Andrew stretched luxuriantly in bed. For all the excitement the night before he’d slept well, and that was what really mattered—what could a person do if he didn’t sleep well? And if anything more had happened, they would have awoken him—right?
Right?
The house was kind of quiet, wasn’t it? Like nobody was up, or moving. Or maybe even breathing. Usually Giles was puttering around, clinking his teapot or something, and Dawn was getting ready for school and singing along to the radio. But now, not a sound.
Could whatever-it-was have returned? Snuck back in the dark of night to complete its evil deeds? Killing all but him, so only he was left to tell the tale, a lonely survivor meant to wander in misery? Leaving the house drenched in blood, an eternal reminder that they’d been foolish to disregard it?
Or maybe it was still there.
“Oh my god,” Andrew breathed, reaching below the bed to pull out his shiny new baseball bat. The others didn’t like him to handle real weapons that had points or edges, but everyone was pretty much okay with the bat. Now it was the only thing standing between him and … it.
Andrew tried not to make any noise as he slipped from his room into the hall. Still nothing to be heard, nothing to be seen. The household was in a state of complete stillness, like the calm after a great battle, and he was the only soldier who yet stirred. And into the yawning—“Aghhh!” Andrew shrieked, tripping over the dufflebag abandoned outside Spike’s room.
The door swung open, and Spike glared down at him. After a moment Buffy appeared behind Spike, frowning. Then she was talking, but Andrew couldn’t hear anything. She was moving her lips, but nothing broke through to him. He squinted, he concentrated, he tried extra hard to hear—nothing.
He was deaf.
Dear god, he was doomed to walk in silence, condemned to live in a world devoid of—oh, wait! Andrew reached up to feel his ears and sighed with profound relief; he’d forgotten that he’d put earplugs in the night before. Andrew pulled the foam out of his ears, and the sounds of the household filtered in.
“—so are you hurt or not?” Buffy finished impatiently.
“I’m fine,” he assured her, clambering to his feet. “We’re having waffles today, right?”
“Yeah,” said Buffy. “That’s what you and Dawn asked for last night.”
“Okay, then—oh, everybody’s still alive, right?”
“Uh—I think so,” Buffy said.
“That’s good, then,” said Andrew with satisfaction, and disappeared around the corner, humming.
The two stared after him. “What was that all about?” asked Spike, bemused.
Buffy rolled her eyes. “It’s Andrew being Andrew,” she sighed.
Spike snorted. “Good to know some things never change.”
“Good? I guess that’s one theory.”
Spike studied her serious face and wondered what she was thinking. She’d come to him the night before, needy, wanting comfort. And wanting to give some, too. They’d held each other, that was all, but he was still … him, right? It was one thing for them to share a bed when all the other rooms were crowded, but here? Now? Maybe she didn’t want anyone to know. Maybe he was back to being her secret.
“Want me to get the boy?”
“Why?” Buffy asked absently.
“Tell him to keep quiet,” Spike explained a little testily. Why was she playing dumb like that? She knew what he meant.
Buffy laughed. “Keep Andrew quiet? That would require serious threats or possibly a tongue-ectomy. Don’t bother.”
“Then everybody’ll know—”
“Know what?”
“That you were in my room,” he pointed out.
“So?”
“So people will know,” he said again.
“What people?”
“I mean like Dawn, and Xander, and Giles—you know, the people you didn’t want to know anything about us,” he said dryly.
“Well, it’s a couple years too late for that,” she said practically.
Fine, then. Spike shrugged. “Not like we were doing anything worth talking about last night anyway,” he dismissed.
Okay, that stung a little. “Yeah … well, not that’s it’s any of their business,” qualified Buffy.
“Oh, so you’d prefer not to tell them?”
“I said it doesn’t matter,” Buffy said impatiently.
“Never did,” Spike muttered under his breath.
Buffy rolled her eyes. God, he could sulk. “I mean, it’s okay if Andrew tells them, and we’re not going to go down there and say, ‘Don’t worry! All we did is sleep!’ That’s our business.”
Spike eyed her speculatively. Didn’t mind if any of them thought they were shagging their brains out all night? That didn’t sound right. In fact, he felt as if he’d slipped into the Bizarro World, and—Christ, was that a “Seinfeld” reference? Or Superman? Either way, he’d obviously spent so much time around the Scoobies that something irreversible had happened. Horrible and irreversible. “God, I’m a lifer,” he muttered.
