SEVENTEEN


Dawn talked it out with everybody on the walk home, stopping--an unremarkable close huddle of teenaged girls--whenever a point came up that required intense discussion. For most of them, the idea of blood magic started at icky and then sloped downhill to gross. For many, it was outright scary. And some refused to have anything to do with it at all on various grounds–mainly that they’d been brought up good (fill in religion of choice). With blood magic you were into human sacrifice territory.

Those with overwhelming reservations were immediately excused without prejudice and sent directly home, do not pass GO, do not collect $200, under a solemn pledge of secrecy.

And the final condition nearly lost them Rona, in tears at confessing, apparently for the first time, that she’d been molested by an uncle at nine. To be benign, blood magic required purity, quite narrowly defined, in those who called on it. Without that restriction, a different magic could result that Dawn couldn’t hope to direct, much less control. She’d be Mickey Mouse contending with forces a lot wilder and more destructive than brooms and water. Assuming, of course, her total inexperience could rouse anything at all….

Everybody hugged Rona and they all sat together for a long time at a bus stop. “It’s not your fault,” Dawn said again, patting Rona’s hand. “It’s nothing bad about you, and nothing bad you did. You should talk to…somebody about it.” Dawn’s mind boggled at the thought of either Buffy, Willow, or Anya giving anything like good advice on such a subject. “We’ll think of something. But blood magic, that’s ancient and not very…well, bendy. I don’t dare take any chances.”

“It’s like unicorns,” Rona snuffled. “I understand. Unicorns don’t make exceptions, and you can’t explain to them that you didn’t like it and will probably never do it again.”

Dawn passed her another wad of tissues. “I know: you can hold the dish. Is that OK, Rona?”

Then everybody cried some more, and Rona accepted the compromise, except that she was afraid she might faint.

“You won’t faint,” said Amanda firmly. “I’ll kick you first and make frog faces.”

There were four of them left: Dawn, Amanda, Suzanne, and Rona.

Nobody questioned that there’d been no mention of Willow’s involvement. It was tacitly understood that the combination of Willow and any kind of heavy-duty magic tended to produce scary phantom monster faces, loud noises, backblasts of rejected power, and generally unsatisfactory results.

As they walked on, Suzanne wondered aloud if a Slayer-in-Training could get suspended. Rona pointed out that since there was no more Watchers’ Council, who would do the suspending? And even if she did get suspended, as a non-Potential, her chance of survival would just have gone up about 2,000%

“There’s that,” Suzanne conceded, kicking a pebble.

Dawn had contrived about ten plans, each with variations to accommodate all possible contingencies, to insure Buffy’s absence from the house. Then Amanda remarked casually that it was lucky the faculty in-service was tonight, attendance required of all staff with student contact, and Dawn presented a bland face and agreed that it certainly was lucky. Amanda’s remark was even luckier since Dawn had forgotten all about it. She only hoped Buffy hadn’t.

Well, if she had, Dawn would remind her.

Somehow with Bringers, and the First Evil, and Spike, zombies and phantoms in the girls’ first floor restroom, the Seal of Danthalzar resting on the Hellmouth, the looming threat of apocalyptic annihilation, and miserably flunking the cheerleader tryouts, Dawn hadn’t been able to work up much interest in school activities.

Mondays were Xander’s day to arrange supper. He’d brought a grill, charcoal, hotdogs, and buns; Anya contributed a tub of deli potato salad she might even have stirred. Dawn didn’t see why they didn’t reschedule the wedding: despite sniping at each other all the time, they seemed to be having sex just about as often as before, and theirs was clearly a union made in take-out heaven. And that reflection--whiny, misanthropic, and teenaged--suddenly made Dawn realize she was off: she was losing or maybe had lost her connection with her Keyness that she’d had all day, that had made everything clear and cool and deliberate.

Omigod.She’d assumed it would be forever, always like this. Then again, she’d assumed her crush on R.J. Brooks would be forever, too, and it hadn’t lasted a week. Or what if it hadn’t been her Keyness at all: what if she really had been bluffing Anya? What if it was just a glitch, a transitory artifact of being so totally upset about Spike?

Omigod. She had to get the others right now, or she’d never do it! It would never work!

