Choral music was playing at a subdued volume, its slow arrangement carrying a mournful tone that belied the lyrics. God rest ye merry gentlemen / Let nothing you dismay....

"It's shaping up to be quite a storm," observed the man who was loading his plate with tea-biscuits. An unraveled hole in the elbow of his green sweater revealed the white shirt beneath. "But it will have its benefits."

A frown of concentration on his face, Rupert Giles didn't look up from the letter he held when Quentin Travers came to stand next to him, tea cup and plate filling his hands. It was several moments before he raised his head to focus distractedly on the other man. "What? Oh, yes. If nothing else, our Glyndaca demon shall likely...retire for the season." He let the remark trail into silence, drawn back into a perusal of the message.

"What have you got there?" Travers asked officiously.

"I don't know. It's quite an odd communication from America. I might think it a joke, were it not for..." He hesitated, glasses catching the light as he tilted his head. "The tone."

Walking toward the hearth, Travers mused with no real depth of interest, "Who do you know in America?"

Giles followed, still peering at the letter, and absently took a seat in one of the wingback chairs while Travers stood warming his backside in front of the tiny fire. "No one. Well, Bellows is in New York at the moment, but this is from California." He cocked his head and stared off into space for a long moment, with the air of a man who can't place his finger on a niggling memory. "California. Why is that important?"

"You weren't at the last staff meeting, were you?"

Attention caught, Giles gave him a sharp look, half warning, half reminder. "I'm not staff any longer. I'm a consultant."

With a tiny snort, Travers moved away from the fire and sat down heavily across from Giles. He balanced his tea plate on one knee. "You're still welcome to join us. Might help you keep up to speed, as they say."

"Yes," said Giles with thin sarcasm, "God knows the velocity of change here might lead one to mistake it for the Autobahn."

"If you had attended our last staff meeting, Rupert, you'd know that we've tracked down our missing slayer in California."

Giles's eyes widened in startlement, and the letter was momentarily forgotten in hand. "You've found her? Faith?"

Travers grimaced. "For what good it does us. Apparently she's managed to land herself in jail. Prison, to be more exact. The watcher assigned to her--fellow named Wyndam-Pryce--turned up as well in Los Angeles. Working for a detective agency." The last two words were uttered as if he were speaking of some uniquely foreign and barbaric institution. His expression grew even more sour, and he shook his head. "We're trying to piece together what happened. This was badly bungled."
 
"Wyndam-Pryce," repeated Giles, the name having snagged his thoughts. "Wesley Wyndam-Pryce?"

"I believe so." Travers bit into a cookie, dribbling a few crumbs down his shirt-front.

Giles lifted his letter again, scanned it briefly, then read aloud, "'Please come, and if you can bring Wes and Angel and everyone in L.A. We need all the help we can get. Buffy needs you.... Love, Willow.'" He looked up, gazing at Travers over his glasses. "The letter requests help from me and the Council of Watchers to battle a race of demons called the 'Grauth,' who have taken over the town of Sunnydale, also know as the Hellmouth. The writer--Willow--also claims that there is another slayer. In Sunnydale." His voice lowered as he spoke to himself. "Why does that name sound so familiar?"
 
"Another slayer?" Travers laughed without much humor. "There can be but one. And much as I might wish for more, one is probably all that we can manage. Though god knows, we've done a poor enough job of that lately."

"You think it's just an odd coincidence, then. The letter a prank." Giles gazed at him steadily, a reluctant part of him curious to know what the other man thought. Travers was hidebound with tradition and inclined to dismiss anything that didn't fit his parochial and very British worldview. But sometimes he surprised one.

"Last week, one of our junior watchers hid a pixie in the ladies' lavatory. I won't mention what it did, but I'm sure your imagination can stretch to cover it." His cool eyes glinted as he allowed himself a smile. "Who else would know such details but another watcher, Rupert? Someone's having a bit of fun. Youth run wild."

"Perhaps you're right. There are certainly other things in here to suggest that." Giles considered the letter, then removed his glasses and hooked them over his jacket pocket. He refolded the letter and tucked it away before gazing into the fire. "I was young once." His voice lapsed into musing. "Brazen and cocksure--quite certain I'd never make the mistakes my father had, or his father before him. I would drive my own life, and it would be quite a sporty little number. Radio playing catchy tunes. It seems so long ago now...." A sense of nostalgia and passing sadness touched him, stirred by the quiet music of Silent Night and crackling flames. The corners of his mouth tipped into a faintly bitter smile. "I thought, when I finally deigned to fulfill my promise, that at least my destiny would be a grand one. Tragic but somehow meaningful." He dragged his glance from the fire, looked at Travers with ironical eyes. "I thought I might have my own slayer, you know. And now it's too late."

Travers met his eyes forthrightly, not flinching. If there was one thing to be said about him, he never minced words. He wasn't a kind man, and kindness didn't surface now. "It is too late. But you can still be of help, Rupert."

"Can I?" Giles rested his head against the back of the chair. "I wonder."

It was just a knife, thought Xander, as he studied the gleaming blade, turning it between his hands to catch the light. It was a clean knife that showed no signs of its recent use. A bloodless knife. But sharp. When he tested it against his thumb, it drew his own blood to the surface. He considered his spilled blood--life juice, freshly squeezed--then licked it from his skin. You got to know the taste of your own blood over the years and it didn't make you a creepy vampire when you had a nip.

The demon's blood had been red, too. That seemed wrong. It should have been a different color, easily distinguished from human.

Feeling a shaking in his hands, Xander deliberately steadied them on the crate and slid the knife blade under its top, levering it open with a creaking give of nails. His head turned as his mother entered the kitchen and came to stand next to him. While upstairs, she'd gotten dressed, putting on a set of light-colored sportswear, against which her signum was a harsh red brand, more visible than his own; she'd also taken the time to brush the sleep-tangles from her hair and dab on lipstick. His visit seemed to have restored some sense of normality to her, and he felt oddly guilty for not having come by sooner. He'd sent word through Anya that he was okay, but even so his mother had cried when he arrived, hugged him like crazy as if she'd feared him dead. Faint traces of tears were still visible around her puffy eyes.

"It's so thoughtful of you," she said, as if he were no more than an acquaintance, someone who'd brought by an unexpected gift and deserved her politeness. She gazed at the crate instead of him, a touch of familiar vacancy in her expression. "It's been hard to get things at the store--and the lines go around the block now."

"Well, there's not much." Xander laid the lid aside and poked around inside. "Flour, cookies, soup." Not much of a Christmas present. He hadn't even packed everything; Willow had tucked some extra goodies in before he sealed it up. But he'd made sure to include one thing. He found the pistol and pulled it out, then unwrapped it from its towel. "Gun," he said redundantly. His mother's eyes held confusion and alarm, but he held the weapon out, letting her get a good look.
 
"Oh, Xander. What would I--I don't know--"

"Take it. Just in case." He demonstrated the basics, handling the cold heavy metal with a fresh degree of intimacy he couldn't hide from her. "Flick the safety off, point it, pull the trigger." He handed it to her. "Here. Keep it close. Somewhere you can get to it fast if you need to."

Her face was dubious but she took the weapon, her hand dipping a little as its weight surprised her. She held it in both hands then, with the gingerness of distrust, and didn't seem to know what to do with it until Xander, taking pity on her, reclaimed it. "I'll just put it away for now," he said, stashing it in one of the kitchen drawers. When he turned back, he found himself pinned by her keen and desperate gaze.

"What's happening?" she asked, and she didn't have to be specific. He knew what she meant. But it was the kind of question that even deities might have a hard time answering, and he was a far cry from that. "These things," she went on, every word reaching for something she didn't understand. "What are they?"

"Demons, mom." Seven years and he'd never had the chance to say that. He'd thought about it a thousand times, though, so it felt as if the inevitable were finally happening. The hard, shiny light of the kitchen made the shadows very real. "They're demons. Vampires, monsters, things that go bump in the night." He held her eyes. "I've been fighting them for years."

His revelation didn't seem to sink in. "But where do they come from?"

"They come from hell. This is the Hellmouth--good old Sunnydale, California. It's like a vacation spot for evil."

"All this time," his mother said, sitting down on one of the faux colonial chairs that made up their dinette set. "The black eyes, and the limping--that time your arm was broken. We thought you just got picked on a lot. That's what you said. Brawls in school."

"Well, they were in school," he assured her. "But the brawls were with demons. Most of them."

"Your father was always so disappointed in you, Xander. And you let him think--let us think--" She broke off, eyes finishing with a look that was tired, old and wounded.
 
Xander could feel his entire adolescence expanding inside him like an accordion, all those years and fights and stony silences, and he squeezed it back down. "I know. I'm sorry."

"You could stay with us now." There was an almost plaintive note in her voice. Xander looked at the top of her head, noticing that her roots were showing, and that they were grey. He could feel his attachment to her, and to the house itself, which was an extension of their lives. He'd left long ago, though, and she knew it--and the house knew it. The wooden surface of the dinette table used to be glossy, but now held a layer of dust, visible among the permanent place mats. Everything looked untouched and unregarded: the display cabinet of china plates, the stiff curtains, the extra chairs that sat unused in the corners because they never had guests. Dinners in this room had been quietly miserable, and he couldn't imagine coming back. It would hurt her if he told her that living in the tunnels and sewers was preferable to this.

"I can't," he said. "I've got this whole rebel forces lifestyle thing going on."

She sort of nodded, sort of didn't. "You're probably safer in hiding." He couldn't tell if this was another subtle accusation, or concern for him, or both. The language of mothers was complex and hard to translate. "I just don't know what to do with myself these days," she went on after a pause. "There's not much call for real estate sales right now. They just take what they want, you know. Move in, kick families out. Property values will never be the same."

"Yeah," he said, because what else could you say to that?

"They said we could keep our house. Your father's job, you know." She managed a weak and slightly bitter smile. "He's useful. He's directing a project to build a new power system."

Attention sharpening, Xander feigned indifference. "Oh? For what?"

"Mines," she said as if surprised he didn't already know. "The labor mines."

You couldn't ask for a chamber roomier than the former Initiative headquarters, but in recent days it had begun to take on a claustrophobic atmosphere to Buffy. With the sleeping bags and crates and makeshift partitions it was beginning to resemble a sprawling slumber party, and there were at least five too many kids hanging about at all hours, scrapping restively with each other, when they weren't whining for the microwave popcorn of days gone by. It was still hard finding them things to do; Buffy hadn't yet reconciled herself to putting them on the front lines. But she had to think of something soon; another few days of marathon Monopoly and they'd all go mental.

