THIRTEEN

When the Scooby council convened (Harris had brought Danish) a little before noon, Spike found a place for himself in the armchair back in the corner, legs stretched out long, ankles crossed, arms folded, and tried to pay attention. Buffy would want him to take part, look sensible, say something from time to time. But he’d never been much for that, and no use pretending otherwise. He preferred Peaches’ style of management: aim him at something and he’d go kill it. Not real great for planning. That was his Sire’s department.

Besides, his focus was blown all to hell. Too much afoot and then the Never dream on top of it.

He’d gone out again last night, alone, and located the vamp nest off past the park: in the cavity dug for gasoline storage tanks at a burned-out service station. Caught one minion dumb enough to still be hanging about there and got out of him that there’d been three of ‘em, three preternaturally composed fledges: two women and a man. Fucking each other blind and the minions not getting any, in the usual incestuous tangle of vampire relationships. One of the women, Julia, he’d done in the park: the one Bit had taken down with the taser. So that left two. They’d drunk up the bloodcows, collected whatever emergency stash they’d had time to put together, and scarpered.

Maria and Bob.

Maria would look about thirty, long dark hair and dark eyes, roundish squinched-up face like a pug dog. Tiny Betty Boop mouth. Chicano bint, fireplug design: short and squat. Maybe 150, 160 pounds. He thought he remembered picking her up at an all-night carry-out place. All he had were wisps of impressions, fragments, left from those nights when his demon had overcome him and hunted at will….

Bob had been a cop moonlighting as night security for a factory site under construction. Spike could recall the lights and jackstraw scaffolding and the big huddled earth-moving six- and eight-wheelers parked like sleeping black Ashokta demons. Bob was Caucasian, about six foot, maybe 210, bit of a beer gut on him, apparent age something like 40. Brown and brown.

Unremarkable people. Pass ‘em on the street and never spare a second glance. Remarkable vampires, cunning and ruthless from their orphaned rising, able to recognize one another by how they stood apart from the rest: the Order of Aurelius come into yet another generation. Spike listlessly did the Alien jaws-snapping thing with his hands. Dawn must have noticed because she came over and perched on the chair arm, and he told her to go, this wasn’t her place, and she protested that she lived there, for crap sake, and Willow let Kennedy come, and Spike said that didn’t signify, and Buffy just about glared holes in them both, and the Bit went off sulky, threatening unspecified doom. Everybody else carried on talking about something or other.

When he’d got out of the minion all there was likely to be, Spike had dusted him and stood awhile trying to memorize what scent traces were left in the nest, of who had been there. He’d boosted some kerosene and torched the nest, then circled back to Willie’s to connect with his minions, who’d about given up on him but not enough to actually leave. Willie’d been pissed off, of course, but admitted Spike had done good by him, tossed him safely outside before getting down to work, spared the bar mirror and all, and word of a really good fight attracted custom for weeks on the chance it might be repeated. That and the promise of in cash or kittens, depending on which Spike could lay his hands on first, and some bartending on Saturdays (always a rowdy night) was enough to square him with Willie, at least enough that Willie wouldn’t cancel his privilege, as a regular, of running up a tab.

Spike had drilled his minions on the names and descriptions, that they’d probably retained for at least 10 seconds after he left, sprinting against the coming sunrise back to Revello Drive.

In the basement, he’d added the details to the profiles in his notebook knowing it was no good, no use. Maria and Bob were gone. Then he’d put his arms up behind his head and lain there waiting for the first sounds of the household waking.

He couldn’t have slept anyway. Didn’t want to. Because as soon as his head had hit the pillow, after parting with Buffy and locking up, he’d been attacked by the Never dream with its portent of devastating calamity; and of course he couldn’t sleep after that.

He thought he was covering decently: even the Bit didn’t seem to have noticed anything off, except for him flapping his hands about like a git. Got through the hair business OK. So good enough, then. Maybe he could get in a few hours, since he understood Rupert had managed to change a connecting flight to arrive with the new children about eleven, after dark anyway, so Spike could lend a hand in collecting them. Departure point someplace near Pesht, the usual zig-zag route through Heathrow (where Giles had called from the first time) and then on, changeover at LaGuardia and another at O’Hare, then back to LAX and the shuttle to home sweet bloody Hellmouth and the newest pending apocalypse. Spike wondered what Prague was like now. He had the vague unexamined sense that the chair behind and beneath him was Dru, holding him, talking beloved nonsense in his ear about some dog and pony show she’d seen on the telly and decided was something else, animals being dissected and shown that way or who the hell knew what….

He startled at a touch on his arm and found the room empty and Buffy sitting on her heels in front of him.

“Wasn’t,” he said, straightening. “Just resting my eyes.”

Buffy didn’t buy that but didn’t argue. “We’re leaving at nine, both cars. You’re driving the SUV. You, me, and Xander, who’s driving his truck. We’re taking Kennedy, Amanda, Meagan, and Kim. They’re with you. I’m inside, to meet Giles and the three Potentials. You and the SITs cover the landing area, the service road, and the drop-off pick-up area, in that order. Xander’s on the parking lot. Willow stays by the phone and I have the cellphone. Willow monitors the police and emergency bands and checks that they’re listed as boarding and that the arrival time hasn’t changed up until the shuttle is on the ground. Anya might teleport some Potentials in if we end up needing more bodies on the ground. If she feels like it. I couldn’t quite pin her down about that.”

Spike tried to shake some more alertness into himself. “Right. Sounds like a plan, then.”

Buffy was still looking at him. “Your hair looks good. Everybody agreed. You look like the real, old you. Genuine Big Bad, accept no substitutes. And we all know you’re not…. You miss Dru, don’t you.”

That told him he’d been babbling, which annoyed him. “Sometimes. I also miss the Great War and smallpox.” Catching her startled, injured look, Spike said wearily, “Pay me no mind, love. I’m just off, a bit. Nothing to do with you lot. Just something of my own. So no matter. If you got the dosh, I’ll see to it the car’s filled up, come last light.”

“Dosh?”

“Money, love. It’s--” She knew, she was just having him on. He was really off, not to catch that. He rubbed at his eyes. “What cheer with Rona?”

“Xander’s going to pick her up now.”

“Gimme a yell when they get back.”

“All right. Then get some rest…. Dawn says you have nightmares.”

He shrugged. “Yeah. Sometimes.” He’d have to have a talk with Dawn.

Dawn knew about the Never dream, no way to keep it from her, the fact of it, anyway. It’d started about the same time she’d got into the habit of climbing out her window and coming to his crypt, most nights, playing cards or watching Man U humiliate themselves yet again, tethering him down with looking after her, her seeing to him, and no way for her not to know: wake bolt upright in tears, crazy with grief, go on a three, four day bender until he could settle himself down again. On the conspicuous side. But he’d never told her what the dream consisted of, that much he’d been able to keep to himself, and he wasn’t pleased, her running off and blatting it to the Slayer. All well and good, the Bit giving the children a bit of a clue, so he and they wouldn’t rub at each other’s raw edges so hard. But that didn’t include tattling to big sis about things that were private.

He thought he knew what it was now, and how he’d meet it. That was settled and sure. So he could contain it, not come all apart like he used to, until he’d swallowed it down again. He could keep on keeping on. About the airport and all, and whatever else the Slayer wanted to throw him at.

Buffy waited in case he wanted to talk about it, which he didn’t. So she eased back, left him alone.

Spike rubbed his eyes. No point moving, if Rona was due back in a few minutes. Might as well just wait. No point to any of it. Maria and Bob were gone.



Kennedy had been issued one of the tasers. Amanda had the other. That was a reasonable distribution: of the SITs, they’d shown the most natural weapons aptitude. All the same, having Kennedy at his back with a taser made Spike edgy. Finishing the sweep of the single landing strip and finding nothing of note, Spike set Kennedy at point and Amanda at rearguard to do a slow sweep of the service road connecting the landing strip with the baggage and maintenance area of the terminal. Again, a reasonable assignment: put the best fighters first and last, with the less dependable between to assist as needed. But that wasn’t why Spike did it.

He wanted to keep her under his eye.

Having by far the best night-sight, Spike ranged around the squad of four, pacing them on one side, then crossing their course to the other side to investigate anything that could conceal attackers--the standing fixtures and gear of a fueling station, a parked emergency vehicle, an empty three-car baggage truck, a small private jet near the shut maintenance bay.

The whole landing area, naturally flat, was spongy-swampy at its edges: host to clouds of mosquitoes the children were beginning to find annoying despite being liberally smeared with stinking repellant that certainly would make any vampire want to keep his distance. Certainly had it all over garlic as far as Spike was concerned; but then again, he liked garlic. He wondered how Bringers reacted to appalling smells and to mosquitoes. The mosquitoes bypassed Spike for the tastier SITs, which was fine with him.

Most of the landing area was well lighted: around the periphery by highstanding sodium lights like skinny giants with bright, protuberant noses, and down both sides of the angled runway bisecting the space by rectangular light plates embedded in the ground. Good visibility. Few obstructions or places to hide. Near the top of the service road, Spike stood upwind of the squad, shut his eyes, and concentrated on sounds, smells, and that unnamed sense attuned to the body warmth of creatures that could bleed. Away off to his right, a human wandered seemingly at random. A visual check identified a uniformed groundskeeper or maintenance worker collecting debris into a sack. Nothing else bigger than a rat, of which there was a fair abundance. From time to time, Spike caught the quick small shine of their eyes as they scavenged the area by twos and threes. Since there were rats, there were almost certainly cats, foxes, and coyotes, but he didn’t sense any. Maybe they were wary of the lights and didn’t converge to hunt until the airport closed for the night.

Where there was prey, there would always be predators whether you spotted them or not, Spike reflected with a certain wryness.

Satisfied that the area was clear and couldn’t be invaded except in a way that would rouse his attention from a considerable distance, he walked back to the waiting squad. “Settle here until the plane comes in. Then we’ll flank passengers into the terminal and move on to the pick-up place in front.”

“What if something’s already in the terminal?” Kennedy demanded.

For about the fifth time since setting out, Spike reminded himself of the unpleasant consequences of tearing her face off, among them that Buffy wouldn’t like it. “Kind of think the Slayer might have noticed, if there was, don’t you?”

“There’s probably lots more places to hide in there,” Kennedy persisted. “And we’re all stuck out here.”

“And the minute the passengers get inside, Slayer’ll have three of your lot and a Watcher with her, makes five. And I count five of us here. Sort of balances out, now doesn’t it? Just how would you like it organized, pet?”

“If there’s fighting, I want to be where it is, that’s all.” Kennedy shifted and gripped her upper arms with the opposite hands.

“Oh, you’ll get over that,” drawled Kim, about the first thing she’d said all night. Having, like Amanda, taken part in the park patrol last night, Kim apparently now fancied herself a veteran, but mostly good-natured about it, with a slightly sardonic edge.

Spike kept his smile to himself. Settling into a comfortable crouch, he listened to the night and reminded himself four or five times why the coal of a lit cigarette was not a good idea when you were trying to remain unseen in a big flat open space with fine visibility.

“Never have liked open country,” he remarked quietly, passing the time. “Take a nice slum over any patch of green you care to name. Parks are nice, though: good hunting in parks.”

Kim stifled a burst of what she tried to make sound like coughing.

“Vampire humor,” said Kennedy sourly. “Just what we needed.”

“Now, you never know what you’ll need, pet.”

“I am not your pet!”

Meagan started, “Ken, put a sock--” and then hushed, seemingly alert enough to spot the slight change in Spike’s pose as he caught a faint whine pitched lower than the drone of mosquitoes.

“Down, children,” Spike advised, with no change of tone. “Don’t skyline yourselves, that’s the way. Best if you don’t fall down, Kim.”

“Yeah,” whispered Kim, recovering noisily. “Got that.”

Spike thought of mentioning that snakes were among the predators drawn to open places with abundant rats, but the cool air would have them torpid by now, not actively hunting and slithering around; and no purpose, beyond amusement, in making the children any more nervous than they already were. Still, he thought about it.

Wingtip lights blinking, the LA shuttle circled once high overhead before descending and tilting into its landing approach. Propeller craft, by the sound: twin engine, a stuttered double vibration not precisely synchronous. Didn’t see them much anymore, it’d all gone private jets except for starvation suburban runs like Sunnydale, where any old crate that could get itself up would do.

A pair of uniformed workers came out of the terminal and laid hands on a tall triangle of boarding steps on wheels, walking it slowly away from the wall as the plane’s fore wheels hit and complained loudly at being forced into a fast spin on contact. Then the tail wheel was down, slight bump and shudder. The propellers slowed a bit, brakes catching hold, flaps already down and changing how the air moved past. The plane nosed toward the terminal at no more than a walking pace, toward where the stair crew waited.

