Chapter 36: Rematch

The DeSoto veered north onto Sycamore, her tires complaining about it a bit.  Spike yanked her gearshift and then blasted the volume on the tape deck as high as it would go to drown the rusty old bitch out.

Whatever happened to dear old Lenny?

The great Elmyra, and Sancho Panza?

Whatever happened to the heroes?

Whatever happened to the heroes?

He started drumming the wheel, and then pounding it and then bashing out the beat on the hardtop with a fist.   The wind howled through the open window as he put the hammer down, gunning for seventy or eighty maybe and guessing that anything above that would gut the trans’ like a wiggling carp.  He caught a glimpse of Buffy beside him, frantically twisting dials and punching buttons.  Somehow, the song got even louder.

Whatever happened to all the heroes?

All the Shakespear-oes?

They watched their Rome burn

Whatever happened to the heroes?

Whatever happened to the heroes?

Something bit his thigh.  He looked down and the girl’s hand was there, pinching up a hunk of skin, and then he looked up and her mouth was opening and closing – her trying to talk and looking fairly narked, but with no bloody sound coming out whatsoever.  “Eh?” he yelled.  “What’s that?!”

No more heroes any more!

No more heroes any more!

Her dainty little fist popped out like a champagne cork, then – a short, steaming jab, dead center.   There was a noise like a glass door slamming and a hiss of feedback, and then Spike’s poor defenseless stereo died a quick and ignoble death.

"Oy!"

“Hey, check it out!” she chirped.  “No more that-song anymore!”

“Someone spent a lot of money on that radio, you know?!”

“Oh please.  You so stole that thing.”

“Yeah, well,” he shrugged. “Didn’t say it was me, love.”  There was a beat, and then they both began to chuckle, low and delicious, everything suddenly feeling very good.  Feeling good wasn’t normally on the menu for them, and historically it had never lasted all that long.  But whenever it happened, every moment was like a century passing.

“Who were those idiots, anyway?” she asked.

“You serious?  That was the bloody Stranglers!”

She scowled.  “The Bloody Stranglers?”

“Well, no,” he clarified.  “Just The Strangers, pet.  They were pioneers.”

“Of what?  Migraine research?”

He eased off the pedal a bit, lit a smoke.  “You’re just uncultured, Slayer, that’s your problem.”    The girl shot him one of her adorable little ah looks, and he felt his rotten old bones melt back into the upholstery.  He wondered again if she knew how easy she could do it.  How he was just helpless.

He gunned through the junction at Main with nary a sideways glance.   It wasn’t like there were any cars driving around, let alone coppers.   Then, another piebald swerve at Third Street that sounded like some great, savage bird swooping down for a four-legged snack.  This bit was fun – driving around in the Watcher’s little dollhouse world without any mincing wankers and blinkin’ lights to slow you down.  The car even felt like it handled different here, like it was an arm or a leg that he could just push along with a thought. 

Buffy was still getting used to the place, of course.  There was a certain dazed look about her as she watched the scenery flip by, like someone dreaming with her eyes open.  The wind was blowing all through her hair, sending fine yellow strands over her face that she kept sweeping aside with one perfect hand, like God’s own angel strumming her harp.   The motion was mesmerizing, charming him like a cobra.   He felt the automated urge to say something stupid.

Don’t, he thought.  Just leave well enough alone, for once…

“Well,” Spike heard himself saying, regardless, “since you’ve broken our little music box, maybe we could… you know…”

She sighed.  “I told you already.  Not while you’re driving.”

“No, no, not that.”  He used a free hand to ruffle his hair, had a thought about shoving it down his own throat.   “I jus’ meant.  Talk.”

“Talk?”

He felt mortified suddenly.  “Forget it.”

“No, it’s okay.  What do you want to…”

He screeched to a stop in the middle of the street and cut the motor dead.  Nearby, the marquis of the Sun Theater beamed back at him scornfully, her old enemy star bathing the sidewalk in a neon yellow glow.  Spike had taught himself to work the projector one evening, more out of boredom than anything else.  He’d been stuck in this damned shoebox for nearly half a year, at that point, and the telly was getting tiresome, always playing the same shows every night.   So, it was more of a project than anything, something to bide the time.  They only had two movies, anyway, and both of them were crap.  Besides which, he had to keep getting up to change the sodding reel.

