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Chapter 28

Buffy turned around and found herself face to face with Angel, who didn't look very happy.

"What the hell is this?" he demanded as he yanked the neck of her sweater away from her throat.

"OW!" she cried.

There hadn't been any Band-Aids at the hotel, so she had simply patted the bite marks on her neck dry. However, some of the fuzz from the turtle neck had stuck to the wounds, and the scabs reopened when Angel had yanked on the fabric. True that on the scale of Buffy injuries, this wasn't all that bad - but it was the principle of the thing.

"I just don't get it. Everyone tells me to leave Sunnydale. 'Spike's not a threat.' 'Don't worry about, Buffy. She can take care of herself.' And now I find he's biting you!"

"It's not what you thing. It was an accident."

"Let me guess. You 'accidentally' fell on his fangs."

"No, it. . . It's none of your business."

"And yet you bring Spike into my hotel and- Hey!"

Angel turned around to find Cordelia poking him with a stake.

"You're not evil, are you?" she asked holding up a cross in her other hand.

"What?! No! Stop that." Angel raised his hands, ineffectually trying to fend Cordelia off.

After a moment she seemed satisfied and put down the stake and cross. She walked back over to him and hit him across the back of his head.

"What the hell were you thinking? Do you want to get the big happy, and go all grrr?" Cordelia asked him.

"No!" Angel protested. "It wasn't like that. I didn't even know she was there. I mean, I thought I was dreaming."

Cordelia glared at him, unconvinced. Deciding he was safe for the moment, Angel turned back to Buffy. Before he could say anything more, Cordelia interrupted once again.

"Not that we wouldn't all love to watch you two get all movie of the week," she said sarcastically. "But we do have a case, remember. You know, the things that pay the bills around here?"

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

It didn't take long for Spike to find himself a demon bar to hang out in. The sewers of every major city had signs for such establishments in them, if you knew what to look for. He hadn't been there long when trouble found him.

Lou had put a price on his head, and a couple vampires had decided to collect. Spike welcomed the distraction. A good fight was just what he needed to work some of his frustration over his relationship, or lack thereof, with Buffy.

Not to mention that, as long as Lou kept sending demons after him, Spike felt he was pretty safe. Demons, vampires and assorted monsters he could handle. If Lou smartened up, though, and sent humans after him, Spike would be in trouble.

After tossing one of his brethren out the door and into the sunlight, and staking a second, the rest of the bar decided to leave him alone.

At least he thought they had until he sat back down at his table and a woman asked, "Mind if I join you?"

"Actually, I do."

He didn't know who it was, and he didn't care. At the moment he wanted nothing to do with the entire female sex. The woman sat down anyway. Annoyed he bothered to look at her. He knew her, but it took him a moment to figure out where from. Then it hit him. She was the female lawyer who'd been with Darla.

"Bollocks." He didn't want anything to do with Wolfram & Hart. "What the bloody hell do you want?"

"Just to offer you a job."

"Not looking for one. . . "

"Lilah. Lilah Morgan."

"That's right. How could I forget. What, was it your parent's fondest wish that you should be evil? Didn't really give you much choice with a name like that did they?"

"Is this the part where I blame my parents for my wicked ways?" she asked with a face with wide-eyed innocence. Then her voice hardened. "Sorry, I got where I got all by my lonesome."

"Still doesn't mean you have anything I want."

"Oh, but I think we do, Spike. Help us out, and we'll remove your chip."

Spike couldn't help but be startled by the offer. No chip meant he didn't have to worry about humans any more. He could protect Buffy, even from the likes of Lou. He could be free again.

"And just what would I have to do for you?"

"Nothing hard. You see, a couple months ago Angel stole something very valuable from us. A very old, one of a kind scroll. We want it back."

"Seems to me you could get your own people to steal it back for you. Why me?"

"True, there's just one problem. We don't want Angel to know it's gone. At least not right away. If any of our people stole it, they'd leave their scent behind. But if Angel smells you in his office, he'll just figure you were snooping around."

Spike sat there for a minute, Thinking over what she had said. It seemed to make sense, and yet he couldn't help but be suspicious. There must be more in it for Wolfram & Hart.

"So what's this scroll, anyway?" he asked.

"A prophecy about the end of the world, and oh yeah, a vampire with a soul. Let's just say our people weren't done studying it when Angel stole it. He keeps it in a safe in his office. The safe is behind a painting on the wall behind his chair. The safe shouldn't give you any problems. It's nothing fancy, not much different than the one you broke into in, 1932 was it?"

He nodded. It bothered him to think they'd been watching his actions so closely. No need to let them know that though.

"So all you do is crack the safe, grab the scroll - it's in an ivory container, you can't miss it - and head out the front door and south for two blocks. There will be a semi parked in an empty lot. We'll have a mobile surgical unit set up, and you'll get your chip out then and there. Easy as pie."

"How do I know you won't double cross me?"

"Cause we're evil of course." When he looked unconvinced she continued, "I'm a criminal defense lawyer at Wolfram & Hart. Do you know what that means? It means that every day I put in long hard hours making sure that 'innocent'," she indicated the quotes with her fingers, "Men go free. Like you. You may not be in jail, but that chip is like a muzzle, keeping you from following your natural instincts. If we take that chip out and you have your self a massacre, hey, I'll probably get a bonus."

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

"That bit about leaving his scent, that was very nice, Lilah," Holland Manners told her. "Do you think he'll do it?"

