Chapter Thirty-One

"I was thinking about starting my own gang," Pete sounded defensive. "I thought of it first."

It was interesting, Jeannie decided, that someone who was so into his whole image was so deaf to the way he sometimes came off. Like now. He was whining about Harmony's form a gang plan. While they were in Sacramento she had spent a lot of time as Pete's unofficial sidekick. He talked, she listened. Most of what he talked about was himself, which was at least a topic that he had well-formed opinions on. Jeannie had his whole life story. He grew up in Clarksville, Indiana, which prompted a discussion of 'The Last Train to Clarksville' and favorite re-runs on late-night cable.

Not that 'The Last Train to Clarksville' was about that Clarksville. It wasn't really about any Clarksville in particular and it was supposed to be a war protest song. Why Pete knew all of this stuff about a song she barely remembered knowing made her wonder how old he was. Spike had the kind of age that she could feel in the back of her head without getting too distracted. Colin had a bit of that quality too, and he looked older, but she had never been confused about the fact that Spike actually was quite a bit older. Pete, on the other hand, didn't put off anything that rooted him in her head as particularly old and neither did Georgia.

That question was answered in part when he explained how he came to California because he read an interview in Rolling Stone where Axl Rose, who was also from Indiana, but not Clarksville, said that he just got on a bus and went to Los Angeles and found girls to sleep with and mooch off of, which sounded like a good plan to Pete, except of course when he discovered that he wasn't Axl Rose. The sleeping with and mooching off girls thing had not worked out. The details suggested that he had come to California in the early 90s. There were adventures in low paying jobs and tenuous living, and then he got vamped and pretty much kept doing the same things to get by.

There was a certain lack of self-deprecation to his life story that Jeannie found kind of cute. He would say these things with such an utter lack of irony or self-awareness, and it was funny. He was working up the nerve to drop his James Dean look, so they had spent the better part of the evening combining hunting with window-shopping for a new look that she was starting to recognize. It was monochromatic and black with a punk sensibility. It was Spike. Just thinking about how the older vampire would react to having a vamp adopting his look as a tribute made Jeannie feel the urge to giggle.

Except, she was a vampire, and giggling was so Harmony that she found that she could keep it under control most of the time.

They were walking down Morton toward the abandoned building that was their home. Sort of. The only thing about being a vampire that disturbed Jeannie was the realization that she was still homeless. Before she became a vampire, when she was squatting in an abandoned hotel outside of San Jose, the central reality of her existence the moment-to-moment requirements that had to be met to continue living in some relatively inoffensive way. Her triumphs were entirely private. It really wasn't hard to imagine the reaction if she shared one of the accomplishments that stirred a flicker of pride at her inventiveness.

There was a lady at the transitional housing office that seemed to get it. She was an overweight woman desperately fighting off the appearance of old age. Unlike a lot of the people in the unemployment and social services offices, she had never discovered business casual. She wore heels and suits or dresses and her office was crammed with paperwork and crap. Behind her desk was a bank of cheaply-framed photographs of her kids and grandkids.

But she always stopped, and waited after she asked how Jeannie was getting by. Like she really wanted to know. It was never a perfunctory, ‘hi, how are you?' but a more direct, ‘I'm glad that you made it back. How are you getting by?'

So, Jeannie found herself sharing things like how she had found a job cleaning hotel rooms and how she got her clothes laundered and a hot shower with soap and clean towels. And Mrs. Davenport would smile at her like she had done something not clever, but that she could appreciate and approve of. Jeannie was tempted to ask if she had ever been homeless, but the pictures behind the desk argued against it. They weren't the pictures of pretty, shinny people, but ordinary people. A son who looked like a twelve-year old in a cap and gown picture that could be tracked through pictures to a man with short, graying hair that was sparse on top.

While Mrs. Davenport read her paperwork, she made up stories in her head about the people in the pictures to distract herself from the inevitable. Transitional housing was waitlisted and homeless with children went to the top of the list. She would have been in an apartment and a job program If she had been stupid enough to compound her problems by being pregnant or making a child to share her crappy life. Last month had been different. Her appointment was for 11:30 and while Mrs. Davenport was reading her application one of her daughters strolled into her office and sat down in the other mismatched chair. She had a big, white bag from a deli and she started unloading food in clear plastic boxes on the corner of the desk.

Mrs. Davenport closed her file and got paper plates out of a drawer. "There's plenty to go around," she told Jeannie. "This is my daughter, Cynthia—"

"Or Carol," the daughter corrected with an amused look at her mother. "We are pretty interchangeable," she joked.

They had bow tie pasta with dried tomatoes and sandwiches on thick, crusty bread, with salt and vinegar potato chips and brownies for dessert. It was too much food, and Jeannie didn't really like the pasta, but she ate anyway because she didn't have anything to say and because she felt like there was a reason for all of this that was going to play out and it hurt a little bit to know that there was something about her that made Mrs. Davenport invite her daughter to her office to pretend to have a casual desk picnic with one of her homeless clients.

