Chapter Fourteen

There were more reasons why she wouldn't kill William than reasons why she couldn't. Oddly enough that was truer of Drusilla. There were reasons why she would never stake Dru and very few reasons why she couldn't.

Dru's talent for prophecy was unpredictable. She had visions of things that would happen in five minutes, an hour, a day, a week, or sometimes years and decades in advance. The latter point was something only Willow could know. Some of the crazier things that Dru announced would in due time come true. Pictures in boxes, white monsters without faces walking on the moon, a litany of atrocities and natural disasters that she sometimes sang under her breath. Sometime in the night Dru had come into her room.

William woke briefly, opening his eyes at the sound of the door opening. When he saw that it was Dru, he started to rise, but she came to the bed and climbed over him, her long fingered hand stroking his cheek. Willow had woken with him. There was something alarming about the way a tense vampire woke up. He was largely inert in sleep and then, he wasn't. She didn't even have to be touching him to feel the change in his body. It occurred to her mildly hung over brain that he was sleeping close to the door for a reason tonight.

She started to move away from him to make room for Dru, but Dru climbed over Willow too before settling down on the outside edge of the bed, facing her. She had a handful of wilted poppies that she laid between them and a piece of sugar candy, dyed blue, shaped in a mold based on one of the characters in the opera. It was a favor from the opera, smelling strongly of peppermint extract.

It wasn't an unusual thing for her to do. When they went to out, when Willow was left behind, Dru would bring little things back for her. Her choices could be unpredictable and sometimes frightening. She had brought her an earring once, the wire dark with dried blood, a ring, with a finger still attached, dead animals, a piece of cake from a wedding spattered with blood. Willow relaxed when she saw the piece of candy.

Dru had left the door from the hallway open, so there was enough light for Willow to see the blue candy, looking like a piece of glass with tiny bubbles inside of it as Dru held it up between two fingers, making it dance as she hummed a bit of the music she remembered from the performance. She popped the candy into her mouth, and made a face at the peppermint taste, taking it out, and sticking her blue dyed tongue out at Willow, who smiled back at her, feeling tears wash her sleep gritty eyes.

The closest thing she had ever come to having a sister was her relationship with Buffy, who had been an ideal, slightly older sister figure. Dru was much older, and less ideal, and she really didn't think that Willow was a person, but there was in moments like this a sad echo of another life. It wasn't hard to imagine that before Angelus, Dru remembered to cadge a treat for a younger sister left behind for the evening. She brought other things tonight. She had a square of cloth that she had been embroidering, and Willow admired it with unfeigned appreciation.

Drusilla's instincts for self-preservation were impressive. In some ways she was much more deadly and terrifying than Angelus or William liked to think they were. In a test of her resolve to kill and Drusilla's reflexes, she knew Dru would win, and it would be quick and direct.

It was infinitely more complicated than that. She was less helpless than she was in the beginning, when the four vampires in all of their careless brutality were at least a known commodity. They were vampires. They were supposed to hurt her, unlike the people, from the soldiers, to the constable, to the nuns, to the girl who had befriended her who had failed her. The last time she had gotten away from them in London she had taken refuge in a church, telling her story to a sympathetic priest.

They had locked her up in a mental hospital that made her appreciate the more enlightened approach to mental health in the late twentieth century. The things that had happened to her in the two weeks she spent in the hospital had nearly broken her, starting the spiral of depression that culminated with her first attempt to kill herself. She wouldn't stake William for a lot of reasons, but she couldn't stake him because no matter what he did to her, it was never as bad as what could be done to her if he wasn't there, or so she thought.

That was becoming less true. The skills that she had acquired, particularly in the last two years, were going to benefit her eventually. The spells she had used yesterday, with nothing but herself as a focus for the power, suggested as much to her.




Paulus had the first watch, starting at dawn, so had he been able to sleep, Lucius could have found a bed and slept away the early morning hours. He was awake, however, staring at the ceiling in the room that had been his since he entered the house. It was a nice enough room, on the third floor, above the more lavish suites, directly above the dressing room that separated the master bedroom suite into his and her halves with a spiral staircase that provided direct access to the dressing room. At a tug on one of the bell pulls in either room below, he could be available in a matter of minutes. There was a similar arrangement across the hall where Matilde slept.

If she could she would be on a pallet on the floor beside Darla's bed. Lucius would not have been surprised if she slept on the floor with her ear pressed to it to listen.

The pull of the bond to the vampire who had killed him and made him a vampire had hardly been noticeable after the first miserable day of his awakening. William had demonstrated a marked lack of interest in him, and to some extent while Lucius resented the disinterest, he observed the almost compulsive way Matilde seemed to crave Darla's approval and attention and considered himself above that. More independent. More his own vampire.

He had been reminded that he belonged to William. It had been no less unsettling than the startling discovery that the girl who belonged to William was not as helpless as he believed she was.

He had cleaned up the mess in the kitchen without being asked, cursing them as he performed the service. Through the long hours at the opera house he had tried to lose himself in the music, in the simple expectations his role held, and in the sound and scent of so much living, breathing flesh under the domed roof. There was an unavoidable still point in his mind that was caught in a snare.

He had belonged to her once, by his choosing, despite the fact that she was unaware of this. He belonged to William now, who she belonged to, utterly and completely. He understood that. He belonged to both of them. William made it so, and he didn't understand that at all, but he knew it was true.



William woke up to an empty bed. His hand tested the place where Willow had slept beside him, detecting no lingering warmth. She had probably been up for some time. He got up and walked across the hall to his own room to dress. It was mid-afternoon. With any luck, he was up in time for tea.

The salon was empty, so he tried the library. Angelus was there, sitting by the fire with Dru perched on the arm of his chair. Darla was nowhere in sight. “Where is Willow?” he asked.

“Walking the dog,” Angelus told him. “She's not been gone long.”

He had meant to tell her he didn't want her walking alone. Had he? He frowned. It might have slipped his mind. “I don't want her walking alone,” he said it now.

Angelus yawned. “That's a bit of a problem, then. Who is to walk with her on a sunny day such as today?” He his lolled back against the back of the chair. He looked lazy and sated. Dru gave him a smile full of unspoken secrets.

William watched them for a moment, feeling a familiar irritation and jealousy rising. He pushed it aside. “There was someone watching the house last night,” he said, “lurking by the garden wall on the west side of the house.”