It wasn’t exactly heaven here.  But a few hours ago, when he’d caught that first glimpse of her sidling up Revello, and for every bloody moment since…

“I lied,” Spike said.

“About what?”

“There’s no cake,” he said.  “No party either.  Fact is, ain’t much of anything round here, 'cept me.”  He flicked the ciggy out the window, quietly damning himself to Hell.  “Surprise,” he added darkly.

She just looked at him for awhile, then back out the window.  “I figured,“ she said.

“Yeah?  What tipped you off?”

“Well, we’ve been going in circles for about twenty minutes now.  Passed the Bronze three times, too.”

“Well, why didn’t  you say anything?” he snapped, oddly wounded by the notion.  “How come you let me go through with it?”

She shrugged.   “I don’t know.  You seemed so dead set.  Guess I just thought I’d just trust you.”   The T-word jammed into his chest, skewering him like a stake.  “So, you gonna tell me the real deal?  Or will we miss our big reservation at Spago?”

He dropped his head onto the wheel.  Brutal.  “Sorry,” he muttered.  “We had to get out of there, lamb.”

“Why?”

“’Cuz,” he strained, “I felt something.”  They exchanged a familiar look, both of them bidding farewell to their shining moment as that other half of them took over, like a tide rolling up a beach.  It became strictly business again, that old comrades-at-arms bit that he’d long hoped to bury.  Spike grit his teeth and got on with it.   “Felt someone, actually.  In here.  With us.”

Buffy sat there for long moment, nodding and turning it over in her head.  “I watched you die,” she finally said.  “I saw it happen.”

“Yeah, I know.  I was there, love.”

“I thought maybe this was all, I don’t know, some kind of dream.”

“Me too, at first.”  He caught himself lighting up another smoke, barely aware he was doing it.  Spike didn’t really crave it so much, not the way people did.  He just liked what it forced his body to do, the way it made his chest rise and fall. Just like a real little boy.

He told her all about it; how he woke up in the Institute’s bowels with that gonging headache, feeling like he just ate Keith Richards.   He said he didn’t remember much about being dusted – which wasn’t entirely true, but bugger it – and that the next thing he knew he was haunting the byways of the Watcher’s laboratories in non-corporeal form.  “Never could twig how I wasn’t fallin’ through the floor,” he admitted.

Soon afterwards his phantom body had gone wonky, flickering on and off like a faulty bulb, he explained.  He made a deal with old Rupes, and, while his brigade of nancy boy scientists were busy trying to glue Spike’s rotten old atoms back together, the Watcher filled him in about Chicago and Baltimore and Santa Fe.  Told him how Big Red had upped the ante in her little War On Mediocrity.  The old Railroad Spiker would’ve surely howled with envy at the Witch’s mounting body count, but these days the news had just served to make the vampire quietly ill.

The Watcher told him the rest of it, too, he confessed.   Told him about that night in Willow’s bedroom, how Buffy went creeping though the darkness to put out the light once and for all.   Spike fell silent after mentioning this last grim bit, both of them staring at the canvas of the car's windshield and the small, empty world it guarded.

“She’s alive,” she whispered.

He goggled at her in disbelief.  “She’s… How?!”

“How are you?” she shrugged.  “How am I?  Who knows?”

He started nodding, fitting the pieces together.  “That’s why they locked you up in here,” he said.    “She’s come after you.”  An alarm rang off in his head.  “Oh, bloody hell!”

“What?”

He started the car.

***

“What?  What is it?”   Blahs-feratu was acting funny again.   Not Ha Ha Clown funny, the other kind of funny.  So, Xander peeked over the hedge again at the beat up Chrysler – Spike’s preferred mode of transit in the good ol’ days, when he wasn’t busy skulking through the shadows.   It was still parked in the middle of the intersection.  Xander could barely make out two silhouettes through the junker’s grimy rearview window.

“He just marked me,” the vampire said.

“How can you tell?”

“Because I jus’ marked him.”  With that, the DeSoto’s engine flared to life.  The car roared off, streaming black smog in its wake.  They stood to watch as it swerved west onto Hamilton and disappeared.

“You mean?  That was?”

“Yeah.”

“But, Ethan said you couldn't come through the portal unless you were... you know.”

 “Yeah, well, I been you know before,” he shrugged.  “In a way, been you know for a bloody long time.” 

When Spike put it that way – all golden-eyed and fangs akimbo – it made a sort of sense.  He turned and started walking.  Xander followed him, piercingly aware that he’d been doing a lot of that lately.

