on hips, rigid with fury. And Angel still wasn’t paying her a bit of attention, still soothing his horribly desiccated childe. Undoing the cuff button and rolling up his sleeve, he presented his bare forearm, saying, “It’s allowed now, Will. You can change. Go ahead. It’s allowed.”

The wraith Spike had allowed himself to become clutched at the arm and began soundlessly feeding. It was really grotesque and unpleasant to watch, so Willow didn’t.

Buffy announced in a take-no-prisoners voice, “We’re taking him home.”

“Not yet,” Angel responded with monumental calm, still not looking around. “He needs me to take care of him now. You wouldn’t know how. What to do.”

“Then you tell me. But he comes home. Now.”

Without further argument, Angel rose with Spike in his arms--trailing limbs that were no more than parchment over bone--and carried him into the hall and out the front door with Buffy trotting right behind, all kinds of stormclouds in her face.

Willow absently dismissed Kennedy to take the SITs on the scheduled patrol. Dawn, pocketing her taser, remarked, “I have to get a good look so I can tell him how awful he was,” and ran off after Angel and Buffy. Catching up, Dawn lifted a hand and found a cluster of bones, maybe a hand, to clasp.

Following along, in no hurry now, Willow could hear Angel doggedly trying to explain. That after all, it wasn’t as though Dawn was really her sister and anyway there’d been no danger, he was there and had stopped it. And Spike (Will, as he called him) had agreed to this, it was an established vampire custom for settling rank, and that wasn’t getting him anywhere either and he should have saved his breath, he was only digging himself in deeper by trying to be reasonable. Buffy wasn’t inclined to be reasonable. She’d taken one look and been horrified and furious, and still was. Having lost the moral high ground, Angel should have just shut up and waited for the worst of it to blow over.

Willow could have told him. But she didn’t. She was pretty well satisfied with the way things were going, all on their own, and saw no further need to interfere.

Making Angel carry Spike upstairs and settle him in Buffy’s own bed seemed a bit much, but Buffy was nothing if not thorough. Still trailing behind, Willow thought she could see some improvement just from the one feeding: Spike looked more mummified than destroyed. You could recognize the hair. But the empty eyesockets still were something Willow couldn’t regard steadily.

Dawn had continued to hold his hand. She looked up at Angel as though vaguely wondering why he was still there. Buffy, standing at the bedside, was looking at Angel the same way, except she wasn’t doing vague, she was doing impatient.

Angel stood unhappily a moment more, then said, “Nothing but water, and not much of that. No more than a pint in six hours.”

“No blood?” Dawn asked.

“No. Not yet. I’ll come back tomorrow for that. All right. Good night.”

He turned and left, and Willow noticed the conspicuous lack of anybody wishing him good night in return.

She could almost feel sorry for him. Or maybe not.

Although Angel had won the battle he knew about, the Supplice d’Allégance, it was becoming increasingly clear to Willow that Spike had won the real war: the one for the allegiance of the Summers women, the SITs, and even herself.

None of them able to tolerate the ruthless absolutes of vampire “conversations” whose words were blood and agony. Spike had only to suffer it, survive it, and let the fact of what had been done to him--and who’d done it--speak for themselves.

Willow knew she’d never be able to look at Angel the same again. Nor, she thought, would any of them. He might still be a general in the present war, but he’d been revealed as a monster well worthy of Angelus, soul and all, and nobody would want to be in a room with him, after this, any longer than they could help. Angel might know planning, and warfare, and vampire lore; Spike knew women.

Dawn was still fondly holding Spike’s skeletal, inhuman hand. Buffy was pawing through drawers, choosing a scarf to cover the horrible absence of his eyes.

Considering the wreck on Buffy’s bed, Willow reflected that Mr. Skate Fast had put everything he had on the line for the highest stakes he cared about and come away with it all.

And Angel still didn’t even know it.

Willow wasn’t inclined to enlighten him. Ever.

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