Chapter Twenty-Six

Darla could see the flicker of reflections in the crystal and flatware lying unused on the table, temporarily abandoned in favor of conversation. A blur of color trapped in cut crystal, an elongated perspective on the older Englishman in the flat of a knife slightly smeared with butter. His contributions to the conversation were negligible. Exactly what you would expect of someone who had become a part of the circle at the table almost by accident. If he had other intentions for the evening, they became moot when Lt. Wyndham renewed his slight acquaintance with Willow.

Mr. Giles placed his finger on the edge of a spoon, tilting it to catch the light, and Darla glanced up at him, mildly surprised to have her inattention noted and acknowledged in such a way. He smiled, almost apologetically, glancing across the table at Angelus who had turned his chair slightly away from the table, invited to join a conversation there.

She expected a compliment on her family, an observation about the weather, or some other banality that fit the role she was playing tonight.

"Has a date been set for the wedding?" he asked instead.

It didn't track immediately, but then she remembered that Angelus had covered for William's overly familiar manner with Willow by suggesting that there was an understanding between them. She couldn't decide if that was an even greater mistake.

She shook her head, letting her gaze drift down before she turned more fully toward him as if she were about to share a confidence. "Nothing has been done yet, but I think this winter, possibly around Christmas."

Weddings were not expected to be grand affairs. A small gathering of family and friends in a chapel and an announcement to acquaintances was the norm. No one would think it particularly odd if the newlywed couple did not set up their own household. Extended family living together was more common than not. David's appreciation of how the Fanged Four blended seamlessly, appearing interesting, but not extraordinary, expanded even as he tried not to appear overly curious in the woman sitting beside him.

She was fussing with the gloves that she had unbuttoned and tucked under her wrists while she pretended to eat. He considered asking her if she wanted to take a turn around the garden. He was anxious about Harry, alone with the two younger vampires and the girl, though if anything happened to him, it was a trap of his own making and there was nothing David could do to save him without endangering himself or others.

Instead he made small talk about Prague. It was a neutral topic, one that Darla warmed to after she finished fastening the small buttons on her glove, struggling a bit with the buttons on the other glove. Harry returned to report that his companions in the garden had departed. He looked a bit done in from the walk around the garden. Unnerved by something he had seen or heard? They could not leave without Frau van Borselin, and it was very late before their hostess was ready to leave.

Settled in the bachelor's parlor that they shared, ostensibly to enjoy a cigar and a drink before retiring for the evening, Harry slumped into a wing-backed chair and took a moment to order his account of the evening, and then gave up.

"She knows who we are," he blurted out, and then realized that as a beginning it was too abrupt. "Miss Grant? She knows what we are," he corrected himself. "I didn't say anything. She just . . . knew. Claimed to have known other watchers," he went on in the face of David's silence.

David looked puzzled. "How on earth could she know?"

Harry had thought about that too. "I don't know, but she was specific enough. Watchers. London. She said that I had drawn too much attention to myself and that it would go very badly if Angelus or Darla figured out who we are."

"Begging the conclusion that they don't know?" David was skeptical. "That seems very unlikely."

"The thought crossed my mind," Harry was testy. "But, I think they don't. She was careful to speak to me when we were alone. Out of the hearing of the other two, and she spoke as if she was in as much danger as us, should she be found out."

"This won't do," David said decisively. "Stop dancing around it and tell me exactly what was said."

Harry hesitated, aware that he had gone well beyond anything that he should have said. The temptation to edit his own contributions to the brief conversation was there, and it all happened so fast that what remained was impressions. The walk back to the house from the garden had been unnerving. As soon as he had gained the illusion of safety in the house he had taken refuge in a glass of champagne from a passing waiter's tray and tried to calm his racing heart while he watched David across the room chatting with Darla. It was hard to describe what had gone through his head at that moment.

The Watchers' Council had passed David by. He was too old now to be considered as a Slayer's watcher. Harry had time on his side. Slayers did not live long once they came into their power. Over the next twenty years he could reasonably expect to have a chance to be assigned to one of the girls. It was what he was trained for. But somewhere along the line of that unstated ambition he had come to the conclusion that he had to prove himself to be as good as any Slayer without the mystical gifts they were imbued with. He had not thought that it was enough to simply observe, but to be prepared to destroy the Scourge of Europe, not to save lives, but to secure for himself the distinction of being entrusted with a Slayer.

A girl with extraordinary abilities who would look at him with the understanding that he was extraordinary. A very ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances had shattered that idea. It came to him belatedly that there was a lesson in being placed with David in these circumstances. If David had been his Slayer he would have gotten him killed by now and never understood until he was dead that just because Slayers died at an early age, he wasn't meant to aid in that process.

"I will," he said. He would tell David everything. "Every idea I've ever had about what we are supposed to be has been wrong," he confessed. "I know that now. A watcher with a Slayer is responsible for witnessing the death of a Slayer. I thought it was a prize," he cleared his throat. "I suppose I thought of it because she said something that made me think of it," he paused, and found that it wasn't so hard to recall after all. "She said that she's known watchers without Slayers and—" he frowned, "No, that's not right. She said that she had never met a watcher without a Slayer, except once, and that she was not impressed."

