Chapter Thirty-Two

"What does it feel like?" she asked.

He didn't answer for a moment and she looked at him. His eyes were wet, his lashes clumping. They were running a little, probably from the unaccustomed quality of the light.

"Hot," he said. "Maybe I'll rethink wearing black."

She cocked her head to one side. Angel wasn't as humorless as her friends liked to think. He just wasn't jokey. The way he said it made her smile and then go still as he gently unfastened her ponytail holder and let her hair fall into his hands, turning her with the slight pressure of his wrists until the sun was behind her and he was looking at her hair in it.

"I've seen you in sunlight, a lot of times," he said. "I'd stand in the shadows and watch you, but this is different."

"I know," she acknowledged it, feeling her throat go tight.

The uneasiness that she had felt didn't entirely subside, but she would deny it. She would lie about it. She would do the foolish thing and tell him to keep the ring if it made him happy. But not completely happy. Not happy enough to bring back Angelus. There was the strange bit of unhappy happiness in the thought that he had managed to accomplish that only in her. Not even being expelled from hell had equaled the perfect happiness that she represented to him. It was a thought that was gratifying and painful.

"Did I tell you about my theory about the Gem of Amara?" she asked, striving for a light tone.

There were so many colors that he had never seen before in her hair, he marveled. He had dreams of her in sunlight, but the quality of the light was, he realized now, drawn from televisions and movies. Similar enough, but so different that he had the same disoriented sensation that he had experienced after he had crawled out of his grave and experienced the world with preternaturally enhanced senses. It was making him feel a little dizzy. He could hear her talking. He could even hear the slightly nervous tremor in her voice. Was it because he was staring at her?

He took a deep breath to steady himself.

"Oh, what is it?" she asked when Angel failed to respond to her.

He blinked, his gaze switching from her hair to her face. There was just the tiniest hint of hesitation. What was what?

Her eyes searched his face. “Angel? The Gem of Amara?”

The Gem of Amara? For a few moments they thought it was the torque, but as soon as Angel reached the outside of the tunnel they had made, to see Devon sitting on a crate, looking like he had a lot to think about, or indigestion, he remembered slipping the ring into his pocket and somehow he just knew. It was the ring.

He took it out of his pocket and handed it to Giles at the mouth of the sewer access tunnel and put his hand into the light slanting in to confirm it. The torque might have been made for a vampire. It wasn't a bad theory, but the Gem of Amara, it was not.

It gave them ideas, though. They were both inclined to take Spike for granted. Angel couldn't help it. No matter what Spike had claimed to the contrary, there wasn't a doubt in Angel's mind that he could beat Spike. Out-think him. Out fight him. Giles wasn't terribly impressed with him, either. They could pull off a bait and switch. With Willow planted squarely in the middle. If it worked, no more Spike.

If it failed, no more Willow.

He separated his hand from Buffy's hair and brushed the collar of his shirt back. He was wearing what appeared to be a kind of metal collar that rested on his collar bones, capped at the open ends with a pair of leering gargoyle heads holding a chain between their teeth bearing a blood red stone.

"Uh, there's a fashion statement that will appeal to Spike," she grimaced.

"What's your theory?" Angel asked, and was mildly surprised that he sounded normal. Not like he was standing in sunlight with Buffy. Not like he was in the middle of a moment he had never allowed himself to hope that he could have.

"If we cut off his head, will he still be alive, because I'm thinking we can keep it in a box and take it out for major holidays, pickup basketball games, touch football," she was glibly gruesome. "It's a theory worth testing, right?"

He nodded, smiling a little. This wasn't about winning or loosing. It wasn't about saving the world for her. It was about bringing Willow home. She would never go for the bait and switch idea. It was too high-risk.

"You could be right about your theory, but the only way to test it is to take an axe and try to remove my head. I'm probably not going to grow another one."

She made a face. "We can test it on Spike," she said.

And she would. It was the way she did things. One problem at a time. It would work if they believed that the torque was the Gem of Amara. Any hint of deception would be fatal. If it didn't work, she would never forgive him. He wasn't sure he would ever forgive himself.



"Denny's," Willow had to hang her head out of the window to read the signs flashing past on the road.

"You threw up the last time you ate there," he reminded her.

