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Not having slept in a proper bed for so long, Willow didn't wake up until Anya's alarm went off. They took turns in the bathroom and she was forced to wear the leather outfit from the night before again, as there was nothing else for her. She much preferred the baggy t-shirt she'd slept in.

Anya wasn't much for small talk, stating that she needed coffee before she was capable of socializing, which was fine with Willow. When it was time to eat, she was taken across the large open room from the day before and into the corridor leading to the right. They passed a door labeled "Library" and entered the one labeled "Dining Room".

Two long tables stood in the center, one laden with food and the other surrounded by chairs. Faith was already seated with a bowl of cereal, as was another woman who glanced up at her curiously before returning to her corn flakes.

"This is why I get up early," Anya confided. "Most of the others, especially the vampires, usually don't show up for another hour or so. That means I can wake up in relative peace and don't end up snapping somebody's head off." Her tone indicated that it was a joke, but Willow still flinched a little.

Anya directed her to the food and handed her a plate. "Help yourself to whatever," she instructed. "Oh, you don't have any allergies, do you?"

"Uh, no."

"You'll be fine then. Vi can't have any nuts you see, so if you see a red plate it means it contains nuts." Anya pointed to one of the three bowls of granola which was, as advertised, red. Every single other plate and bowl on the table were white.

She helped herself to some fruit and filled a bowl with cereal and milk.

Anya picked out seats opposite Faith, whom began chatting with her right away.

"Mornin' Squirt, did you sleep well?"

"Yeah, thanks."

"I saw some of the minions come by earlier with bedlinens and shit, guess they're setting up the guestroom for you."

Anya, cup of steaming black coffee in hand, nodded. "Thought so."

"You know something about what's happening, Ahn?"

"Just good at predicting," she murmured and took another sip.

"What do you foretell then, oh wise one," Faith teased, but Anya took her seriously.

"Dalton will appear around lunch to let her know that the guest room is ready for her, then he'll ask me on behalf of the Master to help her settle in," she repeated from the night before. "At dinner she will be called."

"You think he'll wait that long?"

"It's Tuesday," she said, as if that explained everything. Faith seemed to understand it however, nodding.

Willow said nothing, opting instead to cast surreptitious glances at the other women as more and more entered the room in varying states of wakefulness. They were all pretty, she noted, but no two were alike. Some were fairly old, one woman looked to be in her forties and another she'd peg at thirty-something. Others were younger, but no one as young as she was. Most appeared to be somewhere in that indeterminable age range between twenty and twenty-five-ish.

Then again, looks could be deceiving. Anya had admitted to being over a thousand years old yet her face had not a single wrinkle. The dark-haired woman at the other end of the table that slipped into gameface over her glass of blood had looked not a day over twenty beforehand.

After observing them some more, she spotted scars at nearly everyone's necks. Some were very faint and barely noticeable unless you checked for them, but others had a red tint of irritation around them and seemed to be recent. All were the unmistakable two dots of a vampire bite.

She looked across the table at Faith. No visible marks, but the girl had worn a choker the day before and wore one now as well. Her own neck felt suddenly very vulnerable, exposed as it was in the leather top she was forced to wear. She wished futilely for a turtleneck.

Once they'd finished eating, Anya brought her back to the open room with the fireplace. She settled Willow into a chair and chose an ottoman for herself.

"I expect you have many questions, so I say we get that out of the way now. Then I can take you on a tour after lunch."

"Alright," she said, hesitating. "Um, this is a very large house."

"It's called the mansion," Anya explained readily, "and it is indeed massive. I'd get lost so fast it's not even funny if I were to wander around on my own."

Her brows furrowed at that. "But you just said you were going to give me a tour?"

"Oh, yes, but we don't leave the women's quarters, of course."

"We don't?"

"Not without permission and an escort, no. Don't worry," she said with a reassuring smile, "there's plenty to see and you'll find everything you need here."

"If you don't mind me asking, what kind of... uh, place, is this?" She was scared to ask, but even if this woman was a demon, she had shown her kindness.

Anya shot her a knowing look. "Ah, so you noticed. You're very young, but you're not a stupid girl. That's good."

"Is it really... uh," she faltered. The food she'd eaten had formed a hard lump in her belly.

"A harem? Yes."

So her suspicion had been correct, then. Guards at the door, only women within and several of them at that, not allowed to leave without escorts, bedrooms, bite marks... and Anya had referred to the Master as an old lover of hers, too.

"But don't use that word in front of the Master, he doesn't like it," Anya added hastily. "Or at least, don't tell him I was the one who said it."

"Sure," she agreed, voice low. It wasn't a topic she felt like bringing up at all, if she was quite honest.

"Oh honey," Anya said after watching her cringe more and more until she had almost curled up into a ball in the chair. "I understand that you've gone through a really rough time what with being kidnapped and all, but you're safe now. No harm will come to you here."