Buffy crinkled her nose at him. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” he mumbled.
***
Willow tapped one finger against the return key of her laptop. She’d come over as soon as Buffy called and told her about Dawn’s little adventure the night before. Well, not really adventure so much as disturbing dream, or maybe extremely scary encounter with the supernatural. The jury was still out, but Willow was grateful to be helping again. When she was across town, it made her feel like she wasn’t a part of things anymore. And there were so many fewer problems in Santa Rita than there were in Sunnydale, what with the Hellmouth and all, that her magic skills were getting kind of rusty.
Of course, thanks to school, her computer skills were back up to par. Well, way above par, but who was keeping track?
So far Spike was voting incubus, which Giles said didn’t exist. Giles said Traylor demon, which had never been seen in the Western Hemisphere. Personally, Willow was thinking bad dream, although she didn’t want to say anything until they’d investigated further. “And nobody else saw or heard anything?” Silence greeted her question. “Okay, then—”
“I’m sure I imagined it.”
Everybody turned in surprise as Giles muttered, almost to himself.
“Something happened?” Buffy asked a little apprehensively.
“No, no,” Giles dismissed, pulling off his glasses and giving them a self-conscious polish. “Last night—I was simply tired….”
“What’s the what, G-Man?” asked Xander.
Giles sighed. “I stayed up to continue researching and became fatigued. Then the script on the page seemed a trifle … odd, so I decided it was high time to turn in. That’s all there was to it, really.”
“Odd how?” asked Dawn. “I mean, you wouldn’t have said anything if you really thought it was nothing.”
Spike smirked when Giles glared at Dawn. Yeah, give it to him, Bit! That’s my girl.
“The letters … seemed to shift a little.”
“Shift how?” Willow asked.
“It seemed to twist. Slither. Like a snake.”
“Why didn’t you wake me?” demanded Buffy.
“Because it was nothing—after a moment it returned to normal, and I decided to retire. It was just my imagination,” Giles concluded somewhat more forcefully than necessary. “Like—” he broke off, but it was clear what he’d intended to say.
“Like me?” asked Dawn, a little hurt. “Like what I saw?”
“Hey, nobody’s saying anything right now about whether that was real or not,” Buffy said swiftly, sending Giles a warning glance. She’d really enjoyed thinking that what happened in Dawn’s room was just a bad dream, but what Spike had said about primus—uh, incubus, and what Giles had said about that parasite whatever-it-was was all pretty creepy. And Giles, Mr. Rational himself, seeing something the night before? Come on, how often did a bunch of them see something and it was all just a big coincidence? About never.
“Yeah, this is—geez, this is not great,” said Willow, her forehead crinkled with worry. “And nobody else saw anything, right?”
Across the table Xander fidgeted. Willow caught the movement and knew he must be unhappy that things like this were happening again; there was a lot he missed about Sunnydale, but she was pretty sure that ghosties and ghoulies weren’t among them.
“I did say the book was probably just a result of my extreme tiredness,” protested Giles.
“Yeah. Because these things are so often just nothing,” Kennedy said scornfully.
“I flatter myself that I have a little experience in this realm,” returned Giles tolerantly. “Rushing to make conclusions can lead to significant mistakes. I think it’s safe to say that anyone seeing a connection between those is reaching.”
“Yeah, incubi don’t really care much about making text squiggly,” Spike agreed. “They’re looking more to get themselves a bit of—” he broke off, realizing the sentence was going someplace he didn’t want to imagine Dawn. “Uh, intimate relations leading to the family way.”
“‘The family way’?” repeated Dawn. “My god, that’s so lame. What, are you a hundred?”
“Well actually, I’m a little more—”
“For the third time, incubi are a myth,” Giles gritted.
Willow didn’t notice the byplay; something about what Dawn and Giles had said bothered her. Taken individually, sure, they just seemed like dreams or tired eyes or whatever, but together? Both the same night … it reminded her of something. Something they’d seen before. It niggled at her, just beyond her consciousness. It was there … there….“I’ve got it!” exclaimed Willow. “Thaumogenesis!”