Plus, the closer Christmas got, the more depressed and irritable everyone seemed to grow. As holidays went, it was fa la la la la lame. Earlier in the day they'd dragged in a tiny tree from the campus grounds and decorated its thinning, lopsided body with tinfoil ornaments and yarn. As she threaded her way past it now, she couldn't help but notice how much the thing resembled the mangy fir of a Charlie Brown Christmas. If she'd felt more festive, she might have cajoled the kids to deck the halls, so that the tree didn't look so alone. Poor droopy little tree. But in all honesty, it wasn't so much a lack of holiday cheer that stopped her, but an unwillingness to stir up a hornet's nest of helpful teenagers who couldn't cut a deck of cards without finding ten new things to argue about.

Ignoring the raised voices from across the room, she joined Willow in the north corner, which they'd established as a base of operations. Maps hung on the walls, weapons lay in neat stacks, and the table was covered with spell materials. At the moment, it was mostly base, with not much in the way of operations, but that was going to change.

Willow had cleared a space on the table and spread some newspapers on its surface. She was rooting around inside a dead frog, blood on her fingers as she plucked out its innards. A pile of soggy organs lay next to it on the paper, and nearby were additional corpses of small mammals and one slightly squashed garter snake. Buffy, more squeamish than befitted a slayer, tried not to observe the proceedings as she took a seat.

"How goes magic, the gathering?"

"It's been a while since I harvested fresh ingredients." Willow made a tiny face. "I'm thinking that Anya's philosophy of capitalism has its merits. Mass production, yay."

Buffy nodded. "Guts should come dried, in tidy boxes." Her gaze was drawn to the dissection before veering off again. "What's this?" she asked, catching sight of a small black book and picking it up. It looked familiar, and a guilty expression from Willow met her question.

"It's Avery Foss's notebook, the one you took from him. I, um, broke the code. I thought I'd take another look through it, see if there was anything useful."

"Is there?" Buffy kept her voice neutral. She was no longer the blamey Buffy. Any argument over whether or not Willow should have shared her visions was moot now. The mootest. And if Willow had kept more from her, she didn't want to know.

"Not really. Most of it's notes on the invasion plans, and that's a done deal." Willow dropped a tiny heart onto the paper with a soft, damp plop. "We need new sources of intel."

A tiny smile cracked Buffy's face. "Intel? That's very double-oh Willow." She set the notebook aside and picked up a blood-red taper, fiddling with the wick.

Willow's face remained serious. "I've been thinking of alternatives. We could try breaking into Grauth records again and sure, that might get us some information--if we know what to look for and where." She flicked a gaze at Buffy. "Or we could go straight to the source."

"The mall?" Buffy said blankly.

"The Grauth. We capture some and interrogate them." She gestured at the items on the table with one bloodied hand; bagged herbs, dislocated bones, corpses. "I have all the ingredients for a truth spell. And if that doesn't work...there are other methods."

Her friend's very reasonable tone of voice sent a little chill through Buffy. "That's...an idea," she said carefully, hesitating over how to answer this. She didn't have any huge objections ready and it just might come to that, but something made her hedge. "You know who else has information, though." She messaged the name, unspoken, with her eyes.

Willow's lip curled, and Buffy could tell she'd been expecting this suggestion. "And we can trust him, because...?"

"Because he answers to me," she said quietly, feeling the admission send a shivery ache through her, and a twinge that was the memory of pleasure.

"Okay," Willow said with unexpected capitulation. "We'll talk to him then. See what he's got for us." It was hard to read her face; the curves of her cheeks and frets of her lashes had once held such a powerful innocence that her features still retained its traces, shining brightly even when her thoughts might be dark, her hands drenched in blood.
 
"I'll set it up," said Buffy.

Willow smiled back and rubbed absently at her cheek, leaving a stripe of blood like Indian war-paint on her skin. Then she reached down on the floor beside her and straightened back up with a rabbit trembling and twitching in the nest of her arms. "That's good," she murmured, petting its fur, her own red hair swinging loosely past her face as she dipped her head. Buffy couldn't tell if she were talking to the rabbit or to her. "We'll just have a nice talk, all calm and cozy. Shhhh."

The crack of its neck breaking was quicker than the tick of a clock, and as quiet.

Anya was singing. She would have assured anyone who asked that she wasn't happy. No such politically incorrect emotion would be harbored here, no sir, but even so the holiday spirit had crept in like an imp and taken up shop behind her breastbone. And there was no one to see her, so why not dance lightly around as she dusted the shelves? Who would a little recreational trilling harm? No one, that's who.

"Strings of street lights, even stop lights, blink a bright red and green, as the shoppers rush home with their treasures." Dust, dust, glissade. "Hear the snow crunch, see the kids bunch, this is Santa's big scene--" Sur le pointe! "And above all this bustle, you'll hear--" Twirl, petit allegro, little steps from shelves to table. "Silver bells, silver bells, it's Christmas time in the city. Ring-a-ling, hear them sing, soon it will be--yeoohh! Oh, molasses!" Gasping, she jumped at the sudden wall of curious vampire blocking her path, then whacked Spike's cap with her feather duster. "Don't sneak up on me like that with your little cat feet!"

"Bell rang when I came in," he pointed out dryly.

"I thought that was in my head. Part of the carol." She frowned, still recovering from her shock. "I've never really been the same since that whole song-and-dance calamity back in ought one." She gave it its due, like a hurricane.

"Yeah. Must admit, Broadway musicals have left me a bit cold since then." He removed his cap, plucked a pink feather from the trim and let it drift to the floor. "So why'm I here? Got your message. Some kid knocked me up before I'd even had my brekkie. Where'd you find him, anyway? Little biter wouldn't hand over the note till I'd tipped him."

"Oh, there are children all over." Anya waved a hand. "Running loose in the streets. Parents in the internment camps. They're calling them detention camps, but I think matters are a little more permanent than that--don't you?" She fixed him with a steely gaze.

"I think we both know that as camps go, they could be worse," Spike said. His eyes were blue and imperturbable, and he almost sounded sincere. Like an authentic human. Anya wondered how he did that. She tried so hard herself to fashion herself after appropriate cultural role models like Monica Geller and that one girl on Charmed with the good hair, and yet from the looks on the faces of Xander and his friends, she never got it quite right. But Spike, soulless and sans pulse, pulled it off, making her almost forget he was a vampire for seconds at a time. Not that Buffy's friends liked him any better, of course, so his great artistry or mimicry or whatever you wanted to call it didn't do him a hell of a lot of good.

Forgiving him his facade of humanity with good grace, she nodded. "I suppose you're right." She paused thoughtfully. "Why do you suppose they're keeping us alive? I'm speaking of the human 'us' now," she clarified.

"Funny you should mention. I've been looking into that, and a few other things." He squinted around the shop as if he believed someone might be listening to their conversation, but she could tell it was just restless habit. "Got to get ahold of Buffy."

"Well, that's fortuitous. She wants to see you too."

He perked right up. "She does?" A second later that honest need was hidden away, and a sly smirk teased the edges of his mouth. "Guess she wants takin' out for another ride. Gotta keep the engine in racing trim."

Anya folded her arms. "Yes, do tell her that when you see her. Women appreciate car metaphors about their sexual parts. She'll be revving so fast, she'll leave skid marks when she pulls away."

"You're quite the vixen today yourself," Spike said, arching his brows. "The mechanic drop by your garage last night? Have a poke about under the bonnet...?" He ran his gloved finger along the neckline of her dress.

"Stop that!" She slapped his hand away. "My god, I think you'd flirt with a block of wood or a, a Fezhnik demon. Or other things equally inanimate and grotesque." She touched her hair lightly to make sure it remained coiffed.

The vampire grinned. "Bit harsh on yourself, aren't you, ducks? You're an attractive vehicle. You ever toss over that great wazzok you're latched to, you'd find plenty of punters clustering around right quick. Know one fellow who'd head the queue."

"Speak American," she complained, busying herself dusting a display of guardian angel pins, two ninety-nine a head. "What are you talking about?"

"Sordicov's taken a shine to you," Spike said, picking up a bundle of extra-strength cleansing sage and sniffing it like a bouquet, with a faint grimace. He eyed her intently over the top of the sticks, a rather boyish peep. "Says he'd like to get to know you better."

"Everyone wants to get to know me better," Anya said peevishly, ignoring the implications of his remark the way one might ignore an anvil on one's foot. "I'm very popular with the demon social set these days."

"Just like old times for you, then."

"Oh, I was never popular before," she confessed, knowing it was safe, because he would neither understand nor care about her problems. "All work, no play. I never fit in anywhere." She stared at the gilded angels on their stand (cheap gimcrack that she wouldn't even be selling if not for the heavy mark-up, and how sad was that?), the unwanted realization troubling her. "I still don't. I have this shop and I run it well, but if I closed up tomorrow, another proprietor would just come along and take my place. One always does. And if I were dead, Xander would be sad for a while, but he'd cry on Buffy's shoulder and maybe she'd take pity on him and they'd get married, because oh, there's no curse on her." Bitterness tinged her voice now, and she was rambling to herself without any awareness of Spike's presence. "And they'd have loads of fat babies, and they'd name one after me, and," she sniffled, "and once in a while they'd pull out the photo album and point to a picture of me--one of the really terrible ones where my face is funny-looking and I've got a zit--and they'd say, 'There's your Aunt Anya, she was run over by a bus one day when she was making a deposit, how tragic. She died a spinster, you know.'" Finally she became aware of Spike again, catching his amazed eye. "What?" she snapped.

"You're dribbling," he said, and ran his thumb gently across her cheek, brushing away a tear.

"I hate when men are nice," she said angrily. "It defies all natural law. And you, you're not nice. You're never nice. So stop it. It's--it's gross and wrong." She was brandishing the feather duster like a weapon, her fist white-knuckled around its handle, and he took it away and gathered her close and came close, and she thought he might kiss her mouth, and for a moment he looked as if he were thinking about it, but instead he kissed her forehead with unexpected kindness and a very peculiar expression, which was precisely when Xander came from the street into the shop to discover them.

They jumped apart and Anya straightened her dress, which didn't need straightening. "Xander!"

"Now listen," Spike began warningly before Xander said anything. "She was just havin' a cry--" He caught sight of the feather duster he was waving and tossed it aside. "--and I was just being nice. That's all. Don't even know why. Must've been something I ate." A funny spasm crossed his face when he realized what he'd said. "Er, scratch that."

"Yes," broke in Anya, "and I told him to stop being nice, I swear, but he went right ahead--if you have to kill him, please don't do it in the shop!" She pleaded with hands clasped together, feeling as if dozens of loose anxieties had suddenly knit themselves together in one big tangle.

A long beat passed, during which Xander stared at Spike. "I'm not going to kill him," he said finally, his voice strangely subdued and his face flat and absent, the way he sometimes looked when he hadn't slept well or had just visited his father. "You were crying. He was nicing. I get it." He focused on her. "Why were you crying?"