They’d chosen the correct side, Spike noted, spotting the outline of the recessed door hatch. They’d see the passengers coming out. A plane that size, couldn’t be but seven or eight people inside, total. He doubted they’d have been served snacks.

Still nothing stirring on the field except the trash collector, far distant now, and the rats.

The propellers thwopped a few last times, then stilled. The stair was rolled into place against the plane. The hatch swung up. Behind the patrol, one of the maintenance bay doors rattled up and a tanker truck ground slowly out, dwarfed by the large opening. Spike returned his attention to the hatch.

An unfamiliar face, then another--flight crew, most likely, something of that sort. Then Rupert himself, halting and looking around before consenting to budge, typically wary, and well he should be. Following Rupert tight, two girls in similar blue dresses, good for keeping track of who was on whose side. Have to hand it to Rupert, he had this business of collecting Potentials down to a bloody science. No, there was the third, in the middle: so tiny only the top of her head was visible past the side of the stair.

You had your look, Rupert, now move the feet, get off the steps, you great git, you’re a bloody standing target, Spike thought. Aloud, he murmured, “Kim, watch the side, that’s the girl. Mistress Kennedy, if you’d be so kind…. The idea is not to be noticed, pet. Stoop down, you’ll find you can still walk if you really try. Just quietly now.”

A distant escort, the squad moved from the vicinity of the plane to where Spike gestured them to a halt, watching Rupert and the Potentials pass into the terminal. A motor starting was the baggage truck, whose trailing carts then rattled into motion.

The last Potential was inside. “Three quarters to gone, children. Around front now. Kennedy, swing by the car park, say hullo to Harris.”

“That’s not what--”

“Off you go, then. I don’t like Harris so long on his own, he’s apt to get into mischief. Or fall asleep. Tell him get the engine going, our birds have landed.”

“He has the pager--”

“I’ll go, Spike,” put in Amanda: poised, waiting.

At least somebody knew how to mind. Spike nodded, and Amanda dashed away, keeping beyond where the terminal lights extended onto the macadam.

With Kennedy leading off, the patrol ran toward the terminal’s front doorway and drop-off pick-up circle. There should be time to check the immediate area before baggage collection was complete and the passengers reached the same mark from the inside.

That was when Spike noticed the red brake lights of the vehicle disappearing, ahead, around the corner of the building, belonged to the tanker truck. Which had no business being headed toward the front entrance.

“Nasties in the truck, children. Go.”

When Spike rounded the corner several yards ahead of Kennedy, he found the tanker slowly approaching Xander’s parked truck nose-to-nose, blocking the truck’s passage. Stood to reason something else would be coming in behind, then, to block off the circular drive on the other side. He waved the squad to see to the tanker and kept moving, surprised to find Rupert and the new children in blue already standing by the truck and Buffy handing out weapons from the back. Then he spotted Amanda coming from the parking area, across the circle. He dug for the van keys. Seeing Amanda had already spotted him, he mimed once, then threw the keys high and hard, bright in the tall area lights. She didn’t quite catch them but had grabbed them up in a second. Straightening, she jerked her head questioningly toward the parking area. He pointed, confirming her guess, and she turned and sped off the way she’d come. Spike headed in the other direction.

“Leave that, Slayer. Amanda’s gone for the van. They’ll be coming from the back now. Hullo, Rupert.”

Off the startled flash of Giles’ glasses, Spike kept moving. The baggage truck was coming around the far corner of the terminal. The following carts were full of Bringers. Thirty or more. But only one driver.

Make it a foot race, maybe.

Worth the chance, Spike thought, flicked the axe up on its loop into his hand, and stepped into a flying dive at the open cab. Did the driver quick, grabbed the ignition key, rolled off and whacked two tires flat with the axe before the bringers piled off the carts and were upon him. A burning pain in his shoulder told him at least one had swapped his knife for a stake. He cut low, trying for legs, but with the robes that was chancy and a couple had nearly got a solid grip on him. And he was only holding a dozen or so. The rest were past, almost to the truck. Harris had tried to turn it across the circle but only succeeded in hanging up the undercarriage on the curb. Buffy and the rest had made it to the far side of the circle, and here came Amanda with the SUV, gonna be like a circus, that lot all trying to pile into the one van, but they should have the van before the Bringers had them, so time to depart.

Spike rolled and slashed until he could get his feet under him, then sprinted to the truck, that Harris was still trying to rock over the obstruction, grinding through the gears.

“Harris, you git, go! They don’t want your bloody truck now it’s empty, leave it!”

“Then they won’t want my bloody truck with just me in it, either.” Spike was hauling at the door to yank Harris out, and Harris hit the button to lock it, continuing, “First rule of construction: don’t lose the truck.”

That was when the tanker blew up.

Not airline fuel, not that kind of explosion. More WHUMP. Slow-motion splash. Burn. Some kind of lubricant, maybe, that didn’t catch fire all at once but splattered out as airborne debris, beginning to ignite in long thick gobs almost like tar. Liquid asphalt, maybe: for patching the runway.

Spike hung onto the door as the truck rocked and the thick, burning stuff started raining down. Harris just about knocked him over, shoving the door open. Staggering back, Spike went down on one stiff arm braced behind him, a bad position to rise quickly from. He flipped onto his knees and then up, in time to see the wildly overburdened SUV, several pairs of waving legs out the back hatch, Harris half in and half out the swinging left rear door, and Kim scrabbling around on top, pull away and start rolling, a whole pack of Bringers not quite in grabbing distance. None left near him--all in flailing pursuit across the circle and into the road.

Well, that had been interesting, Spike thought, dusting his hands together, backing a few paces.

He didn’t know what brought his attention around.

It was a very simple image. Burning sludge was cascading slowly over the tanker cab and behind the windshield, Kennedy was struggling and screaming without sound.

Ah, hell.

Moving, accelerating, Spike considered. Nothing to hand to break the windshield and it would take too long to kick it in. Done it before, Spike thought, I can do it again. And closed both hands onto and through the burning sludge on the passenger side door handle. He ripped the door off and flung it wide. Most of the flesh of his hands went with it. It’d been worse. He’d had worse pain than this. Lots of times.

Focus.

The child was struggling to get out but had got hung up on the gear shift. Not a whole lot of good choices left. Spike tried to grab at the shoulder, where there was something to hold onto and her sleeve would keep some of what was on his hands from transferring to her skin. Couldn’t be sure if he had good hold or not, but he hauled backward as hard as he could.

Spike wasn’t sure how that came out.

FOURTEEN

Although it was late, going for midnight, Dawn didn’t think anybody had gone to bed--or to sleep, more accurately, because it was sleeping bags on the floor all over the house every night, there didn’t begin to be enough beds, and the new SITs were going to have to move in with Xander, which Xander had been making eyebrow-waggling jokes about for days, big hairy deal, who cared.

Everybody was gathered in the front room, Command Central, with Fort-Holding Commander Willow, waiting for everybody else to get back from the airport. Rona, who had trouble sitting for any length of time because of her embarrassing injury she was so proud of, was wandering around sucking ginger ale through a straw and kibitzing on the Monopoly game Anya had started with five of the others, all laid out on the floor. Anya, intent, already had two hotels on Park Place and was gleeful that Chloe had landed there and had to pay her a fortune in fake money as rent. Anya also had the bank: pastel stacks of fake money in front of her, neatly sorted by denomination.

Dawn wouldn’t play Monopoly with Anya anymore: Anya enjoyed it too much, and always won. The SITs would play because they were “fish”: new gullible victims to be fleeced. Fish fleece: funny. OK, a little funny. OK: lame. Dawn thought she’d ask Spike how you went about cheating at Monopoly. When she saw him again. Maybe.

Dawn was glum because they’d both been off today and snapped at each other. Then he’d gone downstairs and slept till dark--so weird: like a normal vampire--and there’d been no chance to make it right before the airport expedition left. Not that he hadn’t been unreasonable: Willow did let Kennedy sit in on the Scooby sessions when none of the other SITs were allowed, and that wasn’t fair, everybody knew it; and it was Dawn’s house too and Dawn therefore had a right to be wherever she was; but Spike was often or even mostly unreasonable and if she was going to get mad at him for that, she’d be mad all the time and she didn’t like how that felt. Her stomach all twisted up and everything tasted like pennies.

She thought he’d had the Awful Dream again that he would never talk about: he was like that afterward when he wasn’t worse. He’d managed all right through the haircut and all, but he still didn’t like the bathroom and no wonder it put him right off, and after that he’d just gotten more and more off and couldn’t pretend properly anymore. It was best to leave him alone then, but Dawn hadn’t noticed until too late, he’d been faking too well, and then she’d been off too for not having noticed and then getting thrown out when if she’d just kept still, she could have stayed.

If she understood the Awful Dream she’d know better what to do, but he’d never told her the truly awful stuff: the merely gross and disgusting stuff, he hadn’t known was awful when he’d told it to her. Now he wouldn’t even tell her that, because he knew now. The soul had cost him his demonic innocence.

Dawn wasn’t sure the soul was a good thing. She had the right to be skeptical because as an ex-Mystical-Key-thingy, like Anya was an ex-Vengeance (excuuuse me: Justice!) Demon, Dawn wasn’t sure she herself had one and maybe it was all over-rated, you could be people without it, there’d never been a time when Spike wasn’t people.

After Buffy and the airport team left, Dawn had slunk downstairs and snuck his notebook, to see if he’d written anything about the AD there, but she’d leafed through it now and found it wasn’t like a diary. Maybe vampires didn’t do diaries, that was a long time to keep up a habit. Nothing there but the stuff about the fledges and some of it new, so she realized he’d gone back and found the nest all by himself, without her, last night.

And after the new notes about Bob (Bob, the Vampire: how excessively dorky!), in Spike’s odd lovely precise old-fashioned handwriting, that wasn’t at all like how you’d think he would write, there was: they’re gone what the hell what the hell

That made her feel even worse, knowing how much it meant to him, Order of Aurelius an’ all, vague despairing Alien gestures with his hands when he thought nobody was looking, when he wasn’t looking, all off, careless, and unfocused: figuring it didn’t matter because nobody would see or, seeing, understand….

Dawn wondered if that’s what people meant when they said something was enough to break your heart. She wondered if that’s what this feeling was, a heart breaking. It should make some kind of a noise, so you’d know and could tell it right away from a stomach ache or cramps.

All at once, she thought, It’s all in the blood, like my Keyness. The blood that made them. The blood they share. The Blood of Aurelius, down from forever. What about a locator spell? and was all excited and about to ask Willow when Willow yelled really loud and scared everybody practically out of their skins.

Anya hopped up and darted among SITs to the big chair where Willow sat with the laptop and maps and notes and everything deployed on a small folding table in front of her, and the phone right beside her on the weapons chest, demanding sharply, “What is it? You made me spill my money!”

Willow’s eyes hadn’t gone all black or anything, but she looked as though they could, any second. She was locked, clenched, staring straight up, as though she was either having a seizure or seconds from exploding. Without looking Willow grabbed Anya’s wrist and still without looking slammed Anya’s hand down on the diagram of the airport laid out flat on the little table. “He’s there. Go get him. Now!”

“Xander?” shrieked Anya, already yanking her wrist free, whirling away.

“Spike! Now, Anya!”

Anya vanished.



Dawn was frantic. It was so hard to find out what had happened or was happening. When Kennedy showed up, moving crooked and sobbing with a dislocated shoulder and bad burns too on that shoulder and upper arm, encrusted with something black and tarry, and on the whole side of her left leg below the knee, Dawn didn’t understand how Kennedy had been injured or where she’d come from. The airport of course, but it was too hard with everybody flocking around and getting Kennedy laid down on the couch and Willow sternly naming off the spell ingredients she needed from upstairs with tears steadily rolling down her face, to understand anything and where was Spike? Where was he?

Everybody running in forty directions, Kennedy wailing insanely, “He didn’t change! He didn’t change!” like that was the worst thing in the world or an insult, flailing around and not letting anybody try to lock her shoulder and pull it straight, screaming while Willow cleared them all away from the couch and set out the ingredients and made the spell, Sumerian by the sound, babbling, “It will be OK, baby, just be quiet, baby,” in between as though it was part of the spell, and Dawn clutching the notebook tight against her chest and backed against the wall, getting more and more scared and at the same time more and more quiet until people’s mouths were moving but there was nothing and no spell either, no sound at all. Just a sort of vibrating high-pitched whine that went on and on.

And then somehow Amanda was in front of her, frowning, and more people, Buffy, barging in and adding to the confusion, Xander and Anya hugging hard out in the hall, so some way Anya was there again, and nobody would tell her where Spike was, nobody was making any sound or any sense, just the lone white keening in her head.

