SIX

Dawn had retreated to the basement and shot the bolt, figuring that was the best she could do. She’d brought a magazine and her headphone set, and flopped on her stomach on the disordered cot, ankles crossed behind her and swinging, listening to a tape. When the banging started and Buffy’s voice got louder, Dawn turned up the volume and continued flipping through the pictures. She scrunched her forearms up against her ears.

La, la, la, not listening, so not listening….

One side of the door cracked off and sent the remainder of the door slamming into the wall. Descending like a big round rolling Indiana Jones rock, Buffy flung the magazine away, then took possession of Dawn’s headphones despite a snatching grabfest over the cord.

Holding up the micro-player in one hand and the headphones in the other with an implicit threat to squeeze them to powder, Buffy demanded, “Where’s Spike?”

“How should I know, what makes you think I have nothing better to do than--”

It was an ex-micro-player. Oh, Buffy was so gonna pay for that, destroying Dawn’s property!

“Where’s Spike, Dawn? I saw you two talking. You do not want to get me angry!”

“Fine, this is the non-angry that’s soooo much better?”

Oh, no! Headphones mangled, twisted apart, wrecked, displayed. However, the up side was that Buffy had just run out of hostages.

Or maybe not: Buffy raised a hand. Dawn pointed at it accusingly: “Guilty! Guilty of intent to slap! You’re gonna owe me the national debt and two hours in the Gap. You’re--”

The threatening hand was reluctantly lowered, so Dawn withdrew her point. The sisters glared at each other. Buffy blinked first. “Dawn, he can’t be out there on his own. It’s not safe. For anybody.”

Dawn shrugged and flipped her hair for good measure. “I said I’d go with, but he wouldn’t let me.”

Buffy lifted her face to the ceiling in Thank-heaven-for-small-mercies! unspeakably overburdened mode which she actually did quite well.

Willow came ker-thumping down the stairs and started to say something to Buffy, but Buffy cut her off at “I can’t--” with a hand-slice, her eyes never leaving Dawn.

“He said,” Dawn quoted precisely, “I should say, ‘Out for a walk.’ He said you’d know the rest.”

Spike knew how to push Buffy’s buttons better than anybody: Buffy reacted as though she actually had been pushed, rocking back on a heel, looking not just angry but alarmed.

“OK, Dawn, you’re thirty seconds from full DefCon One at ground zero. You will not go to the Freshman mixer and Ice-Capades is history. Where did he go?”

“Buffy,” Willow interjected hesitantly but firmly, “I could scry him. Or sorta scry him, not with actual water or anything, just have a look--” At Buffy’s surprised expression, Willow’s face firmed into something almost sullen. “I can do that without burning anybody’s brain out or anything, you know.”

“All right: do it.”

Willow faced away from the naked overhead bulb and let her eyelids droop and flutter. The fingers of her right hand assumed an uncomfortable, stiff alignment and performed a looping gesture at her side like scooping up icing. Her eyes shot open and she rocked back a pace, suddenly pale. “No need to get like that about it,” she exclaimed huffily. To Buffy, she added, “He really hates that. Really hates that! It’s either the Bronze or Willie’s. And with the mayhem, yelling, broken glass and overall level of let’s-break-it-up-and-see-what-will-burn, I’d go with Willie’s, personally.” Willow nodded judicious approval of her conclusion.

Bar fight, thought Dawn. No wonder he’d refused her company. Nobody ever let her have any fun.

Then Dawn remembered the other part of what she was supposed to say. She jumped up and clasped both hands around Buffy’s arm. “And, and I was to tell you you weren’t to get yourself all in a twist about it because he was taking a minder, everything looked after.”

“Buffy,” said Willow said, “that’s the other thing. I can’t find Xander.”

Dawn added helpfully, “He also took the handcuffs.”



Willie’s was a demon bar off past the high school: basking in the emanations of the Hellmouth. The three of them--Dawn, Willow, and Buffy--piled into the front of the SUV. Dawn got to go along by making it too difficult and complicated to leave her behind, short of knocking her unconscious. As the Royal Possessor of the (Car) Key, Buffy drove and didn’t actually hit anything if you didn’t count the big sack of trash or the mailbox lurking among some bushes, that leaped out into the headlights, then crunch and gone.

Willow seemed willing to agree with Buffy’s contention that the mailbox had been possessed.

When the car bounced over the train tracks at Wilkins, Dawn’s head hit the roof and she was certain Buffy had done it on purpose, the Revenge of the Short and Vindictive.

“I’ll show you vindictive,” Buffy threatened, but since she failed to follow it up with a specific example, Dawn considered it an empty threat.

Dawn had expected to hear noise, shouting. But when the SUV rolled up to the front of Willie’s and ground to a halt in a stretch of weeds--Buffy did not do parallel parking--all was quiet. However the burning car that compensated for the lack of streetlights seemed like a bad sign.

Buffy and Willow shot out, and Dawn clambered out behind them, cracking her forehead on the edge of the door frame. Rubbing the spot, she hurried after and ran into their backs just inside the door. Right in front of them was a hip-high non-humanoid demon carcass--whether one or more Dawn wasn’t in a position to judge. Its skin was an otherwise pleasant mint-green. Its white blood made a broad pool on the floor. It appeared to have been carved extensively. The empty bar was to the left. To the right, Xander sat on the floor holding the jagged remains of a beer mug by the handle. All the sharp edges were coated in white goo. So was Xander. Noticing them, Xander waved hesitantly. His left wrist was braceleted in half of a set of handcuffs.

Past Xander, five or six vampires were crowded around the juke box laying on its side. The vamps weren’t doing anything but standing very quiet. Following the direction they all were looking in, Dawn found Spike in the shadows by the far wall. His back was turned. He was kissing a guy.

Well, not exactly a guy: it exploded into dust.

And not exactly kissing. Turning, Spike was wiping blood off his mouth. He was in game face and looked extremely pleased with himself. Righting a chair, he set it by one of the few intact tables. As he folded into the chair, he slapped a dripping hand axe onto the table top. The axe was followed by his boot heels. Tipping the chair back, Spike cocked a finger at the small huddle of vamps by the jukebox. One advanced, looking extremely unhappy: the manner was exactly that of one of Glory’s scabby minions--downcast eyes, wringing hands and all. The instant recognition gave Dawn a chill.

Spike pointed at the bar and the minion obeyed, stepping over another carcass, this one knobby and so red as to look black. More chilling still, Spike then said, “You can play with it later, pet. I need it awhile longer.”

Pleasantly addressing empty air.

The minion came back with a bottle and a glass. Spike hurled the glass through the one unbroken window. The motion flashed the circle on his right wrist: the other half of the handcuffs. He then cracked the neck off the bottle and started doing the peach schnapps thing with it.

Somehow Dawn was pretty certain it wasn’t peach schnapps.

Willow had gone to skooch down next to Xander and they were muttering together. As Dawn edged closer, Xander was complaining, “Why do I let myself get talked into these things? Did he say he was gonna wreck the place and start killing everything in sight? All of this, by the way, while handcuffed to me?” He held up his wrist and shook it so that the broken chain of the handcuff rattled. “Or most of it, anyhow,” Xander added glumly. “About the fourth or fifth vamp, he decided I was getting in his way and cut me loose, for which I am profoundly grateful.” He bowed his head twice against hands clasped prayer style. “Even missed all my fingers, I don’t know how because he wasn’t even looking that way. God! When will I learn!”

“But you’re not hurt?” Willow asked anxiously.

“Except for getting scared into a coronary, too much beer applied externally and not enough--”

Willow lunged to block Buffy: until then, standing stone-faced and staring across the room at vamped-out Spike, still chatting happily with his invisible companion. Willow set both hands against Buffy’s shoulders. “Not a good idea, Buffy. It does dead people.”

“What? I’m not dead-- Oh.”

“Yeah,” said Willow, wryly apologetic. “You don’t want to…. It could be, well, confusing.”

Then Willow turned her head and looked at Dawn, and it was all completely plain. Dawn didn’t mind at all, and Buffy wasn’t quick enough trying to grab her with Willow still hanging on and blocking.

Dawn went slowly closer until she was near enough to see Spike’s face. You could generally tell by his face and even in game face, she thought she’d know. He wasn’t pale but people-colored: he’d fed. Slightly sleepy-eyed, so he wasn’t so drunk he couldn’t still take notice, keeping part of his attention on the small crowd of uneasy vamps, eyes flicking to them anytime one moved, whereupon they’d go even more carefully quiet, then returning to a point slightly to his left and about five feet away.

“Oh, I don’t know about that,” he said, clearly in response to something nobody else could hear.

Dawn stopped about two good paces from the table. Not a good idea to startle him when he was drunk or having nightmares.

“Spike--”

His head rolled around. “Oh, h’lo, Bit. What you doin’ down here?” Game face smoothed into his other face, which she took as a good sign.

“Told you I was coming.”

He took more notice. “And I said no, didn’t I.”

“I came,” Dawn said, “with Willow. And Buffy.” She pointed, and Spike’s eyes followed her finger. Then he smiled and his eyes shut a little more--as if he’d thought of something funny but not that funny.

“Who’s there, Spike?” Dawn indicated the space he’d been conversing with.

“Well, it’s Dru, innit?” His attention swung that way again, as if called. “No, you can’t have her, pet. She’s mine. I’ll get you one of your own tomorrow.”

Knowing she wouldn’t startle him now if she moved, Dawn circled the table and stood at his side. She set her hand on his shoulder. His head tipped comfortably against her hip. Not his usual room-temperature skin: warm. But no human corpses to be seen at all. She puzzled at it.

“Spike, if I tell you there’s nothing there, you gonna believe me?”

“Dunno, Bit. Try it and see.”

She could hear the smile in his voice, even though she couldn’t see his face from this angle. One of his provoking moods. He took the bottle and lowered its contents by about an inch. The bottle was still about half full, so no immediate chance of his passing out unless this bottle wasn’t the first.

Setting the bottle down with a slight thump, Spike said quietly, “So you don’t see her: Dru.”

“No. I swear.”

“Ah hell.” He let the bottle go and rubbed his eyes. Then, just like that, he yanked his boots off the table, reached, and hurled the hand-axe through the space. It buried itself in a windowframe. A sharp glance at the vamps settled them again: even without the axe, they weren’t budging. “You see to me good, love. I s’pose I just was missing her. Always liked a nice all-out, did Dru.”

“Is she still there?”

