Chapter Twenty-Six

By the time Buffy arrived to feed her, Harmony was willing to tolerate any kind of company, even if it was accompanied by the physical discomfort of the bugs crawling under her skin sensation that came with the Slayer. She was suddenly getting why other vampires were at least uncomfortable around a Slayer, even if the fear factor hadn’t quite reached her. In a lot of ways Buffy acted like any other unwitting human being. She unlocked the cage, opened the door and bent over with her back to Harmony to get something out of the cooler she had brought with her.

Acting on instinct, Harmony went for her and the open cage door. The next thing she knew she was sliding down the opposite wall vaguely aware of having met an opposing force. She looked down at her bedraggled pink dress and found a dusty footprint.

“Where are you going to go?” Buffy asked, sounding exasperated. “It’s daylight out there,” she pointed out, leaving a Styrofoam container on the floor.

Harmony tried to brush off the footprint, which only made it worse. Now it was a big smudge of dirt.

When no answer was forthcoming, Buffy shrugged and exited the cage, snapping the padlock over the hasp. The long term downside of keeping Harmony locked up was starting to work its way into her thinking. It wasn’t helping. Slaying the annoying and inconvenient really wasn’t part of the whole sacred duty package, and there was the remote possibility that Harmony could prove useful at some point in the near future.

She sat down on the cooler, watching her, feeling more than a little creeped out by the notion that Harmony Kendall was a vampire. There was also a small amount of curiosity. It was inevitable. She had hardly known Xander and Willow’s friend Jesse when he had been vamped. She had known Ford, but his illness and his fantasy of undying had turned him into something that was unknowable before he had died and there wasn’t anything to talk about when he rose. She just staked him.

“How did this happen?” Buffy found herself asking.

She didn’t really expect an answer. “I don’t know,” Harmony admitted. “I just woke up this way. I don’t remember . . . dying.”

Buffy gestured to the Styrofoam container. “It’s blood. Pig, I think. I didn’t ask,” she admitted.

Harmony picked herself up and retrieved the container. It wasn’t human and it was cold, but she was too hungry to pass it up.

“How did you get hooked up with Spike?” Buffy asked.

Harmony growled at her. “I don’t want to talk about Spike. Or Willow. You’d think the whole world revolves around them,” she complained. “And I don’t want to stay here. It smells funny, like wet sheepdog, and it’s dirty. I’ve been wearing this dress for days,” she went on, sounding like a fretful child. “And this is disgusting,” she said of the blood that she had gulped down.

“I didn’t ask for this. I don’t deserve it, and Angel was like, no one asks for it, but what is that supposed to mean?” she demanded of Buffy. “All I wanted was to graduate from high school and maybe go to France, and I’m back in Sunnydale.”

It was an odd echo of Buffy’s sense of being trapped by her destiny.




She was crossing the elementary school parking lot to the tunnel entrance when she spotted Oz’s van speeding across the parking lot, bouncing over a speed bump with a metal stress rattle. The van barely came to a complete stop when Oz and Xander piled out, waving to her.

“Sacramento,” Oz said. “She’s in Sacramento.”

He had a handful of paper and he looked a little wired. Xander was practically bouncing. “Show her the email,” he urged.

Oz shoved the papers into her hands. “Somehow, she got internet access and logged into her email account,” he explained. “Sara’s trying to track that down, to see if they can track an IP address back to the physical address,” he was speaking computer gibberish now and Buffy was trying to figure out what they were talking about. Who was Sara?

“Will sent you two emails, and when you didn’t answer them she sent an email to her boss in San Jose and asked her to call you and tell you to open your email this morning, but you weren’t there,” Xander explained.

The telephone call, before eight o’clock in the morning. Buffy’s eyes widened. “No, wait—“ she said with a mounting sense of unease. Willow had asked someone to call her, and she had blown them off because she thought it was someone who didn’t know her?

“I’m an idiot,” she groaned. “I answered the phone, and I said I wasn’t home because—they asked for me, but they did that ‘Buffy?’ voice, so I thought not anyone I want to talk to, but it isn’t even eight o’clock in the morning and who would call before eight and I let them hang up. I’m so stupid. You must be someone I don’t want to talk to,” she said, rolling her eyes.

Xander and Oz stared at her for a moment. “Okay,” Xander said slowly. “You may want to work on the telephone manners, Buff, but let’s get past that and focus on the important.”

