The Blood Is the Life
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 2: Cat’s Cradle


Dawn was seething.

If Spike had had a puppy, it would be messily dead and put somewhere he’d trip over it. His motorbike would have had its tires slashed and been pushed into the road where eighteen-wheelers would run over it all day. Except that he’d given it to Mike as leavegeld, which removed it from the category of possible targets of Dawnwrath.

She did not think about Mike. Or about what big upstanding six-year-old vamps liked to do instead of have hysterics when they were so freakin’ upset that they’d pitch pebbles at your window and then walk loopy circles by the hedge corner for an hour, out of hugging distance because, they finally admitted, they had to be near but not too near because of the game face thing and therefore the blood thing followed by the insanely melodramatic dusty death thing and goodbye, hello and never could find the right distance and kitty would not get home tonight, never no more. Dawn was sixteen and three-quarters years old and Romeo positively refused to say one word against that peroxided wanker Tybalt and she now knew what wanker meant and wished she didn’t. Uber-squicky. The prospect of dying a virgin at 205 had increasing appeal. Anybody who let themselves get attached to a vamp was obviously certifiable and she was furiousfuckingmad, that’s what, and she kept her mind focused strictly on that.

She’d have gone after his beloved decrepit DeSoto, but all she knew was that it was up on blocks someplace unspecified. But a rag stuffed into the gas filler pipe, or whatever the hell it was called, his (cleverly stolen) lighter lit and applied, and that DeSoto would be history. Engulfed as suddenly and thoroughly as a vamp shoved outdoors at noon. She imagined doing it, every detail. By third period, she’d broken two pencils, staking books.

Since two-thirds of the incompletely rebuilt Sunnydale High School now resided in a crater three stories deep and two blocks across, at least the visible detritus that hadn’t vanished into the dimensional chaos of the Hellmouth in its last moments, most classes had been relocated to a series of tractor-trailers and doublewides lined up like unappealing carnival concessions on the ballfield. The one for fourth period English had recently seen duty transporting oranges not quite fast enough. The residual stench was unimaginable. Dawn vomited her breakfast out the door, conveniently located near her chair+flip desktop. Before returning to her seat she gave the sun a viciously approving glance and took up her notes feeling marginally better.

She visualized savage and irrevocable hair cuttage, with a rinse of some liquid containing copper, maybe copper sulfate, that would turn it green for months. And itch. Perpetual rash. That was in Chemistry and Life Sciences, following a picked-at lunch.

Trekking from one trailer to another between classes, she imagined gouging out his eyes, suggested by halves of a hard-boiled egg being doused with ketchup by an older student using the top of a protruding wheel well as a lunchbox stand. But then she shut her eyes and wished that imagined torture away. Renounced it. She’d seen him like that too recently. His eyes had just finished regenerating and she’d noticed he held paperbacks farther away than he used to. Farsighted and too fucking vain ever to get measured for or wear glasses, Oh No, Mr. Bill, not our platinum vamp preening before a mirror in front of a reflection visible only in the expression of others’ eyes.

And under the phrase vampire protocol, that she’d written in homeroom, she wrote the word stunted, leaning against a trailer prop to get her red spiral notebook (one of Willow’s endless color-coded stash) out of her Holly Hobby vinyl bookbag. And in fifth period American History, she wrote the words Powers. Lady Gates.

The agenda list went faster after that. She doubted she’d heard, much less retained, a word said in any of her classes and hadn’t written down a single homework assignment, but she’d burned off the worst of her rage and could focus for several minutes at a time without feeling she was about to explode.

That was something she’d learned from him: it wasn’t wrong to imagine doing horrible, demented, vicious things. It was only horrible, vicious, and demented if you actually did them. That was what separated the monsters from the men.

Anger management a la Spike.

Numbering a new line, Dawn wrote the word love.

By the time the bus dropped her at the pharmacy corner and she started trudging the remaining blocks home to Revello, she had entered an icy, surreal calm. She found gratification in repeatedly stepping on sidewalk cracks, imagining intricate interlocked vertebrae coming asunder, like when you belted a Lesser Mothe demon (the skinny blue ones, not the big fat sloppy beige Greater Mothes) with a really big hammer. Cool about it, though. She’d even stopped grinding her teeth and hadn’t chewed the ends of her hair in some considerable time.

She had good reason to know that the preferred locale of Buffy/Spike nighttime sexual gymnastics had shifted from the yuppie-preppy plush-carpeted finished suburban tacky hellhole basement of Casa Spike. Dig out the earplugs. Again. And for further noise protection, Buffy still owed her a new micro-player to replace one personally crunched by the Slayer during a yelling sisterly argument. Except Buffy had forgotten everything related to Dawn past a month or so ago. Too bad: then Buffy couldn’t be sure it hadn’t happened either and would just have to pay up, that’s all. Have to accept it, the way she accepted Dawn’s unremembered birth and childhood: had to have happened because there Dawn was, right? A matter of faith. And a matter of dire expediency. No way was Dawn gonna put up with that kind of uber-squicky racket on a school night. Her grades would fall: Buffy would see. Eminently blackmailable.

So she knew where she’d probably find Spike at midafternoon.

