Chapter Twenty-Seven

The mood in the Giles apartment had been euphoric while they were making plans to rescue Willow. The hours on the road to Sacramento had taken the giddy edge off as the focus began to narrow down on the task at hand. This didn’t stop Xander from offering a non-stop stream of bad jokes and quips or Buffy from occasionally joining in while rolling a stake between the palms of her hands. It was the way they coped.

It nearly drove Giles mad at times. All too often the car pool to the Apocalypse made him feel like he had unwittingly trapped himself with teenagers that he wouldn’t have had anything to do with when he was their age. Except perhaps Oz, who rarely spoke, but almost always had something interesting to say when he did, and was in a band. They might have been friends. Then he would catch himself thinking this way and be annoyed at the absurdity of it.

After Spike’s call the mood in the van became grim. Oz drove, pushing the fully loaded van to the limit. Xander argued without having a real argument. Before they returned to Sunnydale he would be picking at the scabs of their failures. The email time stamps that had been ignored before now, the missed phone call that might have put them on the road at least three hours earlier, their failure to pick up on the broad hint that Willow had managed to work into the last, brief conversation that he had had with her. They were all thinking about these things, but Xander would be the one who would eventually say them and Giles hated waiting for it to come.

They were too close to Sacramento to turn around now, and it was possible that they might pick up important clues or that Willow would continue to demonstrate a degree of resourcefulness that they had been unable to fully exploit to figure out how to leave a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow.

They kept talking like they had something to do when they got to Sacramento.

“It’s a hotel,” Angel pointed out. “That means lots of rooms, hallways. We are going in blind. Willow says the doors and elevators are key locked on both sides,” he pointed out.

“Sewer access?” Buffy asked.

“A hotel that caters to demons?” From the front passenger seat, Giles shook his head, “They’ll be on to that,” he pointed out. “Our best chance was to catch them leaving and ambush them, and they can’t know how close we are. There’s still a chance we can catch them,” he said, and he knew it was thin. On the other hand, it was vital that they be alert to the possibility.

“We may be walking into a trap,” Angel warned, echoing Giles thoughts on the matter. “He knows that we are coming,” he reminded them. “Spike kills as many of us as he can, and he goes back to Sunnydale to get the Gem of Amara,” he posited.

Harmony looked perplexed by that. “Why do that when he can make you go back and find it?”

Buffy found herself in the odd position of agreeing with Harmony. “He wouldn’t have called you,” she pointed out. “He wouldn’t have given up the element of surprise.”

Giles cleared his throat. “Angelus might have, for the very reasons that you suggest, but I agree with Buffy. Spike is more direct.”

Angel shifted awkwardly on the floor of the van. They were right. It was something Angelus would have done that Spike would have bitched about. “He cleared out as soon as he got off the phone,” he conceded. He hated sitting on the floor of the van. It wasn’t just the discomfort. It offended his sense of dignity to some degree. “If we can figure out a way inside, then it’s worth getting a look around, but if we don’t find anything, we need to get back to Sunnydale and wait for him to get in touch with us.”

Oz was silent during this discussion. Somewhere between the phone call and this re-invention of their priorities he had started thinking about what really needed to be done. He didn’t know how Willow had managed to get online, but it suggested that she had some freedom and that she was being treated relatively well. Her notes to Buffy were organized, methodical, and very precise. She had seen a lot of her surroundings, so she wasn’t being kept in a closet, tied up, with a bag over her head.

If she kept this up, she would be, or worse. What he knew about Spike didn’t inspire confidence in his restraint.




Pete and Jeannie had been left behind to watch. It was a task that Pete accepted without really knowing what he was supposed to be watching for. Spike explained it to him, but there was a needle in a haystack quality to it that had him reaching for excuses before he failed. He was pleasantly surprised to get a hand from the people he was supposed to be watching for in the shape of a girl in a bedraggled pink evening gown.

“Harmony,” Jeannie recognized her too.

“Yeah,” Pete was delighted. “Harmony,” he grinned. “Poor baby. She looks like she’s hungry.”

They were sitting on a rooftop behind the Victorian façade of one of the buildings abutting the hotel that they had checked out of earlier. Georgia had been a good sport about Willow hitting her over the head with the keyboard, but the fact that the human was still breathing and largely unhurt, and that Spike had no intention of changing that, was the last straw for Colin. He and Georgia had taken off before Spike had finished giving his instructions. Jeannie and Pete were to stay behind and shadow the Slayer and her crew, following them back to Sunnydale.

“What happened in the room?” Pete asked.

He had gotten ejected on the hunt for the girl and wound up in the covered parking garage trying to get a fix on her. Jeannie had been back in the room when he had given up and reluctantly returned, remembering what happened to three minions in San Francisco.

“Colin was pissed,” Jeannie reported. “Georgia was kind of mad, but not as mad.”

“No,” Pete shook his head. “What did he do to her?”

“Willow?” Jeannie made a dismissive sound. “That’s why Colin was mad. Spike was like, so what she tried to escape. It’s my problem. I’ll deal with it. And Colin was like, if you dealt with it this wouldn’t have happened.”

Pete grinned. “Oooh. I missed that? So, what happened next?”

“You know that part. Spike took off, and took her with him, of course.” Pete had encountered them in the hallway while Spike was half dragging her. He finally got fed up with her fighting him every step of the way and punched her. She went down like someone had cut her strings.

Below, the knot of people and vampires broke up. The two vampires entered the hotel while the younger human males got back in the van and drove around the corner at a crawl, leaving a girl and an older man on the street.

“Slayer?” Jeannie guessed, feeling a little shiver work its way up her spine.

“I think so,” Pete was staring at the pair on the sidewalk below. “This is so cool,” he said. “I’ve heard of them. Everyone has, but I’ve never seen a real, live Slayer. It’s kind of like seeing . . . the Easter Bunny.”

Jeannie shot him a sideways look. “What did your Easter Bunny look like?”

“Bugs Bunny, but cuter, and more like a girl,” Pete was sufficiently distracted to admit. “Aw, look at her little pony tail and her overalls. She’s so . . . small and cute! I bet she walks through cemeteries looking like that and it’s all ‘please don’t hurt me scary vampires, and then when you are just about to sink your fangs into her—poof! You’re dust.”

His enthusiasm struck Jeannie as ghoulish. “Okay,” she muttered under her breath. ‘You are really strange.”

The Slayer was walking away from the hotel entrance, slipping between the hotel and the next building where they lost sight of her. “Come on,” Jeannie urged. “Spike said that if we lost her we’d probably find her on our backs. We better move.”

