Chapter Eighteen

Willow performed the locator spell on the dining room floor. Preparing the spell components had consumed several hours, and to her surprise, Angelus assisted in the time consuming process of grinding spell ingredients with mortar and pestle, getting the precise weights and measures worked out, and then following the spell book instructions for her while she combined the ingredients.

They had odd little moments like this when she almost recognized him, or recognized Angel in him. He wasn't moody or brooding the way Angel was. In part it was the nervousness that she felt around him, all the time. Even when she had known him in Sunnydale, with the soul, he made her feel nervous without ever meaning to. The only difference was that her nervousness made Angel uncomfortable while Angelus seemed to savor it. He was giving her plenty of space to work, and she thought it was deliberate, that he was making an effort to keep from distracting her.

Once everything was ready, they returned to the dining room. Darla and William had gone into the salon, but when they appeared in the hallway, carrying the spell components, they left the salon to join them in the dining room.

Willow made the decision to work on the floor. It just seemed easier to her to achieve and maintain her focus there. The map was spread out in front of her. She took her time once she got settled on the floor. She felt a little light headed, partly from exhaustion, partly from the magic she had used earlier. She re-read the spell until she was satisfied that she had it memorized, and then she set aside the book and cast her circle. Raising the cup containing her spell ingredients, she invoked the Goddess and began the casting, sprinkling the ingredients over the map.

For a minute, nothing happened, and she frowned, wondering if she had missed something, and then the map started to sparkle. Glittery bits coalesced. A pleased grin broke, and she thoughtlessly murmured, “Oooh, pretty!”

William snorted back a laugh. She had started out the evening looking elegant, if demure, in the oyster satin, and now she looked like a bit of a ragamuffin, dirty and disheveled, with her skirt gathered up around her to accommodate a pose that no one would have considered for such attire.

Willow studied the map intently, not sure how long the effect would hold. Before she had started she had carefully marked the map with their approximate location so she wouldn't have to puzzle it out later, and sure enough there was a concentration of the glitter there. The next significant concentration of glitter was to the west, distractingly dense. So much so that she almost missed the sparkle moving together across the river, in the castle district, arrowing in towards—

Power punched back, like a fist, slamming into her forehead, snapping her head back, making her grit her teeth and physically scramble backwards to get away from it, breaking her circle and terminating the spell. Her hands went to her face, half expecting to find blood. For a moment she just held her forehead, and then she gave vent to the feeling. “Ow!”

William reacted first, reaching her and kneeling down beside her. “Are you all right? What happened?”

“I think so,” she confirmed, rubbing her head. “It was going great and then, pow! I could feel power punching back at me,” she said woozily. “I'm going to have such a headache,” she predicted. “There's a magical signature that's a doozy,” she mumbled.

“Zlata Ulicka,” Lucius volunteered. “Alchemists have lived there for centuries.”

“Well, thanks for mentioning that,” Willow sniped, covering her mouth with the back of her hand. “Something demony there too, I got that much before I got pushed out.”

William eyed her warily. “You're looking a bit green, pet,” he observed. He shook his head, looking up at Angelus. “According to Lucius, she shot one of them in the head—massive head wound, eye hanging out of the socket, and doesn't bat an eye,” he relayed, inviting contrast to her present queasiness.

“Oh . . . I really am going to be sick,” Willow realized as the memory of the injured vampire intruded.

Lucius and Angelus looked around for something, anything, a basin, a towel. William just scooped her up, carrying her through the narrow hallway to the kitchen. Andreas was dozing in a chair, and as soon as he heard them coming he jumped up.

“Get the door,” William ordered, carrying her out into the garden. The sun was coming up, but this side of the house was still in the shade in the early morning. There was a low bench on the walk between the back of the house and the coal bin. He set Willow down on it before he turned back to Andreas. “Get her a glass of water from the pump.”