Which had nothing to do with Denny's. For a moment, as she slid back into the passenger side of the seat, she considered telling him that. She had the perfect way to conclude the story and for a moment she savored the idea of the summation. ‘These are the lengths I go to—forcing myself to vomit and have sex with you.'

She didn't say it, and she discovered that she didn't need to. Just hearing the words in her head, bright and glassy with spite, made her feel better. A bit of her hair whipped across her face from the open window and she peeled it away, pushing her fingers through her hair, feeling her fingernails lightly scratching her scalp. The fresh air, the giddy malice, and the scrape of her fingernails made her feel tingly.

"I'd really like a pizza."

This touched off a brief discussion of her eating habits, which were crap according to Spike. "Pizza, cheeseburgers, tacos. It's baby food for adults."

"I like salad," Willow told him.

"You like salad dressing."

"It's a part of the salad," she retorted, remembering the salad he had bought in Sacramento that she had largely ignored due to lack of appealing salad dressing.

"The pancakes and maple syrup had to be the single most disgusting thing I've seen you eat. I wasn't eating them, and the smell was enough to make me want to heave."

"Actually," she sounded thoughtful, "I think that's the Denny's factor. They all smell funny."

They ended up at a Chinese restaurant, eating outdoors on a small deck with paper lanterns strung overhead. Spike ordered spring rolls and a hot, spicy chicken dish served on a bed of nearly translucent fried cabbage. The food arrived and she had a choice between chopsticks and a fork.

She had eaten with chopsticks before. Not particularly well, but she was willing to fumble with them awkwardly in hand. The spring rolls had taken the edge off her appetite. The chicken was spicy enough that she wanted to eat it slowly, moving morsels of food to her mouth, washing away the taste with sips of green tea, and then going back in for more as her eyes roved over the mostly empty deck. They were having quiet time, and it wasn't awkward or unnerving. Mostly, it was a relief.

Occasionally she would chance a look at him, only to find him watching her. He wasn't smiling, but he wasn't wearing that expressionless mask that made her feel examined and uneasy, either. She was struck by a resemblance to Oz. It wasn't something that was obvious, but it was there. Oz looked at her like that. Like he was thinking about a million things and nothing in particular all at once. His willingness to let her be her, his patience waiting for her to settle into any particular moment was encompassed in that look. It was an odd thing that they had in common.

Spike was finished eating before she was, occasionally pausing to pluck wrinkled looking peppers out of the path of her consumption. When she had had enough, she wiped her mouth on one of the paper napkins and folded it over her food.

The waiter brought the check and Spike placed a pair of twenties over it without bothering to look at it. "Let's go," he said, gesturing for her to rise, his hand falling on the small of her back as they wove through tables.

She had not entirely given up on her idea of simply leaving and going in the exact opposite direction that he would expect. When they left the hotel, she had stayed close to him, hoping that he would open the trunk to store the items that they were taking with them, but he had tossed them into the backseat. When she got in the car, she had gotten on her knees to look over the back of the front seat while the dome light was still on, creating an eerie glow over the gloom in the interior of the DeSoto.

It was an older car, so the back seat was like its own country. Or a landfill. The light glinted off empty bottles, newspapers, and—

His hand landed on her ass, the sharp smack coincided with her shriek of horror at what appeared to be a small hand reaching up through the crap on the floorboards. She flung herself backward and he caught her, immediately recognizing the fear in her voice.

"Dead baby," she babbled. "Dead baby."

He rolled his eyes. "Calm down," he gave her a small shake. "It's probably one of Dru's dolls, you silly bint."

She looked a little wild. "Probably?"

"I don't eat babies. They smell weird." He made a face. Seeing that she wasn't convinced, and possibly, 'I don't eat babies, it's wrong' might have gone over better, he'd pushed her away and twisted his upper body to reach over to feel around in the back until he found the hand that had set her off. It was attached to a squishy foam doll. Dru usually didn't like dolls that looked like babies, though every so often, one would take her fancy for a few days. This one was infant-sized and it was dressed in an antique christening gown. He tossed it to Willow.

"Doll. Told you," he said when she frowned at it, gingerly holding it away from her.

"Eeew. It's stinky," she said.

He shrugged, shutting the driver's side door, throwing them into darkness. He took the doll from her and pitched it back over the seat back. "Eau de Johnnie Walker Red," he guessed.