Tromping up the stairs, she stood before the shut door of Buffy’s bedroom. She didn’t even bother to find out if it was locked. She just kicked on the solid bottom panel (Xander had warned her about the fragility of hollow-core doors) three times and shouted, “Spike! I don’t care if you’re asleep. I don’t care if you’re naked. On a count of ten you better let me in and be ready to talk or else go out that window and flambé yourself. One!”

She’d reached seven when the knob turned and Spike opened the door. He had his jeans on, anyway, and was shrugging into one of his blood-crimson long-sleeved button-downs, modestly covering his chest, as if she fucking cared. As she passed by to fling herself onto the vanity bench, he leaned and very openly sniffed near her shoulder and then by her elbow. Her waist. She flung her bookbag in his face, or almost, because his wrist came up and brushed it aside so it clunked on the edge of the throw-rug. And it was just wretched of him to be so vampire-fast even when he wasn’t fully awake, blinking and bedheaded.

Dawn kept her chin high and seated herself primly. Spike settled a hip on the foot of the unmade bed, half the covers spilled on the floor and the pink sheet with the roses all twisted into knots. When Spike messed up a bed, he made a thorough job of it.

“So, Bit,” he said. “Where does that leave us, then?”

Dawn closed her hands around her knees until she could feel her thumbs gouging into the sockets. “We are gonna talk this out like two vamps, OK? Completely dispassionately and no dodging.”

“What sort of vamps? A couple of fledges? Pair of fresh-risen frat boys drunk on second-hand beer from their first kill? Couple of masters dickering about territory and trying to guess which will gut the other first? What’d you have in mind, pet?” His eyes were clearblue and guileless and Dawn had no complaint coming because he’d done exactly as she’d required: addressed her just as he would have another vamp, all silky and knife-edged and as subtle as a ton of bricks.

“Peers,” Dawn specified. “Not related and not fledges. Neither submitted--not a minion.”

“Master vamps then, meeting on neutral territory, and a pax bond in place,” Spike refined.

“Pax bond,” Dawn repeated, requiring clarification.

“Somebody of greater rank or value with a great huge knife to his neck. Or hers. Pax bonds are pretty equal opportunity, pet. Vamps are the least sexist creatures on the planet. We’ll kill anybody, fuck anybody, and we’re not too particular who or what we jack off against neither. Pretty choosy who we mark, though, because that means something.”

Ignoring that attempt at distraction, Dawn said flatly, “Old news, Spike. That’s not the point. You belong to me. You’ve said so, and I’m holding you to it. I forbid--”

“Ah, but pet, then we’re not talking peers anymore. Don’t think this is gonna work out for you. You want to claim ownership, you have to go about this a different way.”

Dawn’s breath felt all locked up inside her chest and she resented that he didn’t have to breathe at all. “Are you mine?”

His face went quiet, perfectly still as only a vamp’s could be. Complete, utter attention, the eyes locked, nothing else in the entire universe he was looking at or considering.

He couldn’t do thrall, she knew; but if he could, this would be what it would look like. How it would begin.

“Yes, Bit. I am. That means whatever you say, I’ll hear you out. An’ I’ll think about what you say as hard and fair as I can. Doesn’t mean I’ll do what you say, though. And you know better than to expect that. If Angelus couldn’t get me to mind with twenty years, a belt, and a lot of things I am never gonna talk to you about, not even when you’re ninety and the scandal of Paris, New York, and London, you are not gonna get me to mind you anything like consistent. Though I love you and wouldn’t so much as distress you if there’d been any way around it. Can’t avoid the fallout, love. The Law of Unintended Consequences, like Red says it. Side effects. An’ I got to stop playing two vamps with you here, because I’d never talk to a vamp like I’d talk to you.” He held out his hands. Not reaching, not demanding, just waiting for her to make the reciprocal gesture. He said, “If we’re not gonna play vamps but just be us, I know I’d feel a lot better if you came over here and we could be easy with one another. I know you’re considerably pissed off at a number of things I’ve done lately. Last night most of all, I expect. About Michael. But we’re still who we are, and we’ll talk about it and find what’s to be done to make it as near to right, between us, as it can be and sod the rest.”

“I’m fine where I am. And it’s really disgusting the way you smell people, Spike.”

He set his hands on his knees too, mirroring her without the hurtful sticking-in thumbs, and sat back farther on the bed edge, accepting that she wanted the distance and wouldn’t come. “So, pet. I know some of what you are to Michael. He’s marked you. When I realized, I couldn’t believe you’d been such a fucking bloody fool as to set that up with him, knowing how it’d draw him afterwards. How he’d regard such a thing. Even if it was for me.”

Though there’d been definite snark in what he’d said before, pitched to the two vamps scenario, he had that all damped down now: since admitting her claim on him. Despite the words, no anger. No accusation. Only serious and concerned.

Dawn stirred uncomfortably, releasing her knees to grasp her left forearm with her right hand. Body language: could she possibly be more obvious? Well, yes: she could be the Slayer, who bore three marks and could never decide between hiding and flaunting them. Annoyed with herself, Dawn took her hand away, leaving the marks of Mike’s fangs, pale but distinct to vampire eyes, even farsighted, unconcealed on the round of her forearm. She wasn’t ashamed of the mark or of how or why she’d gotten it. She stated, “You needed the blood. I couldn’t give it to you direct. So…. So Mike.”

“Michael, the walking feeding kit. Noticed he didn’t carry your blood to me twice. A bit humiliating, that.”