Spike shook his head. “Nope. All gone. ‘T’isn’t as though she won’t be back.” He sounded sad. “Or one of the other lot. Hold on, love.”

She thought he meant to do something, move, but realized he was shivering. And caught onto what he was thinking, and did what he’d said: held onto him.

“It’s real,” she told him. “I’m real. You can feel that. You’re really out of there.”

“Certain sure, now, are you?”

“Certain sure. Buffy dusted the Turok-Han and came and got you and brought you home, and I brought you horrible cheap-ass fucking peach schnapps.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” He’d listened. He’d believed her. Presently the deep shuddering steadied. Spike lifted his head. “Harris, you still here?”

“Present, no thanks--”

“Com’ere. Buy you a drink. Give you one, any road. OK, Red, you can have one too. Not you, Bit.”

Dawn slapped the side of his head lightly, and he made a soft purring chuckle.

Although he hadn’t called or invited her, Buffy came too. While Xander set up a chair for Willow on the opposite side of the table, Spike did the point-point thing and two or three of the vamps hustled around like waiters, and all the while Spike was looking up at Buffy.

When there was a chair, Spike said lazily, “Might as well sit down, Slayer. All friends here.” Leaning aside, he muttered, “Bit: she’s there, right?”

“Poke her,” Dawn advised.

“Yeah.” But Spike didn’t do that. He laid his hand on the table, palm up. And after a second, Buffy set her hand in it. Fingers tightened. Then Spike knocked their joined hands once on the table and was content at the contact. But Dawn couldn’t read Buffy’s expression at all. Mostly, she looked tired.

“Red,” Spike said, “you’re a charmin’ lady and I hope you get what’s comin’ to you one day. But if you ever once get into my head again, you and me are gonna have a discussion and you’re not gonna like it. Hard enough as it is.”

Willow flushed bright red.

Spike went on, “Harris, you didn’t do too bad, considering. You--”

There were vamps all around them, awkwardly doing things with glasses and a fresh bottle, and Spike suddenly half rose in his chair and yelled at them: “All right, you lot--get out, I’m done with you for tonight. Get the fucking hell out! Now!”

The vamps didn’t wait to be told twice, and dashed for the door.

Spike settled back, glowering. “That, right there, that’s the trouble with minions. Never worth all the bother. Too bloody stupid, or if they’re too smart, you got to put ‘em down. Well, I’ll do this lot, but then no more, I swear. Harris: you were my minder tonight. Noplace I went you didn’t go. Is that true or no.”

Sourly Xander held up his arm and waggled the handcuff. “Not like you gave me a whole lot of choice, Deadboy.”

“You mind your mouth, whelp. Chip don’t give you any free ride. I tell one of those minions pull your head off, you’re gone and no two hours of blinding pain for yours truly, so you show some manners around me.”

“What do you want with minions, anyway?” Xander demanded.

“Well, I’m entitled, ain’t I? Sodding Master Vampire of Sunnydale, wasn’t I? An’ the fact I went off for awhile, to see to Dru and all, don’t mean there’s been anybody fit to hold the name to claim it since. I’m of the Order of Fucking Aurelius, boy--the Master’s get, as far back as anybody cares to go, that parsimonious bat-faced bugger. And that means something, even if you’re too dirt-ignorant to know about such things, for all you been living smack on top of the Hellmouth all your life, or ‘scuse me, your Daddy’s basement.”

“Someday,” Xander said tightly, “you are gonna get yours, Spike, and I’m gonna be there to see it.”

“Yeah, sure. Got nothing against basements. Can be right cozy. Had one m’self once, before some military bloke took a mind to fire-bomb it.” He glanced at Buffy, but her expression didn’t change. Still just watching him. “Anyway. Harris, you see me do one single human tonight? One?”

“You can’t: the chip,” Xander floundered, scowling.

“When I’d cleared out the place, down to what gave submission as minions, I could’a done anything I damn well pleased, now couldn’t I? Could’a eaten you, or had carry-out fetched off the street, now couldn’t I? Don’t have to kill ‘em to eat ‘em. Did you see one breathing human being in here?”

“No,” Xander admitted, however grudgingly. “Not one.”

“Well, then,” said Spike, and again looked to Buffy, who sighed out a long breath and looked as though she was willing to claim her arm as part of her again. And in a different tone altogether, Spike said, “Slayer. Do I pass muster, you figure?”

“Yeah, Spike. All right. You can patrol.”

“Good. Long as we’re out an’ all, how about we take a turn by the Bronze?”

Willow, surveying the destroyed bar, gave one sharp bark of startled laughter, then slapped her hand over her mouth. Spike gave her a tolerant look.

“I won’t bust anything,” he said, as though that should have been obvious. “Already done that part, haven’t I?”

“Only if I can come,” Dawn put in.

Spike considered. “Well, not a school day tomorrow…. Don’t see any problem, myself. Slayer?”

Buffy said, “I can’t imagine anything I’d like better. And isn’t that pathetic.”

“No, that’s fine,” said Spike, shaking her hand a little on the table. “That’s fine.”

SEVEN

At the Bronze, Dawn looked for an opportunity to tell Spike what she’d learned while channeling Harriet the Spy. But she couldn’t seem to find a good moment. First Spike and Xander (who couldn’t hold a grudge more than an hour if his life depended on it) were playing pool. When one or the other scratched, they started clinking the two halves of handcuffs together before the other one started his turn. She thought Spike began it, since Xander was only a fair pool player and Spike routinely sharked for drinking and cigarette money and therefore hardly ever scratched unless he intended to. But the clink-and-change rotation gradually got more even because Spike had a waaay head start on the drinking and it wasn’t too long before he was having trouble finding the table.

If all you were allowed to drink was Cherry Coke, you might as well take mental notes on how the four people you loved most in the world behaved while getting thoroughly plastered.

For one thing, conversation went downhill real fast. Buffy was down to single syllables within an hour, and then intermittent giggling fits. It was about then she decided the great thing would be dancing with Spike. And Dawn had to give him points for restraint, not to mention coordination (which for him was about the last thing to go). Despite Buffy getting allll over him, somehow his staying on his feet and not quite letting anything vital get unbuttoned or unzipped made it still dancing. Although that style of dancing would normally have roused a general shout of “Get a room!” (a tradition at the Bronze, which had no rooms) a special providence seemed to be watching out for Buffy and Spike tonight: when the yell came, it was some other semi-disrobed panting couple who were left standing alone and (probably) embarrassed in the middle of the dance floor, under the swirling prismatic lights from the glitter ball.

The Bronze was, after all, a teen hang-out. Grown-ups handled things with less fuss, more style. And kept dancing.

“C’mon,” Dawn said to Willow, who’d been doing her own sidelines note-taking, watching the room wistfully between strawberry daiquiris and trying to look bright and chirpy whenever she remembered or she thought somebody might be looking. “Let’s dance.”

Willow resisted her pull, surprised, like she’d been caught at something. “No, honey, you don’t have to, it’s OK--”

Dawn yanked at Willow’s arm again. “C’mon. It’s in the rules: you gotta have a good time or the Bronze Happiness Police come down on you and make you eat soggy pizza rinds all night. Take it like a woman.”

And the Bullying-Dawn Charm worked its magic yet again. They danced. Dawn knew she wasn’t what Willow wanted in her arms, but at least she had the right number of Xs and Ys and Willow loved Dawn and Dawn loved Willow, though not that way and anyway Dawn didn’t even love any guy that way so it represented excellent practice and a learning experience and gave them both something to do.

When she spotted Spike and Buffy wandering slowly toward the back door, Dawn danced Willow toward the pool table and successfully made the exchange, grabbing Xander’s braceleted hand, shoving Willow’s into it, and declaring, “Your turn, Xander,” leaving them blinking at each other uncertainly because although the Bronze didn’t have rooms it did have an alley.

But it was a false alarm. When Dawn banged out the back door maybe three steps behind them, Spike was holding Buffy up and solicitously patting at her shoulder while she threw up.

Noticing Dawn in a kind of dim way, Spike explained, “Your sis had to, come over all unwell y’see, an’--”

“Yeah, I can see that.”

Watching Buffy barf seemed to Dawn the cue that the fun part of the evening was over. She went inside and called a cab. No way was she getting into a car driven by any of these people tonight.



They dropped Xander at his apartment. Reaching home, as second-most-sober, Willow volunteered to help Buffy get upstairs and horizontal while Buffy kept insisting she was fine, was fine, and trying to sit on the stairs. That left Dawn to see to Spike, which was OK. It wasn’t if she didn’t know how.

Drunk, Spike was a long distance away. Light years. He heard you, eventually: it just took awhile for the words to reach him, and anything he said was probably in response to something you’d said five minutes ago.

He didn’t need pushing, just maybe steering, and tonight not even that. With Dawn following along, he got as far as the basement door but hung up there immovably: thumbing the raw wood where it was broken.

“Spike, it’s OK,” Dawn started, but wasn’t surprised that didn’t get through to him. He continued inspecting the basement door, experimentally pushing so it moved on its hinges. Then suddenly he backed off from it. His head bumped the slanted underside of the upstairs staircase and he went down, straight down, pulled his knees up against his chest, arms wrapped around them, sitting as small as he could. Spooked: frightened.

Dawn sat down next to him and took his arm, patted his hand. “What’s the matter?”

After the time lag, he looked around at her, then gestured at the open doorway, the broken door. “’S broken. ‘S not safe.”

Dawn looked at it and realized he was right. No way to bolt it now from either side or even shut it. If he got downstairs and chained himself up, he’d be entirely defenseless and he wasn’t too drunk to know it.

Any vampire who’d survived as long as he had, and got blind drunk as often as he did, must have a kind of instinct to get into a safe place, a place where the sun couldn’t find him, before collapsing.

“You’re OK here,” Dawn tried to reassure him, but he wasn’t taking that in, hadn’t heard her yet.

“Can’t,” he muttered, still rigidly distressed, “crypt’s broke too, no chains, can’t….”

That was when Dawn caught the other horn of his dilemma. He wasn’t worried only about being safe himself: he was scared to death he might start hallucinating and hurt someone else. Not just be safe but make himself safe.

Not my own dog anymore, she thought.

He might be crazy, at least part of the time, but he wasn’t stupid.

“Spike. Spike, listen. Listen to me now.” She tugged at his arm, poked him, until at last his blurred attention came around to her. “Spike, it’s OK. I’ll see to you. Nobody’s gonna get hurt.”