Amanda jerked at her until she unlocked, and Dawn stumbled and moved where Amanda pulled her and made her go, and now Kim had her arm around Dawn’s back and was helping Amanda steer her into the kitchen. While Amanda made Dawn sit on one of the tall chairs, Kim shut the hall door.

Amanda was saying something to her, frowning, very serious, but Dawn still couldn’t hear her and she wasn’t breathing, she’d forgotten how.

Then suddenly all the sounds rushed back, Amanda’s solemn voice saying slowly, “--all right, he’ll heal, he’s a vampire,” and Dawn started choking as she remembered how to breathe. Amanda and Kim hugged her until the choking became breathing and the shaking began, as though she’d frozen solid and was starting to thaw.

“But where is he?” Dawn said in some tiny squeak that didn’t sound like her voice at all.

Amanda and Kim exchanged a glance. Kim said, “I’ll find out. I’ll come right back. Don’t be scared, Bit. We’ll see to it.”

When Kim called her by the name nobody else called her, the thaw ran through her and she was all liquid and hurting, sobbing against Amanda’s neck with Amanda hugging her even harder and patting her back.

Kim returned, shutting the door and setting her shoulders against it. “He’s downstairs. Anya teleported straight there. Buffy--”

Dawn started fighting to get free, to get down there, but Amanda and Kim wouldn’t let her, held tight against her flailing punches and only turned their faces aside when she struck at them, and still hung on, and they were stronger than she was and it wasn’t fair.

“He’s there?” Dawn asked tremulously. “He’s alive?”

As Kim started explaining that nobody was allowed in the basement, Buffy was down there, like before, Dawn heard in her head Spike’s voice saying, Wouldn’t be there if I’d dusted, pet, now would I? And alive, sure, except for the being dead an’ all.

That made sense. She should have known that herself. She was just being stupid. She reached and tore a paper towel from the roll and began scrubbing at her eyes. “I’m sorry I was dumb. I was just so scared.” She blew her nose loudly.

“You don’t begin to be dumb compared to what Kennedy pulled,” Kim said flatly.

Amanda said, “Leave it alone.”

“You didn’t see it. I did.”

“It’s not the time, Kim. Let’s put it all together another time.”

“No,” said Kim, and folded her arms. “She should know. Nobody’s telling her anything, like when your parents fight, and nobody will say why, and she needs to know something.” Short chubby Kim stared down tall skinny Amanda, then turned to Dawn.

“So there’s this middle-sized tanker truck. Big, but not like an eighteen-wheeler. All stinky and black, got messy dripped stuff all over it. Bringer driving, OK? And another at shotgun. It was blocking Xander’s truck. Spike sent us to deal with it. Me and Meagan take the shotgun guy, Ken takes the driver because she has the taser. So she drags him out and does him, then she gets up behind the wheel and hollers she’s gonna back the tanker out, clear the way. Only she’s never driven shift, she gets all messed up with the shift lever and she’s fighting it, grinding the gears, and the tanker’s not moving, and I’m yelling at her to get out, we’re going, everybody else is running for the SUV, OK? So she slams both doors, she’s gonna get that tanker moving or else because now she’s too stubborn to back off. And I’m runnin’ for the SUV, everybody piles in and there’s no room for me, so I step on the back bumper and I make this terrible leap, sprawl on the top, and I’m tryin’ to hang on, and the van’s moving, OK? And this whole big mob of Bringers is chasing after us. And back by the terminal there’s a Bringer we didn’t see, or one new, I dunno, on top of the tanker, got one of the hatches open. And then it blows. Like chucking a big rock into mud. If the mud caught fire and burned. Like what you see about lava. All over the place. And Ken’s stuck inside, can’t get the doors open now because of the burning crud all running down all over it. And then Spike turns and sees it. And he just went after her, like he goes after everything, headfirst slide only it isn’t, not a slide, OK? So he rips the door off, flings Ken the hell way into the air back behind him, just when the SUV makes the turn to the street and I have to hang on and I don’t see any more. But here I’m bangin’ on the roof, banging like a maniac, and when we get a few blocks off Manda finally stops, and no Bringers, so I can slide down and say we left some behind.” The remembered chase suddenly halted, Kim hitched her shoulders uncomfortably, frowning. “But we had the new SITs with, and Mr. Giles, and that was the mission, and I think the Slayer was on the cellphone. To get something done. Send somebody. But I had to get in and we came back. Spike would never do that. No matter who it was, he would’a come for us. If he came for Ken.”

“Yeah,” said Amanda soberly. She had her arms folded and was looking at the floor. “Yeah, he would.”

Maybe not once, Dawn thought, but now he would. He’d do that now, not think twice. You’re mine. I’ll keep you from death. Even Kennedy, who’d been nothing but spiteful and mean. Probably the soul. Maybe there was some use to it.

Opening the notebook to a clean page, she held it out to Kim. “I want you to write it down. Just what you saw. Just like you said it.”

Kim hesitated, then came and took the notebook. “OK. I guess. Put it down while it’s fresh. I’ll do it.”

Dawn went on, “Kennedy was yelling that he didn’t change. What does that mean.”

Kim made a noise she instantly muffled behind a fist, as if ashamed it was funny, which was stupid. If it was funny, then it was, no matter if awful things were part of it.

Amanda decided to field that one. “It was…. Ken said that if she made him mad enough, he’d turn. She wanted to make him turn. ‘Show his true face,’ was what she said, which is so uber-dumb because it’s not like he made any secret about it. Hello: vampire here! So I guess…he didn’t. Even when he went after her.”

There was a silence. Then Dawn slid off the chair. “Yeah, that’s dumb. It’s all Spike. Always.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Amanda agreed uncertainly.

Dawn told Kim, “Bring me the notebook when you’re done.”

Then she went to see if Willow needed help, or what else she could do to make herself useful.

FIFTEEN

The next morning Dawn got up, washed her face, and dressed, then went down and ate her breakfast of Pop-Tarts and strawberry yogurt all very calm. She thought the level of blood in the next-to-last plastic jug was about the same as yesterday, but made a tiny dot with a marker so next time she checked, she’d be sure.

After brushing her teeth, she checked Buffy’s room and found it empty, the unmade bed no evidence one way or the other of whether Buffy had ever gone there last night, since Buffy only made the bed after she’d washed the sheets. Then Dawn collected one of the couch cushions and used it as a seat in the angled corner under the upstairs staircase facing the basement door. She began her vigil. Either Buffy would come up, or someone else would be going down. All she had to do was wait.

While she waited she reviewed the narratives already in the notebook and wrote herself reminders of the others she wanted to get.

About nine o’clock there were ascending footsteps followed by the clack of one bolt. It was Willow and her hands were empty. As Dawn stood up, Willow was plainly surprised to see her. “Dawnie, shouldn’t you be at school?”

“I’m not going to school today. I expect Buffy to write me a note,” responded Dawn composedly, and Willow’s eyebrows climbed.

“Well, I don’t know, you’ll--”

“Willow, that’s not important. I’ve been very patient. I’ve waited all night. Now I want to go down and see him.”

Willow finished shutting the door and pushed the top bolt as though Dawn couldn’t just as well reach it if Willow could. Turning again, Willow’s face lost the comically unsure expression and became merely tired and sober in a way that did not bode well. “You’re not going down, Dawn. I’m sorry.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re not. I could give you reasons and we could argue about them, but the real reason is that I’m not gonna let you.”

Dawn could feel the blood going out of her face. But she held her ground. “How is he, then? Is he awake?”

“No.”

“Has he been awake?”

“No. He looks exactly like a dead body, except he’s not, because he’s still there. And you’re not gonna see him looking like that. And you know as well as I do that he wouldn’t want you to either.”

“It seems he has no choice about anything. And neither do I.” Dawn lifted her chin. “What’s wrong and how bad is it?”

It didn’t seem possible Willow’s face could become even more stern. She considered Dawn for a long moment. “His wrists and hands are burned to the bone. The bones are charred. And not all of them are there. If he were human, amputation would have been performed, and wouldn’t have helped. He’d be dead by now. But he’s a vampire, and vampires don’t die of such things. The bone will regenerate. And the flesh will eventually cover the bone. But that hasn’t even begun at this point. He’s unconscious and has been since Anya brought him home. Whether it’s shock or coma or something else, I have no idea. As best I know, he’s not in any pain. He’s not there at all. It was his pain that told me I had to send Anya. That had ended before Anya reached him.”

Willow stopped, and both had the mouth trembles and held still until they went away. Dawn felt each detail like a separate blow but accepted it, noted it as a fact, and noted also that Willow respected her enough to give it to her.

“Are you reading his mind?” Dawn managed to keep her voice steady. “How you knew?”

“No. He told me…. Well, he told me to quit or else, basically. You heard him. So I haven’t done that since. But…let me use an example. If that pain had been a noise, there would have been dogs barking from here to Sandy Beach. What the dogs hear, I hear. Because I’ve made that connection, it’s still open even if I’m not listening. Though not really listening: only like listening.”

That loud. Dawn shivered, then suppressed it. “What are you doing for him? --is anybody doing for him?” she corrected herself.

“Well, there’s no such thing as vampire medicine. There’s nothing.”

“Giles--”

Willow interrupted, “--has checked what remain of the Watchers’ Council records, and there’s nothing except powers, and principalities, and ways to kill them as quick as possible. Just what you’d expect. But Giles has contacts, and he’s using them. Because I asked him to. Because I know Spike saved Kennedy’s life, and I owe him big time for that. Really big time.” Willow measured it with spread arms and open hands. “I’d try to help anyway, because…we have history. Not all of it good, but history. And…I guess I’m in no position: glass house, kettle, stones, sin? And I have to admit, he’s become a mensch. Not a man, but a mensch.”

“Like a person,” Dawn suggested.

“Something like that, yeah. So I have my contacts, too. I have calls out. I don’t know how much Earth magic is gonna help a vampire. Healing magic: Earth magic. He’s not of the Natural order of things, so that limits what I’d even dare to try. I have calls out. I’ll do whatever I can.”

There was silence while Dawn considered it all. She decided she had no doubts of Willow’s sincerity. Only of how much help Willow, and the mild benevolent magics that were all she allowed herself now, were likely to be.

And that wasn’t Willow’s problem: it was Dawn’s.

“All right,” Dawn said finally. “Thanks, Willow. Will you tell me when something changes?”

“Sure, Dawnie. I know you’re worried. I’ll tell you when it starts to get better. And I believe that it will. I just don’t know when, or how to help it along.”

Willow reached out a hand to stroke Dawn’s hair, and Dawn endured it. Inside Dawn’s head, the high singing whine that had never really stopped became stronger and then faded as Willow went away.

Dawn went to the front room and announced to the air, and the eight or so SIT’s there, “I need to make a phone call. Could you go out in the yard or something for a little while?”

They were uncertain, it was an odd thing for Dawn to ask, but nobody objected or refused. As soon as the room cleared, Dawn dialed the memorized number quickly.

“Angel Investigations, good morning.”

“You’re Fred, right? This is Buffy’s sister, Dawn. Maybe you can tell me who I need to talk to. Angel or anybody. I need to find Drusilla.”

“As in…Drusilla?” said Fred, in a rising, incredulous, alarmed voice. “As in--”

“Look, Angel knows her. Very well. Extremely well. I need to find her. Is Angel there?”

A hand reached past her and broke the connection. Willow was looking down at her with cold, cold eyes. “Drusilla isn’t coming here, Dawn. She can’t pass in, she’s not invited. I will never invite Dru within reach of anybody I care about. Ever.”

“But you have to!”

Buffy came in. She was dressed for work, attaching an earring. “Have to what?”

Willow looked around, still with that deadly impassivity. “Dawn was calling L.A. Trying to contact Dru.”

“No, Dawn! Are you out of your--”

“You have to! None of you knows anything about taking care of a vampire. Nothing at all! You admitted it! All you’re doing is waiting for him to heal. If he does. You’re doing nothing at all. He took care of Dru, and Dru took care of him, for a hundred years. She’s the only person he ever loved who loved him back, and she’ll take care of him! You have to--”

“Dawn,” said Buffy, in what was probably meant to be a sympathetic voice, but all it did was add to the whine.

Dawn rolled on, “OK, not here, he won’t be any worse anyplace else if all you’re gonna do is wait. Take him to his crypt, leave him there, I’ll take care of him! But get Dru to come, that’s all. If anybody knows how, she will.”

Buffy slowly folded her arms. “Dawn, Dru is insane. And so are you if you think I would allow her back in Sunnydale for--”

“You don’t fucking care about him. You just care about the fucking and you don’t even have that anymore. You don’t care if he hurts. You don’t care if he dies. You left him there. If you won’t help him, get somebody who will!”

