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A/N sorry about the delay, I posted this on B/S central then forgot to put it here. On the plus side you get two chapters now :) Thanks to April as always
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The hunger is not gone. It still gnaws at her gut, still rages its incessant demands in her throat. She realises now that the hunger will never be gone, that she will never be sated. But the cold pig's blood in her stomach has eased the desperation of it a little and she can see something beyond that clawing, red need.

She is calm, reasoned. She feels the pain in her gut, the raging of the dark, slithering thing within her as it throws the full weight of its corruption against the righteous fortress of her essence, but she is removed from it, almost serene in her cocoon of unnatural calm.

One thought is clear. One ever-repeating phrase that her mind declares over and over: "I am that which should not be." This handful of simple words is the only certainty she understands. Later, the thought will bring with it despair, perhaps again the raging madness to which she woke, but, for the present, they are merely a curious and inescapable truth. "I am that which should not be."

Her cotton wool mind has enough clarity now for her to understand that she entered into this rashly. With the arrogance and indestructible vanity of youth. She had thought this act a noble sacrifice of love, something heroic and courageous. Now she realises it was not; it was ugly and foolish and maybe even at its core selfish. Certainly it was ill-advised.

He is coming back. She can sense him moving towards her. He is above her now and to her right, but he is moving this way, and that thought brings a warmth to her belly that reheated animal blood could not. With his return she feels the thing within her focus its will on him. He is more necessary to it than the violence and destruction it craves, even more compelling than its red raw thirst. He is sire and he is coming to her again.

He is also Spike, but that seems less important now. That she loved him as a man just days ago is irrelevant: this is something more than love. Love is a fragile, transitory thing compared with what she feels now. She is his, bound eternally to him. Or is this something less? There is no free will in this, no choice. She has sold herself to him for a few sips of his blood. Abandoned the soul he loved so much in her and subjugated herself to him, his grateful slave and possession. As this temporary coherence of thought slips away, to be replaced by the mindless peace of sedation, she thinks briefly that perhaps he will hate her for that most of all.

………………………………

Carlotta is unmarked and quiet when they returned. True to his word, the boy had kept the watcher and his witch away from her, and true to their word they have been able to calm her.

She watches him through her lashes, eyes hazy with magic and intense with devotion. She watches him as he moves tentatively towards her, afraid to move to fast, to make a noise or gesture that will send her again into screaming insanity.

"Anjo?" Even that whispered question sounds loud and jarring in the stillness of the basement. "Lotta?"

She bows her head and lets out a low submissive growl. It is instinct, an almost involuntary reaction to her sire's presence, and he struggles to beat back the rising tide of despair. He tries to focus on his love for the woman she was, but his demon too is reacting to their kinship. She is his, she exists because he created her, she is unformed clay and he the potter. He takes a step back. This is not how it should be, she had been his love, his saviour, the only woman in the world who could have rescued him from the emotional sinking sand that was loving Buffy Summers, the only person since his gentle mother who loved him simply for himself.

Buffy is talking with the witch in agitated whispers. He could easily hear them if he were not so consumed with the knowledge of losing Lotta. Ironic how it is in the moment that he recognises she is his forever that he realises he has truly lost her.

"Steph won't last more than an hour, Buffy." Willow's voice rises and he can't help but hear them now. "We have to do the spell now."

"Willow, we can't." Buffy's voice is torn, her desire to spare him warring with the gravity of the slayer situation. There is no need for her to suffer this moral dilemma. Nothing will change within the next few hours or days that will make this any easier. It is time for them to reap the rewards of Carlotta's sacrifice.

He holds out his hand without looking at the girls, and it is Buffy who understands, always seems to understand. She places the syringe, warm from having spent the last few minutes clutched in Willow's moist palm, in his hand and steps back, ushering Willow and the boy out of the basement. This is something he must do alone and, again, she understands that.

Lotta growls weakly in her chest when his hand touches the cold skin of her arm, and he almost shrinks away from the clammy lifelessness of it. How could she bear to touch him before? How had she, so full of warmth and life, been able to stand the feel of his dead skin against her own?

He ignores the repulsed shudder that runs through his body and strokes the underside of her elbow. "All right, pet," he coos softly, and is at once vividly reminded of taking care of Dru all those years. "Just a little prick." He slides the needle into the clotted vein, watching her intently for signs of fear or distress. She doesn't seem to notice the needle as she slips deeper into the witch's magical sedation.

A small frown flashes across her forehead, but the expression is gone in an instant and her face is blank as she blinks her vacant eyes once and tells him in a soft, unemotional voice, "I am that which should not be."

…………………………..

The spell had worked. With a few drops of Carlotta's demonised blood, Willow has stripped the girls of their power just as easily as she had granted it two years before. Almost immediately, the few slayers still in the early stages of the disease had been cured, many more began to show improvement, and three of the sixteen coma victims were awake within the hour.

She had entertained the hope that the spell would also be Carlotta's saving, that she too would be robbed of the slayer within. She'd be a vampire then, but at least she would be sane. Of course it hadn't.

