Chapter Seventeen

Oz had been given a version of the previous evening's events by Angel, who wanted him to go to San Francisco and see if he could pick up a trail before heading back to Sunnydale. Buffy and Giles were going forward with their plan to launch a no holds barred excavation to recover the Gem of Amara. Devon and the guys helped him pack up Willow’s things—Oz couldn’t bring himself to leave without taking the things that he thought meant the most to her. He sat in the passenger seat of the van, letting Devon drive, holding one of her sweaters in his lap while a million thoughts swirled through his head. She had almost gotten away. God, he was proud of her for that. Not surprised, and proud. Spike had found her before she got away. The thought made him shudder. What would he do to her?

Angel had seemed confident that he wouldn’t risk his trade by hurting her, but Oz didn’t believe that for a moment. He had seen what Angelus had done to Giles, and was afraid that Spike would do something similar to Willow for no other reason than to discourage another escape attempt. His hands tightened on her sweater. His stomach lurched at the mental images that he couldn’t avoid. What would he do to her? Cut her? Hit her? Angelus had broken Giles’ fingers, one by one.

Oz closed his eyes, seeing her hands. Her hands were beautiful. Her fingers were long. With their palms resting against each other, his palm was larger, but her fingers were longer. He had noticed it early on, and kind of envied her those long fingers, imagining the span that they could achieve. Her hands were so smooth compared to his, battered by guitar strings. Other than a spot on her index finger from her slightly odd grip on a pen, she didn’t have any calluses. The fingernail on her left pinky was always a little short from her habit of nibbling on it while she was mousing with her right hand, and there was a small scar on the base of her thumb from falling out of a tree when she was seven.

It wasn’t the first thing he had noticed about her. He remembered seeing her at the Bronze in her Eskimo costume, her face turned up so that the fur from her hood framed her face like dandelion fluff, and he had thought she had the sweetest face, the sweetest smile he had ever seen.

Would Spike see that? Would he see that and would it make him stop? Or would the idea of bruising something that guileless and beautiful just egg him on?

Devon cast an anxious sideways glance at him once they were on the highway. Chris and Dan were quiet, not really knowing what to do or say.

Devon cleared his throat. “What’s on the sweater?” he asked. “Flowers? Kittens?”

Oz’s eyes opened. He blinked a couple of times and took a deep breath, looking down at the sweater. It was an older sweater, the yarn wear softened. Willow kept it next to her bed, and if she got cold at night, she put it on. He made himself look at it. “Bears,” he said with a slight hitch in his voice that made Chris blanch.

He held it up, “See? Bears.”

And sure enough, the sweater had little bears all over it. Row upon row of them in every color you could think of, marching in horizontal lines. “Oh, that’s, uh . . . cute,” Devon managed to say.

Oz looked at him like he was crazy. “It’s . . . cute?”

Devon looked at him uneasily. “Well, I’m not an expert on cuteness, but yeah, I guess it could be considered cute,” he said cautiously, refraining from pointing out that Oz was the one with the death grip on the sweater.

“I think it’s hideous,” Dan piped up. “Are you sure it's Willow’s? She wears some funky shit, but that’s just silly looking.”

Chris kicked him. Willow wore some pretty silly shit, too. ‘Shut up’ he mouthed at Dan.

“Yeah, it’s hers,” Oz breathed in her scent, lingering in the yarn. “She wears it to sleep in sometimes.”

Devon found himself biting his lower lip, hard. “So, that’s like, Willow Rosenberg lingerie, huh? You are a freaky little monkey boy.”

There was a long pause, and then Chris started snickering.

Oz looked down at the sweater and started to smile. “Dog boy,” he corrected with a mock disdainful sniff, aware that Devon was trying to distract him, and grateful for it.



They had no trouble finding the Temple with Angel’s directions. It was a little after two in the afternoon and the club doors were open. They went in and Devon asked to see the manager about booking the band. That was the cover story they had all agreed on. If they got a good lead on Spike, it would give them a reason to be in the club that evening if they had to stick around. They were shown into a lounge where, to Oz’s surprise, and Devon’s dismay, they found a pale, weary looking Harmony Kendall sitting at a table in the back.

Her eyes widened in surprise.

It had not been a good night for Harmony. She had been looking forward to the opportunity to get dressed up and go out for the evening. Georgia had even let her go shopping with her and they had killed a security guard and gone shopping at a small boutique, after hours. Harmony had been annoyed at being forced to bag her own purchases, but she had walked off with an armful of new clothes and had spent the evening before they had gone out having a little fashion show for Pete, who had not been much help.