Somewhere between the dinning room and the garden, her skin had grown clammy. It was an almost pleasant distraction from her heaving stomach. Too much magic. She put her hand on the back of her head gingerly, wondering if she could feel the pulse that was sending throbbing waves of pain through her head.

He squatted down in front of her, gathering her until her head was resting on his shoulder. “Just breathe,” he suggested, rubbing her back.

“If I throw up, I'm throwing up on you,” she told him.

“It would serve me right,” he agreed, kissing her head. “Give it a minute, and then, you need to go to bed.”

Andreas handed him the glass of water and withdrew to the doorway where Angelus and Darla were standing.

The fresh air helped her regain her equilibrium, and Willow managed to make it up the stairs on her own. She considered undressing and settled for removing the most easily removed elements of her attire, the hairpins, jewelry, stockings, and her slippers, then she got in bed, curling up in a ball under the covers.

Dru came in and sat on the bed inside the curve of Willow's body. She made her roll over on her back and smoothed her hand over Willow's cheek. Accompanied by a wave of nausea, Willow felt the mattress move as Dru swayed. She was like a cobra, preparing to strike.

“Look into my eyes, dearie,” Dru cooed to her. “Princess will take it all away.”




Drusilla had retired for the evening while they were still working out the details for the locator spell. After Willow had gone to bed, William, Angelus, and Darla conferred. William seemed to be the only one who found Willow's resourcefulness to be a little disturbing. According to Lucius' version of the events, the confrontation might have been avoided entirely had she simply stayed in the house, though Lucius didn't actually attach any blame to her for that.

In fact, both Lucius and Andreas seemed to feel that without her, things would have gone much worse. He wondered if Angelus and Darla were picking up on the subtle shift in attitude that had taken place.

He really wasn't surprised when he went up to Willow's room to find it empty. He went to Drusilla's room in search of them, and found his sire and his lover in bed. Willow was on her stomach, her head turned away from the door and Dru was sitting up beside her, with a paint brush, pretending to paint her back with one hand while the other was buried between Willow's spread legs.

He undressed and joined them in bed, kneeling on the opposite side of Willow's body, his hands roving over the cool flesh of his dark goddess, gleaming in the dark, sliding his fingers over her smooth, hairless cunt. Her eyes shone, dark and fathomless, seeking his. She raised the hand holding the paint brush, using the silky horsehair bristles to trace his eyebrow and cheekbone down to his jaw. It tickled more than anything else, and his gaze dropped to Willow, who was intensely ticklish, and lying oddly still despite that.

“She was too squirmy,” Dru explained.

He knew before he rolled her over what he would find. She was blank eyed from thrall. More or less. There was a flicker of awareness in her eyes that hinted that she was at least on some level aware of what was going on, but trapped inside of it.

Dru leaned back against the pillows that were propped up against the padded headboard of her bed. She slid one arm under Willow's neck, bending her head to whisper into her ear. “William's here, lovey,” she said, nuzzling Willow's cheek, kissing the corner of her mouth.

He sat back on his heals, biting his lower lip, a frown gathering, his erection deflating a bit. He didn't want her like this. He wished that he had been here tonight to see her take on no less than seven vampires with nothing but her wits and two inexperienced minions to rely on. It irritated him that Dru had done this to her. Robbed of her choices. She didn't deserve to be treated like this, and for that matter, neither did he. If it was Angelus, he would have suspected that it was deliberate, since it was Dru, he decided that it was just her warped judgment at work.

Her hands moved over Willow's ribs, arrowing in to cup her breasts. Moving like a sleepwalker, Willow moved her leg, sliding it over his hip as her body rose in invitation. Catching his eye, Drusilla ran a wickedly sharp fingernail over his breast bone, leaving a trail of blood welling in her wake.

“You aren't afraid of anything,” Dru whispered, bringing her blood wet fingers to Willow's lips. “You are our fierce, beautiful girl, and someday the world will tremble before you,” she said, drawing her fingers across her lips. “I've seen it, in a vision.”

