Chapter 8

Willow's voice was lost in the explosion of light that followed her words, light so intense it was palpable. It knocked her stumbling back against the nearest table. She felt the sharp stab of hot wax burning her palms as she grabbed wildly for purchase amidst the candles. The smell of burning cloth assaulted her nose and she croaked out a spell of quenching; immediately all the candles went out. Afterimages writhed through her field of vision against the darkness, green and scarlet blobs like battling lava lamps, and her ears ached though there'd been no sound. Someone was growling, very softly.

"Willow?" Dawn moaned. "It's still there."

Willow squinted. The blobs weren't all afterimages. The vortex was still spinning slowly in place, shot through with ugly pulsing knots of power. "Ignite," she whispered. A few candles flickered back to life.

Spike was still coiled up in the middle of the circle. The growling noise was coming from him. Every now and again he jerked as if fighting some invisible battle. Dawn was crouched over him protectively, her eyes huge in her pale, strained face.

In the aftermath of the light-burst there was a third figure lying there, a small, slim body in a crumpled heap on the concrete, thin limbs splayed and fair hair tumbling over her face. Willow's breath stopped and she lurched forward.

"Buffy!" Dawn cried, breaking into tears in earnest. She lunged over to her sister, grabbing her shoulder before Willow could utter a word of caution. "Buffy! Wake up!"

Buffy Summers stirred. Her head whipped up and she looked from one side to the other, taking in everything at once. In her eyes there was only confusion, pain, and anger.

"Buffy... it's me," Dawn said.

Buffy's feral gaze fixed upon her sister, and she moved like quicksilver, grabbing Dawn's shoulders in both hands with painful force. She stared into her sister's eyes for a long moment. Her brows knit and her lips parted slightly. She lifted one hand to trace the contours of Dawn's face. Was there a spark of recognition in her eyes? Heedless of her nudity, she rose to her feet and stalked over to Willow, repeating the inspection, then returned to the circle and crouched down beside Spike. She sat back on her heels, studying him with apparent puzzlement. Even accounting for the effect of the candlelight, he looked ghastly. Buffy reached out to touch him, but drew back and cocked her head up at Willow, her attitude saying more plainly than words What's wrong with him?

Oh, God. Was this just the post-resurrection confusion that Wesley had mentioned, or was something more serious wrong? Willow searched the blank, wild eyes for any trace of her friend. "Buffy," Willow said. "Do you know where you are? Do you remember Dawn, or me?" She reached out and Buffy snarled and flinched away from her hand. "Look, we brought a blanket. It's one of your old ones. Can you put on the nice blanket?"

Buffy just hunkered down, her eyes darting suspiciously from one to the other of the three of them. Willow tossed the blanket to the floor a few feet away from her and stepped back. After a moment, Buffy's hand shot out and grabbed it. She turned the blanket over and over in her hands for a moment, looking perplexed, then shook it out clumsily and tried to drag the half-folded result over Spike. "Oh, god, Buffy, that won't help!" Dawn said, her voice half a sob. She pointed up at the vortex. "Willow, why hasn't that thing gone away? Buffy's back!" Dawn's fingers were digging into Spike's shoulder hard enough to have left bruises on a living body, and she sounded as if she were teetering on the edge of hysteria.

"I'm getting really tired of I don't know, but I don't know!" Willow took a deep breath and shoved her hair off her face. "I'm going to try and close it."

She didn't know what else to try, so she began a standard spell of dismissal, throwing all her waning resources into it. The vortex began to twist and wobble, throwing off fat crimson arcs of energy, and Spike howled. Buffy gave vent to an angry wail in response and clawed at the air. "STOP!" Dawn screamed. "You're making it worse!"

There was a crash from the window they'd entered by, and a shower of fresh glass hit the warehouse floor. Both of them whirled to face it, hearts in their mouths; Willow let go the printout of the spell and the pages scattered in the wind of the vortex. Headlights blazed through the opening, a pair of tall, looming figures backlit in their glare. At the sight of the intruders Willow's face twisted in a snarl almost as horrific as Spike's and she drew back a hand to strike; here was something safe to vent her fear and frustration on--

"Willow!"