Buffy had gone very still. “Dawn. You don’t have my permission not to be in school. I understand that you don’t have your homework done. I’ll write you a note for that. On the grounds of a family emergency. Because that’s what I consider it: a family emergency. We’re not, I’m not gonna discuss my relationship with Spike with you. Not now and maybe not ever. But certainly not now. Get whatever you need. I’ll give you lunch money. But I don’t want you in this house for awhile. Get your things. You have three minutes.”

Dawn then knew for the first time what it felt like to be dangerous. That if people were wise, they would leave you alone, stay out of your way. Even the people you loved, that loved you. That you could hurt them, hurt them badly, and not mind at all until maybe later. But right now, not at all.

The icy inner calm deepened, and the white whine strengthened so that it was almost all that she could hear. She collected the notebook. “I don’t need anything. I’m ready now.”



Dawn walked down the hall to her second period class. She sat through the class in case Buffy, who worked at the high school and had a cubicle next to the principal’s office, decided to check on her. She was in no hurry. She showed her note about the missed homework and dutifully wrote down the new assignment.

At the bell to change classes, she sedately passed among the milling students and out the usual convenient door, the way she’d often gone before: a quiet girl with long, straight brown hair, wearing a Puritan grey dress and grey flats that flexed with each step. Speaking to no one, noticed by no one, she took the ways she knew to the Magic Box.

Dawn looked in the front window, knowing there was a chance Giles might be here. She had a story prepared for that. But she saw only Anya leaning by the register, reading a newspaper, which she wouldn’t be doing if there were any customers in the store. Anya never missed a chance for a sale.

Dawn went inside, and the bell tinkled above her. Anya looked up and started to greet her, then changed her mind and they just looked at each other measuringly. Anya might be a grasping, tactless annoyance who changed hair colors faster than the moon changed phases, but she was shrewd after her own fashion.

“Are you a Justice Demon at the moment, Anya?”

“Not officially, no. But I’m only under suspension. I haven’t been fired. D’Hoffryn is still trying to get me back. If he doesn’t decide to kill me first, of course. It varies. Why?”

“Can I make a wish?” Dawn asked steadily.

Anya studied her, evaluated. “Possibly. What kind of wish?”

“Can I wish Spike well?”

“He’s not the one who’s hurt you. So no. You could wish something against Buffy, if you wanted, you’re quite enraged enough, but I wouldn’t advise it. Wishes involving the Slayer tend to go real bad, real fast. Conflicting primal forces on the aetheric planes. Unexpected consequences. Highlyunexpected.”

Dawn had no intention of wishing against Buffy. Buffy wasn’t her concern.

“Obviously,” said Dawn, “you can teleport.”

“Obviously. Though it takes a lot out of me, and I’ve had this terrible headache--”

“Anya, I’m trying not to be rude, but you’re not helping. You’re proud of being a businesswoman. I want to be businesslike.”

Anya changed to what she probably thought was a more businesslike pose. “What did you have in mind, Dawn?”

“I want you to teleport me into the basement. You know I’m not gonna hurt anybody. There’s no good reason why you shouldn’t. That doesn’t mean you won’t try to find one because nobody is cooperating today.”

“You said business,” Anya pointed out. “That’s an exchange of goods and/or services measured in terms of something of mutually recognized worth, usually money, but it could be shrimp, or candles, or--”

“Anyanka, you’re the oldest person I know. A thousand years.”

“Actually--”

Dawn completely lost patience with Anya’s compulsive babble. She interrupted, “I know what I look like. But you know, and I know, what I am. I’m older than you, Anyanka. By thousands and thousands of years. Before there were such things as spells and maybe even before words. When the magic was direct. When powerful, terrible energy could be alive, and aware, for thousands and thousands of years--a ball of bright green energy that opens things. Portals. Dimensions. Paths. I was here long before you, Anyanka, and I’ll be here long after you’re gone, one way or another. In one form or another. I won’t always be what I am now. If you help me now, I won’t forget. I’ll owe you a favor, to be claimed whenever you choose. Whatever you choose that’s within my power. Even D’Hoffryn can’t make you an offer like that. And if you don’t help me, I won’t forget that either. And you won’t like me owing you a punishment. You won’t like it at all.”

Anya smiled insincerely and fluttered her hands nervously in the air. “You’ve been playing too much bluff poker.”

“Spike and I don’t play poker anymore. At least not lately. When he came back, when I talked to him, he said he’d found out what he was for. Today I found out what I’m for, Anyanka. And you sincerely don’t want to get in the way of that.”

“Actually,” said Anya pensively, “I don’t believe that I do. And for all I know, it might help Spike. And don’t tell Xander, I could be very unpleasant to you now if you told Xander, but…I still have a certain fondness for Spike. Demon solidarity. Also very good sympathy sex.”

“Fine,” said Dawn, who couldn’t have been less interested in demon solidarity or sympathy sex, either one. “I want an hour. An hour with no interruptions. Then bring me back.”

”Done,” said the ex-demon Anyanka.



Dawn had never been teleported before. It didn’t feel any different, except she was suddenly in the dark. She listened hard until the creak and bump of feet overhead supplied directions and bearings. She felt her way slowly forward and left and found the stairs, then darted quickly up far enough to reach the light switch.

Willow had been right: Spike looked exactly like a dead body. Dead by violence: a thick pad of gauze was taped over his collarbone to the left. And his hands, subtly the wrong shape and size, were loosely wrapped in gauze and laid at his sides on top of the blanket. If he’d been bleeding, he wasn’t anymore. All the gauze was pristine and white as bedsheets or his flesh.

Dawn ghosted to the side of the cot. She watched for a little while, then confirmed with fingers lightly pressed to his chest: he wasn’t breathing. Well, he didn’t always. But usually, if irregularly, if he was asleep.

Again, Willow had told her the truth. He wasn’t here. Just the body--Spike was elsewhere. Like Mom. But different from Mom, too. He wasn’t of the Natural order. It wasn’t death, only unlife. Dawn could call him back. But not until she’d determined how to take care of him, once she did.

Focus, she thought.

The blue mug was on the floor, almost full, its contents skinned over and congealed. So they’d tried that and he hadn’t taken it. She searched and found the waste paper can. In it was the cut-off top of a hospital unit of blood, A negative. One of the commonest types. They hadn’t raided the rare types, which was right. It was all blood alike to him. Vampires couldn’t afford incompatibilities of that sort. She didn’t find the rest of the blood packet, but the fact that there was the remains of only one told her either they didn’t know any better, which was unlikely, or they hadn’t been able to get him to take that either.

Dawn expected he had profound inhibitions about taking human blood now. He’d refuse it if he could. Best not to begin, she imagined him saying. And it would be hard to force it on him, unconscious and unwilling. You couldn’t just set up a transfusion. Vampires didn’t process blood that way. It was a spiritual transaction.

Normally he needed about two quarts a day. Healing, he’d need much more. At least a gallon, and likely more than that. And they’d only opened one packet. And then probably had to discard it into the sink. It didn’t keep, once it was opened.

She set the notebook on the floor and toed it under the cot so it would be there, were he to wake and look for it. He’d know it had been moved, but Dawn didn’t think he’d mind. Anyway she didn’t need it anymore.

She settled carefully on the edge of the cot and just was with him, thinking, rubbing his uninjured shoulder, patting his cool face and newly crisp and bone-white hair that looked like it should again. She got the pen knife out of her pocket. Then she had an instant’s vision of his coming up at her in game face, desperate and barely conscious and unheeding. It didn’t frighten her, but it could happen. That would upset him so, when he’d tried so hard to be safe. And the chip would punish him terribly. Assuming it read Dawn as human….

Very gently she lifted each manacle and clicked it shut over his forearms well above where the gauze ended. There. He’d feel that, the weight, and know himself not a danger, restrained from the infinite destruction an unguarded moment could be to one incapable of being disarmed or of disarming himself. He was a weapon. That was what he was for. He was the ultimate and absolute defense of the Slayer and her sister, the once-Key. It was very simple, once you knew what you were for.

Then, having thought further, Dawn found the roll of gauze and the tape and the scissors. Having now all needful things at hand, she gritted her teeth and cut carefully: as she’d done once before--then, to see if she’d bleed green. When she’d recovered from forgetting what she was but hadn’t yet truly known it or accepted it.

As then, her blood was the same bright red as anybody’s blood. Except that it wasn’t anybody’s. It was Slayer blood: exactly the same. The portal that the Keyness of Dawn’s blood had opened, Buffy’s blood could close. So no difference. Or a difference that was only magical, not physical. Slayer blood.

To a vampire, the rarest, sweetest blood there could be.

She held some gauze to the small cut for a few minutes, then leaned forward and presented the gauze to his nose, his mouth, the side of her hand resting on his cheek. He hadn’t fed now in nearly a day. It would be days yet before he truly began to starve. And nothing would even begin to heal until he started feeding.

He’d just come back to something like his full strength. It had taken a week, and almost hourly feeding. Dawn hadn’t seen those injuries when they were fresh, but she thought this was at least as bad if not worse. Deeper. More total. Not just a wound, but loss. He’d have no reserves. The last six months had been for him one terrible injury after another, and still fighting back, and fighting back, to coherence and sanity and health, to be what he must. To swallow down the utter disruption of the soul and make his peace with it. Focus.

She felt it when he breathed.

She leaned farther to kiss his forehead: still smooth, unchanged. He changed only for fighting, and now not always for that. He was of the Order of Aurelius. He controlled his demon.

“It’s only me,” she whispered. “Don’t be scared. You’re safe.”

She made another shallow cut higher, where her arm rounded, then held it to his lips. “It’s OK, you can have this. It’s not taken. It’s given.”

She continued to reassure him with her voice and her presence and her calm and her scent, that nothing of what she was, was withheld from him. So he could know it was permitted and not for pleasure or power or even for food, but for healing, that she required of him by right, and he was therefore granted a special mercy on that account.

When at last his throat worked and he swallowed, Dawn knew what she would do. And thought she truly felt her thousands of years of abiding to open the ways between realities. Willow was wrong: the Earth would not reject him. All of the earths, the dimensions, claimed him as their child, of a lineage nearly as powerful and ancient as her own. Dawn’s blood knew connections beyond where Willow had ever ventured.

But Dawn had need of Willow, too; and that would come in its turn.

Now, in whatever remained of her extorted hour, she was with him, and the keening in her mind had all stilled into calm, and she let him feed from her what he could take, quietly stroking his face and content, with a focus so vast she could not touch its limits.

SIXTEEN

Returning from school at the usual time, Dawn drank a glass of milk, then went upstairs and changed into jeans, a blue-and-white striped cotton longsleeved T (covering the taped gauze patch on her right forearm), white socks and Reeboks. Then she knocked at the adjoining bedroom Willow shared with Kennedy and made her request: “I need a locator spell. For Spike.”

”We can’t find him?” Willow asked, half startled, half joking.

“I need to find something for him.”

“You gonna tell me why?”

“No,” said Dawn, folding her arms, looking the witch straight in the eye. “I seem to remember the words ‘owe him big time’ being mentioned.”

“C’mon in. No big.” Willow hitched a shoulder. “What you got for the focus?” As focus for the spell, Dawn produced a wad of gauze stiff and rusted with Spike’s week-old blood.

It was simple sympathetic magic: like calling to like. With minimal preparation, Willow scattered red powder onto the map Dawn had brought, said, “It calls to itself: focus to locus. Mark ye!” in Latin, and touched the focus to the map. Shaken, the powder adhered in points of correspondence like tiny gemstones. The residue was carefully poured back into a shaker and capped.

Four points. Two together, two separate.

One was here: Revello drive--Spike himself.

It was only a moment’s work on the laptop to access what Dawn thought of as the Backward Directory to put a name--McDonald--to the other singleton out on Marsh Avenue.

She folded her hands a moment and considered. Then she pushed the chair back from the desk and stood. Willow had already resumed the job of changing the dressings on Kennedy’s right shoulder that Dawn’s knock had interrupted.

Dawn thought it probably would have been polite to ask either of them how Kennedy was feeling. Since she didn’t care, it was probably best not to ask. Collecting the folded map, she ranged the house summoning, one by one, those Potentials who’d taken part in the park patrol. They convened in the yard and gathered in the shade of the big corner maple.

Dawn sat forward intently. “I want you to get in trouble with me. It’s something for Spike, and it’s important.”

She had no doubt whatever that she had everybody’s attention.

They were all more or less the same age but they were Potentials and she wasn’t, and they were learning to kill things and she wasn’t. They surrounded her like a pack of mostly amiable dogs watching the littlest dog bark.