Pete stood up and led the way across the roof. “I’m thinking that we should just skip the following them part and go to Sunnydale,” he said. “We can stop somewhere on the way for a bite, and get there in time to find that place Spike mentioned where we can hole up.”

“What are you going to tell Spike?” she wondered.

“They looked around, they went home,” Pete summed up. “I get the feeling sometimes that he doesn’t think I’m very smart, so it’s not like he’s going to be expecting detailed analysis of what they were doing.”

Jeannie didn’t dispute Pete’s read on Spike’s opinion. It sounded right to her.





Willow woke up to a smell that was irritatingly familiar. It was the aged scent of stale beer, blood, cigarette smoke, and dirt that had been ground into a weathered leather coat and activated by the moisture in the air. There was a window open over her head and she could feel warm, humid air all around her. Her head hurt. She was lying on her side, with her legs curled up, and her head hurt enough that she allowed herself one tiny whimper of pain.

Or maybe she had already been whimpering, because she felt the pressure of a hand on her hair, smoothing it before adjusting an ice pack separated from her skin by a damp, cold piece of toweling.

Someone was taking care of her? Her eyes flew open. Rescue. She hadn’t gotten outside of the hotel, but that was always a long shot. Slowing Spike down, making him waste enough time for the gang to get there and save her had always been more likely.

Her nose wrinkled. It was dark. Night dark, densely dark, with flashes of light and the sound of tires moving over asphalt. She couldn’t see her hand in front of her face, and then realized that it was because her hand wasn’t precisely in front of her face. It was resting on the surface that supported her head. Her fingers moved, identifying wear-softened denim. The hand that smoothed her hair, tucked the length of it back behind her ear and the attached fingers gave her earlobe a tug.

“Coming around, Red?”

It was Spike.

She flung herself back fast enough to dislodge the compress and make her vision swim a bit as the pain in her forehead surged in time with her pulse. Her stomach cramped, swamped by nausea and hunger, as her hands went to her head.

“Head hurts?” he guessed. “Evidence that it is still attached, and should you want to keep it that way, you should put a bit of effort into working on your ‘I’m harmless, and helpless, and just trying to get along with the undead’ persona,” he said, adopting a mocking girlish register.

Willow heard him, she just couldn’t be moved to do much more than hold her head and wait for the pounding to subside.

He made an exasperated sound. “Silly bint. You were all comfy and quiet and you had to go move around and make yourself feel worse,” he chided, patting the seat beside his hip. Something plastic crinkled in his hand. “Frozen peas,” he told her. “It will help with the swelling. You went head first into a solid glass door. Lay your head down and close your eyes.”

She turned to face what she now realized was the seat back of the front seat of the DeSoto, resting her head against the plastic bag. Her hand went first to her forehead, feeling the dried blood there and then to her bruised jaw. She remembered hitting the plate glass revolving door. The sore jaw took longer to come together in her mind. After they had returned to the room and Spike had dumped her on the bed he had gotten into an argument with Colin. Then what? She remembered getting up with an idea of going into the bathroom to look at her forehead and Spike saying her name sharply.

“You hit me,” she concluded.

“Yeah,” he cracked a window and lit a cigarette. “You’ve gotten off light so far. Fortunately for you the sheer inconvenience of keeping you alive after I beat the hell out of you occurred to me before I beat the hell out of you.”

He didn’t hit her then. That happened later. He grabbed her arm in a grip that wasn’t just meant to keep her near him or steer her in a direction, though that had been a part of it, second to inflicting pain.

“And that’s it?” She wasn’t buying it for a second.

He chuckled. “Possibly. That’s up to you, pet. Kidnapper, kidnappee. You’re supposed to try to escape, and I’m supposed to stop you. Remember? We’re just doing our parts. You’re getting better at it, and good for you, but this isn’t Peewee League. I do keep score, and I’m winning. I intend to keep winning.”

If her arm was bruised, it wasn’t registering as competition for her head. She pondered the possibility of having a concussion. The sports analogy threw her, and then creeped her out. “Eeeew! Don’t tell me that you lurk around playgrounds watching Little League games because that’s just—“

“Evil? I’m a vampire. Evil,” he reminded her, and then he grinned. “Nothing like a soda pop sweetened sweaty little appetizer. You know what they say. The salt brings out the sweetness.”

She turned her head to look up at him in horrified disbelief. “That’s disgusting.”

He looked down at her. “You didn’t think I was bluffing about killing that lawyer in the hotel. You decided that it was an acceptable loss if you got away. I’m not burdened with morality, Red. You however are, so thanks for the helpful victim selection tip.”

With a stab of unease, Willow realized that she really hadn’t thought that he was bluffing and that if she had it to do over, she would probably have made the same choice. It was a value-oriented decision. The three lawyers they had dinner with had gone into the bad guy column and she had not been willing to sacrifice her shot at escape for one of them. Could she bluff?

“You kill people all the time. It’s what you do, and it’s what you’ll continue doing,” she said, keeping her voice steady. “I’m past caring what moves you to kill, or what I might or might not have to do with it.”

He smiled at that. “Nice try,” he told her. “But if it was true, you wouldn’t have told me. You would have held on to that as a trump in case it happened again.”

Bluff called. She gritted her teeth and considered telling him that since he thought she was bluffing, it was just as effective if he was wrong. That was too convoluted for her aching head. Instead she probed the margins of the goose egg on her forehead. It felt spongy and sore, which made her press on it to see how sore and spongy it was. Not one of her better ideas. Her vision swam with funny black spots and she found herself breathing through her mouth to cut down on the stinky car smell while she worked on remaining conscious.

“Where is Georgia?” she asked after a minute.

“Took off with Colin,” he told her.

“And the others?” Might as well figure out what she was up against.

He ignored that. “Harmony? I think they found her in San Francisco and took her back to Sunnydale. What a treat that must be, trying to get something useful out of her.”

Willow shifted around, trying to find a more comfortable position. She settled for bracing her feet against the passenger side door and crossing her arm over her waist to shift her weight away from the edge of the seat.

Snarky comments about Harmony. She had traded them with Buffy and Xander and Cordelia and most recently, Georgia. She wasn’t forgetting that Harmony got her into this mess, and she was still grateful that she wasn’t dead, which she grudgingly credited Spike for. Still, snide comments about Harmony lacked their normal appeal. She had the distinct impression that being a vampire wasn’t working out so well for her childhood nemesis. She closed her eyes, half expecting him to shake her awake. She was tired and hungry and cold, though the interior of the car wasn’t cold at all. It was possible that she was genuinely sick or maybe she was bleeding internally and would go to sleep and not wake up again. She had read somewhere that that could happen with head trauma. The way her luck was running lately, she’d wake up with brain damage.