They both knew that in the last decade there were no accounts of Slayers coming into contact with the Scourge of Europe. David leaned against the back of the other armchair. "Start at the beginning," he instructed, refusing to be distracted by working out that peculiar detail. "When you went to walk in the garden, you were with Drusilla," he reminded him. "How did you manage to speak to Miss Grant?"



After she changed out of her evening clothes and brushed her hair and teeth, Willow smeared on her homemade mud peppermint facial and started putting things in order. She had never been a neat freak, but she liked a certain amount of order around her, and that characteristic had gradually grown more pronounced as time passed. It was a coping mechanism that had something to do with control.

Once she was satisfied that her own room was clean, and the peppermint mask was starting to itch and flake off her skin, she went to the bathroom and rinsed it off, fussing over the arrangement of folded towels.

Returning to her bedroom, she scooped up her jewelry on her dressing table and left her room, crossing the hall to William's room. She placed the jewelry next to the rosewood box where he kept his smoking things, the first place in the room he was likely to visit.

She had to leave him. It wasn't running away. It wasn't because something terrible had happened. It wasn't because she was starting to wonder if she was crazy and she just didn't know it because what had happened to her was so mind-bending that crazy was the least of her concerns as long as she didn't think too much about Drusilla. This was different. It felt different in her head. There was no panic, no hurried thinking, driving her toward the nearest exit.

In panic there was simplicity. There was no one in the house except a few of the minions, and she had managed to hold her own the night they were attacked. There was money in the house, papers, documents, the jewelry that she had returned and other pieces too valuable to be left in her room that she could gather quickly. To hide through the balance of the night wasn't so hard. Prague was a large city. In the morning she could buy a train ticket and be gone with at least twelve hours head start.

But not gone in such a way that she wouldn't spend the rest of her life waiting to be found, stuck in a century that she didn't belong to. Bound to age and die before she was born in 1981.

She was thinking calmly, coolly, rationally when went to the windows, opening them to give the room an airing-out while she picked up discarded clothing to carry down the hall to be laundered.

Almost as an afterthought, with the laundry balled up under her arm, she opened the box that held his smoking things and grabbed a handful of William's cheroots. He never kept a close track of his things, and he wasn't smoking the cheroots as much now that he had started smoking cigarettes. She suspected that he had smoked them tonight because he was out of cigarettes. She wrapped them up in one of his shirts, frowning at the dirt and grass stains ground into the fabric. The shirt was ruined, and it wouldn't be missed.

If this was any kind of normal household there would be a compost heap, but Darla could not abide the smell. There was, however, the refuse bin from the stable that was emptied daily. After she left the laundry in the small closet between Angelus and William's rooms, she went down the back stairs to the kitchen.

Unaccustomed to leaving the house alone, at night, Willow crossed the garden to enter the stable through the side door, pausing just inside the door to get accustomed to the dark. One of the horses made a soft huffing sound, and another nickered. She had never really gotten used to horses. They looked pretty at a distance, but up close they were too large. William had made attempts to teach her to ride. At first she just sat perched on a sidesaddle that wasn't as uncomfortable as it was precarious. It was like having a chair set on the back of a large, moving animal. When she looked down at the ground going by in sweeping circles, it made her feel dizzy.

Moving carefully, conscious that the stable was full of seemingly benign objects that were also heavy and potentially dangerous, she moved along the line of stalls, with one hand against the wood, jumping when one of the horses in the stall stuck his head out right in front of her. A blast of warm air hit her face; a damp velvety muzzle nudged her shoulder. Thin, flexible horsey lips nibbled at the sleeve of her dressing gown.

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. She should have brought a lantern, but being in stealth mode, she hadn't thought of it. Not that a light was going to draw any more attention to her.

"Good horsy," she whispered nervously, carefully stepping back to avoid a swipe of horse tongue or the grab of big horse teeth.

If William had been here, he would have diverted the horse with a chirping sound while moving her away and shaking his head at her for being intimidated. In the center of the aisle, she moved toward the wide double door where the two carriages were kept. The Brougham was still out. The refuse bin would be just outside the outer door, at the edge of the alley. It was metal and the lid was heavier than expected, but she managed to get it open, shuddering at the trapped odor that was released before she dropped the bundle inside.

It didn't seem so hard now. She just had to go back inside, take a bath, write something boring in her journal for William to read, and try to sleep or at least to pretend to sleep. He would run out of cheroots during the day. It wasn't much of a plan, she realized as she returned to the house. She didn't actually know where the tobacco shop was, but it was a start. She would find a way to get out of the house during the day.

On the way back she ran into Matilde and Andreas, the former stuck in the house to wait for Darla to return, the later on guard duty. Heeding William's injunction she stepped around them, hearing the female vampire, her former maid, growl at her.

She remembered him telling her that she should bring things like this to him as she stopped and turned to look at Matilde. She was in no mood to be trifled with. Just thinking it made her smile. Smiling made Matilde's lips draw back in a snarl.