"Giles!" she squeaked. The swiftly aborted spell fizzled around her shoulders in a shower of burning poison-green sparks. Willow staggered under the weight of the unwrought magic as the looming figures broke into the feeble candlelight and revealed themselves as Giles and Xander, and behind them Tara and Anya. Tara's eyes were huge as she took in the circle, the sigils about its perimeter, the glowing braziers, but mostly the tableau of Dawn and Spike and Buffy beneath the whirling red and silver vortex.

Tara dove to her knees and began grabbing the scattered pages of spell responses, reading through them as fast as she could. The look in her lover's eyes when she looked up was one of such horror and reproach that Willow almost broke into tears then and there. Half a dozen things flashed into her head, but the only one that made it out of her mouth was "I can explain!"

Everyone was yelling. Dawn wished heartily that they'd stop. Blood loss and lack of sleep were beginning to get to her, and her head was spinning.

"This isn't Jenny's spell," Giles snapped. "Not even close. What is going on here?" He looked down at the three figures in the circle. "Oh, dear lord."

Tara sounded as if someone had kicked all the air out of her. "Oh, Willow, how c-could..."

"To save Buffy, that's how!" Willow shouted, suddenly furious. Giles took a step forward, equally furious. "That's what we do, save people, right?"

Giles' voice might have been carved from ice. "After all you've seen of evil in the last five years, of human folly in the pursuit of power--"

"SHUT UP! All of you, just SHUT UP!" Dawn scrambled to her feet, radiating fury. "I don't care how right or wrong it was to get her back, she's HERE! Deal with it!" She stabbed an index finger at Spike. "And Spike's still in trouble, so DO SOMETHING!"

Tara was still shuffling through the pages of the spell, frowning. After a moment she closed her eyes and swallowed hard. "Willow. What did you use for the sacrifice?"

Willow's expression said that she wanted to argue, to explain, to justify herself... but she didn't. "Dawn's blood. Spike's soul. I amped up the correspondences so they'd add up to one life, and tied it all back to Buffy's death," she said. "I kind of didn't debug the soul part enough. It's trying to take the demon along with his original soul."

Tara frowned. "Buffy's back. His original soul must have been enough for the spell to work. Once she returned to this plane of existence, the spell ought to have resolved." She glanced up at the vortex. "But it hasn't. There's got to be another connection. If it's not the soul..." Her expression became, if possible, even more horrified. "Um... Dawnie... did you ever... uh... let Spike... uh... you know?"

"'You know' WHAT?" Dawn yelled. "Why doesn't anyone ever say what they mean around me?"

"Drink from you," Tara mumbled, flushing.

"NO! Ew! You people are disgusting!"

"There's got to be some other connection between him and the sacrifice," Giles said, in the sort of infinitely reasonable tone that was one step away from snapping completely. "Disgusting it may be, but the commonest method of binding a vampire and a human via the blood is for the vampire to drink from them."

"Well, think of an uncommon method, 'cause Spike's never laid a fang on me," Dawn snapped. She sat down again, hard and abruptly. She felt woozy, almost as badly as she'd felt up on the tower... The others were arguing, and Buffy, beside her, was beginning to fret and keen in distress. They shouldn't have brought her back. Tara was right. Buffy was all wrong and Spike was dying and Dawn felt like breaking down and bawling, but that would take too much energy. Her palm was aching like crazy and she'd gotten blood all over the shoulder of Spike's T-shirt. That was OK, it was black, it wouldn't stain... was that why so many vampires had a thing for black clothing? She'd have to ask Spike when he woke up... if he... God but her hand hurt. The knife had gotten dull towards the end, silver was a sucky metal for holding an edge. Not like... not like...

"The knife!"

"What knife?" Willow seized on her words with the alacrity of desperation. "The one we used in the ritual?"

"No," Dawn said. "Doc's knife." Why didn't they get it? Was she going to have to explain everything? "On the tower," she said, putting each word into place with laborious patience. "He stabbed Spike. And then he cut me. With the same knife. With Spike's blood on it."