No one was saying it, but Buffy had screwed up. Hugely. The missed telephone call had cost them at least three hours. It may have cost Willow more. The drive back to Sunnydale was conducted in silence so thick that Giles had been moved to turn the radio on. Oz was in the back. Angel had taken over driving for him. Xander was pretending to be asleep, but since he tended to sleep with his mouth open and he wasn’t, it was a given that he was pretending.

She wanted to tell them that she was sorry, but every time she tried someone changed the subject or Xander made a joke.

The only good that had come out of the trip to Sacramento is that they were now less a vampire. Harmony and Angel had gotten inside the hotel lobby, and once there, Harmony had stubbornly refused to leave. Angel might have made an issue of it, or at least staked her, but then a pair of vampires entering the lobby rescued Harmony and volunteered that Spike had taken off for parts unknown with Willow less than ten minutes ago. The older male vampire wished him luck in finding him, which hinted that Spike, never able to play well with others very long, had lost some allies. He even went so far as to describe the car that he thought Spike was driving, and said that he was pretty sure that he was heading to Los Angeles.

Outnumbered and not entirely disappointed to be rid of Harmony, Angel had decided that the information was a fair trade and backed out of the lobby. There was a less than graceful moment with the revolving door followed by a startling impression—the sharp scent of a strong cleaning solution that almost, but not entirely masked the scent of blood, and then he was on the street, alone. Oz and Xander were circling the block in the van. Buffy would be doing a perimeter sweep with Giles.

He had an itchy feeling that Spike had just barely gotten away, that he was still close.



Stupid, Stupid. Stupid. It matched the dull ache throbbing in Willow’s head. The keyboard. How could she have forgotten the keyboard? How had it not occurred to her to hide the keyboard and the billing statement behind the television?

They were staying at a Marriott Express off the highway. There was no restaurant, but given their early morning check in the desk clerk had given them extra coffee for the coffee maker in the room, juice in foil sealed plastic cups, and a paper plate with bagels, lite cream cheese and melon slices from the complimentary continental breakfast bar that would be set up in the lobby in a few hours.

The room was equipped with a multi-line phone, data ports, and a television with game station and Internet TV. Spike was exploring the later. He was laying on his stomach at the foot of the bed with the keyboard in front of him as he typed, using the hunt and peck method.

The padded headboard that was bolted flush to the wall didn’t provide any bondage opportunities, so she was handcuffed to Spike. Naturally, he waited until after she had used the bathroom, because otherwise she would have come up with another gross bodily function to inflict on him.

She chewed a piece of dry skin off her lower lip while she conducted an internal debate with herself on how disgusting she was willing to be. It was a train of thought that was more pleasant than dwelling on the conversation they had had earlier on the balcony that kept trying to push through to the front of her brain.

She was on her back, looking up at the popcorn ceiling, feeling the small movements of Spike’s fingers on the keyboard through the handcuff. Her arm was extended over her head, curling around the top of her head. She considered yanking her wrist back just to annoy him and concluded that it was preferable to being disgusting but potentially more painful for her.

She jerked her elbow to the side.

For her troubles he rolled away from her and then resettled himself half on and half off her, holding her chin. “Getting bored?”




Spike hadn’t given a full ten seconds thought to any idea of beating the hell out of Willow. After they had gotten on the road and it had gotten dark enough to make a quick stop at a store for cigarettes and the bag of frozen peas that he had made a compress of, he had gotten her sorted out with her head on his thigh so he could mind the compress and drive.

The blow to her head had put things in perspective. She was too easily damaged, Georgia wasn’t around to take care of her, and he still needed her alive and relatively mobile. He really didn’t fancy carting around a badly injured girl. He also had to face the fact that threats of violence simply were not effective. She was all to aware that he was motivated to keep her alive and he strongly suspected that she lacked the capacity to understand how badly he could hurt her, which could only be established by doing enough hurt to get her attention.

Getting a bit seared in the revolving door had driven home the fact that if not for some incredibly good luck on his part, this was the second time she had managed to make a break for it and she damn near got away. He was going to have to find another way to establish and maintain control, and the most effective way to do that was to make her do it for him.

He drove until a little after four in the morning and found a cluster of hotels around an outlet mall off the highway. There was a low hanging mist that shrouded the road, and the headlights cut through it, making the mist glow. Heat from her body had turned the peas under her head to mush. He combed his fingers through her hair to wake her up and she cried a bit before she realized where she was.

Walking unsteadily, with his hand on the small of her back, she looked like a mess, hair tangled, clothes wrinkled from sleeping across the front seat in them, her forehead and jaw bruised. Big green eyes, luminous with unshed tears, completed the woebegone aspect of her appearance.

The desk clerk had taken in her battered appearance. Spike had offered no excuses or explanations. It was interesting. People were funny. In this decade domestic violence was no longer a dirty secret and neither were the things that adults sometimes did with children. You could see the suspicion forming and then something approximating good manners and an unwillingness to subject themselves to someone else’s problems took over and the victim became invisible. Or in the case of the desk clerk, a collection of needs that could be addressed with a hastily assembled plate of food and some plastic juice cups and sample sized packages of aspirin and antibiotic ointment.

After they were checked in, they had gone back to the car to get things for Willow. She seemed relieved to find the bundle of toiletries and the hastily packed bag of clothes. At random she tugged a plastic sheathed garment on a hanger out of the bag. It was another Capri pants set in pink and white check. She frowned at it, and he really didn’t need her to say, “blue jeans, t-shirt, sneakers,” under her breath to guess at what she was really thinking about the silky pink and white ensemble.

Once they reached the room, she fell on the food. She hadn’t had a meal in over twenty-four hours. She ate two plain bagels with cream cheese without complaint, though from the expression on her face he could tell that she didn’t think much of the bagels. All the while she was alertly studying the room, despite the headache that made her push her fingertips into her eyes occasionally as if she could blot out the discomfort.

Then she retreated to the bathroom, which gave him a moment to study the room rather than watch her to see what she was picking up on. It was a fairly generic hotel room in a building that was less than five years old. There was a vestibule from the door to the room proper that held a closet space and a small mini refrigerator in a utility configuration with an ironing board that hung on the wall from a bracket that supported an iron. A small four-pot coffee maker rested on top of the mini refrigerator with a basket of coffee things, two glass mugs, an ice bucket and another pair of glasses covered with pleated paper coasters.

He opened the door to put the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign out and shut it, throwing the dead bolt and the safety lock for good measure before checking out the rest of the room. Claiming that she could stake him by levitating a pencil had gotten his attention. Having heard about her little beer bottle missile success had him studying the room for potential hazards. The light fixtures were attached to the walls and ceiling. He went through the drawers of the two bedside tables, dresser, and entertainment center, collecting two pencils that went into an inside pocket of his coat.