“Doesn’t matter. Didn’t care. Anyway, by that time, you were coordinated enough to bite me yourself.” It was a cold, spiteful, vamp thing to say. But she said it because it was true. Only a glancing bite, impulsive and unconsidered. His demon had got past him and snapped at what it wanted. Nothing deep and protracted enough to leave a mark.

Spike’s eyes didn’t change or move from her face. “Yes. I was. And I haven’t forgot. But now this has come of it, and I can’t not do something. He’s tasted you, Dawn. An’ I know the lad doesn’t mean the least harm in it, but he’s locked onto you now. That’s what he thinks of, when he’s feeding. And nothing else is as good. Because it’s not. He’s right. Slayer blood. Summers blood, all alike. And he may mean no harm, but harm will come of it just the same. He’ll drink you down and then be sorry as fucking hell that you’re gone, an’ you got to give me due credit, Bit: I’ve never said a word of blame to him about it, and I didn’t dust him last night when the breeze changed and I smelled you on him. And him offering to do vamps, just because I do it, like there’d be no consequences, goddam bloody idiot…. It got to be too much, is all, and I flashed out at him.”

Spike’s brief gesture with a lifted hand meant this wasn’t an apology, only an explanation.

He went on, “I wasn’t inclined to say anything about that in front of the Slayer. But I think you should talk to her. Because as there’s things I know that she can’t, there’s maybe things she’d understand better than I ever will, to make you see how your choices stand and what the consequences are apt to be. Maybe she doesn’t remember you back to when you wore footie pajamas and carried stuffed animals to bed, even though that wasn’t but two years past; but she knows what it is to carry a vamp’s mark, put there by somebody she can’t truly separate herself from, and what follows from that. And it’s not mine, Bit.”

“Angel’s. I know.”

“Yeah. And I know when you start to tell her, she’ll go straight through the roof.” His arm and lifting bladed hand illustrated that rocket-like ascent. “Like Rupert would. But that didn’t stop your sis talking to him about things he had a right to know, even though…. Well, you know, she’s not like us. Blunt talk’s not a thing she takes easy to. Never gonna be as plain-spoken as a vamp, our Buffy. But she made herself do it all the same, because if she’s anything, she’s brave about what she thinks is right. So you should do the same, because I know you’re braver than she is, cause you got the same sense of what’s right but all your strength is in your mind.” He tapped his forehead.

“Yeah, that’s me: muscle brain!” Dawn giggled harshly.

“Don’t you make small of yourself. Mainly because it’s a lie. Can’t have lies between us or how is anything to come out well?” Spike lifted a hand and then let it drop, finally unlocking that searchlight gaze from her face, and that released her to look away too, which was a relief. Spike said, “Really wish you’d come here to me, pet. Don’t care for the distance. I’m yours, all right. But you’re also mine, and no need to bite you in the arm, or the ass, to claim you, and you’re not gonna say otherwise. Now are you.”

“No,” Dawn admitted, wringing a fold of her plaid school skirt into a tighter and tighter twist. Sunnydale High had lately decided that the answer to massive, catastrophic subsidence was a dress code and uniforms.

She hitched herself a little on the vanity bench but didn’t get up because that would mean conceding the problem of Michael wasn’t just Spike’s but theirs and that it was impossible for her to look him in the eyes, and listen to him, and remain self-righteously furiousfuckingmad at him.

Spike made an automatic gesture toward his pocket, caught himself, and looked sourly around at Buffy’s frilly, girly bedroom. Then he bounced up. “Change of venue. Can’t go outside, you wouldn’t find it half as much fun to watch me combust as you likely think you would. Basement. Come on.”

Still barefoot, he took off down the stairs, and Dawn followed him glumly. She no longer had any stomach for an apt revenge, even imagined, on him for turning on Mike that way. She knew the provocation. And she knew that display, for Spike, had been the spirit and soul of moderation under the circumstances. Just as he’d said.

At Willy’s she’d seen Spike kill a minion for bumping his elbow and spilling some of his beer. Not normally heavily into self-restraint.

One slow foot after another, she descended the basement stairs, automatically slapping the light switch to turn on the single bare bulb at the bottom. Spike was moving the wooden dryer chair against the wall where the chains and manacles still hung. He collected a lawn chair from the stack by the camping gear, opened it with a practiced jerk, and placed it facing the wooden chair about the same distance as the vanity bench had been from the bed. By the time he had a cigarette lit, Dawn had taken the lawn chair, drooping and dispirited. He dropped into the other.

“So we know pretty well where Michael stands with this,” Spike commented quietly. “What’s not been said is what Michael is to you.”

“You first,” Dawn countered. “He loves you: that’s no news. What’s he to you?”

“I’ve thought about that.” Spike slid lower in the chair, legs stretching long. “And I believe I can actually tell you. He’s my hope. That there might be a way to be a vamp, and no chip, no soul, just what comes raw out of the grave in the fright face, and still not be a monster. Like I been. Like every other vamp I ever knew has been. Be like you said to me once: a vampire person, and not something the Slayer should rightfully dust, first chance she got. And if you let him kill you, Dawn, all the hope is gone. So what is he to you, and will you dust him when you must or leave me to do it. Afterward.” There was a long silence. Neither of them looked up or moved at all. Finally Spike added, “Because I don’t believe he can keep himself from it. I know I couldn’t, was I him. Even now.”