“Get the chains, Bit.”

“Can’t, Spike, they’re bolted to the wall, remember? But you’re OK. You’re OK.”

“No,” he said, and dropped his face onto his folded arms and started crying.

Although she searched hard, Dawn could think of no answer to the puzzle, nothing that would make it right. He was right to be scared. Remembering invisible Dru chatting with him in that slaughterhouse he’d made of Willy’s, she couldn’t help being a little scared too.

If things were to suddenly go all pear-shaped and bad, nobody could stop Spike but Spike. And he wasn’t sure in his heart anymore he could always do that.

Dawn pushed up against the wall, skipped to the kitchen door, then returned and settled beside him again. “Look. Look what I got.” When he roused enough to lift his head, she showed it to him: a solid foot of pine sharpened to a needle point. His eyes went large and started to change. Dawn grabbed him around the back and held him hard. “Any dumbass can stake a vamp, Spike. It isn’t the strength: it’s knowing how. I’ve done it. You know I’ve done it. But I won’t. Unless you make me. I’ll do you if I have to. You listening to me here? I’m your minder tonight. And tomorrow we’ll get Xander to come fix the door and it will be OK again.”

She kept talking, a steady stream of words, until at last she felt the tension in him slacken and he was leaning bonelessly against her.

“Promise?”

“Certain sure,” she said.

Just like that, he was asleep.

Dawn slid a little aside until her back was braced more comfortably in the corner. Spike tilted with her, not stirring, no longer drawn up tight, stretched out on his side. She continued to hold him, feeling his occasional indrawn breath. He did too snore!

Sometime later, she woke up and found Willow, barefoot in a fuzzy robe, regarding them, eyebrows crinkly in concern.

Pushing her hair out of her face, Dawn checked that Spike was still OK and asleep, then explained in a whisper, “He gets terrible nightmares sometimes, sleeping drunk.” Which was true: she’d intended to stay with him all night anyway in case of the Awful Dream. And in case he woke up thinking he was still wherever Buffy had brought him back from, with nobody to tell him what was real and make him believe it.

Concern-face fading, Willow said nothing for awhile, considering them. Then she whispered, “I’ll get some pillows.”

Dawn must have fallen back asleep because the next thing she knew, she had an afghan around her shoulders and a pillow at her back, and Willow was perched opposite on more pillows at the side of the basement door. A tiny magical glow burned in the middle of the air.

Seeing Dawn rouse, Willow held out her hand and whispered, “I can take that now.”

Realizing Willow wanted the stake, Dawn blinked muzzily. “No, we’re good. I promised.”

“All right, baby. Whatever you say.”

That was how Buffy found them in the morning. Because when the noise of two or three SITs arguing upstairs over bathroom rights awakened Dawn, she was clasped in Buffy’s arms. Clear-eyed and solemn, Buffy squeezed her and kissed her head. Then for a few minutes they all sat in unspoken communion watching over Spike’s sleep.

EIGHT

Something was off. Spike felt it when the Bit woke him with collecting pillows and what-all she’d fetched to nest herself comfy. Must have stayed by him all night, he realized. Arms piled full, as she passed by she patted his head--like that’s what she did, like he was a pup gonna be desolate left alone.

Not that he minded, but it was off, wasn’t it? It had no source but he could smell it, feel it, like coming thunder.

From the noise upstairs, there was no chance getting at the shower anytime before noon. But he could do with a change of clothes. That was when he noticed the broken door again and recalled how it’d given him the trapped-in-the-open horrors. Oh. That was what the head-pat was about then: most likely he’d made a prat of himself about the door.

Well, it wasn’t as if it’d been the first time, or the Bit hadn’t seen him do worse. Seemed he was forgiven, anyway, which was all that mattered. Never liked to be on the outs with Dawn. Never would be if he could help it.

He enjoyed a bone-popping stretch, then went downstairs and rummaged in the cardboard carton of thrift-shop castoffs Buffy’s charity had provided. As he was changing T-shirts, Dawn called from above, “You decent? Never mind.” She came barging down. “I paged Xander, then celled him. He was not amused.”

“Bouncy little thing today, aren’t you?” Having made the final necessary adjustments, Spike turned around.

Dawn made a flopping, impatient gesture with both hands. “Well, he’s hung over and if you had an ounce of decency, you would be, too.”

Spike pushed both hands through his hair. “Did I make a nuisance of myself, Bit?”

“Of course,” she told him, grinning like a furnace. “Didn’t you want to?”

“S’pose I did. But I got three of ‘em.” His grin was smaller, tighter, and felt a bit like fangs.

“Three…of what?”

“Fledges I’d made. Two together, and I followed ‘em. Led me to the third. Then I did ‘em all. Best I can figure, can’t be more than six left. I don’t think--” Spike stopped himself because Dawn had backed into the cot and sat abruptly, holding to the edges. Her breathing was off. Spike dropped down onto his heels--close, but not touching. “And now I’ve upset you. Never thought, you didn’t bat an eye at Willie’s. Like your Mom, Joyce, when she came after me with that fire-axe. Didn’t faze her. Bit, I didn’t think. I’m sorry.”

Dawn left off clutching the cot edge to flip a hand. “I knew. It’s just… I knew.”

Carefully, he put fingertips on her arm, and that was all right. So he set his hand there. “Why that, and not the other?”

“Because…if they’re yours…. If they were yours, they’d be like you. Not some lame vamp, minion in a bar. Just all fangs and Rrrr,” she said, trying to pretend she wasn’t still upset. “They’d be like you: people.”

He smoothed her hair. Quick as a spark, his Bit. “There’s not many would figure that out, Dawn. Or care. But that’s why. They’re mine. I got to see to ‘em. Because there’s nobody else who will, except by damn bad luck, runnin’ head-on into the Slayer…. But I wasn’t thinking, the other night. If you don’t want to have a part in this, I understand. ‘T’wasn’t fair of me to ask you.”

She looked level into his eyes. “Tell me why.”

Spike rocked back and sighed. “Maybe you don’t want to know.” He waited, but she only waited too, unchanging. He settled down crosslegged, wishing for a cigarette.

“At the first,” he said finally, quietly, “you’re dead. Truly dead. No breath, no pulse, no life. You know nothing. Feel nothing. An’ all of a sudden…there’s everything.” His hands exploded, his arms flung wide, to show her. “A pebble drops and it’s thunder. A breeze, and you can’t hear yourself think for the noise. It’s dark, wherever you rise, but you can see each leaf of grass, separate, burning-like…and there are thousands on thousands of ‘em, everywhere. An ocean of smells, all different, each clear as a song. You see a house, a building, it’s like there was never such a thing, and you could be hours trying to take in how all the pieces fit just so. And you’re terrified. And it’s all wonderful. Beautiful. Intense. All strange, like nothing you ever dreamed of imagining…. And you want something so bad you can’t stand it, and you don’t know what it is, that you want. You go searching, trying to sort through all the everything about you, that you don’t understand and can’t take in except in tiny fragments…and it draws you, and you feel it and smell it and…it’s life itself. It’s alive.” Spike slowly folded his hands, watching himself do it. “It’s blood, Dawn. Happens to be in a person, but if you realize that, if you can even know what a person is in all the confusion…it doesn’t matter. Because somehow you know they’re no kin to you anymore, they don’t see what you see or feel what you feel. They smell like food. And…your body is changed, your face is changed…and you have what you need to get what you need. You’re strong. You’re fast. And then you bite through…and nothing has ever been so wonderful that you ever knew, as that blood is to you now. It’s sex and love and home and food and music and God and damn fucking all…. Most like, you spend your whole first night, risen, killing to get more of it. More than you need or can use. Because…you can’t help it. And…and whatever you had of love, or cleverness, or kindness, or honor or any good thing…is lost. Into the demon alive in your dead body, that’s all the life you have now. And all you know.

“And you’re a moron, and an idiot, an’ you got no sense, and no caution, and no least notion whatever about how to stay alive, or at least what feels like alive…. The demon is dirt stupid about this world, and you don’t know how to set the demon aside. So nine times out of ten, you’re caught by the sun without the sense to hide until it starts hurting, and then it’s too late. Or some enormous git stakes you with the hind end of a shovel. Or beheads you with a hoe, or throws a lamp at you, and you burn…. Most fledges are vicious, stupid animals, Dawn, and the best thing is to put ‘em down right off, quick as you can, because they’re torment and misery and…I don’t know how to say, to everything and everyone around them. Evil, soulless things….” He felt Dawn’s hand on his shoulder and laid his cheek against it. “’S’true, Bit. True as ever she said.”

“But you’re not. So how come you’re different?”

“Well, it’s because of the blood, innit? The blood that made me. Old blood. Away back at the beginnings of things, vampires who got through the first confusion maybe made a decade or two. Made more of their kind and some had the tiniest least sense of anything beyond their own hunger, their own pleasure, to protect and teach the new fledges and gather together into a hunting pack. So more survived longer. And the Master of that pack, he might live to see fifty, or a hundred or two hundred. Survive to be powerful and clever. Make their demon submit. And what they are is what they give. It’s in the blood. If that vampire lived to a thousand years, his fledges woke smart. The shock of being turned didn’t overwhelm who they were before. They kept that. As vampires. They might remember music, and fine clothes, and could shed the face of the demon at will and walk among men and not be known for what we are….”

Dawn prompted, “You were Angelus’ fledgling.”

“Well, Dru…Dru turned me. But she was made by Angelus, and it was Angelus who gave her leave to turn me, to have a fledge to mind her when she took one of her spells, which was most of the time…. And Angelus was Master and Sire to us both, and a right vicious brute he was, no mistake…. And Angelus was sired by Darla, and Darla was the direct get of the Master himself: the Order of Aurelius, that’s the eldest lineage there is. Old blood. We’re…the absolute best at being monsters, Dawn. We rise smart and we’re not lost in the demon for years or forever. We see to our own: barring mischance or carelessness we’re not alone when we rise. We cooperate however much we hate each other. Hate or love, we never can forget what connects us because there’s nothing else, nobody else for us…. We plan, though I’m a poor example to go by, never been worth…worth anything at that, as Angelus, Angel, would be the first to tell you.

“And the thing of it is, Dawn, even I don’t have it in me to wish otherwise. That, like last night-- You don’t need to know what that is to me. Well, it’s joy. Pure fucking joy. And it’s not in me to regret it. Any more than it’s in me to regret…comin’ together, like, with your sis. With the Slayer. Nothing could be better than that….”