She made herself focus on the pages that Oz had given her. She had two new message, her first emails, and they were from Willow. She could beat herself up about missing them later.




She had been left handcuffed to the headboard with a piece of duct tape over her mouth, a reward for her untimely re-discovery of screaming, for four hours and twenty-eight minutes according to the digital clock above the television. She had managed to get her legs under her, which lessened the pull on her shoulders. Her hands had gone numb two hours ago. She was hungry, thirsty, and oddly, grateful.

Over the last four hours Willow had time to reconsider her rescue from several angles, and this—the one where she was found handcuffed—was the one that she preferred. She didn’t think for one moment that anyone would question it if she didn’t appear to be ill used, but the handcuff motif precluded any doubt about her status as the victim of the crime.

The complexities of her victim hood preoccupied her. To a certain extent she was proud of what she had managed to accomplish in an uneasy sort of way. She had almost escaped twice and gotten a message out to facilitate her rescue. She had managed to affect a bargain with Spike that would keep him from coming after her friends after they made the trade that her kidnapping had made possible for him. That deal would be void. No trade, no truce. Which meant that Spike probably would come after them, especially if he thought that Buffy or Giles had found this mysterious thing that he wanted so badly.

In which case when the taunting of friends and boyfriend started, the handcuff inducing lack of credibility would be hard for Spike to overcome.

She spent a few hours stewing over her preoccupation with how her behavior would be perceived and her lack of scruple about twisting things to show herself in a better light. It was dishonest and cowardly, and yet, she didn’t think that she could bear to see the looks on their faces if they knew what she had done, even armed with reasons that were still compelling to her way of thinking.

When she had dispatched her uneasy musings on how she was going to deal with the being rescued and lying through her teeth, she indulged herself with a few happy notions of Spike, foiled again, and then with the problem of retrieving the keyboard and returning it to its mostly accidental hiding spot behind the television.

When the door from the hallway opened, it was Spike, carrying a plate of food. The smell reached her and her dry mouth was suddenly flooded with saliva. She almost didn’t notice Georgia and Colin following Spike through the door.

Spike brought the plate over to the bedside table and set it down before unlocking the handcuffs. Her shoulders cramped as her arms fell to her sides. Spike picked up her wrists, examining them briefly before rubbing her arms to restore the circulation while Colin went to the refrigerator to get a beer. Georgia was standing with her hands on her hips looking from Colin to Spike like she was waiting for something.

“Hold still,” Spike warned, picking at a corner of the duct tape he had slapped over her mouth.

She tensed, half-expecting him to rip it off, but he pulled gently, easing a finger under the tape to press against her skin as he peeled the tape away. It wasn’t comfortable, but he hadn’t gone out of his way to hurt her, which was probably a good sign. The whole ‘you’re up to something’ surmise had the potential for something ugly if he really thought that she was up to something.

He wadded up the tape and tossed it to the ground before going to the refrigerator to retrieve a bottle of water and a beer for himself.

Colin looked at Georgia, who shrugged. “This is ridiculous,” Colin said. “Start breaking a couple of fingers and she’ll crack,” he predicted.

Willow found herself looking at him, recalling what he said when they had played backgammon. It was nothing even remotely personal. Colin stared back at her, looking like he had concluded that she had not gotten the lesson he had meant to impart. This was the something ugly that she had been afraid was coming.

Spike opened the bottle of water for her and handed it to her. His closed off expression didn’t say much about what he was thinking. Her hands felt like they belonged to someone else, but she managed to bring the bottle to her lips. The rush of cold water filling her mouth made her want to gulp it down.

“Don’t fucking ignore me, Spike,” Colin warned. “I’ve been patient, and I’ve gone along with this so far, but the big pay off you keep hinting is coming is always a little farther away, and I don’t fancy playing games with a Slayer.”

Spike used the end of his t-shirt to twist off the cap of the beer bottle. “I’m not ignoring you,” he countered. “I don’t agree with you, and since we are not living in a democracy—you might be, but I’m not—what you think I should do doesn’t particularly interest me. I do as I please.”

His gaze was redirected to Willow. “Don’t gulp, pet. You’ll make yourself sick,” he told her. “Eat your supper.”

Georgia approached the bed from Spike’s side. “We don’t have to mark her up,” she said.