That got Angelus' attention. It was meant to. “Cook didn't mention it.”

William shrugged. “Didn't notice it,” he corrected. “Moved too fast to be anything human.”

Angelus' eyes narrowed slightly. “Probably the local vampires sniffing around,” he said dismissively. If a vampire tried to enter the house and was repelled, they would assume that the barrier protection was vested in the human who lived with them, which made killing her a prerequisite to any attack on the house. There were demons and humans who could move in daylight hours that might work for vampires.

“Dru? Willow's not to leave the house alone to walk your dog,” Angelus told her.

“What do you know about the local vamps?” William wanted to know. There was a cabinet built into the wall around the fireplace and he found a crystal tumbler and poured himself four fingers of whisky, neat from a decanted bottle.

“Small community,” Angelus warmed to the topic. “Standoffish. They don't make a lot of new vamps.”

“Any real reason to think that they would go in for hiring out help?” William asked. It suggested a whole new set of possibilities for the not so casual way Willow had been approached in the park.

Angelus thought about it. “None,” he admitted, a small smile appearing. “We'll have an evening in,” Angelus said. “With parlor games. Would you like that, Princess?”

William sat across from him in the twin to Angelus' armchair. “I'm taking Willow out,” he said before Dru could answer. Angelus' parlor games involved systems of reward and punishment that he would rather not involve Willow in at the moment. He would as soon tell Angelus that as open one of her veins and invite him to have a snack.

Dru pouted. “It's not as much fun without Miss Willow. She makes the best noises.”

Darla arrived in time to have caught the general drift of the conversation. She looked at William thoughtfully. “Where are you taking her?” she asked.

Caught, he simply smiled. “Hadn't given it that much thought.”

Darla exchanged a glance with Angelus. William was being his usual provoking self. Or there was something more to his sudden desire to take his pet out of play. It might be no more than a spasm of retaliation for the way Dru was hanging on Angelus.

“I want you to take her to one of those little taverns under the Charles Bridge,” Angelus said. “Paulus and Andreas have been hunting there,” he looked over Dru's head at Darla. “William thinks we had someone prowling around last night,” he explained.

“You want to draw them out?” William guessed. “I don't fancy the idea of using Willow for bait,” he admitted. He didn't fancy being bait, but he could take care of himself. She would slow him down considerably. “I'll take Lucius,” he substituted.

“And Willow,” Darla insisted. William's instincts went straight to fight. Willow's presence would create an impediment to that. He would be more cautious if she was there, and she was a potentially useful observer.

William looked annoyed. “She'll slow us down if we have to fight,” he complained.

Angelus gave a quick bark of laughter. “That's the point, boy. We aren't sending you there to fight. Just to look pretty and helpless, eh, my love?”

Dru nodded sagely. “It's like playacting,” she agreed. “It will be great fun. My William will be a good and virtuous page,” she mimed turning over a card. “But he shall be as the Knight of Wands.”

Darla and Angelus looked at William who shrugged. “Haven't a bloody clue,” he admitted. “Which one is the knight of wands, Dru?”

Her eyes twinkled and she got a conspiratorial look on her face. She put her finger to her lips. “Not telling,” she said. “It's a secret.”

She looked so pleased with herself that he found himself smiling back at her. “I thought we didn't have secrets,” he cajoled.

She tilted her head to one side. “This is our secret,” she insisted with a degree of severity. He was the knight of wands, so he had to know what he was. She was too polite to point it out, but sometimes he was disappointingly obtuse.

His eyebrows lifted at that, and his eyes cut to Darla long enough for a spare shake of his head to let her know that he didn't know what Dru was talking about. “So, I'm to look helpless and find out what they want? Is that the game?”

“More or less,” Darla agreed.

“And not get myself tortured or staked?” he added sourly, since he didn't think Darla gave a damn either way.

“Probably works best for you that way,” she agreed.



For Willow it was much later in the day than she normally chose to walk the park. This was in part by design and in part by circumstances. She had woken up with what she recognized as a mild hangover. She never slept well or deeply when she had too much to drink. She had fallen asleep again with Dru rubbing her temples soothingly and woken up a few hours later feeling refreshed. William was still sleeping. She had a bath and dressed for the day in a silvery, pale blue dress that buttoned up the back. She had gone to Dru's room looking for help with the buttons and found Angelus there, lounging in the canopied bed.

Her first instinct was to back out of the room as fast as her feet could take her, but Dru darted forward to catch at her hands, pulling her into the room.

She should have just woken William up and asked him to help with her buttons. Dru was wearing a nightgown that hung off one shoulder. It had once been white, finished in lace and delicate embroidery. Dru told her once that when she was in the convent she made nightgowns like the one she was wearing now that were gifts for brides. It was blood stained in odd patterns that had been made from the fabric pressing against her skin where it had been broken.

Dru had pulled her across the room towards the bed. Her options were limited. She could scream. It would probably wake William up, and he might simply remove her from the room. Or her might join them. Dru was running her fingernails over her bare back. When the back of her legs hit the mattress she knew she was running out of time as Angelus moved behind her.

To her intense relief, he simply buttoned her dress.

“Take the dog out for a walk. Lucius let him out for a while, but he's been whining for you all day,” he told her.

Saved by Mr. Buttons. She walked him around to the pond pavilion and sat on one of the low walls framing a view of the pond. It probably wasn't very ladylike, but it was late enough in the afternoon that the park was practically deserted. She let Mr. Buttons off the leash and he took off like a shot to chase the geese at the edge of the pond where an old woman with an umbrella was feeding them.

Unimpressed by the small dog, the geese huddled for a moment and then started toward the dog, honking fiercely, making Willow laugh. The old woman looked amused too.

Startled, Mr. Buttons came to a halt, dancing around nervously before he raced back over to her, muddy paws dragging over her coat.

Savior and bane of her existence, Willow decided. She snapped the leash back on and they continued on their walk. He didn't get enough exercise in the house. She gave him an extra turn around the park to apologize for laughing at him when the geese had retaliated. She saw no one else in the park and was relieved.

When she returned to the house she picked Mr. Buttons up and carried him into the kitchen to wet a towel to wipe his feet on before he tracked mud all over the house. He really wasn't a bad little dog. He tolerated this, wriggling in her lap and licking her fingers, trying to push his cold wet nose in to the palm of her hand. She took the hint and smoothed her hand over his domed head before resuming her paw cleaning.