They were in the process of sorting out their pack structure. She’d come on one patrol. Once. And run errands, and made signals, because that’s what Spike wanted. Besides running with them, step for step, she’d also played bait for a monster fledge and put it down with a taser, but they didn’t know that. They didn’t know how she’d figured out for Spike where the new nest was. They didn’t have to. Because she did.

She could aim herself like a gun and pull the trigger. And was doing so now.

The littlest dog sat tall and met every eye.

She began, “Because of the ambush in the park, Spike had to choose between bringing us all home safe and taking care of something real important to him. He chose to stay with us. So the other choice was lost. And nobody else knows about it but me. Because it’s not about Slayers. It’s not even about humans. It’s about vampires: separate from us. Kind of a private thing to him.”

Then she told them about the Order of Aurelius, and the eldest blood, and the smart, quick, savage fledges, and how Spike had told her he’d come to believe that the worst thing a vampire could do was create another vampire.

Dawn went on, “A little over a month ago, something was done to Spike, he still doesn’t know what, that put his demon in control for a few nights. He hunted. He drank people. Just like any vamp, except that he’s very, very good at it. And with some of the people he’d drunk nearly to death, he opened his arm and made them drink from him before they died. They were turned, and rose as fledgling vampires. The newest model from the Order of Aurelius.

“At first Spike didn’t remember any of it. Then, slowly, he began to piece together what had happened. Know what he’d done. Or really, what he’d been used to do. If you can imagine looking at it his way, it’s a kind of rape. It made him sick. And it made him mad. But the next night, the Bringers took him and, and hurt him: during the time of the Turok-Han.” Sober nods all around. “There was nothing anybody could do until that was settled. Since Buffy brought him back, he’s been trying to locate those fledges. And dust them all.”

Dawn saw a chill run through the group. Shivers, unease. A monster story in the warm afternoon sunlight beyond the shade of the sheltering tree.

Amanda raised her hand. “But these fledges…if they’re like Spike--”

“There are no other vampires like Spike. He’s the only vampire ever to have killed two Slayers. He started out trying to kill Buffy before they went all kissy-face and decided other things were more…interesting.” That got a lot of grins. “He’s still technically the Master Vampire of Sunnydale, though he thinks the meetings are boring, and minions are boring, and the conversation is appalling, and there’s no sodding liquor or dancing.” A burst of loud laughter. And Dawn thought very coldly, They don’t know. Buffy hasn’t told them. Willow hasn’t told them. If I hadn’t forced it, I wouldn’t know either.

For an instant that frightened her: that he could be so hurt, and she cut off from it, separate. No, she thought. I would have found out. Without Willow. Without Buffy. In spite of them. Like I found out I was the Key. What I have to know, I find out.

That steadied her, and the laughter had quieted. They were waiting for her. She went on, “Spike didn’t start out as what he is. He’s made himself up. Like a story. Tried one thing and then another, then broke himself apart and tried again. It’s not just the soul. He’s always done it. He tries to be more than he is, better than he can even imagine. He…reaches for things he can’t even see. It’s who he is, and what he’s for, and what’s important to him.” Then Dawn used the analogy from Alien, about the one surviving monster that could eventually generate thousands, amoral and scary and devouring. Not just murder but murder forever. Murder unending. Amanda’s frown smoothed, and other Potentials were nodding.

Kim hadn’t seen the movie. Amanda quietly drew her apart to explain. Amanda spontaneously making the finger-fangs-biting gesture caught Dawn’s eye because she herself hadn’t used it. Maybe it was a newly discovered archetype.

Dawn continued, “One of the fledges, the Slayer dusted. Two were unlucky and ran into your patrols the first night or two after they’d risen. Three more of the fledges, Spike was able to hunt down himself last Friday: just about the first day he was really on his feet more than an hour at a time. As you may have heard, he celebrated afterward. At Willie’s.” Dawn waited out some of the laughter and comments, then went on, “He wanted to go after them sooner, but his legs pooped out after two and a half blocks.” Surprised looks and some laughter, yet some poor baby! expressions of concern. “I know because I’d tagged along to make sure he didn’t get himself into trouble.” Broad grins, at the concept of Spike in trouble: they’d begun to know him, that much at least. “What I’m trying to say, this is desperately important to him. And because he chose as he did in the park patrol, the last two fledges he knew about got away.” Dawn stared slowly around the group, waiting if need be until she’d met every single pair of eyes. “I know where they are. I’m not waiting for sunset. They’re pretty much pinned down by daylight. Now is the best chance there’ll be, and maybe the last. And Spike’s unconscious in the basement because he stayed for Kennedy last night and burned both hands nearly off.”

Dead silence. Because they hadn’t known. And now they did. The faces Dawn saw were startled and anxious…and also indignant, angry. Because they’d had a right to know: they were Spike’s--he’d said so, and kept faith with that claim. And he was therefore theirs.

Buffy’s compulsive secretiveness had delivered the pack to Dawn’s purpose.

Dawn said, “He can’t go, so I will. This isn’t Slayer business: it’s vampire business. Because it’s Spike, and because it’s me. Who else wants trouble?”

Rising, Amanda said, “Second rule: we keep between Dawn and trouble. What’s the mark?”

And the rest of the pack rose with her, to hear Dawn call it. Most of them were grinning like wolves.



The first mark was a hardware store. With the lunch money Buffy had given her, Dawn bought a cheap, heavy knife and a fistful of inch-thick dowel rods. Back on the street, she passed the dowels out and everybody cracked them into serviceable lengths. Then they passed the knife around, roughly whittling the jagged ends into points.

They’d all sworn to touch no weapon in the house except upon instruction. Fine: they’d made their own.

The map’s conjoined dots indicated Third Street Cemetery--one established so long ago, people hadn’t even believed graveyards required pretty, soothing names. Old graveyards generally didn’t provide much fledge action, but from time to time mature vamps would establish a nest there because of the availability of big hideous mausoleums seldom disturbed during the day.

Dawn had a vague recollection that Harmony’s pitiful attempt at gathering minions and clueless fledges and becoming a power in Sunnydale’s undead politics had been based here.

The map’s scale wasn’t large enough to provide an exact location, especially on a green oblong containing no street addresses in tiny type. Dawn could only approximate Maria and Bob’s hiding place from which quadrant of the graveyard held the two ruby dots.

She named a mark, a big marble bench, for them all to return to. Then they scattered, sweeping the area to report back on structures large enough to accommodate two or more vampires. There were six. Dawn folded the map and handed it to Rona (who’d insisted on coming, stitched butt gash and all), who had the sack that held spare stakes, the knife, and other things not convenient for pockets. Then Dawn sat on the bench, and the Potentials gathered around the mark.

“I think what they’ve done is begged lodging in another nest,” Dawn commented softly, with due respect to acute vampire hearing. Not all vamps slept during the day. “Besides the fledges, we could be facing up to half a dozen mature vamps. Our Maria and Bob don’t like being on their own, and any fight would give them more chance to get away in the confusion than they’d have by themselves. If we can, we’ll do them all. But it’s Maria and Bob we want. This is what Maria looks like.” From memory, Dawn recited the notebook description Spike had so methodically noted down in his elegant old script. And then the same for Bob, the Vampire. “Remember: if you’re hurt, get out. They can’t chase you into the sunshine. Well, they can, but….” Appreciative soft, grim chuckles. Dawn added, “Do teams of two. One engages, one goes for the stake. If one team’s in trouble, the first team that’s free doubles with them. So when you dust one, look to see if anybody needs help before you engage again. Choose up your teams. Rona, you’re with me. You’re strong and mean, and I’m just mean. Should be a good match.”

They started with the mausoleum most in the open, bathed in sunshine. Amanda and Kim were point and moved in fast, a quick glance, and out again. Half the possible nests were ruled out in a few minutes. Dawn had the two next least likely silently scouted for footprints, more trash than usual, or any other sign of unnatural habitation. Finding none, the point team cleared them too. The pack gathered before the final target: slate roofed and ornate, about ten feet from the cemetery’s high outer wall, large stretches of which were draped in shade from the street trees beyond.

Spike would risk a dash like that, if he had to.

Dawn thought a few minutes, then set Amanda and Kim to catch anything that tried to escape toward the wall.

“Door’s on the opposite side,” muttered Rona.

“I’d noticed that,” Dawn responded calmly. “No harm in taking care.”

She indicated a different pair to be point. Then, on a finger count of three, they went in.

About two minutes later, all that was left in the mausoleum was the drifting dust of four vampires spilling out and lifting into the sunshine.

The back had seen action too. Two vampires, one taller, one shorter, had erupted straight through the tile roof. Kim and Amanda had staked the first as he landed, and the other one they tackled and impeded for the extra second needed for her to combust.

Dawn waved the dust away from her face, then held out her hand to Rona and waited until Rona passed back the map.

Only two red jewels remained.

“That one’s Spike,” commented Rona, kibitzing, and pointed. “What’s the other one?”

“Glitch,” Dawn lied. “Artifact of the way the spell was done. Anybody hurt? Bloody brilliant, then. I give you the late, late not so great Maria and Bob. I can’t wait to see Spike’s face when we tell him. Next mark is home. There’s another thing to do.”

SEVENTEEN

Dawn talked it out with everybody on the walk home, stopping--an unremarkable close huddle of teenaged girls--whenever a point came up that required intense discussion. For most of them, the idea of blood magic started at icky and then sloped downhill to gross. For many, it was outright scary. And some refused to have anything to do with it at all on various grounds–mainly that they’d been brought up good (fill in religion of choice). With blood magic you were into human sacrifice territory.

Those with overwhelming reservations were immediately excused without prejudice and sent directly home, do not pass GO, do not collect 0, under a solemn pledge of secrecy.

And the final condition nearly lost them Rona, in tears at confessing, apparently for the first time, that she’d been molested by an uncle at nine. To be benign, blood magic required purity, quite narrowly defined, in those who called on it. Without that restriction, a different magic could result that Dawn couldn’t hope to direct, much less control. She’d be Mickey Mouse contending with forces a lot wilder and more destructive than brooms and water. Assuming, of course, her total inexperience could rouse anything at all….

Everybody hugged Rona and they all sat together for a long time at a bus stop. “It’s not your fault,” Dawn said again, patting Rona’s hand. “It’s nothing bad about you, and nothing bad you did. You should talk to…somebody about it.” Dawn’s mind boggled at the thought of either Buffy, Willow, or Anya giving anything like good advice on such a subject. “We’ll think of something. But blood magic, that’s ancient and not very…well, bendy. I don’t dare take any chances.”

“It’s like unicorns,” Rona snuffled. “I understand. Unicorns don’t make exceptions, and you can’t explain to them that you didn’t like it and will probably never do it again.”

Dawn passed her another wad of tissues. “I know: you can hold the dish. Is that OK, Rona?”

Then everybody cried some more, and Rona accepted the compromise, except that she was afraid she might faint.

“You won’t faint,” said Amanda firmly. “I’ll kick you first and make frog faces.”

There were four of them left: Dawn, Amanda, Suzanne, and Rona.

Nobody questioned that there’d been no mention of Willow’s involvement. It was tacitly understood that the combination of Willow and any kind of heavy-duty magic tended to produce scary phantom monster faces, loud noises, backblasts of rejected power, and generally unsatisfactory results.

As they walked on, Suzanne wondered aloud if a Slayer-in-Training could get suspended. Rona pointed out that since there was no more Watchers’ Council, who would do the suspending? And even if she did get suspended, as a non-Potential, her chance of survival would just have gone up about 2,000%

“There’s that,” Suzanne conceded, kicking a pebble.

Dawn had contrived about ten plans, each with variations to accommodate all possible contingencies, to insure Buffy’s absence from the house. Then Amanda remarked casually that it was lucky the faculty in-service was tonight, attendance required of all staff with student contact, and Dawn presented a bland face and agreed that it certainly was lucky. Amanda’s remark was even luckier since Dawn had forgotten all about it. She only hoped Buffy hadn’t.

Off that thought, Dawn said, “Manda, first time you see Buffy, remind her. In case she’s forgotten.” Amanda nodded.

Somehow with Bringers, and the First Evil, and Spike, zombies and phantoms in the girls’ first floor restroom, the Seal of Danthalzar resting on the Hellmouth, the looming threat of apocalyptic annihilation, and miserably flunking the cheerleader tryouts, Dawn hadn’t been able to work up much interest in school activities.

Mondays were Xander’s day to arrange supper. He’d brought a grill, charcoal, hotdogs, and buns; Anya contributed a tub of deli potato salad she might even have stirred. Dawn didn’t see why they didn’t reschedule the wedding: despite sniping at each other all the time, they seemed to be having sex just about as often as before, and theirs was clearly a union made in take-out heaven. And that reflection--whiny, misanthropic, and teenaged--suddenly made Dawn realize she was off: she was losing or maybe had lost her connection with her Keyness that she’d felt all day, that had made everything clear and cool and deliberate.