Outside the restaurant, she hung back, clearly not looking forward to returning to the car. "Willow?"

"Hmm?" she turned back to him, looking distracted and innocent. "Hey! I've got an idea! We could find a car wash."

And lo and behold, there was one right across the street! It was a self-service place with a couple of stalls for car washing and a long, narrow one story building next to a small liquor store. He had an intuitive flash of her doing this kind of thing most of her life. Willow Rosenberg: girl most likely to helpfully nudge you into the direction she wanted to go in.

"Oooh. Could we?" he mocked. "You want to wash my car?"

And vacuum the interior, and search for her purse, not necessarily in that order. "Uh, yeah. Your car is gross."

That was how he found himself sitting on a low brick wall, smoking, mildly diverted by the spectacle of Willow, in jeans that were saturated courtesy of a leaky hose, crawling across the front seat of the DeSoto wielding the hose from an industrial strength vacuum. All the moment lacked was a cheesy Donna Summers eight track and roller skates, Spike decided. She was nothing if not thorough, though he had drawn the line at the pine-scented Christmas tree air freshener that she had wanted to get from the vending machine.

Excavating the back seat had taken a bit of time. Willow kept pausing to ask if he wanted to keep things. Like the doll. The tentative and slightly sappy look on her face made him wonder if she thought he was attached to the doll because it was Drusilla's. He was about as fond of Dru's dolls as he was of Angelus. Crazy bitch. The thought was tinged with as much fondness as anger and, for a moment, he wondered where she was and what she was up to. Not for the first time, he wondered what Dru would make of Willow. Even in her most lucid moments, it probably would go right over her head that Willow admired his devotion to Dru.

In her most lucid moments, it went over Dru's head that there was a possibility of him being anything but devoted to her. Even when she was doing her fretful 'no one loves me' bit, it was all a set piece for him to respond to with a declaration of his undying devotion. She would smile her satisfaction, or run her long fingernails over his face as if she could memorize him from the tips of her fingernails and engrave him on her bones. At moments like that, his reward for making Dru his whole world was that he was the anchor of her world.

His gaze drifted downward. Willow hadn't expressed her appreciation like it was some sappy, romantic thing. She said it like she understood that it was, at times, an expression of will. He had been a bit put out that she admired anything about him on general principle, but there was a grudging respect in it that was . . . nice. Angelus had always dismissed his feelings for Dru, completely missing the point. It wasn't convenient, or fun, or easy. But, that figured. Loyalty was something that Angelus demanded but never gave.

Loyalty was something Spike gave sparingly but, once it was assigned, it was forever.

It was odd that Red recognized it. He wondered if it meant that she gave it the same meaning. She wiggled backward out of the DeSoto, the vacuum hose slung over her arm as she plucked at the wet fabric clinging to her, wriggling a little. Yeah. Loyalty was one of her vices. She carried it too far, letting him use it to manipulate her. He hopped down from the wall and, at the sound of his boots hitting pavement, she turned to look at him, damp hair sticking to her bruised face.

He felt a totally unexpected wave of tenderness. She was a mess. Sweaty, soaked, reeking of detergent, bruised. She was too thin and too tired. It almost made him want to kill her just to give her a good night's sleep, but the thought of physically trapping her in a moment of weakness was unthinkable. She wasn't weak. She was just worn down a bit.

At the same time, he wanted to peel off her wet clothes and bury his head between her legs and stay there a while, feel her hands in his hair and the tremble under her soft skin as he gave her something that would make her sink into sleep when she was sated and possibly before he was. He was sure that he could be that generous.

She had piled the bags of clothes and food and other crap that they were collecting on the back seat while she tossed trash into a bin and vacuumed the floor. He dug in his pocket for the keys. "I'll do the boot," he offered, gesturing to the bags, "and we can shift that lot in there."

She looked startled at the offer, and not altogether pleased by it. "That's okay. I don't mind," she offered. "It's something to do, and you have interesting garbage. I can't wait to tell Xander about it."

He had a hard time imagining what she found interesting in empty bottles, old newspapers and other bits of rubbish he had collected. Her garbage was genuinely interesting. She was very methodical and neat about how she stowed things when she was through with them. She was doing her plucky kidnap victim thing again. It made him smile a little, wondering idly what she was up to now. He picked a wet lock of hair off her cheek, just watching her with an expression that was studiously patient and slightly suspicious.