William and Dru came into the kitchen while she was cleaning his feet. Seeing Dru, Mr. Buttons erupted in a series of sharp, excited barks. “Come to Mummy,” Dru cooed at the dog. Willow let go of the dog and he ran to Dru who picked him up and slung him under her arm. He never appeared to mind this treatment, and was licking Dru's fingers.

She went to the sink to wash her hands off. She had found the picnic hamper earlier and ate some of the bread for a snack. She was hungry now. She opened the icebox to look for something to eat. There was a ceramic bowl full of raw chicken livers. Yuck. She certainly hoped that was for the dog. Nothing on earth would induce her to eat chicken livers.

“Hungry?” William guessed. “I thought we would go out tonight. I'll take you somewhere for dinner.”



They didn't take the Brougham. It was the smaller of the two carriages with a passenger compartment for two and a box for a driver. “I thought we would take the streetcar,” William told her as they left the house, Lucius trailing behind them.

While she was still in her dressing gown, changing into something to wear for their evening out, William had come into her room with an armful of clothing that he had dumped on her bed. She recognized the cloth jacket. It was square and boxy, with an inverted pleat in the back and an inch wide band of black velvet around the waist. It was Sofia's. She had bought it used and she and Matilde had refurbished it with the ribbon and silver buttons that had come off an old coat of Willow's.

The dress was one of Sofia's too. It was a kind of smock that was worn over a shirt, gathering at the waist with a tie that went through a loop of fabric half hidden in the waistband that fastened at the waist. Sofia had not survived the night Angelus, Darla, Dru and William came to Prague. Wearing the dead woman's clothing should have bothered her, but having worn clothes removed from dead people more than once, Willow only felt a brief twinge of guilt, more over having given so little thought to Sofia, than for wearing her clothes now.

The clothes made more sense to her now that she knew they were taking the streetcar.

They went through the park. She wasn't surprised that William was familiar enough with it to lead her unerringly to the north gate. Because she walked the park in daylight, he would have familiarized himself with it at night. She half expected, when they came to the park, that he would insist that she go over her encounter with the two men the previous day. He could be territorial about things like that, and she knew with a certain degree of regret and a more profound sense of failure that she had, inadvertently set up the two men who had spoken to her.

It was a by-product of loosing her temper. The burst of anger had felt good, but it left in its wake an uneasy feeling of loss. The hard core of anger that she kept reigned in was hers alone. It was the numb, cold fist inside her that held the last shreds of who she once was, and any loosening of her grip on it threatened what she held inside.

Lucius was, it turned out, in charge of managing the schedule and fares for their streetcar excursion. After they boarded a mostly empty car, William's arm came to rest on the back of her seat, loosely circling her shoulders. Lucius sat directly across from them, his long legs crossed at the ankle. She had never seen him adopt so casual a pose and recognized it as one of William's when his hands, loosely clasped, came to rest over his abdomen.

“I thought we would go to London in the fall,” William said, reminding her of Angelus' promised reward for her good behavior on her own in Prague. “Does that suit you?”

A lot of things could happen before fall. He was brushing his knuckles over her shoulder. The solicitous mood that had started after they had fought was holding.

When she didn't respond immediately to his question, he dipped his head to peer at her. “That wasn't a rhetorical question, love,” he chided. “Does it suit you?”

“Oh,” she shook her head. “I'm still . . . streetcar . . . neat,” she admitted. “Fall is fine,”

He looked amused by that. Only Willow, with a houseful of servants and a carriage at her disposal would look at riding a noisy streetcar as a treat. She liked trains too. He had taught her to ride, and she could stay in the saddle, but she didn't care for it. Perched on a sidesaddle she looked like she was all too aware of the possibility of falling.

“Fancy it?” he asked.

He got one of her head ducking smiles for an answer when she nodded, looking out the window, giving him a view of the back of her head. She had put her hair into a simple but neat twist at the back of her head. Before they had left the house he had wrapped one of his seldom-used black cashmere scarves around her neck under the loose collar of the jacket she was wearing. It covered most of her neck save for a spot under her ear that was smooth and soft between the dark scarf and the downy auburn of her hairline.

He found himself holding one of her gloved hands, watching as her head turned when something caught her eyes. Angelus had spent a considerable amount of time teaching her to draw. She had no talent for drawing people or plants, but she was fairly good at drawing maps or sketching buildings with a decent sense of scale and proportion.

His indolent pose duly noted, at least by Willow, Lucius had nothing to do but watch them together. She was dressed more casually than he had ever seen her in a faded red jacket with velvet trim and silver buttons. The gloves she wore with it probably cost more than the rest of her clothing combined. The plan for the evening was to take her out to shop before the stores near the town square closed and then to find someplace to feed her near the river. She did not go out nearly as much as anyone else in the household at night, and it was not permitted for her to be out alone after dark, an injunction that made a lot of sense from the vampire point of view until you knew that she wasn't entirely helpless. Except that they were still pretending that she was helpless. He grasped her reasons for the deception. It was not unlike reserving English for private conversation. William's reasons were harder to fathom.

She was looking out the window, one gloved hand lying in her lap, the other loosely held by William who looked, either deliberately or accidentally, like he was completely absorbed by her. Color climbed into her cheeks. A woman on the streetcar, dressed in a dark, ugly green dress with three bands of contrasting black trim at the bottom of her skirt giving away a dress refurbished for a taller frame than the original wearer, watched them with an expression that was wistful and a little envious.

Almost without meaning to Willow started thinking about the logistics of their trip. It was a useful way to distract herself. She could feel Lucius watching her. It was not yet full dark outside, but closer to dusk. The overcast sky was blue gray around the smoky wisps of cloud cover that seemed to almost hang over the city. It was the kind of sky that made her think rain, and she had considered taking an umbrella with her. William had seen her reaching for one and had given her a spare shake of his head. He was rarely wrong about the weather. If he thought an umbrella wasn't necessary, then it probably was not going to rain anytime soon.

William had property of his own in London. He owned a small house on Charlotte Street that would be the most likely place for them to stay while they were in London. The house was leased when they weren't in London, which was more often than not, so she would need to write to his cousin in London that handled the property to see that the house was vacated for the duration of their stay.

