Chapter Twenty-Eight

After Angel left the hotel, Harmony spun around. Her hair flip was made less effective due to dirty hair. Colin was at the desk, settling a bill. Georgia was not looking at her and Harmony had a feeling that nibbled on the edges of her awareness that she was in danger of being ignored. It wasn’t an unfamiliar feeling. Her parents had never had a lot of time for her. It wasn’t personal. They had jobs that kept them busy and they provided her with more than acceptable substitutes for parental attention: credit cards, clothes, membership at the country club, and casual approval.

Cordelia had provided her with a role model—at least until she had gotten involved with the Sunnydale High geek squad, which in retrospect wasn’t as geeky as Harmony once thought. Willow still dressed badly and Xander was hopeless, and Buffy had serious issues, but given the whole fighting demons and vampires gig, they seem a lot less weird and slightly more interesting now that she was a vampire. She didn’t feel particularly evil on most days, but she got how people might have that impression when she was eating them.

She scrubbed at Buffy’s smudgy footprint.

She told herself that Georgia’s effort to ignore her wasn’t personal. It just meant that she needed to try harder to get her attention and ignore the fact that Willow had gotten it without even trying. Not that she wanted the kind of attention that Willow had invited. If you had to pick a side of the predator and prey relationship, predator was the side to be on.

“You wouldn’t believe the stuff that I’ve been through,” Harmony told her.

Georgia didn’t ignore this opening. Most people would have. Ignored it, hoped that if they didn’t participate it might go away, while smiling in a patient kind of way. She wasn’t most people. She was a vampire.

“I don’t care what you’ve been through,” Georgia was blunt. “You weren’t lost in San Francisco. You were left there,” she told Harmony, though unkindness didn’t move her to do so. There wasn’t anything wrong with Harmony that a dose of reality or a stake couldn’t cure in Georgia’s point of view.

Colin heard her and looked over his shoulder at Harmony to see if she was getting the message. Her mouth was open, her face twisting in a childlike mask of astonishment, hurt and frustration. He shook his head at the performance. It probably worked like a charm once upon a lost lifetime ago.

“Fine,” Harmony spat, eyes narrowing. “I’ve got stuff I could be doing. I know what Spike’s really after. I know what it is and where it is. Maybe I’ll just go back to Sunnydale and get it!”

Colin signed the bill and looked over at Harmony. “You look like crap,” he told her. “Are you coming with us?”

She had him at the claim that she knew what Spike was after. Georgia had more than a passing interest in the subject, but she was weighing the cost of getting the information out of Harmony who was throwing Georgia a slightly triumphant look.

“I guess,” Harmony agreed, wondering where they were going and deciding that it really didn’t matter. She didn’t have anyplace to be. If she had stayed with Angel they probably would have taken her back to Sunnydale and thrown her back into the stinky cell with a ration of pig’s blood. A sense of how desperately maltreated she was returned. She had some scores to settle, with Georgia, who had always treated her like crap, and Pete, for dumping her, and Oz for being really, really mean to her, and Buffy—it was a long list.




The heavy equipment brought in to complete the tunnel included a portable generator with a long tube of ventilation hose to keep the fumes out of the sewer access tunnel that was their staging area. They worked slowly. Dr. Holbrook stopped periodically to inspect the tunnel to make sure that the vibration from the specialized drill and saw that he was using were not compromising the tunnel.

For a group of amateurs, Giles and his crew had worked amazingly fast.

When the floor of the vault was found, Dr. Holbrook drilled several holes and insisted that they clear the tunnels, leaving two large fans hooked up to the generator to ventilate the tunnel. Working with a lamp for light, he made new notes on the maps and charts that had been assembled during the dig and told Devon about the projects that UC-Sunnydale had scheduled for archeology students.

Devon had enrolled in college because that was where his fans were. It wasn’t a large group and he was sure he knew all of them by name—except for the thin dark haired girl with the streak of blue in her hair who turned up at too many of his gigs for it to be coincidence, but never spoke to anyone. He had seen her on campus too, black hair with a flash of blue, but she was always on her way somewhere. He didn’t worry about not having a major because he knew what he was going to be and it had never occurred to him to question it. But there was no reason that he couldn’t be an archeologist too, he decided as Dr. Holbrook told him about a dig he had been on in college in Arizona. Their find had amounted to little more than broken pottery shards, but it was buried treasure, and Devon got that, the same way Oz savored flatted fifths.

Angel showed up a bit after dawn, coming through the tunnels. From the clay clinging to his feet it was obvious that he had come through the part of the sewer access tunnel where they had been spreading dirt from the excavation site.

“Did you find her?’ Chris asked.

He gave a spare shake of his head. “No. Oz is at Giles’ place in case there is a call,” he said, deliberately vague in front of Dr. Holbrook, who didn’t have the whole story.

Angel waited until they left to get breakfast to open the cooler and find a container of pig’s blood packed in melted ice. He knew from the look of the ice that the cooler had been repacked at some point.



Vampires dream. Spike’s dream followed the narrative of the story he had started to tell Willow. It was a dream he had had before and the woman who began with him in the park was almost always Drusilla, which was fitting. It was the beginning of a story that he used to read to her that always ended at the same place: at the door. It evolved as all stories told to Dru did, because while she liked to be read to, she had no patience for it and would inevitably take over the story. Over time it was adjusted again, and again until the story was about them and it stopped at the door, with him telling her that he loved her before they went into the house.