"If you aren't careful, your face might freeze that way," Willow said, feeling something like a rush of charged air around her.

Andreas felt it, too, and stepped away from her. He had heard her leave the house and had been on the verge of following her when Matilde came down. The status of the lone human in the household was unambiguous in his opinion. She was off the menu. That had not been a complicated notion to absorb. Then she became something else, equally uncomplicated, when he saw her defending the house. She was off the menu and not without her own defenses. That was simple enough to follow.

Matilde knew it, too; she just didn't like it and was inclined to let it show. Now, she looked almost as confused as frustrated by Willow's refusal to be bullied or intimidated. She was not afraid of Willow. She was afraid of Darla.

Willow felt the rush of charged air wrap itself around her, burrowing into the spaces where she could still feel hurt, soothing the sting of rejection with a warm bath of anger. It was . . . interesting. She was tempted to see if she really could freeze Matilde's face like that, and was rescued in a way by her own sense of humor.

She shook her head, amazed and a little gratified that she could still feel hurt by the idea that someone didn't like her. Using magic to retaliate was probably wrong. Using magic that she didn't understand that felt like an answer to something she never admitted was possibly dangerous. If the unreal world didn't end soon, she was going to need psychotherapy, which was only now being invented. In the real world an apocalypse rolled around with stunning regularity, so the unreal world was, by her estimate, long overdue.

She looked at Andreas curiously. He seemed to be expecting something. He was generally polite to her, she remembered. "I guess you've never heard that before," she murmured. "I don't think it's true. It's just something that people say to children when they make faces."

He nodded slowly, "Yes," he agreed. "Is there anything that you need?" he asked, willing to fetch and carry for her if she didn't start looking like she might be tempted to start staking someone.

She blinked, startled by the question. It was a reminder of what it had been like in the house before they had been murdered, when they had simply been hand-picked by her to be murdered.

"Tea?" he suggested.

She nodded slowly. "I'm going up to my room," she told him. "I need a bath."

"Matilde will bring it up, then," he told her, casting a warning look at Matilde.

Willow went up the stairs, unnerved. The whole night was one self-contained freak-out after another.



"Tea and cakes, moonlight, and dancing," Drusilla turned to him. "You didn't dance with Miss Willow. Neither did I." She said it as if it was an omission that puzzled her.

"The evening is not complete," William told her, wondering what she would do with that idea.

She tucked her hand inside his arm, smoothing his coat sleeve. "I dreamt of dancing, all the time. I saw it. No one had to teach me to dance. I knew all of the steps from my dreams. But it was never right. Not like flying. Feet stepping on the hem of my gown, sweat running down my back," she pressed against him, one hand going to her ribs to finger the whalebone stays under her gown. "Too tight to breathe."

"Too tight to breathe," he echoed, thinking it was an apt way to describe the lives that they had left. "I remember that."

They walked in silence that was richest for Drusilla. Between each step was a waking dream, like a window that was gently closed between footfalls. She saw the entire evening in a kaleidoscope of images that had undiscovered meanings and incomplete beginnings. A shower of rose petals falling around Willow's shoulders. That happened. Her own fingers peeling back the gray silk of her gown, slipping it over the point of Willow's shoulder where her skin would be warm from the gown. That didn't happen, but it might have and it was all the same to her. Hard light dancing on the ceiling from great swags of crystal pendants hanging from a chandelier seen out of the corner of her eye. A new catalog of faces and scents had been imprinted on her memory, and she felt as if she could command them at will, selecting one to hunt. Just one out of the great many.

William's thoughts were not scattered like a field of stars, nor were they open to her as he sometimes assumed. It was because of the way he had come to her. He thought she could read his mind because she had seen in him a life that fit him too tight for breathing. A life for which the only remedy was to no longer need to breathe.

"What are we hunting, my William?" Dru wanted to know.

From his sideways look it was clear that he thought she had read his mind. He wanted to find the van Borselin home. He probably would have considered Harry a meal just on his own annoying merits, but he had upset Willow, and aside from her tendency to cry over trifles, she was a levelheaded girl, not prone to flights of fancy. Ridiculous stuffed shirt, nancy boy, public school prat, he had to know better than to accost young ladies in the park. The fact that those rules didn't bind him didn't move William in the slightest.

He explained it to Drusilla. Her eyebrows drew together as he told her about Willow's experience in the park. She didn't understand it. William thought there was something unseemly about the young man's interest in Willow, that Willow existed as an object of that kind of attention. She wasn't stupid. She knew very well where and how William had found Willow and what he kept her for.

He seemed to have forgotten, or this was the part of the something that had been changing with the weight of inevitability that she was aware of but unable to name. She could have found him without effort, simply by following the threads that were connected to him now that William had pointed them out to her.

And she might have, if William had understood that she had a purpose of her own. He lacked a proper feeling for anything that he couldn't kill or maim. There were men who sought to do God's will, willfully unaware that she was a part of the design. She was created to destroy, not for revenge or justice, but as a reflection of the caprice of the natural world where birds fell dead in mid-flight and disease struck without warning.