“So, what now?”  Xander asked.

“Now, I’m goin’ to the factory.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because that’s where I’d take her.”

“Look, we should talk about this first.  Figure out a plan.”

“Said I’m going to the factory.  Not you.”

It was too much.  For the past ten minutes, Xander had been fingering the knife in his jacket.  He’d borrowed it from one of the Magic Box’s display cases, the one Willow used to call the "Please Don’t Touch Museum".   It was a ceremonial dagger of some sort; pearl handled and with a surprising heft for its size.  As he turned it in his grasp, the curved blade flashed white in the moonlight, seeming almost supernaturally sharp.  “Stop,” he said.

The vamp turned mid-stride, squinting at the knife like it was poorly timed joke.

Xander loosened his grip on it some, just so nobody got the wrong idea.  “Look, I know this isn’t what you wanted,” he said.   “It’s not what either of us wanted.  But I’m here.   Same as you.”

“Not the same as me,” Spike growled.  '“Cause you could never do it.  Not even in a dream.  ‘Cuz It’s not in you.”

Unsure why, Xander reached for his eyepatch and gently tugged it off, revealing a scar that was old and not so pleasant.  The look on the vampire’s face shifted as he studied it, the bumps and fangs masking something that was like pity, but colder.

“You don’t know,” Spike protested, almost pleading with him now.  “What you’re getting into.  You don’t know the price.”

“Hey, I’ve paid lots of prices.”  He tucked the knife back into his jacket, but left the eyepatch off, letting a breeze wash over the wound for what felt like the first time in years.  “Premium outlets.  Big markups.”

A tense moment passed.  Finally, Spike began to nod.  “Alright, Harris.  Okay.  You’re in the game.”  The vamp got right up in Xander's face then, the yellow eyes blazing with something more dangerous than fire.   “On one condition.   That you swear – on your other soddin’ eye – you’ll stay as far away from me as possible.”

Xander puzzled over it for a second.  “Now, when you say you, do you mean the other you or, like, the real you?”

“The real me?” the vampire scoffed.  “Xander, we’ve known each other for years.  But believe me when I say, you’ve never met the real me.”

***

Willow sailed through the air on a wave of hot electrons, tasting only poison.  Watcher and Witch exchanged spells like gunfire, the battle quickly filling the chamber with a howling storm of ether.  Giles stood his ground at center stage, his high leather collar flapping like wings around his weathered face.  She flung bolt after bolt – threw everything and the kitchen sink at him – but nothing seemed to break through.

It’s a trick.  He’s tricking you, somehow...

“Verto,” the Watcher shouted.  She felt the air around her cling like a vise again and a second later she was whirling doll-limp along the walls, the Watcher sketching her flight path with little dips of his finger like an orchestra conductor.  Willow's body was still sturdy from the Silex Firmus enchantment, but her armor was starting to wear down.  Before she could halt her momentum with a counter spell, she felt her ribs glance off a gargoyle’s stone elbow, and tasted blood as she went crashing to the floor.

“Feeling smart yet?” Giles boomed, his hands aflame.  “We told you that everything was connected, but it seems you haven’t learned that lesson either.”

An image slashed into her brain: Willow sitting in a grassy field, pulling a flower through the Earth with her soul, Giles speaking to her:

‘In the end we all are who we are, no matter how much we may appear to have changed.’

This wasn’t when it began, of course.  It was possible she wouldn’t ever know the beginning, that lost moment when she first set foot on the path.  Maybe it was the end of that first summer without Buffy.  Those nights came flooding back in now, violent and terrifying and blurred along the edges.  They had all looked to Willow, back then.  All of the sudden, she was Willow the Smart and Willow the Strong.  All that power was wonderful, in ways she couldn’t ever bring herself to admit. 

But the responsibility wasn’t so wonderful.  In fact, it was a little sucky come to think of it.  She recalled how it felt; hung heavy like a millstone around her neck, dragging her into the mud.  Only Buffy Summers was strong enough to carry that burden, she’d realized.  And Buffy Summers was dead.

At first, the resurrection was only a theory, something to kill time between the gang’s bumbling patrols.  She didn’t even tell Tara and Xander about her research.  Didn't say a word until she was sure.  She didn’t want to get their hopes up.  After all, parts of the Rite were fairly hardcore.   They might’ve gotten the the wrong idea.