"Does rape count under harm?" she asked in a whisper.

This did not go down well. Anya's eyes hardened and her voice revealed her anger. "Don't even say that. He would never."

Eyes wide at the sudden change in the until-now pleasant demon in front of her, she temporarily lost her ability to talk.

"Look, you're scared," Anya said and sighed. "That's fine. Totally understandable, considering the circumstances. But you can take my word for it, none of the women here have ever been forced to do something they did not want. Perhaps I shouldn't have told you," she frowned a little. "Since you belong to him now though, I didn't see a point in keeping secrets."

"I belong...?"

"You were given to him as a gift, weren't you? You said that's what the kidnappers talked about and Dalton said you were, too." She took Willows hand and squeezed it for comfort. "Most of his associates stick with the traditional expensive object, but you're not the first living gift he's received. See the girl over there in the sofa, with the book?"

She peeked over at the sofa, spotting the woman that had seemed separated from the others somehow when she'd first arrived. She nodded mutely.

"That's Tara. She was given to the master two years ago, and she's never slept with him."

Her brain attempted to process this information. It didn't seem logical at all, to have a woman in your harem and not sleep with her. Wasn't that the entire idea? But she remembered checking the girls neck during breakfast and she had not seen any bite marks on her. She hadn't seen any on Anya either, however. She couldn't help her eyes darting up to the demons neck.

Anya smiled and reached up to pull the hem of her cardigan and blouse aside. Two classic puncture wounds were exposed, quite far down her neck near the shoulder.

"But... uh, that's nowhere near the jugular vein-"

"He doesn't feed from us! How crude! No, no, Willow, these marks are placed during sex, to heighten the pleasure," she explained. "It makes for great orgasms."

She was stunned into silence. A year with the Slayer as her best friend had taught her a lot about vampires, but never anything like this.

"I prefer to be able to hide my marks, that's why they're to the side. It doesn't pay for a demon to advertise that she's letting a vampire suck on her, they're considered to be lesser creatures since they're half-human. I never agreed with that."

Nor had she ever encountered the attitude that being human or partly so was something to be looked down on.

"Not that I'm planning on leaving the mansion and rejoining my former social circle, mind you, it's just that old habits die hard."

Willow swallowed with some difficulty and tried to think of a topic change.

"Uh, are all the other women here demons, too?"

"No, not at all. It's just me. Well, Tara's part demon. I suppose that counts, a little."

She threw another glance at the perfectly normal-looking woman reading on the sofa.

"Dru and Harmony are vampires and the rest are human," Anya carried on. "And now there's the Slayer, too."

"Buffy's joining the har-, um, us?" While the very idea of being in a harem was terrifying and she knew she wasn't supposed to wish that for her best friend, she couldn't help but brighten a little at the thought that she might not be by herself for much longer. Buffy would have confidence enough for the both of them.

Anya shrugged. "Why else would he bring her here? I'm not sure how he'd control her, though. Maybe he'll keep her somewhere else, for everyone's safety. I hope so."

Their conversation was interrupted as a tiny woman with wavy brown hair sat down with them. She extended a hand to Willow in greeting. "Hey, I'm Winifred, but please just call me Fred. Faith mentioned something about needing a little help?"

They shook hands.

"Do me a favor first, please," Anya interjected. "Willow here is scared the Master is going to tie her up to a bed and have his wicked way with her against her will."

Fred noticeably paled in horror. "What?" She looked between them hurriedly. "Why would-"

"She was given to him as a gift, she's completely out of the loop," Anya explained. "It's Tara all over again."

"Ohhh," Fred said slowly, nodding in understanding and, still shaking hands with her, added another hand to give Willow's a reassuring squeeze. "It's not like that at all, here. You're perfectly safe."

Willow smiled nervously and plucked at the hem of her top. "It's all a little strange," she offered. "I don't know what to think."

Fred stood. "Come, let's see if one of my bras will fit you, and I'll tell you how I came to be here."

"Thank you," Anya said behind them as they walked away.

Moments later she found herself in yet another bedroom, following the same standard layout as the previous two. Fred's had no window though. Instead there was a large pin board and her desk was much bigger than Anya's and Faith's had been. It was covered in papers, notebooks, pieces of fabric and several folders.

After bringing out a bundle of bras from her closet, the tiny woman gestured to the bed and they both sat down.

"Once upon a time," Fred began with a small smile. "I was a student at UCLA. There was a guy. I didn't like him, but he really liked me. He decided that if he couldn't have me then nobody would. He sent me to another dimension."

Willow's eyebrows rose in astonishment. "Whoa, how did he manage that?"

"No idea. I suspect he wasn't entirely human, but I wasn't about to look him up and ask, you know?" she laughed. "I was there for five years." She let that sink in for a moment, then continued. "I was a slave."

"Really? That's awful."