Willow sighed. Fear was the enemy. Fear of being hurt or humiliated. She eyed the three of them suspiciously. “We have ways of making her talk,” she mocked in a deliberately bad accent. “This is some kind of good cop, bad cop,” she looked at Georgia pointedly, refusing to flinch as she crawled across the bed toward her, “When you do the creepy throat licking thing, please keep the slobber to a minimum, because it’s not creepy. It’s just gross.”

Spike’s eyebrows rose. “Kitten, we’re vampires. Don’t delude yourself. It’s bad cop, bad cop, but nice try, and good tip about throat licking. I suggest that you eat because we are leaving, as soon as it’s dark.”

Frantically calculating how close she might be to being rescued, Willow stared at him, horrified by the simplicity of it. Leaving. It was the easiest and most obvious solution from his point of view. He didn’t know what she was up to, just that she was up to something.

Spike chuckled. “Really, if you could see your face,” he teased. “Aghast doesn’t begin to do it justice.”

“This isn’t funny,” Georgia interjected. “We need to know exactly what is coming,” she insisted. “A century of dodging a stake with Dru may have blunted your survival instinct, but mine is fully intact,” she said brusquely. “And if you can’t bring yourself to getting it out of her, I’ll volunteer,” she moved toward Willow, who was still on her good cop, bad cop theory despite Spike’s claim to the contrary, and frantically trying to think of ways to slow him down.

Spike took a step toward Georgia just as Colin moved, maybe to cut him off. They would never know. His foot caught the edge of the keyboard and it banged against the foot of the bed and Willow winced at the sound before she could stop herself.

Colin bent over and fished the keyboard out. “Well,” he said. “Three guesses?”

“What did you do?” Georgia demanded, reaching for Willow, who scooted off the bed so fast she might have fallen if Spike hadn’t caught her arm and hauled her to her feet.

“Georgia? Leave her alone,” Spike sounded weary. “For the love of Christ, people, she’s not exactly Mata Hari. She figured out a way to get a message out. That’s not so hard to work out. She’s got her hopes pinned on the Slayer and her band of do-gooders coming to rescue her. It’s inconvenient, but we weren’t hunkering down for a cozy vacation,” he pulled out the cell phone. “Watch and learn,” he said, speed dialing the number Angel had given him.



The excavation operation had not come to a complete stop. Devon, Chris and Dan stayed on task with Dr. Holbrook after Giles, Angel, Buffy, and Oz left, regrouping at Giles apartment to gear up and work out a plan. Oz went to work re-vamp proofing the van for the afternoon drive to Sacramento. Buffy’s plan included using Harmony. Worst case scenario, she got staked. Best-case scenario, she would be able to help spot Spike’s crew so they could pick them off and take them down.

Using Willow’s computer and some help from the technical support team that Sara was coordinating, they were able to locate a set of plans for the hotel that was put up on a hastily constructed web site. It wasn’t a true hotel according to some more information that was dug up from a search of public records. It was a privately held building that operated as a club, which kept them from having to follow the laws on public accommodations, nixing Giles' original notion of simply calling the hotel to make a reservation and once they were checked in and issued key cards, using them to penetrate the elevator key card security system.

Xander and Buffy took the van to retrieve Harmony while Oz continued downloading information as fast as it could be streamed to him from the San Jose office where Sara was coordinating their research. The IP address was a floater that belonged to an Internet service provider that handled corporate accounts.

Within two hours they were on the road with the vamps in the back, Oz driving, and Giles in the passenger seat. Harmony disputed Willow’s count of the vampires, a detail that concerned Giles. They were going in outnumbered and there were still security issues with the hotel that remained unresolved. He knew that Buffy, Xander and Oz were running on emotion, and would be all for recklessly charging in and fighting their way to Willow if necessary. Since this was likely to get them killed as well as Willow, he was advocating a reconnaissance. After dark the vampires would leave the hotel to hunt, and that presented opportunities to retrieve one of the key cards that would give them access to the elevators.

They were a half an hour outside of Sacramento when Angel’s cell phone rang. The digging team had the number, as did Sara Engstrom in San Jose, and Spike. Angel answered it.



Angel answered the phone on the second ring, and if Spike hadn’t guessed that they might be on the way, the background clutter on the line more or less confirmed it. “I love these cell phones,” he started without preamble. “Bloody brilliant invention. You can talk to anyone, anywhere,” he said. “On the road, Peaches?”