She loved all the details, which remained his contribution even after she assumed control of the plot. Vampires don’t sweat, but the sense memory of feeling almost unpleasantly warm—distinctly different than the sudden and searing sensation of being in sunlight—the complex impressions formed by a bead of sweat tracking over skin, were things that they shared with each other. Things that they remembered about being human was a game that he had started, otherwise they would have had nothing to talk about on her worst days when she was hard to reach. He had found that it was possible to distract her for hours with the beginning of the story in the park.

Sometimes he made it spring with the scent of flowers on the air. They had spent an afternoon before television ninety years ago trying to make each other sneeze and then cataloging the sensations that sneezing produced. Dust and pepper still worked, but flowers didn’t, though he distinctly remembered that when he was human flowers had made him sneeze. At other times he made it fall. It was one of the things he missed most about being human. Autumn leaves had a rich scent that was worth savoring, but he missed the way they looked in sunlight, blazing with color, and so did Drusilla. She would bring home different leaves to look at during the day when they were stuck indoors. She might have accompanied him out on those days when he would accept the discomfort of being out in sunlight, and stand in the shade with a blanket held over his head like a tent to look at the sunlit world, but he feared that she would forget that sunlight was deadly to them.

And it was unlikely. Drusilla’s sense of self preservation was intact, even in her worst moments.

It was Drusilla’s story after the door. The narrative was not always possible to understand, but she never tired, never struggled to find something inside the house that pleased her.

He really was not surprised to see that the girl with him in this version of the dream was Willow. It didn’t bother him. He was even amused to find that it was impossible to imagine her in anything suitable to the period. She was wearing overalls and a t-shirt that he knew would be in two colors that should never be brought together but were in Willow. He was curious about what would be inside the house. She had unwittingly written the ending when she cut him off by saying that the house was full of vampires and the girl died.

It was the ending that was most likely for her, without the mystery. She couldn’t understand that there was, behind the door, the potential for all kinds of endings. It didn’t have to be mundane or even particularly sad. In Paris, after the war, there was an appreciation of having died well that came with having lived unwell through a time when dying was possibly preferable. Or at least a lot easier to explain later in the post war years when people wondered about the why and the how of what they had done or failed to do.

Even in his dream, she proved stubborn and practical. The heat made her sleepy. She balked at the door. When he started to run out his tender declaration, she rolled her eyes. He found himself amused by and annoyed with her. It was a game. She bloody well knew it, too, and was being a spoiled brat, refusing to play, but making her own game of that. She sat on the stair instead until the door opened and Drusilla came out to see what he had brought home to her.

She could be unpredictable. That was part of what he loved about Dru, but he was certain that she would approve of the girl that he had chosen to bring home.



Over breakfast Luke Holbrook found himself rigorously quizzed about the protocol for opening the vault. Venting the vault was a first step. He planned to cut the floor of the vault in a single section. It was the quick and dirty approach, but Rupert Giles had stressed that speed was an over-riding consideration and when he talked to Dr. Parrish about the project that Giles was working on, he had stressed that no matter how uncredentialed or unconventional the former high school librarian might appear to be, he was an authority on artifacts associated with religious practices and paranormal rituals and had belonged for over twenty years to an association of scholars based in England that occasionally published in the journals.

It remained to be seen if Devon’s interest would last through a few semesters of hard course work. He seemed to have a genuine aptitude for the field work. As Luke laid out the principals of setting up a grid inside the excavation space, Devon was following along, asking good questions. He immediately grasped the reason for leaving everything in situ and working in a pattern to catalog items. All order tells a story. Even the random, unthinking order of things that people once used, has a story to tell.

Breakfast food and a certain amount of boredom with the minutiae of their efforts was pushing Chris and Dan into sleepy lassitude. Luke offered to give them a ride home. He had a meeting with Giles this morning to make before getting some much needed sleep.




Giles found Angel outside the entrance to the tunnel they had excavated. He was able to conclude from the equipment that had been assembled overnight that the floor to the vault had been reached.

“We could finish this now,” he guessed. A vampire could make short work over the last few inches of stone separating them from the vault, and since air was not an issue for Angel, air quality was also not a concern.

Angel nodded. “We need to talk,” he said. “Willow called, on Spike’s cell.”

“Thank God. Is she all right?”

Angel frowned. “She said that he hadn’t hurt her, or something like that. He’s made some kind of promise to her that if he gets what he wants, he’ll leave her friends alone.”

Giles frowned. That was, if it could be believed, all very well and good for his charges, but hardly acceptable for the people that would suffer in consequence. He did not find it hard to understand why Willow would find it persuasive. There had always been an attitude between Buffy, Xander and Willow that demanded that they limit themselves to the immediate crisis and work from there. It kept them from getting overwhelmed by the sheer challenge of some of the obstacles they had overcome.

He was a Watcher, even if he was unemployed. He could not afford to think that way. “What are you thinking?”

“She’s breaking down,” Angel was blunt. “She’s half way to helping him. He doesn’t have to hurt her. All he has to do is convince her that he will hurt Xander or Oz or Buffy, and that she can keep that from happening, and we’ve played her into his hands already. Right now her confidence in Spike making good on what he is promising is higher than her confidence in us.”