She gathered more blood from the seeping wound, that even now was starting to close and applied it like it was perfume, to Willow's throat, the space between her breasts, slipping between her thighs. He watched two of Dru's long, elegant fingers penetrate her, her thumb moving over her clitoris. Her head fell back against Dru's upper arm as her back arched into the caress and Dru turned her head to her, kissing her.

With an almost imperceptible sigh, he moved closer, giving Willow the support of his thigh under the leg she had moved to draw him in. The slow, undulating motion of her body lifted her breasts. “So fierce,” Dru purred between kisses, her long, dark hair falling to lay on Willow's shoulder, a long lock curling over her breast. He bent his head to the other, letting her nipple brush his lips as she pushed herself into Dru's hand.

“Show him what you really are,” Dru said.

He didn't have time to ponder the meaning of that. One second he was hovering over her, feeling annoyed with Dru, and wondering how to get out of this, and the next, he was on his back. It was impossible. She couldn't move that fast, and she didn't have the strength to overwhelm him even by accident, but she had. Her legs were tangled with his and she was bending him back awkwardly at the hips, rubbing herself against the hardening length of his cock as she licked the last of the blood that Dru had drawn off his chest in rough, cat-like swipes of her warm tongue, looking up at him through the tangle of her hair.

Her sharp little fingernails dug into his upper arms. She was whispering something in Latin, licking his throat, her blunt teeth scraping his skin, her warm, wet cunt sliding over his cock. He heard Dru's hand come down sharply on her ass, the sound loud. She slanted her mouth over his, thrusting her tongue into his mouth, refusing to let him take control of the kiss, even when he would have broken it off for no other reason than to let her breath. It was Dru who pulled her off of him, leaving him panting as she pushed Willow up until she was straddling him, her hands tangling in Willow's hair as she nuzzled her throat and bent her head down to take one of her nipples into her mouth. It wasn't exactly that he couldn't move, it was just that he felt like he was moving through tar. Now that his legs were free, and he didn't necessarily have to worry about hurting Willow, he managed to straighten out the awkward angle of his body, but the effort and concentration that required was enough to make him feel a bit worried.

Dru was kissing her way down Willow's stomach, one arm behind her to support the arch of her back, the other hand on his chest. Willow was pushing her head down, leaning back so far that her hair fell over his thighs. He knew exactly when Dru reached her clitoris by the way her body quivered, her hips canting forward. He could imagine Dru using the cool tip of her tongue to tease her, though he couldn't see anything but the back of her head.

The hand on his chest moved down, fingernails scoring his chest, the scent of blood and sex thick between the three of them. Dru's arm left Willow's back and she collapsed against his legs, lifting her own until her feet were flat on the mattress, bracketing his rib cage. She was keening softly, her ass rocking against his cock as she neared orgasm. He could move just enough to grasp Willow's ankle, and it was driving him wild, the sounds they were making, the contrasting hot and cold sensation of their smooth skin on his.

They came apart, Dru lifting her head, pushing Willow off of him, straddling his head. He found that as soon as she lowered herself to his mouth, he could move his arms enough to lock them around her hips. He wanted to flip them over and fuck one of them while he feasted on the other, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't seem to get his shoulders and hips to cooperate. A frustrated growl left his throat and he heard Dru laughing, even as she bent at the waist, one hand braced on the mattress near his hip, the other on his cock.

He groaned at the sensation of Willow's warm mouth surrounding him. He wasn't sure who was doing what to whom anymore. It didn't matter if it was thrall or magic, or both. He spent so much time trying to control both of them, in one way or another. His tongue lashed Dru's clit. Willow alternated between his cock and kissing Dru while her hand moved up and down on his cock, never letting him come.

The lessening of the magical restraint that Willow placed on him was a gradual thing, like the thrall that was wearing off, the spell that held him faded until he was able to turn the tables on them. Instinctively, he reached for Dru first, rolling her on her stomach and thrusting into her cunt. She drove him crazy sometimes, with her games, and her insatiable craving for pain. She couldn't get off without someone hurting her, and he hated it. As soon as he was satisfied that his cock was sufficiently lubricated he withdrew from her and forced himself into her ass. She was grabbing at Willow, leaving little half moon marks in her skin that welled with blood.