An even longer silence. “I don’t know, Spike,” Dawn said at last. Then she went to the next agenda item. “There’s something you don’t know because there was no reason to tell you. You’d have noticed eventually, so why say? You know what I am. Mostly. But not all.” Spike nodded attentively, waiting. “I was scattered back into the Powers That Be. What I called Lady Gates, to give you a way to think about it and deal with it. One of the Powers. Dimensionality. Keyness. I’m part of that. And when I was collecting the parts of me, waiting for you to come back and make them let me go, I had choices. Of what to collect. What would be me. This-- (she waved vaguely at her white bloused torso) “—looks human enough. It would test as 100% human by any scientific method available or probable. It would take very sophisticated magic to know it’s not. It will never change, Spike. I chose it for you. So I could be Bit for you always. Even when I was ninety and the scandal of Paris and whatever.”

She sniffed determinedly, locked her jaw a moment, squinted her eyes tight, and did not cry a single molecule. She didn’t look at his face to find how he was taking the news that barring accidents, one Summers, at least, would be the companion of his journey until the end. As surely as if she’d been turned, but without the more squicky side-effects.

“Be awful sick of me in sixty, seventy years, pet,” Spike observed quietly. “Might want to reconsider.”

“Dru put up with you for longer than that.”

“Can’t hardly go by Dru. Mostly loved me well enough, but she’s a nutter through and through. If you wanted, could you take that part back?”

“You want me to?” Dawn asked, vaguely indignant.

He tilted his head and blinked at her the way he did, like an intelligent dog. “Don’t want you doin’ irrevocable things for me without considering yourself, love. Stopping as you are could get old real fast, even if you didn’t. Happens to vamps--a lot. Get bored with yourself maybe. Want a change. There’s arguments on both sides, mostly theoretical because there’s not many get a choice. Considering what’s happened and all, I wondered if you thought you’d made a bad bargain and would rather return that particular gift.”

“Well, that’s the second thing I haven’t told you. I probably could. If I wanted to. Not indefinitely--Lady Gates wouldn’t be patient with me flip-flopping back and forth, making demands. But for a while, she might let me revoke that option. Return to the default—growth, mortality. Maybe once. She has no stake in pleasing us: every part that loves you is here. None left in her. Maybe that was dumb. But it’s not a thing you get to practice.” Dawn made a wry face and sighed. “I haven’t been me again very long, and the connection to the Powers is still wide open. It hasn’t diminished to casual contact, benign or indifferent neglect. What I know, she knows. What I see, she sees. As much as she bothers to. And it seems, with shutting the Hellmouth and all, she’s taken an interest in you--”

Spike spat out a few highly flammable syllables and then said, “I know.”

“More dreams?”

“Not since the locket. You keep that close, Bit. Had the First in my head. Be damned if I’m gonna let Lady Gates stomp around in there. Not me and not you.”

Dawn gave him a wan, sad smile. “Don’t think it’s gonna work, Spike.”

“Worked so far.”

“Not forever, though. You made yourself too useful. They’ll want to use you some more. Like they do Angel.”

“Fuck her. Not gonna let her do me like that. If the locket won’t work, I’ll get Red to magic something else up for me. For us. Someday, maybe. When I don’t care anymore. Let ‘em take me then if they want. Who the hell fucking cares, when she’s gone. Let ‘em use me up closing some other Hellmouth. Some other prancing bimbo of a Hellgod. Whatever nuisance they take a disliking to enough to nudge one of their goddam minions, their champions, into place to dispose of for them. Won’t matter then. Didn’t expect to last, this last time. Now I got past that, I’m nobody’s dog but my own. And yours. And Buffy’s.”

“Too many hostages, Spike. Too many people you’ve let in. Every connection is a wound they can make you bleed from. They’re like Angelus. If they can’t get at you directly, they’ll come at you crooked, on a bounce. Through the people you care about. Hurt them to force you. Until eventually you’ll cave. Because they don’t care, Spike. And they have time.” Dawn got up, took two steps, and curled up in his lap. Slightly too long-legged for that, but she still fit, spine rounded and head tucked under his chin. As always, his cool solidity was comforting. As his arms came around her and held her close, she whispered, “They’ll break your heart and grind you to dust.”

“Are they pushing Michael, d’you think?”

“Maybe.” Dawn hadn’t thought about that before. “Probably. Yeah. They push everybody. More, the ones they find convenient. But everybody.”

“I’ll get him a locket.”

“All right. We can try. But it’s not gonna work, Spike.”

He gave her a squeeze. “Yes it will.”

“No it won’t.”

“It will. Because it has to. Because I won’t let it be otherwise.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mean stubborn vamp won’t budge.”

“Well, I won’t. Got you back, didn’t I, and didn’t know what the hell I was doing then neither. Didn’t forget when they wiped you out of everybody else’s heads. Had you written into my arm so even if they wiped you out of my head too, I’d still have an end to catch onto and get it back.”

Dawn’s finger couldn’t help but touch and trace on his hand the start of the tattoo, the spiral that meant Dawn, that curled up the whole of his left arm, knuckles to shoulder, as a line of green poetry.

Spike continued, “Between what you know and what I know and the Slayer on top of that, we got a fair fucking chance, Bit. And a high-powered witch besides. Have some faith here. So. You figure to grow up and be a fuckable wench for Michael or stick at sixteen and three-quarters for boring old William the Bloody?”