Giles toed a clod of dirt. “Well, yes, it’s been one cock up after another,” he admitted tiredly.

Xander came forward, hands shoved into his pockets. He came to a halt, rocking back on his heels. “We can’t keep screwing this up,” he observed. “We have to have a plan. A plan that is about saving Willow—and keeping Spike from going on a murderous rampage.”

Giles felt the skin across the back of his neck tightening with irritation. Xander was not being deliberately annoying in his state the obviousness. People said that boys were easy and girls were hard, but Giles found the opposite to be true. The girls might chatter happily about mindless teen drama, but ultimately they were steadier in a crisis and pragmatic. With Xander everything was black and white with undertones of frustration.

“She’s not breaking down,” he told Angel. “Not Willow. No way. You think you know us, but you don’t. I know Willow. She might not stand up for herself. When she started getting into the mojo, she didn’t start cooking up ways to even the score with the Cordettes or make herself something she wasn’t. It didn’t even occur to her. That’s Willow. She won’t give up.”

Giles removed his glasses. He found a handkerchief in his pocket and started polishing them. It could be argued that Xander had no idea of the pressure that could be brought to bear on her. The psychology of kidnapping was a subject that would have drawn out his scorn and skepticism. He stubbornly chose to live in a world of absolute moral certainty. Unbidden, the memory of Willow’s triumphant grin as she pulled the pages she had separated from the Books of Ascension came to him. It didn’t mean that Xander was wrong.

“We can’t give up on her,” Xander insisted.



When Spike woke up he was alone in bed and the shower was on. He got out of bed and walked to the bathroom door, finding it unlocked. His jeans were in there, left on the floor when he undressed last night. He lingered at the door a moment, listening until he was sure that what he was hearing was water sluicing over a body, not just water running. He really would not have put it past her to figure out how to buy herself some time by making him think that she was in the shower, and that made him smile even as he registered that the door to the hall was locked from the inside.

Without a care for whoever might be in the hallway, he opened the door and found a newspaper at the foot of the door. There was a plain envelope on top of it. Tossing the newspaper on the unmade bed he opened the envelope and read the computer generated message that had been left for him. The Sunnydale super hero team had arrived too late, launched a dispirited recon, and left. Harmony was back. Colin and Georgia had taken her with them.

They now knew what he was after, what he was trading Willow for. He crumpled the note up and tossed it in a wastebasket, checking the time and turning on the television to check the weather. He was hungry and the slightly stale scent of Willow was clinging to his hands, mixed in with nicotine. Business first, and then playtime.

He went to his coat to retrieve the cell phone, checking the battery setting. It was nearly out of power. He needed to find a new cell phone and replace some credit cards before they were put on hold or maxed out. It was one of the reasons that he had selected the hotel, anticipating finding your better class of business traveler.

His habit was to call the Watcher, but he was curious about where Buffy was. Not once since he had taken Willow had he talked directly to the Slayer. What was going through her head right now? Was she aware of how utterly she had failed Willow? Was she cuddled up with brood boy having a frustratingly incomplete snog? He decided to call the Summers residence to see if she was there.

The phone was answered almost immediately, and from the sound of her voice, he could tell that she had been woken by it. “Rise and shine, cutie. Oughten you be out finding the Gem of Amara for me, or are you worried about chipping a nail?”

“Spike,” she woke up fast to the sound of his voice.

“Buffy,” he found himself relishing the taste of her remarkably silly sounding name. If she wasn’t a Slayer and the bane of his existence, he would have found her nearly as amusing as Red. “Have a nice drive back to Sunnydale?”

“I want to talk to Willow,” she said.

“She’s having a shower,” he reported. “Tends to stay in there a bit, I’ve found. She likes to have a nice soak, and it's one place where I don’t have to worry about her coming up with something creative to escape.”

There was a pause. “Is she okay?”

“She’s got a nasty bump on her head,” he told her, pacing a bit. “Do you know how close she got? Even after I was on to her, she got to the revolving door. She’s made it interesting. Don’t beat yourself up too much about it,” he said, twisting the knife. “I wasn’t that impressed with her to start with either, but I’m all caught up. She’s a clever little thing. Too smart for her own good. It’s up to you and me to keep her from getting herself killed trying to save herself, and you.”

He gave it a beat. “That’s not true,” he said. “I’m not going to kill her—well, it could come to that, but she’s far too interesting to be left dead. Don’t tempt me to experiment, Slayer. I’ll send her back to you to stake. She’s smart and resourceful. I’d give her even money on taking out half of your little gang first.”

“I’ll hunt you down,” she promised.

“Right, then,” he sounded monumentally unconcerned by that prospect. “So, we understand each other? You want Red back alive and in one piece, and I want the Gem of Amara, and here’s a bonus—I’ll consider Sunnydale off limits until the inevitable happens and someone, vampire, demon, careless driver, takes you out of the equation. I’m not going to destroy the world, love. That’s Peaches' thing. So as long as you keep your knickers on, you don’t have any worries.”

He heard the shower shutting off in the bathroom. “I’ll check in later,” he said, thumbing the off button before she could formulate a response to that.

Returning the cell phone to his coat pocket he was left to wait for Willow to emerge from the bathroom. Never patient, he smacked the surface of the door and heard her give a stifled yelp. “Shake a leg in there, or toss out my clothes, will you?”