The others swung to face her. “I don’t believe I’m familiar with that term,” said Giles, frowning.
“Oh, thaumogenesis!” repeated Xander. Giles sent him a stern look, and Xander puffed up a little. It wasn’t like he had one over on Giles often, so he had to make the most of it.
“What’s ‘thaumogenesis’?” demanded Kennedy.
“It’s no biggie, really,” dismissed Dawn. “Easy fix. Unless it makes you breathe fire. Then you might need a lozenge.”
Xander laughed. “Yeah, that was the scariest I’ve ever seen you—except when you’re screaming at us to get out of your room; there’s pretty much nothing scarier than that.”
“Latin, with a Greek root,” mused Giles to himself, disturbed the children were so familiar with something he’d never heard of—something that didn’t involve obnoxious, wild-haired layabouts who liked to pretend they knew more than three chords. “It can’t be that significant, surely, or else I would—”
“Oooh, you breathed fire?” Andrew asked Dawn, impressed. “Did you burn anything up?”
“No, I mostly—”
“What is thaumogenesis?” repeated Kennedy, her voice rising a little.
“Thaumogenesis sounds like it should be cold, not hot,” observed Andrew.
“No, it was really cool—I mean, not cool in a cold kind of way, cool in a strange-and-neat kind of way. And Xander got these crazy eyes and a deep voice—”
“Excuse me, my voice was already deep,” interrupted Xander. “Just not as demonic and Darth Vader-y. Mine’s more a deep, normal, very manly man kind of voice.”
“Would one of you please explain what thaumogenesis is?” Kennedy shouted in frustration. The others quieted down at her outburst, embarrassed.
“Oh. Sorry,” said Willow, her cheeks red. “It means a hitchhiker followed Spike back from the great beyond.”
“What? You’re saying it’s my fault?” Spike protested. “Not likely.”
“It’s nobody’s fault,” Buffy reassured him. “It’s the same thing that happened when I came back, remember?”
Spike’s mouth compressed into a thin line. “Wasn’t precisely kept in the loop back then,” he said tightly. “You telling me this same thing happened before?” Jesus, something went wrong with her return? Why didn’t anyone tell him?
You know why, he thought bitterly. You were just muscle to the lot of them. Since when do they tell the underlings all the upstairs doings?
“Buffy, are you saying there were similar occurrences when you were resurrected?” asked Giles, disturbed. They’d never told him—never even hinted that there had been any problems beyond the immediate challenge of raising her. Willow had given him some blithe explanation about an urn and a snake and magicks she had no business dealing in, but she’d never suggested there were any problems after that. Not until Buffy admitted she’d actually been in heaven had Willow allowed that the resurrection had gone other than perfectly.
Buffy shrugged. “It was your basic monster-of-the-week,” she dismissed. “Wham, bam, dead demon, ma’a—Giles,” she corrected herself.
“What does it want?” Giles rapped out, turning to Willow.
“Well, it wants to stay around. ‘Cause being here’s better than being in hell. I guess.”
Xander laughed. “Hey, when we get through with it, it’ll wish we’d just sent it to hell. It’ll pray for hell when we’re done with it. Hell, it’ll pray for Oxnard.”
Giles sent him a quelling glance. “Are you quite finished?”
Xander considered for a moment. “Well—um—yeah. ‘Cause let’s face it—nobody deserves Oxnard.”
“It followed Spike out of hell?” Giles specified.
“What makes you think I was in hell?” challenged Spike, irate—as if he himself hadn’t assumed he was going to hell.
Giles gritted his teeth. “I beg your pardon.” To Willow: “It followed him back from the dead?”
“Yeah. Well, no, not exactly,” admitted Willow. “It’s like a byproduct of resurrection. The natural order is being cheated by Spike returning to life, so this is the price.”
“Some price,” Kennedy said in dismay.
A ghost of a smile flitted across Xander’s face. “Some people would say it’s a gift with purchase.” Dawn, sitting next to Xander, squeezed his hand.
“So how do we get rid of it?” asked Spike. Should he offer to leave? It was the gentlemanly thing to do, right? Ugh. Sometimes it had been easier to be a demon, since nobody had expected anything of him. Nobody was surprised when he did the selfish thing then. It made things easier.