“What do you want, Spike?” Angel asked. He was much better at this than Willow, a point Spike considered sharing with her, but decided it would keep. “Just calling to deliver a friendly message,” he said. “I know that you’re coming. If I catch a whiff of that cheap cologne Xapper bathes in, or get that delightful Slayer tingle, then you’ll be getting the witch back in pieces and I’ll be very, very angry.”

“How do you know we aren’t there right now, waiting for you to make a run for it?” Angel countered.

“Don’t really care if you are, mate. She’ll be dead before you can finish growling my name in that ridiculous way you have. Am I supposed to wet myself?”

“How do we know she’s still alive?” Angel asked.

Spike chuckled. “Thanks for asking,” he said. “You don’t. Turn around and go back to Sunnyhell and I’ll get in touch with you. Until then, you can think about it.”



To Harmony, stuck in the back of the van, out of direct sunlight, with Angel, the conversation Angel was having was not one-sided. She could hear Spike’s voice on the cell phone. It wasn’t the cleanest connection and she had to concentrate, but it was definitely Spike.

When Spike hung up, Angel snapped the cover on the phone closed and held it clenched in his hand for a moment. “He knows that we are coming,” he announced.



Spike pocketed the phone. “Simple,” he pointed out. “Now we leave.”

He pinched Willow’s chin. “Told you to eat, didn’t I?” he mocked. “Too late, now. You’ve got ten minutes—an actual ten minutes—to get what you think you might need together before we leave.”

Georgia looked from Spike to Colin and then went to the connecting door to enter the other room.

Spike gave Willow a little push. “Tick tock,” he reminded her.

For a moment she just stared at him, thinking furiously, and then she went into the bathroom. The wastebasket in the bathroom was empty and there was a clear plastic liner in it. She picked up the wastebasket and started tossing toiletries into it without any regard to what she was taking.

She had no idea how close her friends were, but she was positive that they would not turn back now. They would come, and she had to figure out a way to be here when they arrived.

The wastebasket was half full and she added the toilet paper off the roll, a hand towel and a washcloth to it before sliding the edges of the plastic bag over the top of the wastebasket. She made two ends and tied them together in a double knot.

When she left the bathroom, Georgia was transferring an armful of clothes from the closet to the kind of bag with handles that Willow associated with expensive stores and Pete was standing in the open doorway holding a set of keys that looked vaguely familiar to Willow.

She could hear Spike’s voice. He and Colin must have gone into the other room for something. Willow set her bag of toiletries down. She went to the small refrigerator, staring at the contents, looking for anything remotely useful. The beer bottle Colin had been drinking from was resting on the top of the refrigerator. She picked up a can of diet Coke, holding it for a second, testing the weight of it. The long necked beer bottles had more potential for damage, she concluded.

Setting a couple of the beer bottles on top of the refrigerator, she walked back to the bed, picked up the keyboard and when Georgia bent over to stuff another plastic sheathed garment into the bag, one hand buried in the bag to smoosh the contents flatter, Willow swung, two-handed, with the keyboard.

Georgia heard it and rose into the descending keyboard and then staggered a bit. Willow gritted her teeth and hit her again, hearing Pete coming. She expected that and darted to the end table to grab the plate of food, throwing it at his chest. When he started brushing off the food decorating the front of his dark red t-shirt she made a grab for the keys as she feinted right as if to dive across the bed to avoid him. He had the presence of mind to make a grab at her arm, and she brought her knee up, hard, ripping the keys out of his hands as he froze, waiting for the pain to catch up to him. She skirted him as he crumpled, avoiding a hand that flailed at her, as she bolted for the door to the hallway.

Less than six months ago she had levitated a pencil across a room and staked a vampire. The beer bottles were bigger, her eyes were open, and she was moving. Pushing all of those considerations aside she reached for the power that she had used to levitate the pencil, thinking less about the how of it than the what of it.

She was through the open door as her beer bottle missiles flew, catching Georgia by surprise. A very startled Jeannie was there with a luggage cart and Willow grabbed one end of it with a sound very like a growl. She pushed it with all her might and the startled vampire stumbled back when the cart caught her at her midsection.

The luggage cart skirmish cost time she could not afford to lose at this point. Repeating the litany of directions to the parking garage in her head, Willow took off at a dead run, bare feet flying over the carpet. Over the sound of her feet on the carpeted floor, and the sound of blood rushing through her head, she could hear feet, behind her.