"Yup," Fred did not seem to be very bothered by this. "I was rescued by some demon hunters that ended up being sent to the same dimension by accident, and they brought me back with them. I had trouble fitting into normal society again," she sighed. "Major trust issues. I didn't want to go anywhere near the university again, so I abandoned my studies and moved to Vegas. Got a miserable job waitressing at a club run by a friend of one of the demon hunters. Then one day, Spike walked in."

"Spike?"

"Nickname. Everyone calls him that or Master. You should stick with Master until he introduces himself to you." Fred chuckled. "Knowing him, he's probably fully aware that we gossip like hens in here, but we prefer to pretend that we're a little more mature around him."

"Right," Willow mumbled in acknowledgment, temporarily lost in terror at being 'introduced' to the Master. She shook it off.

"Anyway, he chatted me up, told my boss to leave me be even though I was on shift, got me seriously drunk and then I ended up telling him everything. I cried on his shoulder like a complete loser. I was a mess." Fred laughed again at the memory.

"He took me back to his hotel. Didn't touch me at all," she was careful to specify with a pointed look, "just let me sleep it off. The next morning, over lots of coffee, he explained that he'd heard of me from the demon hunters and had sought me out on purpose. Said he knew what it was like to feel like a stranger in the world. Thought it'd help if I got it all out. And it did."

Fred flopped back on the bed with a grin. There was a glow in her eyes when she talked about him.

"I met up with him regularly after that, to talk. After a couple months he asked if I'd like to join his household. The rest, as they say, is history."

"You came here willingly?"

"Of course!" Fred sounded surprised that she'd think any different. "He said I could stay for as long as I wanted, that I wouldn't have to work or do anything I didn't want to. No having to deal with people. Just the other women he loved, all of whom knew about demons and other worlds. I wouldn't have to hide or explain anything. It sounded like paradise, why would I say no?"

Willow shifted uncomfortably. "So he didn't expect you to have sex with him?"

"Well," Fred drawled and grinned again. "I wasn't entirely against the idea, if you get my drift. I knew full well that he was trying to charm me with the looks and the smiles, but I didn't mind. I liked him. He's very attractive and sweet, with those eyes and God, those cheekbones! Not to mention it had been a long time since I'd met a man I felt I could trust. Or, well, not a man exactly. Anyway, no, he made it clear from the start that it was an offer, not a trade. I didn't owe him anything."

"Um, but you...?"

"Yeah," she confirmed. "After he'd courted me for a few weeks. Of my own free will."

Willow was lost in thought again.

"What's the matter?" Fred asked, a little concerned, and sat up.

"It's nothing, I just-" she faltered and looked down.

"C'mon, talk to me," Fred urged, elbowing her side. "I'm not easily offended, promise."

Clearing her throat, she tried again. "I was just wondering, you know, why a human would..."

"Oh, that," Fred understood at once. "It wasn't a big deal to me, after spending five years in a world where humans were the minority. And hey, a vampire's body is fully human. It's not like he's got any extra parts or scales or horns or a tail or whatever."

"He's got fangs," she pointed out uneasily, and couldn't prevent her eyes from trailing up to Fred's neck and the two red marks there.

"I don't see the big deal." Fred shrugged and reached up to caress the marks. "When I was a teenager I dated a guy who wanted to suck on my toes while getting himself off. I knew another guy who wore diapers at home and wanted his wife to pretend that he was a giant baby. A friend of mine's boyfriend got off on being humiliated and stepped on. Being bitten just doesn't rank very high on the creep-o-meter after all of that," she finished with a laugh.

"But he could kill you," she prodded.

Fred stopped laughing. Like Anya earlier, her expression went stony and she seemed angry. "Nu-uh. Never," she insisted. "He'd never let me come to any harm. He loves me."

That was twice now that Fred had referred to the Master loving her and the others. She knew through Buffy and Giles that demons weren't supposed to be able to love, but these women didn't seem to have read the same books. She elected to say nothing, at least not while Fred was clearly upset at the suggestion that the Master could hurt her. She wasn't likely to get less upset at the suggestion that he couldn't love her either.

They distracted themselves with the bras for a bit to escape the awkward silence that fell. Fred selected the two that she deduced would fit Willow best and assured her that she could keep them for as long as she needed.

"He'll probably see to it that you are fitted with all the clothes you want soon enough, but just in case."

"Thanks, I appreciate it." She bit her lip and looked down at the garments in her hands. "I'm sorry I made you mad. I didn't mean-"

"No, don't," Fred cut her off. "It's okay. I forgot for a moment that you don't know him at all, and you didn't choose to be here like I did. Don't worry, you'll understand what I mean in time."

They went back to Anya's room and both women waited outside the bathroom while she tried on the bras. They would do the job, thankfully, though she felt weird wearing someone else's underwear. Afterward, Anya suggested that they watch some TV and she didn't feel like she could say no, even if all she wanted was to curl up in bed and hide.





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