"Wait, you're not jealous and homicidal?" The wrongness of his reaction offended her. "What's the matter with you? Are you sick?"
 
"Yeah." Xander tipped up a crooked half-smile. "Must be something I ate."

Out in the street, they walked together past the fruit and coffee stalls and the newsies hawking the latest hot-press headlines of fabricated victories, while demons in pork-pie hats bustled by on their way to stolen offices. In Spike's company, Xander got more second glances than he did when traveling alone. The speculative eyes of strangers assessed him from boots to bare head, humans dismissing him with stonily disguised contempt or even hatred, non-humans pegging his purpose in ways he could imagine all too well.

"She's crying a lot these days," he commented to Spike, his conversation on Anya, his thoughts elsewhere, circling a darker spot like vultures round a corpse.

"You've got to expect that," Spike said, lighting a cigarette. "What with her condition and all."

Xander blinked at him, baffled. "Her what?"

"Bun in the oven. Makes women come over all weepy. Doubt she'll be herself until she pops the tyke out. Course then she'll be a mum--that's when you really want to be scared, mate. Give me a choice 'tween fighting a raging hellbeast and some ticked-off mama bear, and I'll--"

"Whoa, whoa, whoa," Xander interrupted. "Anya's pregnant?" He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, aghast. "Oh my god. Oh my--oh, wait." He relaxed, remembering the night in the bar when they'd run into Spike. "Anya's not pregnant. She was just making that up."

Spike looked annoyed. "If that bird gets any crazier when she is carrying, you're in a lot of trouble."

"I know." Xander tucked his hands in the pockets of his jacket, felt the shape of his knife in its sheathe. A vampire in game face hurriedly shoved between him and Spike, displaying no interest in either of them, simply on its way somewhere, keeping whatever appointment a young vampire professional might have. It wore a woolen coat and a long green scarf wound around its neck, and was carrying a briefcase tucked under its arm. They both watched it go for a moment, and Xander wondered if Spike's thoughts mirrored his own. Was he thinking of stalking and killing, regretting the ripe peach of a missed opportunity; did he wish for simpler times?

"Tragic what the world's come to," Spike mused, lifting his cigarette to his lips and staring after the vamp. "Children of the night, getting jobs. Getting respectable. Next thing you know we'll be opening sweet shops and running for congress."

Oh god, how he wished for simpler times.

"Two guys walk into a bar," Willow said in a dry little tone of voice. Buffy looked at her across the booth and waited for the punchline, then realized her friend was staring toward the entrance.

She turned to see Spike and Xander standing just inside the door as it swung shut behind them. A palpable wave of hush and mutters swept across the room as the bar's patrons noticed Spike. He stood out like a shiny new soldier in a box of broken toys, his jet-black uniform crisp and expensive, from his cloak to his polished boots; even the little bits of red and silver trim looked like fresh paint. The bar, shabby but unremarkable before, was made seedier by the contrast of his presence, and it struck Buffy how differently he carried himself now. Before, he would have blended in, his leather coat and old boots as worn as the weathered boards, just a skeevy vamp making himself home among the other lost souls. And sure he would have strutted and picked fights, building himself a rep, but now...now he didn't have to try at all.

"I'm thinking it maybe wasn't such a good idea to meet here," Buffy said, looking at the restive, grumbly crowd of demons and humans. Some were getting up and slinking out; others huddled over their drinks, trying not to be noticed and making themselves all the more obvious.

The men joined them at the table, taking seats. Uncomfortably, Buffy slid over to make room for Spike. He took up a lot more space than he used to, what with the big bat-cape and all. His hands, hidden in black leather gloves, rested against the carved and splintered table as if waiting for something to play with--a drink, a knife, a swizzle stick.

"Whiskey," he said to the waitress who edged up to take their order. He glanced at the drinks in front of Buffy and Willow. "Beer for the lad," he added.

The lad? Buffy thought. The hell?

"I don't want anything," Xander said.

"Beer," Spike repeated, and the waitress left. He looked at Xander critically. "You could use topping up." Wow, thought Buffy, exchanging a look with Willow that involved the surreptitious arching of brows. Check out the almost-friendly vibe, her look said. It was kind of...well, the word 'disturbing' came to mind. And Spike was eyeing her now. "Take it this is neutral ground, Slayer? Not exactly five-star, is it."

She raised one shoulder. "Anya's black-market buddy told me about it. I thought it would be low-profile. Unfortunately, you're not."

The drinks came in record speed, and the waitress whisked herself off again, leaving them to an awkward group silence that Willow broke first. "Before we start, there's something we need to clear up." Even lost in an oversized corduroy jacket and wearing the signum of their oppressors, she gave off a slightly menacing air. That hard tone was for Spike, who looked guardedly at her in return.

"What's that?"

"I don't trust you."

"There's a shocker."

"So you're going to prove yourself."

Buffy tensed. "Okay, not something we discussed, Will."

Willow had removed a small leather bag from her pocket and was loosening its drawstring. "Don't worry. It's not painful...if he's honest." She swirled her finger in the bag, stirring a sparkly red flare to life around its mouth. "I need a token," she told Spike. "Something you've touched, something you keep on you."

After a moment in which no one said anything and Buffy couldn't think of a good reason to stop this, Spike reached into a jacket pocket and withdrew something silver. She'd thought it would be his lighter, but when he unclasped his hand and let the item dangle, she saw it was a cross on a chain. It lay across his fingers, swinging. Willow seemed briefly nonplussed, her lips parting in surprise, then regained composure and flicked a puff of red powder across the cross. It twisted around the metal in a double helix and then seemed to be absorbed.

"And now?" Spike said with cold civility, eyes never leaving Willow.

"Are you betraying us?" she asked, watching the cross.

"No."

"Are you killing humans?"

A deep breath, and then: "No."

"Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?" asked Xander. The others looked at him, and he cleared his throat. "Sorry. Just trying to lighten the mood."

"Okay," Willow said. Her face was composed as she studied Spike's, and if her acceptance was grudging, she hid it well. "I guess we trust you. For now."

A knot of tension in Buffy eased and under cover of the table, she lightly touched Spike's leg, resting her fingers there before withdrawing them. He made no sign at this caress, but his own stiffness relaxed slightly. He put the cross away and settled back in his seat, one hand curling around his glass. After a collective hesitation, Spike directed a gaze out across the bar room, scanning it as if looking for a change of subject. "'S like old home night for losers and tossers," he said, the edge in his voice indicating he was not at all surprised. "Take a good look, kiddies. These are the dispossessed, the new underclass." He toasted the room, then drank.

Annoyance touched Willow's expression, but when she spoke her voice was milder than it had been in weeks past. "In case you didn't notice, those are mostly your kind out there. Demony and possessed. The dis are sitting right here."

Training his sharp gaze on her, Spike lowered his voice and said, "You want the stories that aren't reaching the papers, right? Well, I'm telling you: it's not just humans getting it in the shorts. The new landlords have plans for everyone."

"What kind of plans?" Xander asked warily.

"Bring the lower races into line. Kill the ones that don't follow or fit into their program."

"And where are vampires on that food chain?" Xander's face was set into mocking lines, though his voice lacked its usual energy.

"Depends." Spike tipped his head, acknowledging one of the unspoken truths of the Hellmouth. "Not all vamps are created equal."
 
Buffy had always wondered about that, but right now she wasn't really interested in discussing the creation theory of vampires. "I don't care what happens to demons," she broke in. "I have only one priority, and that's keeping the human race from becoming fertilizer for Grauth flower gardens."

The imagery she'd used was blunt and sobering, and there was a moment of silence before Spike said carefully, "You might want to consider the benefits of making allies then, Slayer."

Her cheeks heated. There was nothing like having Spike point out strategic oversights to make her feel ten years younger and stupider, the blow-pop sucking ditz she used to be instead of the girl general she styled herself as now, Sunnydale's answer to Joan of Arc.

Even worse was when Xander added, "He has a point." He didn't sound pleased about it. In fact, he sounded horrified and looked queasy, and gave a cracked little laugh after he spoke.

"I won't rule it out," she allowed, "but right now we need information more than we need allies." She was speaking to Spike, but her gaze was drawn to Xander, who'd rested his head in both hands and was scrubbing his fingers through his hairline with small but brutal-looking motions. "Xander, are you all right?"

"I'm fine," he said to the table, then dragged himself upright as he realized he'd gained their attention. His face had paled, highlighting shadows under his eyes that Buffy hadn't noticed before. "Headache."

"What else do you know?" Willow said, directing the conversation back to Spike, her tone implying he should come up with something more useful.

He looked from Xander to her. "Seen our friend Willy a couple of times. He's comin' up in the world. Apparently some info made its way to the right people's ears, and he earned himself a line of credit. Opened a nightclub over on Sierra. Something else too--" He paused for dramatic effect, removing his gloves to light a cigarette. "He's getting the treatment."

"What," said Buffy, "like a permanent wave?" And okay, why were they looking at her like that? Didn't they recognize sarcasm? She wasn't that blonde.

"No, like a permanent makeover from human to demon. Special reward for friends of the state. Your pal Foss was on the same step plan. 'S done with injections or something."

Willow looked sickened, her brows lowering in a frown and her lips parting as if she were tasting something unpleasant. "They're turning them into Grauth? They can't do that. It doesn't work like that!" She turned her gaze to Buffy, seeking an arbiter for her argument. "You can't give someone a shot and say, poof, you're a demon."

"Why not?" Buffy wondered. "We've seen stranger."

"Demons and humans have different natures. It's not genetic or even like an infection--it's elemental."

"What about that time I caught the aspect-of-the-demon thingy? Wasn't that like an infection?" She honestly didn't think it sounded so far-fetched, but Willow seemed stubbornly upset by the idea. Xander appeared just as staggered, but wordlessly so. "Maybe that's what the treatment is. A bunch of magicky elements, like vitamin shots."

"That's crazy," Willow said, a bit more loudly. She was giving off anger vibes now, but Buffy could tell they weren't directed at her.

"So, getting turned into a demon is a reward." Xander, slouching in his seat, shook his head at the prospect. "What's the punishment?"

It was clearly a rhetorical question, but Spike answered, "That would be the detention camps. And the labor mines."

"We've been hearing about those," Buffy said, imagination dwelling unwillingly on the bleak scenes the words conjured, a nightmare courtesy of Hollywood: people crammed into cold bare rooms, hungry, dressed in rags. Mud and barking guard dogs and barbed wire. Forcing herself to concentrate on the more immediate present, she asked, "Any idea what they're mining?"

"No," Spike admitted. "Very hush-hush, whatever it is."