She decided to follow through on the later and the door opened, letting out a cloud of steamy air. His jeans and t-shirt were bundled in her arms and she looked like she was ready to throw them at him when he barged in. She had a towel wrapped around her head like a turban and another wrapped around her body that barely covered her.

“Get out,” she squeaked, backing up hastily, trapping herself between the long counter beside the sink and the toilet, the top of her towel turban hitting the metal towel rack that was largely empty now. There was a hand towel and a washcloth left unused. She was clutching his clothes to her like they were going to save her from whatever she thought he had in mind.

A drop of water ran down her neck, drawing his attention. He let it go for the moment, ignoring her defensive posture as well. Leaving the bathroom door open to let out the steam, he moved toward her and laid his hand on her cheek. “Hold still,” he admonished, when she tried to press back into the wall, further dislodging her turban. He started to push it back to get a better look at her head and gave up, unwinding it.

She had a nasty bruise, but the swelling had gone down and the cut was pulling together on its own. “Does it hurt?” he asked, running his other hand lightly over her bruised jaw.

“Yes.” Confusion, wariness, and something like gratitude competed for a hold on her. He thought that he understood the gratitude. She was hurting in more ways than one and if he didn’t notice it, then it went unacknowledged. Even if he was the cause of her discomfort, it didn’t make it less comforting that he recognized it.

He smoothed his thumb over the mink of her eyebrow. “Have you taken anything for it?” he asked.

She focused on the wall behind him, the open door, and the de-fogging mirror, anything but the closeness of him. He was naked and completely unselfconscious about it, and she found that she had started to become accustomed to this without loosing any of her awareness of him being naked. The towel she had wrapped around her hair hadn’t fallen to the ground. It was partially trapped between her shoulder and the wall. The cold of the tile was seeping into it, creating an odd assortment of textures at her back where her skin was prickling with gooseflesh as he examined her face with fingers that were now gentle but potentially violent or just calculating.

“I’d like to dry my hair and get dressed,” she said.

He smiled a little at her tone. “I’m not stopping you,” his hand left her face and dropped to the clothes she had clutched to her chest. He gave them a small tug to remind her to let go of them.

He took the jeans from her and stepped back to pull them on, leaving the fly open. The t-shirt went on next, smoothed down over his hips before he started working on the fly. “What do you want to do?” he asked. “I was thinking about going over to the outlet mall. We can probably find food for you there.”

She peeled herself away from the wall. The bag of toiletries that she had hastily packed before they left Sacramento was sitting on the countertop, open, the contents spilling out. Her post bathing ritual had been disturbed. She had an order to the things she did after she got out of the shower. The skin over her shins felt tight, in part due to the soap that she had used and the leg shaving from yesterday. She picked through the contents of the bag, trying to get organized despite the audience.

In one of her thinly veiled efforts to get Oz to notice that she was ready to have sex with him she had made a big production of moisturizing her legs while they were sitting on the couch in the family room, watching television. He had scooted away from her after a few minutes and it reached her, belatedly, that the expensive scented moisturizer that she had taken from her mother’s bathroom was bothering him.

It would probably have the same effect on Spike she decided and sat down on the toilet seat with a sample-sized bottle of one of the floral scented moisturizers she had snagged from the hotel. Careful of keeping the towel covering her, she started working from her feet up and the strategy seemed to pay off when he stepped out of the bathroom and went to get something out of his coat.

It was the last of the packages of ointment. He squatted down at her feet and picked up the foot with the split toenail, tearing open the package and using the foil to dab it on as she tried to keep the towel in place. When he was done with her toe, he ran his hand up the back of her leg.

“I asked you a question,” he reminded her, seeming to enjoy the discomfort he was causing.

“You answered it, so I didn’t think it was a real question. I’d like to go home now,” she said pointedly, and then cocked her head to one side. “That’s not going to happen, is it?”

He kneaded her calve muscles, leaning forward to kiss the inside of her knee. “You know where the door is,” he pointed out, using his other hand to nudge her legs apart while she stubbornly held the towel to keep herself covered. “There are all sorts of interesting things that we could do to pass the time,” he mused. Kissing the inside of her thigh, just above the crease of her knee. “Watch the telly,” his blunt teeth nipped at her skin. “Have a chat about your adventures on the computer,” he licked the spot he had just nibbled on, pushing her legs further apart.

She made herself push his head away from her, absorbing an impression of his hair against the palm of her hand that corresponded to a memory of clutching at it while his head was between her legs from last night. It made her close her eyes for a moment, feeling guilt and panic swirl in her belly. She knew without even thinking about it that there were things that were loosening and tightening inside of her, responding to him. She made herself stand up, even though it meant that at least for a moment she was awkwardly straddling him where he was on the floor at her feet.

She picked up the most prosaic object on the counter, uncapping the pale blue oval shaped deodorant to apply to her underarms as he uncoiled to stand behind her, close enough that she could feel him, but transparent in the wet mirror. His hands bracketed her rib cage, pressing the damp towel into her skin as he bent his head to kiss her neck. “We can do anything you want within reason,” he said. “Go to a movie,” his fingers were flexing lightly over her ribs, parting the towel as she recapped the deodorant.

“Find a club,” he took her earlobe between his lips and the deodorant clattered to the surface of the counter.