Smiling her mysterious smile, she let him work it out on his own. His methods were slower. In the shadows they waited while the guests left the party they had been a part of earlier. Moving between houses, he tracked the progress of a slow-moving coach to a house not far from the one they occupied.

Unaware of Drusilla's lack of participation in his mission, William noted the location of the house. It wasn't the enormous pile they had spent the evening in, but it was a big, stolid-looking house of three and half stories, with a dozen chimneys. Nothing about it suggested that the Van Borselins were taking boarders, so the Englishmen were probably social acquaintances.

Harry Wyndham would wander out for a late-night stroll and he'd be there, at some point, probably sooner than not. When he got a yen to kill someone in particular, he wasn't given to the drawn out gamesmanship Angelus preferred. He'd terrify you to death before he killed you. William was all about the kill.

"What would you like to hunt, poodle?" he asked now that he had satisfied his curiosity.

She licked her lips, eyes dancing. "Oooh! I know," she moaned, rubbing herself against him. "I smell something young," she said enticingly.

"Great," William muttered. He hoped it wasn't babies. It was like draining a small dog. Hardly got a taste and then it was on to the next one, and then there was the squalling, and the weird smell. Babies and old people were not high on his list of things to eat.

It wasn't babies. Just a pair of lads, probably not yet sixteen, larking around and sharing a bottle of apple brandy between the two of them. Dru found them behind a shed, and they gaped at her in a stunned sort of way. William shared their bemusement as Dru danced around a tree, pulling her hairpins out, flinging them around. He perched on a garden wall, unnoticed, as she dazzled and charmed, and wooed them out into the open until one of the boys, emboldened by drink, the realization that the beautiful young woman they were watching was probably not in her right mind, or just by the nearly unbelievable prospect of what she seemed to be offering, chased after her.

His friend pursued him, hissing at him to leave her alone. Timid or principled, or both. He really wasn't surprised to find Dru favoring the second boy. Cooing to him. "You're a knight, a noble and virtuous knight," she said.

They crashed into a bed of lilies, and William smiled at that, knowing his Princess. She'd leave the boy laid out neat as a pin, minus his heart, blood stained flowers clasped over his chest.

Springing down lightly from his perch, he slipped up silently behind the other boy, who was straining to see what was going on, drunken envy twisting his face. William relieved him of the bottle. "Surprised me, too, mate," he told him. "You always think they'll go for the bigger, stronger, bloke, but sometimes for reasons only they understand, it's the weak ones they crave between their legs."

As observations went, William thought it was one of his better ones. Pity the boy wouldn't live to mull over it or recognize the irony.

They were still feeding when someone came out of the house, swinging a lantern, cursing, and William had to give up his mostly-dead prize. He snapped his neck, and retrieved Dru, who was not happy to be leaving without her laying him out completed, so they stayed close enough to hear the first body discovered, and then the second. The horrified moaning and crying appeased Dru, putting her back into a good mood. She daintily licked her fingers clean and placed the heart in her beaded handbag, squashing it in amongst the pate she had nicked for a late-night snack for Mr. Buttons.

"It's still early," William pointed out. "Hours to go until dawn. What can we do to entertain ourselves?"

She waved her bag at him. "Treats for Mr. Buttons, William. He must be ever so sad and lonely," she declared with a pout that had regained a great deal of its charm.

The purse was dripping blood, which was creating a trail to be followed. That gave William another idea. He led Dru through the streets to the mission and persuaded her to relinquish Mr. Buttons' treat, depositing it at the threshold of the door, thinking that the mayhem that was likely to follow would liven things up after it was discovered.






She heard Matilde in the bedroom while she was in the bathtub. She had said something earlier that evening to William about not trusting the minions to bring her anything, and she meant it, but she had not imagined that she would find Matilde doing anything for her without being instructed to and resenting it.

When she left the bathroom, Matilde was still there, examining the dress worn that evening, hanging in the wardrobe. The bed was turned down, and a small fire had been laid in the fireplace with kindling, not so much for warmth as to take some of the damp out of the air. The dress was removed from the hanger and laid over the end of the bed while she went to her dressing table where a pot of tea was waiting for her.

Without comment, Matilde came to her, reaching around her for her brush before unwrapping her wet hair from the towel Willow had wound around the length. She started brushing her hair, working from the ends to remove the tangles and then setting down the brush to retrieve a pair of scissors from her pocket to trim the ends. The whole time not one single word passed between them until Matilde was done.

She asked if she should leave the tea and said that she was taking the dress to clean and press.

Left alone again, Willow considered going to sleep, or at least pretending to sleep. It could not be a coincidence that the watchers' names echoed the names of the two watchers she knew in Sunnydale. She debated about leaving her room again to go down to her cellar under the library to look at her books.

The meager collection of books she had accumulated were ones she knew well by now. They were not going to offer up new insights into her time travel versus alternative universe meditations. It was more the idea of books that drew her. She had done her research once surrounded by books. Now, as then, she found them inadequate. The good stuff, the books that Giles kept in his office, had been at her disposal through long nights of sitting quietly in the library while Oz was locked in the cage.

She had to get more books. Better books. The kind of books watchers had access to.