“Getting back to the point,” Dawn said, very cool and dry. She tugged at his hair and made him smile.

“Yeah. Yeah. All right. Won’t fret you with the soppy stuff, then…. No credit to me, but whatever I’ve done, I’ve never turned anyone. Mostly too lazy. Had enough seein’ to Dru an’ all, without that. Never wanted the responsibility. Couldn’t be bothered. But there was this young chap came to me, some years back…sick, he was: knew he was gonna die--and wanted me to turn him. Idiot, of course, had no notion what that really would mean…. But anyway, I wouldn’t. Didn’t. Didn’t like the idea somehow. Dunno if Dru ate him or what, but anyway I didn’t turn him. And I’ve thought about it, since. Well, not really thought about it, but…. When I came to know I’d been used like a damn animal to do that… Breeding stock for the smartest monsters there are…. I won’t do that. I don’t…consent to that.”

Dawn’s touch on his forehead made him realize he’d gone to game face: with an effort, he withdrew his demon and saw Dawn’s anxious look likewise retreat. Shouldn’t do that around her anyway.

She caught his glance shifting to the manacle cuff and set her long, little girl fingers over it in interdiction. He shouldn’t have forgotten, shouldn’t have--

In a small overcasual voice, she asked, “When you see me…what do you see?”

At once he said, “I see you, Bit. Fierce an’ funny an’ fragile and brave as a lion.”

“And?”

“And mine. And that’s all that signifies. Let me get done now, pet.”

Instead she threw her arms around him. He held very still so as not to say or do the wrong thing and spoil it.

“You should get your hair cut,” she commented, ever so soft.

“I’ll see to it. Soon as I can. I get distracted.”

Finally she turned loose of him and sat back, regarding him with everything gentle and kind and approving, that he’d always hoped to see in Buffy and never had and now never would. Wasn’t what he was made for, this. But it made him able to bear the rest and be content.

“Let me finish, love, or I’ll never get through.”

She tossed her head. “So who’s stopping you?”

Her eyes at last let him go, and he breathed until he’d steadied himself. Thrown him off, that had. He had to think how to tell her what it was, what it meant.

He recollected, “Somebody--Rupert, I guess it was--asked me once to calculate up how many people I’ve eaten, or killed, or just bloody well wasted for the hell of it. I couldn’t begin to count. Not even begin. Coming to know a bit more now of what I am, and what it means…I think the worst thing a vampire can do is create another vampire. These fledges, now--it’s worse than murder: it’s murder forever. No end to it.”

“Like in Alien,” Dawn said. “One egg, and--” She meshed fingers together like huge savage teeth biting down.

“Yeah. Exactly like that. Never could abide that movie though that Ripley, she’s a treat, like a Slayer almost. Would have loved to’ve danced with that one, upon a time…. They’re mine. Mine to see to. And I will. At the first, they’ll stick to the places they know, like all fledges do. But once they get the wind up, know I’m comin’ after them or something is, they’ll scatter and then I’ll likely never find ‘em. I claimed a few minions, set them to looking, asking around. Tonight I’ll hunt again. And every night until I do them all. But you don’t have to--”

“Two are gone,” Dawn said. “Patrols caught them. Not your ordinary fledges, like you said. Willow helped me match up the descriptions with the obituaries and then with ID pictures from news archives, drivers’ licenses, military records. So I know when they died. I know their names. I have a good guess on two more I’m still working on. And I know where to look for another.”

“Brilliant. Bloody marvelous, pet. Let me get my notebook and we’ll check who’s been seen to and who’s yet to be done.”

NINE

Disconsolately slumped in bra and panties at the edge of her bed, Buffy caught sight of her wan, bedraggled reflection in the closet door mirror and pretended she was having a conversation with the Buffy-replica sex toy that represented an all-time low in Spike bad ideas.

BUFFYBOT: (chirpy) Hello, I’m idiotic and cheerful and I look just like the Slayer. In fact I think I am the Slayer, and none of the Slayer’s friends can tell the difference until I open my moronic but full and kissable mouth! I am a portrait mannequin of Buffy, a girl, fully functional except that my brain is made of Cheez Wiz. I was constructed by Warren, who hated girls, killed Tara, was skinned by Willow, and is currently featured as a manifestation of the First Evil in Andrew’s empty head but soon to appear at a theater near you. I can do sex for days if my gearing doesn’t lock up! Thanks to Spike, I am extremely well lubricated!
BUFFY: (sour) Hello yourself, you pneumatic bimbo. Gettin’ any?
BUFFYBOT: (chirpy) No, I’m packed in pieces in a box in the closet under the stairs and communing with the dust bunnies because RealBuffy never cleans. O why doesn’t Spike love me anymore? How about you?
BUFFY: (sour) Funny that you should ask. In addition to being a rotten housekeeper, RealBuffy is an enormous slut. While extremely well lubricated she snuck downstairs hoping for a rest-of-the-night sexathon and found her intended safely chaperoned between her best friend, a lesbian witch in a perky pink bathrobe and bunny slippers, and her freakin’ little sister who used to be a Key of Mystical Energy and now is a reasonable facsimile of a bolted door!


The stake Dawn held had probably been symbolic.

All the tableau had lacked was an apparition of Joyce Summers. Then the chaste rest of Buffy’s once-lover would have been guarded by all three Persons of the Triune Goddess, in all Her dread majesty, per innumerable earnest Tara lectures: the Maiden, the Maid, and the Crone.

Guess the Crone had other plans.

Sorry, Tara. Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Spike. Sorry, ME.

Then it occurred to her that without hesitation or any vestige of thought, she’d joined the tableau herself and completed it.


The Crone stands alone

The Crone stands alone.

Heigh-ho the merry-O.

The Crone stands alone.


“Gaaaah!” Buffy scrubbed hard at her burning eyes. “What is it with me and cheese? I hate my life!”

She next tried to pretend that Spike’s image, sort of vague because no mirror would really reflect it, wearing only jeans, was sitting on the bed next to the Buffybot.

BUFFY: (angrily) Spike, why do you have to be such a freaking Romantic? Just have sex with me four or five times a day. It’s not as if it’s anything personal.
SPIKE: (looking neutrally attentive)
BUFFY: (plaintively) It’s not as if I don’t appreciate your gorgeous cheekbones, magnificently athletic physique when not recuperating from a month of torture, pretty blue eyes, great ass, and growing collage of attractive permanent scarring. Or your non-existent refractory time and century plus of experimentation with mind-bending and physically impossible positions it should take at least four of us to get into. Or your amusing willingness to be hurled into walls and regard a brick as a marital aid.
SPIKE: (looking vaguely pained and sexy as hell)
BUFFY: (cajoling) I admit that you’re a person. I admit that you actually love me. And I know--HOW I know!--you have a freaking soul. I don’t mind anymore that you’re technically dead. So am I. That’s so too last year! Besides, only a minority of my boyfriends have had pulses or measurable brain activity. What else do you want from me? It’s not as if I’m discriminating, Spike: I don’t warm up to ANYBODY. Ms. Permanent Winter of Sunnydale California, here, behind Door Number Two. Why can’t it just be fun and feel good? Except for the blood, broken bones and name-calling? Why does it always have to mean something?
SPIKE: (looking straight past her and sexy as hell)
BUFFY: (pouting attractively) If you loved me you wouldn’t want me to be so miserable. You’d do whatever I want, as often as I want, hanging from the freaking ceiling if I want. It’s not as if your feelings matter, after all, supposing you have any. I’m the Slayer: I deserve to be pampered and put to bed with Cherry Garcia ice cream with lots of fudge and Spike on top. You’re tough: you can take it! Why won’t you take it, Spike?
SPIKE: (smiling enigmatically, raising the eyebrow and looking sexy as hell)
BUFFY: Oh shit.


Sudden loud knocking at the bedroom door: Kennedy, asking if Buffy was up because Mr. Giles was on the phone from someplace unpronounceable. Buffy hurled a pillow at the mirror while grabbing a robe.



The stairs were crowded. The hall was worse. Giles was on the regular phone, which was in the living room, tethered to a cord. Sitting on the weapons chest, Buffy clenched her left fist against her ear, trying to make out his voice against the transatlantic crackle and the girls’ noise. Giles started giving arrival time and flight numbers and she had nothing to write it down on.

“No,” Buffy hollered, “take a later flight, Giles. Later! After dark. Wait, I need to get something--”

She dropped the receiver and dashed into the hallway, full of SITs coming and going. Morning light was bright in the kitchen, to the left. At the end of the hall, Xander, looking surly, was working on fitting a whole new basement door, the old one leaned against the wall in the corner. Dawn was jiggling around while Willow showed Spike something in a book, a stack of other books at her feet. Spike was holding the green notebook dangling at his side. Target acquisition was complete and locked. Buffy made a quick lunge and grabbed the notebook, except that Spike grabbed back, yelling indignantly, “Hey!”

Buffy began wrestling him for it, blurting, “Giles is on the phone, I need--” Without thinking about it she shoved him airborne into the wall.

Rebounding, Spike shouted, “And you keep out of it too!” to nobody in particular and reached long to catch Buffy’s retreating elbow, whirling her around. Buffy came down strong on her right leg and pulled a head-high roundhouse kick, nearly decking Willow, with her left. Spike leaned back under it and was straightening when Xander caught him in the back of the head with a hammer and Kennedy came up with the stake still lying in the corner. Dawn got between, she and Kennedy smacking wildly back and forth, which brought Willow into it, and Spike, suddenly in game face, went after Xander. Everybody shrieking bloody murder. Then the SITs got into the melee, everybody in everybody’s way, getting hit and shoved from every direction, crowded into the small hallspace, and Buffy now throwing people indiscriminately aside to get at Kennedy and the stake, heart clenched and cold. And Spike fighting like a cornered cougar in the middle of it, no howls of punishment from the chip, full-out and unrestrained and overwhelmingly outnumbered. Buffy belted Kennedy and got the stake away from her, then butted straight through Dawn to reach Spike, took him from the side, and threw him down the cellar stairs.

Xander slammed the door and Buffy held it the second it took Xander to drop the top hinge pin and bang it into place. The door thumped once. Buffy held it. Xander got his power drill and started attaching the bolt. Fastening the screws took about a minute. Xander shoved the bolt home.