She stared back at him. There was a slight change in her heart rate, but nothing dramatic. Her eyes widened a little, becoming slightly unfocused as she kept her gaze as bland as possible. It took him a second to notice the way she was breathing. It was very measured, deep, even breathing. Probably something she had learned right off when she started learning her craft. She was using it to keep her heart rate under control. He had to take a small breath himself to keep from breaking into an appreciative grin.

"You look like hell," he told her, cradling her face in the palm of his hand, letting his thumb slip under her jaw to tilt her chin up. Relief bloomed in her eyes. He could almost see the wheels turning in her head. She was thinking that he just wanted to kiss her. The momentary relief was chased off by a tiny frown that drew in her eyebrows. She wasn't supposed to find being kissed by the Big Bad a relief.

"You should help me," he said instead. "It'll go faster. Unless you want to lie down."

Willow blinked. He was talking about the trunk. "Uh, okay," she agreed. Her purse was probably in the trunk. For a second she debated about just asking if she could have it back, and then decided not to. He implied that she could take off anytime she wanted to. She didn't think that included actively assisting in her departure, and she wasn't all that sure if he was being absolutely literal when he claimed that he wouldn't stop her.

While she was distracted weighing her chances of getting her purse back, his head dipped and his lips brushed hers. He backed off. Her eyes had widened, only this was the real thing, not the fake disingenuous she had tried to bluff with a moment ago.

"Got your attention?" he asked, pleasantly despite the hint of mockery. "You'd be a vision, spread out over the back seat." His fingers moved down her bare arms, circling her wrists.

She reared back, her attention finally wrested from her preoccupation with her purse and flight. She looked around incredulously, aware that it was somewhat spoiled by the fact that there was no traffic to speak of and the restaurant across the street was the only sign of life.

"You want to have sex in a car at a car wash?" she squeaked. It occurred to her for the first time that he was remarkably circumspect in public places, with the lone exception of the night in San Francisco, and even then he had sought some degree of privacy. There had been touching, but no kissing, no groping, no display of her as a trophy or conquest, or whatever she was to him. Which sort of made sense because as he pointed out, she looked awful.

He laughed at her. "Among other things," he nodded, willing to be entertained by her, watching her lips purse as she tried to gauge how serious he was. She was fun to tease. "No?"

She looked wary. "No," she tried it out, wondering if he would snatch it back from her.

His fingers tightened ever so slightly on her wrists. No was not part of the vocabulary of victims. He had to go and crave something more than that, a little bit of coercion to scrape away her reservations. He let go of her wrists and handed her the keys. "Might as well finish anyway."

Now she had the keys and a chance to find her purse in the trunk and the distracting idea that he would have it his way no matter what he appeared to agree to. She moved around him to open the trunk. The lock was a little sticky, but she managed it. When she got the trunk open, she stood, scanning the surfaces, looking for her purse, spotting it in the well of a spare tire. He leaned against the side of the car, looking at her in a way that made her feel every wet spot that had formed on her clothes, sticking to her.

She felt a little dizzy. Clammy from the cold that seemed to spread against her skin, despite the fact that it was a warm night and she had eaten recently. In the restaurant he had handled the chopsticks with seemingly effortless dexterity that she couldn't copy, even when he put his chopsticks down and corrected the way she was holding them. She had had the odd thought that she had never felt so much the center of someone's attention in a way that wasn't awkward with misunderstanding, except for the time that Oz told her that he wouldn't kiss her, even though he wanted to because he wanted to kiss her when kissing would be about her kissing him.

Her fingernails bit into her palms. He kept doing that. He kept looking at her like he understood things about her and what he understood was not reassuring. It was terrifying. It was wrong. If she lifted the hem of her t-shirt over her head and shimmied out of her wet jeans would he notice that her underwear was getting a little gray from it's inadequate washings in sinks? Would he notice that she was getting a little gray? Would Xander or Oz or her parents be less dead if she managed to keep him from forcing her to watch them die?

Her eyes looked a little glassy and her complexion was chalk. She was no longer trying to hide how she was breathing. Her breath came in shallow little pants. He cocked his head to one side, trying to figure out what was going through her head. Why she suddenly looked so overwhelmed and uncertain.