She almost decided that the daughter was a social worker. It made sense. People tended to do things that were similar to what their parents did. Jeannie wasn't an alcoholic teetering on the edge of oblivion, but she had the teetering on the edge of oblivion going for her even without the alcoholism that had made her father's life so tenuous after her mother left them.

But nothing like that happened. They had lunch. They talked about stuff. The daughter packed up the empty plastic cartons in the bag they had been delivered in and asked Jeannie if she needed a ride anywhere since she had to drive back to work, but didn't press when she declined, and Mrs. Davenport finished her file, gave her the bad news and scheduled their appointment for next month, also for 11:30. The strange thing was that she thought about it all the time, even now. She couldn't possibly make the appointment, and she wondered what Mrs. Davenport would make of it. She thought about waiting outside the building for her, but sundown was nearly nine in the evening. Sunrise was before seven.

Instead, she called her when she got back to San Jose and told her that she had a job and a place to live and wouldn't be keeping her appointment, and Mrs. Davenport had wished her well. It was probably weird, but she didn't want her to worry about what had happened to her, and at the same time she kind of wanted to eat her even though she was old.

She was still homeless, and every once in a while, like when she woke up in another strange place, she remembered the panic that went with waking up in a strange place. Then she remembered that she was dead and it really didn't matter where she was anymore. Except, maybe to Mrs. Davenport, who didn't know she was dead.

Harmony was back and on this thing about starting her own gang, which was probably funny if you went by the looks Colin and Georgia exchanged. It clearly bothered Pete. He might have thought of it first, but Harmony had a plan and he didn't and Colin was taking her semi-seriously with the planning. Jeannie thought the taking Harmony seriously had a lot to do with wanting Harmony to form her own gang and take it elsewhere, like back to Sunnydale, where Pete and Jeannie were supposed to be right now.

Finding the Slayer had not been hard. All they had to do was hang out on the roof until she showed up and then follow her back to Sunnydale. Pete decided to skip the following part and just go to Sunnydale. They had made good time and arrived in Sunnydale in time to go trolling for leads to find out where the Slayer lived and hung out.

It only figured that it would be a preoccupation in Sunnydale for the demon population to keep up with the Slayer. At Willie's they had found their tour guide, Chas. They had paid him fifty bucks for the deluxe Sunnydale Slayer tour which consisted of their tour guide Chas walking backward, gesturing to places where vamps and demons had been dispatched while tossing around fun facts about Sunnydale and props to his sponsors.

In other words, it was a complete waste of time. So they went looking for the local vamps to find a place to crash for the day and get some information. That hadn't gone particularly well. Apparently Slayer stalking in Sunnydale was considered likely to incur the wrath of the Slayer—the short, cute girl with the ponytail that had wiped out dozen's of vamps a little over a month ago in some big battle at the high school.

In a last ditch effort to establish bona fides, Pete resorted to name-dropping Spike, who had been in Sunnydale off and on for two years. It wasn't that he wasn't remembered fondly or respectfully, but no one was throwing out the welcome mat either. Jeannie got the impression that Spike had gotten his ass handed to him repeatedly by the slayer, but having un-lived to tell the tale was considered quite the accomplishment in Sunnydale.

They slept in the car under an overpass and went back to San Jose without anything useful to report. Colin was okay with that, so she was home, in a manner of speaking.




"Holy moley," Xander said, gaping at the chamber.

Luke Holbrook felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten. This went against everything he taught and had been taught. He was looking at a major archeological find, the kind of thing that made a career and there were too many people in the space that had yet to be studied. "Don't touch anything," he warned for the umpteenth time.

He understood from Giles that there was an object in this room that had to be located and that there was a girl's life at stake. It might have sounded insane, but the market for rare objects had never been more heated. International laws intended to prevent the loss of finds like this to looters had made it more difficult to trade or sell items on the open market, but not impossible, and collectors were not necessarily concerned with the niceties of provenance. The illicitness of a rare object sometimes added to its value.

He didn't believe in the existence of demons and vampires and magic, but he believed in avarice. Seeing the chamber, he had no doubt whatsoever that there was something in this room that someone was willing to kill to get their hands on.

He hated the fact that they were going to succeed. Not for the first time he wondered if he should call the police. Giles had been adamant on that point, and when he had discussed the matter with David Parrish, his mentor had assured him that no matter how strange the request, that Rupert Giles was too much the scholar to disturb an archeological find without very, very compelling reasons.

"We need to lay out a grid and start photographing," Luke spoke. It was, from the blank expressions on the faces of the volunteers, something approaching a non sequitur.

Buffy pointed to the skeleton on the bier. There was a heavy necklace on a gold chain with a large cabochon emerald glinting dully in the light that lay on the exposed rib cage. "Obvious much?" she asked.

Luke turned around, facing them. "You don't even know what you are looking for," he pointed out. "Before we go tearing through this chamber, we need to develop a protocol for a search."

"We have one," Giles told him. "Angel?"

Angel nodded. "This is going to take some time," he pointed out. There were literally hundreds of objects in the room, some of which could be eliminated by deduction, but if they didn't find what they were looking for then they would have to remember everything that they had not tried.