She settled on a pink strapless dress that she knew she looked good in. Pete had made a comment about her looking like she was going to a prom that she had taken as a compliment. The club was a let down. Full of vampires listening to awful music that hadn’t been popular in her lifetime. She had wandered upstairs to the club filled with humans. A pair of demon bouncers had locked her into an old meat locker and she hadn’t been let out until well after dawn, effectively trapping her in the club until sundown. Pete was gone. The people in the club had given her icky tasting blood to drink and waved crosses in her face and threatened to stake her, which was just rude.

She was leaning toward blaming Willow. Nothing had gone right since she had seen Willow in San Jose. She had to live in a run down motel for days with a bunch of minions who laughed at her when she tried to order them around. Being a vampire sucked. With a look on her face that was almost wistful, she realized that the best time she had had recently as a vampire had also been with Willow. Between almost killing her, and talking about handbag design, and shopping, Willow had been almost okay and pretty yummy tasting, too.

She couldn’t believe it when Devon and Oz walked in with two boys she vaguely remembered from being in their band. Seeing someone she knew was a relief.

“Harmony?” Oz said.

“I can’t believe it,” she blinked at them. She ignored Oz. “Devon!”

Devon looked uncomfortable. He had dated Harmony for a while during her senior year at Sunnydale High. “Uh, hi, Harmony,” he said. “This is . . .”

“Unexpected,” Oz filled in.

Devon accepted the ad-lib. “Yeah. Unexpected,” he echoed.

“I can’t believe it,” she repeated. “Just when I was ready to give up, you come walking through the door,” she was looking at Devon like he was the answer to her prayers. She got up and walked toward him, looking a little bedraggled, but pretty good, Devon had to admit before reminding himself that he had broken up with her because she made him want to pound his head into the nearest wall.

The hair on the back of Oz’s neck prickled with a sensation he had come to recognize. It was the wolf in him sensing a threat. He sniffed, suddenly alert and wary. Just before Harmony reached Devon, Oz grabbed his t-shirt and pulled him back. “You’re a vampire,” he said, flatly.

Harmony pouted. “I’m still a girl. I’m still me. And I want to go home,” she wailed.

“She’s a what?” Devon had nodded his way through vampires, vampire slayer, and werewolf, but being confronted with the reality in the shape of an ex-girlfriend was a bit of a shock. She didn’t look any different.

“She’s a vampire,” Oz said again. “Blood sucking—never mind,” he shook his head. His attention was focused on Harmony, and his hand was wrapped around a stake. He showed it to her. “That’s close enough. Don’t make me use this,” he warned.

“Everyone is so mean to me,” she wailed, her face crumpling in a mask of misery. “My boyfriend left me here. I’m stuck here until sundown. I don’t have anywhere to stay,” she whined. “It's not fair. I didn’t do anything to deserve this. I’m beautiful and . . . I was a cheerleader!”

“She seems like the Harmony we know,” Devon commented.

Unnervingly so, Oz was inclined to agree. “You were here last night?”

“Yeah,” she sighed. “Aren’t you supposed to be in Los Angeles? Willow said—“

Oz seized on that. “You’ve seen Willow? Did you see her last night?”

“Sure,” Harmony sniffed. Willow. It figured. “She came with us.”

The club manager walked in, looking annoyed to see their unwilling vampire guest chatting with the band who had come in inquiring about bookings. Should have staked her, he thought for the third or fourth time that morning. He took in Oz’s defensive posture and stake. That was different.

“Are you sure that you are a band?” he asked warily.

Harmony answered for them, “Dingoes Ate My Baby. Isn’t that a stupid name?” she observed. “It's not very catchy, you know, like Backstreet Boys, or N’Sync.”

Devon made a gagging noise, and Dan laughed nervously while Chris muttered a disgusted, “Oh, geez. You dated her, man,” to Devon.

The manager considered them for a moment. Having a band that actually was clued in as to what went on above and below stairs at the Temple was an intriguing notion. “You got a CD?” he asked.



Buffy answered the phone at Giles' when Oz called to check in. Xander, Angel, and Giles were in the tunnels armed with pickaxes to start digging. She was on phone duty since Angel expected Oz to check in. The story he had to tell was bizarre even for the Hellmouth. He had gone to the Temple and found Harmony, who was now a vampire, and she had seen Willow as recently as twelve hours ago, though she had no idea where she was now. Oz was bringing her back to Sunnydale with him in the event that more useful information could be coaxed or coerced out of her.