Spike had been subdued when she'd joined him again in the basement as he watched over Carlotta with forlorn eyes. Numbly wiping away the thin line of spittle that occasional ran over her sagging lower lip and onto her chin, or adjusting her uncoordinated body in its chains enough that he could make her comfortable on the old cot they had salvaged for her from one of the hotel's outbuildings.

His touches had been gentle, and his softly murmured words: "There, luv, let's clean that up for you." "Come on now, pet. Lie you down here, all comfy like." "There, much better. Pretty as a picture," had been full of heartbreaking compassion.

But it had been impossible not to notice that he never let his eyes linger on her face, that for all the gentleness and sympathy of his hands when he touched her, there was no tenderness in the gestures. Gone was the reverent care with which he had handled her dead body, replaced with an almost professional detachment that no amount of murmured endearments could conceal. She also noticed that he didn't once call her by name, or his preferred "Anjo."

She had offered her support, silently asking him with a gentle brush of her fingers over his hand if he wanted her to stay. He had shaken his head and given her the glimmer of a smile that didn't get near his eyes and she had left him to his grief.

"Another girl woke up." Angel's voice pulls her attention back to the present and she frowns as she tries to focus on what he is saying.

"Who?" She doesn't look at him as they both potter about their room, going through the robotic routine of getting ready for bed.

"I think Willow said her name was Cassy."

Cassy: rude, lazy Cassy who had always treated her calling with contempt. Sulky, unhelpful and graceless Cassy is awake, and is going to be fine. Well, isn't that fan-fucking-tastic. She wasn't even half the slayer—half the person—Carlotta was. Cassy is going to be fine. Carlotta is chained in a dank basement dribbling on herself, but Cassy is going to be fine.

"Great," she bites out, not bothering to hide her disdain. Wow, isn't life just the fairest thing?

She sees him approach in the mirror of her dressing table, so she is ready when his hands land on her shoulders and she can clamp down hard on the instinctive desire to tense under his touch. She has been neglecting him. She knows that since Spike came back, even before this awful business with Carlotta, she has been treating him badly. She remembers how, confused and insecure by the arrival of Spike and his beautiful girlfriend, she had blown hot and cold, one minute clinging and desperate for reassurance, the next withdrawn and crabby.

Since Carlotta's death. Can she call it that? She feels she must. She saw her body, after all. She has barely spent more than an hour or two with Angel, so preoccupied has she been with Spike's needs. So when his touch on her neck turns sensuous in intent, she fights down the urge to pull away and turns to face him with a welcoming smile.

"You okay, baby?" he asks, soft and concerned, his voice and expression inviting her to unburden on him, to let him in, to let him help. She can't. This terrible thing is Spike's and his alone, so she simply nods sadly and allows him to lay his lips over hers.

It is strange, and she has thought this for a long time, that Angel seems so much smaller than Spike. She can't remember now if it has always been this way, if in Sunnydale all those years ago, arrogant brash Spike had seemed to fill the room, with his bravado and gruesomely imaginative threats, while deep soulful Angel had blended almost invisibly into the shadows.

Certainly she has felt this way since Angel's return to humanity, and she feels it now as he lays her back across their bed and covers her body with his own. He is small and fragile and human. She could break him so easily in accidental passion, but she is by now so used to restraining herself that he is probably quite safe.

She long ago stopped fantasising about Spike when she and Angel are together. Between Spike's demise in the hellmouth and Angel's Shanshu, she had taken a few lovers, most notably The Immortal, and had never once slept with one of them without wishing, fantasising, that it were Spike in her bed. But with Angel it had seemed wrong to give herself over to the comfort of those illusions. Not just unfair to Angel, whom she had always loved, but somehow a disservice to Spike. He had, after all, hated Angel with a fiery passion.

So she had learned to keep her fantasies for late night patrols when she would slip into some abandoned crypt that smelt of old earth and let her own hands, chilled by the night air, become his against her skin.

But Spike is back, real and alive, and she has felt his lips on hers more than once since his return, has felt his cold hands skimming—oh so disappointingly briefly—over her skin. It is impossible now not to think of him as Angel moves within her, his back hunched so that he can reach down and trail uncomfortably hot kisses along her throat.

Impossible not to remember how much better Spike's slight body fitted in the cradle of her own slim hips. How when they lay together she could look into his stormy eyes rather that find her nose pressed against a bulky chest. Impossible not to marvel at how small this huge man feels in comparison to her skinny 5'10" vampire.

She feels him begin to tire and can't help but notice the unease in his eyes when she flips them over with an effortless flick of her powerful hips. She slows her pace, going deliberately, frustratingly, slow and gentle, and is too slow to banish her adulterous wish that it could be Spike beneath her.

He comes without warning and pulls her body down against him with a sigh. Surely he knows that something is wrong, has been wrong from the start even when she had been so sure that all her wishes had come true. She sighs in response and realises that she will have to let him go.

He is a good man and he deserves better than half a heart. He deserves a real love, not this illusion of memory and affection. Tonight she will let him hold her; for once, she will enjoy the warmth of his body rather than retreat from it. Tomorrow she will let him go.


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A/N sorry about Buffy and Angel doing it (shudder). Disturbing but necessary I'm afraid.

Thanks to everyone who reviewed





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