William George Spencer Mordaunt was, for all intents and purposes, the victim of a tragic murder on the streets of London in 1880. He was interred at St. Marylebone Cemetery in the family plot, with a sister who had died in infancy, a not uncommon method of internment. His mother simply disappeared after his death, a mystery that had gone unsolved leaving the property that the family owned in legal limbo for years. One of the most startling things that Willow had discovered about William was that he had a human family that still lived in and around London that he remained in contact with in sporadic correspondence and the occasional visit. How they resolved his dead, but not quite dead status amongst themselves was a mystery, but they seemed to find it a great joke. His younger cousins, only vaguely recalling his funeral eighteen years ago, seemed to divide him into two different but closely related people.

Who she was to his family was every bit as odd. In a spur of the moment bit of truth and fiction, she had been introduced to his family as nothing more, nothing less than his mistress, a status that was accepted with a degree of bland tolerance tinged with eye rolling humor. The humor came with a highly edited version of his discovery of her in Bristol. In part the tolerance was papered over in money. The Mordaunt's weren't aristocratic, but they were wealthy in the odd second or third generation English way, with pretensions to gentry that were still largely perceived as pretensions within the family. Outwardly, they were Anglican, public school educated, with enough entrée into what was considered society to be invited to parties where the hostess' triumph might be a Viscount of someplace obscure to lend consequence to the evening. William's part of that wealth was considerable, and he wasn't deeply interested in it, which allowed the cousins to control the holdings that were the most profitable and kept any one of them from gaining more control over the wealth than the others.

The only evidence Willow had ever seen that they really suspected that there was something deeply wrong about him was an avid interest in the occult, and a fascination with secret societies which really wasn't that odd in Victorian England. His maternal aunt Lucy Spencer Douglas had a collection of creepy artifacts including a shrunken head kept in an ornate box that she claimed talked to her. She also believed that a family of fairies lived inside of the floorboards of her house and held séances to chat up old school chums that had died.

William's ease with Dru never made more sense to her than after an unnerving hour of high tea with Lucy Douglas and her mummified shrunken head companion.

They left the streetcar a few blocks from the Charles Bridge and Willow found herself walking between them over a paved sidewalk on a street of three story buildings that reflected nearly five hundred years of architectural variation. Hand lettered signs with iconic illustrations provided some sense of what shops were located on the street. William had drawn her hand into the crook of his arm. Lucius had moved up to place himself between her and the street. William led her into a confectioners. His answer to any problem she was having was a piece of chocolate, which was both sweet and irritating at times. He bought a bag of mixed nuts and a slice of orange freshly dipped into warm chocolate and left to harden on a sheet of wax paper. The later he offered to her with a grin, knowing that she wasn't above eating in public.

They left the confectioners shop and strolled past a half dozen other shops before coming to a bookstore. Willow automatically slowed, looking at the titles displayed in the window. Most of their books were purchased at a bookseller in London who selected titles for them and shipped the books to any location Angelus requested. They went in and Willow found an English language Baedeker for Prague that they purchased. It barely fit into the cloth purse she was carrying.

At the beginning of the next block was a shop selling glass that Willow would have walked past, but William reached for the door and steered her in. They had a collection of tiny crystal figurines in a display case that Willow knew Dru would have enjoyed. The shopkeeper was eying them with a degree of skepticism. Willow knew it had everything to do with the way she was dressed. She had shopped with Darla, whose couture clothing, fur-trimmed coats, and jewelry had an electrifying effect on shopkeepers.

“Come here, pet,” William extended his hand to her, pulling her towards a display case with faceted glass bead jewelry. He pointed to a necklace with blue beads spaced with smaller beads.

“Very pretty,” she said automatically.

He gestured to the shopkeeper who retrieved the necklace from the case while William loosened the scarf around her neck. He fastened the necklace around her throat leaning back to admire the play of light on the blue beads against her white skin. He smiled at her, and looked over her shoulder, nodding to Lucius who completed the transaction, paying for the necklace.

Three stores and no dead bodies. Willow started to relax. They walked on for another block before William pulled her across the street, wrapping one arm around her waist when they reached the other side. His lips hovered by her ear. “I thought you might like to look at furniture, to find something that would suit you, for your room,” he said.

Trailed by a shopkeeper, they looked at several pieces of furniture, some used and refurbished, others new. A rosewood seating group drew her eye. Upholstered in a dark red fabric, there was a chaise lounge with graceful, curving lines and a more masculine armchair. A round table with a deep skirt of carved wood completed the set. “Is this what you want?” he asked.

“I like it,” she admitted. “Do you?”

His eyebrows rose. “I'm not Angelus. This is not a test,” he told her, eying her choice. He didn't like the rosewood setting. The hard curving line of the back of the chaise was pretty, but he thought it was more decorative than functional. “We'll look at bit more?” he suggested.

She looked confused. Tactful and William did not go together. “It's not a bloody test,” he insisted, “but, look at that back,” he drew her eye to it. “It's going to hit the back of your head and there's no give to it,” his hands on her waist directed her to the chaise. “Sit on it, and you'll see what I mean.”

Armed with a better understanding of what William was looking for, the shopkeeper directed them to a chaise lounge with an adjustable back. The back of the chair fit into bracketed grooves at that allowed the back to be raised and lowered from a sitting position to reclining. Staring at the chair while the shopkeeper demonstrated its repositioning features, Willow realized that she was looking at a very early version of a recliner. The chair was covered in gray velvet. She was wildly tempted to ask if it was available in naugahyde for a moment.

“What do you think?” William asked.

“It's perfect,” she told him.

Delivery was arranged for the following day after a price was settled on. The shopkeeper agreed to take a look at the settee that was being replaced.

“We need to find you something to eat,” William said as they left the store. He switched to German and asked Lucius to suggest a place where she could dine.

Lucius' suggestion took them two city blocks from the street they had shopped on, towards the Vltana River. The gas lit Charles Bridge came into view and without thinking about it, Willow found herself pulling on William's arm. The Charles was a stone bridge with sixteen pillars supporting the arches under the bridge. In the distance, Hradcany Castle, or Prague Castle rose majestically almost overwhelming the gothic bridge tower rising on the opposite side of the river.

“It's beautiful,” she said, looking at the light spilling over the water. A steamboat traveled up the river, its decks brightly lit, the strains of a waltz spilling across the water.

William made up his mind then and there to make sure that she had an opportunity to sail on the Vltana while they were in Prague.