"So, Deadboy puts stuff on and we stake him?" Xander perked up. "Can I volunteer?"

"Er—no," Giles frowned at Xander. "Impervious to holy symbols," he reminded Xander. "I thought a cross might suffice."

Luke frowned. The whole vampire with a soul story about the otherwise normal if overly-gelled Angel had sounded like something out of a bad novel. The casual blood drinking from Styrofoam containers had made him feel slightly nauseous, but his college roommate ate powdered donuts dunked in nacho cheese sauce, and his girlfriend was in SCA and made some unfathomably disgusting authentic meals from the Middle Ages. He had studied with anthropologists who would eat literally anything literature or archeological evidence suggested that people ate. He considered himself inoculated against bizarre eating habits.

So the guy was going to freak if someone pulled out a cross? That was a test? He frowned, wondering if this could possibly get any weirder.



Unable to sleep, Willow got up and took a shower, scrubbing at her skin with a washcloth until she felt like she had sandpapered off the layers of dried sweat, the stale smell of beer, cigarettes and sex that clung to her and made her feel slightly nauseous. She still felt queasy after she was done and dressed in the blue jeans and a t-shirt over the slightly damp bra and panties that she had rinsed out in the sink after she bathed last night, or perhaps it was this morning—her sense of the time of day was all out of whack. She hadn't wanted to pick out underwear with Spike hanging around, so she hadn't, which left her with precious little underwear and no socks.

The socks were an omission that she put down to being distracted, even as she slipped her feet into the new tennis shoes and laced them up. For the first time in a long time she was wearing clothes that she might have picked out for herself and they felt like a shroud. The blue jeans were too heavy and saggy around her hips and the eggplant t-shirt—what had she been thinking? The color picked out the greenish tones of the bruises on her face and she turned away from her reflection in the bathroom mirror with a wince, feeling tired and ugly.

There were fruit cups in the refrigerator. Spike must have gotten them at the truck stop. There were no spoons, so she peeled off the foil and ate the fruit from the lip of the cup. Feeling her appetite stir from the fresh infusion of sugar, she had another fruit cup and then got a can of soda before going to the table by the window to work on her crossword puzzle.

The drapes had not gotten the duct tape treatment and she had only to lift an edge to discern why. They were tucked into a corner where the hotel formed an L shape around a portion of the parking lot. No direct sunlight reached the corner, or the window. She could have flung it open, and it might have caused him some mild discomfort, but it wouldn't have been dangerous. She had seen Angel pick his way through sunlit spaces on a few rare occasions.

She tried to concentrate on her crossword puzzle. She had a method. Working across and down in sections, filling in with neat block letters when she was satisfied that the answers matched up. Her attention kept drifting away from the crossword puzzle into a blankness that was smothering. Then she would realize that she had drifted off and feel a certain amount of panic at how her brain was working. Or not working.

She knew that Buffy and Joyce invited her to dinner and sleepovers because it bothered them that she was at home alone so much. It was odd to realize that it didn't bother her. In principal, it bothered her if she thought about why she was alone. In reality, she missed her alone time. If someone came through the door right now to take her home, she would be grateful, but a part of her would dread the long drive home in a car with another person as well as knowing that she wouldn't be allowed to be alone. She closed her eyes, imagining them all pressing in around her, leaving her no space to breath or think or forget. For the first time she thought about not just getting away from Spike, but running away entirely.

Her gaze drifted to the door, becoming slightly unfocused as she imagined walking out of the room. Her lack of resources presented a problem. In her purse, she had a credit card of her own and another credit card that belonged to her parents. She tried to remember the last time she had seen her purse and concluded that it was probably in the trunk of the DeSoto in the year 2000 layer of crap that had accumulated. She didn't see Spike as a 'clean out his trunk' regularly sort of vampire. Her father was big on car cleaning. It was one of his rituals before he left on a trip. He took his late-model Buick to a car wash to do a thorough cleaning, inside and out. When she was a lot younger, she would put on a bathing suit and go with him to help out and splash around barefoot in the sudsy water that accumulated on the concrete floor of the car wash.

She could call her aunt in Arizona. Her circumstances constituted an emergency if she could figure out a way to explain them that didn't sound insane.

It would be easier to take the keys to the DeSoto and find her purse and just leave. She could buy a bus ticket to anywhere and call Giles and tell him that they didn't have to bother anymore, because she had gotten away from Spike and she was going to keep getting away from Spike, for the rest of her life if that was what it took. He was on the bed, unmoving, the sheet pooled at his hips, unavoidable, even when she closed her eyes.





Willow was asleep when he woke up. It was almost seven o'clock in the afternoon. She hadn't slept particularly well, getting up a couple of times through the course of the day to take a shower, dress in a pair of blue jeans and a t-shirt that were slightly too big because she hadn't bothered to try anything on, and maybe because she instinctively sought sexless shapelessness.

She had fallen asleep at the table with her head pillowed on her arms.

The room reeked of sex and sweat and stale beer. He got up and went to the bathroom to take a shower.