Omigod. She’d assumed it would be forever, always like this. Then again, she’d assumed her crush on R.J. Brooks would be forever, too, and it hadn’t lasted a week. Or what if it hadn’t been her Keyness at all: what if she really had been bluffing Anya? What if it was just a glitch, a transitory artifact of being so totally upset about Spike?

Omigod. She had to get the others right now, or she’d never do it! It would never work!

Just about everybody was out in the yard, watching Xander perform the delicate art of hot-dog chefery in his Kiss The Cook Or Suffer The Consequences apron. Bouncing on her toes, Dawn spun until she’d located Buffy (talking to Kennedy, who was seated in one of the folding lawn chairs with an ice pack on her shoulder, and Dawn was never gonna talk to Kennedy again if she lived to be three-thousand-million), then located Amanda and gave her the high sign. Repeatedly. Until Amanda wandered over, trying to balance a collapsing paper plate of baked beans (and Anya was totally responsible for making Dawn’s life unbearable tonight, 8 people in a room and baked beans! It was Anya’s revenge, that’s what it was!) to find out what Dawn was waving about. Dawn explained it wasn’t mere waving but The High Sign and Amanda chewed and swallowed, then remarked mildly, “So that’s what it looks like. I always wondered.”

“Get everybody now!”

“Everybody?!”

“No, no, not that everybody--our everybody! What we talked about on the way home. That. We gotta do it now, or it will be too late!”

Amanda swallowed hard. “I just ate. I don’t think it was a good idea to eat. Maybe I should throw up first and get it over with.” She did look faintly green. “I thought we were doing it later, and there’d be time to eat. Rona just started on some watermelon. I better tell her.”

“Just bring her! I’ll get Suzanne.”

“Yeah,” agreed Amanda vaguely. She wandered off leaving a trail of fallen baked beans as they slid off the collapsing plate.

Focus, Dawn commanded herself, hopping. Focus!

It wasn’t helping.

The four of them gathered in the kitchen. Dawn detailed Rona to collect the big oval roasting pan under the sink, a roll of paper towels, a bowl of ice cubes and something, a bucket, in case Amanda barfed. With Suzanne standing watch in the hall, Dawn raced up to the bathroom to secure the most important implement: a pack of straight-edged razor blades from the cabinet over the sink.

She would have bought fresh, but her lunch money would only cover the ugly knife and the dowels, of which a large number were now left over. Well, that was OK because spare stakes never went to waste in this house. But Dawn had the idea that fresh blades would have been more hygienic somehow.

They would probably all come down with lockjaw and nobody would ever speak to her again.

Oh, what’s the matter with me? Dawn’s mind wailed as she skittered back downstairs, everybody took a stealthy look around and then made a wild break for the basement, only momentarily delayed by the bolts.

The bare-bulb sight of Spike all laid out, immediately suggesting funeral and not hospital, just as Dawn had left him, did a lot to quiet everybody down, Dawn included.

Turning by the cot, Amanda asked shyly over her shoulder, “Can I touch him?”

Dawn felt a sharp little pang of what was probably jealousy. Which was just dumb. “Sure, as long as you don’t get, you know, personal. That wouldn’t be respectful.” Dawn was unloading the bowl and paper towels next to where Rona had set down the huge shallow turkey pan on top of the washer. “It’s not as if he’s dead or anything. Just…gone.”

“Sure looks dead to me,” Suzanne commented, all very cool, descending the stairs after shutting the door and bolting it.

“Well, he isn’t,” Dawn said shortly.

“He’s cold,” Amanda reported. She sounded uneasy.

Dawn checked, and Amanda wasn’t touching anything too personal. Just his shoulder. “He is not cold. He’s room temperature. Just like always. Just like all vamps. Didn’t you ever notice?”

“Guess I was too busy. Look, Dawn, if you’re planning some kind of cockamamie resurrection, you’re gonna have to count me out. Because that’s too heavy duty for me. I--”

With everything laid out, Dawn swung around, hands on hips. “Don’t be dumb, Manda. I don’t begin to have the power or the spells--” Dawn stopped herself. She joined Amanda by the cot, Suzanne standing behind them, watching. Dawn reached out and very softly touched each of Spike’s shut eyes. She felt the calm coming back. She was starting, quietly, to cry. “All I have is me. And what I am. Whatever that is. And I hope, with you helping, that will be enough.”

Rona had collected a candle and was now lighting it. Taking the cue, Sue went back up the stairs far enough to reach the light switch.

That was a good thing, Dawn thought. Better, quieter light, not making a noise about itself. One little wavering, strengthening point, and all around it, the dark. Without anything said, they all gravitated toward the small flame. Dawn rolled and pushed up the right sleeve of her tee until it was bunched near her shoulder. She’d go first: it was only fair. She knew how it was done, had done it before, truly wasn’t afraid at all.

Rona had pushed one of the blades out of the case and was offering it diffidently, like Dawn didn’t really have to take it, nobody was making her.

Dawn said, “Thanks, Rona,” because Rona really was doing fine and it seemed right to say so. They were all doing fine. “Rona, maybe it’s a good time for the paper towels. All of them. Around his hands.

“OK,” Rona whispered. She picked up the roll and went back to the cot.

Dawn said to Amanda and Sue, “If you want, hold an ice cube here.” She touched the gauze on her own arm, then picked at an end of tape. “It doesn’t hurt much anyway. But after the ice, you hardly feel it.”

Amanda reached for an ice cube from the bowl. Sue didn’t, just stared big-eyed at the dark, slightly ragged line the pen knife had left in the thick part of Dawn’s forearm.

Dawn carefully picked up the razor blade again and felt to find the right angle, the best way to hold it against her skin. Shallow cuts, she thought. Shallow cuts.

She positioned her arm over the big turkey pan and shut her eyes. Not because she was scared, for she truly wasn’t; but because it strengthened the calm. She thought, I’m not off. I’m on.

If there was a ritual you were supposed to do, she had no idea what it was. But this was old, old magic--from before rituals and maybe before words at all. Any words would just be for her, for them: to help focus; to help make the gift worthy.

With the part of her mind not intent on the cutting, Dawn murmured, “The blood is the life. And blood is always holy because life is holy. And the blood of Warriors of the People is the holiest of all because it’s always given away. Our Spike, he’s also a Warrior of the People--not as we are, but in his own way. Equal and opposite, the light and dark that make a whole. I do this for his healing. I ask nothing for myself, nothing except that he be healed. I hope this gift is found worthy, and blessed by the oldest spirits to its purpose. I am your child and so is he. The oldest blood of all. Life for life, healing for healing. This is to make him be OK and come back to us. Healed. Please.”

“That is so gross,” Sue whispered, watching fascinated as the blood from Dawn’s arm dripped into the pan.

“Do we have to do this by turns?” Amanda asked, face averted: not looking as hard as Sue was looking. “Because I’m not-- I want to get it over with, OK?”

“Do you want me to do you?” Dawn asked kindly. “I can, if you want.”

As answer, Amanda blindly stuck her arm out. Up near the elbow, the skin was shiny with wet where the ice cube had been.

Dawn held Amanda’s wrist with one hand and found the right position and angle for the blade with the other. Blood from her own cuts was still falling into the pan. As she began, she directed, “Amanda, say why you’re doing this.”

Staring hard at the ceiling, away from what Dawn was doing, Amanda whispered in a choked, shaky voice, “I want to be brave. I want to know what to do. I want to do what’s right even when I’m scared. Spike has started to teach me how to do that. I believe he knows how to do that. I want him better. Healed. So he can teach me how not to be afraid of death. Or afraid of life. Because he knows them both. Please let this be the right thing I’m doing.”

The last phrase was rushed and barely audible. Amanda was clenched up so tight her arm was shaking. Dawn gave Amanda’s arm back to her and showed her how to hold it, so nothing would be wasted.

Suzanne had pushed out a razor blade for herself. Frowning with concentration, she said, “This is for Spike. To heal him.” She cut the first line. She reported, “Doesn’t hurt much. Looks worse than it is.” She cut a second line and moved her arm so the pan would catch all of it.

When Suzanne had cut six straight, unhesitating parallel lines and the razor blade neared her wrist, Dawn said quietly, “That’s enough, Sue.”

“Are you sure? Because I can do more, I don’t mind.”

“It’s enough. It doesn’t make it stronger if you hurt yourself.”

“Oh,” said Sue, as though that was a foreign and surprising idea.

Amanda jerked away, thudded onto her knees by the bucket, and began vomiting. Rona came to help her, pushing Amanda’s hair back, helping steady her.

The drops from Dawn’s cuts had begun to slow. This might be the best of all, Dawn thought: blood with her own healing already in it.

She tried not to let the sound or smell of Amanda’s vomiting affect her, but that was getting harder. Her mouth tasted coppery and sour, and her stomach was knotting up in sympathy.

She told Sue, “Hold it as long as you can,” then took the roll of gauze and flipped a couple of quick loops around her arm--just enough to minimize the mess--and snipped the end to free the roll. Kneeling next to Amanda, who was sitting crooked, sweating and looking thoroughly wretched, Dawn began a light non-constricting bandage on her forearm, smoothing each spiral layer.

“Is it done?” Amanda gasped. “Do I have to do any more?”

“It’s fine,” Dawn said, winding gauze. Either it was enough, or more would be no better. This wasn’t, after all, either a medical or a scientific procedure. It wasn’t the quantity but the intention in the blood that mattered from a magical perspective. If Dawn had truly known what she was doing, a single drop might have been enough.

Passing Amanda a piece of ice to suck on, Dawn looked around asking, “Sue, are you done?”

“I dunno--am I?”

“Rona, take the pan and pour it over his hands. Sue, come and I’ll get you bandaged. Leave it overnight, then take it off and wash with cool water and soap. Don’t disturb the scabs any more than you can help.”

Dawn cut the gauze, divided the end, and was trying to remember whether a square knot started with left-over-right or right-over-left, when Rona gasped, “Manda, do your frog faces. Or kick me, either--”

Dawn jumped and tried to grab as Rona keeled over in a dead faint. Between Rona falling, Dawn grabbing, and Suzanne bumping both of them forward, the pan upended. Its remaining contents, and the three of them, all landed on Spike, and the cot collapsed.

For a second, it felt like weird, horrible wrestling. Then Dawn was pitched away, sprawling, with Rona mostly on top of her.

“WHAT THE BLEEDING HELL!”

Spike: shouting.

Dawn rolled over and peeked. Hair to hips, he was covered in blood, trying to find his balance in the wreckage of the cot, caught crookedly by the manacles and chains.

“You incredibly stupid bints, what’ve you been doing? What are you doin’ down here to begin with? What--”

Running out of breath to shout with, he staggered against the wall and drew air in hard, head thrown back, braced like somebody before a firing squad as the first bullets hit.

“What’ve you done to me, an’ what’s wrong with my damn hands, can’t--”

Stirring, Rona managed to poke Dawn in the eye. Dawn scrambled away, slapping her poked eye, still trying to see despite her other eye watering and stinging in sympathy.

Still muttering furiously, Spike was shaking off, pulling off, the blood-sodden paper towels and then, awkwardly, the layers of gauze underneath. Working at the fabric with his fingers. Bending wrist and hand, trying to find a knot or an end. With the fingers of his other hand.

Oblivious of the grace that had been granted them all.

Dawn collapsed on the concrete, sobbing in relief.

“Bit? Bit, what’s the matter? An’ what’ve you lot been about, down here? It’s-- Bit? Dawn?”

What she wanted to do was fling herself at him and hang on. What she did was help muzzy Rona sit up. Sue, her whole front covered in blood, total Carrie, pulled herself to kneeling, facing him.

“Spike,” Sue announced, matted head proudly high, “we did ‘em for you: Bob and Maria. All of us.”

Spike’s face went blank. Staring at Sue. Glancing to Dawn for correction or denial. Then back to Sue again.

Then he shut his eyes and just stood there. Breathing. After a moment he said, “You lot get out before I forget myself. See to yourselves, so you don’t smell like holiday dinner on a platter. Go on now.” His head bent and he put his one freed hand over his face.

Amanda and Sue started helping wavering Rona up the stairs. Following, Dawn was three steps up when she heard Spike call her and turned.

“Bit. Fetch me the key to the cuffs. On a nail by the washer.”

When she’d found the key and brought it, he reflected, “Terrible mess. You’ll have to do ‘em for me. Hands are sore…. Did I get ‘em into the sun?” Puzzled, he looked up heavy browed, golden-eyed and fanged and, she was certain, completely unaware of having slid into game face.