The tavern Lucius found for them had a dining room on the second floor with a good view of the river. The house specialty was carp in sour cream sauce, but Lucius suggested the potato soup, and Willow followed his suggestion. After a bottle of wine and two large tankards of ale were delivered William fished the bag of mixed nuts from a pocket of his coat.

He offered her a cashew, brushing her jaw with the back of his fingers before resting the tip of his index finger in the hollow behind her ear. In the mellow light her pupils were enlarged, turning her eyes darker than normal. She looked like she was thinking. Her skin felt warm in the way it did when she was adjusting to a change in temperature. She had taken off her gloves when they were seated, and when he picked up one of her hands he wasn't surprised to find that her fingers were damply warm.

She was leaning forward a little to look out the window they had been seated near. He brought her fingers to his mouth. That got her attention back where he wanted it, on him. He watched her blink, frowning a little as she tried to assess the probability of him carrying things further. Her nose wrinkled a little. She disliked being fondled in public places. He wondered if it had something to do with her former life in Bristol.

He kissed the palm of her hand, and decided to quit teasing her. “So? London,” he returned to the topic. “You've probably got it all organized already.”

Her gaze moved to Lucius. William had switched back to English when he spoke to her about their trip to London. It wasn't a conversation that Lucius could follow or participate in, and he was sitting at the table with them. “Not really,” she said. “I didn't know if you would want to stay in the house or somewhere else,” she admitted.

“The house, of coarse. I'll write to Edward and tell him to arrange it,” William started to pour a glass of wine for her. Lucius took a clean handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the glass off first. William's eyebrows lifted at this, but he waited and poured the wine when he was done.

She opened the drawstrings of her purse to take out the Baedeker. There was just enough light to read by and she was curious about the bridge and the castle in the distance. Now the book selection made sense to William. It was a prop, a distraction, and a way for her to shift the attention away from her, to an object of fairly benign intent. There was some kind of clock described in the guidebook that she wanted to see. Lucius said that he knew where it was.

Her meal was served a few moments later. The soup was served in a glazed earthenware bowl with a basket of bread.

They were not so far from the Town Hall where the clock Willow wanted to see was located. After her supper was finished, William left Lucius to settle the bill and they walked a short distance on the cobblestone walkway under the arch of the bridge. It was dark here, despite the streetlights. Willow's gloved hand was tucked into his. When they entered the walk under the bridge, her free hand slipped under the cuff of his sleeve.

He gave her fingers a light squeeze before releasing them to pat himself down for a cigarette. He located the pack of Turkish cigarettes he had purchased last night and shook one of the thin cylinders out, grabbing it with his lips before returning the pack to his inside pocket and searching for a match. He flicked the match against his thumbnail to light it and cupped his hand around the flame as he lit the cigarette. Willow was watching this operation with an odd expression on her face, caught momentarily in the flicker of the match before William tossed the spent match away.

She rubbed her arms through the thin jacket she was wearing. It had warmed up again during the day. Yesterday it had been a clear sky and cold. Today, it was overcast and warmer. They were waiting for Lucius to settle the bill . . . but Willow knew better.

She took a step away from William, closer to the other side of the arch they were standing under. There was a small house on the other side of the bridge, almost snuggled up to it at this angle, a little out of place beside the impressive architecture of the bridge and the taller, more substantial structures built in the same scale as the bridge. It had been white washed at some point, acquiring a patina of grime with the original brickwork leaching through.

He stood in the shadows cast by the bridge, watching her. She was fair skinned, and in the streetlights her skin had an ivory toned glow that clarified what she was. Living, breathing, human, ordinary in contrast to the preternatural glow streetlights gave to a vampire, and extraordinary, at least in his eyes. At this distance, even with the sounds of the city all around them, he could hear her heartbeat; feel her awareness of him even as she made a study of their surroundings. She had questions that were trapped inside of her. Talk was cheap. Silence cost her something. There were subtle hints of tension in her face, in the way she clasped her hands together.

It was a strange feeling. He had it too. Eight years they had been together. He knew her well enough to read her posture and her carefully averted gaze. He knew her well enough to know that she had secrets that she would never willingly share with him. He knew her well enough to register her confusion like a smell, complimenting his own. He was confused, but it didn't bother him the way it troubled her. His confusion could be satisfied in a dozen ways, by holding her hand, or breathing her in, or listening to her heartbeat, or pulling her into the shadows and taking her up against a wall, holding her high enough to bury his face in her neck. It was in not taking what he wanted, in the unfamiliar restraint, that he felt confused.

It was in understanding that he didn't like what he had seen in her face when she told him about her encounter in the park. It wasn't jealousy or possessiveness exactly. It was the idea that someone had hurt her with nothing more or less than what she was to him. That was what kept him from pulling her into his lap in the tavern, and what would keep him from drawing her into the shadows now. It wasn't part of his system of values, because he had never thought worse of her for any of those things. He had never thought anything more than how beautiful she was in the moonlight, or how pretty she was when she was blushing, her eyes hot with distress.

It made him feel a little tired. He was making concessions to what she thought was important, and it would never be enough. There would always be some part of her that he couldn't reach. She had no idea how much restraint it required not to demand it of her. There would always be that between them. He would give and give and she would hold back the only thing he really wanted from her, and he would grow impatient, loose his temper, forget that the restraint got a facsimile of what he wanted from her, and it would come apart and he would take what she wouldn't give him.

They had been over this ground a thousand times, and the steps only became more elaborate.

All she had to do was turn to him. Slip her hand inside of his, lay her head on his chest. He didn't have to have the words. He didn't have to break her or drive her to her knees. He just needed some little sign that she understood. He willed her to do it now, the cigarette pinched between his fingers almost forgotten as he stared at her.

Willow felt him watching her. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. She had mixed feelings about being out with him, even with Lucius along. Her sense of him as a predator was more acute when they went out in the evening. He was being terribly circumspect, and she had a feeling that when he tired of his present benign mood, that bad things would happen. It made her tense, and her tension fed his, like a feedback loop, only now it was worse because she had a feeling that when his mood broke the goading that had gone on in the kitchen was going to seem like friendly teasing compared to what would come. She didn't know how to stop it from happening.

She didn't know if she should. In a frightening way, she knew that she could forgive too much when he was like this. It appealed to something in her that he . . . . made an effort. That even at his worst, he drew back from killing her, that for some reason, he wanted and needed her enough to keep her. How many people had died between the day he had found her in Bristol and this night? How many more would die? How did his failure to kill her make up for what he was?