"Info not fit for a mere captain, huh?" Buffy smiled with her eyes, and he glinted dryly back for one shared moment of communication.

"'Fraid not," he said.

"Hey, Slayer," said a reedy feminine voice. Buffy looked up to see a purple newt standing at the end of the table. It wore a poncho and several pounds of beaded bling-bling, and smelled so powerfully of weed, Buffy thought she might be getting a contact high from proximity alone. The creature swayed slightly and tried to bring its glassy eyes into focus, while behind it a speckled companion lizard in tasseled sombrero and overalls flashed them the peace sign.

"Hellllloooo," Buffy replied, driving every ounce of doubt she owned into that single syllable. A hazy recollection surfaced of having come across the demons before, but being a slayer was like being a movie star: more people remembered meeting you than you remembered them. Still, she seemed to recall they'd been eager for the new age to dawn in Sunnydale. She wondered how they liked it now that dawn was here.

"So, hey, look," said the newt. "We're not, like, best buds or anything, but you know people, right?"

"Several. Some of them at this very table."

"See?" the newt said over its shoulder. "I told you, man. She's cool." Liquid eyes fixed on Buffy again. "So, like...we're trying to hitch a ride out of town, but no one's got wheels. You need this permit for a car and it's...." She lost the trail of her thought, then recaptured it with a pounce of outrage: "It's wack!" Her tail flickered behind her in punctuation.

"Wack," repeated Buffy.

"Exactly." Newt expressed this word in amazement, as if Buffy had just shared satori. "But you have permits and stuff, 'cause you know...you're the Slayer."

Buffy's brows couldn't have climbed any higher up her forehead without surgical intervention. She wouldn't have thought it was physically possible to get that stoned or that stupid, but here was walking evidence. "Uh huh. I'm a real big wheel around here now that the hell demons have taken over."
 
"Fantastic!" Newt exclaimed, with pathetic enthusiasm. Then its eyes clouded. "But we don't have any money, so it'd just be like...karma."

"Right. Karma." Absolutely.

"Karma chameleon,"  Xander said, staring at the demon as if seeing an apparition from his own occasionally bong-shattered past.

"Dude," said the speckled demon suddenly, from behind Newt. He nodded with affinity and pumped a fist of solidarity at Xander. Xander's eyes remained big and fascinated.

"Look," Buffy said, finally dredging up a thimble of pity for her deluded petitioner. "I can't help you. There's no way out of the Hellmouth right now. You should just find a place to hole up and ride this out." She couldn't tell if she was getting through. "Capisce?"

Newt's tail twitched. "If you don't wanna help out a sister, you could just say so. No need to be all high-hat." Buffy opened her mouth, but Newt blew on: "C'mon, Derek." Derek? "Might as well leave Queenie to her court." Her patter lowered to a mumble as she shuffled off with Derek in tow. "Know a vamp with a Bug, lives at the beach, owes me a favor..."

Everyone at the table watched the lizards leave, and a silence lingered in their wake until Willow drew up her lower lip in a thoughtful nibble and said, "Does anyone else have the munchies?"

If Lieutenant Illamar Clude had made a fresh pot of coffee on time, he never would have seen the vampire.

The New Grauth Reich was not entirely what Clude had expected. He had been commissioned a lieutenant back when his people couldn't reach the surface, when he'd been one of the few to walk the Earth, preserving their culture until the time of destiny, when the Grauth would return and reclaim their birthright. He'd worked hard, taken all doctrine on faith, been a leader to his cell. He'd worked with humans--had to, because humans could tolerate the sun, and his people couldn't--but even so he hadn't complained. He'd known that when the New Reich arrived, he would be justly rewarded. He was a lieutenant, after all. A respectable rank. Or so he'd been led to believe.

Occupation had changed things. Within days, he'd learned that his rank was considered nominal only. Lacking combat experience and formal army training, he was bound by regulations which prevented him from joining the ranks of soldiers charged with defending the Reich. His newly assigned duties were purely administrative--in truth, he was little more than a glorified secretary. He wore the uniform of deskside staff and reported to a surly, dyspeptic career captain, who in turn answered up a chain of command that effectively ended in Colonel Liyoge. This captain had decided that Clude's experience on Earth suited him to the task of running to the market every morning for pears and chocolate, and making pot after pot of Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee, a substance whose days were numbered, given that all imports were cut off by the Civic Defense Barrier. Of course, Clude hadn't bothered to tell the man this yet.

This afternoon he'd failed to make the three o'clock pot at three o'clock, having had the temerity to perform, instead, actual work. No more than typing reports, but that was something. He was good at reports. That was part of his problem, apparently. He'd impressed his superiors so well with his reports on the good citizens of Sunnydale that he'd earned himself an eternal place in the bowels of bureaucracy. And today, while typing, he forgot to brew a fresh pot of his superior's cultivated addiction. This had resulted in a severe dressing-down that lasted forty-five minutes, time Clude felt could have been better spent actually making the coffee his captain desired, as well as finishing up his documentation of weekly recruitment and attrition statistics.

Burning furiously from the reprimand, Clude had left the office on the dot of five, rather than staying late as was his wont. Why make extra effort when it would only go unrecognized--when making coffee was the only measure by which one's worth was judged? It was grotesquely unfair, what he'd come to, after all the dedicated service he'd given, and he was musing deeply and still smarting with the injustice when he looked up and saw the vampire coming out of a drab windowless bar in the Lower Quarter, where the lesser breeds of demons--what Grauth called dreffa--resided.

It was Spike, a.k.a. William the Bloody, a.k.a. Captain William Aurelius, the new darling of the Special Forces. Clude recognized him easily. He'd recruited the man personally, after all, and had been following his exploits in the press with bitter resentment. No more than a single rung above Clude on the ladder of rank, and no formal army training there either, and yet Captain Aurelius was invested with the full authority of a combat officer. And he was not even Grauth, but a vampire.

He did wear the uniform of their kind, however. Which was why Clude found it so interesting that the vampire was leaving a dreffa club in the company of the slayer and two other humans. They parted ways quickly, but their glances and nods could not be mistaken for anything other than partnership. Clude smiled unpleasantly as he hung back behind a dumpster and watched the vampire walk away, cloak swirling behind him, the human male by his side. The slayer was supposed to be dead. She'd been on one list; Spike on another. Names on those lists didn't mix, didn't mingle, didn't meet in dark bars. Or if they did, it meant...something very inappropriate.

Clude didn't need to follow Spike. He knew where the vampire lived; in tony officer's quarters reserved for the Reich's best and brightest. But the slayer--it would be prudent to follow her, see what she called home these days.

He fell silently into step, trailing her with care, close enough to track her golden head cleaving the shadows and far enough back to avoid her attention. He didn't want to lose her. She was his ticket out of the dull offices of Recruitment and into a field position--perhaps even Intelligence.

It was true what humans said. The only good was knowledge, and ignorance the only evil.

"There sure were a lot of sad sacks in that bar," Willow commented as she and Buffy skirted the pond in Stickler Park. "Some of them were pretty sack-like to begin with, but this occupation is laying everyone low."

"I thought you were all, 'dis here, possessed there.' You think Spike's right, we should ally with demons now?"

Willow lifted her shoulders, bodily struggling with the problem. "I don't know. We're up against something bigger than we've ever faced before. Maybe it's too big for just us."

"I know there are good demons," Buffy said. "Or at least, not-entirely-bad ones. But the way things are right now, we might not be able to tell which are which. Or worse, what if it's the bad ones we'd have to trust? I don't think I'm ready to take that risk with our lives."

"It seems like it used to be easier to tell the good guys from the bad," Willow acknowledged. "But you know, even back in the day when the Initiative was around--"

Buffy touched Willow's hand and the other woman fell silent, giving her a sidelong look. "I think we're being followed," Buffy said quietly. The waves were lapping at the embankment and the path lights made tiny pools in the darkness, and like a ripple from her own steps she could hear other footfalls behind her.

Without turning her head or breaking stride, Willow noted, "The tunnel entrance is just across the bridge."

"Yeah. So I'm thinking we should see who our shadow is--now." Abruptly, Buffy stopped and whirled into a defensive posture, half expecting a bullet or bolt to come flying out of the night. Down the path a uniformed figure paused under a lamp, too distant for Buffy to make out his features, then broke and ran away, boots thudding on the walk without any further attempt at concealment. Her only certainty was that he was Grauth, and she would have given chase, if she'd had any idea what to do with him when she caught up.

"Aren't you going to go after him?" Willow asked.

"No. Not here. I don't want to attract attention. Besides," she said as they turned and walked on, "he didn't have a chance to find out anything important."

Back at the Initiative--Buffy never really stopped thinking of it like that--they gathered the others into conference mode and outlined their plans. It felt good to have plans, which along with the maps helped her feel she was coming to grips on things. "We're going to do some recon," she said. "We know the Grauth have set up detention camps. They've got a whole town's worth of forced labor, and they're mining something out by Mount Siliyik."

Dawn perked up, enthused by knowledge and the chance to be exposition girl. "Oh, that's the glowy place we saw in the locator spell."

"Right." Buffy sat up straight at the head of the table, trying to inject an air of authority and professionalism into proceedings that were at risk of resembling an after-school club meeting. The youth of her audience made her nervous, more for their sake than her own. Kerry was nibbling a Twinkie she'd found god knows where, and sitting too close for Buffy's comfort to Marcos, providing a candid illustration of how premature teen sex could destroy your sense of personal space and public restraint. "We need to find out what's going on out there," she went on. "What their operation is."

"If that's where the portal opened, it's no coincidence," Willow said. "It's a place of power."

"Funny we've never had any trouble there before." Tara looked around questioningly. "Not that I can remember."

Willow lifted one shoulder. "I guess it was dormant."

As the conversation threatened to veer into unhelpful speculation, Buffy regathered the reins. "In any case, it's time we took a closer look."

"All of us?" asked Dor.

Buffy nodded, hiding her doubts about the wisdom of this idea. It required a deep mental breath to include them all in the commanding sweep of her eyes and say, "Get ready for a field trip."

Anya had taken the drastic and unprecedented step of locking the shop door during business hours and hanging a sign that said 'Back in 5 Minutes--Don't Leave!' If things turned out the way she expected, she would need those five minutes' worth of income and much more besides.

She was sitting on the closed toilet lid in the tiny bathroom with a timer ticking away the last few minutes of her wait. The ticking was a mocking sound, like a biological clock that wouldn't ding no matter how much you glared at it.

"Tick, tick, tick," she muttered to it, having no one else on hand to talk to. "They say a watched pot never boils, but that isn't true, I have no problem boiling. Water obeys me. They should say, 'A watched timer never dings,' because you can observe that for yourself. And timers are inherently imprecise devices, not even good for cooking eggs, and these are my eggs under the gun." She glanced down at her belly, lifted the hem of her blouse. "Go little eggs, go!" She didn't see any movement there, but would she? It was probably too early.