When she tried to pull Willow to her to taste the blood she had drawn, he grabbed a handful of her hair and viscously yanked her head back. “Mine,” he reminded her, shaking her.

Dru shuddered, moaning, grinding herself against him. He pushed her head to one side and sank his fangs into her throat in a deep, hard bite, the kind a predator used to hold its prey through its death throes. She came, collapsing under him in a show of submission that he would have found touching if he wasn't so furious with her. He relaxed his hold on her throat, feeling her blood dripping over his lips as his eyes picked Willow out.

Thrall bound or not, she seemed to recognize that he was in a dangerous mood, but Dru held her still, stroking her stomach, smearing blood with the sweep of her fingers. “I've seen it,” Dru whispered. “Falling, always and ever, slow as a leaf tumbling on a breeze, but it could be like floating, or flying,” she moved her head, shifting and squirming out from under William. She sat up, shivering at the pain the movement caused, dark eyes shining. “Come to me?” she entreated.

Willow slowly placed her hands in Dru's, allowing her to pull her upright as Dru leaned against William, lifting their joined hands over his head to include him as Dru's arm settled behind his neck. She laid her head against his shoulder, her forehead resting on his throat. The deep bite mark he had inflicted was still bleeding freely.

“This is Willow,” she told him, as if they were being introduced for the first time. “She's never anything that we expect her to be,” she went on, tugging Willow in, closer. “My beautiful, terrible, wicked boy, looking for his Goddess in the night sky,” her lips touched his ear as she lowered her voice to the barest of whispers. “Look closer to the ground.”

He had a memory of coaxing her into a position that was awkward for her in the big sleigh bed that dominated his old bedroom in the Charlotte Street house. He had been leaning against the footboard, sitting on his heels, holding Willow by the waist as she stood on the mattress, wobbling a little, looking skeptical. He had wanted her to straddle him until she was resting on his thighs. There had really been no question that she was going to do it, and his wheedling tone was more to mollify her than anything else.

She had choices. From her point of view, they were usually lousy choices, but she had choices. Of course, when she actually reached him, he hadn't been able to resist pushing his face into her smooth thighs, bumping his nose against her warmest, wettest flesh, tasting her while she clutched at the arms holding her, too worried about falling to fully appreciate the caress, which just made him linger over it.

She had always tasted good to him. Once he settled on keeping her, he spent a lot of time showing her how to please him, managing along the way to discover that it wasn't necessarily skill that he craved. It was this, the blush that warmed her skin, and the slightly uncoordinated way that she moved when she was a little overwhelmed. It was the way her heartbeat took off when he talked to her.

“My girl has the most delicious cunt. I want to wake you up with my head between your thighs, my tongue lapping up your sweetness. You're so wet for me. Feel that, baby? Feel how your cunt flows for me? Like that?” His lips, tugging on her clitoris, making her legs tremble. He had guided her down to him, whispering to her to use her hand to spread the lips of her cunt apart as his cock butted against her, feeling her fall heavily, awkwardly against his shoulder as she did what he instructed. He tried to control her descent even as his instincts were screaming at him to thrust into the hot, wet channel that was ever so slightly resisting his penetration.

When she was settled on him, his cock embedded in her to the root, he had to stop to get her organized, because she really didn't understand how to do this, how to plant her feet on the mattress and push with her legs so she could move up and down on him at her own pace. Her halting attempts were full of concentration and uncertainty. She just sort of bounced on his thighs, using the footboard to balance herself.

He had tried to explain to her how to move, an exercise that descended into the ridiculous. “It's like riding a horse,” he told her. “Just lean into it and use your legs to—“

“I don't know how to ride a horse,” she pointed out, since he seemed to have forgotten that.