"To get the chip out? He'll do it. And once he starts killing, the Slayer will be too busy hunting him down to worry about Angel and Darla. Not to mention, we'll get the Shanshu prophecy back, so hey, bonus."

"What if he doesn't kill?" Lindsey asked.

"He's a vampire, of course he'll kill. And if he doesn't, all we have to do is let Miss Goody-Two-Shoes know he had the chip removed, and she'll try and kill him anyway," Lilah said with complete assurance.

"Lilah's right," Holland agreed. "Although this Slayer is more flexible than many of her predecessors, she still sees the world as black and white; soul or no soul. She won't suffer an unrestrained vampire to live."

&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Life as a private eye? Pretty boring, Buffy had decided. She'd trailed along with Angel's gang when they'd gone to a hotel to find out if some guy's wife was cheating on him. She was, but first they had to sit around in the lobby for hours waiting for her to show up.

Things had gotten a little more interesting when Darla had showed up, pretending to be just some girl. She'd actually gotten hotel security to stop Angel. Treating him like a stalker. Now Angel had gone off on a mad hunt for Darla. Buffy had tried to help him, but he had pulled one of his disappearing acts on her.

That had really pissed her off. First of all, he'd just sort of stranded her in the sewers. By the time she'd found her way out of the stinky underground tunnels, it was already dark, and she was in a part of L.A. she wasn't familiar with. It had taken her almost an hour to find a pay-phone which still had its phonebook. Finally, she'd gotten in touch with Wesley and he was on his way to pick her up.

More than anything else, the thing that made Buffy mad was that Angel wouldn't talk to her. It had to mean something to him, Darla coming back from the dead. And human to boot. But he wouldn't say a word on the subject. All man of mystery.

She hated that. It had been cool when she was sixteen. Well, except for all the times it had nearly gotten her killed. Like when he'd first shown up in Sunnydale and said, "Beware the Harvest." Like she was just supposed to know all her ancient vampire rituals. Even Giles had to look that up. It was bad enough that he was that secretive about life and limb 'end of the world' stuff. Trying to get him to open up about emotional things was about as easy as getting Anya to shut up about her and Xander's sex life.

"Buffy?" a black SUV pulled up next to her and Wesley stuck his head out the window.

"Hey, thanks a bunch," she said as she climbed into the car.

"Of course. Are you all right?"

"Just kind of worn out."

She buckled up her seat belt. For a moment she stared out the window. Her left hand crossed her chest in an unconscious gesture, and she began to tug on the seat belt with her thumb and forefinger.

"There's like a Watcher/Slayer confidentiality thing, isn't there?" she asked him.

"Actually, no. A Watcher is supposed to report anything of consequence to the Council. However, I'm not a Watcher anymore," Wesley added. "And I always keep my friends confidences."

Buffy nodded. "Do you know about claiming?"

Wesley cleared his throat. Buffy rather suspected that if he wasn't driving he would have cleaned his glasses.

"Well, um, yes. What the Council taught me anyway. It's a very complex subject, misunderstood by the Council for generations. When a vampire claims someone, it leaves a mystical marking on the claimed that other vampires can sense. The claimed is understood to be off limits for feeding -if they are human- and. . . sex, if it is another vampire. If another vampire violates the claim, that vampire is marked and can be hunted down by the vampire who initiated the claim."

"So it's like being branded?"

"Not at all. In fact that was the crucial mistake the Council made for many years. Vampires are very territorial, as you know, and yet claiming is very rare. You see the claiming effects the vampire more than the claimed. The vampire gains a sort of physical awareness of the claimed. They can always locate their mate, and they experience what the claimed experiences."

"So they can read the person's mind?"

"No, not ESP. Rather the vampire experiences the physical experiences of the claimed. How intense those sensations are varies depending on how recently the claim was made or renewed, and the distance between the two.

"That's the reason the claim is so rare. The most common type of claiming is a sire claiming a childe, but that it only done after the childe has been around for some time and is - for lack of a better phrase - well trained. A Sire is greatly limited in his ability to punish his childe if he will experience some degree of the punishment himself.

"Of course, vampires don't react to pain quite the same way we do. I'm sure you've noticed that vampires can usually shrug off pain not caused by fire, holy water, crosses and sunlight. However, if a vampire claims a human, they experience that human's pain the same way the human does.

"That fact has lead to fascinating and diverse uses of the claim throughout vampire society. Many vampires shun the whole notion, fearing it will make them vulnerable to their enemies. Supposedly there is a master vampire in the Balkans who claims a human once every hundred years, then allows his followers to torture the human to death. Just to prove how strong he is. There have even been stories of female vampires who keep heavily guarded harems of claimed men so that. . . Um, well. Anyway, you get the idea."

"Yeah. I get the idea. Thanks," Buffy told him.

For several minutes they drove on in silence.

"Buffy," Wesley said as he pulled up outside the hotel. "I know it's none of my business and perhaps I'm completely mistaken, but if you allow Spike to claim you, you'll never be rid of him. There's no going back; no changing your mind."

She got out of the car.

"Thanks again for the ride, and everything. You won't mention this to Angel?"

"Not a word. In fact, I think I prefer he not know about this more than you."

She nodded, waved, and went inside the Hyperion. Worn out, she collapsed on the ottoman. There were no vampire's in the hotel, so she lay there, her mind mulling over what Wesley had said, as she waited for Spike to come back.





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