“Dunno, Spike. Haven’t decided.” She untucked enough to lean away and look him in the eyes. “When I know, I’ll tell you. First thing.”

“Second thing’s good enough. Don’t need first, you know that. You gonna have that talk with your sis, like I said?”

“Yeah. When I work up the courage. Will you sit in?”

“Couldn’t pay me enough to get me into that. Afterward, though. If you still want. Or she does. Because I know she’s gonna want to pin me down about Michael then, chapter and verse. A right catechism. Why have a pet vamp if you can’t twist his arm for information every now and again?”

“Does she? Twist your arm?”

“Among other things. Been known to happen.” Another squeeze. “Can you keep clear of Michael awhile? Because I’m sure he’s all put out, and hurt, and furious, that I warned him off. And sent him off. Sometimes folk do the most amazing stupid things when they’re all wound up like that. Vampire people, too. Same as anybody but generally messier in the consequences department.”

“Been known to happen,” Dawn echoed, tucking her head again and lifting a hand to brush her hair away from her face. “Jealous much, Spike?”

She felt him shrug. “No more than I can help. Vamps, we’re real possessive about what’s ours. Don’t have much. So what there is, we hold onto like grim death and mostly never turn loose. You might have noticed that, a time or two.”

“That’s what Lewis says. As in C.S. As in Narnia. That once a vamp’s got you, it’ll never let go.”

“Believe that was werewolves, pet. They’re the ones with the cold voices. Vamps, we’re just cold.”

“Warmhearted, though.”

“Sometimes. Some of us. Intense, anyway, or so I’m told. Light up a treat, too, if you stick us in the sun.”

"Don't joke about that, Spike. Specially not with your arm peeling." She picked at the edges of flaking skin on the wrist of his non-tat arm, below the unbuttoned sleeve, until he cuffed her hand away.

“So you still haven’t said, love: what’s Michael to you?”

Dawn frowned and started picking at his wrist again. This time, he let her, waiting, and she knew he’d never leave off about it until she answered him because he was like that. Implacable.

She formulated unhappily, “I like vamps. Mike is a vamp. So I like him. But not the way he likes me.”

“I know you been visiting him, over at his place. Was over there yesterday, a thing about Rona and Kennedy and all…and I noticed. S’not sensible. Told Rona the same. No vamp knows where the limits are, with a human. Your sis punched me down many a time before I could catch hold of the idea, much less try to abide by it. Doesn’t make any sense a vamp would understand. Not how we think or how we do. Just have to accept that’s how it is and learn it, and even then half the time you’re wrong…. Imagine it’s quite trying for the human, too. And you can’t hold your own, Bit--not the way a Slayer can.” He fingered through her hair, then tapped her forehead twice, lightly. “Brain muscles are not really gonna make the same impact.”

“I have my taser,” Dawn countered, and slapped her empty pocket, belatedly remembering she’d left the weapon in her bookbag.

“And it’s good you do. And I know you’d take me down in a second if you had to, because you done it, bam and done, just like you should, when I was too off to properly know what I was doing. But we go back a ways, and you know I’d not hold such a thing against you, or be much hurt by it once it wore off, or feel I had to come back at you for doing it. Would you do Michael like that if there was need?” When Dawn didn’t say anything right away, Spike asked, “Do you wish he’d just leave you alone?”

“No,” Dawn said firmly, except that once out of her mouth, it sounded like a question. And it shouldn’t be a question, because she knew Spike was attending to the tone as well as the words and would act accordingly. Mike, she realized, was her pax bond, whether she wanted it that way or not. Whatever she said wrong or uncertain or even unconsidered, the hurt of it wouldn’t come down on her: it would fall on Mike. And on Spike. Because even though he’d never admit it, he cared for Mike. But that wouldn’t stop him.

Vamps were like that. Strong feelings but not in the least sentimental about them. Not emotional about their emotions. Ruthless as sharks. And none of them inclined to patience or considering someone else’s point of view.

More steadily, she continued, “But I don’t have to encourage him. He’ll have to lair someplace else, now that you claimed the area as yours and banned him from it. And when he throws gravel at my window, I don’t have to go down. He’s never been invited in, so no problem there.” She decided, “It’s nothing that you need to be concerned about, Spike. I just haven’t been clear to him. Haven’t set limits and then stuck to them, made him mind. I know I have to do that now.”

“Ahuh. Well then, that sounds like a plan. You tell me how it works out for you, all right?”

“All right.”

“You promise?”

“Yeah. I promise.”

He said, “Well, that’s all right, then,” and touched lips to her forehead--cool, quick, and casual. In a tone that said the previous subject was closed, he went on, “Speaking of Rona…. I got this situation now with Kennedy. Came up yesterday, like I said. And I’d like to know what you think about it. Rona, she comes into it. And Kim. ‘Manda, indirectly. And I’d like not to see them get hurt, if that’s possible. There’s money in it, that would have to be explained away. And I don’t know if Willow should get a say or not, because she’s in the mix too. Can’t get my mind around all the angles, what they all want and what I should do about it, big ugly ball of twine. Cat’s cradle: pull the wrong bit, it all unloops and falls to pieces.”

“Tell me.”