The screeching had only gotten louder and more confused. Dawn was in a heap, rocking, holding her middle. Willow and Kennedy were having a heated conversation. Xander had started attaching a second bolt vertically to the top corner farthest from the hinges.

Buffy walked slowly back up the hall and the SITs got out of her way. She found the handset dangling on its cord and mechanically took it up. Without waiting to find out if Giles was still on the line, she said, “You’ll have to call back. We’ve had a kind of a thing,” and hung up. The whole business couldn’t have taken over three minutes.

Rona was helping Amanda clench some cloth around her bleeding wrist. As Buffy passed, Amanda blurted tearfully, “He bit me. Does that mean--?”

“No. I’ll talk to everybody about vampires after lunch.” Feeling frozen solid, Buffy swung a glance around at the variously frightened, demoralized, and furious SITs. “Anybody else hurt?” She waited a few seconds but no voice claimed injury through the sobbing. And she saw no bodies on the floor. They’d been lucky. “Get your breakfasts then. We’ll talk about this after lunch.”

As the SITs started to disperse, Buffy went to see that Dawn was all right. On the floor, Dawn jerked away and smacked at Buffy’s hand when Buffy patiently reached again. Nothing serious, maybe a black eye, certainly some bruises.

Dawn spat at her, “You started it!”

“I know.”



At three o’clock, wearing black slacks and black sleeveless top, golden hair gathered and pinned, Buffy nodded to Xander. He slipped the four bolts now securing the corners of the basement door. There’d been no sound or sign from downstairs that Buffy knew of at all. The door opened onto darkness and silence and descending stairs. Starting down, she switched on the light.

Halfway down, she saw what she’d expected to see: Spike seated crosslegged on the cot in Yogic stillness, manacled wrists on his knees, bare-chested and barefoot. Top-lit by the bulb overhead, the circle of scars on his chest and abdomen was enigmatic and powerful: like warrior markings. There was cigarette smell in the air, but Buffy dismissed that awareness. She stopped at the foot of the stairs.

Spike in chains: slightly battered and sexy as hell.

He said, “Slayer.” There was no reading his face.

Buffy raised a hand, and Dawn descended, straight and slim as a high priestess, bearing a blue cup. She crossed the basement floor and sank in a flow of skirts by the side of the cot, offering the cup.

It was a good minute before Spike’s unchanging attention left Buffy and acknowledged Dawn there. He said quietly, “Not just now, Bit.”

Dawn set the cup down and stayed where she was.

In answer to a second gesture, the SITs were coming down the stairs by twos, silent, like a dance. Willow and Xander came last. The SITs arranged themselves into a semicircle. Willow and Xander took places to either side of Buffy.

Buffy commented, “There wasn’t time to get Anya.”

Spike said nothing, watching. His left hand rested on Dawn’s bowed head, fingering through her hair in minute movements.

Buffy took a long breath and said, “This is Spike and he’s a vampire. He also has a soul. He’s a good man and I depend on him. He’s mine. Nobody else in this house will ever raise a hand against him except in training or by my direction. Or his. Say it: I will never raise a hand against Spike.”

Buffy waited out the ragged mutter of repetition. She noticed Dawn repeating it, too.

When it was quiet again, Buffy continued, “What happened this morning was my fault. It was completely wrong every way there is to be wrong. And it was stupid. And we were real lucky it wasn’t worse. From today, nobody is to touch any weapon in this house except if I, or Spike, tells you to. Say it.”

They said it, Xander’s deeper voice audible among all the higher ones.

Buffy said, “We six--me, Xander, Willow, and Anya when I can find her, and Giles when he returns--and Spike, are the bosses here. Any of us can give orders that will not be disobeyed except for good reason. They will be respected and obeyed without argument or reservation. If there’s a disagreement among us six, we’ll discuss it privately. I know of no such disagreement now. I’m the Slayer--the Chosen One. The responsibility is mine. The choices are mine. Depending on the circumstances, I may designate any of the other five as my second and their authority then is mine. We will keep you all from death with all our strength, in every way we can. And whoever should break this covenant is no longer under the Slayer’s protection and lost to our company. I swear I will abide by this. So help me God.”

They said it. All of them: even Xander. So help me God. Then Buffy walked forward and put the key into each of the manacles, removing each cuff and laying it aside. She took up Spike’s left hand from Dawn’s head, turned it, and set the key in his palm. Against momentary resistance, she closed his fingers over it and let his hand go.

Buffy said over her shoulder, “That’s all. Go back to what you were doing. Don’t ever come down here uninvited. Except Kennedy, who stays.” As the girl turned, startled, among the others, Buffy said, “Kennedy, Spike is gonna show you how to stake a vampire in an enclosed space. It’s plain you need practice. And expert instruction.”

That was a risk: Spike’s eyes went wary and surprised. But he at last lowered his gaze and nodded.

Her eyes never leaving Spike, Buffy dropped down on her heels next to Dawn and waited until he looked at her. While most of the SITs were still on the stairs or milling around at the bottom, Buffy held out her arms and waited, and Spike gently leaned into them. His strong arms came around her back. Their heads were tipped together. He was breathing: short shallow breaths Buffy only knew about because she was holding him.

She asked him softly, “Can you be OK with this.”

“Didn’t leave me a whole lot of choice about it, did you, pet?”

“Give me another six hours and I’ll make up a better speech. I did the best I could. It was my fault. I’m sorry.” She hugged him tighter, glad for once not to have to meet his eyes.

“Yours, am I?” he murmured against her ear.

“Yes. You are. What the hell that actually means, what we do with it, I don’t know. But you got Willow on your side some way, and she’ll take care of Xander and his world-famous Silver Hammer. I’ll take care of Giles. Eruption at five, news at eleven. I’ll take care of it. And I sorta think you can handle Anyanka…. And if you do, I’ll kill you, I swear to God.” Breathy purr of a chuckle against her cheek. “I need you here and you’re with us. They’ve accepted that. You have to have a place here that everybody recognizes. This morning mustn’t ever happen again. God, Spike! I can’t manage like this anymore. Can’t--”

His torso moved and he was rocking her, holding her solidly. For the first time in months, maybe years, she felt consoled, safe, cherished, protected. “Hush, pet. Hush now. We’ll sort it out, clean or messy. It’s what I wanted. I can be good for you now. I will.”

“I know. Giles is coming in tomorrow sometime, at night I hope, with three more Potentials. When you’ve taught Kennedy not to come at you with pointy objects, hopefully without damaging her too severely, come find me and we’ll figure out how to play it. Willow plans because we both suck at it. Then we execute, at which we’re very, very good.” She gave him another squeeze, then pushed away. But she stayed another minute, balanced on the balls of her feet, looking him in the eyes. “Nobody ever gets to hurt you except me. Mine, Spike.”

“Yours, Slayer. Until I’m dust.”

TEN

The sky was still bright, long streaks of pink and yellow, over the treetops when the SITs arranged themselves in the grass in the back yard in front of Spike lounging on the porch steps and smoking, seeming not to notice them at all.

Dawn took a place by the lilac bush, to the side. She clutched the taser Buffy had given her: about the size and shape of a small remote. Buffy herself was conspicuously absent. It was just Spike, Dawn, and the SITs in the darkening yard.

When the whispering and the adjustments all had quieted, Spike looked around, remarking, “Well now. You all know me, know what I do for a livin’.” He watched them stir and whisper, then said, “Rona, you know that, don’t you, lass.”

Rona nodded hesitantly.

“Tell them then, pet.”

“Quint’s opening line from Jaws.”

“Good on you, Rona,” Spike commended in his warmest voice, looking straight at the girl: like being drowned in butter and deep-fried. Dawn couldn’t help grinning, how good he was at it. Rona couldn’t help a shy, uncertain smile, either. Spike said, “I know your names, but not yet how they all connect. And I guess you know mine. Tell me.”

From all sides, it came: Spike, ending on a kind of breathless hush.

“And what do I do for a living, my pets?”

Everybody saying something different, confusion, then finally all looking to him warily to find what answer he expected.

Spike said, “I keep you alive. That’s what I’m for, pets. That’s why I’m here. Oh, and for the Slayer, o’course.”

That got startled snorts and giggles fading to a deeper silence. They were settling now, less frightened, listening to him. Andrew had been all freakazoid at not being allowed to even try to videocam this. Dawn found herself agreeing with Andrew. Watching Spike charm about twenty terrified teenagers who, this morning, had been intent, with a Slayer’s terrible single-mindedness, on tearing him apart was just awesome.

“I belong to the Slayer. You all heard her say so: I’m her dog now. But what you maybe don’t know yet is that you belong to me. She’s put you into my hand, to do whatever I please with you.” He looked around as if idly. “No Slayer here. Just you, and me, and what a treat this would have been a few years back! Ah, children, I got myself a vampire’s dream come true here an’ no mistake. I can smell you all, and what you had to eat at your suppers, and who’s had sunburn, and who wears what perfume, and who’s on the rag…. I can smell your blood, children. I can hear it, the pitty-pats of all your hearts drivin’ it around. S’pose I was standin’ away off there in the street, in the big shadow of that pear tree, I’d still know it as clear as now. It shouts at me. What am I, children?”

They all knew that answer: Vampire.

“Amanda.” Spike pointed, the glowing cigarette tip marking the swing of his hand. “Run to the street, girl--quick as you can.”

Startled, Amanda got her feet under her, impeded by the girls sitting around her, and had no more than risen and turned when Spike was already standing where he’d pointed, arms folded, waiting. Dawn hadn’t even seen him move and therefore neither had anybody else.

But Dawn didn’t need a demonstration of Spike being scary. That was something she felt she’d known forever.

“Well, what’s keepin’ you, child?” Spike called impatiently. “Did I tell you to stand there like a lump, goin’ from foot to foot, need to use the loo, d’you?”

Driven to it, probably angry now, Amanda started moving, head going down, longer strides, until she was charging full-tilt across the dark grass, that always felt like almost-flying, running at night as hard as you could.

Spike picked her up in flight, swung her clear into the air and around, black silhouettes against the brighter street. Setting Amanda on her feet, he pulled her in close, spun her to be before him, and bent his head into her neck. There was no sound anywhere.

“Kim,” said Spike, straightening. “Come to me. Quick as you can, girl.”

He caught Kim and spun her and bent to her, just the same. Then, with Kim and Amanda still standing there, he somehow was in a different part of the yard, calling Cho Anh to him in unhesitating lilting Mandarin, and the girl was smiling as she rose and began running, to be spun, embraced, and set in place.