He had never given a lot of thought to where he had seen her the first time. He hadn’t taken any particular notice of her before she had conveniently placed herself in his path at the Magic Box when he had come back to Sunnydale looking for unholy revenge over the loss of Dru. It came to him now. She had been there the night he had sought out the Slayer at the Bronze, her long hair falling forward around her face as she earnestly and sympathetically played her second banana role to Buffy, and later got up to dance with less grace than awkward enthusiasm. It was something about the tension in her body that reminded him of it now. He found it fascinating. With his hands on her rib cage, he could feel it humming inside of her, the tangible evidence of the constant restraint that held her together.

Watching it come apart was amazing. Whether she was unraveling in his arms, or making a split second decision to let him kill someone in her place, or trying to kill him, when she lost the restraint he found aspects of her that were surprising and intriguing, all the more so for being so contrary to her carefully cultivated outward aspect.

He used the mirror to his advantage, tugging the towel free. In the too harsh overhead light and the white tile of the bathroom, she was flesh tinged pink from the heat of her shower and the rush of blood through her body. Accustomed to his lack of reflection, he could appreciate hers. The towel that briefly draped his arm before he pushed it away gave him momentary substance and then there it was just her in the mirror, staring at his lack of reflection in appalled fascination as his hands cupped her breasts, filling his palms with the now familiar shape of her.

She looked down, unnerved by his absence in the mirror while she felt him touching her, bitterly aware of the fact that her body was responding. His hands were cool. Even as she watched him pinch her nipples between forefinger and thumb, she wanted to point out that the coolness of his hands was causing that reaction and then the light tug on her nipples made her close her eyes and press her lips together to keep from making some horribly embarrassing sound that would please him.

Last night, or this morning, her day/night clock was becoming increasingly out of whack, he had told her that he liked the sounds she made. It wasn’t the first time he had said something like that, but it was the first time he had said it without making her feel like he was rubbing her nose in it.

“Lean back against me,” he whispered in her ear. She could feel the towel that had been wrapped around her sliding down the backs of her legs and tried to grab it before it fell beyond her reach. She bent forward from the waist, not really thinking about how it would push her hips back into him as she grabbed at the towel and tried to tug it back up around her.

With a speed that was logic defying and frightening, he spun her around and picked her up, and she barely had time to register the cold porcelain under her when he swooped in on her mouth, open to offer a feeble protest. Her hands slipped on the counter as she tried to find something other than him to hold onto and the back of her head would have crashed into the mirror if he hadn’t gotten his hand there first to hold her head still. The towel had become tangled around her leg, the toweling catching on her split toenail making her teeth clamp down hard on his tongue when she felt the weight of the towel pulling on her toenail. Her flailing arm sent toiletries and a water glass she had used earlier when she was brushing her teeth, flying.

It was hard to say who was more startled. Spike, who immediately let go of her, or Willow whose head smacked into the mirror before she got her left leg up enough to push him away from her while she frantically tried to free her foot from the towel, falling off the counter in the process, narrowly avoiding a collision with Spike, who had figured out that something other than a nagging conscience had set her off. He sucked on his bleeding tongue.

“Bloody hell!” he complained as she grabbed her foot, swaying unsteadily on the other leg, sounding out of breath as she whimpered. “You bit my tongue!”

“Stupid vampire,” she shot back, holding the back of her head with her free hand. “I’m going to end up with brain damage.”

The glass she had knocked off the counter had bounced harmlessly off the fiberglass surround of the bathtub and onto the soaked bathmat without breaking, but the way she was sort of hopping around in a punch-drunk stagger made him reach out and grab it before she accidentally stepped on it. He kicked a few more objects littering the ground away from her and then gave up on the project, picking her up over a storm of protests, and carrying her out of the bathroom to deposit on the bed.

She was still clutching her toes and he had some idea that she had managed to re-injure herself. “You may be the clumsiest person to have ever walked the earth,” he told her. “How you’ve managed not to break your bloody neck while tripping after the Slayer is a miracle.”

“Hurts, hurts, hurts,” she chanted.

“No doubt,” he agreed sourly, “you’ve got a death grip on it which probably isn’t helping,” he tried to pry her fingers loose. “Let go,” he insisted.

“No! It’s gone. My toenail is gone,” she wailed. “It’s going to be all,” she grimaced, unable to come up with a description for it, “gone,” she shuddered at the idea.

“Come on,” he sat on the bed next to her. “Tell you what? Just let me look, okay? We’re going to have to do something about it. You don’t want it getting all septic and then die of blood poisoning from a stubbed toe because that would just be a ridiculous way to die, right?”

“Oh, shut up! What do you know about it?”

“Been dead,” he reminded her. “Of course, I didn’t die ridiculously. I was very manly. No squealing and carrying on about my toenails,” he said dryly. Actually, he had been limited to what he now recognized as a fairly standard litany of ‘ow’ and ‘oh, God’ but she didn’t need to know that.

“Let me see,” he coaxed, prying her fingers loose.

The release of pressure from her fingers sent blood back into her toe and she fought to restore the pressure while he pushed her hand away. It didn’t look any worse as far as he could tell but it obviously was hurting. He dragged her foot to his lap and pressed his thumb down at the base of the toenail.

“Is it gone?” she quavered.