No, she thought, staggering back to her feet.  They would’ve had the right idea, dummy. 

Giles looked on with grim satisfaction as she enveloped herself in a red cloud of magma.  He wasn’t enjoying this, necessarily, but he seemed profoundly content with the way things were going.  As if to prove it, he sent forth a swarm of crystalline knives.   Willow watched them leap down from a wall one by one and come spinning towards her heart.  She warded them off with a sweep of her arm, and felt another parcel of precious, astral strength seep out of her like air from a balloon.

The Watcher’s strategy seemed simple enough.   He would keep her on the defensive, force her to use up her mystical batteries.   He was trying to whittle her down a little at a time, until she was weak enough… 

Weak enough to kill.

And he can do it, too. 

Because he’s strong.  Because it’s in him.

Hardcore.  The Dark Art was full of hardcore things, you see.  There was nothing warm or fuzzy or Earth Momma about it.   Necromancers didn’t just pull pretty flowers through the soil.  They made pacts and swung deals.  To pull something out of the dirt, you had to put something in.  In the case of the Restoration Rite, a human sacrifice was required.  Tit for Tat.  It was a very old rule. 

Willow couldn’t do it, of course.  Not back then, not when she still had all those super snazzy delusions about being one of The Good Guys.  She wanted her Buffy back, more than anything, but discovered she couldn’t afford the price tag. 

So you cheated, she thought.  You stole.  

She’d never told them about that part.  After all, they were already wavering on the whole What-if-She-Comes-Back-a-Zombie dealie.  And afterward, she assumed she’d gotten away with it.

A freaking deer.  Ha!

Willow thought she was pretty clever, at the time.  And she would’ve gone on thinking this forever had it not been for that afternoon in the café, Jack Turtle dragging her up into the Now and showing her the consequences of her crime. 

She’d broken Everything.  The enormity of this notion was still crippling, all these years later. 

What kind of a monster can break Everything?

Before she could ponder it so much, Giles began talking again, cooking up his next trick.   This time, Willow was determined to play first.  She whispered the words, “multus plura,” and in a flash three carbon copy Willows materialized at either side.  She sent each phony scrambling in a different direction, and used the momentary confusion to make a dash for the stairwell.   It was less than a yard away when she smacked into the barrier, the Watcher’s potent counter-spell setting off a string of bombs in her nervous system.

“Destitus Donec Necis,” Giles explained.  “Are you familiar with it, Willow?”

She let the clones evaporate into mist, scrolling through her inner Wikipedia for the reference.  “It means that it’s powered by your life force,” she said.  “It means I have to kill you to pass it.”

“Very good!  You always were such a thorough student...”     

“Giles, listen to me,” she said.  “We have to stop this.  I’m not who you think I am.”

He chuckled.  “Is this the part where you convince me that the ‘ends justified the means'?  Where you explain why I should join your little rebellion, for the sake of all that is good and wholesome in the world?”

“No,” she gasped, wrestling back tears.   “I know what we’ve done here… the mess your Willow made of this world.  But I’m not here to fight her war.”

He eyed her suspiciously.  The gears seemed to be turning, despite himself.  “You’re here to kill someone I love.  That’s all that matters.”

“No it’s not,” she cried.  “You were right, Giles.  You were right about me.”  She limped towards the old man, palms spread in a gesture of truce.  “I saw what I wanted to see.  I was looking for a scapegoat, a version of Buffy who deserved to die.  And the truth is, I’m the one who deserves it.”

“Don’t come any nearer,” he whispered.

“But it can’t be me,” she pleaded.   “My death won’t fix it...”

“Stay right where you are, or I’ll…”

“Or you’ll kill me.  I get it.   Except, you can’t kill me Giles.  Not yet.  Not until I’ve fixed this.”  She felt something tingling all through her body, the Earth turning under her feet.   “I did a terrible thing, in my world.  Buffy – my Buffy – died, and I brought her back.  There was no sacrifice, Giles.  I didn’t have the nerve…”

A ray of blue light coursed out of the Watcher’s outstretched hand, freezing her where she stood.

“Giles,” she begged, “it’s too late to search, anymore.  It has to be her.  I have to put her back in.”

He shook his head.  “Your lies won’t work on me, Witch.”