Just about everybody was out in the yard, watching Xander perform the delicate art of hot-dog chefery in his Kiss The Cook Or Suffer The Consequences apron. Bouncing on her toes, Dawn spun until she’d located Buffy (talking to Kennedy, who was seated in one of the folding lawn chairs with an ice pack on her shoulder, and Dawn was never gonna talk to Kennedy again if she lived to be three-thousand-million), then located Amanda and gave her the high sign. Repeatedly. Until Amanda wandered over, trying to balance a collapsing paper plate of baked beans (and Anya was totally responsible for making Dawn’s life unbearable tonight, 8 people in a room and baked beans! It was Anya’s revenge, that’s what it was!) to find out what Dawn was waving about. Dawn explained it wasn’t mere waving but The High Sign and Amanda chewed and swallowed, then remarked mildly, “So that’s what it looks like. I always wondered.”

“Get everybody now!”

“Everybody?!”

“No, no, not that everybody--our everybody! What we talked about on the way home. That. We gotta do it now, or it will be too late!”

Amanda swallowed hard. “I just ate. I don’t think it was a good idea to eat. Maybe I should throw up first and get it over with.” She did look faintly green. “I thought we were doing it later, and there’d be time to eat. Rona just started on some watermelon. I better tell her.”

“Just bring her! I’ll get Suzanne.”

“Yeah,” agreed Amanda vaguely. She wandered off leaving a trail of fallen baked beans in her wake as they slid off the collapsing plate.

Focus! Dawn commanded herself, hopping. Focus!

It wasn’t helping.

The four of them gathered in the kitchen. Dawn detailed Rona to collect the big oval roasting pan under the sink, a roll of paper towels, a bowl of ice cubes and something, a bucket, in case Amanda barfed. With Suzanne standing watch in the hall, Dawn raced up to the bathroom to secure the most important implement: a pack of straight-edged razor blades from the cabinet over the sink.

She would have bought fresh, but her lunch money would only cover the ugly knife and the dowels, of which a large number were now left over. Well, that was OK because spare stakes never went to waste in this house. But Dawn had the idea that fresh blades would have been more hygienic somehow.

They would probably all come down with lockjaw and nobody would ever speak to her again.

Oh, what’s the matter with me? Dawn’s mind wailed as she skittered back downstairs, everybody took a stealthy look around and then made a wild break for the basement, only momentarily delayed by the bolts.

The bare-bulb sight of Spike all laid out, immediately suggesting funeral and not hospital, just as Dawn had left him, did a lot to quiet everybody down, Dawn included.

Turning by the cot, Amanda asked shyly over her shoulder, “Can I touch him?”

Dawn felt a sharp little pang of what was probably jealousy. Which was just dumb. “Sure, as long as you don’t get, you know, personal. That wouldn’t be respectful.” Dawn was unloading pans, paper towels, next to where Rona had set down the huge shallow turkey pan on top of the washer. “It’s not as if he’s dead or anything. Just…gone.”

“Sure looks dead to me,” Suzanne commented, all very cool, descending the stairs after shutting the door and bolting it.

“Well, he isn’t,” Dawn said shortly.

“He’s cold,” Amanda reported. She sounded uneasy.

Dawn checked, and Amanda wasn’t touching anything too personal. Just his shoulder. “He is not cold. He’s room temperature. Just like always. Just like all vamps. Didn’t you ever notice?”

“Guess I was too busy. Look, Dawn, if you’re planning some kind of cockamamie resurrection, you’re gonna have to count me out. Because that’s too heavy duty for me. I--”

With everything laid out, Dawn swung around, hands on hips. “Don’t be dumb, Manda. I don’t begin to have the power or the spells--” Dawn stopped herself. She joined Amanda by the cot, Suzanne standing behind them, watching. Dawn reached out and very softly touched each of Spike’s shut eyes. She felt the calm coming back. She was starting, quietly, to cry. “All I have is me. And what I am. Whatever that is. And I hope, with you helping, that will be enough.”

Rona had collected a candle and was now lighting it. Taking the cue, Sue went back up the stairs far enough to reach the light switch.

That was a good thing, Dawn thought. Better, quieter light, not making a noise about itself. One little wavering, strengthening point, and all around it, the dark. Without anything said, they all gravitated toward the small flame. Dawn rolled and pushed up the right sleeve of her tee until it was bunched near her shoulder. She’d go first: it was only fair. She knew how it was done, had done it before, truly wasn’t afraid at all.

Rona had pushed one of the blades out of the case and was offering it diffidently, like Dawn didn’t really have to take it, nobody was making her.

Dawn said, “Thanks, Rona,” because Rona really was doing fine and it seemed right to say so. They were all doing fine. “Rona, maybe it’s a good time for the paper towels. All of them. Around his hands.

“OK,” Rona whispered. She picked up the roll and went back to the cot.