He had spent a fair bit of time after that teaching her, but never really getting beyond just staying in the saddle and handling the reins. The little gray mare in the stables, the one that had been ruined by the coachman, had been meant for her to ride.

So he had tumbled her back on the bed, laughing, because she was so clumsy, and so delicious, and when he hit the right angle inside of her, the expression on her face was everything he wanted.

This was just wrong. It was her body, her welcome warmth surrounding him, her scent, her soft sounds, but she felt off to him. The movement of her body as she straddled him, exactly as he meant her to then, was unexpectedly fluid, like she had channeled Dru's grace. Her gaze was direct. There was no fear or uncertainty, no shyness or shame, no hint of thoughts flying through her head. Sometimes she looked so lost that he couldn't look away and leave her even more alone.

He couldn't bear looking at her like this. Threading his fingers through her hair, he pushed her face into his throat and made himself concentrate on what did feel right, his hand moving over her back. I'll make this up to you, baby, he promised himself as her body rose and fell on his with mechanical efficiency. Dru was pressing up against his back, her arms moving against him as her hands guided Willow's hips.

He barely registered the sting of her fingernail opening up a cut on his throat, grimly concentrating on finding his release and ending this hideous parody of Willow fucking him. If it wasn't the worst fuck in memory, worse even than his first time with Dru and Angelus, he might have come when he felt Willow's tongue pressed into the scratch Dru had opened on his throat, or from Dru biting his shoulder while one of her slim fingers worked its way into his ass. It was the pressure on his prostate that finally accomplished it, and he held Willow, his arm clamped down on her hips as he jerked against her.



He was determined to get her cleaned up and back in her own bed, and then he and Dru were going to have a little talk. Dru followed him into Willow's room, turning down the covers for her, but when she started to get in bed with her, he stopped her with a seldom used word.

She looked so startled that it might have been funny, except that he was angry, and not seeing the humor in it.

“No?”

“No,” he repeated.

She wrung her hands, her eyes liquid with distress. Normally, she had him at the fussy hand movements. He waited. Next came a cringe, a whining moan, the rolling eyes, the tearing at the hair. He crossed his arms over his chest, waiting. The interesting thing was that he actually saw it register, when she realized that he wasn't going to relent.

There was no little girl pout or a pretty peekaboo stare through her absurdly long eyelashes. She reached out and threaded her fingers through the brace that he had not pulled up over his shoulders when he pulled his trousers on. “There was such pain and confusion,” she said.

He cocked his head to one side, wondering if she would say more. “Bad dreams, and,” she frowned, and then she hit her head with the heel of her hand, hard enough for him to want to catch her hand to keep her from repeating the gesture.

“I made it go away!” she sounded aggrieved.

“You made her go away,” he corrected. “Next time, just come get me.”

From her expression, he guessed that she didn't think much of this plan. “Mine, Dru,” he reminded her. “And I don't want you crawling around in her head.”

She let go of the brace she was fingering. “I made her not afraid.”

“Oh, right,” he drawled. “That's what she needs—to be less afraid. God damn it, Dru! She walked out of the house because she was curious about what was in the yard. If that was you or me inside the gate, what would have happened? She isn't afraid enough. She never has been.”

She flicked her fingernails at him. “They weren't very clever vampires,” she said dismissively.

William gave a short laugh. “They were idiots,” he agreed.

“Miss Willow is clever,” she pointed out, swaying a little, her eyes fixed on him watchfully

“Hideously,” he nodded. “And she has more lives than a damned cat, but—“

Dru tilted her head to one side and made a shushing noise. “I've seen her with us, my William,” she said, her tone soothing. “Having grand adventures, our beautiful, terrible, fierce girl,” her gaze shifted to Willow, with something like fondness softening her features.

He studied her for a moment. “You're positive?” he asked.

“Positively positive,” Dru nodded once. “Always and ever. It cannot be altered.”

“Then, we are agreed. You'll never do anything like this again, because I won't stand for it,” he told her.