The idea of loosing her toenail really seemed to freak her out. “Nah,” he replied, wondering at the weird way her mind worked. “It’s still there,” he said. “Maybe we should get something to wrap it up in so it doesn’t catch on things.”

“Does it really hurt that bad?” He looked back at her and found that she was checking the back of her head. He picked a lock of wet hair off her jaw and separated another one clinging to her throat.

“Yes!” she glared at him, pointing at her head. “Head injuries. Plural. My bruises have bruises. My toenail is going to fall off, and,” she made a face at that, “yuck! It’s not all about you. I’m hungry, my head hurts, and you keep asking me stupid questions about what I want to do,” she held up a hand and counted off her supposed options, “Shopping at an outlet mall,” she made a face, as she held up one finger, “Movie?” she rolled her eyes. “Clubbing with the undead—not!” she waggled her ring finger, “sex on a bathroom counter,” her pinkie came into play. Discretion made her shut her mouth before some artless pre-verbal sound of disgust and denial escaped her, but it was plain what she thought of the last choice.

His attention returned to her foot. “I don’t think your toenail is going to fall off, but if it does, it will grow back,” he predicted. “So, shopping or a movie, yeah?”

She wriggled her foot free of his grasp and got up, moving gingerly on her injured foot while he watched her with a baffled expression. She went back into the bathroom to finish getting dressed and he lit a cigarette, turning the television back on to channel surf while she got dressed. He would have let her go to sleep this morning if she had just settled down and slept, and she had been far from an unwilling participant after she made her mind up that they were going to shag—have sex—he mentally air quoted, using her favored neutral terminology.

The blow drier came on with an annoyingly high pitched whine, but she was quick about it, using the drier to speed up the process of drying her hair without making a production out of it. When she came out of the bathroom in her pink and white outfit, which consisted of silky pink and white checked Capri pants and a matching top that was meant to be tied at the waist to show a bit of midriff but had been tucked into the waistband of pants tugged up to meet the hem of the shirt he started laughing, helplessly.

She checked her waistband arrangement. “What’s so funny?” she demanded, looking around for the shoes that she had found in the bag Georgia had packed. She was afraid that despite her best efforts her tummy, once described by Cordelia as resembling the underbelly of a fish, was showing in all of its stark white glory.

“Hunch your shoulder’s forward a bit,” he suggested.

Suspicious, she complied, and that just made him laugh harder at the picture she presented. He put the cigarette down, the glowing end hanging off the edge of the nightstand, and got up to walk over to her. He tugged the shirt out of the waistband of her pants and tied the ends together the way they were clearly meant to be tied.

She crossed her arms over the strip of skin that was showing. “It’s hideous,” she said. “I hate this,” she plucked at the top, which was slightly too big for her. It looked to her like it was missing actual breasts to fill it out.

He shrugged, going back to his cigarette. “Shopping then,” he said, “though, if you had gone when I suggested it, you wouldn’t be wearing pink. It’s not hideous,” he added.

“I’m hideous,” she muttered under her breath.

He glanced over at her. She probably did have a headache and what was shaping up for a wide range of reasons to be a fairly shitty day, but the nervous, fidgety way she kept tugging at the top smacked of something else. He shook his head, finding what he thought was going on in her head tedious. When she was like this, he found the notion of Georgia taking her off his hands and spending a few years eradicating her insecurities enormously appealing.




There wasn’t any reason to think that there would be more email from Willow, but Buffy checked anyway. She hadn’t bothered to undress when she fell across the bed dosed up on an ounce of Nyquil, the Summers sleep aid. The phone didn’t wake her up completely, nor did talking to Spike, which had taken on a slightly unreal quality. It was up to the two of them to save Willow, and that actually made sense to her, which had to be wrong on so many levels.

She had an impression that Spike really didn’t want to hurt her. Giles and Angel would have told her that this was a dangerous way to think for a Slayer since Spike had made his reputation killing two Slayers, but ever since he had come back to Sunnydale and kidnapped Willow and Xander, she had this odd feeling that wherever Spike was in the world he was not spending a lot of time thinking about ways to kill her.

Everything they had pieced together about what might have happened in San Jose suggested that this was a truly random event. Opportunity dropped into his lap, and he took advantage of it, but he hadn’t gone out of his way to hunt them down. He sounded more amused by Willow’s nearly successful escape attempt than anything else.

There was no new email, which was hardly a surprise, and she turned the computer off and went down to the basement to find clean clothes. The drier was empty, so she trudged back upstairs and found her clothes folded in a basket in front of the couch. Her mother must have done that last night while she was left to wait around to find out what was happening in Sacramento.

Buffy skipped a shower and dressed in jeans, a t-shirt, and an old flannel shirt before brushing her teeth and pulling her hair back into a ponytail. She splashed some cold water on her face to wake herself up and then went to her bedroom to call Giles. Oz answered the phone and told her that Giles had gone out to meet Dr. Holbrook and that they were keeping the line open in case Spike called.

She sat down on the edge of her bed. “He called me,” she told him. “I guess it was my turn.”

“Did you talk to Willow?” he asked.

“No,” she made a crease in her jeans over her knee, debating about what to tell him. “He said that she was okay, taking a shower, and that she hit her head on a door trying to escape, but that it wasn’t that bad,” she paraphrased.

“Do you believe him?” Oz asked sharply.