“Sounds dangerous,” Buffy said, thinking of an eight-hour road trip with a vampire in the back of the van.

“Yeah,” Oz agreed. “We’re stopping at Home Depot to get some chains to keep her from getting any bitey ideas,” he admitted.

Vampire Harmony? “What’s she like?” Buffy asked.

“Pretty much the same Harmony,” Oz told her.

Thinking of an eight hour road trip with Harmony Kendall, Buffy winced.




Willow woke up to the sound of rain. Or it seemed like rain to her. For a moment, she thought she was back in her bed in her room, listening to rain hit the French doors. She kept her eyes closed, snuggling into her pillow, warmly wrapped up in soft terry cloth and softer sheets. The rich aroma of coffee teased her. It wasn’t ordinary coffee. It was expensive coffee that carried a hint of hazelnut. When her parents came home from a trip, they brought presents like flavored coffee, or bags of pink cinnamon candies, chocolates, and chewy, dense bagels from New York delis.

Her stomach rumbled. Starvation threatened. Sleep beckoned. Difficult choices loomed ahead.

The air was cool and dry. After days of waking up to the scents of cheap, harsh detergent, stale cigarette smoke, and air heavy with dust and dry rot it felt wonderful in her nose. She recognized the cool dryness of central air conditioning. Nothing to compete with the faded scent of honeysuckle, the aroma of coffee, the bakery smell with cinnamon, and the not unpleasant musky odor of sex.

The rainy sound was cut off. Half asleep, Willow felt the muscles in her neck tightening. Rain didn’t just stop. She opened her eyes.

She was alone in a room that she recognized, though she hadn’t spent much time last night taking in the change of scenery. A pair of chrome light fixtures flanking the closed bathroom door provided the only light in the room, illuminating a wall that was painted dark red with a finish that looked leathery. Just about as far from her soft white walled bedroom as she could conceivably be, she noted with a heavy feeling in her chest.

She sat up after a moment, realizing that she was alone in the room. She rearranged the robe that had loosened a bit in her sleep and looked around for clues as to where she was. She was guessing some kind of hotel room though there were no windows, which was odd. It was the hallway door, with its peephole and the heavy hardware of the doorknob and the ball and hook mechanism that substituted for a chain guard on the door that tipped her off. It was the kind of door found in your better hotels, minus the framed recap of the room rates.

There was an armoire, slightly off center to the bed that held a television. She flipped the covers back and got out of bed, still feeling a little stiff from last night. Her left foot throbbed, but the pain was tolerable under the circumstances. She looked for a telephone. Hotel rooms had phones. Where was it?

There was a tray on the table with a gleaming carafe of coffee, coffee cups, and a plate with a domed cover. The small shape of a cell phone caught her eye, and she made her way over to it, dropping the cell phone into the pocket of the robe. Spike’s leather coat was draped over the back of a chair. She had worn it once, when they were pretending to be civil. She had a mental map of the pockets and quickly started to go through them looking for the keys to the Desoto and money, in that order.

Keys, check. She gripped them, feeling the sharp edges bite into her fingers, reminding her with sharp regret of the keys she had taken down from the pegboard in the Shell station. If she had had any guts, she would have grabbed the keys, hung up the phone on Angel and Giles, and taken the first working car she could find in the lot and gotten the hell out of there. Instead she had allowed herself to be tethered to a phone, waiting for someone else to save her instead of going with what had been working for her all along. Seizing every opportunity that presented itself and going with it to put more distance between her and Spike. She would never make that mistake again.

Wallet. She dropped it into the pocket of the robe, feeling a surge of triumph as she darted to the door. She stopped herself. The gloating satisfaction of a well-timed escape was usually the prelude to disaster. What had she forgotten?

Weapon, she reminded herself. Looking around, she spotted Spike’s lighter. It wasn’t much, but it would have to do. She wasn’t strong enough to break one of the chairs to improvise a stake. She went to the door, hearing the lock disengage with a sharp twist of her wrist. She jerked the door open and found herself facing a bored looking Pete, sitting in a chair opposite the door with his hands folded over his stomach and his legs stretched out in front of him.

He didn’t look surprised to see her there, or alarmed. He looked amused.

“Going somewhere?” he asked.