She hoped, as she passed out, that the adults could figure out the rest of it on their own for once.

"Look, this is getting ridiculous." Hank Summers was scrunched in between Giles and Tara in the back seat. His reflection in the rear view mirror was strained, and his voice had the sound of someone pushing the limits of his ability to cope. "If you people are sure this is the factory they were talking about, we should tell the police."

"I assure you, Mr. Summers, there’s no need for that at this stage," Giles said. "The last thing Dawn needs is the trauma of dealing with the Sunnydale police force."

Xander snorted softly. "Speaking as someone whose family has been dealing with Sunnydale’s finest for a good twenty years, I second that."

There was a rumble, and the earth shook as Xander took the corner onto the weed-grown warehouse drive a little faster than he should have. The car jounced as the wheels scraped the curb. Xander forced himself to slow down. It wouldn't help matters if he ran off the road and punctured a tire on the jagged scrap in the factory yard. "Should've known they'd come back here," he muttered. "It's like a salmon swimming upstream to spawn."

He was still pissed off with nowhere to go. Despite his conviction that the whole thing was the vampire's fault, he had to admit that Hank Summers’ description of the 'attack' on him sounded a lot more like Spike going off half-cocked and dragging Dawn and Willow along for the ride than like deliberate villainy. I guess we didn't skip the insane-plan stage after all. And maybe, just maybe, it wasn't only Spike going off half-cocked. Anya had a point: Willow was powerful enough these days that it was hard to imagine anyone forcing her to do anything she didn't want to do.

It was impossible for him to get as mad at Willow as he wanted to be mad at someone.

"I hope you know what you're doing," Mr. Summers muttered. "That Spike guy needs professional help. You do realize he's convinced Dawn that he's Dracula or something?"

"Oh, no, Dawn knows he's not Dracula," Anya assured him.

Hank did not seem appeased. "I'm sure she realizes it’s a con deep down. She’s a smart girl. She's just getting a hell of a kick out of pretending he is, and your friend Willow seems to be buying it too. He's taking it awfully damned seriously himself. That was real blood he was drinking the other day--I know, I bought the stuff for Dawn when I thought it was for her biology class. He's not stable. He could lose it any minute and--"

Giles interrupted him. "Yes, well, the real blood would follow from his being a real vampire. Under most circumstances I prefer to keep our association with the supernatural clandestine, but frankly, Mr. Summers, we haven't the time to pander to your craving for normalcy. Spike is a vampire, Willow is a witch, Buffy was the Slayer. Do please attempt to deal with it, or have the grace to shut up while the rest of us do."

And the Watcher gets testy, Xander thought. Hank Summers looked cowed for a moment.

"I just want my daughter back safely," Hank said after a moment.

"As do we all," Giles said, more kindly. "I don't think you need to worry about Spike hurting Dawn," he added. "Though that may be all one doesn't have to worry about in connection with Spike. He truly is fond of her."

The Corvair’s headlights revealed the DeSoto parked up ahead as they approached the warehouse, and Xander pulled in beside the larger car. Another tremor shook the ground as everyone began piling out, and off in the distance something crashed to the ground. Giles put a restraining hand on Hank Summers' shoulder before he could follow them. "It's best you remain here. There are other parties who intend to use this place for their own purposes later today, and they may show up to prepare at any moment. Keep watch." There was no expectation in his tone that he'd be disobeyed. "If you see anyone else coming, let us know immediately. If one of us doesn't return within half an hour, leave and call the police." He handed Hank a cross. "If a stranger does approach, for God's sake don't hesitate to use this, no matter how silly you think it makes you look. Give him your keys, Xander."

Xander did so, somewhat reluctantly, and Hank took them and the cross (despite Giles' advice, Xander noticed that he tucked it down on the seat beside him) and got in behind the wheel. They left him peering out uneasily into the darkness of the fields while the rest of them headed for the warehouse. Faint light was visible through the windows, and a little reconnaissance quickly disclosed the route that the three renegades had taken to get inside. The four of them peered in through the missing panes of glass, but there was too much clutter of old machinery and tables between them and the center of the warehouse to see anything except the glow of the candles and occasional flares of red or white light. Tara shivered.