He ran his thumb over her damp toothbrush, smiling a little. She had gotten up earlier, moving quietly as she dressed herself and brushed her teeth before pacing and thinking. Even when she was trying to be quiet she was loud. Armed with her new knowledge about his intentions, he half expected her to call his bluff and walk out of the room. He wasn't sure what he was going to do if she did. It wasn't a bluff. He would follow her to Sunnydale and start killing off all of her chums, but it was a lot of trouble when he could simply handcuff her to a chair. Or to a bed. Or to himself, and then watch her try to figure out a way to thwart him.

He had woken up briefly to find her was sitting at the little table by the window. She had found the tabloid that she had asked him for and the pen. The tabloid was open in front of her and the pen was waggling back and forth between her fingers. He hadn't done anything to the drapes this time. He watched her lift a corner, and work it out in her head. Her chin lowered and her lips compressed and then she applied herself to the crossword puzzle with a small sigh, twirling a piece of her hair around one finger as she got involved in the puzzle. He went back to sleep.

He left the bathroom, walking across the room. His cigarettes were on the table near her. When he reached for them, she woke up, shoulders twitching, and looked up at him briefly. Leaning over her, he reached around the drape to unlock the window and slide it back on its track.

She was dressed because she was Willow and lounging around naked just wasn't something that would occur to her, he realized as he smoked his cigarette. He turned the television on and went to the refrigerator, looking for a beer, or something to keep his hands busy. It was half the reason he smoked. There was time to bring her back to bed, removing the clothes that she had put on without ripping anything, without a word passing between them until much later when they were all tangled up and she was complaining again about how complicated it was.

"What do you want for dinner?"

She shook her head. "I don't know," she went back to her crossword puzzle, propping her forehead up on the heel of her hand. Food that wasn't directly in front of her lacked appeal. Thinking about food seemed like too much work.

He gestured to the binder on the table next to her. "There is probably a list of restaurants in there," he pointed out. "Pick something out, and we'll go there."

He saw her shoulders stiffen as she hesitated, holding the pen in one hand. Resentment flashed on her face and she set the pen down sharply, picking up the binder and opening it to the restaurant tab.

He called the watcher's place while she stared at the listings in the binder. There was no answer there or at the Summers' home, which left Angel. He really wasn't in the mood to chat up Angel, so he decided to let it go until later.

He checked up on Pete and Jeannie next. They had gotten lost in Sunnydale, Jeannie reported. Pete hadn't wanted to tell him and they headed back to San Jose to hook up with Georgia and Colin.

"Are you going to stake him?" Jeannie asked, more curious than deeply concerned.

"Probably," Spike told her. "He's pretty useless."

"Harmony is starting her own gang, so Pete decided that he would, too. If I have to pick, I'm thinking Pete."

"What are you going to do if I stake him?"

"Try not to get staked too," she said.

Spike chuckled appreciatively. "Baby's growing up. Makes me feel all—"he tried to think of a Willow word, "sniffy."

"Huh?" Jeannie did a double take. So did Willow.

"Never mind," he shrugged it off, pleased to get a rise out of Willow. "So, what else is going on? How did Harmony manage to fly the coop?"

"I've heard a couple of versions of it. She showed up in Sacramento with the Slayer, and I think it was like San Francisco. They just left without her. Harmony. Go figure? She told Colin and Georgia what you are on to," she revealed, "and I think that was interesting enough for them to keep her around. She's got this big plan to start her own gang, but I already told you that. Pete's pretty jealous. He wants to start his own gang, but he doesn't have a plan. I think he just expects one to sort of form around him."

"A plan or a gang?" Spike asked, amused by the snarking from the quiet minion.

"Both."

"Unlikely," Spike predicted.

"Except, you know, the Harmony thing. If she can actually form a gang, Pete will probably be like, 'let me be in charge and you can be my girlfriend,' which I'm thinking is going to work because Harmony would rather be the girlfriend."

"So, you'll be in the Pete/Harmony gang?" Spike commented, feeling Willow's eyes on him. She was paying attention now.

"Trying not to be staked, too," she finished the thought. "Unless there are better options," she tried to play if off.

"Pet, I'm not really the gang leader sort," Spike told her. "But, not planning on staking you if it counts for anything."

"It's cool," she said. "How is Willow?"

He smiled at the note of genuine interest in her voice, wondering how it was that Willow managed to inspire curiosity, idle or otherwise, from the evil undead. "Alive." He figured that summed it up nicely.

After he finished his conversation with Jeannie, who was shaping up into a minion who could hold up her end of a conversation, Spike smoked another cigarette—Willow looked up sharply when he lit a second after crushing out the first one--and thought about what they were going to do for the next day. Leaving the hotel was a no brainer. There was a body down the hall waiting to be discovered and he preferred for that to happen when they were well away from the hotel. On a purely intellectual level Willow clearly knew that he was killing and feeding, but the sight of the police tape stretched across a door and the sure knowledge that he had killed someone specific a couple hundred yards down the hall was different.