She flipped the top of the Zippo back, and thumbed the wheel to light it, tossing it at him. The Zippo landed on his chest, above his folded arms. Realizing what she had done, and being highly flammable, the vampire jumped to his feet with a snarl, game face springing into place as he slapped at his chest. Willow got about three feet into the otherwise empty corridor before she was brought up short by the collar of her robe.

It was Spike, wet from the shower, with a towel loosely slung around his waist who had snagged the robe.

“Lighter?” he drawled. “Now, that was inspired, pet,” he said as Pete lunged forward. He jerked Willow back, out of the enraged vampire’s path. “Ah-ah-ah,” he scolded. “Told you to be careful, didn’t I?” he reminded a growling Pete, hooking his arm around Willow’s neck as he backed them both into the room. “I’ll take it from here,” he dismissed the younger vampire, letting the heavy door shut in his face.

Willow tried to elbow him in the gut, and connected, but he seemed unimpressed with her effort. His forearm tightened around her neck.

He searched the pockets of the robe with his free hand, retrieving his wallet and cell phone. She was getting better at this. Much more organized. She kicked him, and he shook her.

“This is the way the game is played, Red. Twitch, and you loose the robe,” he told her, sounding cheerful. He felt her heart pounding through the thick terry cloth that separated her back from his chest. His fingers stroked the side of her neck, feeling her pulse pounding under his fingers. She flinched when his fingers brushed the bite mark he had left.

He figured that she had gotten the message, and released her. He reached around her to throw the deadbolt on the door and she scrambled away from him.

Fed up with being treated like she was a minor inconvenience, and determined that they were never going back to her complying with his wishes, Willow shifted the keys in her grip until the sharp ends were free. She put every bit of bitter temper and humiliation into a backhanded swing when he turned back to her, ready to gouge his eyes out.

When he turned back she came at him with the car keys. He jerked his head back fast enough to keep from loosing an eye. Dropping the wallet and cell phone to deal with the more immediate threat she posed, he seized her wrist in a brutal grip and pried the keys out of her hand, hearing her make a sound that was less pained than frustrated and enraged. It should have been pained. Had he squeezed her wrist much harder, bones would have cracked, and she was going to have a nasty bruise. The teary eyed kitten was gone. Her narrow green eyes glowed with fury. She looked like a pissed off alley cat. It was an improvement over the sniveling, he decided before he grasped a handful of the robe.

“Fancy spending the day naked, do you?” he sneered at her, shaking her like a rag doll. “I’m going to give you a second chance at this, pet. I strongly advise you to take it. You hit, I hit back. You provoke me one more time, and I’m taking the robe and handcuffing you to the bed, where you will stay until I feel like letting you go. Do you understand me?”

She closed her eyes, blocking him out. He had used appeals to reasonable self-interest to control her from the start, and it infuriated her that her resolve was crumbling in the face of the familiar tactic.

“No bathroom privileges,” he taunted. “Nothing to eat or drink,” he ticked off the deprivations in store for her. “And if you didn’t like having me smack your ass a couple of times with a belt, just imagine me beating you until you can’t move, which is starting to appeal to me right now.”

They were engaged in a contest of wills that he could not afford to loose, and as usual he was handicapped by her limited concept of exactly how much harm he could do to her.

“Do. You. Understand. Me,” he ground out, vamping out.

Her eyes opened and she lost her nerve. A primal scream was trapped in her throat as he jerked her closer to him, his hand in her hair yanking her head painfully to one side. The implicit threat of being bitten, again, reached her as nothing else had. “Yes,” she managed to say.

Amber eyes glowing, he released her, and she stumbled on legs that were shaking. His gaze raked her contemptuously. “I thought you were smarter than this.”

She needed to sit down. Keeping her eyes on him, she made her way over to the table and collapsed into one of the chairs.

He shook off the game face. “We don’t have to do this, you know,” he said, annoyed with her. “I think I’ve demonstrated that I’m willing to treat you reasonably well.”

She stared at him in appalled fascination. He had to be kidding. He had kidnapped her. He had had fairly unpleasant sex with her, orgasm notwithstanding. Where was the reasonably well in that?

“I need you breathing,” he said, breaking it down to the lowest common denominator for her. “Hell, not to put too fine a point on it, I don’t even need that. I just need them to think that you are still breathing. I could kill you and turn you.”

It wasn’t a new thought. He had mentioned it to Angel last night and now it was back again, tickling his sense of humor. He could turn her, and deliver her back to the Slayer on a silver platter, forcing her to stake her best friend. Now, that was an idea with merit. Of course, the unmentioned deterrent in this plan was that they had Angel on board, and Spike knew, even over a phone line, that Angel would pick up on the subtle signs that she was no longer amongst the living.