She made herself look at him, seeing the glowing tip of his cigarette, and the shape of him in the dark. He looked like he was expecting something from her and was prepared to be disappointed.

Her stomach twisted. Uncomfortably full from the soup and rich blackberry wine, she felt a spasm of nausea cramp her stomach.

He watched her hands loosen and then press against her stomach. “What's wrong?” he asked.

She made a face. “I ate too much.”

“Come here,” he ordered gruffly.

She walked back to him and let him pull her into his chest. His hand moved beneath the hem of her short jacket to rub her back. She adjusted a little, standing on her toes, resting her chin on his shoulder while he rubbed her back. Sometimes she thought that she was physically incapable of burping. Xander and Jesse used to tease her about it. She couldn't burp or spit. Actually, the whole concept of spit made her gag, which had put a very abrupt end to her brief flirtation with the clarinet in the third grade. William rubbed her back and her stomach made rumbling, squeaking noises that made him chuckle.

“God, you are a mess,” he said, kissing her temple. “Just relax. Stop fighting it. I'm not going to be disgusted if you burp,” he told her. He thought it was all in her head. Someone had convinced her that she shouldn't burp, and being Willow, she had taken that stricture to heart.

“Good for you,” she muttered. “I'm pretty sure I am,” she grumbled.

He patted her back between her shoulder blades, and felt the bubble of air inside her crawl up from her stomach to erupt in a sound more like a sigh than a burp. He snorted. “That's it? That's all you've got?” he gibed. “You look like you are in pain.”

“I am,” she said, feeling another air bubble expanding as he alternated between patting and rubbing her back. “This must look odd.”

He looked around. “Well, yes, but if there was anyone around to see it, I wouldn't do it. I've got my evil vampire dignity, you know. Somewhat in tatters, but I can put on a good show.”

She frowned a little at that, adjusting to rest her forehead against his shoulder. “Is it because you are being nice?” she asked. “Because it won't last,” she reminded them both.

His hand slowed. “It could,” he said cautiously, his tone matching the slow way he was rubbing her back. “It could be made to last.”

He believed it. When she was like this, loosely inside the circle of his arms, he could believe it. He shrugged his shoulders to make her look up at him, and when she took the hint, he threw the cigarette away and brought his hand up to cup her cheek, his head lowering to kiss her. She tried to avoid it. “I'm all burpy,” she protested. “And the soup had onions in it. It's icky,” she said, like she was trying to avoid breathing on him.

For someone that had an unhealthy preoccupation with killing herself, she was very weirdly obsessed with oral hygiene. She was almost twenty-five years old, and God only knew what kind of life she had had before he had found her, and she had all of her teeth, in excellent condition, and seemed determined to keep them that way.

He kissed her, probing the seam of her lips with his tongue until she gave up her reservations about letting him into her mouth. It made him moan, not her. She made a sound that was mostly distressed. She was thinking about burping and cleaning her teeth, and he was thinking about finding some way to never hurt her again, or see the hurt in her eyes. Her mouth was warm with the milky aftertaste of the soup and the rich sweetness of wine, and textures that reminded him of so many other parts of her under his mouth. He could have gone on like this for hours, running his tongue over her lips, feeling her tongue touch his, retreat, and come back.

She pulled back, shoulders straining, gasping a little as she tried to catch her breath. Her eyes were wide with surprise, like she had some inkling that there was more to the kiss than him fucking her mouth with his tongue because he wanted to and because he could. He saw that look in her eyes, the look that he thought he never wanted to see again. So much sadness. She was smart. It was one of the things about her that intrigued him. The quiet intelligence that made her shine, that made the sadness hanging in her gaze compelling. There was something to be said for stupid. Stupid didn't question or examine or weigh things the way she did. Stupid didn't claw at itself for what couldn't be changed.

Stupid didn't draw a shocked breath and whisper his name like it was a prayer and a plea and an apology.

“Don't,” he began. If she said something else, something that went with the tone, he knew he was going to react badly, which, unfortunately for her, probably meant that she was going to take the brunt of it.

She understood how he felt about Drusilla. It was where he was most consistent. It was the place where William and Spike intersected, and she thought that it was a sign that her presence in the past or an alternate version of the past had not changed the essential realities of his life. She understood it, and had on occasions been invited inside of it, and it was always the one thing about him that she admired. It scared her to think that there was room for her inside that feeling, that without knowing it, he had made room for her and that it was her space, distinct from Dru's, and that in some way it hurt him.

“You talk to much,” he resumed, in a more normal tone. “Gets on my nerves,” he told her, eyes narrowing on her face, looking for a flinch or some sign that the criticism bothered her. She hated being criticized.

If she heard him, it didn't register in any way. She was just staring at him like she had figured something out that was a little unnerving.

He needed another cigarette. He needed to do something with his hands. It was either that or the nearest alley, and he knew that he'd wipe anything she was thinking out of her eyes or half kill her trying. She was a prostitute for the love of hell. Where she got off looking at him like he was something beneath her was a mystery.

“Will,” she tried again. She didn't really know what to say. He was patting himself down for the pack of cigarettes. She felt something burst inside of her, like warm rain, a weird mix of tenderness and arousal that normally she would have been loathe to acknowledge. “Will?” she said a bit more sharply than she intended, because he was ignoring her now.

His gaze flicked to her, and she was reminded yet again that he was so much more the predator when they were out in the night. Self-preservation suggested in a loud clear voice inside her head that she leave him alone, that she let him do whatever he needed to do to keep from whatever was in his eyes. But she had a glimpse of something that made saving herself seem petty.

She bit her lower lip. “I want it to last,” she said after a long moment.

He went absolutely still, rolling it around in his head. From her point of view, extending their present truce of mutual accommodation, made sense, but even as he thought it, he knew that wasn't what she was offering. When it came to selling herself, she was the world's most inept whore, giving away the wrong things too cheaply. She was brilliant and stupid all at once, and he wanted to point it out to her. He wanted to explain it to her because, God help her, she was better than this, better than anything he could offer her, and she was so fucking unaware of it that it was staggering.

He took a deep breath, extending his hand to her.

She took it, not just with one hand, but with both, the one hand that slid inside his, and the other that slipped under the cuff of his coat to rest between his skin and the fabric. His expression turned rueful. “At the risk of being turned into something slimy, you really are stupid sometimes,” he told her.