Dawn got goosebumps as each of the Potentials was called and gone, the remainder risen and standing now, bent and poised, intent for their turn, to be away instantly at the sound of their names.

When the last Potential was gone, Dawn was unready and surprised to hear Spike call her from over by the big maple in the corner. Jamming the taser into its clip, Dawn bounced up and took off. Before she’d reached the maple, in the middle of the yard, she was caught around the shoulders in mid-stride and flung into the air but not falling, could feel herself held and swinging, tethered, safe, and unafraid. Suddenly on her feet, with no chance to find her balance, she felt Spike’s arms come around her from behind. He murmured in her ear, “Dawn, you’re mine. I’ll keep you from death.”

“Dumbass,” she whispered back, and he pinched her arm. She felt him flinch when the chip fired.

“Now see what you made me do. Naughty Dawn. C’mon, then.”

He took her hand. Arms swinging like children, they strolled among the SITs back into the light from the back porch lantern. Dawn took a step toward the lilac bush, but Spike didn’t release her. He sat on the patch of bare ground in front of the steps, and Dawn dropped beside him. He said, “Come to me, children.”

From all sides of the yard, the Potentials returned and made a circle about two deep around them. The brightness in the sky was now gone. By the porch light, Dawn could distinguish the lifted faces.

“There’s nobody,” said Spike, “knows as much about Slayers as I do. Killed two, haven’t I? Glorious dances, those were. I’ll never forget ‘em. But not so fine as the dance I have now. And there’s never in the world been such a thing as this. No Slayer has ever been trained by a vampire. Pushed and taught beyond anything she imagined she could do, to be a pack quick and deadly as the first vampire pack that came together and ran their prey down like wolves. School like fish. Fly like birds. Change in a breath, to take down anything that stands before you. Now I’ve touched you and breathed you. I could find any of you a mile away at midnight. I have a line to you all now. From each of you to my hand.” Spike held up his spread left hand, looking around at them, willing them to imagine cords stretching out. Dawn could imagine. “You come and go to my hand. I will never let you fall. I’ll keep you from death. I swear it. I will also knock you about, and throw you down, so you’ll be creaking and lame and purple in patches for days afterward because none of you is the Chosen and you don’t have the healing yet or the strength that’s the gift to the Slayer, to do what she must, night after night. To me, you are all Slayers and I’ll teach you how to dance with me, with Death, if you will be Slayers to me. Pretend the healing. Pretend the strength. No whining. No complaints. I’ll teach you what you were meant for because I know what that is. I’ll never hurt you beyond what you can bear.

“Now you all know my Bit: Dawn. Wave to the nice Slayers, Bit. Lately, she’s not been trainin’ with you lot no more, like she used. That’s changed. I need her, and the Slayer says I can have her, so long as I see she keeps her homework caught up. Couldn’t manage, without. Dawn, she’s my runner and my minder and my recorder--whatever she needs to be. Where we go, she goes. The first rule is, I look after you. The second rule is, You look after Dawn. Anything comes at us from any side, I want you between it and Dawn. Your first job is to mind me, learn what I’m showin’ you. Your second job is to see to Dawn, whether I’m there to say or not. You just see it an’ do it.

“Now you divide yourselves into two parts--at…Meagan, there. Just as you are. Look who’s around you. Remember. You’re the two packs. This lot, to the left, they’re the lucky ones: they get to stick with me tonight. You other lot, you’re the Slayer’s, and she’ll come for you presently. My pack, onto the porch an’ get your weapons.”

Dawn handed out weapons laid out ready on the porch: stakes, two apiece. Spike didn’t want them all weighted down and fumble-fingered, he said. Simplest was best. If they couldn’t handle a stake, he didn’t want them whacking about with edge-weapons in the dark. For himself he’d picked his usual favorite, a short-hafted hand axe, this one with a leather thong he could loop around his wrist, leaving both hands free.

He sent them racing for the first mark, the streetlight at the corner of Morris, and was waiting for them when they swept up, all grinning and eager. Dawn, among the last-comers, couldn’t help noticing that the first to reach the mark mimicked his arms-folded, hipshot pose, trying to cover that they were breathing hard. He, of course, wasn’t breathing at all.

“That’s fine, my doves. Now you don’t move till I say Ready, go, like Simon says, right? Next mark is Auburn Park, by the swings. By way of Anderson. And this time, it’s not a race. You watch to the sides, you move together, and whoever sees anything off, you remember it to tell me at the mark. Anything off, you come straight to me, you don’t go look at it, poke it with a sharp stick. Nobody first, nobody left behind. You’re boomerangs: I throw you now and you come back to my hand. Haven’t yet had reason to choose the goat for this evening. What’s the goat?” He looked around, waiting, until Amanda put up a timid hand. “So what is it, then, do you think?”

“The one who messes up?”

“Exactly right. And who wants to be the goat, tell me?”

All hands remained down, with a majority of Aw, come on! expressions.

“Well, somebody does, because she’s gonna do it, ain’t she? I got something special for the goat, when we get back. For tonight, that’s a great (his eyes went golden) big (his face shifted) kiss!” And he was grinning at them in full, fanged game face. Dead silence. Wide-eyed recoil. “Ready, go!”

Watching them go, Spike shed game face, waiting until they rounded the next corner and were gone. Then he called Dawn to him with a tilt of his head. They started off at an easy jog she could maintain, following a shortcut to the next mark.

Dawn spoke the realization that had come to her: “You’ve done this before. Or something like it. When?”

“Oh, that would be telling.” After a few more strides, Spike added, “Bit…don’t ask me about such things anymore. All the stories are sad.”

And end with “And then we ate them,” thought Dawn. She decided not to try out any “Mr. Chips” jokes on him tonight, after all.



Dawn was left sitting on what Spike called the roundabout while he circled back to intercept and pace the pack, watch how they moved, maybe give them a bit of a scare. She made sure she had the remote-sized taser right-way around and the firing button under her thumb.

This unit was one of a pair: a parting gift from Riley Finn, that jackass. One jolt would stop a vampire dead in its tracks and likely drop it--long enough for Dawn to get the stake taped to her back. If she spotted any of the larger non-humanoid demons wandering through the park, she was under strict orders to run and yell, and Spike would be there, quick as that. But that wasn’t what the taser was for. It was for Spike. That was the condition he’d required to take the SITs out alone, without the Slayer along to be minder.

Buffy and her group would be taking the SUV to check out the approaches to the airport, where Giles and the new potentials would be arriving sometime tomorrow. The patrol route Spike had chosen for his pack wasn’t currently the usual one for Saturdays, but it hadn’t been swept in awhile and contained only one active cemetery. Not particularly dangerous, therefore, it would seem. But just north and east of this park, Dawn’s research had found a pattern of recent deaths and disappearances over the past month: mostly at the edge of open country beyond the town limits. The deaths, in the usual Sunnydale euphemism, were attributed to animal attack: in other words, they’d been bitten. Foolhardy hikers or backpackers, lone motorists with car problems, people walking dogs: suddenly gone. And then, this last week, no more deaths in that area at all. Five disappearances, total. The pattern of a new vamp nest systematically clearing out the competition from their chosen hunting territory, then collecting enough bloodcows to keep the need for active hunting to a minimum.

Shrewd. Deliberate. Forethoughtful. Quite different from the chaotic rampage of the usual fledgling; and in the unclaimed territory that Sunnydale had become since the Master’s death, mature vampires typically hunted alone, far more likely to dispatch any vamp they met than to join forces. Vamps weren’t too big on trust or cooperation without being decisively hammered down first.

Dawn thought when she went to college, she’d like to do a study on vampire domination hierarchies. Maybe Giles would help, with the remaining Watcher records.

In the pattern and its interpretation, Dawn thought she’d found one or more of Spike’s missing fledges, the clever monsters--possibly with a minion or two, ordinary fledges drawn to any purposeful action that promised food and willing to offer fealty to get it.

No reason not to choose this area to patrol. Only Dawn and Spike knew the reason for singling it out.

She’d been sitting long enough that the crickets had recovered from her intrusion, with Spike, into their range. So she noticed at once when their steady sawing stopped. She and swung her feet as though idly for a second before rising, taking her time. Standing the way she’d been taught: lead foot and back foot, balanced, ready to move in any direction.

By a picnic table a woman stood watching her.

Dawn’s eyes were fully acclimated now, and though nothing like as sharp as vampire vision, she could see the woman quite plainly by the light of the risen moon. Could have been a waitress or a shop clerk, something like that. Vaguely rumpled and just short of dirty: hard to get proper dry-cleaning when you were living in a cave or a crypt or the basement of the sporadic Sunnydale tract housing constantly being started up and then abandoned when the first occupants unaccountably vanished. Otherwise perfectly human looking.

“Hi,” Dawn said, wiggling fingers in a small wave. “Waiting for my Dad, when the Little League game lets out.” From mapping out the patrol route, she knew there was a lighted ballfield a couple of blocks away, at the other side of the park.

“Hi,” said the woman, pushing off the table, sauntering closer. No least resemblance to Spike of course: why would there be? But she sort of fit one of the descriptions in Spike’s green notebook. “Always walk my dog here. Surprised me to see anybody out here at night, specially a kid. Your brother playing?”

“Yeah. Johnny.” Dawn figured the woman could hear her heart going. Dawn certainly could. “What’s your dog’s name?” Dawn found herself asking idiotically.

The woman stared at her like she was crazy. Dawn had a second’s impression of yellow eyes, then impact and she was down on her back. Dawn jammed the taser right under the woman’s jaw and hit the button. The woman spasmed back. Dawn got knees up and kicked her the rest of the way off. Dawn yanked the stake out of the tape but held it, standing over the stunned vampire woman out of reach of a sudden grab.

”Spike!”


It seemed Spike could have been no more than a pace or two away, he was there so fast. But the crickets had said different.

Dawn didn’t ask him where the SITs were. She just got out of his way while he knelt and pinned the vamp (still in game face) with a hand on her chest, leaning all his weight on it.

Dawn passed the stake to his free hand, behind his back. No sign of the axe.

“Nasty surprise for you, love.” He was talking to the vamp. “This here one’s mine. We come to an arrangement. You know how those things go. But there’s a whole lot more just off a ways there, and I could be persuaded to share. More’n I need, since I got this one to do me awhile, all friendly-like.” He looked around to smile at Dawn, and he’d gone to game face, too.