If it was time travel, could she find a way to write a note to be handed to one of the watchers with a stern injunction that it was to be kept for Giles to read a century from now? If she did that, if she accomplished that, would it erase the last eight years? Would Giles read the note before she started researching ways to keep Angel from losing his soul and explain to her that there was a disaster in the making, that her efforts were doomed to failure?

Would she listen in the future?

Was it a sign that she should try again? The ritual was the one thing that she had made herself memorize. Every detail of it was sorted and organized in her mind. The ingredients, the precise measurements. The symbols, painstakingly copied over and over again in her notebook before she cast the spell, when she was still working out the perfect moment to go back and change one thing, just one thing that would make the most difference. She had drawn on the floor between lines of masking tape, because she wanted it to be perfect.

In a few days she was to go back to Zlata Ulicka to pick up the rest of the spell ingredients she had ordered. There were things that were not on her list that she would need to attempt the spell, and she was at once wary and intrigued about attempting any spell casting inside the barrier wards she had created around the house. It was drawing on power that made her feel more powerful when she needed to feel powerful.

"It's just a teensy temporal fold," she heard Anya's voice in her head, but the memory offered no guidance. It suggested that it was possible even as Willow remembered that it was dangerous.

She paced the bedroom floor. If it wasn't a bizarre coincidence, then she was supposed to meet the watchers. It made sense in a way. She had always been puzzled by how unlikely it was that she would find herself in a place that she had no way to associate with Angelus—no watcher's diary entry that she had found had ever suggested that Angelus had been in Bristol. The first time she had seen it on the page of an atlas, a dot hovering in Gloucester near Somerset, she realized that she had had not understood where the spell had taken her.

It couldn't be coincidence that she met William there. She hadn't even recognized him. It wasn't until she saw Drusilla that she realized that William was Spike.

The idea that there was some purpose served in her being here was infuriating.

She couldn't try the spell now, and she wanted to badly, so much so that she considered for a moment leaving the house and making her way to Zlata Ulicka, before discarding the idea as impractical and dangerous. There were vampires there, too. She had no reason to trust that they would keep her presence a secret unless it served their purposes to do so, and she had no idea what their agenda was, though the fact that they were vampires made altruism unlikely.

There had to be a reason. A connection. Something that explained what had placed her here. The books she was allowed to have were, half of them, full of folklore and nonsense and the rest of them, jammed with benign spells, petitions, and recipes for good crops, health, and protection against malign spirits.

Fingers pressed against her lips, she tried to think clearly, coldly, logically. She had tried to escape before, but running away never addressed the real problem of being stuck in a dimension or time period that she did not belong to. She ran without having anywhere to run to and she didn't want to live out her life here, alone.

She didn't want to leave him.

Her vision blurred for a moment. That hadn't always been there. She was sure of it. There had been times when getting away from William seemed like the only thing she could think of. Until she was sent to Prague, to live alone in a house full of people that she could not allow herself to think of as people, for two months. They were hundreds of miles away, and she could have left at any time in those two months.

"No," and what she heard in her voice made her squeeze her eyes shut, shaking her head, before trying again. "No."

It was firmer the second time. It didn't mean anything. Not really. Life wasn't about how you felt about the people who were part of your life. It was about what you did despite how you felt.

She was more or less confined to the house during the day, thanks to her freak-out about the way the two men approached her in the park. She had to figure out a way to go out more, to move about more freely during the daytime. She had been formally introduced to Mr. Giles and Lt. Wyndham. That made them social acquaintances. By the rules that governed these things, she now had a defined context in their social circle.

There was no reason that she couldn't resume walking in the park. She didn't have to invent excuses. She simply had to pretend that she had read too much into Lt. Wyndham's interest in her, and, in a way, she had. Convincing William would be difficult. He didn't care about maintaining social contacts or appearances.

Darla did.



Darla considered the evening a success. If she was keeping score, and she was, Willow and Angelus took the top honors for the evening. Willow was likely to be invited back, having established a rapport with their hostess, and Angelus had covered so beautifully for William's lapse in manners that he made her appear intriguing and sympathetic all at once without saying anything specific. Darla didn't want to be entertaining potential suitors for Willow, and the implication that she was practically engaged was a stroke of genius.

She was not so preoccupied with these thoughts that she failed to notice that they were visiting a graveyard. She allowed herself to be assisted to the ground, feeling moderately curious as she picked her way over the slightly uneven turf to a freshly laid and untidy grave.

"Your work?" she guessed.

Angelus nodded, looking solemn. "I've always wondered if a human could get out of a grave." He gestured to it. "It wasn't a fair test. The coffin was broken and we just pushed the dirt in to cover it up."

She studied the grave. It looked pretty much like any other grave, except not as neat. In a few days, after the ground settled again, it would need more dirt. "If I had known, I would have brought flowers."

He looked back at her. "She reminded me of you," he told her.

She smiled at that, genuinely amused by his tone. "What every woman wants to hear."

