Xander rushed into Dawn’s room, a sword clenched in his hand. “What? What is it?” he demanded, flipping on the light and seeing Dawn sitting up in bed, pale and shaking.
“He was here—he was here,” she gasped.
“Who?”
“Spike!”
Xander swung around, tensing. The door was still ajar from his hurried entrance, and the window was closed.
The room was empty.
And Dawn … Dawn, who sometimes imagined giant spiders on her ceiling and mice nibbling in the walls, was alone. Looking frightened, but not terribly awake, as she rubbed sleep from her eyes.
“Are you okay?” Xander asked carefully. At her nod he relaxed his sword arm and sat down on the edge of the bed. “What happened, Dawn?”
“He … looked at me,” said Dawn in lingering horror, hiking her legs up to her chest and wrapping her arms around her knees. Xander released the sword entirely to rub Dawn’s back and murmur soothingly. Dawn’s eyes darted around the room, still searching, still panicked.
A year before, Xander would have jumped on the incident like a beagle on a Snausage—pit bull, he corrected himself, pit bull on a Snausage—but now it just seemed odd. Spike, that dangerous, ungrateful twerp, had been so quiet after Buffy took him out of the school’s basement. Helpful. Harmless. Except, of course, for the time he decided to beat the crap out of Faith for kicking Buffy out of her own house, which hadn’t been harmless or helpful or anything good, but since Faith had tried to strangle Xander, he wasn’t going to hold that one against Spike.
“What do you mean, looked? Was he, you know … all bumpy in the forehead?” He knew Spike wasn’t supposed to be able to do that anymore, but hell, what did he know? Maybe vampires who were made human again had some sort of weird hybrid mutant power thing going on, and man, he had to stop hanging around Andrew so much.
Dawn shook her head, heart racing. She felt almost paralyzed. Like if she didn’t move, she could become so still and small that she’d be safe.
Of course, growing up in Sunnydale had taught her that actually never worked.
Here, in Santa Rita, she’d thought she was safe. No Hellmouth, no Glory, no monster-of-the-week. No, here all she had to be afraid of was someone she used to trust. To love. Why did he do it? Rotten disgusting creep!
“Dawn?”
Dawn looked up at Xander’s prompting. “He had this look on his face … like I was a sandwich, and he hadn’t eaten in days,” she said, voice quavering. “And then he said, ‘I’ve been waiting years for this,’ and started to unbutton his shirt.”
Xander was silent for a moment as he absorbed her words, then surged to his feet. “Where’d he go?” Xander asked coldly, sword in his hand. He’d missed before, when he’d seen Spike with Anya, but this time his aim would be true.
There was a sound in the hall, and Buffy rushed in. “What is it, what’s wrong?”
“Spike,” grated Xander.
“Spike what?” said Buffy.
“He tried to—” Xander broke off as Spike ran into the room, slightly winded. “You bastard,” Xander gritted, raising the sword and starting for Spike.
Buffy grabbed him, her hand at his wrist. “What the hell’s this about?” she demanded.
“Your boyfriend here was threatening Dawn, that’s what,” Xander snapped, jerking his head in Spike’s direction.
Buffy and Spike exchanged a look, then Buffy turned back to Xander and shook her head. “That’s impossible,” she told him flatly. Behind her—behind Spike—she could hear dull footfalls and knew that the rear guard, Giles and Andrew, had arrived.
“Impossible how? Because he has a soul? Because he’s human now? Because you say so?”
“Because he was with me,” Buffy replied softly.
***
Xander looked uncomfortably at Spike across the dining room table and shifted a little in his seat. Buffy had sent the two of them away after the initial confusion had died down, and it was established that Spike was otherwise occupied.
Andrew had sought comfort from several notably loud video games.
“So you two were … down here talking?” Xander asked, studiously polite.
Spike nodded, then caught himself. “Well, actually—” he began, and Xander cut him a sharp look. “—we were in the living room,” Spike finished.
Xander let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.
They both snapped their heads up when Buffy walking into the room.
“Is she settled down?” asked Spike.
“Finally,” she sighed. “The promise of taking tomorrow off school can solve any problem.”
Spike watched her closely as she sank down on the couch. “So what do you think it was?”
“I think it was a big shock seeing you, and then I think she ate enough potstickers to give her nightmares,” said Buffy dryly.
Spike didn’t look convinced. “Nightmares? You sure that’s all it was?”
“What else would it be?”
“Could be about anything, I suppose,” Spike admitted. “But how often do these things turn out to be nothing?”
To his surprise, Buffy smiled. “We’re not in Kansas anymore, Spike,” she told him. “Well okay, we were never in Kansas exactly, but this isn’t the Hellmouth. This is a perfectly normal town, not ground zero for demonic activity.”
“Yeah, that’s what they say about Fresno, I hear,” snorted Spike.
“Fresno?”
“Oh, nothing,” Spike dismissed innocently.
Buffy glared at him. Becoming human hadn’t made him notably more serious.
“So what do you think it was?” she demanded.
Xander watched the two of them. Neither of them, preoccupied with their conversation, paid him any attention. At the moment, he found that a relief. He couldn’t tell them anything, and now he only had more questions.
Spike shrugged at Buffy’s question. “Could be anything. Incubus—”
“The band?” asked Buffy in surprise.
“No, not the band,” Spike said dryly. “Nasty little buggers that, um, take advantage of girls while they’re asleep.”