"It feels bad," she whispered. "Really bad. Something twisted. Something stuck..."

"We'd better unstick it, then," Xander said. He shrugged out of his flannel overshirt, wrapped it around one hand, and bashed the last scraps of glass out of the window frame. He flung a leg over the windowsill. "Let's go."

A huge flashing vortex thingy pulsed overhead in the center of the warehouse. Xander had expected that--there was always a huge flashing vortex thingy; as far as he could tell it was some sort of requirement down at Wizards, Witches, Conjurers and Diviners Local 106. An eldritch figure limned in green flame stood in the middle of a sinister-looking array of magical paraphernalia. It spun to face them as they burst into the center of the warehouse, lightning clutched threateningly in one upraised hand.

"Willow!" Giles shouted.

"Giles!" the eldritch figure yipped back, and all of a sudden it was Willow, and the smoking braziers were Mr. Rosenberg’s back yard hibachis, and everything was suddenly a lot less impressive-looking than it had been a moment ago. Far from appearing a confident practitioner of the dark arts, Willow looked about three steps further down the road to Panicsville than Hank Summers had been. Dawn was kneeling in the in the middle of the floor beside Spike, who was vamped out and having some kind of fit. Buffy crouched on the other side of the vampire--

For a moment Xander’s brain froze up, taking the rest of his body with it. Buffy?

BUFFY!

NAKED Buffy! Look somewhere else!

Giles, focused on Willow and the details of the spell, hadn’t noticed Buffy’s deshabille yet. Maybe he hadn’t dared allow himself to notice Buffy, not really. Tara spared Buffy a glance, but she had other fish to fry. They plunged into a heated argument with Willow almost immediately. Xander didn’t hear a word of it. Buffy. Real live Buffy. Death did not become her; Xander realized with an unhappy pang that she looked exactly as soul-weary and exhausted as she had that night last spring, her eyes shadowed and her face too thin. What the hell had they done to get her back like this?

It would have been a lot easier to bust in and shower righteous wrath on the perps if Willow hadn’t been doing the quivery lower lip thing, or if Spike had been, well, conscious. Shaking himself back to life, Xander unwrapped his shirt from his hand, snapped it a couple of times to make sure there were no shards of glass on it, and held it out in Buffy's general direction while trying to keep his eyes averted. His eyes didn’t want to cooperate. "Buffy, you wanna, um, put this on?" I can't believe I'm saying that.

Buffy cocked her head and frowned at him. Her expression reminded him of the look that a smart dog got when it knew you were asking it to do something and it couldn’t figure out what. She reached out and touched the shirt tentatively, then drew her hand back. This is bad. This is oh, so bad. He tried to keep his voice calm and gentle. "Buffy...can you talk? Can you understand what I'm saying if you can't talk?"

Buffy’s mouth worked for a moment and she looked up at him with big uncomprehending eyes. Frustration grew in her gaze.

Anya took the shirt and studied Buffy critically. "Here, Buffy. Please put on this shirt. It's extremely unflattering, but that's a good thing right now." She took one of Buffy’s hands and tried to guide it into a shirtsleeve. There were scuffling noises. "Xander, help me."

"I don't think that's a good idea, Ahn." I can't believe I just said that, either.

It took a lot of coaxing and pleading, but Anya finally got Buffy into the shirt, by which time Dawn had stood up to join the shouting match. Buffy kept looking at them and making little worried whimpery noises. "It's OK, Buff," Xander said, patting her shoulder awkwardly. "It's OK." It wasn't anything of the sort. Was this really Buffy at all, and not some weird clone or changeling or zombie? "We’re going to get you home and..." And what? And home? What home? Hank Summers’ apartment? No effing way. Giles’ place, maybe; it was the most familiar.

Possibly-Buffy, swimming in the oversized shirt, looked down at herself and examined the tips of her fingers coming out the sleeves curiously. She tugged on Xander’s hand sharply and pointed at Spike. "What, you want us to move him? I dunno if that’s a good idea, Buff..."