He’d warned Dawn: it was when his demon surfaced she’d need to watch him specially hard, see if he seemed to be doing anything off and act accordingly. So far, she’d seen nothing she’d classify as off. She was scared she wouldn’t know off before it bit her. What scared her was the responsibility to judge and do, all in a second--the fear of judging wrong.

The vampire woman didn’t say anything, looking up with a sly, amused expression. Spike suddenly punched out and dusted her, grabbed Dawn’s arm, and yanked her into a full-out run back toward the nearest trees. Dawn concentrated on hanging onto the taser but keeping her finger clear of the firing button, so as not to hit him by accident.

“Here!” Spike shouted, and the SITs burst out of the trees. The thing that flashed in the moonlight was the axe, that he caught out of its spin and whirled with, the SITs fanning out to either side, stakes in hand. Spike shoved Dawn behind him. The next instant, they were surrounded by Bringers.

ELEVEN

As much as Spike loved a fight, he hated being lumbered with these children and the responsibility of protecting them. It was too soon: he’d barely had a chance to begin with them. The ambush was an annoying distraction that kept him from finding the nest and dispatching the other fledges.

He couldn’t afford to be distracted. He focused on the fight.

As best he could tell, there were about two dozen Bringers against eleven potentials, him, and Dawn. So the first thing to be done was better the odds and trust the children, just for a few moments, to see to themselves and one another.

He went straight into the nearest pair of Bringers and carved them, left and right. Swinging the axe backhand into an attacker, solid contact, he whipped a leg forward and stopped the lunge of another cowled Bringer with a bootheel to the throat that would have taken a vamp’s head off but no such luck here, the Bringer just stumbled back into the Bit’s taser and went down. Spike dropped into a crouched whirl to choose who to go after next.

Bringers seemed to favor long-bladed daggers: fine against a bunch of human children but wrong weapon entirely against a vampire. They could hurt him, slow him maybe, but not do him any serious harm. All they really had against him was force of numbers: faced only by twos and threes, he was methodically hacking them to pieces. Unless they mobbed him fast, he’d have the most of them and the girls would take the rest.

Then Spike came up under a Bringer, and it vanished--simply melted away--at the instant of contact.

Bloody hell: he could no longer trust his eyes. Do the ones being touched, then. He concentrated on finishing the ones some girl was already engaging and those Bit’s taser had put on the ground. Bringers were down to about ten, and if there’d been time, Spike could have done them all. But he could hear a fresh force coming through the woods, off to his right someplace.

He directed, “Get the knives, children. If you see one, take it. Now! Mark is the ballfield. Go!”

That far, he’d taught them: they stooped, and rose, and ran in something like unison and he hoped they all were there, he saw nothing but Bringers’ dark robes on the ground, and then there was a girl there, pale limbs sprawled at the edge of the woods. Spike made a sour, incredulous face, thinking Yeah, pull the other one, and collected the Bit, slower than the rest, sticking right to him the same as he’d told her. No Bringer could run as fast as a scared fifteen, sixteen year old girl with Slayer in her blood, and the ballfield would be bright and full of people, confuse things, keep his own lot tight and together, yeah. And it was a new direction, unpredictable (he hoped): there’d have been no chance to set anything up there to bar their retreat (he hoped).

Just have to make do with what he found to hand.

“Bit. They’re throwin’ ghosts at me. Might be I’ll need you to call things, say if you see ‘em or not. Keep close. Don’t trust the taser past another shot or two, I dunno how much it’s good for. Get yourself a knife, a stake, something as fallback.”

Dawn squeezed his hand hard for confirmation, saving her breath for running, not looking back because that was his chore, rearguard. As the racing Potentials were silhouetted against the lighted playing field, Spike took quick count and they were all there, all there should be. An anxious knot in his chest let go at the realization. Somebody was hurt, the bloodsmell strong; but nobody hurt to the point she couldn’t run, nobody being carried or dragged, so that would have to be good enough.

The Potentials streamed onto the field near third base and veered toward the pitcher’s mound. Following, Spike jerked and lost Dawn’s hand, momentarily frozen. Entering the floodlit space from darkness threw him: everything in him was shouting daylight! daylight! in instinctive terror. Panic on a cellular level. He drove himself forward, continuing to find the floodlights an unexpectedly powerful distraction, making it hard for him to focus on anything beyond forcing himself deeper into the space his body was convinced meant annihilation.

He must not loose his demon in this place. All the demon would want to do was escape the lights. And where was the Bit?

The intrusion of the SIT pack had turned the game into a chaos of small, uniformed players screeching, wailing, and scattering away from the disruption. The bleachers were emptying. At the sidelines, disorganized crowds of alarmed parents were trying to collect their own, some coming onto the field. Reaching the little group of Potentials gathered at the pitcher’s mound, Spike looked around frantically for Dawn. Then he caught sight of her: jogging from the benches beyond the base path, carrying the weapon she’d turned aside to collect as he’d told her to.

A vast sense of yes fell on him like a bucket of water on flames. “Here,” he shouted, to call the Potentials’ attention to him, then swung his arm down, his whole body thrown into pointing, like an umpire calling strike three. As he had, they saw it at once.

When about eighteen pursuing Bringers erupted into the picnic area and then the outfield, twelve teenaged girls and a savagely grinning vampire awaited them with baseball bats.

The street beyond the ballfield was a cacophony of shouts, car alarms and approaching sirens. Whatever senses Bringers had to compensate for their sewn-shut eyes would be registering hundreds of randomly running forms.

Spike saw the Bringers halt, then retreat back among the trees. At once he named a new mark and sent his pack flying off to reach it.

Starting away, Dawn halted and turned at finding herself alone.

Spike hated the blinding unnatural glare. Wanted to be gone. Yet it galled him to desert the field with any Bringers still unfought and alive. He wanted to do them all. And the chance of locating the nest and slaughtering any of his fledglings stupid enough to still be there was becoming more remote with each passing second. In an hour, it would become no chance at all.

But his pack had performed brilliantly, had fought their first engagement and all survived. They’d now be into the backlash, scared and tired. Some were hurt. They needed to be taken home, into rest and care. If they were his, as he’d claimed, he was also theirs: they had a claim on him now, no matter what he wanted.

Maybe there’d never been a chance. His fledges weren’t stupid. The Bringers’ ambush made it plain that his fledges had taken alarm from his initial kills. Instead of running, they’d made an alliance of common interest with the First. From the woman fledge’s reaction, Spike had known he’d lost the advantage of surprise and instead was facing whatever nasty surprise they’d slapped together to greet him with.

He couldn’t go both ways, do both things.

He made himself move and caught Dawn’s hand. They escaped the lights just as the first police cars screeched up.



Spike loped down Ravello Drive alone, on the off chance another ambush might have been set along this last, predictable stretch. But the street was all quiet, as far as he could see or sense. He stopped and lifted an arm to Dawn, standing at an intersection three blocks back, to send her to relay the come-along to the pack waiting where he’d put them while he checked that the coast was clear.

The SUV was still gone so Buffy and her lot weren’t back from vetting the airport. Spike lit a cigarette and paced the back lawn, violently unsettled, wanting a drink. Wanting to barge into the bloody basement and get himself chained up, collapse into the sleep he’d first had too much of and now wanted desperately. Sleeping in the daytime was more a habit than a need, the body didn’t need it to regenerate, but his mind was spinning with impressions and ideas and he wanted them all to shut up, drink himself back to quiet, but couldn’t do that till Buffy returned and he’d given her something like a report, which was gonna be a treat and a half, this fiasco.

The SITs started arriving, the first of them putting on a final burst of speed to show off to him, and then they were all over him again, and the bloodsmell bothered him something ferocious. He could feel the chip sizzling in the back of his head, just waiting to fire off searing lightnings if he so much as touched a one of ‘em, the way he was feeling, and that kind of unconsciousness he really didn’t want to deal with right now. Another minute and he was gonna grab and try to eat somebody, and the chip would fry him blind and senseless, and the children didn’t understand.

He seized on Dawn the second he saw her and was able to make something like sense, enough that Dawn took charge of herding them all into the house and the hell away from him! for all that they didn’t want to go, wanted to hop like bunnies and yank him into some sort of fucking victory dance, and in another two seconds it was gonna go all pear-shaped and they still didn’t understand--

Dawn hauled the last one off him and he managed to stand there, hold his demon from exploding, start pacing again. After awhile an ambulance came and then left, no siren, so maybe it wasn’t too bad. He was starting to stiffen up and he knew he’d taken some damage but nothing worth tending, nothing that wouldn’t right itself in a few hours.

Dawn came back onto the porch but had the sense to stay there, and he was so grateful to her and loved her so hard it was all he could do to keep away from her. But because she stayed clear, so did he, and he was glad when she put out the light.

Finally he’d settled down enough that he could swing by the porch and ask, “Who’s gone to hospital?”

“Rona.”

“How bad?”

“Not too bad. She made it home. But she was still bleeding…. I guess you know.”

“Yeah. Yeah.” He threw himself into another circuit. The tiredness was catching up to him, it was better, he was slowing down. He circled back to the porch and settled there, fishing for another cigarette. “I’m real proud of ‘em all. They done fine. I just can’t--”

“You have a fan club,” Dawn said.

“Bloody hell.”

She laughed at him, and it was suddenly better, nearly all right. He tipped his head back and shut his eyes, ready to sleep then right where he was, and the sun be damned.

“An’ you done the best of all, Bit. Couldn’t have managed without you.”

Quick as a shot, Dawn said, “Does that mean you’ll take me to the mall, a movie and Buster Crabbe’s?”

“Goddam, Bit. Whatever you say. Whatever you want.” Spike looked around at her: all long legs and huge eyes and sweet girlsmell. The blood, that was there, but no longer so important. He could set that awareness aside. Food wasn’t what she was to him. “Ran you off your feet tonight. Get yourself inside, get to sleep.”

She shrugged and flipped her hair. “In a while.”

Then he understood: she was staying with him till Buffy got back. That was all right.

Diffidently, Dawn offered, “I’ll try to tell them, if you want. How you are. So the next time, they’ll know.”

“Yeah. That would be good. I wouldn’t know how to say. I’d just scare them.”

“Maybe not. You don’t scare me.”

“No: not never you, no, ‘course not…. You know when to stay clear of me, Bit. An’ I can’t tell you…how that helps.”

She unfolded and stepped all long-leggedy down the stairs, waited a second to see if he minded, then thumped down next to him and leaned against his shoulder. And that was good, even better: he drew quiet from her and he could feel her smiling.