He found the game station controller and a keyboard. Curious about her adventure with the Internet, he made a mental note to find out more about that.

Before she was out of the bathroom, teeth cleaned, face scrubbed, he was there with the handcuffs, pushing her against the wall hard enough that her breath left her in a rush. He snapped a handcuff on her right wrist and fastened the other cuff to his left wrist. She pressed herself flat against the wall, obviously bracing herself for more, her heart rate increasing in little spurts as her imagination started working against her.

“I never promised not to try to escape,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “We’ll talk about that,” he dismissed the claim, rooting in his pocket for the packet of antiseptic and the aspirin. She had blotted away the dried blood on her forehead and the lump that had formed had decreased a bit. Like most head wounds, it had bled a lot and looked much worse than it actually was. Her skin was broken above her hairline and about a half inch into her forehead. He tore the antiseptic foil with his teeth and squeezed out a bit of the ointment on her forehead, dabbing it into the cut.

He gave her the aspirin. She needed something to wash it down so, awkwardly tethered by the handcuffs, he was forced to follow as she got a glass and went back into the bathroom to fill it from the tap. In a way, it confirmed his earlier thoughts on the matter. Being tethered to her twenty-four hours a day was going to get old fast for both of them. He watched her in the mirror as her eyes darted to the toilet, probably wondering if she could convince him that she needed to use it so soon after she had come out of the bathroom. While she was sorting that out, he was eyeing the bathtub with manufactured interest.

She took the aspirin and refilled the glass of water. He refrained from rolling his eyes and gave her handcuffed wrist a tug to get her moving. Bypassing the queen sized bed, he walked over to the north facing sliding glass door, pushing the drapes and blinds aside to unlock and open it. There was a tiny balcony with a pair of metal-framed lawn chairs around a small glass table. He stepped out on the balcony and for a moment they got tangled up. He caught her fingers in the hand that was tethered to her and turned to lean against the railing, finding a cigarette while she perched on the edge of a chair, looking out at an outlet mall strip that had been visible from the highway.

He lit his cigarette. They were on the fourth floor of a six-story hotel. He ran his fingertips over his jaw, testing the beard stubble that was coming through.

“It’s going to be light soon,” she observed.

He nodded. “It’s about twenty minutes away,” he estimated without reference to the sky. His gaze fixed on her. She was leaning forward enough that her hair was falling around her face, veiling her expression.

“I’ve been wondering about something,” his voice was deceptively mild. “What do you think is going to happen if I don’t get what I want?”

After a moment of hesitation, she lifted her head to look up at him with a blank expression.

He smiled. “You’re tired, your head hurts, and you’ve been wondering when I’m going to do something to hurt you for hours,” he summarized. “Try to pay attention? This is one of those things that’s more important to you than me,” he said, sounding like a guidance counselor. “Do you think that if you manage to get away from me that old Spike is going to give up?”

He watched comprehension forming in her eyes. He nodded. “That’s right, kitten. I’m not going to stop. I’ll keep coming back,” he paused to take another drag on his cigarette, exhaling a lungful of smoke before he resumed. “You don’t want that, and if there’s another way to do this, I’ll go along. That makes us on the same side.”

“What is it that you want so badly?” she asked.

He shook his head. “It’s not important. What’s important is that I want it and that I’m willing to give a little to get it. That’s free. That’s a free piece of meaningful information. You’ve made your priorities clear. You want to go home, and you want me to leave your mates alone. Fucking you, as delightful as that has been, isn’t worth trading on without getting what I want. It’s a distant second, at best.”

She put the glass on the small table beside her and then wished that she hadn’t. Holding the glass had given her something to do with her free hand.

“You are going to get yourself hurt. You are going to get people killed if you keep this up,” he told her. “That works for me, too, but I think you are going to have a hard time living with it, and Red? Push it, and I’ll make sure that you are the last one standing.” He reached out with the hand tethered to hers, pushing her hair away from the side of her face. “I’ll make sure that you are around to watch.”

Later, when she started squirming around while he was surfing the Internet, he figured that she was probing at the boundaries that existed between them. She couldn’t help it. Partially it was boredom and a need for distraction from a furiously scheming brain that she couldn’t shut off. He had a notion of what she might try next.

He pushed the keyboard off the end of the bed, letting it fall to the floor with a sound that made her flinch. According to the clock above the television it was seven in the morning. By now the Scooby gang would be back in Sunnydale. He found the key to the handcuffs and unlocked them, climbing off the bed to retrieve the cell phone from his coat.

“Angel’s phone is on the speed dial, and you know the rest of their phone numbers,” he pointed out. “I’m going to go take a shower. Call them. Walk out of here, if that suits you. You can do anything you want. I’ve told you what I’ll do,” he pointed out, tossing the phone to the bed beside her, feeling her watching him as he left her.



She didn’t quite believe it. Even as she heard the shower come on, she reached out for the cell phone, half expecting him to appear. She held it for a moment and then flipped open the cover, staring at the buttons in a numb sort of way. Were the keys to the Desoto in his coat? She slid off the bed to check and found them, his wallet and the confiscated pencils. Out the door, with the phone, and the keys, and money with a good idea of what direction she had to go to get home, she could be there in a matter of hours. She had been a little surprised to find that Spike had left Sacramento and driven south, which made them closer to Sunnydale.

Not that it solved any of her problems. Not like the pencils could. She held them in her hand for another moment and then slipped them back into the pocket. The drapes and blinds had already suggested a kind of final solution. She didn’t have to get to them to move them. All she had to do was wait for the right moment.

From now on, she was on her own. As much as she wanted to talk to Buffy or Giles or Xander—but not Oz, she wasn’t ready to talk to Oz—she was on her own.

She called Angel instead, using the speed dial that Spike had pointed out to her. He answered right away, probably expecting a call. Spike had said something about calling them. He thought it was Spike calling and answered the phone that way, but he quickly caught on, and his tone of voice changed. “Willow?”

“Uh-huh,” she confirmed. “You really don’t like Spike, do you?” she observed. It was a neutral topic. “I guess this is the ‘I’m alive’ call,” she went on. “Alive, and . . . I’ve been better, but I’m okay,” she said.



After they returned to Sunnydale, Buffy said something about making a quick patrol. Normally Angel would have gone with her, but Giles spoke first and it was clear that he thought that he needed to talk to her. She was beating herself up about missing the call that morning.

That left Angel, Xander and Oz together again in Giles living room. Oz had finally gone to sleep in the van, but he looked like hell. Xander had slept through most of the trip back and was already moving to the kitchen to find something to eat. Oz gestured to him. “Why didn’t you go with?”