Buffy’s eyes flashed, and for a moment she was completely herself again, radiating determination. She looked as if she were about to get more insistent, but at that moment Dawn, who'd stood up for the shouting match, collapsed. Buffy’s eyes went wider and confusion flooded back in. She gave a little cry of alarm. The shouting match abruptly ceased.

"Get her off the floor," Giles said.

Two down, one to go, Xander thought sourly as he took Dawn’s ankles and Giles lifted her shoulders. The two of them picked her up off the concrete and carried her over to one of the tables. Buffy came after them, dragging the blanket. She held it out mutely, and after a moment Giles took it from her and tucked it around Dawn's shoulders. He could scarcely bring himself to look at her, and Xander had a feeling that it had little to do with Buffy’s state of undress. Seeing Buffy like this was killing him.

"She needs orange juice," Willow gasped. "Or a cookie or something, that’s what they give you when you donate blood, low blood sugar, I don’t think we brought any orange juice--I have a Kit Kat bar--oh, everything’s gone wrong!" She dropped to her knees beside Tara, her eyes pleading.

Tara met her gaze sternly. No problem with righteous wrath for her, apparently, but she seemed to come to a decision to stick to the business at hand, for her voice, when she spoke, was neutral and unaccusing. "So the spell was supposed to amplify the connection between Dawn's blood and Buffy's, but it picked up on this other connection between Spike and Dawn, too."

Willow nodded. "Right. The blood thing was supposed to be a closed Dawn-Buffy feedback loop." She turned one of the printout pages over, pulled a pencil stub out of her pocket and began sketching a diagram.

Dawn = Buffy

She frowned at it thoughtfully. "With Spike in the mix, it's not closed. He's kind of a... leak, or a short-circuit, bleeding energy out of the spell." She added a few more lines and held out the new version for everyone’s inspection.

Dawn = Buffy

\

Spike

Tara nodded. "So the spell can't resolve. We have to get him out of the loop."

Xander folded his arms and looked over at Spike. The vampire’s eyes were open now, just a slit, and there was something weird about them--after a moment Xander realized that they were flickering blue. He’d seen Spike’s eyes go yellow and demony plenty of times when he was in human shape, but this was the first time he could remember seeing the opposite happen. "Could we just move him out of range?"

"I don't think it matters how close he is," Willow replied, nibbling on her pencil. "Taking him farther away may just speed things up. I tried a dismissal spell, but that made the pull worse." She glared at her notes. "Rats, rats, rats! Everything I can think of for getting him out of the loop ends up with a good chance of him getting dusty."

Xander mulled that over. No more insults, no more mooching, no more arguments, no more narrow escapes from situations arising from Spike’s smart mouth writing checks his chipped ass couldn’t cash... no more weekend pool games, no more scouring auto yards for parts for that damned DeSoto, no more ally in the eternal war against a full slate of chick flicks on video nights... no, wait, half the time Spike went for the gooey romantic stuff. Traitor.

No more Spike. Xander started to say "So what?" but somehow the words wouldn’t come out.

It didn't look like Tara was happy with that possibility either, but she was being Responsibility Girl. "Even so... we can't just leave it here. It could be very dangerous. If it comes to a choice between Spike and leaving it--"

"We act the same way we’d act if it was any of the rest of us," Xander said. In the face of their stunned expressions, "What? He’s only half as annoying as Angel was."

Willow’s mouth firmed. "We'll close it somehow. Resolve face. The thing is--oh!" Her eyes lit up.

"Oh?"

Tara sounded uneasy, but Willow, caught up in her new idea, didn't notice. "Oh! We're going at it backwards!" She gave a little bounce. "Look, the spell needs a nice neat closed loop, right, so what we should be doing is giving it one! We don't try to pull Spike out, we tuck him back in!" She retrieved her diagram and elaborated further.

Dawn = Buffy

\\ //

Spike

Tara frowned. "But--oh, no, Willow! No! You're not going to l-let him bite her!"