He regretted not having eyes and ears in Sunnydale as they edged closer to the end game but, if it had been important, he would have chosen someone more reliable than Pete. Their next stop would be Los Angeles. It was a big enough city to lose themselves in and he needed to do some scouting to come up with a good location for the trade that they would make.

She emerged from her self-imposed silence with a sigh. She looked a bit shopworn with her fading bruises. "We could just stop somewhere on the way to somewhere else," she said.

He went to the refrigerator and found a soda for her, before he walked over to the table and took a seat in the captain style chair, appropriating her crossword puzzle. She snatched up the pen before he could get it. Her crossword puzzle methodology was very organized. She worked the across and down in sections, probably double-checking her answers before penning in the neat block letters. The upper left hand quarter of the puzzle was complete. Opening the can of soda for her, he pushed it across the table to her and started looking at the next quarter. He held his hand out for the pen.

When she didn't hand it to him, he looked at her. "Don't be a brat. Give me the pen."

"Prick your finger and write in blood," she held her hand out for the crossword puzzle.

"A convention reserved by vampires for signing binding documents," he shot back, reaching across the table to grab her wrist. He pulled the pen out of her hand while she reached for the crossword puzzle. With the pen in hand, he got the crossword puzzle back, frowning at her. "You're in a mood. Wake up on the wrong side of the vampire, kitten?"

She eyed the king size bed. "Why is that in America, where a double room is more or less exactly what you expect to find, do you insist on renting rooms with one bed? I get that you want to have sex, but is there some reason why you have to sleep with me?"

He half expected her to seize on the conversational detour he had tossed out there for her to play with and was slightly disappointed at failing to intrigue her with the comment about signing contracts in blood. She zeroed in on the snark, which suggested that she was dwelling on her unacknowledged attraction to him.

He considered that for a moment, permitting himself a smug grin as he thought of a few ways to explain it to her. "No reason, really," he admitted. "If it bothers you that much, there is always the floor."

Which was so true that her head snapped back in surprise that she hadn't thought of it herself, even though Colin had said something about it before.

He watched her slowly turn red for a moment wondering if she was indignant because he suggested that she sleep on the floor or taken aback at not having thought of it herself and went back to the crossword puzzle. He filled in the answer to seven across, the Sooner state. Oklahoma. Same number of letters required for hellhole or dust bowl. The thought made his lips twitch.

Tonight's battle would probably be about her sleeping in another bed or on the floor. He thought about it for a second. It didn't have to be a battle. He didn't have to have an opinion about when or how or where she slept. Not that that had ever stopped him from having an opinion. She wasn't sleeping on the floor, or in another bed. If her guilty conscience was keeping her awake, it wouldn't indefinitely trump her need to sleep, and the sooner she got used to that, the better off she would be, he told himself without bothering to examine why he had an opinion on the subject.

"If you need some more sleep, you should lie down," he told her. "We've got a few hours before sundown."

Being startled awake on top of not having slept very well had made her irritable. Being told that she was going to die, eventually, had made her not sleep well. It was all a part of the same thing.

"I would rather have my crossword puzzle back," she said, trying to keep her voice even.

He shook his head. "It just galls the hell out of you that by every way that you measure things you keep coming up short." He chuckled. "Eight letter word for stubborn, starts with an ‘O'? Funny, yeah?"

"Obdurate," she muttered, unable to help herself. "Hilarious."

He pursed his lips, blowing her a mocking kiss. "A little show of petulance really doesn't put a crimp in my plans. If your new master plan is to be annoying, have at it, but I don't want to hear it later if you don't like the way I deal with being annoyed."

She hadn't come up with being annoying as a plan, but now that he was suggesting it to her, she could see the benefits of it, at least in terms of the issue of being killed and turned into a vampire. Though, the part about being turned into a vampire was less of concern than the being killed part. She didn't want to be a vampire. She didn't want to be buried either. Cremation seemed more appropriate to her, partially from having patrolled with Buffy in a lot of cemetery real estate over the last few years. Burial had come to feel a bit barbaric to her, but it had occurred to her that since she would be dead anyway, strong feelings about how her remains would be dealt with were a moot point.

On the other hand there was the emotional turmoil her friends would experience when they had to stake her, and given her experience meeting her vampire double, Willow had no doubt that it would end in staking. It would have ended in staking if she hadn't asked Buffy to not stake the other Willow.

She frowned, remembering how they had greeted her when she came in the library, thinking she was dead. Big happy when they discovered that she wasn't dead, but not so much with the deep emotional turmoil before that. Just a lot of ‘back, demon, back' from Xander. Hmm. If she was ever forced to stake one of her friends because they had been turned into a vampire, she was going to work in a heartfelt sorry first.

Silence? Spike filled in an obvious ‘kite' incorporating the K in Oklahoma and glanced up again to observe. The angry flush gave way to a far away look that turned thoughtful. He wondered what she was thinking about. Whatever it was, she was thinking too hard about it and that was never a good thing. If she had a shred of self-confidence she would have laughed in his face last night and told him that he should hope to survive a couple of years around her. She wasn't very bloodthirsty, but given sufficient motivation, time, and a bit of negligence on his part, she might manage to dust him.