“You know why,” Angel pointed out. “She needs to hear this from Giles,” he looked at Oz. “And, maybe you. She thinks it is her fault that we didn’t get there in time.”

Xander peered at them in the living room through the opening above the breakfast bar. “It isn’t her fault,” he defended Buffy. “She’s wiped out. She had other stuff on her mind. It could have been any of us.”

The expression on Oz’s face was unconvinced, but he didn’t want to argue with Xander, and it didn’t matter who was at fault. It was just slightly less stomach churning to think about than what happened when Spike found out that she had gotten a message through to them or where she might be now, or why they didn’t do anything but tell her to hang on because they would have the Gem of Amara soon and that was the safest of all options.

“He’ll call here, won’t he?” Oz guessed.

Angel nodded. “I think so.”

Oz sat on the long couch. “I’m not leaving then.”

He was asleep by the time Giles got in from a patrol that included walking Buffy home and staying to tell Joyce what had happened in Sacramento after Buffy had gone up to her room to get a few hours sleep.

Unlike Xander, Giles had let Buffy talk, and let her accept the responsibility for their failure. It was never easy, or always fair, but she needed to get past it and he didn’t see that happening as long as Xander was making excuses or Angel and Oz were not commenting.

He felt old when he came home to find Oz sleeping heavily on his couch. Xander had gone to the tunnel to find out where they were on the dig. Angel was planning to leave while it was still dark. Giles got ready for bed and lay awake, listening for the phone. Like Angel, he was convinced that Spike would call here to make sure that they had actually returned to Sunnydale.




Angel was cutting through an alley to get to an access tunnel that would take him to the tunnel they were working in when his cell phone rang. He checked the number and was surprised to find that it was the same number that Spike had called from earlier.

Who was the bigger idiot? Spike telling them to high tail it back to Sunnydale, or else and then calling a cell to check up on them? Or him for assuming that his grand childe was smarter than that?

“I should have staked you the first time you called me ‘mate’,” he told him in lieu of greeting. There was a long pause before Willow started talking in a rush. He hardly heard what she was saying to him.

“Where are you?” Angel asked, stopping in the middle of an alley. “Is he there?”

Her eyes went to the closed bathroom door. The shower was still running. “Yeah,” she said. “He’s here,” she closed her eyes. “Look, just give him what he wants, okay? It’s the only way to make this work without anyone getting hurt or worse.”

“Oh, Willow,” Angel was disappointed for her. She sounded like she was ready to throw in the towel. “You don’t know what he wants, do you?”

“It’s some artifact thing-y, right?” she shook her head. “Just give it to him. He’ll—we have a kind of agreement that he’ll leave us alone,” she said, her voice thickening as her throat tightened.

“You can’t trust him,” Angel picked up on the change in her tone of voice. A sense of urgency swept over him. He knew what Spike could be like. He could bully and charm his way into getting what he wanted almost more effectively than he could fight.

“You have a better idea?” she found herself asking, wanting to cut him off before he got warmed up to a rant on the subject. “Because I’m running out of good ideas here,” frustration crept into her tone of voice. “I’m doing my best, but—“

“You don’t know what he wants,” Angel insisted.

“I don’t care what he wants,” a fine thread of hysteria had crept into her voice. “I want to come home, and—“ she made herself stop before she said the words that were forming in her head. Her two best escape attempts had involved them. Instead of finding a car and driving away from the gas station in San Francisco, she had waited for the police Angel had sent to arrive. She had sent three emails and waited over twenty-four hours for someone to come get her, and she would have been better off if she had emailed the Watcher’s Council, not that they had ever impressed her with being quick to react.

“I know,” he said. “Calm down, okay? Willow the only reason he’s let you talk this long is because he knows that hearing you like this is going to upset everyone even more. It’s emotional blackmail.”

An awful idea starting forming in her mind. Whatever Spike wanted it wasn’t something they were willing to give him, even to save her. No. That couldn’t be right. Buffy, Xander, and Oz wouldn’t go along with that. Giles wouldn’t. Angel wasn’t saying what she was imagining.

“He’s threatening to kill me,” it was a little dramatic, but essentially true. “Why does he have to resort to emotional blackmail on top of that? Is the idea that he’s going to kill me less upsetting if you don’t know that I’m upset about potentially being dead, or undead?”

Angel winced. “That’s not what I mean. Whatever he’s telling you, it’s a lie, Willow. He’s manipulating you. You can’t trust him,” he insisted, alarmed by the tone of her voice. “You’ve gotten away from him once, and we almost had him tonight. You can do this. You’ve proven it. That’s why he’s telling you that he’ll leave your friends alone if he gets the Gem of Amara, but you can’t believe him.”

“What is the Gem of Amara?” she asked, sounding a bit calmer.

“It’s something vampires have been seeking for centuries,” Angel began. This was wrong. Spike had put her on the phone before but never for more than a few seconds. “If he gets his hands on it, he’ll be unstoppable. He’ll say anything, do anything to get it. You can’t trust him.” His sense of just how wrong it was that Spike hadn’t cut this off was setting off alarms. “Why is he letting you talk this long?” he demanded. “Willow? Where is he?”

Panicking at the tone of his voice, Willow cut him off. “I’ve got to go, Angel,” she said.

“He’s not there, is he?” Angel guessed. Damn it! “He’s—Willow, get out. Wherever you are, it’s day. Get outside. He can’t follow you. We’ll come get you. Don’t help him, don’t—“

She found the ‘end’ button and pressed down on it so hard that the phone beeped and she dropped it, burying her face in her hands. Angel was right. She was helping Spike, and it was stupid and cowardly. She darted across the room and stopped, making herself go back for the phone. She needed the phone. She grabbed his coat, dropping the phone as she frantically searched for the two pencils in the inside pocket, hearing the shower cut off.

No more time. She ran for the door, twisting the knob and pulling it back only to have it hang up on the safety lock. The bathroom door opened and Spike reached around her to push the door shut. Water from his arm dripped on her as he unfastened the safety lock.

He tugged the coat out of her hands. “I’m fond of the coat, pet,” he reminded her, making no move to stop her as she sidestepped him, bumping up against the mini refrigerator. He had a towel draped around his hips. Calmly, completely unruffled, he hung up the coat, giving her his back. She clutched the pencils in her hand tighter and lunged. He seemed to be expecting that too, effortlessly deflecting her arm and then seizing her wrist in an unbreakable grip.

Backing her into the corner, he held her wrist against the wall, exerting just enough pressure that her wrist started to ache. Moving with careful deliberation, he pried the pencils out of her hand. Her knees went out from under her when he swung his arm, half expecting him to back hand her, but the when the swing was completed the two pencils were embedded in the drywall backing of the closet and she was sliding down the wall to sit on the floor with her knees pulled up.

