Seven o' clock, Sunday morning, cold as Southern California allowed and slightly foggy; earlier, before the sun had come up, breath had been visible on the still air.  Daniel Tanner shuffled down the sidewalk and turned into the alley behind the Doublemeat Palace, heading for the dumpster where, if he were lucky, he'd find the leftover burgers tossed out by last night's closing shift, still safely ensconced in their greasy wrappers.  A careful walk down the center of the alley, one foot before the other in the grimy trickle of condensation.  Not too close to the doors, not too close to the watching huddles of trash or the looming metal bulk of dumpsters--mouths had teeth, teeth to bite with.

Lizzie had died in the night, slipped out of herself through the hole in her crushed skull and danced away with never a word, and he'd spent the rest of the night bullying a terrified Jim and Ramon into helping him move the body out of the landfill.

There was no end.  There was no cure.  They'd lied, the eyeless men, opened their dead mouths and spat out maggot-words that meant nothing.  "There are rules," he muttered, and knew with some small part of his mind that the words were too loud, too angry, that if people heard him they would shy away.  "There are limits and bounds."  There were laws that circumscribed the greatest of forces, promises that had to be kept or unmake their guarantor in their neglect.  He'd kept his half of the bargain, and he would see, if it meant his dissolution, that the eyeless men did likewise.

As soon as he raided the dumpster.  Vengeance was a luxury reserved for those with full stomachs.

Willow Rosenberg woke to the certainty of power and the sweet weight of her lover's head upon her shoulder.  With her fingers she parted the netted swath of honey-blonde hair concealing her beloved's face, exposing to mortal view the shuttered eyes, the stubby dark blond lashes lying upon the silken cheek.  This was Tara in a nutshell, some part of her forever aloof, forever hidden.  Not by design or desire, but simply because there was always more of Tara, the farther in one went.  Tara hid her serene face behind a curtain of hair, Tara hid her unfashionably lush body behind baggy sweaters, Tara hid her iron will behind a facade of diffidence.  There was always one more veil to pierce, another hope that this was the final curtain and behind it the white limbs of the goddess would rise from the pool, sky-clad and radiant, and rather than striking the intruder blind would fold her to her bosom... Now am I special enough to catch your eye?  Now do I have the power to hold you?

Tara's eyes opened, blue-grey, the color of distant mountains.  Tara's lips curved, no less sweet than the curve of her hip beneath the blankets, the succulent weight of her breasts pressed against Willow's slim body.  She could nestle into the comforting softness of Tara's arms, worship at the altar of her body, bury her face in the well of delight between her thighs, and Tara would cry out in joy and weep in ecstasy beneath her lapping tongue...

But there was always one more veil.

Dawn Summers lay awake watching the moving shadows on the ceiling, and thought bitter thoughts about the coming appointment with her social worker.  Her existence was built on a foundation of sand.  The photographs hanging in the stairwell and tucked into little stick-on holders in the photo albums, bright fleeting images of vacations past.  The box of report cards (A's, A's, and more A's; until last year, the good sister, the smart sister, the sister who didn't burn down gymnasiums).  The chess set under the bed with the broken black rook, chipped against the wall when she'd thrown it at Buffy when she was six--all, all a sham.  She hadn't existed before last fall, the chess set hadn't existed.  They told her it didn't matter, they told her that they loved her anyway, but in the dark hours of morning when she stared at the ceiling and thought Who am I? it did matter, because they'd been made to love her.

I steal, therefore I am.

Buffy Summers dreamed.

She didn't want to examine the darkness too closely; something prowled back there.  She could hear the pad of feet on floorboards, the low growl... but she couldn't stay in bed; Willow was calling and she had to go downstairs again.  She got up, her long white nightgown trailing on the floor.  She took up the candle from her bedside in her hand, holding it high overhead.  "Boy," she said, "Why are you crying?"

He looked up from his cross-legged seat on the bare wood floor, moonlight curls tumbling over the high forehead.  Silver tear-tracks marked his cheeks.  "I've caught it," he said,  "but I can't hold on forever."  His shadow stretched away into the darkness, black as jet; in its arms a bright shape struggled.

The thing in the darkness crept closer, and its growl muted to a pleading whine.  It slunk up to rub against Spike's knee and he reached down, ruffling its fur and crooning to it.   She couldn't see its face, but she could hear its claws kneading the floor.  "Send it away," she whispered.

"Can't do that, love.  It's not mine.  Here--you have to take this."  He held out the bright shape; it flickered in his grasp and darted away into the shadows.  She gasped, snatching for it, but the beast was faster, leaping after the shining figure with a snarl.

Spike was gone, replaced by a bespectacled young man in antiquated clothing.  A green-scaled, razor-fanged demon crouched at his side.  He held a hand to his mouth, hiding an apologetic cough.  "I realize our situations are not precisely identical," he said.  "But sooner or later one has to come to an accommodation."  The demon growled agreement and bumped its nightmare head against his arm; he scratched its spiny ears fondly.  For a second they looked at her with identical pairs of blue eyes before blurring together into Spike once more.  The beast trotted back from the shadows, the shimmering figure held with tender care in its jaws.  Spike smiled proudly and patted it on the head.  "There's my girl."  He looked at her. "Blood and a little kindness--best feed it, pet.  They get stroppy when they're starved."  He took her shadow from the beast's mouth and held it up.  "Well?"