“Yeah,” Buffy shrugged. “I don’t know why, but yeah, I think that the program is pretty well established at this point. He wants the Gem of Amara, and all he has to trade is Willow, so he’s going to make sure that she’s there to trade.”

Silence hummed over the line. “Are you okay?” Buffy asked.

“No,” Oz was blunt. “I’m not okay.”

“Me either,” Buffy admitted. Her head felt numb, but her chest hurt. “I’m sorry, Oz,” she said, biting her lower lip to keep from crying because he didn’t deserve that. “I let Willow down and I’m sorry.”

“It was a group effort,” he reminded her. “I keep thinking that if I talked to her, she’d say something I’d get and I’d be able to find her, or I’d know if she is really okay, because I’m thinking that she’s not. I’m thinking that she’s scared and hurt and—“ he ground to a halt. “We have to get this done.”

“Yeah,” Buffy took a deep breath. Some of the tightness in her chest eased. “We will,” she promised.





In high school, Willow had made her mother the scapegoat in her fashion disasters. It served two purposes. It made it sound like her mother did personal things for and with her, like shopping for clothes, and it deflected the criticism away from her. In a weird way it hurt less and made it possible for her to pretend that what hurt did show was for the implied insult to her mother.

She even used a version of it with Spike, who believed her and taunted her about her parent’s lack of understanding of her, probably not at all getting how icky it would be if her parents understood what passed for insight into her character on his part at that particular moment.

Her mother bought some of her clothes. She bought things that she found when she was traveling. They were usually small things that fit into her luggage. Sweaters, since her mother knew that she liked sweaters, scarves, a hat or purse, handcrafted jewelry or a belt. In her own fashion sense, or sensible lack thereof, her mother stuck to things that didn’t require a lot of thought to pull together. Things that were sold in sets or collections and could be mixed and matched. The theme was taupe.

In direct contrast, Willow’s choices were all about color and the non-mix and matchedness of things, though occasionally she did go for matching, but usually in a slightly over-the-top sort of way.

They had been shopping since sundown. There was a midnight madness sale at the outlet mall. Fortified with an order of chewy nacho chips and cheese from the snack bar and a soda, they had gone to the Gap outlet and Spike had bought more versions of his monochromatic wardrobe of choice and a package of socks, also black. He didn’t hover or follow or offer any opinion on anything she was inclined to pick up to look at. Most of the time she wasn’t sure that he was there. Wandering from the back to the front of the Gap she spotted him outside, blithely smoking in defiance of the signs that said smoking in designated areas only.

She got two pairs of jeans and he appeared to pay for them, using cash. They stopped at a shoe store to get a pair of sneakers, and then wandered for a bit longer until he caught her elbow and steered her into an Ann Taylor outlet and toward a short, dark green suede jacket on a rack with a collection of paisley print tops that incorporated the green.

It was a cliché. Green. Red hair. It reminded her of catsup on green beans, a Harris family variation, aside from which, she wasn’t a vampire and it was summer, so a suede jacket was pretty out of the question. She walked over to a rack of t-shirts and picked a couple at random in her size. When she looked around for Spike to go to the register, she spotted him talking to two girls. One was a short pudgy blonde that Willow recognized as ‘the friend’, a role that she had been relegated to throughout the length of her friendship with Buffy. There was Buffy and Buffy’s friend Willow. The other girl was only slightly taller with hair dyed a shade of red even more improbable than Willow’s and cut short to frame her face.

She was laughing at something that Spike had said like it was the funniest thing that she ever heard.

The pudgy blonde was looking at him like she had already decided that he was out of her league, but it didn’t hurt to look.

Spike was holding the green suede jacket up to the red headed girl, who struck a little pose and laughed some more while he eyed her with a blend of interest and speculation. Which the red headed girl was aware of. Willow marched over in her hideous pink and white outfit, sandals slapping on the fake wood floor.

She held her hand out. “Money?” she demanded, startling everyone, except Spike. He just gave her one of those warning looks.

She interpreted it as a warning not to scare off his dinner, and ignored it. The memory of her mostly demented but highly effective performance at the gas station popped into her head and she found herself warming to the notion of a repeat performance.

“His name is Spike. He has a three pack a day cigarette habit. He’s unemployed and unemployable. I don’t ask where the money comes from,” she said and then pointed at her face with its two visible bruises. “His work,” she pointed out cheerfully as she plucked the wallet Spike had fished out of his hip pocket out of his hand. “Got to go pay for this. Have a nice time getting to know each other!” she caroled before scooting off to the register.

At the register, she paid for her purchases, keeping an eye out for Spike. The two girls hadn’t lasted long after her announcement and he was just standing with his arm across the top of the rack, waiting for her.

When they were outside again they walked in tense silence to the car.

She wasn’t sure what she expected when he got into the car. Handcuffs, more threats, hair pulling. What she did not expect was a terse reminder to fasten her seat belt. Given Spike’s style of driving, it was a practical point. When she was traveling handcuffed to the door she had been grateful for the security of the seat belt since she was likely to loose her hand if they were involved in an accident.

A few minutes later they were on the highway and she was relatively certain that she had seen the last of that particular Marriott Express. Spike hadn’t bothered to check out and what had been left behind were the clothes that she had worn yesterday and her bag of toiletries that were still mostly scattered around the bathroom.