He tilted his head to one side, looking at her like he didn’t know quite what to make of this behavior. Spotting the phone on the floor, he picked it up and checked the last number dialed. She had called Angel. Not the Watcher or the Slayer or her beau ideal, Oz. She had called Angel. A solid choice in an emergency when you needed a clear, cool head—even as much as he detested Angel, he had to give him that.

“What did he say to you?” he asked. She was shaking a little, and aware of it, so she was trying to keep it under control. Her breath was coming in hard, shallow gasps.

“Hmmm?” She had her arms around herself like she was cold. “What ever he said to you,” he felt his way through it cautiously, “I’m thinking, getting yourself killed wasn’t the main theme. Right?”

“Did I mention that you can do anything you want short of taking my coat and staking me?” he asked with a hint of asperity. “I thought the later was more or less implied,” his voice trailed off as she lifted her head.

“Shut up,” she gritted out, pushing her hair out of her face. Her eyes were glassy with unshed tears. “We aren’t friends, and I can’t do anything I want without staking you, and you know that as well as I do.”

He started to smile, “Worked it out on your own?” he sounded oddly approving. “You’d make a hell of a vampire, pet.”

“Actually, not,” she retorted. “She screwed everything up and she was pretty much a disaster, and Buffy kicked her ass,” she muttered, which made her sound loonier than Dru until he remembered that she had told him about meeting herself as a vampire.

She scowled at him, turning away, letting her head rest against the cool exterior of the mini refrigerator while she tried to remember everything that Angel had said. The artifact was the Gem of Amara and it was something vampires wanted and had sought for a long time. Angel said it would make Spike unstoppable, but so far, Spike was unstoppable, so it was hard to get how much worse it could be. She half expected to find out that he was looking for something slightly less scary. Like an ancient artifact that would help him get Drusilla back or make him the evil Indiana Jones of the vampire set. If you paid attention to the movies, Dr. Jones never really dug up much of anything. He was usually stealing stuff from people who did. Evil people. Since this was Spike, the whole thing was inverted and he was stealing something from the good guys.

What did Angel mean when he said unstoppable?

She nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard the all too familiar sound of duct tape being torn off a roll and lifted her head to see Spike with the duct tape in his hands. He gave a spare shake of his head. “Only for you in a round about way,” he told her and walked across the room to tape the panels of the drapes together and around the sliding glass door until they were secure.

Her head thumped down on her chest as she realized that he had already figured out that she had considered the danger that the windows posed for him, say at high noon. She stared at him wearily as he walked back over to her to lay the roll of duct tape on top of the refrigerator. He was still wearing nothing but the towel and it was sort of droopy around his waist. The droplets of water on his skin had mostly dried.

He found a comb inside one of his coat pockets and dragged it through his hair until it was in its normal combed back configuration. Returning the comb to the inside pocket of his coat, he held one hand out to her. “Not planning on staying there are you?” he asked when she didn’t take his hand immediately.

She placed her hand in his and let him pull her to her feet. He gave her a little push to move her away from the refrigerator and got a juice cup for her before going to the bed and turning the side near the door down.

He was shaking the juice cup with one hand and loosening the towel with the other while she hovered just outside the vestibule. He tossed her the towel. “Hang that for me, please,” he requested as he got into bed, making himself comfortable.

She hung the towel in the bathroom. His jeans and t-shirt were in on the floor. She unbuttoned her blouse and slipped out of the walking shorts, folding them neatly and leaving them on the vanity. She picked up his t-shirt and put it on to sleep in before she came out, picking up the keyboard from the foot of the bed to put it away. Her wardrobe choice elicited no comment from him.

This connection was much more stable than the one at the other hotel. It hadn’t timed out even after a fairly long period of inactivity. Her email account was still set up for remote access, but she decided not to try it. She considered backing out of the chat and going to a search engine to look for information about the Gem of Amara. She sat on the foot of the bed with the keyboard, her back to him.

A private message popped up on the screen and she scrolled the screen to get the name of the room he was visiting. The title of the room was ‘Brits in America’. “Someone is inviting you to chat with them,” she pointed out. He read the message on the screen.

“Hello,” he was amused. “Say something back?” he made it a question.

She squinted at the screen and shrugged, testing out ‘hello, I’ve been kidnapped by vampires’.

Spike found his cigarettes and lit one. The t-shirt she was wearing was a new one, not yet stretched out of shape with wear. The color didn’t suit her. He read her message and rolled his eyes.

The reply appeared. “How’s that working out for you?”

Spike gave a short laugh.

Discouraged, Willow logged out and turned off the television. She left the keyboard on top of the dresser the television rested on.

He turned down her side of the bed and let her get settled before handing her the juice cup, “In case you get thirsty,” he explained.

“You are very thoughtful,” she said, bitterness underscoring the comment.



Angel was swearing at himself, knowing that he had screwed up, and considered redialing the number. His hesitation in the alley had cost him a bit of time and he was in a hurry to get to shelter with the sun rising. There were enough buildings in this part of Sunnydale to provide shade and he moved through the shadows like a pedestrian in a crowded city, finding a path, and moving swiftly to clear it before it disappeared. He redialed the number, but no one answered.

He had been caught off guard by Willow calling him, but he knew that he was right about what it suggested. Spike was starting to wear her down, to convince her that it was in everyone’s best interests that she go along and be a good hostage. Any advantage that had been gained when Spike lost the support of the vampires that he had following him had been neutralized.

He knew how it worked. He’d done it himself more times than he cared to recall.




They were lying side by side in bed. Spike was willing to go to sleep. He was tired. Willow had slept though much of the drive, but mentally and physically she was exhausted, and she dreaded going to sleep. It was hard to believe that twenty-four hours ago she had been congratulating herself on her imminent rescue.

“Damn it,” Spike swore, making her flinch. “I got your copy of the Star and I left it behind.”

“Oh,” Willow wondered what made him think of it now. She felt a strange desire to say something like ‘it was the thought that counted’ even as she was telling herself that it really wasn’t.

“Giant crossword puzzle,” he reminded her.

“Yeah.” Her mind was not in crossword puzzle mode.

“What’s a—“ there was a pause, “ten letter name for Christopher Robin’s bear?”

That was too easy, even for her numbed brain. “Edward Bear.”

He nodded. “Your turn.”

She thought for a second. “Tom Sawyer’s girl friend. Twelve letters.”

“Becky Thatcher,” he turned toward her. “What’s the name of Bianca’s suitor in The Taming of the Shrew?”

“Which one?” she stalled.