**********

Holding her tote steady over her shoulder with one hand, Buffy peered up under the other at the cab of the tallest crane she’d ever seen. The low afternoon sun was blinding, and the cab near the short end of the long cross-beam seemed the size of a cigarette pack. No way to see, much less recognize, the operator. Except for the lifting cable, carrying the buckety-thing and its contents from the depths to the first of a line of big dusty trucks, there was no way to be certain the crane was even manned, not operated by some lunk looking at a monitor miles away.

She dug in her tote. Unshipping her cellphone, she hit the #4 speed dial. Cradling it against her cheek, she continued looking up, squinting against the brightness.

“Acme Wrecking,” came Xander’s cheerful, attenuated voice. “You name it, we wreck it. Helll-lo!”

He must have his caller ID on.

“Hey, Xander. You see this gnat-sized speck about level with your big toe, Mr. Transformer Guy?”

“I come fully equipped with all the latest gadgets including binoculars. Well, if it isn’t a yellow Buffy. Oops! Give me a second here, Buff, OK?”

“’Kay.”

The toothed, diamond-shaped bucket adjusted itself over the truck, lowered a bit more, then opened, depositing what looked like a full load with a crash and an uprush of dust. Lifting again, closing as it went, it began its slow traverse back to the pit.

“All righty,” said Xander, “the Monster Trashmasher scores again! Buff, do you have any idea how satisfying this is? Dismembering Sunnydale High? Again? Emptying one hole and dumping the contents into ye friendly neighborhood landfill a few miles off and paid union wages for each and every happy chomp and spit? And still with the contract for the rebuilding, on top of it? Literally: on top of it! Personally I think if I was on the school board, I’d plump for change of venue. Hasn’t been a really fortunate location somehow. The Feng shui not well aligned or of good omen. I’d hire one of those little raggedy-ass dowsers Will knows at Magick Group and find a better piece of ground.”

Buffy listened through this cheerful burble with an expanding grin. Detecting a pause, she said, “Xan, I heard from Giles. He’s en route to the Cotswolds, wherever that may be--Vi’s aunt--and anyway, he expects to get in to LAX on Thursday. So, Scooby council meeting Friday? To let him get his beauty sleep? Have the whole ‘Where do we go from here’ discussion.”

“Ahhhh-- All right, there could be a work-around. You’re on.”

“Xander, is there something you’re not telling me? And what’s her name?”

“Can’t get anything past you, can I? Maria. Met her bowling. And no, no spooky eyes, anomalous appendages, or facial varicosity noted yet but I haven’t had a chance to check out, ah, the entire package although I live in hope. Continually. First date, ergo no expectations to fulfill or disappoint. I think that terrifying encounter can move to Saturday without a major rupture in diplomantic relations.”

Buffy’s grin widened: her cheeks had begun to feel tight. Even though Xander dating meant he and Anya must have had one of their periodic tiffs and they’d be sniping at each other all through the council meeting and the inevitable party that followed. Nothing unusual in that, sad to tell. “So what do you have planned?”

“I thought I might expose her to something really exotic. As in…bowling? That lady has a sliding hook ball into the one-three pocket that has to be seen to believed, and the pins jumping and the crash? Music. Absolute music. Rolling thunder. Background beat groove for the Sex Pistols.”

“Speaking of that, before you and Ms. Pin Exploder get too thick, tell me an evening and bring her by. We have the whole house to ourselves again, no patter-crash of little SIT feet, or hardly, so we can make like normal again, right? Or new normal, if we can’t remember what old normal was like. Video de jour and pizza, OK? Check her out. He can’t whack her in the nose anymore, well he can but not tell anything useful from it, but he could smell her and deliver a private ruling on the whole human-demon thing.”

Silence. “I’m coping but still inhabiting don’t ask, don’t tell major denial territory here, Buff. Someday I’ll be sanguine about how you get your freak on, but still a little soon for that. Major world saveage, that gets him street cred by me. The Xan man gives ground graciously. But slowly. As in glacial. As in tectonic. And got to play now with the many, many highly symbolic levers arrayed before me here, so if we’re good for Friday…?”

“Yeah, then. Bye.”

**********

Hearing the front door bang shut, Spike went up and found Willow slamming bowls and utensils in the kitchen, apparently all of a swivet at getting a mere A- on her Western Civ. midterm.

“I mean, that whole Manifest Destiny question should have been a gimme,” Willow ranted, rooting in the back of the refrigerator. Rising and shutting the refrigerator door, she pitched a couple of small zip bags onto the kitchen island and yanked its door open, stooping to look in there. “I don’t think there’s much to debate about the outcome. We saw it, we wanted it, we took it. It’s not open to debate. Whether might makes right, yeah, you can get together a lively little bloodbath of a discussion on that on any street corner but the facts themselves are beyond dispute, and how Professor Boyd could say I’d scanted the economic influences--!” She whacked down a cookie sheet as though swatting a cluster of particularly vicious flies.

“Wanker,” agreed Spike sympathetically. “Give me a description and I’ll look him up some evening at one of the poncier bars. Explain to him why Western Civilization is your basic oxymoron and he should be more open-minded about it. Tap him on the breastbone every other word, let my eyes turn, give him a bit of a peek at some other influences he’s maybe not taking into proper account.”

The witch paused to give him a prolonged, amused, evaluating sidewise look. “Offing your professors is not a generally approved method of improving academic performance evaluations.”