Willow liked to think that she had priorities and principals that she was ready to die for, but what exactly did that mean? She had been through some scary moments—nearly burned at the stake ranked up there, but she had been mostly thinking that it would all somehow work out pretty much up until the hem of her pants caught on fire, and then it was just pain and panic.

While he pretended that he wasn't watching her, Willow sat back in her chair, bringing her knees up. She wrapped her arms around her legs, rocking a little.

"George Elliot novel. Begins with M?" he prompted.

"Middlemarch," her voice held the sound of unspoken questions. She had a feeling that he knew the answer and was just asking to make conversation, or maybe to find out if she knew the answer. Her little flush of pleasure at having known the answer faded. There were times when she felt like a trained seal, so obvious and desperately eager for approval that she would do anything to get it.

"What's on your mind, pet?"

"When you kill people, do they seem to know that they are dying?"

An eyebrow rose at that. "Probably not. I don't stop and ask, but I suppose I could," he tapped the pen on the folded tabloid. "It's pretty fast, and shock becomes a factor." He briefly considered explaining the mechanics of feeding. No one had explained it to him and he remembered with a wry grin, the first time he managed to find an artery on the first bite. Instead of letting blood pressure work for him, he had sucked and the increased flow of blood had overwhelmed him, filling his nose and his sinuses in an unpleasant way. He had backed off, coughing violently while Angelus laughed at him, his dinner spraying to the pavement.

No. Probably not something she should hear. She was having a hard enough time wrapping her brain around the idea that he would kill her. Me and my big mouth, he chided himself. Really, what did he expect?

"Why? Do you want a five-minute warning so you can get your affairs in order? Write letters to your friends and family?"

She looked at him, wondering if he would agree to that. "Would you—"

He shook his head. "I already did," he reminded her. "I know you are bored silly, but quit turning it into a drama," he advised, his tone softening a bit. He tapped on the crossword puzzle with the pen to bring her attention back to it. "Let's live dangerously and answer all the questions we can without cross-checking."

"I don't like living dangerously," she grumbled.

"Uh, yeah," he snorted. "Stakes, holy water, vampires, demons, fighting the forces of evil in between trips to the mall, reading up on the dark arts, and snogging your steady—the werewolf," his lips curled into a crooked smile. "You are in less danger on a moment-to-moment basis hanging out with me than you are on any day in Sunnyhell with your mates, and you'd seriously consider jumping out of a moving car if you thought that you could wring some kind of advantage out of it. You know what tipped me off in Sacramento? You were happy. You were having fun." His eyebrows rose, daring her to deny it. "You like living dangerously. If you saw a burlap sack wiggling around in a ditch, you'd open it."

Her nose wrinkled. "It could be kittens or puppies," she defended the hypothetical bag opening. He was wrong anyway. She would get Xander to open the bag.

"Or rats, with beady eyes and sharp teeth."

Her expression cleared. "I like rats," she admitted, watching him lift the beer bottle to his lips. He tipped his head back and drank, throat working in a way that was a little disturbing. Did vampires have extra strong throat muscles from sucking blood out of people? And, eeew! Why did she have to think of things like that? Her life was like a bad horror movie without dead cheerleaders, so why did she have to dwell on thoughts that were guaranteed to freak her out even more?

He smiled at that, licking his upper lip where the tiniest bit of foam clung from the beer. "Figured that you were type that only went for the cute, fluffy animals," he told her, glancing over at her.

She looking at him and hastily redirected her gaze to the soda can he had opened for her, rocking forward in the chair to grab it before settling back and trying to disappear behind her raised knees.

She was such an odd creature. Little Miss 'Go along to get along' until she was backed into a corner and forced to acknowledge that she was outflanked. Some people would have never gotten over acknowledging it, but she had the capacity to look beyond losing battles on a regular basis.

"You made up that bit about signing documents in blood, didn't you?" she accused.

He toasted her with his beer bottle, mentally applauding her for working her way back around to that. His eyes glinted with humor as he considered spinning outrageous vampire lore for her. "Nope. It's true enough," he shrugged. "Blood oath," he rolled his eyes. "But most of it? All the vampy fairy tales and fables? You live forever, and you get bored. Some wanker comes along and makes up a version of social order with its own set of rules. Its mostly bullshit or outdated stuff that no one remembers why it got started."

She thought about that for a moment. "Like laws prohibiting spitting on the sidewalk?"

"I was thinking along the lines of virgin sacrifices, but that'll do for an example," he agreed.





The taping and marking of each section of the grid that Dr. Holbrook had plotted was a bit tedious. Not unlike setting up and taking down the band's equipment before and after a gig. On a night spent talking about nothing in particular while Devon was trying to come down after a gig, Oz had talked about how math and music and logic were all tied together. Devon didn't necessarily agree with him, though he got why someone would think that there was science and order to the structure of sound. The band was the structure, they built the box that he stood inside.