“Yeah? Well, you are stupider,” she retorted.

“Darla and Angelus would endorse that notion,” he agreed.

She started working on her lower lip again. “So, how does this work?” she asked uncertainly.

He reeled her in, one hand on her waist. “Haven't a bloody clue,” he admitted. “Let's call it a truce for now. I'll be nice,” he made a face, “and you'll be . . .”

“Nice,” she put in.

“That's not much of a truce,” he said dryly. “Nice is easy for you.”

She tilted her head to one side. “Is it so hard for you?” she asked, sounding like she really didn't want to hear the answer.

Well, fuck. He was caught. It wasn't that hard. The hard part was not getting what he wanted from her, and not wanting it if he had to explain it to her, which was, he realized, a bit unfair. He found himself looking at the glass beads at her throat. “It's like a dance,” he said slowly. “I hold out my hand,” he squeezed hers, “and you take it in yours,” his gaze lifted to meet her eyes, “and I put my hand on your waist,” his fingers moved to remind her where his hand was, “and you step in, towards me.”

The analogy was puzzling her, but she stepped in closer, sliding her hand out of his sleeve like she was going to take up the proper position in his arms. “No, love,” he stopped her. His analogy no longer worked for him. Too much of what happened between them was entirely predictable. “We do these things with each other because they are expected, but when you slide your hand inside my sleeve, that's just you. That's the part of you that could make me do almost anything to have that feeling.”

This was more dangerous and stupid than anything she had ever done, including casting a spell she didn't half understand to fix things that fate had ordained at tremendous cost. The more she read about Wicca, the more she respected the three fold rule. Resented it too. She had paid with her body and mind, and before it was done, she had a feeling that it was going to be carved on her heart and soul. Something awful and tragic to balance things for Angel and Buffy to have each other the way that they seemed meant to. When she was sixteen the idea would have appealed to the romantic in her, but not so much now, it just seemed unfair and inevitable.

He sighed, looking away from her. “I'd rather have you angry and willful and stubborn,” he said.

She blinked at the abrupt change in mood, not realizing that he had seen something in her expression that prompted it. “What? Why?” she asked.

“Because it's better than seeing you look so sad,” he told her.

The idea that he was reacting to her mood was fairly novel. It took her a moment to process it. “I can't help it,” she said in a small voice.

“Right,” he nodded, looking around for Lucius. “Where the hell is Lucius?” he wondered aloud.

Willow refrained from comment. She knew where Lucius was, and so did he. He shook his hand loose to get a cigarette. He eyed her through a thin stream of smoke. “Do you want to see your clock, or go home?” he asked.

“What time is it?” she asked, automatically reaching for the pocket watch he kept in his waistcoat. She opened it and tried turning it to get enough light to read the dial without success. He took it from her. “Quarter to midnight,” he told her after a quick glance. “Why? Does it matter?”

“Uh-huh. According to the guide book, there are mechanical figures that move at the top of the hour,” she said informatively. “If we can get there in fifteen minutes, the clock, then home, or if not, home,” she established her priorities. “Unless you want to do something else,” she added hastily.

One corner of his mouth turned up in a crooked smile. “There is nothing I want to do that you would not prefer doing at home,” he said, lifting her chin with the tips of his fingers. The blush came, but she didn't lower her eyes, or look away, or retreat into any one of a dozen ways to deny him. His fingers tested the heat in her cheek and she turned her face into his hand to kiss his wrist, the way he kissed hers more times than he could count.

“Shouldn't we look for him?” she asked.

“Lucius?” William frowned. Normally, he would. He really had been gone too long, and there was no good reason for his extended absence. “No,” he said. “We shouldn't.” If Lucius was caught in someone's snare, he wasn't offering himself or Willow up to the same trap.

He saw her open her mouth to argue with him, and then shut it when she realized what she was doing. Her lips parted again, and then pressed shut, a tiny frown appearing. Diverted by the show, he waited, eyebrows raised. The frown deepened and her lips pursed. She pulled one side of her lower lip in and bit down on it hard.

“Willow?”

“Hmm?” she didn't stop chewing on her lip, but she was looking at him, a question in her own eyes.

He smiled. “What? You've got my curiosity piqued. You have some observation burning away. What is it?”

“Oh,” she looked like she didn't know how to start. “Well . . . I like Lucius. I liked him better before he was a vampire,” she admitted in what was from her tone of voice, vast understatement, “but, he's not so . . . grrrr! ‘I'm a vampire. You are a lowly human,' annoying,” she sighed. “Never mind. You don't really care, do you? He could be a big pile of dust, and it would be a very mild inconvenience.”

“That isn't exactly how I would put it,” William refuted. It was close. The inconvenience factor would register. It wasn't like he was fond of Lucius. If he felt anything at all for him it was a mild dislike tempered by the fact that he was reasonably useful. “You like him?” he repeated. “I bet you wouldn't like him if you had the least notion of what he would do to you given the opportunity.”

It occurred to her to point out that it probably wasn't anything he hadn't done, but she thought that would violate the truce that they had declared, and she was in the habit of keeping pithy observations to herself.


Lucius was in the alley behind the tavern. The girl who had waited on them had extended her life by about fifteen minutes by taking him out of his trousers and into her mouth. She was wearing a cap with a frill and he had watched it move with her head as he leaned into the wall and let her get on with it. She seemed to have a pretty good idea of what she was about. There had been a time when he would have been too distracted by a vague sense of guilt and overwhelmed by sensation to just appreciate the skill that went into taking a cock that far back into her throat. Having performed the same act, he was a bit more appreciative, and less repelled.

A warm mouth holding him. He was tempted to close his eyes, and indulge himself in a way that he never would have before he had been made into a vampire. Until he had seen it for himself, he didn't have the capacity to imagine her doing this. There were too many distractions for him at the moment. The ripe scent of the river and of compost nearby, the glimpses he got of the large breasts swaying against his thighs, the long, dark hair under the cap, all made it impossible to distract himself.

She let him slip out of her mouth, looking up at him, breathing a little hard. “I have to go back to work,” she said, almost apologetically since he hadn't come. Her hand stroked him.

He pulled her to her feet, one arm around her waist, the other working her skirt up. “How much more to fuck you?” he asked, cupping her mound. He flexed his fingers against her clitoris, rubbing her through her thin undergarments. She clutched at his arms, shuddering a little.