Dawn said to Amanda and Sue, “If you want, hold an ice cube here.” She touched the gauze on her own arm, then picked at an end of tape. “It doesn’t hurt much anyway. But after the ice, you hardly feel it.”

Amanda reached for an ice cube from the bowl. Sue didn’t, just stared big-eyed at the dark, slightly ragged line the pen knife had left in the thick part of Dawn’s forearm.

Dawn carefully picked up the razor blade again and felt to find the right angle, the best way to hold it against her skin. Shallow cuts, she thought. Shallow cuts.

She positioned her arm over the big turkey pan and shut her eyes. Not because she was scared, for she truly wasn’t; but because it strengthened the calm. She thought, I’m not off. I’m on.

If there was a ritual you were supposed to do, she had no idea what it was. But this was old, old magic--from before rituals and maybe before words at all. Any words would just be for her, for them: to help focus, help make the gift worthy.

With the part of her mind not intent on the cutting, Dawn murmured, “The blood is the life. And blood is always holy because life is holy. And the blood of Warriors of the People is the holiest of all because it’s always given away. Our Spike, he’s also a Warrior of the People--not as we are, but in his own way. Equal and opposite, the light and dark that make a whole. I do this for his healing. I ask nothing for myself, nothing except that he be healed. I hope this gift is found worthy, and blessed by the oldest spirits to its purpose. I am your child and so is he. The oldest blood of all. Life for life, healing for healing. This is to make him be OK and come back to us. Healed. Please.”

“That is so gross,” Sue whispered, watching fascinated as the blood from Dawn’s arm dripped into the pan.

“Do we have to do this by turns?” Amanda asked, face averted: <I>not</I> looking as hard as Sue was looking. “Because I’m not-- I want to get it over with, OK?”

“Do you want me to do you?” Dawn asked kindly. “I can, if you want.”

As answer, Amanda blindly stuck her arm out. Up near the elbow, the skin was shiny with wet where the ice cube had been.

Dawn held Amanda’s wrist with one hand and found the right position and angle for the blade with the other. Blood from her own cuts was still falling into the pan. As she began, she directed, “Amanda, say why you’re doing this.”

Staring hard at the ceiling, away from what Dawn was doing, Amanda whispered in a choked, shaky voice, “I want to be brave. I want to know what to do. I want to do what’s right even when I’m scared. Spike has started to teach me how to do that. I believe he knows how to do that. I want him better. Healed. So he can teach me how not to be afraid of death. Or afraid of life. Because he knows them both. Please let this be the right thing I’m doing.”

The last phrase was rushed and barely audible. Amanda was clenched up so tight her arm was shaking. Dawn gave Amanda’s arm back to her and showed her how to hold it, so nothing would be wasted.

Suzanne had pushed out a razor blade for herself. Frowning with concentration, she said, “This is for Spike. To heal him.” She cut the first line. She reported, “Doesn’t hurt much. Looks worse than it is.” She cut a second line and moved her arm so the pan would catch all of it.

When Suzanne had cut six straight, unhesitating parallel lines and the razor blade neared her wrist, Dawn said quietly, “That’s enough, Sue.”

“Are you sure? Because I can do more, I don’t mind.”

“It’s enough. It doesn’t make it stronger if you hurt yourself.”

“Oh,” said Sue, as though that was a foreign and surprising idea.

Amanda jerked away, thudded onto her knees by the bucket, and began vomiting. Rona came to help her, pushing Amanda’s hair back, helping steady her.

The drops from Dawn’s cuts had begun to slow. This might be the best of all, Dawn thought: blood with her own healing already in it.

She tried not to let the sound or smell of Amanda’s vomiting affect her, but that was getting harder. Her mouth tasted coppery and sour, and her stomach was knotting up in sympathy.

She told Sue, “Hold it as long as you can,” then took the roll of gauze and flipped a couple of quick loops around her arm--just enough to minimize the mess--and snipped the end to free the roll. Kneeling next to Amanda, who was sitting crooked, sweating and looking thoroughly wretched, Dawn began a light non-constricting bandage on her forearm, smoothing each spiral layer.

“Is it done?” Amanda gasped. “Do I have to do any more?”

“It’s fine,” Dawn said, winding gauze. Either it was enough, or more would be no better. This wasn’t, after all, either a medical or a scientific procedure. It wasn’t the quantity but the intention in the blood that mattered from a magical perspective. If Dawn had truly known what she was doing, a single drop might have been enough.

Passing Amanda a piece of ice to suck on, Dawn looked around asking, “Sue, are you done?”