Setting up and taking down equipment was something he was pretty adept at appearing to do without actually participating so much. He worked the room, before and after they played. Working the room was his job. Chris was holding up a white board with scale markings as a backdrop to the photographs that Dr. Holbrook was taking.

Giles and Angel were still working around the skeleton. Angel would pick up an object, usually a piece of jewelry, put it on, and touch the cross that Giles was holding. The sizzling flesh sound made Dan gag. After the third or fourth go at it, he had enough and left the crypt. Xander and Buffy went with him. Dr. Holbrook seemed to have decided to block out the weird flesh-burning phenomenon, but blocking it out was absorbing his attention.

No one was watching him. Devon picked up a ring, on the edge of a roughly carved shelf in the stone. It looked like it might have tumbled out of one of the overflowing chests. He considered slipping it into his pocket like it was a hotel ashtray or a box of matches from a club. Compared to the magnificent ropes of pearls and gold and the heavy, ornate cross sticking out of one of the chests in front of him, it was a pretty humble, almost contemporary looking piece of jewelry. Something you might see at a flea market on a tray of crappy jewelry.

He looked at it a little more closely. It was probably the only thing he had seen that he could take and wear that no one would automatically associate with this place. Before he could slip the ring into his front pocket, he heard the now familiar sound of flesh sizzling. Mr. Giles didn't suggest that they stop and Angel didn't ask. It was just one more item eliminated. Devon looked at the ring again.

"I know you've got this whole search pattern thing going," he turned towards them, "I'm getting itchy fingers." He held up the ring. "It looks like something that no one would have noticed that I took," he pointed out. "I probably ought to get out of here."

Dr. Holbrook paused. A faint, grudging smile appeared. "It happens to everyone," he said. "You see something that stands out, but looks inconsequential, and you think, this is a little bit of nothing. It's not like it's valuable."

"So, I can have it?" Devon started to slip the ring on.

"Er—no," Dr. Holbrook was emphatic. "The only thing in here that isn't going to a museum is whatever Giles is looking for," he insisted. "And, yeah, you are out of here," he told him with a wry grin. "Put that back exactly where you found it."

Devon started to put the ring back and then stopped, his hand hovering over the spot. He wasn't good at a lot of things, which really didn't bother him very much. He wasn't worried about the future, he didn't think a lot about life's imponderables. This morning he had wanted to be in on the excavation. Right now he wanted a ring. In an hour he'd be thinking about dinner and not having the ring, but missing the rest of the excavation wasn't really going to bother him now that they had gotten to the boring parts.

"If this is what Giles is looking for, and somehow we get Willow back without trading it, could I have it then?"

Chris made an exasperated sound. "Jeez, Dev. You are like a raccoon. Bright shiny object. Ooooh!"

Giles had turned to look at him, and Devon shrugged, miming putting it down even as he slipped the band over his pinkie. "I was just asking," he grumbled, turning toward them, his body between the spot where he had supposed left the ring and their site lines. He could feel his heart pounding. "I know," he slid his hands into his pockets. "I know. I'm out of here," he gave up, slouching past Giles, flashing a weak smile at Chris. "You aren't going to tell Oz, are you?" he asked.

Chris frowned at him. "No. I think he's got enough to deal with."

He almost reached the hole in the floor before Angel, who had was taking a break stopped him. "You didn't put the ring down. I would have heard it, and your heart is beating too fast. It's a dead giveaway," he told him, holding his hand out.

Devon considered lying until Angel opened a Styrofoam container full of blood and his face changed. Without a protest he put the ring in Angel's hand. It was quite possibly the most unremarkable of all the objects they had tested so far, Angel decided. A simple gold ring, not particularly well-made, with a murky cabochon stone under a crude overlay of gold. He gave a spare shake of his head as Devon backed down the ladder and put the ring in his pocket. He would put it back when no one was looking. He didn't think Devon meant any harm.

Giles was holding what appeared to be a kind of torque. "Whenever you are ready," he said to Angel, waiting for the vampire to feed.

Figuring out how to get the torque on consumed several minutes, drawing Dr. Holbrook away to make a study of the piece. It was a solid white gold open circle with gargoyle head end caps. Between the clenched teeth of the gargoyles a table cut ruby hung suspended on a chain.

"I've never seen anything like this chain," Dr. Holbrook commented. "It reminds me of a safety chain on a bracelet, though it's hard to see how this could be easily removed on its own.

Giles tried to find a catch or hook to deal with the chain, working under one of the halogen lamps that had been brought in to give them light to work by. "Angel? Your eyes are better than mine," he pointed out.

Angel took the piece in his hands, turning it over, examining the chain, like Giles, he was looking for a hinge, a clasp, something that would open the circle. He tried twisting one of the gargoyle heads, feeling a little give in it. He applied a little more force and it started to twist free on threads that probably hadn't seen use in centuries. The opening was still too small for anyone but the smallest of children.

"Maybe it goes on your head," Chris put in.

Angel didn't dismiss the idea. "No. It's a torque," he was puzzled, and then it came to him. "Wait. This makes sense," he said, grasping it in both hands and pulling it apart until it was wide enough to force around his throat.