“The worlds are all ending,” she pleaded.   “You can feel it.  I know you can…”

“Lying to me.  All you ever do is lie…”

“Giles…”

“No!”  He blasted her with all his strength, the ancient power surging through him like a hurricane.  Willow fell, veering close to the edge of darkness.  She stared in dazed wonder as Rupert’s eyes turned to black pits, filling with the sacred blood.  Veins webbed his face like bright scars, coursing with a brand of rage that Willow recognized all too well.

“We’ve played this game long enough,” he said.  “It’s high time we ended it.”  

***

The books were singing again.  Trilling symphonies and weird, old whale songs.  Fiery serenades and reverent psalms and raucous, clanging overtures to hosts of dead and dying planets.  Nancy set them all free at once, sent them soaring off the shelves with a grand sweep of her arm.   Fluttering constellations of them swirled down into the grand well of the foyer, stirring the air like the arms of a glorious paper galaxy. 

Nancy’s mind browsed through them all at superhuman speeds, absorbing whatever poetry they contained and molding it into physical form.   Bookshelves and benches twisted into a landscape of undiscovered flora and stones carved smooth by alien tides.   The Now’s black form had become like clay in her fingers.   It was getting easier to shape, made suppler by the decomposing flesh of countless realities.

The galaxy of books churned faster and faster, new monsters sagging out from between their white pages like heavy dollops of rain onto the floor of the atrium.  The creatures flowered into adulthood where they fell, their pink and embryonic shapes hardening into ropes of taut white muscle and razor sharp claws.  They were gorgeous in their violent symmetry, the Adam and Eve of a Post-Mortal Age.   Nancy decided to name them the Imperators, and so that’s exactly what they were.   

Before long, her creations were stalking out over the terrain, the concrete transforming to red clay and shattered stone and lush Kentucky Bluegrass under their long, elegant paws.  The Imperators brought Kennedy’s demons low as they found them, the old world's monsters no match for the new one's.   She watched the pair tear one into steaming grey hunks, like two dogs squabbling over a bone.  A moment after it happened, one stood on its haunches on the landing below her, its pink eyes glittering like jewels as it bellowed a wordless sacrament between mother and child.  She smiled down lovingly at it as she ascended into the air.

This is where it begins.  The New World.

And it will be beautiful.   Perfect.

It could use some shade, though...   

Nancy’s fingers began to dance, as though plucking invisible strings.    Down on the floor, the Watcher’s grand stairwells twisted up out of their moorings, shredding remnants of the polished stone there.   They entwined like wefts of yarn in a loom, and a great tree slowly began to take shape at their meeting place.  Black roots as thick around as old wagon wheels lanced into the burgeoning soil, snarling and tangling for eternal purchase there.  Overhead, branches roared out from the cleft of a massive trunk, all manner of sugary fruit erupting along the limbs.   It was a glorious, time-lapsed ballet of botanical magic, a thousand new species just begging to be plucked and tasted and named. 

This was only the beginning, of course.  This was the seedling of the Eternal Garden struggling to be.  The Beast was still on its way, loping quietly down the rows, devouring last season’s fetid yield.  

She wasn't strong enough to survive it, yet.   She still needed the Key, the one pressed into the shape of a mortal and tempered with the Chosen One’s blood.  The Key could unlock the door for her, and let the devil strength of the Slayer flow into her soul once more.  Nancy wouldn’t have to hunt her.  She could sense the one named Dawn was on her way, wriggling up through the bowels beneath the campus like a worm to rain.  Mortal or not, the Key had mortal feelings, and suffered from the same old diseases.

Nancy alighted on the elegant Scholar’s Stone which moments ago had been a computer terminal.  Near the foot of the rock, Frank Grange was stirring, frozen on death’s ledge by Dr. Stark’s ministrations.  A stump of a wrist swayed back at her for a moment, captivating her with its wonderful futility.  

Dear Old Francis needs a hand, she thought.

Let’s give him one, poor dear.

She lifted the man up onto the tree’s bone-hard bark.   A dozen vines snaked down to meet him, embracing him like a lover’s arms.   One of his tired brown eyes cracked open, the pupil glittering back at her from the bottom of a deep, deep lake.  His lower lip was trembling, a thick strand of blood dangling down from the tip like honey as he tried to speak.   

 “Shhhhh,” she said.   “Don’t try to talk.   Y’all’s suffering is almost over, mistuh general, suh.  It won’t be long, now.”

