“Sir? She’s been spotted leaving the house.” Quentin Travers immediately sat up in his seat, his full attention on the scratchy voice coming through the long distance call from America.
“And?” he prompted, barely containing the excitement in his voice.
“It looks like she’s headed out on patrol. A blond haired man is accompanying her. Nothing seems out of the ordinary, sir.” The small pit of excitement that had flared somewhere in his stomach at the news dimmed slightly.
“Tail her. Don’t let her know you are following her. The second she does something out of the ordinary—and I mean the very second she does—I want her captured and taken to our safe house.”
“And what of the man, sir?” Travers hesitated for only a second.
“Kill him. The last thing we need is Rupert Giles on our blood trail because we leave one for him to follow,” He replied, doing nothing to conceal his contempt for the current Slayer’s Watcher.
“Consider it done.” A small sadistic smile curved its way over Travers’ mouth. Finally, they were getting somewhere.
The Watcher disconnected from his call with the head of the Watcher’s Council and turned towards his men.
“Spread out and tail her. If you see anything out of the ordinary, then Travers wants her contained and taken to the safe house. She’s not just a little girl, she’s the Slayer, so be prepared for her to fight till the end. Shoot only to incapacitate, not to kill. However, the man with her can be taken out.” The five men surrounding him nodded before melting into their surroundings and following the Slayer’s trail.
A shot cut through the night effortlessly, and a dull thud could be heard as the bullet embedded itself in its target. A hitched breath and a small cry of pain sounded as the Slayer stumbled slightly and hit the ground.
“BUFFY!” She lifted her head and shot a quick look back over her shoulder, in the direction from which the shot had come.
“I’m fine,” she managed to ground out through gritted teeth as she fought to keep the tears that were threatening to spill down her face at bay. “Help me up. We can’t go back to the house until we’ve lost them.”
“Where’d they get you?” Spike said as he reached a hand out and pulled her to her feet.
“Just the leg, I’ll be fine. We have to keep going.” Blood was oozing sluggishly from the wound on her calf near the outside of her leg and only about four inches below the joint of her knee.
“You sure you can walk?” The response he received was a quick nod of her head and a shove in the back to get him moving.
“We don’t have time. Quickly!” Spike looked at her unconvinced but he moved away from her side where she was subconsciously leaning her weight on him to support herself. The moment his support was gone and her full weight was placed on her leg, she cried out and began to overbalance.
“’Fine’, she says. You can’t even bloody well walk!” Without waiting for her response, he bent down and scooped her up into his arms. “Where to?”
She didn’t even try to fight him as she squeezed her eyes shut to try and keep from wailing like a child at the pain that was radiating from her leg. “The school, head for the library.”
“Does it usually take this long?”
“What?” Giles asked in a mildly annoyed tone at being interrupted. His demeanour softened and turned some what apologetic when his eyes fell on Buffy’s mother. “Oh, well yes. Translating a prophecy can sometimes take days. A lot of these ancient languages have hundreds of different symbols and characters, most of which have multiple meanings that make things highly difficult when translating texts. Ancient Amharic can be particularly difficult when—.”
“No,” she interrupted, cutting across him with no hint of embarrassment. She wasn’t even looking at him. Instead her gaze was trained on the window behind his head. “Buffy and Spike. They’ve been gone for hours. I was asking whether it usually took this long to patrol.”
Giles slipped his glasses off his face and turned to look out the window. It was still dark out, but some hours had definitely passed while he had emersed himself into translating the prophecy. A faint dirty yellow glow could be seen poking out of the horizon in the distance that signalled the approaching morning as it began to burn away the darkness of the night.
A quick glance at the clock told him that the sun would indeed be up in just a little over an hour.
“I know Buffy thought I was oblivious to all her sneaking out,” Joyce continued, her gaze finally coming to rest on the Watcher, “but I would hear her some nights—leaving and returning at all hours of the morning. But she was never gone for more than two, sometimes three hours at most. They’ve been gone almost all night.”
Giles felt his own worries ignited along with the feeling of guilt that he had been so immersed in his books that he hadn’t noticed the hour, or his Slayer’s continued absence. He schooled his features, however, to look unconcerned as he moved to reassure Joyce.
“I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about, Joyce. Buffy is extremely capable—she’s the best Slayer I have seen—it’s likely that they just got as carried away with time as I have and are on their way home this minute.” He tried to offer her a smile but it fell flat, just as his words had. He could tell she wasn’t buying a word he was saying.
“Maybe,” she said in a noncommittal voice as her gaze moved back to the window and the ever increasing glow on the horizon.
“Ouch! Oh god that hurts!” Spike winced as he laid the Slayer out on the table in the centre of the library.
“Sorry, pet. Got to put you down while I call the Watcher.” Buffy nodded stiffly as she clenched her jaw against the pain, knowing that if she broke down now she wouldn’t be able to stop, and they were in no way out of the woods yet. “Where’s the phone, love?”
“Office.” Spike nodded and quickly walked into the office. Finding the phone easily enough he quickly rattled through the draws looking for an address book, something—anything—that might list the Slayer’s number.
“Fuck,” he swore when he came up empty handed. “Slayer, what’s your home number?” he asked as he stuck his head back out through the office door. Shit, she was unconscious. “Bloody hell, will you cut me some slack?” he growled to himself.
Walking back over to the phone again he picked it up, hesitating only for a moment before he hit redial. He waited impatiently as it redialled the previously called number and began ringing.
“Hello?” Hope flared somewhere within him at the sound of a female voice.
“Joyce?” he asked with anticipation. If this was the wrong number then he was screwed.