Of course, it made other things much, much harder.
“We don’t have to do anything,” Willow assured him. “It’ll dissipate naturally after enough time has passed.”
“How much time?” asked Dawn. “I mean, not that I don’t enjoy waking up and being threatened and everything, but, uh … how long?”
Willow glanced down. “I’m not really sure,” she admitted nervously. “Remember, the demon became kind of—well, it—we had to—”
“I killed it,” Buffy interrupted baldly. “It decided to be a little more proactive in the big evil department, and I cut its head off.”
Giles sat back a little, disturbed. “So it is capable of doing damage to humans, not merely frightening them?”
“Did a pretty good job on me before Willow and Tara softened it up for me,” said Buffy.
“So if you don’t kill it, it eventually disappears?” specified Giles.
Willow opened her mouth to mention the little “but” clause with the demon—the demon became permanent if it killed the person whose resurrection created it—but before she could speak, Buffy was nodding and telling Giles, “That’s the sitch.”
Willow sent Buffy a look, and Buffy sent one right back. We’ll talk later, it said plainly.
Willow frowned, and wondered what Buffy was up to.
***
Spike was the only one who saw Kennedy slip away. She drew further and further back from the others as they talked and squabbled and joked, until finally she just wasn’t there anymore.
He completely understood the impulse.
He stayed for a few more minutes, listening to the Scoobies go ‘round and ‘round they way they always did—the way they had long before he met them. Then he melted away, unnoticed as Kennedy.
She jumped when the back door squeaked. “Want a smoke?” Spike offered, holding his pack of cigarettes out to Kennedy, sitting in the back porch swing.
She wrinkled her entire face in disdain. “Eww, no!”
Spike leaned against the porch railing and studied her angry face. “Getting a little thick in there for you, was it?”
“You think I’d be used to it by now. Scoobies, Scoobies, rah rah rah. This happened two years ago, three years ago, five years ago, let’s refer to it in shorthand. Hell, let’s refer to it in Phoenician,” she said bitterly. “Everybody who really matters knows it all already, right?”
Spike nodded philosophically. “It wasn’t so bad this time—Giles didn’t know what they were talking about either. Most times it’s even worse.”
Kennedy snorted in agreement.
“I would tell you it’ll change, but that’d be a crock. They’re bonded with industrial-strength epoxy—when they’re not trying to kill each other, that is. They formed their little club years ago, and the rest of us are just visiting; you either accept it or hit the road, ‘cause they’re not going to change.”
“Some choice,” muttered Kennedy in disgust. They sat there in silence for a few minutes, absorbing their status as outsiders—visitors to the Scooby circle, temporary no matter how long they were around. No matter what they did, how much they helped.
“You know what’s the worst?” he asked absently.
Kennedy shook her head.
“It’s that, after awhile, you won’t mind it so much. Then you’ll start not hating them completely. Then you think they wouldn’t be half bad, if they took the sticks out of their asses every so often, and then pretty soon, you catch yourself thinking like one of them. Talking like one of them, brain-dead, vocabulary-stunted California zombies that they are. And then you think, god, what’s happened to me? I’m one of them! And let me tell you, love—it’ll be the worst day of your life,” he finished, his cigarette burning down to the filter—had to think of his health now that he had functioning lungs and all. No more flavorful, unfiltered cigs for him, oh no, just filtered pablum appropriate only for babies and invalids.
He ground out the remains of the cigarette, thoroughly disgusted with himself.
Kennedy eyed him skeptically. “You know, Spike? I don’t think you have anything to worry about.”
Spike looked hopeful for a moment before resignation covered his face. “You’re just saying that,” he said forlornly. He could tell when his fate was sealed; it wasn’t like he didn’t have experience being a useless git, after all.
It was a compromise, wasn’t it? Got to be him, be Spike. Or be with her. Be hers.
He’d made his choice a long ago. Hadn’t been him ever since he let her grab hold of his short hairs way back when, and he’d returned to Sunnydale despite the distinct lack of Dru because she’d wormed her way into his guts. Like trichinosis.
“Spike? We need you,” called Buffy from inside.
Spike smiled faintly. “Right there, love.”
He’d made his choice. He’d make it again in a minute.
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