He glanced over at her curiously. She never sounded jealous, but he knew it was there. It had to be. Holding her skirt to keep it from trailing across the fresh dirt, Darla's foot nudged a bone white object just peeking from the dirt. Inert and slightly misshapen, it took him a moment to recognize it as a part of a hand. So, she had almost made it out. He watched for a moment, waiting for the fingers to twitch or show some sign of life.

But the hand remained inert, half in and half out of the ground. He was struck by the expressiveness of hands. They were difficult to sketch, so much so that they were avoided entirely by otherwise competent artists.

Darla took a step back as he reached down, grasping the exposed wrist. He could detect no pulse. He considered pulling her out of the grave, not really caring if he took her arm off, or broke her neck. It hadn't been a good test, and she had failed it anyway. She was dead, useless, and no longer interesting, but it was fun to imagine the reaction of anyone visiting the cemetery during the day and finding a body half in and half out of the grave.

Darla was already turning away. The only time he had managed to shock her was when he had turned Drusilla for no other reason than to preserve the master work of her madness.



Willow was still awake when Darla and Angelus returned. There was a great deal that went on around her that she had been committed to sleeping through. Despite living with them for so many years, she wasn't nocturnal given a choice in the matter. Having her own room was a relatively new development. It added a layer of privacy that still felt private even if it was violated more or less at will. Hearing the house gain occupants made her want to go to sleep, mostly to avoid being found awake.

She dozed off, sleeping fitfully only to wake again when William and Drusilla came home. A muscle twitched under her eyelid and she tried to grimace it away, dreading the possibility that William would notice that his supply of cheroots was greatly diminished or that he would simply seek her out. If she had gone to sleep right away, she would have had the energy to deal with him.

When she heard her bedroom door open she couldn't contain the nervous start it gave her, but she decided to pretend to be asleep. It wasn't that hard to do. She just kept her eyes closed and used the small involuntary movement to roll to her side as if she was startled but not awake. She didn't really think that it would work. Sometimes, when she pretended to be asleep, he would slip in bed beside her and carefully, cautiously arrange her to lie against him, stroking her hair or her back until he took one, shallow involuntary breathe, like a swimmer going under, to fall asleep himself.

William smiled at the performance. He knew that she wasn't asleep. She was pretending. Faking sleep. Lying on her side, with her face in profile and her nose pressed into a feather pillow, a picture of what she thought she looked like when she was asleep. Her lips were pressed together though and her hands were inside the covers. Too neat. Too orderly. She tended to clutch at blankets and pillows, balling them up against her body. She slept with her lips parted, breathing through her mouth. For a moment he stood, one hand on the door, content to watch the performance. He could practically feel the tension gathering in her body, and then flash across her face when she realized it.

She made a sleepy sound and snuggled into the pillow, kicking away part of the blanket to push one foot out off the edge of the bed before settling again. When she was too warm under the covers, she put a foot outside them. But only when she was awake. When she was asleep and she was too warm, she just moved to a cooler place in the bed until she was pressed up against him.

He finished untying his cravat while he watched her. He had come home intending to spend the night with Drusilla. He hadn't spent enough time with her of late and she seemed to recognize it, too, tonight. The two of them, alone, was rare enough to be special. She felt it, too. Killing, kissing, laughing softly at nothing.

He could hear Drusilla in the bathroom they shared and gave Willow one last look, before stepping back into the hall and shutting the door gently behind him. He walked down the hall to Drusilla's room. The drapes had been left open, letting in the moonlight, giving the room a faintly purple glow. The rooms in the master suite were the most opulent in the house, but Drusilla's room was the most attractive. A bank of windows formed an open space that had been converted into a amphitheater for Drusilla's collection of dolls, arranged across a box seat posed in doll-sized furniture or doll stands.

She emerged from the bathroom, still dressed, and he felt an old ache of pleasure and longing. She had waited for him to help her with her dress. She was the first woman he had ever undressed during the brief and unforgettable time after she had made him when they had been like husband and wife, acting out cozy domestic scenes that they had never enjoyed when they were alive.

He unfastened her dress and helped her step out of it, smoothing his hands over her shoulders, holding them as he kissed the nape of her neck. She smelled like the bed of flowers she had crushed beneath the boy she had killed, and the hand she raised to touch his cheek, fingers trailing to his lips, was still stained with blood. His lips parted for her and he kissed her fingers, smiling when she made a game of it, kissing each one.

She gathered up the dress, frowning over a blood-matted spot in the velvet, and then laying it over a chair, because there were other uses for the rest of the fabric if bloodstains ruined the dress. He withdrew a cheroot from his pocket, waiting for her to nod her assent before he lit it. He was going to have to ration himself. The prospect of a long day spent indoors without anything to smoke was annoying, but he only had himself to blame for not paying more attention.

"Did you have a good time tonight?" he asked as she started taking her hair down.

"Wonderful," she said, twisting her head, pretending to admire herself in the etched-glass oval mirror behind her vanity. "Did you?"

He laid his arm across the back of the chair where her discarded dress lay. "Tolerable," he drawled, playing at pompous for her.