Xander looked equally alarmed. "I’m with Tara on this one, Will. The last time Buffy let a vampire bite her out of the goodness of her heart she ended up in the emergency room. The more Spike makes with the fangs the less I feel like saving his bleached hide."

Willow rolled her eyes. "What is this thing everyone has with the biting?" She waved a hand at the near-comatose vampire. "Does Spike look even slightly bite-capable at the moment? There is no biting! All we have to do is get a drop or two of her blood and mix it with his. It doesn't have to be a big sucking thing." She glanced apprehensively over at the table where Dawn was lying. Buffy was pacing between Spike and her sister with occasional wary detours to examine her surroundings. Giles and Anya hovered to each side of her, trying without much success to convince her to calm down. "In fact, it’s better to do it with the knife, it’ll give it another correspondence with the way Dawn and Spike are connected. The problem is explaining it to Buffy." She got up and grabbed the silver knife. "We have to move fast."

Xander followed Willow over to the table where Buffy was peering anxiously at Dawn’s pale face. "Buffy," Willow said softly, "I think I know how to help Spike. We need to mix a little of your blood with his. I’d need to prick your finger a little. It’ll hurt, but only for a minute. Do you understand?"

Buffy’s ears pricked up at ‘help Spike’ and she seemed to be listening very closely, but it was impossible to tell how much she understood. Willow mimed pricking her own finger with the knife, then pointed at Buffy. "Help Spike," she repeated.

Buffy’s brows knit and she looked from Willow’s hand to her own, then, carefully, brought the point of the knife over to her own hand. "H-help?" she said.

"Buff! You can talk!" Xander whooped.

"Yes!" Willow grinned with delight. "Come over here with me, Buffy, and we can help Spike. Tara?"

Tara sighed and nodded. Willow led Buffy over to the middle of the circle and crouched down beside Spike. Very carefully wiping the silver-bladed knife off on the hem of her pullover first, Willow said, "Spike, I don’t know if you can hear me, but I’m going to have to cut you a little. The blade’s gotten too dull to slice with so I’m going to stab you really quick. Here goes." She rolled up the sleeve of his t-shirt and with one quick motion drove the point of the knife into the pale flesh of his arm. Spike gasped but otherwise gave no sign of feeling it. A little dark blood smeared the blade when Willow removed it, but the cut didn’t bleed to speak of. "Rats," Willow muttered. "He’s too tense and his blood doesn’t really flow anyway... hand me that bowl. No, the clean one."

Xander passed her the bowl and Willow pressed the rim to the vampire’s arm just below the cut. "Squeeze his arm, hard."

"I want you to know this is way above and beyond the call of duty," Xander grumbled, grabbing the vampire’s upper arm in both hands and following Willow’s directions. They managed to wring a trickle of blood and a pained snarl out of Spike before Willow nodded.

"That’s enough. Buffy... will you give me your hand?"

"It’ll... help?" Buffy sounded dubious.

"That’s a sentence! You did a sentence, Buffy! Yes, it’ll help. Hold still and--"

Buffy snatched the knife out of Willow’s hand. "No."

"Buffy--"

"Me," Buffy said very firmly. She held up her hand, hesitated for a second, and then drove the point of the knife into the ball of her left thumb. Blood welled up. She held out her hand over the bowl, wincing, and Willow pressed several drops into the bowl.

Willow looked at Tara. "What do you think?"

Tara shrugged. "Anything we do now is improvising."

Willow sighed and nodded. She stirred the teaspoonful of blood in the bottom of the bowl with the knife and chanted, "A is equal to B. B is equal to C. Therefore A is equal to C. Thus be the circle completed."

"Well, that’s quick and dirty," Xander said.

"We can’t wait on lengthy and clean," Willow replied. "OK, let’s close that sucker down!" She held out her hand and Tara took it. Both of them looked up at the vortex with matched expressions of determination. "The scale is balanced!" Willow held up the censer. "The flame is quenched!" Tara whispered a word and the piles of glowing charcoal in the hibachis went black and the candles went out, plunging the ritual space into darkness. Only the vortex was visible, spinning overhead. As they spoke, its revolutions began to speed up perceptibly. Willow continued, "The earth is still, the stream returns to the ocean. Let it be finished. What we say three times be so: Porta claudatur! Porta claudatur! Porta claudatur!"