“You did the best of all,” Dawn said in a dreamy, far-off nighttime voice. “I never saw you fight before. Never really. With Glory, too busy being scared and all ME, the glowy Key center of the known universe and all…. You’re beautiful and awesome. And you brought everybody home.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess.” He supposed he could live with awesome.

The SUV pulled into the driveway.

TWELVE

Buffy hadn’t been able to get her mind off Spike all evening because the SITs wouldn’t let her. Since his little presentation, four of them had decided he was “totally hot” and wanted to change teams and were speculating about who might be induced to swap. This incensed Kennedy, who was still mad about Spike teaching her the finer points of getting repeatedly smacked while attempting to push a rolled newspaper “stake” at an impassive vampire not occupied with twenty-some other Potentials this time while she did it. Kennedy was not about to admit Spike scared her, so she flailed out with every hateful speculation about him she could think of, ranging from the insane and impossible to the almost-true. This naturally was tantamount to treason to Molly, Chloe, Joanne and Lisa, the would-be defectors to the Hotness party. Meanwhile Gail had been trying to play peacemaker on the way back and naturally, with the insane logic of teenagers, everybody was now mad at her. Gail kept bursting into backseat conversations with, “But I only said--”

It was such a relief to pull into the driveway and see Spike and Dawn on the steps.

Buffy managed not to break the key turning the engine off, nor did she break the SUV’s door in shutting it. In fact she felt she shut it with great care. A definitive masterpiece of shutting. She was the Reigning Queen of Shutmanship.

She gave the SITs plenty of time to get inside before starting across the moonlit grass to where Spike stood waiting for her.

“I think,” she said, “we have firmly established that there is an airport. It occasionally even has planes. Not on any useful schedule, but there are planes. So I am of the opinion there may actually be a world beyond Sunnydale, hard as that is to believe.” Buffy couldn’t help noticing that Spike looked particularly delicious tonight: plainly tired, and still willing to find her jokes amusing. What more could any reasonable person ask? She also noticed that he’d come a few paces forward to meet her, and that Dawn had had the uncommon tact to stay on the porch. “I hope you and your team had an exciting outing, since I have been informed by experts that my outing sucked major rocks, in the most boring, mosquito-bitten uber swamp of suckiness ever.”

“Hullo, pet. Thought I might report. We ran into Bringers. Five wounded, no dead, one in hospital, our side. There--”

“Let’s do this tomorrow morning, when everybody’s here to plan our coordinated-to-the-second, clockwork-perfect mission to rescue Giles and three more houseguests,” (Buffy stuck out her tongue expressively) “from the utter boredom and disgusting restrooms of Sunnydale airport.”

“Whatever you say, Slayer. Rona’s not hurt bad, I hear. Just have to get the bleeding stopped. Some stitches, likely.”

Buffy felt obscurely criticized for not having immediately demanded the details of Rona’s hospitalization. In any case, she had them now, and there was plainly nothing to worry about by his account. And it wasn’t his fault if his patrol produced sexy wounds and hers, mosquito bites.

Whatever the Potentials might think, she and Spike were not in competition for the hearts, minds, or trim teenaged limbs of the SITs. It was all one team, she’d said so, and if tonight Buffy had assigned herself the sucky reconnaissance patrol, tomorrow (assuming Giles ever called back) they’d have a patrol in dead earnest, everybody pulling their weight, and it would go well, and Giles would be back (joy unconfined, when he heard about the Declaration of the Teamness of Spike), and the ambient fumes of teenaged hormones would level out again. Eventually.

Buffy put her arm through Spike’s and strolled a bit farther from the porch. “Thought you should know: Molly, Chloe, Joanne, and Lisa are really impressed by your total hotness.”

The corners of his mouth quirked. “Yeah. Well. Little birds are easy to impress. When they find out they got to actually work, an’ sweat, and break nails an’ all, they’ll cool down soon enough.”

“Are you doing some kind of thrall thing?”

“Hell, no! Is that what--?” He clamped down on himself. “Y’don’t need to worry about me collecting a bunch of brides like that ol’ bugger Drac. Seems like one woman at a time--”

“Brides?” Buffy demanded in something much closer to a horrified squeak than she’d intended.

“Well, what with the total hotness, an’ all. Pet, you got me mixed up with Dru. If I could do thrall, I wouldn’t’a had to pitch you through a wall to get your attention, now would I?”

Buffy couldn’t believe he’d actually said that. From his whacked-from-behind-with-a-brick expression, neither could he.

It seemed that recollection had been mined, and setting so much as a toe back onto the shrieking take-no-prisoners ferocious brass-bound kamikaze fuckfest of their previous relationship was enough to set off the whole assemblage.

Buffy felt as though every cell in her body had flipped and realigned. Maybe werewolf Oz could have described this feeling--how, suddenly, everything turned. As if, at a touch, she’d shatter and reform into an entirely new creature. Or, just as likely, into a puddle of molten goo.

She could see the moon in his eyes. That meant something.

The clack of the back door shutting could equally as well have been the beginning of something or the end of something. Spike apparently took it as a signal of ten seconds left before the countdown hit zero and absolutely everything went irretrievably pear-shaped. He didn’t seem all that eager to transform into a new creature or perhaps only regress to the old one who came up with creative uses for handcuffs, toothbrushes, and grape jelly and whose unbroken record was making her come twenty-seven times between four in the afternoon and six the following morning not counting aftershocks.

Spike took a hike and the door clacked again, this time with finality.

Wandering like a dazed survivor, Buffy paced the yard, swinging her arms, blinking. Wowser! Where the hell did that come from? And where the hell is it going? Wowser! Total hotness? They have NO idea!



The following morning, Buffy found that Spike had acquired an entourage: the SITs had decided to take matters into their own hands and cut his hair, assembled in the kitchen, Dawn supervising. Dawn apparently had the final word on how Spike-hair was supposed to look.

Waiting for a call from Giles gave Buffy an unassailable pretext to hang around in the hall, watching. Somehow Willow needed three trips to slop enough milk onto her Grape Nuts to achieve the proper degree of crunchy indestructibility. Willow declared the proceedings “cute,” and got a two-finger salute from Spike. Willow laughed and the SITs tittered or snorted, depending on whether they knew that variation or not. Spike looked resigned. He couldn’t fool Buffy: he was eating it up.

And it was no accident, she thought, that the chaperonage had become denser by something like a factor of four. Buffy couldn’t decide between amusement and annoyance. No reason she couldn’t choose both, with a side-dish of vague puzzlement over why he bothered.

When the kitchen got too bright (it was already too crowded), the makeover crew removed itself to the front room to finish, and Dawn pronounced. Then there was the heated discussion of the merits of plain peroxide as opposed to Miss Clairol #17, which eventually produced a mass exodus to the drugstore three blocks down. Without Spike, of course. He shook the catch-towel over the carpet and came into the hall trying to brush cut hair-ends off his neck.

He presented himself before Buffy, giving her sides to look at. “Did they do me bald anyplace?” He didn’t seem worried--of course not, not with Dawn, the New Number One, supervising.

Following the thought, Buffy said dryly, “That would be telling.”

“So it would. Feels better. Been doin’ it like this for forty-some years. Get used to it, a time like that.”

With grave deliberation Buffy performed the delicate operation of removing a scrap of cut hair from his left ear. She wanted to see if the Wowser factor was still in effect. Apparently not. But his eyes told her he knew precisely what she was doing and why and didn’t, at the moment, mind.

It was an interesting exchange of gazes, and their minds must be running along similar lines, because he remarked, “Educational.”

“Very,” said Buffy. “We’ll have to discuss it sometime.”

“I’ll consult my social secretary. ‘M sure there’ll be some afternoon free. This month or next.”

“When you grow up, you’ll come to appreciate quality over quantity,” Buffy said, and he leaned forward and Meeeeow’d in her face. Then he wandered past to where he could look into the kitchen, calling, “Red, could you pour me out a cuppa? Bints wouldn’t let me finish my brekker.”

After a minute Willow emerged with a mug. “Here you go, Mr. Popular. How does it feel to have groupies?”

“To be frank, damn strange. But better than the alternative, I s’pose. If it’s between bein’ took for a bloody rock star and getting yanked into cats’ meat like sodding Orpheus, I know which one I opt for, no question. An’ I expect it’s kind of novel for them to be around a bloke they don’t have to worry about breaking.”

With considerable effort, Buffy suppressed any comment whatsoever. Willow looked at her, and the corners of her mouth twitched, but she also said nothing.

It’s not the words, Buffy reflected, it’s the subtext that’ll get you if you’re not careful.

She wondered what further minefields remained to be discovered.

The purchasing expedition returned some ten minutes later, and Spike had to be firm about doing the rest for himself, no little birds gonna help him in the shower, the mere thought scandalized him and shame on their wicked minds for suggesting it. And Buffy noticed that the SITs didn’t for a second mean it seriously, only teasing, and that Spike had begun to extend to them the playful, absolute gentleness he’d always shown toward Dawn. Not rock star adoration but something much closer to genuine liking, much more relaxed and knowing on both sides that Buffy had originally thought.

Teasing a vampire: flirting with a kick. Well, she should know.

Blocking the stairs while Spike went up, Dawn wore her new authority with dignity and fizzing happiness, and so far nobody seemed to resent her elevation to Handmaid to the Hotness that was Spike. She called them into conference in the front room, thumping to assorted angular awkwardnesses on and around the couch, beginning, “I asked Spike if it was OK that I explain a few things, about what he’s like. Vampire, and all. And maybe there are things you want to know, that you’d feel funny asking him right to his face. So here we go: Basic Vampire 101.”

Her audience seemed riveted and she, comfortable, instructing them in Spike lore as the acknowledged expert.

Watching, Buffy thought that in many ways, Dawn had evolved into his go-between, interpreting to him and for him to the human world. Maybe the Potentials were taking their cue from Dawn. Somehow Buffy thought it would never occur to Dawn whether Spike was totally hot, one way or another. They were long past such things having any meaning at all.

It was sad that her own relationship with Spike had to be so jagged and problematical. She wondered if being a grown-up was ultimately worth what it cost.

Buffy hung around by the doorway, listening. She figured she might well learn something.

Dawn was in the middle of the Tale of the Chip, and how it worked, and what it meant, when the phone rang. Since she happened to be loitering nearby, Buffy grabbed it on the second ring.

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