Willow felt dizzy. She heard him at a distance. She felt like she was looking at him through a tunnel. She could feel herself balanced on a precipice with her life, literally on the line. She had thought, when she was in the coffee shop, and seeing Spike sitting across from her that she understood that she was in danger. She had thought when she tried to slip away from Georgia and Spike in the club, to get back to the dance floor, that she understood that she was in danger. Her grasp of that had never diminished over the last week and a half, but it was brought home to her in a terrifying way that she hadn’t understood the full scope of her peril. There were worse things than dying. Infinitely worse things.

She didn’t want to die. She really didn’t want to be turned into a vampire.

Spike thought that she looked like she was going to pass out. He had gotten her attention, at last. He smirked. “Just an idea, Red,” he told her, not bothering to tell her that it wasn’t one he had discarded. She would figure that out when the time came.

“I’m just letting you know where I’m coming from. You’ve played a shitty hand so far, and come out in one piece. If you want to stay that way, you better put your outraged virtue in perspective. No one has done anything to you that is worth you dying over.”

She shuddered, hugging herself, wishing that he would go away and leave her alone with her queasy stomach and the buzzing in her ears.

Impressed with his success, Spike decided to back off, so to speak. He had seen Angelus at work. Cruelty followed by kindness. He strolled over to the table and poured her a cup of coffee. After an assessing look at her stricken face, he loaded it up with sugar and cream, figuring that she needed it to counteract the shock.

“Have a cup of coffee. You look like you could use it. You’re really not completely with it this morning, or you would have worked out how stupid that was, right, Red?” He pushed the chair until the arms were under the table, effectively trapping her there.

He pulled the other chair over at a right angle to hers, and sat in it, picking up his cigarettes from the table. His Zippo? Where was it? He got up, collecting the wallet, cell phone and keys from the floor where they had been scattered, setting them on the table. He opened the door to the hallway to look for his lighter. Pete had vacated his position outside the door, which was more or less expected. Spike found the lighter lying on the hallway floor and picked it up. He hadn’t gotten across the room fast enough to see the expression on the other vampire’s face when Red had tossed the lit lighter at him, but he was willing to bet it was startled.

Humans taught to fight back were a novelty away from the Hellmouth. Adrenaline, fear, and an instinct for self-preservation occasionally trumped the whole vampire package, and the human won, but that was mostly through carelessness and stupidity on the vampire’s part.

When he came back to the table Willow had her hands around the coffee cup and she was sipping the coffee, still looking a little glassy eyed. He lit a cigarette, positioned a heavy cut glass ashtray within range, and lifted the lid on the plate. A pair of cinnamon rolls slathered with thick white icing rested on the plate.

Not hungry? He eyed her thoughtfully, leaning forward to pick up her injured foot. She did not like that at all. Her eyes narrowed and she stiffened up, but she didn’t try to remove her foot. The damage to her great toe probably looked worse than it was with the way the nail was torn and split down into the nail bed. He glanced at her face and then at her hands.

Her grip on the coffee cup had changed enough that he figured she was thinking about throwing it at him.

He let go of her foot and leaned back into the chair. “You might as well say it,” he invited. “You throw a cup of hot coffee at me, and . . . I’ll break one of your fingers?” He gestured with the cigarette. “Burn your skin, right under your left eye,” his specificity was deliberate. It advanced the deliberate inflection of pain from a threat to a plan. ”That ought to hurt like hell.”

He watched her carefully set the coffee cup on the saucer, her gaze fixed on it with a determination that suggested that she was paying attention. He took a drag on his cigarette, gesturing to her with it. “So, instead of sitting there, keeping your tongue between your teeth, and letting your emotions lead you places where loosing leaves a mark, you might as well get it out.”

She picked up the coffee cup with a hand that shook only slightly and brought it to her lips to take a dainty sip.

The silent treatment. How novel. Effective too. He didn’t like being ignored. It irritated him. It made him want to get her attention. Before he acted on the thought she broke her self imposed silence, which hadn’t lasted very long.

“Are you really going to go through with this?” she spoke. “Are you going to make a trade with them? A real trade, with no tricks,” she specified.

Spike’s eyebrows rose. “Do you think I’d go to the trouble of keeping you alive for any other reason?”