Reflexive, probably, with so much blood: the smell and touch and taste of it.

She moved aside the trailing, sopping gauze to find the manacle’s lock. “They got hurt,” she confirmed vaguely. “They’ll be better soon, I think. We’ll get it all sorted out.” She unlocked the first manacle, slid it off, and reached across for the other.

“And that was so? About the fledges?”

Dawn just nodded.

“How dare you! They were mine!”

“You have no manners,” Dawn told him, unlocking the second manacle. “What you’re supposed to say is ‘Thank you.’”

Then his arms closed around her and he laid his vampire face against her hair. “’M all turned around. Pay me no mind, love. They’re truly gone?”

“Certain sure.”

“Then it must be so,” he said wonderingly.

And Dawn thought they could be both covered in blood and chocolate sauce and him half starved and it still would never for an instant occur to him to regard her as dinner.

They’d become something different from what they’d been.



Being, after his fashion, a gentleman, Spike gave her one of his clean T-shirts and first turn at the laundry tub, so she could at least get upstairs without looking like a walking murder, since Rona, Sue, and Amanda would have the shower upstairs tied up for some time. Dawn was bemused but unsurprised to find, under the gauze on her arm, only a series of pale diagonal lines. The connection was the healing and it healed in both directions. She guessed it made a skewed sort of sense.

All of it very much like life: confused, messy, accidental, well-intentioned, embarrassing, and ultimately successful.

Clutching a towel from the dryer, Dawn got out of the way to give him his turn.

Head under the tap, he called, “We’re gonna have to talk about this, right?”

Dawn finished pulling on the T-shirt and bent to poke the towel back in the dryer. “If you want. Or not.”

He made a satisfied noise, as though talking about it wasn’t high on his list of favorite things either. He’d just been checking.

Holding her wadded, bloody top, Dawn looked dubiously at the washer, then dumped it in the trash basket. “Spike, I need you to cover for me.”

He glanced around a second. “About this?”

“No, something else. Sort of…‘out for a walk’ business.”

“Ahuh. Boyfriend, is it?”

“No! How could you think--”

He straightened, mostly clean now, toweling dry. Ivory pale across the room in the dim candlelight. “Well, ‘tisn’t as if it’s impossible, pet. It’s just I expect to have right of first approval, rip the heads off any I don’t consider suitable. Seen some major mayhem comin’ in that direction for some while now. Since RJ, I figured I’d been put on notice.”

Dawn shrugged and flipped her hair. That was so not what she wanted to talk about! “Since I’ll probably be grounded for the next hundred years, there’s something I need to take care of first. There’s an in-service at school, so I may be back before Buffy gets home. In case I’m not, just tell her I went out, and I’m in my right mind and don’t need to be chased down, and I’ll be back in a little while, all right?”

“You gonna take a minder?”

“No.”

He thought about it a moment. “Then you’d best get on, hadn’t you.”

“Yeah. All right.”

Spike leveled a finger at her. “No, the proper answer is ‘Thanks.’”

“I don’t know how anybody puts up with you.” Dawn went to the stairs and started up.

Having the last word, his reply caught her near the top: “Too good-lookin’ and all-round charming to do otherwise, I expect.”

Dawn could think of nothing to top that and contented herself with thumping the door.



Marsh Street was off by the mall, and Dawn knew which bus route ran that way. In her Box of Hidden Things she scraped together enough change for the fare, thought about changing her spattered jeans without actually doing it, then dug her panda backpack from under the bed and stuffed the map and a few other things in it.

Forty-five minutes later, she stood on the sidewalk studying the two-story frame house at 1072 Marsh Avenue. A wood-burned sign attached to the front porch railing read The McDonald Family. The porch light was on but all the windows were dark, although it had just turned 8. Unslinging her backpack from her shoulder, Dawn trudged up the walk onto the porch and pushed the bell.

No response. She pushed the bell again.

“What do you want? Oh. H’lo. Summers. I mean Dawn. Fifth period, right?” The boy was standing in the side yard, just past the edge of the porch.

“Right,” said Dawn, swinging her backpack nervously. “You hadn’t been to class for a couple weeks now, and my sister--the student advisor?--asked me to stop by, see how you were doing, maybe help you catch up. She said she’d called but hadn’t been able to catch anybody home during the day.”

“Yeah, well, they work. But it’s nice of you to come. It’s not like I’m sick or anything, though. It’s…my Dad, he’s relocating. So I’ll have to catch up when I start school there anyway.”

“That’s hard, moving. I remember when my Mom moved here, with me and my sister, it took--”

He was over the railing and his jaws were closing on her throat when the taser charge took him down, twitching.

Though he hadn’t remembered her much, she’d remembered him: Billy McDonald. Somewhere between a nerd and a jock, with a nice, goofy sense of humor. A little like a younger, less insecure Xander. Several girls in History liked him, but so far, he’d never asked any of them out.

Sliding the stake out of her backpack, Dawn said, “I’m sorry for you, Billy. Although you’re not Billy anymore. You remember being Billy, but it’s not the same. We might have been friends, and you might have lived nearly forever the way you are now. But sometimes things don’t happen the way you think or the way they should. The man who made you what you are is sorry, and I’m sorry too.” As the fledgling vampire began to struggle, Dawn said, “Goodbye, not-Billy,” and staked him.

As the dust dispersed, Dawn took the magicked map out of her backpack and unfolded it. Only one red jewel remained.

She’d broken her word about taking weapons out of the house without permission. She was prepared to live with that and with the consequences, if any.

Some things were just too important.

There’d been two sisters, Dawn recalled: one younger, one older. Dawn had met the older one at cheerleading tryouts. And an intact family, with both mother and father.

She didn’t have to see into the dark house to know nobody alive was left inside.

Dusting Bob and Maria, that had been for Spike. But attending to Billy had been a private matter, just for herself. Because there were still distinctions to be made among monsters, and Dawn meant never to forget that.

On her way back to the bus stop, Dawn pitched the map into a trash can.

EIGHTEEN

The in-service had stretched on and on, all stuff about lesson plans, grading curves, “test-based teaching” and “proactive remediation”: nothing that connected with Buffy, or her life, or her job, or her calling, or any other damn thing about her whatsoever because she wasn’t a teacher. But she’d had to go anyway because she had “student contact.”

Pulling into the driveway, Buffy thought savagely that sitting through it better have earned her karma points because otherwise it had been no damn use at all and she just didn’t know if she could keep making herself do useless, meaningless things every morning, every day, every night, without respite or hope there’d ever be an end to it short of dying. She was sick, almost literally to death, of duty.

As she turned off the engine, her eyes lifted to the lighted porch. Spike was sitting there, smoking, slowly leafing through his notebook.

It seemed no more than an instant before she was standing by the bottom step: in touching distance but too terrified to reach out and try for fear the one good thing that’d happened in she couldn’t remember how long would vanish.

“Hullo, love,” he said, and turned a page. He had a pen stuck behind his ear. “How you doing, then?”

Buffy found herself sitting on the very edge of the steps. “How…? Did Willow…?”

“No, it was Bit who put me to rights, seems like. Went all Harry Potter, our Dawn: done a spell with some of the other children. Blood magic--tricky stuff. Went somewhat more wholesale than I imagine she intended. Still, can’t complain. What with the chip and the soul and a hundred twenty-odd years of this ‘n that, I expect I needed sorting out. So long as the important stuff’s still there, no complaint from yours truly.” He took a drag on the cigarette, a smooth, reflexive gesture. Natural. Without thought. His hands inexplicably whole again. “Seems like I made myself more of a dog’s dinner than I knew, the other night. Sorry, love. That must’ve given you a nasty turn. And one more helpless git to look after. ‘S’not the way I meant it to be. On the positive side, I don’t seem to be nearly so crazy, so maybe I can finally be a bit of use.”

Buffy sat looking at him. Nothing he’d said made the slightest scrap of sense. She put out trembling fingers and touched his arm. He was here. He was real.

“Yeah,” he said, glancing around with the edge of a wry, momentary smile. “Don’t blame you. Hard to know what’s what anymore. Very strange.”

Buffy blurted defensively, “I came back as soon as I could. I had Giles and the new girls, I couldn’t just leave them, what I want doesn’t matter compared--”

“Who’s lit your tail?” Spike interrupted, looking around again: amused, slightly puzzled. “You mean the airport do? That’d be real bright: turn the point back to collect the rearguard, then everybody’s in it, nobody gets clear. ‘S’not the way to do. Who’s got after you, dumb idea like that?”

“But you were hurt!”

“An’ now I’m not. So it all worked out fine.” He took the pen, wrote something in the margin, then suddenly seemed to notice his restored hand. “I’m still left-handed. Ain’t that a thing. They tried to beat that out of you, in school an’ all. And to think, that was right all along.” He suddenly went to game face and raised a hand, obviously checking. “An’ no change there. You’d’a thought that would’a got sorted out. Evil: demon, an’ all. But I s’pose that’s bedrock now: past undoing. Get rid of that and you’ve got rid of me. Can’t be right. Just unavoidable.”

When his face relaxed to human contours, he was still frowning. “I wonder what it’s done to the chip. Pity Harris is gone. Nobody else I feel like slugging at the moment…”

“Spike, we’re not on the same page here. Not even in the same library. What the hell are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘sorted’?”

“You think it’s confusing from the outside. You should see what it’s like from in here. My mistake, tryin’ to come at such a thing sober.” He swiped the keys she was still holding, spun her around, and started walking her back to the SUV.

“Spike--!?”

“Not another word.”

Claiming the driver’s side, he slammed the van into reverse and backed onto the street without checking for traffic.

Neither of them could tolerate the other’s driving. Not that Spike wasn’t competent: he just wasn’t willing to concede that anybody else had a right to be on the road when he was. And Buffy found it such a shock to find him behaving what she considered normally that she didn’t dispute the matter.

Leaving the motor running, Spike spent maybe three minutes inside Willie’s and then came back with a fifth of something uncapped, already drinking before he opened the door. He didn’t offer Buffy any, and she didn’t ask.

When they hit the city limits, Spike turned west. He switched on the radio and fiddled with it until he found eighties hard rock. He turned it up so loud Buffy had to open her window; his was already open.

From silent and still, he was visibly building up speed inside, gearing himself up to something. The image came to Buffy of his old motorcycle (she wondered what had become of it), him on it doing laps around a block, checking balance and momentum and how everything was working, and when he was satisfied, when he was ready, he’d go blazing up some ramp and try to jump thirty-seven cars, or a lake of fire, or off a cliff.

Even though he wasn’t talking to her, she could tell he wasn’t mad--just preoccupied, focused inside on something else. Something, she thought now, he was afraid of but was going to do anyway.

It had been a long time since just being around Spike was a rush: fast, all out, absolutely unpredictable and vaguely scary. But the SITs who’d gone on the park patrol had plainly felt that rush: it had taken them hours to come down, settle. They’d risen the next morning and given him an enforced, adoring haircut to shape him closer to their dream and their desires. And he’d let them. Buffy had been sad and a little jealous that he’d show them what he denied her. But Buffy wasn’t sixteen years old anymore, and she’d thought that maybe that’s all it had been: that they’d seen for the first time what it seemed she’d known forever and it was only the discovery that had power.

Nothing could have been better refutation or a better antidote to a mind-numbing in-service than feeling Spike build up speed and wondering what the hell he planned to do with it and why he’d required that she come along.

He turned onto the coast highway going north, doing about ninety, drinking steadily.

He got out a cigarette one-handed and lit it, then snapped the radio off. Only the sound of the wind.

“So about the spell,” he said abruptly, resuming the conversation just as if there’d been no lapse, which meant he’d been thinking about it the whole time. “Dunno a whole lot about magic, but some. Enough to know nobody--not Red, not fucking Nostradamus--can catch hold of blood magic and have any notion how they’ll come out on the other side. Or what they’ll turn loose. What it’ll do. With the children, a plain case of know nothing, fear nothing. They never should’a tried such a thing an’ I’ll make sure Bit knows never to do such again. It got away from them. Always does. Meant it as some sort of healing spell, I s’pose. It did that. But then it went on and went through me like some kind of runaway goddam flood: scoured away, changed, healed, whatever it counted as wrong. Sorted me proper. So there’ll be no more Dru dropping in for a chat, no more instructive conversations with people who aren’t there. No more need of chains or minders. My own damn dog again. Some fucking explosion out of noplace and here’s me picking through the wreckage, tryin’ to suss out what the hell happened as per usual, but that’s what I make of it.

“What with the blood and the magic, that basement’s got a half-life of about a thousand years on it now, far’s I’m concerned. Toxic. Maybe it can be got out enough for you lot to use again but to me, it’d be like tryin’ to have a nap in what’s left of a battlefield after the war’s moved on plus nuclear crater, watch your fucking bones go luminous. Can’t go down there again. Can’t be there anymore. Gonna have to move, love.”