“I dunno--am I?”

“Rona, take the pan and pour it over his hands. Sue, come and I’ll get you bandaged. Leave it overnight, then take it off and wash with cool water and soap. Don’t disturb the scabs any more than you can help.”

Dawn cut the gauze, divided the end, and was trying to remember whether a square knot started with left-over-right or right-over-left, when Rona gasped, “Manda, do your frog faces. Or kick me, either--”

Dawn jumped and tried to grab as Rona keeled over in a dead faint. Between Rona falling, Dawn grabbing, and Suzanne bumping both of them forward, the pan upended. Its remaining contents, and the three of them, all landed on Spike, and the cot collapsed.

For a second, it felt like weird, horrible wrestling. Then Dawn was pitched away, sprawling, with Rona mostly on top of her.

”WHAT THE BLEEDING HELL!”

Spike: shouting.

Dawn rolled over and peeked. Hair to hips, he was covered in blood, trying to find his balance in the wreckage of the cot, caught crookedly by the manacles and chains.

“You incredibly stupid bints, what’ve you been doing? What are you doin’ down here to begin with? What--”

Running out of breath to shout with, he staggered against the wall and drew air in hard, head thrown back, braced like somebody before a firing squad as the first bullets hit.

“What you done to me, an’ what’s wrong with my damn hands, can’t--”

Stirring, Rona managed to poke Dawn in the eye. Dawn scrambled away, slapping her poked eye, still trying to see despite her other eye watering and stinging in sympathy.

Still muttering furiously, Spike was shaking off, pulling off, the blood-sodden paper towels and then, awkwardly, the layers of gauze underneath. Working at the fabric with his fingers. Bending wrist and hand, trying to find a knot or an end. With the fingers of his other hand.

Oblivious of the grace that had been granted them all.

Dawn collapsed on the concrete, sobbing in relief.

“Bit? Bit, what’s the matter? An’ what’ve you lot been about, down here? Bit? Dawn?”

What she wanted to do was fling herself across the room and hang on. What she did was help muzzy Rona sit up. Sue, her whole front covered in blood, total Carrie, pulled herself to kneeling, facing him.

“Spike,” Sue announced, matted head proudly high, “we did ‘em for you: Bob and Maria. All of us.”

Spike’s face went blank. Staring at Sue. Glancing to Dawn for correction or denial. Then back to Sue again.

Then he shut his eyes and just stood there. Breathing. After a moment he said, “You lot get out before I forget myself. See to yourselves, so you don’t smell like holiday dinner on a platter. Go on now.” His head bent and he put his one freed hand over his face.

Amanda and Sue started helping wavering Rona up the stairs. Following, Dawn was three steps up when she heard Spike call her and turned.

“Bit. Fetch me the key to the cuffs. On a nail by the washer.”

When she’d found the key and brought it, he reflected, “Terrible mess. You’ll have to do ‘em for me. Hands are sore…. Did I get ‘em into the sun?” Puzzled, he looked up heavy browed, golden-eyed and fanged and, she was certain, completely unaware of having slid into game face.

Reflexive, probably, with so much blood: the smell and touch and taste of it.

She moved aside the trailing, sopping gauze to find the manacle’s lock. “They got hurt,” she responded equivocally. “They’ll be better soon, I think. We’ll get it all sorted out.” She unlocked the first manacle, slid it off, and reached across for the other.

“And that was so? About the fledges?”

Dawn just nodded.

“How dare you! They were mine!”

“You have no manners,” Dawn told him, unlocking the second manacle. “What you’re supposed to say is ‘Thank you.’”

Then his arms closed around her and he laid his vampire face against her hair. “’M all turned around. Pay me no mind, love. They’re truly gone?”

“Certain sure.”

“Then it must be so,” he said wonderingly.

And Dawn thought they could be both covered in blood and chocolate sauce and him half starved and it still would never for an instant occur to him to regard her as dinner.

They’d become something different from what they’d been.



Being, after his fashion, a gentleman, Spike gave her one of his clean T-shirts and first crack at the laundry tub, so she could at least get upstairs without looking like a walking murder, since Rona, Sue, and Amanda would have the shower upstairs tied up for some time. Dawn was bemused but unsurprised to find, under the gauze on her arm, only a series of pale diagonal lines. The connection was the healing and it healed in both directions. She guessed it made a skewed sort of sense.

All of it very much like life: confused, messy, accidental, well-intentioned, embarrassing, and ultimately successful.

Clutching a towel from the dryer, Dawn got out of the way to give him his turn.