"Of coarse," Giles breathed. "It was made for a vampire to wear."

The word vampire drew a startled look from Dr. Holbrook. "Okay!" he said. "The bizarre never stops, does it?"

Chris patted him on the shoulder. "Welcome to Sunnydale."

Angel squeezed the sides back together and found the dangling gargoyle head, screwing it back into place. "Okay," he nodded to Giles. "Let's do it."

Chris and Dr. Holbrook had stopped working. They watched as Angel touched the cross in Giles' hand, and then wrapped his fingers around it. Nothing happened.




"Is this where you and Willow went to grade school?" Oz asked, looking down at the elementary school.

Buffy and Xander were sitting between the open doors in the back of Oz's van. The school had been built in the seventies and it had a kind of institutional bomb shelter look to it, hunkered down low to the ground, built into the side of a hill. Half of the building appeared to be one story, but the other half was two stories across a flat roof that bristled with clumps of equipment that he recognized as having something to do with the heating and cooling system.

"We went to Winkler," Xander said, referring to a school on the other side of town that was now an antique mall.

Buffy knew that from back in the day when Willow was hopelessly fixated on Xander and willing to relive every moment from their childhood. She felt a surge of irritation and anger that made her itch to smack the back of his head for old time's sake. How could he have not known how much Willow had loved him? Or knowing it, have mistaken it so completely?

Xander was looking down at the playground equipment, rocking a little. "We used to come here in the summer, on our bikes. It was out-of-bounds," he nodded to the four-lane road that bisected Sunnydale from its northern hub. "We weren't supposed to cross Hanley, so we went under it and we would come here for the swings and the—" he frowned. "Can't remember what they are called. The thing that spins? It's like a big flat piece of steel with bars and you run beside it and jump on?" He pointed to a bare place in the playground. "It was over there. Willow would get on, and Jesse and I would push."

"She likes swings, too," Oz noted, thinking about Willow on a swing with her eyes closed and her face lifted into the rush of air flowing past her.

Xander nodded. "She's easily entertained, our Will," he put in.

Oz was standing a bit away from them, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched forward, leaning into the wind that was picking up. Buffy's irritation with Xander passed. She had never really understood the mystery that was Oz, except the few times that she had caught him watching Willow the way she deserved to be looked at by someone. He was quiet, he had an odd sense of humor, and there was something a little withdrawn or remote about him that she thought was probably the worst thing in the world for someone like Willow, who was too easily pleased by the smallest things.

"There was a swing on the porch at her cousin's house," Oz said. "After we got all of her things in from the van, we ordered a pizza. I wasn't worried about her being there. Away from Sunnydale, because what's to worry about?"

Most of them time he looked alone because he was a bit of a loner, even in a band and a crowded club, he was in his own little world of precise timing and sound. He looked at ease with his aloneness, like he had figured out the big secret of being alone and was savoring it.

On a normal day he might stand like that, and Willow would tuck her hands inside his wrists and rest her cheek on his shoulder, content with that small amount of contact even though she probably wanted more. Buffy gritted her teeth against the sob that rose in her throat when she realized that he was crying.

"I'm never there when she needs me," he said bitterly. "Never."

Buffy got up. "You'll be there," she told him. "You'll—" whatever she meant to say was lost.

"Yes!" Xander shouted, scrambling off the end of the van. He was looking toward the opening of the access tunnel where Angel stood, with Giles, in the late afternoon sunlight that was slanting across the field.

She got the whole ‘yes' thing. It was the Gem of Amara. They had it. Angel was wearing it, standing in the sun. She hadn't thought about what it would feel like, to see him like that. He was holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. Nearing sunset, slanting down at that angle that made things blaze with color, she was suddenly aware of how bright it was. It struck her forcefully how unnatural it was. How vampires weren't meant to stand up to the light of day. This light wasn't kind. In the radiantly white light in darkness where he dwelled he was aptly named, gleaming, and pure somehow. A beautiful boy armed with the seriousness of purpose of a man. In daylight he was leached of color. She felt something like panic claw at her sense of who he was to her. Not a boy. Not a man.

In daylight it was impossible to forget that he was also dead.

She felt Oz moving behind her, pausing, just behind her, a little to one side.

"This is the part I didn't think through," he said.

Buffy nodded, unable to speak.

"Angel's the whitest guy I've ever seen." He gave it a moment, feeling like he was coming back to a life where there was always a way to make things work. "He's really white."

Buffy could only watch as he peered through his fingers at the sunlit world of Sunnydale. This was the part no one thought through, except maybe Angel as Xander joined in with, "Whiter than Larry Bird?"

"Oh, yeah," Oz nodded, but he wasn't unaware of Buffy's distress. He just didn't know what to do with it, so he did something he might have done with Willow. He let his hand brush hers, just to let her know that he was there, and then he jerked his head to one side, catching Xander's eye. "I'm for finding out what's the what," he said. "Are you coming?"

"Yeah," Xander agreed. "Buffy?"

"Give her a minute. It's a lot to take in," Oz told him as they walked towards Angel and Giles.