He was rewarded with a dazzling smile. When Drusilla was caught up in a pretense she was heartbreakingly lucid. She removed her hairpins and shook out the length of her hair until it fell around her in coils that still held the shapes her hair had been wound into. He watched her finger comb her hair, soothing the sore places on her scalp. Everything he had ever learned about taking down a woman's hair or running a brush through it he learned from watching her, and he never got tired of it.



Willow waited a few moments after the door shut. It would not have surprised her to find that he had shut the door from inside her room, waiting to see if she was really sleeping. The longer she waited the more certain she became that this was not the case. It was an impression that seemed to seep into her, wiggling past the sense of accomplishment at her acting ability. She didn't want to open her eyes to confirm what she had started to suspect.

She hadn't really wanted him to stay, she had just expected it.

She rolled over again, pulling one of the unused pillows close, muffling the achy feeling in her chest in eiderdown. She opened her eyes, letting them adjust to the almost total absence of light. The drapes were closed. The furniture in the room was shape in shadows that had grown familiar. Her room. It really didn't look like it was her room. She was too conscious of what her room was supposed to look like when she had been picking out the furniture for this room. She didn't treat it like it was her room. There were no books piled next to her bed, nothing pushed under the bed because she didn't feel like picking it up, nothing piled on a chair or her chaise.

She didn't even have a writing desk, just the vanity. It was a room for a woman that she had pretended to be for so long that the thought of being anyone else, even the girl she had once been, was frightening.

That wasn't all bad. Scary, but there were possibilities, and it wasn't about a trip to London that would probably never really happen when she might slip out for a day to see the Tower of London and figure out where the Watcher's Council was. It was more than possible that it was fate. It was, like finding William, or being found by him, a part of something incomplete that would bring her one step closer to home.

The word made her take in a shaky breath. Home. It was an idea more than an actual place. If she did go home, back to the day or the moment she left, would she be the same age or would she be a younger Willow with first-period Calculus and second-period Advanced Chemistry before she had a class with Buffy or Xander? Would she be sitting-in-the-quad Willow, holding hands with Oz?

There were so many things that she had missed. Prom. Graduation. The first day of college. Mochas. Helping Buffy study while patrolling. Bronzing with Xander and Buffy. Listening to Oz play. Watching the glaze of boredom settle on Oz's face as Giles or Wesley said too much about something that he had already figured out.

She no longer remembered what Oz looked like. She knew what he looked like, but if he had appeared, like the two watchers had tonight, she had a terrible feeling that she would have taken too long to recognize him. She closed her eyes tightly. She could never be that Willow again for Oz. Too much had happened.

But she could still be Buffy and Xander's friend. She could learn to be Shelia and Ira Rosenberg's daughter. And as long as Angel and Spike and Drusilla didn't think otherwise, she could be a Willow Rosenberg that never really knew any of them.

None of this eased the ache in her chest.

"Deal with this now," she whispered to herself, feeling tears sting. It wasn't that she loved William, but she was used to him and she felt a little less lonely when he was around. That's all it was. It was easier to be a little scared of William than a lot scared of everything. It was easier to deal with his demands than to figure out a solution to her own problems.

She closed her eyes again. It was too much to think about. She needed to sleep.




Few know what it is to be exalted. To climb inside of cloudless skies and spin around stars. To be the dark star that explodes in a wordless cry of wonder and completion. Drusilla wasn't selfish. She didn't need to be transported in the moment and took her own pleasure in creating it.

For William it was all hands, lips, bodies touching, but to Drusilla it was art. It was the decorous pattern unwound on the ceiling of the Opera House. It was the tumble of words that fell in layers. It was the drama in the tension of a bow on the strings of a violin. It was not hers alone. It was all connected. The boy who had died who saw the face of a woman in the moon and felt the thrill of the connection to something ancient and pagan was present. The creature she made, who reveled in the taste of blood on her lips, was there as well. Everything he touched, felt, and yearned for until the yearning became a source of shame amongst the shameless, was in the taste of his skin under her tongue.

Beastly rutting creatures careened around her, unable to become what they were.

She resisted the lure of their dance. She had this instead, and tomorrow the other things, and the day after that another kind of dance. They all caused pain. It was there in his eyes as he realized that she had not reached the kind of fulfillment he wanted to give her. It was never what she needed from him, but he was too selfish to grasp this.

He wanted what had been taken from her.

She laid her fingers over his lips when he would have spoken, holding the part of him that fit inside of her within her body until his hips shifted under hers. Again? He looked so stubborn, so determined, so bent on his own greedy desire to reduce her to what he found. He never seemed to grasp that she had exactly what she wanted already.

"You want too much," she told him, eyes shining.

He smiled at that. "I'll have it," he warned her. "One way or the other."

"Yes, you will," she agreed. Found so seldom in her, and ever and always in the next room, even if he didn't understand that it was all the same thing. "Look into my eyes," she entreated.

He shuddered under her, fighting her when he felt her presence in his mind. Even when he was mortal and frightened, he had fought her, and the only thing she got from him was the one word that made him think that she had read his mind. It was all the insight that she ever required. He wanted something shinning in a world full of dingy things. Wanted it so fiercely, so purely, that he was able to find it in the most unlikely places.

She ran her fingertips over his cheek as his gaze became unfocused. "I love you," she whispered.