“Spike, you know perfectly well that incubi are a myth,” said Giles, walking into the room wearily. It wasn’t really surprising that as soon as Spike returned, trouble began; indeed, it would have been astonishing otherwise. Spike might never have managed evil on the scale of Angelus, or genuine repentance like Angel, but at simple troublemaking, he was without peer.
After a moment Giles corrected himself. Spike had, by the testimony of Buffy and the other Slayers, willingly sacrificed himself to save the world. It almost pained Giles to think it, but Spike had saved the world.
And he had also killed two Slayers, and countless others. The restrictions the chip had placed upon Spike had lulled Giles into dismissing the scope of his evil—a dangerous mistake. Spike may not have indulged in the Grand Guignol tortures of Angelus, but he was—had been—a legend. He had earned the name William the Bloody, earned it with the lives of the innocent.
“The hell they are,” Spike insisted, drawing Giles back to the conversation.
“So they take advantage and then leave?” Buffy asked impatiently.
“They impregnate the women,” Spike scowled. Didn’t like the thought of one of them bothering Niblet. “That’s how they reproduce.”
“Impregnate!” exclaimed Buffy. “And one of these was after Dawn?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, could have been anything.”
“Including some things that actually exist,” said Giles dryly. “Such as Traylor demons.”
“What do they do?” asked Buffy.
Giles thought for a moment, trying to dredge up long-buried knowledge. “I’ll have to check my books, but as I recall, upon making physical contact with the victim, they take up residence in their body as a … well, a parasite.”
“Parasite?” exclaimed Buffy in horror. Every option was worse than the one before it. Impregnate Dawn? Live in her as a parasite? God! “Wait, how’d these things look like Spike? They can do that? Look like whoever they want?”
Giles took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “They need to find a form the victim is familiar with, to ensure that she will allow them close enough to complete their attack. Demons can be highly adaptable. With so specialized a method of attack, they need acceptable camouflage.”
“Why me?” Spike asked suddenly.
The others turned to look at him. “I’m not getting the feeling that Dawn feels all warm and fuzzy towards me right now, so why me and not one of you?” he said, jerking his chin towards Xander and Giles.
“Or Andrew,” muttered Xander absently. The others looked at him curiously and after a moment he added, “I mean, assuming there’s actually a demon delusional enough to imagine Andrew in a girl’s bedroom.”
Buffy shrugged. “She had a crush on you,” she said to Spike.
Spike brightened at the news. “She did? When?” he asked, evidently pleased.
“Settle down there, fella. She had a crush on me first,” Xander told him. “She just decided to lower her sights a little. Okay, a lot.”
Spike’s face fell, and Buffy giggled at him.
Xander didn’t laugh, but he did smile. It might have been after midnight, and he had work in the morning, but it was never too late to enjoy Spike being disappointed.
Giles frowned at Spike. Was he onto something? Or was the vampire (no, not vampire) simply indulging his considerable ego?
“The girl was refining her taste,” Spike argued.
Yes, his ego was healthy, wasn’t it?
“Excuse me, her tastes were already highly refined,” returned Xander, affronted.
“Sure, refined. You were right up there with the Backstreet Boys. Same haircut, even.”
“Hey, I did not—”
Giles closed his eyes and ignored the byplay.
Maybe Buffy was right. Maybe it had just been a dream.
Maybe not.
***
Giles remained downstairs long after the others had retired. He’d moved to his library, a large room tastefully decorated in dark tones and lined with his books. The largest collection of mystical texts anywhere in the world now that the Council was no more, no matter what Wesley said about the collection at Wolfram & Hart.
What had awakened Dawn was no bad dream, he felt sure. And whatever it was, he was certain it would reappear. Not that night—it had been surprised; clearly it wanted to catch them unawares, or it wouldn’t have approached Dawn as she slept. Nobody in the house would sleep soundly that night, too keyed up and cautious from the incident. But it would return. Eventually.
Spike there for only a few hours, and already the house was in a panic. Perhaps it wasn’t fair to blame him. Perhaps.
Giles sighed. He wished he could talk to Olivia, but they’d drifted apart; he hadn’t to her spoken in ages. Nothing was as it should be; everything was so fragmented, their lives no more stable than they had been on the Hellmouth. Like they were in a holding pattern.
No, not that exactly. It was as if they were waiting for the other shoe to drop. The battle that had destroyed Sunnydale had not set them free as they had all hoped—especially Buffy, he knew. She still patrolled, she and Dawn still bickered, she and Giles still looked at each other across a gulf. The only real difference was the zip code. And now, again, horrors sought them out.
Giles glanced down at the ancient text in front of him with atypical disinterest. It was a beautiful specimen, hand-scribed in a monastery in Italy. It had been found still-open in the scriptorium by pilgrims hoping to view the femur of Santa Lucia, the prized relic of the place, only to find the monastery deserted. The entire order had fallen, one by one, when the Black Death unfurled.
Surely it was natural that men, so isolated from women, from their families, from what anyone else would consider normal, would create fantastical images. Even the letters were so embellished as to be considered art. The images in the text could enthrall, but they had also been known to chill Giles to his marrow. Never so much as now, as the twining snakes that formed the first letter on the page twitched, and then began to writhe.
Giles blinked and the page was still, the movement merely a trick of the light.
Giles shook his head and shut the book. It was undoubtedly time to turn in.
It had been a long day, and he was anxious to leave it behind.
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