“Didn’t say I’d do the bloke. Never said any such thing. Just lean on him slightly. Help him reconsider where his best interests lie. No? Well if you change your mind you know where to find me. Always eager to be helpful, here. Pull my bloody weight, make myself useful, an’ all that.”

One side of her mouth pulled down in a tight grin. She began doling scoops of flour into a large glass measuring cup. “What d’you want, Spike.”

“Oh, we’re into subtext here, are we? Figure there’s a quid pro quo every time I open my mouth? You wound me, Red. Another locket, actually. Make time for it after the guilt cookies?”

“Rage cookies. And this time you provide the container. Anything except aluminum: skews the spell into something fairly uncomfortable.”

“Plastic?”

Willow bobbed her head, auburn hair swinging. “Plastic’s fine. No interference there. And get your sneaky fingers away from the chocolate morsels. Remove or lose.” She brandished a large spoon.

Popping the pinch of chocolate chips into his mouth, he smirked at her ingratiatingly, then turned and went into the hall, intending to check on his afternoon soaps. He’d lost almost a year in the remarkably complexified lives of his favorite imaginary people: it would take awhile, and fierce concentration, to cog himself properly to what was happening to them all now.

Except for the occasional pregnancy, it was almost like watching the shifting alignments and power games in a vampire clan. Nobody much died or left or admitted to aging except if they’d been out of town for a very long time, and returning might be played by some different actor. Actors passed; characters and relationships endured. The characters had continuity and old, old enmities that could surface years later, all wildly intense and passionate. And if you paid close attention, it all made sense. Fascinating stuff.

Willow’s voice caught him by the front room arch: “Oh, and Spike?”

“Yeah?”

She leaned out the kitchen door, stirring a bowl. “Buffy called in and says Giles will be back Thursday night, late, and there’s a meeting on Friday. She tried you, but your cell was turned off. Again.”

Spike made an annoyed gesture and Willow rolled her eyes, frowned rueful admonishment, and disappeared.

When Spike turned on the TV and dropped onto the couch, he found he’d hit the first post-opening string of commercials. His mind wandered, reviewing parts of his conversation with Dawn; thinking about the Powers and about Restfield. And blood. Thinking about Dawn herself, and Mike, and what the lad was most apt to do now, and how long it was likely to be before Buffy got home, and what might be arranged with Giles. Also blood. Then he considered the question of what he’d do next. He seldom thought farther than that. Not into long-range planning. No use to it. Things changed too fast, and then it was all to be done over. Best to do it on the fly, as things developed.

And he needed to figure out what to do about blood.

By then the commercials were over, and what a raft of them they were sticking in now! As the program resumed, Spike leaned forward intently.

When the next batch of commercials intruded, he rose and crossed the room, set the corded phone aside, and took a quick inventory of the contents of the weapons chest.

**********

Gripping grocery bags, Buffy returned to Casa Summers to find Dawn pacing up and down the hall, wearing blue pastel overalls over a pink T with an appliqué of yellow birdies, a cellphone clutched to her ear, her voice in the upper ranges of wheedling teenaged whine that could strip paint. In the front room, Spike was on the couch with Rona and Kim on the floor, the TV blaring unnoticed, the three of them apparently deep in a discussion of the merits of blade-up stabbing, underhand, as compared to blade-down stabbing from above. As Buffy finished shutting the door by bumping it with her butt, Rona had just leaped up for a mimed demonstration, sans an actual knife. Spike wasn't watching: he'd risen and turned to meet Buffy's eyes, and they smiled at each other. For about five seconds everything else went away. Then Buffy felt one of the bags beginning to tear and hustled past Dawn to hastily plop it, and then the more secure one, on the kitchen counter, grabbing the sweating-cold milk jug as it threatened to topple through the tear and setting it aside on the kitchen island Xander had built when mass-produced meals for thirty had become mandatory.

At the sink scrubbing a cookie sheet with fierce determination, Willow remarked over her shoulder, “Everybody’s entitled to three before supper, absolute limit, and looters will be suspended by their heels over termite mounds. Of course termites don’t actually bite, so it’s not a really dire threat, but I’m not currently into dire. Bad enough to imagine all those tiny little legs churning. And they’re not even white but sort of colorless, never come out in the daylight. Vampire termites.” Willow gripped her elbows tight to her sides, shuddering, eyebrows worriedly clenched. “OK, that’s scary. Quitting now.”

The house was filled by the wonderful smell of her labors: Toll House cookies with pecans and butterscotch bits (the chocolate chips were a gimme), fragrantly stacked on a large blue-rimmed plate on the front right stove burner where it could be guarded from predation.

Grabbing one of her allotted three cookies and biting ecstatically down on the splendid expiation of Willow’s guilt, Buffy inquired, “Mmmff?”

“A- on the Western Civ. midterm,” Willow explained dispiritedly. “Spike offered to intimidate the professor with long words and grammar so good it sneers. Whom used correctly in compound-complex sentences. But I was firm, I said No. I don’t think that sort of thing should be encouraged.”

Not guilt but rage, then. Same difference, when it all came out in cookies.

“Mmmff,” Buffy agreed, over a Dawnscreech from the hall and the seismic bangs as Dawn jumped up and down, followed by “Yes! Yes! Yes!” as her wheedling achieved climax.