Anya picked up the timer, shook it vigorously with great suspicion, and set it back down. It continued to tick. She looked at the stick in her hand, but didn't look too closely, because she might see...well, she might not see anything, and that would be bad.

"It's really his sperm that need to do the work here," she said aloud, to whoever might be listening. The Powers That Be, if they had any interest. "I have perfectly healthy ovaries, and many fat little eggs just waiting to be implanted with seed. My eggs aren't lazy, oh no. I don't know about his guys. Probably all sitting around on their duffs like those fatheads he works with, yelling at all the hot mamas who walk by. They want sex, oh sure, but do they want the responsibility of fatherhood? I think--"

The timer dinged.

"Okay," she said. She held the strip in one hand and the paper instructions in the other. She had a frown on her face as she read, and then she looked at the strip. Looked at the strip, then at the paper. Looked at the paper, then at the strip. Strip, paper. Paper, strip. "Okay," she said at last, as it sunk in. And then, with giddiness, she tested out the words in her head: "Mom. Mama. Mother. Moeder. Mommy dearest."

Bouncing out of the bathroom with the pregnancy test strip still in her hand, Anya wore a grin that was wasted on the empty shop, but she didn't care. She had company now, a little Xander in her belly. "Madre. Mor. Mater. Mere," she said. She went behind her counter and placed the pregnancy strip down, centering it with great care within the frame she'd selected. When she'd assembled the frame and glass, she hung the results on the wall, next to her first dollar bill. She straightened both and stood back, regarding them proudly.

And with great pride she said, "Ma!"

Still riding her high with a light tra la la of song, she went to open the shop again. On the step outside waiting stood Colonel Sordicov. "Hello there," Anya said cheerfully, removing her sign and inviting him in. "Beautiful day, isn't it?" It was, of course, pitch black out, but day was in the eye of the beholder.

"Miss Jenkins." He inclined his head. "I was concerned when I saw your shop closed."

"Nothing to worry about," she assured him, nearly skipping across the room to deposit her sign in the trash. "We're open for business! Not a lazy egg among us!"

Sordicov looked politely indulgent of her remark. "Indeed, you're the most hard-working egg I've ever had the pleasure of meeting, m'dear." He followed her, wandering closer. "And I dare say the prettiest."

Nothing could dent Anya's good mood today, even unwanted compliments. "Now you know I have a boyfriend," she said brightly. Her thoughts twirled her away into happiness and she slid a finger into her hair, tugging at its strands as her gaze dreamily unfocused. "And he has healthy, powerful sperm."

"Er, jolly good. Man should have lure on his line," Sordicov said agreeably. "Still, not much of a worry when the fish is dead, eh?"

For a moment, Anya wasn't sure she'd heard him correctly. "I beg your pardon?"

"Sorry, m'dear." Sordicov cleared his throat. "Uncouth of me to refer to the matter."

Her cheeks unaccountably hot under his gaze, Anya asked, "What matter?" For all his outward show of politeness, the Grauth had an air about him of over-familiarity that hadn't been earned by a few ballroom dances, a kind of sly twinkle in his eyes that she wasn't sure she liked.

"Ex-demon, you said." He extended his cane and hooked her wrist gently with it, drew her a few tottering steps closer. "Can't imagine everything made it through the remodeling job." He laid an overly intimate hand against her side, not quite brushing her belly. And she would have pulled away, but his sleepy eyes held her still, like a horrible little rabbit in a snare. "Demon's a hard thing to get out, once it's in. But you..." His smooth voice grew smoother. "...you, Miss Jenkins, are quite human where it counts, thank Sytos."

He was as close as Spike had been earlier that day, but his forwardness was intolerable to her and she pushed him away before he could take advantage. "You have a thing for humans, I'm gathering. Bit of a kink, huh?" Hiding her slight tremor, she stepped back, pulling herself behind a wall of refusal. "Well, you can forget about dipping your wick here, mister." Her eyes flashed dangerously and she lowered her voice, channeling the old Anyanka. "I think you'd find there's a little too much demon in me for you."

It had taken a while to cross town into the outlying burbs, and would have taken longer to reach the mountain if they hadn't hiked over to the river and stolen a boat. Willow had powered the vessel speedily and silently with some outboard witchcraft, and they'd pulled up near the base of Siliyik without alerting anyone to their arrival. Creeping close, they'd seen a net of lights spreading out from around the entrance, flooding the darkness and making visible a chain-link fence that surrounded the previously open parking lots and tourist center. Spotlights planted in the ground illuminated twin totem poles at the entry port and a carved, twenty-foot statue of a bear, which loomed over a cedar cabin serving as a guard house. Around the foot of the mountain spread the fringe of the forest, like a nest of pine and fir. Buffy had been able to see Grauth guards on patrol just inside the fence, walking its perimeter with guns slung at the ready.

They'd had to circle around until they found another way in, an abandoned back entrance half buried in an overgrowth of shrubs, advertised by only a single rusted sign that hung across the path on a chain, claiming No Admittance. They'd single filed in, Buffy and Willow keeping the kids between them, and descended through the rough-hewn passages in a kind of twilight.

Now they could hear ahead of them the irregular clang of metal against rock, dozens of strikes overlapping one another, filling the caves with a staccato rhythm. Buffy glanced back at her own personal scout troop and raised a finger to her mouth. The kids were carrying weapons--short swords and cross-bows, whatever they'd had lying around. She didn't know how well they'd handle themselves if the situation demanded it, and hoped she wouldn't have to find out. Her plan didn't call for confrontation, just some amateur sleuthing.

She beckoned Dawn and Dor forward and whispered to the others, "Stay here. We'll take a look ahead." The rest hung back with various looks of disappointment or relief.

After creeping along the tunnel and around a corner, they crouched behind a tumble of rocks and surveyed the scene. The passage they'd come along opened up into a wider cavern, roof supported by columns of rock and broken up by toothy stalagmites or stalactites that Buffy, no science geek, generically categorized as "jaggy thingies." Around the cavern, humans in dirty and very ordinary street clothes chipped at the walls with small picks and hammers, dislodging dust and chunks of stone. Occasionally, one of them picked up a rock, examined it, and dumped it into a pail. As vacation packages went, Buffy thought this one sucked.

At the edge of the cavern a Grauth guard sat on a boulder and ate Twizzlers, gun propped at his side. Dragging down his shoulders was the mid-shift slump of profound boredom, an affliction transcending species and dimensions. Buffy gestured to Dawn, making little walky-fingers in the direction of the guard, then circling the air with her finger; in the universal sign language of rebels, this meant: you distract the demon while I circle around and jump him.

Dawn watched her hand-puppet show with a face that questioned Buffy's sanity. Rolling her eyes, Buffy pointed vigorously between Dawn and the guard, then crab-walked off to begin a circuit of the cavern, quieting several startled humans as she went. From the other side, after a minute, she heard Dawn scuffling across the ground.

"Um, hiiii...yah," she heard Dawn say. "Me nah nu nah nu?" The Grauth guard got to his feet slowly, a Twizzler hanging from his slack mouth as he took in Dawn's appearance. Focused on her sister, he didn't notice Buffy creeping up. "Peekahbo kamah sutrah," Dawn said in a plaintive voice. "Dah lee la ma...la dee dah dah?"

When she was within a few paces of the guard, Buffy stepped out from behind a jaggy thingy and caught his eye. "Yo," she said, and spring-kicked him in the jaw. "Hi keeba!" The Grauth was down for the count. Satisfied, she turned away from her work, eyes stretching wide as she noticed Dawn's bare shoulders and then her bare--

"Dawn!" she yelped, aghast. "Put your shirt on!"

Meekly, Dawn pulled her top back on and tugged it down. "You said to get his attention," she said defensively. "Well, you didn't actually say, you mimed. Same diff."

"That was a very noble thing you did, miss," a heavy-set, fortyish man assured Dawn, still staring fixedly at her chest. Dawn shifted and crossed her arms.

Buffy's eyes narrowed at the man, then she glanced around at the bystanding miners, who had broken off work at the sign of freedom. "We're going to get you all out of here--but we need to know what you're mining."

"Gemstones," said the man who'd spoken before, his gaze finally lifting from Dawn's rack a split second before Buffy was ready to clock him. "There's rubies and sapphires 'round here. Not so big, but the grey-necks like them."

"Grey-necks?"

"Those things." The man jabbed a finger toward the unconscious Grauth.

Filing the term away, Buffy weighed the best means of getting the people out of the cave against her own curiosity. She found it hard to believe the Grauth were wasting their time digging out the guts of a mountain just to decorate their earlobes with pretty rocks. The idea of exploring further was tempting, but she had a dozen captives to liberate and a bunch of kids to do it with, so she curbed her inner Nancy Drew for the time being.

"We'll take these guys out along the tunnel," she said to Dawn and Dor. "After we get them to safety, I want to come back and--"

A crunching sound behind her and the girls' gasps made Buffy jerk around. The beefy man was just rising from the fallen Grauth, a bloody stone in his hand. The demon, its head bashed in, lay permanently unmoving. Beefy Guy looked at Buffy and tossed the stone aside. "Just finishing the job," he said, as if this were expected and helpful. Shocked and frozen, she didn't know what to say. It was no more than she should have done, but the act committed so casually by what she thought of as a civilian was somehow more disturbing.

"We should go," she said, swallowing down a reprimand that would have been empty.

"What's that?" Dor broke in fearfully, gazing back the way they'd come. Shots and sounds of running feet were growing louder, and the miners closest to the tunnel entrance edged away. As Buffy stepped forward to meet disaster, Willow ran in, followed by Marcos, Kerry, and Jason. Kethas and Tara stumbled in a moment later gripping hands, Kethas in human face, which was a fortunate choice of outerwear for the occasion.

"They're coming." Willow was breathless and near panic. "I can't cast spells--there's something in the mountain. It's like, kryptonitey."

Now was the perfect time to discover this. "We'll have to find another exit," Buffy said. With rising urgency, she turned to Beefy Guy. "Are there any other ways out of here?"

"Maybe," he said. "This way!"

Buffy fell back, guiding the miners and kids out first and then tagging close at their heels as they wended through the cutaway rock. She couldn't see ahead far enough to tell where the guy was leading them, and that made her nervous. Guards were close, their voices resonating against the vaulted ceilings and skipping off the walls until Buffy could no longer tell from which direction they came; it sounded as if they were all around, and she felt the pressure of claustrophobia and the helplessness of having things taken from her hands.

When she heard screams though, she knew the only possible source and put on a burst of frantic speed that caught her up to the others. Skidding around a corner she found herself in a junction where several tunnels met, the dense rock opening up wide enough to hold their own escape party and a squad of guards.