Buffy simultaneously clenched against the idea of him leaving and felt deeply let down to think he’d been working himself up for no more than this: for facing what he knew would be her opposition.

Before she’d thought of anything to say, Spike jammed on the brakes and spun the SUV into a 180 across the other lane. It came to an abrupt rocking halt at the far edge of a turn-around overlooking the moonsilver sea a couple of hundred feet down.

Turning toward her, his face changed and his grin had fangs.

He tapped her shoulder.

“Tag, love. You’re it.”

Then he was out the door and gone.



Buffy wasn’t dressed for a game of vampire tag up and down a cliff, grabbing hold and spinning off the contorted branches of stunted trees to change direction, out on the beach and racing along the packed sand at the surf line with the cliff high and dark above, Spike a good four paces ahead of her and drawing effortlessly away. On the flat, he outran her easily even after she pitched the shoes and hiked the skirt higher to open her stride.

Outlasting him, tiring him out, wasn’t even a remote possibility. She’d never been able to do that. And he had the advantage of not needing to breathe.

He could see better, hear better, smell better. He knew when she got close without having to look and would dive into a roll or a backflip or a side-spinning cartwheel, out of reach again and running, sometimes even insultingly backward, golden eyes shining, still with breath for laughing at her, mocking her as old and slow and plainly past her best, out of fighting trim for lack of anything but children and inept fledges to make her stretch herself, which was infuriating.

But on the cliff they were even, his longer stride no advantage, and a couple of times she nearly caught him there, sudden handholds and angled leaps and drops, measuring out the space and the surfaces like a couple of monkeys, all spring and catch and go and God, she’d missed this!

He pushed away from the rock and dropped, twenty feet or more, and they hit together and not far apart. He was an instant longer changing his balance point, so she was right behind, barely a step off, no time for him to dodge off to the side. She ran him straight down the slope into the water ahead of her, knee-deep and slowed by the breakers that hit him first and harder. Lunging, Buffy slapped his elbow: tag. And Spike spun and slapped her back. They were trading slaps and then elbows and then fists, in and out of the surf, too fast to see anything coming and block, all instinct now and rhythm. Knowing because of how he moved how he could move and where he’d be by the time her fist or foot arrived. No longer striking at him but at where he was going, the instantaneous sense of his movement and momentum and her own, all balanced and perfect without any hesitation at all.

Finally and splendidly dancing together, Slayer and vampire, all-out, nothing held back, pure motion and ferocity and joy and he could have had her then, bitten and drunk her life away and she wouldn’t have cared; or she could have staked him and watched him explode into dust and it would have been the same thing, the same exultation of what they were meant to be to one another. But of course they were a different thing, a diminishing spiral, the blows become pats and the pats, embraces, still moving even when they were still. Moving into one another and searching for how they fit and where the best blaze was and doing that, more of that, simultaneous and intense, so attuned to one another that they were one creature immediately from the very start. And everything was moonlight and bright stars.



It took them four times to even begin to slow down and even then they hadn’t got back to words, only a different line of motion. Spike hauled her up and they went down into the sea, out into the deep water. Stroking, weightless, in three dimensions, turning and rolling like dolphins or seals, and only afterward did Buffy realize she’d had no problem breathing because before her need for air became acute, she was lifted to graze the surface long enough to take what she needed and then down again, without pause, what she needed always there for her so her body forgot it and concerned itself with other things.

More explosions there, an endless series. When her feet touched bottom her legs wouldn’t support her. But there was no need. Spike swung her up into his arms, carrying her easily even losing the water’s support so that she felt her own weight again. Too heavy to stir or think. Almost too heavy to breathe. Before she realized Spike was gone he was back and gathering her into the Official Designated Tatty Emergency Blanket from the back of the SUV, he’d gone up for it and brought it back. And the bottle. And his cigarettes.

But she was happy he still had his priorities straight. Once the blanket was around her he made himself a chair for her back, all four knees lined up together. She rested against him while he played with her hair and kissed her cheek and the back of her neck, not really doing anything, just there.

From his mouth against her, she realized he’d dropped game face but couldn’t remember when that had happened. And then she thought it didn’t matter. And the following thought of how strange it was, for it not to matter.

There, she thought: that wasn’t so scary, was it?

She didn’t realize she’d said it aloud until he laughed. “Love, you have no idea.”

There was something shaky in his laugh, and in his voice too, that carried the memory of very old hurt. And she remembered they’d never actually done this before--not like this. Not without her savaging him afterward or even during. Hammering him down. Refusing his tenderness or any softness at all.

She said, “Let’s not do dumb stuff anymore,” and got one of his speaking silences that made her remember he’d always been a lot farther from the dumb stuffthan she had been. But he wasn’t going to say that now. Because this was a new thing. All you could do with the dumb stuff was hope to survive it. And they had. And that was enough for him.

Buffy heard all of that in his silence and decided he was right. They didn’t have to talk about the dumb stuff. They knew what it was, but they were done with that. They’d begun a new thing and that’s what was important.

She told him smugly, “You can’t leave now.”

He kissed her ear. “Ah, but this is what lets me go. Can stand a little distance now without coming over all anxious. Won’t go far, pet--houses goin’ empty here and there all over town, had you noticed? ‘M sure I can find one within a block or two. Thought of goin’ back to my old crypt, but it’s all destroyed…. And that way, I can take some of the children off your hands, won’t be so crowded for you an’ the Bit. Red, if she stays. Be close by if there was need. Can’t abide the basement no more and your place…it’s your place.”

Buffy thought about it. Was prepared to think about it, listen to what he said. But she still didn’t like it. “You have minions now. What’s next: brides?”

“Those children? You’re joking. Couldn’t begin to keep up with me, what would I want with that when I got this?” He hugged her with his hands on her breasts. Beginning to stroke there, thumbs skimming the nipples.

That was nice, but Buffy thought about it some more. And thought of a new thing: “Is that what you want?”

Buffy didn’t remember ever asking him that before.

When he went quiet, not even breathing, she wanted to see his face. Leaning out of his embrace, she hitched around in the sand to look at him. He’d turned his head and seemed to be considering the cliffside, although she knew he wasn’t. Of course he was hard again, that was a given, with practically non-existent vampire recovery time. But at the moment he was paying no attention to that either. He reached out and collected the bottle, and it’d been decent of him to wait this long, and put the contents down another couple of inches, throat working, and there wasn’t gonna be any argument about which of them was driving home.

Buffy waited, because she knew he was nervous and upset, and he was going to tell her why just the same. But he needed to settle himself to it before going off that cliff. She’d assumed it was just the sex. But this had been behind it all the while, whatever it was. She’d set it off with her question, but he’d made his mind up to it driving up here and would have found another way to come at it if she hadn’t provided one.

“That summer you were gone, I started having a dream,” Spike began, not looking at her as though he couldn’t do both, look at her and say this. “Not much to it, really. It’s just me, I see myself sittin’ on a crate or something in an alley. Seems like it’s the alley behind the Bronze, but no matter, doesn’t matter where the alley is…. An’ I’m crying, and I dunno what to do with my hands, like.” He began doing it: not showing her, just enacting what he saw in his mind. Strange, stiff gestures. Hands locked behind his head, bent forward. Hands tight around his knees. Hands thrust under opposite armpits. One arm thrown up randomly, fist then slamming back hard into his chest. Compulsive. She could see it: absolute agony.

Once started, he couldn’t stop. Even after she grabbed his hands and held them, she felt the muscles still twitching and firing, trying to continue. Tears ran steadily down the planes of his face.

They sat like that for quite a long while before he drew in enough breath to go on, “An’ it’s just that, seeing that. And some way, I know it’s one of you, gone. You or the Bit, doesn’t matter, I just know you’re gone. An’ I’ll never find you again. Wherever you’ve gone, I can’t go. And I can’t bear it, is all.”

Hands still immobilized and jerking, he leaned into her, convulsively sobbing. When she let his hands go to grab him around the back and hold him, the hands couldn’t be still or touch her in any purposeful way, contorting aimlessly like muscles of something dead firing off from current in a wire. It was running all through him. The hands were only the way it was coming out.

Whatever had been sorted out of him, this remained. She thought she’d never seen another creature in such all-encompassing agony. There was no possible answer for it except to keep on holding him, move enough to remind him she was there, wait for it to subside of its own accord, however long that took. Because it was plain Spike had no control over it. Could not separate himself from it. Utterly lost in it.

The sorting hadn’t touched this as it hadn’t touched his being a vampire, or his love for her, or any other deep thing that could not be removed and leave him intact and himself.

When the hands at last collapsed and fell, she knew they must be near the end of it. But it was a long time after that before he was able to quit sobbing or take a breath without it hitching in his chest.

She said to him quietly, “God, Spike!” She carefully let go to reach for the bottle. She had to hold it for him, he still couldn’t manage his hands. So she didn’t bother trying to get a cigarette for him, that would have to wait. She pulled him over to rest, head and shoulders, in her lap, and kept holding him, waiting for him to settle.

He couldn’t do that either and maybe passed out, maybe fell asleep: utterly exhausted by the seizure.

Buffy hoped now that it had broken loose, now that he’d waited to let it out until she was here to receive it, this would be the end of it. An exorcism. But she remembered his saying I started having a dream.

So it hadn’t been just the once. And this waking, willing reenactment he’d put them both through therefore might well not be the last. Because he’d told her, he believed it was something she had to know. And she’d set it off by asking him what he wanted.

So there was more yet to come, of which this had been the necessary prologue and context.

Finally he started breathing again. Just every few minutes. And awhile after that, he came back into himself, blinking slowly. “Buffy, love, you still with me?”

“Absolutely. How you doing?”

“Absolutely fucking shattered. As per usual… You?”

“How d’you think?” she responded, but kept her tone light, knowing he was completely raw and without defenses and she wasn’t gonna do dumb stuff anymore.

“Yeah…. Any scotch left?”

“Don’t think so. Some got spilled.”

“Oh.” He dredged up enough energy to look up into her face. “There’s more.”

“I know. Can it wait?”

“Don’t think so.”

“All right.”

He concentrated on getting enough breath. Then he said, “First couple times that happened, I figured it was Glory’s tower. Figured it was because I couldn’t protect Dawn. Or save you.” He waited until he could, then went on, “Then you came back, an’ I sort of forgot. Thought I was all done with it, I s’pose. Because you were back. Then…after we started comin’ together, the way we did…it started up again. And every few months since. I’d just come off one that night. In your bathroom, an’ all. Not fit to be near anybody for awhile after. Even Bit’s learned to keep clear of me after. Should never have gone to you, should’a known better--”

“No more dumb stuff,” she told him. “We’ve been through that. But I understand better now.”

“All right. Yeah…. Since, I’ve figured it out: that dream is not about what’s been. It’s about what’s coming. Except that it won’t. Next time, it’s gonna be me. Gonna do it right. Me instead of you. Or me instead of Dawn. And that’s what’s gonna happen. So you mustn’t get too attached to me, love. Because it can’t be you in that alley. That’s not a choice I’m gonna give you.”

She thumped his forehead, just lightly. “Too late. If you go, we both go.”

He shoved and wrestled himself up to sitting. “No! That’s not right. You’re the Slayer. You gotta--”

“Shut up, Spike.”

“No.”

“Just shut up. Being the Slayer has already eaten as much of my life as I can stand and sometimes more. It’s not gonna eat this. Even when I was coming apart and doing all the dumb stuff, I knew: I need you, to stay alive. To even want to stay alive. This is not negotiable. I have to learn to manage my Slayer like you manage your demon. It’s who I am. But it’s not all I am.”

“And getting between you and death is what I’m for. That’s not negotiable neither.”

She leaned over and kissed him. “Maybe that next time, maybe that’s not gonna be soon. Maybe I have time to make you admit there’s always another Slayer but only one William the Bloody and he can’t be spared. At any rate, it isn’t now. Agreed?” She probably would have described his answering expression as “sulky.” She added, “So arguing about it now would just be dumb. Wouldn’t it.”

“Yeah. I guess. Don’t like thinking about it, if you want to know the truth. It comes with extras. Special effects, like.”

“Some of the special effects, I think we can both do without. Others, on the other hand….”

“Oh, don’t worry. That comes free. Just…not now.” With some effort he leaned back to look at the cliff top. “Can you get the van down here, d’you think?”

“Nope.”

“Damn. Then find me my pants. Have to be around here someplace. Sun’s coming.”

While Spike shakily lit a cigarette, Buffy got up and began looking for his pants. Their eyes met, and they both started laughing.


Finis.