He followed her gaze to her purse, and realized that he was in the middle of another one of her escape adventures. Only this one wasn't terribly well thought out and she didn't know how to fix it. He picked up an empty carton of cigarettes next to the purse and tossed it in the general direction of the trashcan that she had been using. That got her moving. She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. She put her foot on the bumper and reached for her purse, forced to stretch for it.

"We should make a pile of things to keep," she said, sounding hollowed out. She had already figured this out. The only way to stop him from following through on the threat he had made was to destroy him, and she wasn't sure that she could. Plunge a stake through his heart and watch him come apart the way vampires did. Her stomach heaved a little, and she breathed through her nose to get it under control.

"Right," he agreed, pretending that he hadn't noticed that anything was amiss. It wasn't arrogance on his part. She was running on empty and he was certain that whatever half-formed idea she had in her head, he was more than capable of dealing with it, without scaring her more than he already had or hurting her again. Or letting her hurt herself.

Loyalty was a curious thing. It curled in his gut. He didn't bother to wonder how it had gotten there, and it felt familiar in a good way. No matter what happened from this moment forward, he would feel it. Decisions would be influenced. His priorities would be weighed with it. She had no idea and, if she did it would scare her, but he thought that he could be something to her other than a bad thing.

He found himself reaching out to touch her cheek. He let his fingers smooth back her hair, wet and a little sticky from the detergent that had been used on the exterior of the car. "Your hair is full of soap," he pointed out, tilting his head to the red-roofed building behind them. It was barely a building, more of a shed row in cinder block with a roof that provided cover for the vending machines, but there was a bathroom. "You should rinse it out."

While she was presumably in the bathroom, or working out her hitchhiking technique on the mostly deserted road, or maybe walking in no particular direction with great purpose, he finished stowing the crap that they had accumulated over the last week, throwing out anything that seemed soiled. She had picked out another t-shirt and the second of the two pairs of blue jeans she had bought to replace her wet clothes. In a minute, or ten, he would go look for her. He was a vampire. The idea that she would run and that he would have to catch her didn't bother him in the least.





They didn't have anything left to do but wait for Spike to call. Giles wanted to send them home, but he settled for sending them out on patrol.

They went on an uneventful patrol and ended up at the Summers' home. Angel had started to take off the elaborate torque and to leave it with Giles. Xander found that reassuring for some reason, though it also irritated him the way Angel tended to irritate him when he kept doing the right thing, the admirable thing, in a self-conscious sort of way like he was still trying to score points with a higher authority and Buffy. Giles stopped him, pointing out that it was safest in his custody.

It was one of Xander's well-developed theories of Angel that he kept to himself, because he was aware that it sounded like dog in the manger stuff. The worst fight he had ever had with Buffy had been over Angel, and she had accused him of being jealous of him. It was unfair and true all at the same time. He was over his initial crush on Buffy, but there were pieces of resentment that he chose to hang onto. In a Xander-ordered universe there would be no ambiguity about good and bad, and Angel would have never paid enough for what Angelus had done to them.

They killed demons. It wasn't personal. It was like pest extermination. Except with Angel who tried to be good in a relentlessly nauseating noble way and co-existed with the potential to be their worst nightmare. He chained Buffy to impossibility, so while Xander no longer thought of Buffy in a Buffy-dream-date-girl sort of way, she was his friend and he did think of her as being trapped.

Who was ever going to measure up? In a less ambiguous world, Angelus would have gone to hell without a soul and Buffy would have figured out that dating the undead was bad. But no, Buffy had to kill him after he got the soul back, after he was given back to her because nothing could be arranged or done that didn't tie them together in a way that was hard to imagine anyone ever topping.

Oz sat in an Adirondack chair, watching them on the porch. Mrs. Summers was the popular mom. His mother had been a popular mom when they lived in Louisville. She was the mom that it was okay to hang out with in the kitchen, and she still was in a way, only it was usually just Devon, Dan, and Chris from the part of his life labeled music. He wondered if he would have hung out with Buffy and Xander if there were no Willow. The werewolf thing was a factor, and Giles had been instrumental in helping him deal with that, so it was probably a given that they would have hung out.

He looked up at the nearly full moon. Only a couple of days to go. It gave him a bad feeling. Chances were that he would be out of it if the exchange didn't happen tomorrow or in daylight hours.