Slayer Time was what she called it.

When her heart sped up and the world slowed down, time and space taking on the consistency of taffy, through which her legs moved heavily. Like those nightmares in which you run and run but the monster catches up, sinks its fangs--

--in your neck--
 
--and it was in the scope of an instant that she watched Fate reach into the earth and shake up their lives and drop them as randomly as dice.

The Grauth's bullets hit Kerry first as she spun to face the arriving guards, knocking redly against her chest and sending her to her knees, and with that same slow force struck Jason, who was leaping to catch her. Two more bullets zipped by  Buffy's head with tiny whuffs of air, and she instinctively sheared away, then drove herself forward, toward the source of the attack. There were miners in the way, whose buffering bodies needed to be shoved aside. Bullets smacked into their flesh and the smell of blood was raw and rising.

She hit the nearest guard like a freight train. Even as he toppled she was taking his gun, using it like a club to smash the next closest Grauth, and dropping it and turning and kicking in motions fluid as freely running blood. Her head was a roar of red, her body nothing more than a device, a shuriken wheeling as it sliced mindlessly through its victims. Once, she felt something sting her arm but she ignored it, continuing until there was nothing more to kill, and then--

"Buffy!"

--snapping back into time with a sickening jar. With nothing left to fight, Buffy stopped on a dime, gaze taking in the litter of fallen bodies on the cave floor, both human and demon. She picked her way over to where Willow knelt. Kerry's eyes were wide open, staring sightlessly at the roof of the cavern, blood-drenched shirt clinging to her body. Next to her, Jason lay with eyes closed, one arm twisted and outflung in his last gesture to reach her. A sound sawing into Buffy's ears she identified after a moment as Dawn's sobs. Tara had one steadying arm around her, to keep her from falling.

"We have to go," Buffy said. The remaining miners, stunned and silent, huddled around their tiny group, too afraid to move in any direction. She gathered herself, wiped a handful of bloody hair from her face, then grabbed Willow's shoulder, drawing her to her feet, away from what was past help and hope. "Come on."

This time, she led them. If she picked a tunnel at random, they didn't need to know that. And when they resurfaced safely into the night, Buffy felt the touch of Fate again in the cold wind that stroked her face.

Capricious bitch.

"I'm not sure I'm liking this plan," Xander said, jiggling his foot nervously. "We should have gone with the others. A little recon, a little raiding party. Maybe some chips and dip."

Spike glanced up from his magazine, an incongruous copy of Cosmopolitan that he'd been absorbed in for the last twenty minutes. Around the waiting room a rather seedy collection of human men sat reading similar material, while from speakers in the ceiling issued a Muzaked version of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" that lilted like background music for eternal limbo, which this assuredly was if Xander knew his circles of hell, which after a lifetime stuck on its lip he assuredly did.
 
"Listen to this," Spike began in an earnest tone. Xander listened. "'How do you rate yourself against your friends?'" Spike read. "'They're Pintos and you're a Porsche. They're Prada and you're Kathie Lee. They're Naomi, and you're Anna Nicole.'" He looked expectantly to Xander for help.

Goggling, Xander stared back. "And the purpose of this question?"

"Find out if I'm obsessed with appearances."

"Uh...'kay." After a second he hazarded, "Anna Nicole?"

"Right. Thanks." Spike reimmersed himself in his magazine with deep concentration.

It was insane to even bring up, but Xander had to say, "You know, I don't think I'm supposed to answer for you. You can't expect to find out the truth about yourself if you can't answer your own questions."
 
Spike, who'd flipped ahead a few pages, frowned and then smiled at his results. "Says I've got au naturel style and I'm a believer in inner beauty," he reported with satisfaction.

Xander was trying to remember which circle of hell was reserved for violent suicides when the door to the doctor's office opened and a Grauth in a white smock poked his head out. "Captain Aurelius and," he consulted his notes, "X-Ander?" They stood together and followed the doctor back along a carpeted corridor, into an examining room that immediately made Xander's skin break out in goosebumps.

"This had better not involve probes of any kind," he whispered fiercely to Spike, who gripped his arm and propelled him toward the exam table.

The doctor consulted his clipboard again. "This is one of your operatives, I take it, Captain?"

"That's right." Spike leaned against a counter edge, giving off a nonchalant air. "Busting his hump for the Imperial State of Grauth, day and night. Tireless little badger." Xander gave him a dirty look. "Thought I'd look into this treatment, reward his good services and all that."

"Fine, fine." The Grauth clucked his tongue as he perused Xander's form. "It shouldn't be a problem--he seems healthy enough. There will be some tests required, of course, and there's paperwork to fill out. You know how that goes."

Ignoring the invitation to commiserate, Spike said, "So what's this about then? How's it work?"

"Oh, I thought you knew." Surprised, the Grauth lowered his clipboard and folded his hands in front of him. "It's a simple process, a series of shots over the course of a few months that confer the attributes of our own noble species on his inferior body."

"Watch it, buddy," Xander said, startling a look from the doctor.

"Don't mind him." Spike drew the man's attention back. "He's lippy." A scowl warned Xander against further comment. "Go on."

"Mmm, yes. Well, that's all, really." He paused and scratched one horn. "Except for the side effects."

"Side effects?" Xander didn't bother to hide his alarm, while with an irritated glare, Spike clearly gave up on additional reproof. "I'm already going to be turned into a demon--what other side effects are there?" This whole visit might be a charade, but he was getting into the spirit of it. The spirit of horror.

"It varies from patient to patient. You might not be affected at all," the doctor soothed. "Even if you are, the vomiting is usually mild--and I believe the rash is quite bearable if you bathe every few hours."

"Sounds swell," Spike said breezily, wandering over to a skeleton and regarding it with chummy familiarity. He asked over his shoulder, "So how many lucky sods are there in this fun program of yours?"

The doctor hesitated. "Oh, I can't really--" When Spike turned, the Grauth caught his eye and stammered, "A, a few hundred or so. Just the most favored of our new subjects."

"You know, I don't think I deserve this," Xander put in. "I really haven't paid my dues yet." He slipped down off the table. "Maybe I could start out wearing a rubber mask, work my up to the full shebang."

"Nervousness is perfectly normal," the Grauth said, patting his arm. "But you've been chosen for a great honor. And in time you'll reap the benefits of your higher state of being."
 
Help, Xander's eyes said to Spike, who strolled over. "Yeahhh," the vampire drawled with a skeptical frown, as if beginning to entertain doubts. "But what if it goes arse up?"

"Arse...up?" the doctor echoed.

"Y'know." Spike waved a hand vaguely. "Allergic reaction."

"Very few subjects have died," the Grauth said, drawing himself up into professional umbrage. "Relatively speaking. Most were simply too old for the treatment. Others, too weak."

"Did I mention my bum heart?" Xander asked, raising his hand.

The doctor looked nonplussed. "A heart condition would eliminate you from consideration in the program."

"Damn," Xander said with affected feeling.

Outside in the hospital corridor, waiting for the elevator, Xander's manic energy subsided and left him a spent penny. "What did we learn?" he said rather grimly, more or less to himself. Next to him Spike, a lean and hungry spook, seemed to give his question consideration.

"Piss all." Spike's tone was edgy with disappointment.

Xander shook his head, thinking over the conversation they'd just had. "I call bull. This is no reward system. A few hundred subjects? They'd be lucky to get a few dozen volunteers for the whole demon facial and sitz-bath package, and you can't tell me those losers in the waiting room were the Grauth's best assets. There's something else going on here."

In brooding collaboration they got into the elevator, going down.

The wind had changed direction and picked up strength, carrying pine and the cold, somehow metallic scent of the night to Buffy as she guided her lost sheep through the forest. She tried not to hear Dawn's wet sniffles and Dor's labored breath, both the result of heavy crying, listening to the stir of fir needles instead, a giant restlessness in the canopy above them.

"I think it's this way," Tara said as they paused at a fork in the path. Or where a fork would have been, if there'd been a path. Buffy doubted her Girl Scouting instincts. She could navigate the most complex of shopping malls and, after years of necessity, Sunnydale sewers, but she couldn't see the forest for the trees.

"Then we'll go this way." Buffy forged ahead, boots crunching on fallen leaves and underbrush as she tried to clear a way through the darkness.

"My battery's still drained," Willow said, falling into step with her. She flicked her wrist, casting a few weak showers of sparks that dispersed quickly instead of cohering into a magic compass. "I wish I knew why. I've never had anything like this happen before. Not unless I overdid it on magic, which I didn't." Her voice was low, rough with swallowed tears. "It's my fault they died. If I'd been able to tap deeper, find the power--"

"You couldn't. Something stopped you, Will, and it's not your fault." It's mine, she thought. For bringing them there in the first place, for arming them with toys, for not training them better. Guilt got to be a habit, something you lived in. It turned up, you put it on like a piece of armor, letting its heaviness remind you of the fight and how vulnerable you were underneath.

"I have to take a piece of the fault," Willow said quietly. Buffy stole a look at her clean, girlish profile and the troubled aurora of power it hid. "Like that piece of pie you have to eat, even though you're full, not because it's polite, but because you sit at the table.... We couldn't stop this--I couldn't--but this is what's happening now. So I'm just...eating the pie."

Buffy didn't quite nod, but felt that her silent acknowledgment was understood. Their similes were different, she thought, but they bore the same meaning, and then her attention was drawn away as without warning they reached the forest's edge, feet carrying them to a sudden halt on an outcropping of stone, overlooking a shallow quarry and what it contained. She took a deep breath that seemed to rip the heart from her.

"This night just gets worse and worse."

Spread out before them, encircled with burning torches, was a killing field of demon bodies. They lay in broken piles, gutted and shot and sprinkled with lime, left to decompose out here in the middle of nowhere. The stink they gave off was a gagging, terrible odor that made Buffy cover her mouth and turn away briefly before she forced herself to look again. The stench might have been stronger, but many of the bodies were still fresh. At the nearest edge two familiar forms had been pitched carelessly across a mound of dirt and bones. It was the lizardy demons from the bar, who'd asked Buffy for help. They were still dressed in their stupid frippery, laid to rest with a shattered guitar and a spilled purse.

"I blew them off," Buffy whispered, her throat scorched with death, the taste of bile threatening to choke her. She could feel the gathering of horrified witnesses behind her, Dawn and Dor and Marcos and Kethas and the refugees from the mines, and she couldn't look away now from the demons. Their deaths were meaningless to her, or should have been. But instead she was having one of those revelations she didn't want, a sweeping unwelcome sense of wrong, as if she rode a scale that was tipping out of balance. These were demons, and she was the slayer, responsible for killing their kind. They weren't under her protection and never would be.