“Yes? Spike, is that you?” He shut his eyes and sent a silent thank you to whoever was listening.
“Yeah, it’s me. Is the Watcher there, love?” He heard some shuffling and some mumbled talking before the Watcher was put on the phone.
“Spike?” The blond vampire almost chuckled at the mixture of anxiousness and perplexity in the Brit’s voice.
“Listen, mate, we’re at the school. Sun’s up and things got a little hairy last night with a few of your Council buddies. Slayer got shot in the leg.”
“Good lord, is she alright?” It was proof Spike was spending too much time around the Slayer and her chums when he could picture Giles removing his glasses and polishing them with absolute clarity. He frowned and shook himself out of the disturbing thought as he heard the Watcher’s voice again. “Spike?”
“She’ll be fine. Leg’s a bit sore at the moment I’d wager, but she’ll be right in no time—bleedings already slowing.”
“What do you intend to do then?”
Spike furrowed his eyebrows and glanced back out the door at the still unconscious Slayer. She’d still be out of it for a while.
“We’ll probably hold up here for a bit and give her a chance to heal and then make our way back through the sewers a bit later on today. We won’t be safe here for too long.”
“What happened?” The question was asked by a concerned parent rather than the trained Watcher he knew the man to be and he knew that getting into details now over the phone wasn’t the best idea.
“We’ll fill you in when we get home, yeah? See if you can’t do something about putting up a few more wards on the house, something that will keep the Council out. We tried to lead them away from there but they’re bound to have someone watching it by now. It’d be best if the Slayer and I could be able to disappear altogether for a time when we arrive through the sewer entrance outside the house, figuratively speaking of course.” Spike waited silently to see if Giles had picked up the hint.
“I’ll see what we can do.” Giles’ tone was thoughtful, but Spike was confident he had understood the message. As long as they weren’t seen entering the house then the occupants inside should be safe for the moment.
No goodbyes were said as the two men disconnected the call without another word being spoken between them.
Spike wasted no more time snooping as he picked up the extensive first aid kit he had come across in the desk’s bottom drawer and walked back out to the Slayer’s unconscious form.
As gently as he could, Spike rolled Buffy’s prone body over before pushing up the leg of her pants, so that he could get to the wound. He set the medical kit on the table and took out a pair of tweezers. They were the kind that you usually used to get small slivers of wood out of fingers—the kind of splinters she probably got hundreds of from her stakes. He winced, they would have to do.
Checking once more to make sure she was still out for the count, he bent over her leg to inspect the small wound before moving the tweezers in as gently as possible. Buffy groaned loudly as the tweezers bumped the end of the bullet, but she did not wake up. Slowly, Spike managed to grab hold of the end of the foreign object and little by little started to ease it out. He wriggled it back and forth as gently as possible, and it began to work its way out of the tight sheath it had created for itself in the fleshy tissue and muscle of her leg.
Once it was free, he quickly dropped the bloodstained piece of metal on the table and pulled out an extra piece of gauze as the wound began to bleed again. Spike held the bandage firmly to Buffy’s leg with one hand as the other searched through the contents of the small box for something with which to tape it down.
“Just lick it.” His surprised face shot up to meet her own conscious face.
“What?” Another small groan left her lips as he jostled her leg slightly. “Sorry.”
“Lick it. Your salvia seals wounds, right? So lick it.” Spike looked down at the piece of gauze he was holding to her leg, already soaked through with her thick blood. The smell of it was perfuming the air heavily, a fact that he had been able to ignore up until now. For a moment everything else fell away and all he could see was her wound, bleeding freely through tunnel vision.
God, did he want to lick it. He was hungry—not having finished his mug of pig swill before they left to patrol—but she had already lost so much blood. The last thing she needed was for him to lose control at the taste of it and take even more of the precious substance than she could afford to lose at that moment.
“Will you just lick the damn wound! We don’t have much time and the longer you wait the more blood I’m losing.” Spike stared at her for a long moment before finally caving in with a tight nod. He bent down and gently slipped his free hand under her leg to steadily it as he removed the soiled gauze from the wound. He let his nose trail above it for a moment, drawing in her scent before quickly darting his tongue out and running it slowly over the wound, staunching the flow of blood and sealing it off.
Buffy let out a low moan as the throbbing pain in her leg became a pleasant tingling of awareness. She felt his tongue run over the wound once more before a soft kiss was placed on the smooth skin behind her knee.
“Spike?”
“Better?” He asked, straightening up again and fighting to put away his demon that had surged forward at the first hint of her blood against his tongue.
She blushed lightly and sat herself up on the table. “Much better, go us and our Slayer and Vampire healing powers!” she said, offering him a small smile. They were both silent for a moment and she took the time to test her leg.
“No need to rush, pet. Told the Watcher that we’d be on our way once I’d patched you up and that Slayer healing had a chance to work.” Buffy nodded as she gently placed some of her weight onto her leg.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore. Just a slight tugging feeling,” she remarked as she turned to clean up their mess.
“It’ll hurt more later on if you don’t rest it now though,” Spike replied as he leaned his weight against the table and watched Buffy as she put things away. Buffy shrugged off his concern.
“I’ll be fine. The important thing now is we get out of here so we can talk to Giles about what’s going on. Did he say anything more about the prophecy?” she queried, limping back into the office with the medical kit under her arm. “Spike?” she prompted when she got no response from him.
The Slayer frowned as he didn’t answer her once more and stuck her head back out the door to see what he was up to. Fear lanced through her at the sight with which she was greeted.
“Buffy, so glad you could join us.”