Buffy and Willow traded an eyebrows-raised glance.

Having secured her second cookie, Buffy put away a box of pasta, then leaned into the hall to make sure the floorboards had survived. Dawn, still phoned, was bent over a notebook open on the hall table, alternately writing intently and slapping at her hair. And Spike was coming toward the kitchen. A glancing, nearly impersonal kiss--barely a two on Buffy’s personal scale--and then he was sizing up the merchandise to identify the jars and canned goods that lived on the upper shelves of the cabinets.

Buffy went back to putting away the things that lived on the middle or lower shelves, bottom cabinets, or under the sink, aware of doing with Spike a coordinated dance of bending and reaching, weaving back and forth across the kitchen, smooth and automatic as a fight. A motion study would have been a smooth interlace of red and blue lines. Buffy smiled at the precision and the unspoken understandings.

Unlike a normal guy, Spike wouldn’t come grab bags from her, all macho despite her having dragged them from the store and then to the house on her own. It wouldn’t even occur to him: the Slayer needed no help handling about fifty pounds of dead weight. But he’d turn up to take care of storing the high stuff that was difficult for the vertically challenged without resort to the kitchen step-stool.

Quietly watching his chance, he swiped an unauthorized cookie and disappeared it into his mouth in less than a second, absently scratching the peeling skin on his right ear while turning his back so Willow wouldn’t notice him chewing. Buffy ogled the back of his neck for a savoring moment. Smiling the smile of the contentedly successful thief, he began sorting aside the laundry products that would need to be toted down to the basement. He might take care of that, or Buffy would. Whoever finished with the other groceries first. All just as simple as could be.

As she finished her own second cookie with luxurious finger-licking, making sure every smear of chocolate was completely removed from each of the fingers, Buffy’s eyes caught Spike’s and there was another of those rapt, suspended moments between them, this time with the devastating heat of the full-body blush followed by a mutual gulp as they came out of the trance and shakily went back to work.

Oh, yes.

Spike could be sexy about cookies. Buffy suspected he could be sexy about second-hand lawnmowers and molting Pekingese. Pretty much hard-wired, no thought whatever required.

Buffy put a loaf of bread on the kitchen island with the cluster of items waiting for mass disposal into the refrigerator because Joyce Summers had been adamant about the unacceptability of opening the refrigerator door more than once in any given ten-minute period and letting out all the cold air. It was automatic: you minimized your refrigerator openage. Even Spike did it.

The spirit of Joyce Summers presided over the kitchen and such details as these, like no smoking in the house and no weapons left laying around, except following emergencies. Buffy considered it entirely of the good.

Buffy asked him, “You know about Friday?”

“Yeah,” Spike confirmed, and slowed in his motions: waiting for something.

Almost instantly, Buffy knew what it was. “Left your cell turned off again. Or did you forget to charge it?”

“Sorry, love,” Spike responded insincerely, in lieu of an actual answer.

No use going there. He knew perfectly well how to use the cellphone rented for him at frightening expense. He used it for outcalling all the time. But he wouldn’t leave it available for incalling. Hated it with the unspoken passion he accorded to wrist watches and nearly anything digital. Unsuitable for a vamp to be lumbered with a bleeding chunk of puce plastic, carry it around all the time, leashed to it like a bloody poodle, unquote. Spoiled the line of his jeans in a way the cigarette pack and lighter evidently didn’t.

Nice line.

Buffy grabbed the refrigerator stuff and would have earned perhaps an 8.5 score for fewest possible seconds required for the transfer. The sweating milk jug was slippery. And at least a second lost while she noted the continued complete absence of any gallon milk jug usefully recycled into storing blood. The new normal, vaguely disquieting and problematic.

Spike left, toting the laundry stuff. Joint team score at least a nine.

Stacking the last dripping bowl in the drying rack, Willow asked, “What’s for supper?”

“Spaghetti, that’s usually safe, with cubes of leftover meatloaf masquerading as meatballs. Choice of marinara or chunky garden sauce. Tossed salad featuring grape tomatoes. Garlic bread.”

“Sounds like a plan. I’ll turn on the oven and get the water started.”

“Thanks, Will.”

“Patrolling tonight?”

“Short one. Just hit the worst hot spots. Lick and a promise, my mom would say.”

Pulling out the big salad bowl, Buffy performed refrigerator openage and snatched salad ingredients into the bowl. Would have been a clear nine except for violating the specified resting period.

Dawn gloomed in, staring appalled at the notebook. She announced, “I got, like, seventeen tons of homework.”

“Then you should get started,” Buffy responded in her best mom voice. “Twenty minutes or so till supper.”

“Yeah.” Dawn somnambulated out again. From the hall came the afterthought, “You should start nagging Spike about getting contacts.”

“I heard that,” came menacingly from the other direction.

Brutally wrenching lettuce in firm handfuls, Buffy remarked, “Xander’s got a new girlfriend.”

Spike leaned in the door. “Have him bring her over, pet. I’ll check out the demon quotient.”

Buffy smiled to herself. “Maybe.”

“Anya will be pissed,” Spike reflected, and moved off down the hall.

Proper vamps did not offer to help with cooking. Though he’d undoubtedly eat some. And at least half of the garlic bread. So much for legend.

Sometimes the new normal and the old normal coincided.

Digging in a drawer for the veggie scraper, Buffy collected her third cookie.