“The one who wins her,” he prompted.

“Bernardo?”

He propped his head up on his bent arm. “Your turn.”

“For Whom the Bell Tolls refers to a line in a poem. Who is—“

“Donne,” he said before she finished asking. “There are two poems that begin with the line, ‘Come live with me and be my love’. One is by Donne. Name the other poet.”

“Christopher Marlowe,” she said. She turned her head to look at him. “Have you ever just read the cards from Trivial Pursuit?”

He gave her a long, amused look. “Isn’t that cheating?”

Maybe, a little. She made a face. “It’s not like I can remember the answers to the sports questions.”

The air conditioner kicked on with a hiss of cold air. He picked up a piece of her hair and rubbed it between his fingers. “Does your head hurt?”

She didn’t look away. “A little, but mostly I’m just not looking forward to having sex with someone who punched me in the face. I’m odd that way.”

“Yeah? I’m all over you trying to stake me, or get me staked,” he told her.

She didn’t believe that for an instant. “That’s big of you.”

“I’m a hundred and twenty-six,” he pointed out. “I don’t hold grudges. At least not for very long,” he amended when her expression turned incredulous. He thought about telling her that he wasn’t interested in sex, though as soon as he had the thought it died. It wasn’t a lack of interest that he was feeling. She was just so beaten down at the moment. It probably wasn’t going to last very long and he knew he ought to consider it an accomplishment, but he didn’t like seeing her like this.

It didn’t make him want to say anything cheerful and encouraging, which would have really been unnerving.

He smiled at the tone of voice. “There’s a story that starts in Paris, not that it matters. It could be anywhere. Two lovers at a park. The story is about the woman, so all the details are about her.”

He sat up, pushing aside the sheet, grasping the hem of his pilfered t-shirt. Her arms moved, as if to hold the t-shirt in place, but his eyebrows rose and she realized that she was going to loose before an argument began. He pulled the t-shirt up over her head, and she cooperated insofar as to lift her arms and shoulders off the bed. He tossed the t-shirt to the foot of the bed while she settled back against her pillow, feeling the cool air from the air conditioner blowing across her arm and her stomach.

“Park, Paris,” he reminded himself. “Right, then. So, there they are, sitting on a bench at the edge of a park. She’s wearing a suit and a silk blouse and long gloves that come up over the sleeves of her suit. That was a good look for women,” he recalled with a half smile, thinking of Dru in a hat with a net veil, her lips painted scarlet. The things she could do with a hatpin were not to be believed.

She thought she knew what he was talking about from old movies on cable and the sensibility they reflected that put Barbara Billingsley in a slim skirt and silk blouse with a pearl necklace at the base of her throat while she vacuumed the floor in an episode of Leave it to Beaver.

“There’s a hired car at the corner, and he takes her to it, though she didn’t know they were meant to go anywhere in particular. Inside the car, he pulls down the shades—this was before tinted windows,” he elaborated when he saw her lips twitch at this detail.

“Shades? Like on a roll, or mini-blinds?” she looked at him like she thought he was teasing her, but she was listening to him with a tiny frown that puckered the space between her eyebrows.

“On a roll, of course. Mini-blinds?” he shook his head at that. ’He tells her to take off her garter belt and her knickers—“

Willow snorted, rolling her eyes. “Sure,” she said, looking annoyed. “And she does that, in a cab?”

He laughed at her expression. It wasn’t disapproving, just highly skeptical.

“It’s a game,” he scolded. “Well, it seems like it’s a game,” he amended. “And, yeah, she does that.” He didn’t bother to tell her the amazing things French women did during and after World War II when everyone in Paris existed in suspended time. The Germans were outwardly polite, in a relentless sort of way, and they controlled everything. After they were gone there was the lingering residue of the war, the desperate celebratory excess combined with an unstated longing for someone to please give it all meaning.

He waited for her to comment, but she just shook her head in denial, the product of a different generation, and a different sensibility. The thing that was so hard to imagine about those years was how quietly so many people went and did exactly what they were told to.

His fingers traced the skin just above the waistband of her knickers. They were black to match the shorts she had been wearing, mismatching the flesh-toned bra she wore. “She’s sitting there, not on her skirt or slip, but against the cool leather. It’s very discreet,” he teased.

Again with the skeptical look, more highly developed. His index finger lazily extended, tracing the outline of her through the silky panel of her underwear. “He just lets her sit like that, feeling the cool, slippery seat under her, not touching her at all while she wonders where they are going and what this is about.”

She wanted to tell him to stop it. This isn’t subtle. He’s swamped her with difficult choices tonight and it’s all deliberate. A part of her is stuck on the floor next to the door wondering if he would have stopped her if she had gone out the door, or if he would have done exactly what he claimed and let her go.

“There’s another version of the beginning of the story,” he said. “It’s more to the point, but there’s no mystery in it,” he concluded, hooking his finger in the waistband of her knickers and tugging them down past her hips before leaving them there, curious about what she’d do about it. His fingertips drifted up her thigh, over her hipbone where it jutted out a bit.

A small, slightly disgruntled sound escaped her. She sat up so abruptly that she nearly collided with him. Her arms went behind her back to wrestle with the hooks on her bra and she took it off. The knickers followed, both items dropped on the floor beside the bed. She flopped back down with more energy than he had seen in her since he had explained that he wasn’t going to stop coming after them until he got what he wanted. Her expression was grimly martyred.

“What wouldn’t you do for those people?””

That was the question. She didn’t answer, but she didn’t look away, though she was trying to keep her face blank. All it accomplished was to draw more attention to her eyes.

He felt something, a little used muscle that twisted under his chest. It wasn’t affection, though that was there too, though he didn’t examine where it was coming from. He spent too much time with envy not to recognize it right off, so he was almost relieved to see it now. That was what he was feeling: envy.

The look in her eyes drew him. It was irresistible. He combed his fingers through her hair, kissing the space under her eye, near her nose, and then the tip of her nose, and then her lips, feeling her discomfort like a third presence in the room even as she fought her own instincts to try to relax and accept what he was doing.

“It’s not a long drive, and she’s expecting something that explains the darkened car, but he’s talking about everything and nothing in particular while she sits there. And it’s hot. Inside the car, just on this side of uncomfortable. She can feel the sweat trickle down her chest, feel the seat below her growing warmer, and damp. She’s sticking to it a little. It’s distracting. He hasn’t kissed her, or touched her yet.”

She was listening now, despite the distraction of the cool air-conditioned air, turning her skin cool, even to him.

“Then the car stops. One mystery solved when the driver opens the door and she sees that they have come to a house. It’s nothing grand, just a town home in a street full of town homes. He takes her hand and tucks it in the crook of his arm and she can feel the slip and the skirt brushing the backs of her legs with each step. It’s not a bad game, and they’ve played a lot of them.”