Her nacho snack had taken the edge off her appetite, but she was still hungry. It didn’t seem like a great time to mention it, so she folded her hands in her lap and stared at the claustrophobia inducing black painted windshield in front of her, feeling the Desoto eat up miles under her while she came to the conclusion that he was much better at the silent treatment than she was.

Her verbal excesses sprang from her discomfort with silence. It started with her parents, who never had much to say to her. As soon as the thought came, she grimaced. The teen angst fodder her parents represented was getting old and it wasn’t entirely fair, either. Running down her parents was a bad habit she had gotten into with Xander, who had infinitely more to complain about from his parents.

If she had wanted to go to Europe with them, all she had to do was ask, but the truth was that she had still been holding out for spending an unsupervised summer with Oz. By the time that she realized that wasn’t going to happen, her plans had been too far advanced to back out of.

And, okay, they were kind of goofy parents, but she knew that it was partly because they were afraid of ruining her or limiting her personal growth. When your professional life was all about dealing with the damage that was done to people emotionally it wasn’t hard to see the fabric of relationships as a minefield that had to be negotiated with care. There had been some definite manipulating of that on her part, especially when she was in high school.

There were all of those unopened emails from her parents. She had barely looked at them. What if they were the last thing she ever heard from them?



She was crying again, very quietly, eyes fixed straight ahead, her face telling a tale of guilt and grief. He didn’t imagine that she was stewing over depriving him of a meal, so it was probably inner turmoil over the misery of being kidnapped and guilt over fucking him.

He knew that she was hungry. She had hardly had anything to eat for over a day and a half and the veering back and forth between sluggish sleepwalker to fretful crying suggested that physically, she was on the ropes. He had been inclined to pay her back in kind by letting her go hungry. Food was comfort, and while he had no intention of drying her tears, the effort of feeding her was worth it if it cut off the waterworks.

He started scanning signs on the highway for a likely place to stop and settled on an all night truck stop. He needed to fill up the Desoto, figure out where they were going to go to ground for the day and stock up on supplies. He filled up the Desoto first, leaving her in the car. Once the tank was topped off, he found a space to park and grabbed her wrist, giving it an attention getting squeeze. “We’re going in, and you will behave,” he warned her.

The restaurant was attached to a convenience store. There was a bathroom between the store and the restaurant and he pointed it out to Willow, who took the hint and trudged dispiritedly to the ladies room. He browsed the aisles, picking up a bottle of aspirin, a couple of sandwiches from the refrigerator section, beer, soda, and a couple of magazines. He was paying for the gas and purchases when she emerged from the ladies room, red-eyed, clutching a handful of toilet paper that she used to blow her nose.

She came to stand awkwardly beside him. The clerk behind the counter was a twitchy looking guy in a faded high school football jersey. He eyed Willow with a hint of puzzled curiosity before his attention reverted back to Spike. They didn’t add up right. The pink and white outfit had the unanticipated consequence of making her look entirely too wholesomely pretty and banged up. The wholesome part probably was intentional. Georgia had picked out her clothes and she tended to play up that aspect of Willow at every opportunity.

He paid for their purchases and picked up the two bags, nodding towards the restaurant. “Get a table, Red. I’ll be back in a minute,” he told her.

She looked at him for a moment, and then at the restaurant. It was mostly empty at this time of night. He could see the wheels and gears starting to turn. She blew her nose again and scrubbed at it with the wadded up toilet paper and then walked into the restaurant to find a table.

He stowed his purchases in the boot of the Desoto and went back into the restaurant to join her. There were two coffee cups on the table and she had ordered a cheeseburger and French fries while he was in the parking lot. Rather than sit across from her, he sat beside her, draping one arm over the back of the booth behind her shoulders.

“What the hell is your problem?” he asked, the irritation that had been nagging at him for the better part of the day evident.

She gave him an incredulous look. “Everything,” she said lowly.

From her point of view, that was probably an accurate assessment. His hand lifted from the back of the booth, hovering over her head for a moment. He gave a sigh as he went with the impulse and smoothed her hair back, kissing her temple. He smiled at how ridiculous it was. “Fair enough,” he said, as she sniffed and coughed a little to clear her throat.

She ate her dinner and drank two cups of coffee while he helped himself to her French fries and eyed the customers in the restaurant in a purely predatory way. His preference was to find someone who was alone and less likely to be immediately missed. Easier said than done. Eating was a communal activity.

The back of his fingers stroked the side of her neck as she ate. It wasn’t doing a damn thing for his growing appetite, but it was oddly calming. He had set an effective curb on one set of impulses that had threatened his plans, and before the evening was done he was probably going to teach her a lesson about interfering with him that she would not soon forget.

When he noticed that she had slowed down on eating her cheeseburger, he started stroking her hair with just enough pressure to coax her into letting her head rest against his shoulder.

“I got you that magazine that you wanted, with the crossword puzzle,” he told her.

“Yeah?” she tilted her head back to look at him. “My mom doesn’t really pick my clothes out. Sometimes it seems easier to be child of a geek and not the geek.”

He wondered what made her tell him that. He had a feeling it had something to do with what was bothering her so much tonight. He smiled crookedly at her. “I want to push on if you are done here,” he said.

“Okay,” she nodded, sitting up.

“Why don’t you go to the ladies before we hit the road. I’ll take care of this,” he indicated the table.