Prevarication, Willow thought. He answered a question with a question that gave nothing away. She could count on him to lie. He either didn’t know the answer to the question, which was highly likely given the fact that he seemed to drift towards impulsiveness, or he planned a double cross, like turning her into a vampire before giving her back. Either way, she had absolutely nothing to loose.

Her lip curled. “No, then,” she concluded.

He didn’t like that. She was right, and points to her for not letting her fear of the outcome keep her from seeing where this was headed, but he didn’t like her thinking she had him all figured out.

“Careful, Red. We shagged. I’m not your fucking boyfriend. Don’t even pretend you know what I’m thinking.”

“Did I say that?” She was direct. “And don’t flatter yourself. I have a boyfriend.”

He leaned back against the back of the chair. “Remembered that, did you? Before, during, or after we shagged?”

She didn’t flinch. “During,” she said curtly. She managed to look down her nose at him, an impressive feat given her lack of inches, devout inoffensiveness, and propensity for guilty musings. He had read her scribbles in her notebook.

“Coffee, cinnamon rolls . . . what? No flowers? And, you, the closet romantic. I’m disappointed,” she said, dripping sarcasm.

Her hand was steadier on the coffee cup as she lifted it to her lips again. He watched her, fascinated by the change in her. He figured she would collapse, like sponge cake, molded into any shape he chose given sufficient pressure. She had, from the start, gone to what probably worked best for her dealing with other people. Helpful, harmless, cheerful, and child-like. Scratch that away, and she was unexpectedly astringent. A hell of a lot more tough minded than he expected her to be.

“It’s going to happen again, pet,” he told her. “You, me,” he smiled wickedly, “maybe Georgia, too, rolling around in bed together. Count on it.”

Her only sign of distress was in the way her lips thinned and her gaze wavered. A little color crept into her cheeks. He could tell she was struggling for a comeback and failing. She expected to fail. She wasn’t good at this, and deep down, she knew it.

He crushed out the cigarette. “And you’ll like it,” his voice was pure velvet.

She looked around the expensively decorated room, taking in the coffee service, and the lounging vampire. She wasn’t blind or stupid. She didn’t need to look at him to be reminded of what he was. From the first moment he had walked into their lives she had recognized him—or at least she had seen what he seemed to be most of the time. A beautiful boy with a tinge of something exotic that came from the cheekbones, the accent, and the knowing look in his eyes. A visitor from a land of cool that Willow could only recognize. The idea that he ever noticed that she existed as a person, rather than an appendage to Buffy was so remote that she didn’t think he saw her in any other way, even now.

The idea that he was simply a beautiful boy had been shattered in less than ten minutes. He had lured Buffy out of the Bronze simply to study her fighting technique. After that, he had been categorized and studied. Species, vampire. Name, Spike, aka William the Bloody, childe of Dru, childe of Angelus, killer of two Slayers. Smart, dangerous, deadly, and so far, unsuccessful at killing Buffy, though that was a two way street. Buffy hadn’t managed to dust him either.

And she was Willow Rosenberg. Her wildest daydreams ran to being moderately well liked, having a boyfriend, and being regarded as someone with a small but useful gift. She felt a surge of irritation at him and at herself.

“Well, duh,” she said in response to his taunt that she would like having sex with him or Georgia. Aside from it being a more or less established fact, they were gorgeous and sexy, and they probably knew more about sex than she did about computers, which was saying something. If she were a boy would it even come into question? If this was Xander and not her and his choices ranged from abuse and torture to relative comfort and weird sex with the undead, she would have shrugged off weird sex as the lesser of two evils.

It wasn’t that simple. If she survived, she was going to have to deal with what happened and how she felt about it. The thought of anyone else knowing about what she had done in the last twenty-four hours made her feel queasy with fear and guilt. The thought of what it meant, what it said about her, was something that made her flinch. She was not sharing that with Spike. She knew that kind of weakness was something he would not hesitate to exploit.

He blinked back surprise, schooling his features to keep from showing how taken aback he was. As comebacks went, duh, lacked for glib wit, but there was enough derision in it to make up ground. She had recovered her composure enough to start eating. Her small fingers tore off a piece of the cinnamon roll and she ate it. Her cheeks were flushed with splotchy color and she looked angry and determined. He took another drag on his cigarette and swiped her saucer, flicking ash into it, to give his hands something to do.

He refilled her coffee cup, watching her cut her eyes at him. She looked unimpressed by the implied courtesy of the gesture. If she kept this up, he was going to work himself up to a crush, he decided.