He rested his arm on the mattress beside her head, holding his head up with his hand. “On the stairs, in front of the door, he paused, turned to her, and told her he loved her.”

She shook her head. “Oh, that’s so sweet. And then, they go into the house and it’s full of vampires, because he’s a vampire, and she dies.”

He smiled crookedly. “That’s another version of the story without the mystery.”




Buffy lay in bed staring at the wallpapered wall in front of her, the blue white glow of her computer monitor registering in her peripheral vision. Before she went to bed, she sat in front of her computer reading her email. The messages seemed different. Printed on paper they had seemed less real, less authentic.

She was supposed to sleep. Giles said so. He pointed out that a lack of rest and the concentration on the tunneling had played a part in all of them missing the clues that had been dropped. He was in ‘I blame myself’ mode, but willing to spread it around, and share it with her. Their relationship had evolved a lot in the year since she had sent Angel to hell. All of her relationships had. Her mother knew she was the Slayer and had learned to accept it, more or less. She had gotten through some rough spots with Xander and Willow during their senior year. Her relationship with Angel had evolved into a non-relationship.

That was the oddest part of the last two weeks. They had been together nearly every day, and there were times when she looked at him, and she knew exactly what he was thinking or feeling, and it felt so familiar. At the same time, it was like looking at someone she used to know—not that he had changed that much. He hadn’t really changed at all, but when she used to look at him she saw forever, and now she looked at him and saw now and no more.

If Willow was here, they would have walked home tonight and talked about it, and in her eternally optimistic way, Willow would have made it seem like there was a reason to hope that somehow, someway, someday, there was a future and that she would find her way.

Could she make this anymore about herself and what she needed?

Willow had been depending on her. Banking on her. If anything terrible happened to her, Buffy would never forgive herself.




Willow pushed Spike away from her, and he let her, rolling over on his back as she sat up, pulling the sheet up and reaching for the t-shirt he had taken away from her. His hand lifted, almost touching her back. Such a pretty back, unmarked by anything save the freckles that were thickest across her shoulders and a dark, flat mole that was centered between her spine and the right side of her back. She was turning the t-shirt right side out while holding the sheet to her chest.

He went after her. She held the t-shirt away from him, thinking that he was going to take it away from her and gasped when his hands bracketed her rib cage and he kissed the mole on her back instead.

“Yow! Hands! Cold!” she yelped. His hands had picked up the cold from the air conditioning, and she squirmed to avoid them.

His hands moved over her warmer skin to her breasts. “They’ll warm,” he said between kisses.



Oz woke with a start. He was on the couch at Giles and it seemed like he was alone there, but he couldn’t be sure. He had some idea that something had woken him, but that it wasn’t the phone.

The door shut behind him. Giles offered him a weary looking half smile. “I didn’t mean to wake you, though I don’t expect you slept well,” he said, holding what looked like the newspaper, folded in thirds, and his mail. “I kept dreaming that the bloody phone was ringing. Must have answered it a dozen times,” he explained with a grimace.

“He hasn’t called?” Oz asked. That sounded bad.

“No,” Giles set the mail and the newspaper down on the counter and went into the kitchen. “I expect you’ll want to stay by the phone,” he guessed. “I’ve an appointment with Luke Holbrook at noon, to get caught up,” he said. “If he hasn’t called by then, will you stay?”

He made it sound like it was a chore that someone had to perform, and Oz found himself agreeing as he walked over to the counter.

Giles put water on to boil and started going through his mail. He got to a crumpled catalog envelope that felt bulky and flipped it over to examine the address before tearing it open. Aside from four badly lit Polaroids of Willow looking terrified with duct tape over her mouth, there was no message. The pictures spoke for themselves. He considered dropping them back into the envelope without making a fuss about it, but Oz was watching him all too closely.

“It’s not as bad as it might be,” he reminded him before he relinquished the Polaroids.

The phone rang and Giles went to answer it, half expecting Spike. It was Angel, calling to say that he had gotten a call on his cell around dawn from Willow and asking Rupert to meet him at the tunnel as soon as possible.





There was a voice in her head that was telling her that she didn’t want this. It was like the long night after they left San Francisco. Clinical and dispassionate, except that he kept talking to her, and his voice was easier to listen to. Between kisses he prodded her to talk to him and she had a vague memory of him encouraging her to go back to being harmless and helpless.

It was like the story he had told earlier. It was all a big evil set piece. It was nothing more to him than a game that he intended to win. And what he didn’t seem to understand is that she did read the answers to all the categories in Trivial Pursuit. When winning was important, she would win, even if it required a little prep work and the retention of a useless piece of sports trivia.

So she kissed him back, because when he was kissing he was no longer talking, no longer insinuating his way into her head. Oz hadn’t been the initiator of sex, she had. She had raised the issue, and pushed them towards a more intimate relationship that he had been more wary of. He had made her feel like a beggar, and sometimes she hated him for that. Spike didn’t love her or care about her or need her and Oz never loved her or cared about her or needed her as much as she wanted him to.

No one did. No one could.

When she took him into her mouth, he didn’t stop her, or suggest that they slow down or talk about it. He adjusted, tangling his fingers in her hair, huskily inviting her to have her way with him.

When she lifted her head to tell him to shut up, he seemed to get it, and he laid a finger across her lips, looking more serious than she had ever seen him and after that he confined himself to the occasional direction or muttered encouragement until they were grappling with each other to reach a climax.

Spike rearranged them so that she was laying on her side, her back against his chest, her head tucked in under his chin, one arm loosely curled around her body. She didn’t settle against him, didn’t relax into the embrace. If anything she tensed and he waited, feeling it coming, like an earthquake, because he was a part of nature that felt them coming. She tried to hold it in, and that made it worse, made her body shake with the effort of keeping it inside.

He didn’t say anything, not when she was shaking, or when she was crying, or when she was cried out and she wiped her nose on the back of her hand. When she moved away from him to get the juice cup and blow her nose, he kept one hand on her hip, his thumb moving in circles as he waited for her to take a chance on leaving the bed, getting dressed and walking out of the room. He wasn’t surprised when she settled back on the bed beside him. She had made her choice. He pulled the covers up around her to give her more cover from the air conditioning, luxuriating in the heat of her body.

“Wake me up when you are ready to eat,” he said, closing his eyes, ready to sleep. She was a strange girl, no doubt about it. The desire to say something kept him awake even as she settled into a fitful sleep. If he had to pick one quality she had that he was drawn to, it was her loyalty, foolish and overdeveloped as it was.