Unless she placed them there.

Back in town, the idea of night had fallen and the streets had emptied. Only a few lonely souls, or creatures without them, walked abroad. There was a crystalline chill in the air that seemed to promise snow, but the sky remained clear. Every window was shut, however, and curtains were drawn against the darkness.

"This is quite the Merry Christmas," Xander said, smiling at the picnic Anya had laid out. She'd spread a blanket across the training mats and lit a few fat candles--nothing spellifying, he hoped--and bought a tiny ham from the market, which she was serving with canned yams and potatoes, microwaved to steamy goodness. She looked anxious, which was nothing unusual, and he took a seat next to her and squeezed her hand. "This looks great, An."

"It's too early, but I thought we could celebrate...you know." She lifted both shoulders with an elaborate eloquence. "The great and awesome gift that is life."

"Always a call for festivities." Xander held back from digging into the food though, his gaze idly roaming across the spread. He couldn't quite keep his mind tethered here in the confines of the magic shop when his friends were out somewhere confronting the forces of evil.

"You're thinking," Anya said. "I can tell. Your brow furrows and you look constipated. What are you thinking?" Her tone was one of clinical curiosity; her expression suggested that she was braced to learn something unpleasant.

"I'm thinking...this is a time of year to share your ham with friends and family." He rubbed his thumb across her hand in a gentle motion. "Why don't you come with me back to base? Buffy and the others should be there by now."

Anya, her face crinkled and a tad confused, looked at him, then at her dinner, then at him again. "There's not enough ham for everyone," she pointed out.

"We'll make do. We'll stretch it out with boxed soup." He caught a glimpse of something in her eyes he couldn't pin down, a flicker of seriousness or disappointment she was keeping hidden. "What's wrong?" he asked. "What?"

"Do they want me there?" A reedy uncertainty had entered her voice, and she had spaniel eyes now, the eyes of a puppy that doesn't quite expect love. It sent a tiny shock through him, even as he puzzled at her worry.

"Of course they want you there! Anya. Why would you even ask that?"

"Oh, I don't know."

"Anya."

"I don't know, I don't know--" She was getting squirrelly.

"An!"

"Because I'm a demon, Xander!" The words burst out like an unkept secret. "Even when I'm not. I have a thousand years inside me and they haven't gone away." Her hands rested on her belly with strange tenderness, as if her old vengeancy self actually lay coiled somewhere within. "And I can't imagine I'm Miss Popularity right now. I never have been before, but with all this--" She lifted one hand and waved elegant fingers at the enormity of it all. "They're probably thinking, 'That Anyanka, she must be very happy now that the Reign of Eternal Night has fallen.'"

"No, no, no. Why would you think that? Has someone said something?" Protectiveness was a tinder, ready to set his anger alight.

"They don't have to. They think it very loudly."

"I think you're imagining things," he said with as much gentleness as he could muster. And if it took a little effort, that was okay. You had to work at a relationship, at love. "Besides, you're a very human woman--" He stroked her hair. "Very soft and nicely shaped, and very not a demon."

Briefly, Anya looked almost wounded, and then her face took on that flinty resistance he so disliked, a mask for bitterness he couldn't understand. "Right. Huh." Tight laugh that was not a laugh. "Of course we both know why I can't be a demon, don't we? You couldn't love a demon, Xander. So I have to be a very human woman for you, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred and--"

"An."

She cut her litany short and struggled to her feet. "You get my point."

"Yes," he said, rising and wondering with that familiar bemusement how things could see-saw from good to crappy so fast between them. "It's the sharp, stabby thing you're driving into my heart." Under the facetious words, real feeling lurked. He believed as always that he took great care not to hurt her, while she went to great lengths finding new ways to pain him. Maybe she did have a sharp pointy point, and that vengeance demon gig built skills that were hard to set aside after retirement.

"I'm sorry." She didn't look sorry. "I know you love me. The human me. But just once I'd like you to say you love the demon in me, too. The gnarly bits, the veiny face that I still see in the mirror sometimes, the occasional nostalgia for vengeance."

And, oh god, the one request he couldn't fulfill, because how could he do that? How could he love what she'd been, when what she'd been was evil? He moved closer and took her by the shoulders, looked down into her expectant, hopeful face. In his heart, he knew love was a kind of forgiveness. You forgave faults and sins and loved the sinner, not the sin. And if he'd never examined his love for her too closely, that wasn't because it didn't bear up to examination; it was because he was too close to it. That was the paradox of love. He'd have to pull back to get a good look, and once you pulled back, could you get close again?

"I love you," he told her. "I love who you are, what you've become. You put the past behind you, Anya. You overcame it, like--like a bad childhood."

The spark of hope in her eyes went out. "Overcame it," she said flatly, as if fascinated by this diagnosis. "That's what you think? I had a thousand-year 'bad childhood', but now I'm okay, because I 'overcame' it?"

How had that been the wrong thing to say? Xander couldn't begin to fathom. "I didn't mean it like that--"

"I know what you meant." She disengaged herself from him, stepped back. "I need to be alone now."

"An."

"Please go, Xander."

And in the usual way of things he did her bidding, and he went.

He'd had a vision in his mind of bringing Anya with him back to the Initiative, their arms full of food and gifts, and the others would be back from their mission, stripped of their coats, settling in after a job well done. Everyone sprawled on sleeping bags or sitting on crates in a circle, as if gathered around the place where a fire should be--maybe they could set something on fire again just to have a little burn, build the proper atmosphere. And then they'd assemble at the table for their pre-Christmas feast, share the canned goods and crackers. There'd be talk and laughter, a feast of candles burning in defiance of the darkness.

But when Xander came in alone, there was a heavy silence to the room he immediately didn't like. Buffy, Tara, and Willow were sitting at the table by themselves, not talking, not eating. He looked around and saw the kids on their sleeping bags, silent but awake; something about them struck him as wrong, but he couldn't quite make his mind accept it yet. What he knew.

"Hey," he said, coming over to sit at the table with the women. They turned their faces to him in wan welcome, except for Buffy, who moved her head slightly but didn't meet his eyes. Xander's stomach curled in on itself in dread. "Okay. Tell me."

"The mission didn't go so well," Tara said. Her eyes and nose were pink from crying, but she wasn't crying now. She looked tired. "Jason and Kerry were killed. And some of the miners we  were rescuing."
 
He should have been there, was his instant thought. His own investigations could have waited another day. He hadn't questioned the assignment Buffy had handed out, no one had, but now he wished he'd been more--what had Spike called him--lippy. He should have been lippy, told them he was going with them, been there to help. It might have made a difference.

"Oh my god," he said aloud, his head bowing under the weight of this news. "Oh god." Then he looked up. "How...?"
 
"It was quick," Willow said, stealing a glance at Buffy. "They were shot."

Just...shot. No magic. Just a bullet and bang, death. It was so mundane, or should have been, but these were...these were still demons doing the shooting. Demons. Hatred held sick sway over his thoughts for a moment, then blurred indiscernibly into sadness. He wanted hatred's comfort, but it wasn't warming him today. What had been a zealous fire felt cold as ashes. "We should try to find their parents," he said. "Tell them...." Tell them their kids were dead. Christ.

"We will," Buffy said, breaking her silence. She sounded as if she were making a promise to herself. Her head lifted and Xander could see her surfacing from wherever she'd sunk, returning to them. "There's more you need to know," she said, turning to take him in. "They're killing other demons--we came across a, I guess you'd call it a dumping ground. There were bodies. Lots of them."

He assimilated this, tried to, but she was still talking.

"When I saw all those bodies..." She looked at Willow now, and Tara, sharing her gaze around the table. "It was like nothing I've ever seen before. What happens when they start doing that to humans? What if they already have?" Her hands were folded, one on top of the other. "We can't play by the rules anymore. It's time to think outside the box."

"What box is that, Buff?"

"We need help with this fight. I think...I think Spike is right. We need allies." Her green gaze returned to Xander, a warrior queen affirming her captain. "And you're right, too. We need to train better, and we need to do it with guns."

He wasn't sure he wanted to be right. Being right sounded wrong. The other part of the plan didn't sound so great either. "So we're going to do what--fight side by side with vampires? With things that steal souls and kill children?" His voice was low and steady so as not to carry to their own kids, and the necessity of quietness robbed his words of accusation. He was as tired as the rest of them at the table.

"We'll take whoever we can get. Whoever isn't on their side, we'll take for ours." The sureness of Buffy's command deterred argument. Even Willow seemed to have resigned herself to this change of heart.

"Most of the vampires are with the Grauth," Tara noted.

"Most," Buffy said. "Maybe not all."

It was crazy talk, and it hurt Xander's head, but he couldn't dredge up the words to articulate this. He thought suddenly of Kerry, with her pierced tongue and kinky hair and the make-up she managed to find time to put on even when the world was turned upside down. And Jason, with his funky shaved scalp and...well, he'd never learned a lot about Jason. Now he never would. They'd been Dawn's friends, and now they were dead. And probably by this time next year, all the rest of them would be gone, too. Unless they did something big and drastic and stupid, like ally themselves with demons, and oh fuck, that was it. That was what they had to do.

He straightened up in his seat. "I guess we know where to get started, then," he said. Then he paused. "Where do we get started?"

Lame wit won him a smile. Imagine what he'd get if he ever sharpened that baby. "I don't know," Buffy confessed. "I'm thinking we put the word out. Make contacts. Start organizing and getting serious."

Willow looked up from the design she'd been digging into the table with her fingernail. "This isn't going to happen without more casualties," she said softly, almost apologetic for pointing this out. "Are we ready for that?"

They all looked at each other, dwelling on the question in silence. "We'll just have to make sure the losses are minimal," Xander said at last. "It's all about taking this band of rag-tag misfits and making them into a crack paramilitary outfit." He caught their looks. "Or...something a little less Clint."

"No," Buffy said. "You're right. That's exactly what it's about."

In the back of the Magic Box, Anya was putting herself to bed for the night. She rarely spent the night at their apartment these days, and each time she visited she expected to find it empty of goods or full of Grauth. She'd brought half her clothes down to the shop by this point, but was wearing now a pair of striped pajamas that belonged to Xander. They hung loosely on her small body, but she found them comforting. She wore them when he wasn't around, and they were an important element in her tiny re-creation of home here in the corner of the training room, along with her narrow cot, its covers turned down in a triangle, and the bedside packing box on which sat a lamp.

She was rubbing a pumice stone across her feet as she sat on the edge of the cot, alone in the lamplight, but not quite alone. You had to take care of your feet, no matter what else happened. Soldiers in the field knew that, and it mattered no less to those not in the field. And when you thought about it, she was taking care of her feet for two now. Soon she'd be lugging around a lot of extra weight, and these small details could only get more important.