Head under the tap, he called, “We’re gonna have to talk about this, right?”

Dawn finished pulling on the T-shirt and bent to poke the towel back in the dryer. “If you want. Or not.”

He made a satisfied noise, as though talking about it wasn’t high on his list of favorite things either. He’d just been checking.

Holding her wadded, bloody top, Dawn looked dubiously at the washer, then dumped it in the trash basket. “Spike, I need you to cover for me.”

He glanced around a second. “About this?”

“No, something else. Sort of…‘out for a walk’ business.”

“Ahuh. Boyfriend, is it?”

“<I>No!</I> How could you think--”

He straightened, mostly clean now, toweling dry. Ivory pale across the room in the dim candlelight. “Well, ‘tisn’t as if it’s impossible, pet. It’s just I expect to have right of first approval, rip the heads off any I don’t consider suitable. Seen some major mayhem comin’ in that direction for some while now. So I figured I’d been put on notice.”

Dawn shrugged and flipped her hair. That was so not what she wanted to talk about! “Since I’ll probably be grounded for the next hundred years, there’s something I need to take care of first. There’s an in-service at school, so I may be back before Buffy gets home. In case I’m not, just tell her I went out, and I’m in my right mind and don’t need to be chased down, and I’ll be back in a little while, all right?”

“You gonna take a minder?”

“No.”

He thought about it a moment. “Then you’d best get on, hadn’t you.”

“Yeah. All right.”

Spike leveled a finger at her. “No, the proper answer is ‘Thanks.’”

“I don’t know how anybody puts up with you.” Dawn went to the stairs and started up.

Having the last word, his reply caught her near the top: “Too good-lookin’ and all-round charming to do otherwise, I expect.”

Dawn could think of nothing to top that and contented herself with thumping the door.



Marsh Street was off by the mall, and Dawn knew which bus route ran that way. In her Box of Hidden Things she scraped together enough change for the fare, thought about changing her spattered jeans without actually doing it, then dug her panda backpack from under the bed and stuffed a few things in it.

Forty-five minutes later, she stood on the sidewalk studying the two-story frame house at 1072 Marsh Avenue. A wood-burned sign hung from a porch railing read The McDonald Family. The porch light was on but all the windows were dark, although it had just turned 8. Unslinging her backpack from her shoulder, Dawn trudged up the walk onto the porch and pushed the bell.

No response. She pushed the bell again.

“What do you want? Oh. H’lo. Summers. I mean Dawn. Fifth period, right?” The boy was standing in the side yard, just at the edge of the porch, beyond the railing.

“Right,” said Dawn, swinging her backpack nervously. “You hadn’t been to class a couple weeks now, and my sister--the student advisor?--asked me to stop by, see how you were doing, maybe help you catch up. She said she’d called but hadn’t been able to catch anybody home during the day.”

“Yeah, well, they work. But it’s nice of you to come. It’s not like I’m sick or anything, though. It’s…my Dad, he’s relocating. So I’ll have to catch up when I start school there anyway.”

“That’s hard, moving. I remember when my Mom moved here, with me and my sister, it took--”

He was over the railing and his jaws were closing on her throat when the taser charge took him down, twitching.

Though he hadn’t remembered her much, she’d remembered him: Billy McDonald. Somewhere between a nerd and a jock, with a nice, goofy sense of humor. A little like a younger, less insecure Xander. Several girls in History liked him, but so far, he’d never asked any of them out.

Sliding the stake out of her backpack, Dawn said, “I’m sorry for you, Billy. Although you’re not Billy anymore. You remember being Billy, but it’s not the same. We might have been friends, and you might have lived nearly forever the way you are now. But sometimes things don’t happen the way you think. The man who made you what you are is sorry, and I’m sorry too.” As the fledgling vampire began to struggle, Dawn said, “Goodbye, not-Billy,” and staked him.

As the dust dispersed, Dawn took the magicked map out of her backpack and unfolded it. Only one red jewel remained.

She’d broken her word about taking weapons out of the house without permission. She was prepared to live with that and with the consequences, if any.

Some things were just too important.

There’d been two sisters, Dawn recalled: one younger, one older. Dawn had met the older one at cheerleading tryouts. And an intact family, with both mother and father.

She didn’t have to see into the dark house to know nobody alive was left inside.

Dusting Bob and Maria, that had been for Spike. But attending to Billy had been a private matter, just for herself. Because there were still distinctions to be made among monsters, and Dawn meant never to forget that.

On her way back to the bus stop, Dawn pitched the map into a trash can.