***

They clambered down into the access tunnel one by one.  It was slow going, given their strange cargo.  After a bit of debate, they finally settled on lowering Drusilla down with a rope.  The monster giggled all the way down, her starry eyes dancing as Faith dropped the slack and let her plummet the last ten feet.  “Whoops!” she hollered down sarcastically.  “My butterfingers, yo!”

It was about a fifteen minute march to the main terminal underneath the campus Command Center.  They mostly walked in silence, Giles leading the way.  Occasionally he’d mutter something about the “structural integrity” of so-and-so, which Buffy took to mean that the place was falling apart.  A fine craquelure scarred the tunnel’s brown, metal ribs, and every so often, a soft tremor seemed to wobble up through the soles of their feet and into their shins.  Faith kept a close watch over Drusilla, punching her along whenever the vamp stopped to admire some imaginary detail.

“Look at the lovely fawn,” the vampire crooned.  “Look at the way she swims with three legs.”  

It suddenly occurred to Buffy that Drusilla had made Faith, almost as surely as she’d made Spike.  The soul hadn’t seemed to change this vamp much, but at the moment Buffy Summers felt like she understood less about how souls worked than anyone in the world.   You might as well have asked her how cell phones work, or how a "loan amortization schedule" works.  Souls were Blank Stare Territory, these days.

As they crossed the junction underneath the south gate, Giles began to talk turkey again.  He and Ethan exchanged thoughts about the alternate universe, and discussed whether it was possible to help matters along there.  It all sounded a little too technical to her – for instance, she didn’t even want to guess what a Calabi-Yau Manifold was – but the general thrust of it seemed to be that Bizarro Dimension Rayne wasn’t on the T-Mobile Friends and Family Plan anymore, and that standard rates now applied.

They wouldn’t speak a word of the other spell, or course.  Not in front of Faith.   It was likely, Buffy realized, that the brunette wouldn’t be on board with that one, whether she kept her powers or not.   That last part was a big fat question mark.  Rayne seemed to believe that since Faith’s powers were acquired the old fashioned way, she’d become all Slayerly again when the rite was complete.

Then again, this was Ethan Rayne they were talking about.  If he told Buffy that water was wet, she’d ask for a second opinion.

Suddenly: footsteps.  They echoed up the west tunnel for a moment and then stopped, their owners turning palpably sly.   Giles took the time to exchange an anxious look with her, then he was moving, dragging Drusilla into the mouth of a large, squat ventilation shaft with Ethan tiptoeing in quickly behind.

There were eight enemies, lean and pretty in identical gray jumpsuits.   Watching them draw near, Buffy instantly recalled the Slayer in the Roman Pantheon, the way her eyes were so full of murder that they seemed to glitter through the darkness.

“Looks like class is in session, Buff,” said Faith. “You remember how this part goes?”

A tall, tan chick tried first, launching her entire body like a harpoon.  Buffy looped sideways and fired out a sizzling right hand that sent the girl flying.  A cartoon-y bong rang out when her head hit an air duct, then she flopped to the floor.

“It’s coming back to me,” Buffy quipped.

The fight was as fierce as it was short.  Kennedy’s Murder Patrol seemed to be making all their mistakes in slow motion – bobbing when they should’ve been weaving, weaving when they should’ve been ducking.  Faith moved like something electric, whipping a kick into the side of one girl’s jaw with such force that it spun her like a pinwheel.  Buffy took on two and then three at a time, feeding them a whirling, painful meal of knifing forearms and crunching knees.  At some point, one of them cried out – not in pain, but in terror.   The little psycho was terrified of them, and the notion gave Buffy a weird little thrill.

When they’d winnowed their foes numbers down to one, Faith grabbed the last girl by the throat and slammed her up against a steel pylon.  She was a small, freckled thing, with a strawberry mullet that almost screamed "Heartland, U.S.A."

"Well, that was fun,” Faith smirked.  “Guess what happens now?”

She watched Giles and Ethan emerge from their cover, dragging Drusilla between them like a drunken college buddy.  The vampire was swooning, eyes rolling to white in her porcelain skull.  The Watcher surveyed the battlefield, and shot Buffy a look of guarded pride.

“Please, don’t kill me,” Ms. Heartland gasped, wriggling and jerking like a fish in Faith’s iron grip.  The brunette giggled back at her, loving it.

“Well, I guess that depends,” said Buffy, as blackly as she could.

“Depends on what?”

Buffy peeled the two-way radio from the lapel of the girl’s uniform.  “On how helpful you’re willing to be.”