If she'd been a different type of person, she might have said prayers before she went to sleep. Prayer-like thoughts were in her mind whether she wanted them or not. This was the hour when her thoughts turned to the others, and she wished them safe.

Even if they were thoughtless bastards with stupid powerful sperm.

This was the hour when all good little kiddies were at home in their beds, and the bad kiddies were in other people's. Of course, these days you couldn't count on having a bed at all, unless you were a high-ranking officer in the Army of the New Grauth Reich. And then you had the luxury of not going to bed at all. You could stay out the entire bloody night, hopping from one club to the next in the curfew-free officers' district, ending up in the smoky crush of a brothel on the outskirts of respectability, listening to Gershwin.

"There's a saying old, says that love is blind; still we're often told, seek and ye shall find--so I'm  going to seek a certain girl I've had in mind..."

Spike was reclining in his chair in a pose of rapt attention while the torch singer swayed, her sequins glittering under the dim spotlight, a pinch of holly on her breast one of the few tokens of holiday spirit in the room. He wasn't so focused that he didn't notice Rosa descending from the stairs, adjusting the strap of her dress, smoothing her skirt. She halted at the last step, one hand on the newel, and watched the singer for a moment, then caught his eye across the room, over the heads of the audience. He sketched a bare nod, and she turned and went back up.

He drained his glass, took one last toke before mashing out his cigarette. He had someone to see.

Under the blanket of grief and darkness, Dor and Marcos were taking comfort. Dawn could hear them, though she pretended not to. She'd suspected for a while now they had a thing for each other, even though Dor had been with Jason and Marcos with Kerry. She pictured the four of them in one big bed together. Remove two of them and the remaining two would roll down to meet each other in the middle, into that sunken spot of the mattress. She didn't blame them, couldn't quite convince herself it was tacky. It just seemed natural. Like surviving.

Part of Dawn wanted that for herself, to roll over toward Kethas, the nearest male she could even hope to lay claim to at the moment, and pull him close and ask for comfort with her mouth. She turned in her sleeping bag discreetly, propping herself to glance at him, but he was asleep. Figured. Her body ached all over, especially that part of her, between her legs, that she couldn't decide on a name for, because all the names were dry, like terms teachers used in health class, or dirty, like what boys said when they wanted to be crude. She was seventeen years old and it was time to have sex. She could die. It could happen so easily. She wanted to cross sex off the list before death. The other way around was just too gross to contemplate.

And that she was thinking of sex at all right now seemed terribly wrong, but whenever she thought of Kerry and Jason she cried.

Sadness was always so salty and damp. That must be why it felt like an ocean.

Across the room from her sister, Buffy lay curled on her side, eyes wide open. A white candle was burning in its dish, and she reached out and touched the flame with her finger, not flinching when it burned. She was going to have to get tough. Tougher. She would have to watch those around her die and keep on fighting until the town was freed, until they were back in the world again.

The light of the candle was steadying now, but she couldn't waste it. She snuffed it out.

As the light winked out from where Buffy lay, Willow shifted, bringing her chin to rest on the hard curve of Tara's sleeping head. She wanted to sleep too, but worries pressed close, filling her with anxious shadows. She watched her own candle flame flicker and lifted a finger toward it with a soft command: "Exstingue." But the candle kept burning, and she had no choice but to reach over and kill its light with her own hand.

The atmosphere on base wasn't conducive to sleep, and he couldn't return to Anya, so Xander took a long walk, out through the virtual minefield of the UC Sunnydale campus. He knew there were Grauth soldiers about; he occasionally heard them patrolling in pairs, their voices carrying loudly as they chatted and laughed and cracked jokes. Not very good soldiers, the Grauth. It was comforting, in its way.

He kept rearranging his thoughts, but they didn't come together. It felt as if he'd missed a puzzle piece somewhere, or several. Blank spots where sense should be. But then, it had been a long day. Maybe even two. He'd lost track of time and of sleep. When had things gotten so strange? It certainly wasn't however many weeks ago when the Grauth invaded. Strangeness had made a home in him long before that.

As Xander walked, driven randomly by his thoughts, he neared one of the paths criss-crossing the campus grounds. He paused at its periphery behind a clump of bushes, rousing himself just enough to notice where he was before he stepped out into danger, enough to spot that a Grauth guard was approaching. He took a step back, blending into the shadowy concealment of a tree and drawing his knife out by instinct, raising the blade at the ready. Just in case. In case the soldier spotted him.

Just in case.

It was the middle of the night, but certain people were still awake and about; a figure moving through a living room, out of the shadows and into the glare of light.

"Hey," said Xander, looking up from his meal of meatloaf and mashed potatoes to where Spike stood framed in the doorway. Beside him, Xander's mother hovered uncertainly, fingers twisting her loose wristwatch. "Thanks for coming." The lamp above the dinette table swung back and forth like the light in an interrogation room, troubling the shadows, which grew and shrunk with uneasy rhythms.

"Thought I'd better see what you needed at this hour." Spike's uniform was gaudier than Xander remembered, and at the same time somehow blacker, gleaming heavily like the carapace of an insect. He looked like Darth Vader. Was he wearing chest armor?

"Is it late?"

"Two in the morning."

"We don't have mornings anymore." Xander pushed away his meatloaf, which had too much ketchup and looked like dead woodchuck, or something worse. His mother had disappeared, and he didn't know where his father was. He stood up and stumbled unsteadily against the side of the table.

"Easy there," Spike said, catching him. Xander looked down at his side and saw that he was bleeding again. He'd bandaged it up so as not to alarm his mother, but it was seeping through his shirt. The demon had gotten in a few blows before it died, and if Buffy found out she was gonna be pissed.

"I killed it," he told Spike, managing a smile. Spike's confused expression forced him to clarify: "It fought, but I came out on top. Are you surprised?"

"You don't have to justify yourself to me, Harris."

"Justify, testify." Xander realized Spike's arms were still around him, holding him up. "I'm just really tired. Really tired of things. Things with funny sharp shapes. Like squares in round pegs. Or holes, maybe." He leaned in and rested his head against Spike's shoulder, which felt warm and smelled of wool, like a sweater after you got caught in the rain. The vampire's arms were entirely encircling him now.

"You smell of blood," Spike whispered in his ear. Xander could feel himself getting hard at the words, which wasn't entirely pleasant or unpleasant, neither surprising or unsurprising.

"I can't get it out," he replied, drawing back reluctantly. He was afraid he was bleeding against Spike, he could feel a spreading wetness from within his shirt, but the other man didn't seem to notice. And then Spike kissed him, the way he must have kissed Buffy a thousand times, coldly with that dead mouth, a demon playing with him, terrible and miserable and sucking every bit of life from his body as the shadows in the room darkened around them.

When they broke apart, Xander fell, staggering back, looking down to find his shirt bathed in blood, his own life coursing free. Looking up at Spike, who had blood on his mouth. "Sorry," he said as Xander dropped to the carpet. "I was hungrier than I thought."

"You vamped me!" Xander exclaimed in outrage. He couldn't see his own newly pale face and dead eyes, but his pulse was gone and his body felt heavy and stuffed with cotton, as if it wasn't his own. Spike knelt down and held up a pink hand mirror, its face an oval into which Xander's reflection vanished, and he held the mirror close enough that it obscured his own face perfectly.

"Fair trade," he said from behind the mirror. "You've taken my dream."

And in the mirror, Xander now saw a girl's face with lank hair, her features as dead as his. He was the girl, or wasn't; couldn't tell. He didn't know her, but then he didn't know himself.

Looking away from that confusion, he discovered a stake in his hand, and it was the work of an instant to strike out against the demon who taunted him. The wood struck flesh and then bone and then heart, and Spike, his mirror tumbling aside, fell back in a splash of dust to become a part of his mother's carpet, something to be vacuumed up if she ever got around to it.

Xander took no joy in the act, which had been quick, and that was funny, because he wasn't holding a stake any longer but a bloody knife.

"That was quick," he said, voicing his own thoughts. "A knife would be slow."

With fear like a vise in his chest, he turned his head and gazed across the floor to where Anya lay crumpled on her side, skirt shoved up past her knees to show off her shapely doll legs, hair hiding her face. Every face was tucked away or inside out or changed. Wrongness, wrong. He'd done that to her, broken her, before Spike came to visit, while his mother served him dinner, and he could never take it back. With a sick and desperate ache he said, "Anya, Anya--"

She tipped her head back, showing him her smile, the grey mottled skin of a Grauth demon. "You killed me," she said conversationally. "Slayed the nasty demon. Good job. Rah rah." Her hand made feeble motions against the carpet, dragging across a pool of blood that had spilled from her knife-wounded body, from intricate decorations cut into the skin below her lacy bra. And oh god, he had killed her, he had. And with that wrenching shot of knowledge--

He woke.

Xander found himself lying atop his sleeping bag in the corner of the Initiative common room, apart from the others but close enough to see their own unmoving forms. He shoved himself up onto one arm, still dream-shocked, his mouth hanging half-open in an unspent gasp, his heart racing. His knife lay by the side of his bag, and he picked it up and stared at it closely. Its blade was clean, and he dropped it again and then suddenly he began to cry, collapsing back onto his side, one hand pressed to his face to stifle his sobs. No one should hear him cry. It wasn't a manly thing to do and somehow, ridiculously, he was the only man here.

"Buffy."

Giles's eyes shot open as he woke.

The word was already dying on his lips, and it was like a box opening within a box of thoughts in his head, as he sat up from his bed in the violent moonlight, trying to hold on to the remnants of his dream and the name that had come to him. It seemed so important, but it was dissipating quickly, dissolving like smoke from a cigarette.

"Buffy," he repeated, touching his head to try and keep the name there, and its significance. And then he knew where he'd heard it, or at least seen it. He snapped on the lamp and picked up the folded letter he'd left there, read aloud to himself the words he'd half memorized. "'We need all the help we can get. Buffy needs you....'"

Looking up from the letter, he stared into space with a frown. Someone needed his help.

Someone named Buffy.
 
 

In this ep, I did a tiny ret-con, adding a sentence to noir ten regarding Willy's appearance. It's not that important, but it does set up something. Also, I know his name is supposed to be "Quintin." I just kinda think that's a stupid name.

Eleventh episode in an alternate season 8, with an AU season 7 in between; everything branches off from "Gone."

Joss has the coolest toys. I am just manhandling them. A few song lyrics belong to the people who wrote them, except they're probably dead, so they belong to someone else.

Do not archive. Links are fine, though. My blog is here, the main noir page is here, my nominal homepage is here, at least if you aren't reading this page in frames.

I still do appreciate feedback. I read all your e-mails, and then I stuff them into a cherished folder and flee in terror of having to reply.