The expression that flashed on his face might have broken her heart if it functioned properly. His lips moved soundlessly, and she nodded, feeling not a shred of jealously or remorse at the way he confused their names. It was all so clear to her. He would never be what Angelus was to her, but Willow might be what he was to her.

It was what they were made for.







Willow wasn't aware of having fallen asleep when she woke. She was just aware that being awake came with a feeling like she was floating that made her feel slightly queasy. She felt something tickle her cheek and then brush over her lips. Opening her eyes she found Drusilla leaning over her with one of the scraps of fur that she had been using to make chew toys for Mr. Buttons in hand.

She was lucky that was all it was. Drusilla had left a dead cat in her bed once. With a frown, Willow took in her surroundings. Walls painted black and scored by a fire, a creepy four poster with a limp, dirty lace canopy overhead. She looked quickly to her right to see if Xander was there too. He wasn't there, but that didn't alter her conclusion. She was dreaming.

"How badly do you have to miss television and movies for this to be your twisted idea of making your own fun?" Willow asked.

She didn't really expect an answer. Drusilla's eyes were half-closed and she was swaying a little. It was the kind of thing that she did that looked a little crazy, but in an attractively crazy and graceful sort of way. Darla could snap her out of it with a hard pinch.

She hadn't ever dreamt of Drusilla in the future. Lately, it was just Spike.

She stilled, eyes opening. "He doesn't want you," Drusilla told her.

"I'll go back to sleep then," she muttered.

"I tried to make him come, for tea and cakes. You didn't dance tonight, but he wants me. I'm the one he will always want."

It was so much in evidence that the real Drusilla would never say this to her. They were not in any way rivals.

Willow cautiously sat up wondering why dream Drusilla was telling her this. She almost wanted to tell her that she was leaving. She would leave, and Drusilla would have Spike all to herself, and that was how it was meant to be.

"You won't leave him?" she asked instead. It was stupid, but the thought of him being alone bothered her more than she wanted to admit.

Drusilla's head tilted to one side. "I hadn't thought of that," she admitted. "It's not a thinkable thing."

Willow started to smile at that. "No, it's not," she agreed. An idea was forming. "But, promise me anyway, that no matter what, you'll never abandon him."

Drusilla stared at her. "You've seen this," she breathed. "How?"

"It doesn't matter," Willow argued.

"If you've seen it then it will happen. No promise will alter it," Drusilla told her.

Willow heaved an inward sigh. Trying to have any kind of conversation with Dru was hard enough, and worse when you were asleep, and worse yet if you dreamt that she was more lucid than normal. She shook her head. "I don't think I have visions like yours," she told her. "Your vision is true. What I've seen might not be true. You said it yourself. It is not a thinkable thing."

Drusilla sat back on her heels, thinking about that. "I promise," she said after a moment that stretched so long that Willow wondered if she had forgotten what they were talking about.

"You promise what?" Spike asked, having caught the last of the exchange. He walked over to the bed and looked down at Willow. There was a hint of calculation in his stare. "You brought Drusilla back to me. I suppose you think I owe you a favor," he said, moving around the bed to Drusilla's side. His hand moved over her hair and she turned to look up at him.

She understood where she was now. The factory, except none of this happened. She had never had a chance to cast the love spell to bring Drusilla back to Spike.

"What did you promise, Princess?"

"I promise that I will never leave you," Drusilla told him. She bounced on the bed, pointing at Willow. "She has visions, too."

He looked skeptical, glancing from Drusilla to Willow. "Does she now?" he drawled.

"Mostly bad dreams," Willow said cautiously. "Well, now that you two are back together again, I'll just be . . . moseying home to do . . . my homework," she started to edge away from them.

She was pretty sure that what would happen next would involve a lot of running and screaming on her part, but when she got off the bed on the other side she was in the Sunnydale High School library, just inside the double doors. She stood there for a moment, trying to figure it out.

"Giles?" she called out.

She jumped when she heard him answer her from his office, and rushed to the door. He was sitting behind his desk with a book open in front of him. "There you are," he said. "I've been looking for something that would explain what has happened to you."

She nodded. "I did a spell—"

"Of course you did. Anyone could see that," he frowned at her. "Please don't interrupt. It's very rude."

Giles didn't say things like that. He just gave you one of those looks that said that he was patiently refraining from saying it. "Be careful who you place your trust in, Willow."

"Thanks for the cryptic warning," Willow muttered as Giles' office became City Hall and she found herself tied to a post with a pile of books around her that were starting to smolder.

There was no angry mob, or Buffy, or even Amy. In secret she had practiced every spell she could find to unbind restraints. All she had to do was find the right one and rescue the books from the fire and start looking for solutions inside them. Simple. A small flame flicked to life near her foot.

The panic she had felt then came back. She hadn't been thinking of spells or clever ways to save herself. It had been Buffy that she relied on to save her. She could feel the heat crawling up her leg. There was a smell that denim had just before it reached combustion. And then Spike was there, kicking the burning pile of books away from her.

But he didn't untie her. "That's your one favor, repaid," he told her.