The temptation to duck into a side hall to elude pursuit beckoned. The distance they had walked so quickly last night while Georgia chattered about soap operas and QVC seemed to have stretched and Willow started to wonder if she had taken a wrong turn somewhere when she reached the stairwell that went into the garage. There was a plastic garbage can with a lid inside the landing and she shoved the keys through the swinging lid and flew down the stairs. Last night they had gone up to the parking garage level where the car Spike had been driving was parked. She had no illusions about getting to the right car that matched the keys she had grabbed from Pete. She was gambling that the stairway would take her back to the lobby.

From the lobby, she would make a run for daylight. Judging by the digital clock in the room, it was still daylight and she had a couple of hours to work with before the sun set.



Swearing under his breath, Spike was on the elevator. He hadn’t been terribly specific about his injunction to keep Willow from exiting the hotel, and if Pete or Jeannie caught up to her, he could only hope that they didn’t get carried away. The parking garage was a trap, and he was counting on her to recognize it. It was covered, so it presented no particular danger to them, and the open floors and concrete would turn it into an echo chamber. Hiding between cars would buy her time, but that kind of hide and seek was a vampire’s natural milieu for hunting.

He was betting on her making for the outdoors, a big patch of warm sunlight, and the nearest pay phone. As soon as the elevator doors opened, he was moving, and finding himself on the second floor with two of the three lawyers they had dinner with standing at the doors, looking startled by his sudden lunge out of the car.

“In a hurry?” the woman asked, looking amused, as she followed him back inside the elevator car. Her companion, the younger of the two male attorneys had the wit to look slightly nervous.

“Lilah, we can take another elevator,” he hissed, hesitating outside the doors.

She stuck her hand out to keep them from closing. “Get in,” she snapped at him, sounding irritated. “We’re already late.”

Spike shrugged. Using what was at hand was his strong suit. He wrapped his arm around the woman’s neck, hauling her back. “It’ll keep,” he told her companion as the doors slid shut.

“Hey!” she protested.

“Very eloquent. Right up there with ‘duh’,” he retorted. “Now, shut up and listen. You can tell your clients that I’ll visit them personally to settle up if they’d like,” he told her. “I’m busy right now, but I’ll get to it, so if they want to start packing their bags, that might be a good idea.”

As threats went it didn’t lack for subtlety. Lilah started to speak and his arm tightened. “If I hear anything other than please don’t kill me, I’ll give you a reason to start begging,” he promised as the elevator doors opened.

His senses were immediately assaulted by a second rampant heart beat and a familiar scent, heady with adrenaline and fear. A flash of red hair caught his eyes as Willow emerged from a side hallway on cue.

“Scream,” he ordered, and to make sure that she complied, he grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her head to one side and was rewarded with a blood-curdling shriek.

Willow’s head whipped around and she stumbled, but she stayed on her feet. His notion of using her best tendencies against her died a quick death. He saw the hesitation, the twist of guilt and grief that rippled across her face as she realized that she had signed someone’s death warrant, but she barely slowed on her path to the revolving doors and he didn’t have time to fuck around with a quick kill to make a point.

Shoving Lilah away from him he dove after her, closing ground fast. A diving tackle slammed her into the glass panel of the revolving door and the momentum nearly spilled both of them into the sunlit street. As it was, he was forced to scoop her up, one arm around her midsection and the other around her neck, and push the door through the cycle before the sunlight scorched him.

The impact with the door split her head open right under her hairline and for a moment she stared at the lobby spinning back toward her in furious disbelief, swaying a little, and then she went down like a sack of potatoes as Pete skidded into the lobby in hot pursuit. The collapse seemed genuine enough, though after Spike picked her up, she started coming back around and twisted violently to get out of his arms until he got tired of trying to keep her from throwing herself down on the marble floor and threw her over his shoulder.

She grunted, cutting off a rambling tirade. Spike returned to the elevator and Lilah sidestepped him with a glare. Willow lifted her head enough to see the attorney they had had dinner with the other night. Their eyes locked for a moment.

“Help me,” Willow begged. “Please.” Remembering that Spike had had his arm around her neck, a threat that Willow ignored implicit in the gesture. “It will really mess things up for him,” she threw out the one thing that she thought might move the attorney.

Lilah gave her suit coat a firm tug and looked away, pretending, like the staff behind the front desk, that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. The vampire hadn’t hurt her. He had been bluffing, and she thought no less of Willow for calling him on it. She made a mental note to find out who the red headed girl was as the elevator doors closed.