The vortex was a shimmer of motion now, whirling too fast to distinguish details. Its lurid glow painted every surface in the whole warehouse in crimson and silver, and the warehouse vibrated in sympathy with its pulse. It showed no signs of disappearing, and Tara’s eyes began to betray real fear for the first time. "We didn’t get it right!" she cried.

Willow’s face was twisted with insane determination, and her eyes had gone black. "Yes... we... DID! PORTA CLAUDATUR!"

The crackling whine of magical energies strengthened, deepened, acquired undertones and overtones, a neverending chord struck on a madman’s organ. All the light in the warehouse enveloped her for an instant, and she cried out, her voice lost in the roar of magic. The vortex revolved in upon itself, tighter, tighter, pulling back all the light it had scattered, and as the insane music reached its crescendo, spun itself into nothingness and disappeared.

Everything stopped. Light, sound, sensation--all fled, leaving numb darkness in their place. Slowly the world began to reassert itself. Xander realized he’d fallen to his hands and knees at some point. Someone--Giles--turned on a flashlight. "Is everyone all right?"

"Willow!" Tara croaked. Anya came over with another flashlight. Willow was sprawled on the floor, a puppet whose strings had been cut. Her breathing was shallow and both eyes looked as if someone had punched her; the bruises were already starting to darken and swell. Tara took her lover’s head in her lap and cradled it there, choking back sobs.

"Will?" Xander crawled over and looked down at his oldest friend’s pale face. "Oh, Will... damn you, Will..."

"Second that," said a hoarse voice to the side. Spike was sitting up, looking like five miles of bad road. "I didn’t want... bugger." He looked over at the table where Dawn was beginning to stir, and caught sight of Buffy. Half a dozen emotions chased across his face as his human features reasserted themselves. He got to his feet and walked over to the table as if she were the only object in the universe, but stopped short a few paces away, trembling slightly. "Hullo, love."

Buffy looked up at him gravely and took a step towards him. She raised her hand and traced the contours of his face gently, as she’d done with the others earlier, and smiled. "Spike," she said, very carefully. "Thank you. For Dawn." She patted his cheek and turned back to her sister.

Spike looked as if he was about to collapse, or burst into tears, or both, but he was grinning like a maniac again. "Any time, love," he whispered. He swiped at his eyes, turned round and glared at Giles and Xander. "Right, what’re we standing about for? Let’s get Dawn and Will out of here. Sunrise’s coming."

A strange blatting noise from outside interrupted him, and for a moment all of them stared at one another in confusion before they realized that it was the horn of Xander’s car. They’d all forgotten about Hank. The vampire cocked his head to one side, listening. "Bloody hell. Someone’s coming."

Xander exchanged a look with Giles and groaned. "Vespasian."

"Damn," Giles said under his breath. "We need to get everyone out of sight, now. A fight at this point would be a disaster."

Spike jerked his chin in the direction of the back of the warehouse. "Stairs up to the catwalk are that way. Or there's Dru's and my old digs downstairs. It's a bit easier to get down there carrying dead weight, and it's got a connection to the sewers--"

"Uh, the connection to the sewers is currently a little more direct than I think we want," Xander said. "That staircase is less a staircase and more what we in the construction biz like to call a 'twisted pile of wreckage.' It collapsed when Cordy and Oz came to rescue me and Willow from your last fiendishly clever plan a few years back."

Spike sucked in his cheeks. "I can't leave you anywhere without you making a mess, can I?"

Xander gave him a look. "I meant to tell you -- you, writhing in pain on the floor back there? It's a good look for you."

Buffy smacked both of them on the backs of their heads, hard, and pointed upwards. Xander winced and rubbed his skull. "OK. Up it is."

Continue to Part 9

Back to Authors A-F

Back to Fan Fiction