A breathy little moan escaped her when his thumb hooked the waistband of her loose pantaloons, slipping inside. “Your hands are cold,” she said. It didn't sound like a complaint. He smiled at the observation, watching her face with an interest that was almost clinical as he slid two fingers into her, wrenching another moan out of her.

“I'm thinking you'll let me fuck you,” he said.

She had his coin in her purse. It wasn't what she would have asked for if she knew that he wanted to fuck her, but she wasn't going to haggle. Still, she was working, and if she was gone too long, she would loose more money than she was making. She rubbed herself against his fingers. “Hurry,” she said breathlessly, hardly having to act.

He looked around the alley. There was a woodbin, about waist high, not a yard away. It would do nicely. He moved her toward it, spinning her around so that her back was to him. She braced her hands on it without protest while he pushed her skirt up over her hips and slipped her drawers down. In the dark, she could have been anyone at all. He guided his cock into her, listening to her moan as he sank into her. The moan wasn't terribly genuine.

His hand worked to find her through the mass of her skirts. He rubbed her warm, wet cunt, his hips pumping. His free hand freed one of her plump breasts, rolling the nipple between his thumb and his forefinger. Her breathy moans grew in volume.

“Harder?” he asked. “You want it harder?”

“Yes!” she wasn't loud, or unaware of where they were. She was too practical for that. He might have liked her for the streak of practicality, and for the way she clenched around him, sighing her pleasure. When they were done, he helped her straighten her clothes, earning an almost shy look at this unexpected gallantry.

She hesitated. “If you come back, around closing,” she began.

“I won't,” he told her. Her cap was slightly askew. He straightened it and then went to straighten his own clothing.

She started to walk around him. She would never know how close she was to living another day. He moved that fast. One arm around her, trapping her arms at her side, the other, covering her mouth, even as he pulled her head to the side. His fangs slid into her neck. It was a fatal bite, deep, severing her jugular, tearing through muscle until all he had to do was seal his mouth over the wound and let the blood pump into his mouth.

When he was done, he let her drop, not quite dead, but close enough to it. Stepping over her body, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. It really wouldn't do to return to her with blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.



Lucius joined them a moment later. Without being told, William knew that he had fed, and a bit more. Annoyance at being left to wait for him made him eye the younger vampire with a cold and unwavering stare.

Willow looked from William to Lucius. There was a slight resemblance between them that she had not noticed before. Lucius was taller, but he had a similar build, lean bodied and sinewy. His features were more bluntly masculine. He looked like he was secretly amused about something, and that was very like William.

“You wanted to see that clock,” he reminded her before she could tell Lucius that she had been worried about him. He took her hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm, his eyes picking at Lucius like he was making an inventory.

The astronomical clock was everything Willow might have hoped for. Situated at the base of the town hall, with a pair of uniformed guards impassively flanking it, the triple faced clock was a confluence of art and science. Originally built in the fifteenth century it had been renovated as recently as the 1860s. The upper most clock face displayed the exact position of the sun and stars relative to the earth timed to sundials in the courtyard daily. Superimposed over the astronomical clock was the Sphere, showing the movements of the sun and moon. The bottom clock was the calendar.

The clock was nearing the top of the hour. They were, more or less, alone. There were two guards dressed in uniform, looking bored out of their respective skulls.

For a moment there, Lucius thought that he was in trouble, but as soon as they reached the square, William's attention switched back to Willow. He had his head tilted towards hers, listening to her as she identified the features of the clock, a conversation begun in German that was steered by William back to the privacy of English.

She was probably still talking about the clock, a feature that he had seen dozens of times without giving much thought to. She was pointing to something on the upper clock, and William's gaze followed the gesture, his eyes narrowing a bit. Lucius took in her face in profile. He felt peaceful. Soothed. He wanted to know what she was saying, but he had to settle, at least for now, for hearing the sound of her voice.

She was pointing out the part of the dial that showed the exact time of sunrise. He had been raised with a lot of ideas about gender roles that had been smashed by Darla and Dru, neither of whom was particularly helpless, and even more so by Willow. The idea that science was a masculine area of study, for instance, was mostly shattered by Willow who saw science in everything.

When they were in Paris, while Willow was recovering from the dysentery episode, Angelus gave Dru a talking doll. Talking and walking dolls had been around for at least a century, but this was a relatively new sort of doll modeled on a human baby. Dru wasn't terribly impressed with it. She mostly wanted to know how it made the crying sounds that it produced since her other dolls had what she called their own voices. Willow dissected the doll without destroying it, in an elaborate procedure that had delighted Dru, though it had the unfortunate side effect of inducing Dru to find other things for Willow to dissect, ranging from real babies to dead animals.

He had managed to head off most of these experiments before Willow found out about them, though there were a couple of dead animals that Dru managed to sneak past him.

He shifted her around until she was mostly in front of him, with his arm around her waist, her back to his chest. She paused to look up at him sideways. He grinned at her and nodded to the clock. “I think it's starting,” he told her.

The figure of a skeleton holding an hourglass pulled a bell cord. Two windows above the uppermost clock opened and the figures of St. Paul and St. Peter appeared, dividing the apostles into two groups that rotated into view, each figure representing an allegorical aspect of the apostles. William's Church of England background came back to him as he deciphered the figures for her, assuming that the Christian imagery would be lost on her. Willow's head was tilted back as she watched the moving figures rotate past the windows.

When it was over she gave a little sigh, and turned toward him. “That was nice,” she said. She actually found the clock itself more interesting than the mechanical show that came at the top of the hour.

“Let's find a hack and go home,” William suggested. “Lucius?” He switched back to German and told him to find a hack.

The younger vampire nodded, and moved ahead of them to find a suitable conveyance. William kept one eye on him. “Will? Are you angry about something?” she asked.

“A bit,” he admitted. “Nothing to trouble yourself over.”

“Are you angry because Lucius was gone for so long?” she ventured.

He looked at her, one eyebrow lifting. “Why would I be angry about that?” he asked.

“Because it was rude?” she took a stab at it.

He laughed at that. “Bloody rude, but no. Try again,” he invited.

She shook her head. “I don't know,” she admitted.

“I didn't bring him for the pleasure of his company,” he said pointedly. “He's here for no other reason than to be useful to me if I need him.”

Her nose wrinkled. “How nice for you,” she muttered.