"Soap won't do," she said.  "It must be sewn back on."   She sat down on the edge of the bed, wincing in anticipation, and lifted one bare foot.  He sat down tailor-fashion and pulled a needle and thread out of his duster pockets and held them up; the needle glinted bright and wicked as a dagger in the candlelight.  Spike began to sew her shadow back on.  She scarcely felt the first needle-pricks, but as he continued to work, the pain increased.  Blood ran down his fingers, and every few stitches he stopped to lick his hands.

"They'll never be clean, you know," he said.  "And this--" He lifted one hand up, pale tongue flicking out to capture a crimson rivulet before it reached his wrist, and pointed to the limp rag-clad heap in the corner-- "Is your fault."

The heap of rags was a body.  The dead woman's face was pale and waxy, and the hair around the depression in her skull, smashed in as if by a length of pipe, was matted with old blood.  Tanner crouched over her, looking up at Buffy with fathomless dark eyes.  "Her name was Lizzie."

They were all looking at her, the dead woman, the living man and the undead one.  The beast growled softly, uneasy.  She should have known the name.  "It's in a good cause," she said, hearing the weakness of her own words.  "Isn't it?"

Spike shrugged.  "We won't know for certain until it's too late, will we?"  He held out his hand again, palm cupped; it was full of tiny blood-red droplets.  Pomegranate seeds.  "Here.  You get this out of it, anyway.  I can't promise they'll taste good."

She took the handful of seeds and regarded them doubtfully.  Had she heard this story before?  She could throw them away, crush them underfoot. "What about you?" she asked.

"Ah, I've eaten already."  He patted his stomach.  "Came off the other tree, and I think it was green.  It's given me a hell of a bellyache.  May take awhile to digest."

Could she afford these?  The budget was so tight.  She felt a blunt head nudging her elbow from behind, and a warm damp tongue tickled her fingers.  She wasn't ready to look it in the eye yet, but... hesitantly, she stroked the beast's muzzle.  She stuffed the seeds into her mouth, crunching down hard on the pips as the juice ran down her throat, red as life's blood, red as fire, and heard the beast break into a rumbling purr.  The pain wasn't in her feet any longer, but in her gut.  With every stitch, the needle dug deeper, the thread grew stronger.  It hurt.  It hurt.  It...

The dream dissolved into shreds and tatters, leaving the bittersweet richness of pomegranate juice on the back of her tongue.  Buffy lay there, unwilling to open her eyes and admit she was awake just yet.  She could feel the twinge deep in her belly as her body grudgingly followed her mind into wakefulness.  Damn.  Cramps.  It was a good sign, she supposed.  Her first period since coming back, proof that all the plumbing was in working order.  It was difficult to feel disassociated from reality when your uterus was tying itself in knots.  She got up, checked to make sure there was no blood on the sheets, and shuffled across the hallway and into the bathroom to ransack the cabinet drawers for a tampon.

Suitably fortified, Buffy faced herself down in the mirror, scrubbed her teeth (dutifully turning off the water during; a Slayer was conservation-minded, except when engaged in hour-long hot shower orgies with the undead--but, she assured herself, it had been with a low-flow shower head) and did fearless battle with the horror that was bed hair. So this is the face of a girl who sleeps with vampires.   Funny how it didn't look that much different from the face of the girl who violently repressed any desire to sleep with vampires.  Where was the mark of Cain, the scarlet letter that she could flaunt defiantly?  Not even an incipient zit.  Buffy bared minty fresh teeth at her reflection, spat toothpaste foam into the sink, and went back into the bedroom.

The starkness of her room dissatisfied her.  The furniture was still the same--the white-painted iron bedstead, her dresser, the chairs.  Dawn had saved her diaries and Mr. Gordo and one or two small things as mementoes, and Spike had rather shamefacedly returned a few photos he'd snatched after the funeral, but everything else had been thrown away or given to charity after her death: posters, knickknacks, stuffed animals, clothes, all gone.  When they'd moved the furniture back from the U-Stor-It, the week after she'd returned to the land of the living, she hadn't cared.  The monastic austerity of bare walls had been soothing.  She went over to the suitcases she'd left behind the bed last night, opened her overnight bag, took out the copy of the Rubaiyat Spike had given her, and put it on the bookshelf.  It was a start.

Buffy pulled open the curtains and let the morning light flood in, looking out the window into the branches of the oak tree where another vampire had so often crouched in the wee hours of the morning.  Spike just used the front door.  He was a ghost in the house this morning, a blanket-stealing, bony-kneed, tobacco-breathed, too-chilly-for-December phantom with tousled platinum hair--curled at her side when she woke, standing beside her in the bathroom, sleepily scratching his chin and expounding on the art of shaving without a reflection.  In a little while he'd follow her downstairs and gross out Tara with his disgusting bloodsoaked mess of a breakfast and fight with Dawn over the comic section.

If she was going to be haunted it might as well be by the real thing.  For better or worse, she'd wrestled the earthshaking ethical dilemmas of their situation to a temporary standstill, and now they were left with the hard stuff.  Question: how exactly does one unemployed vampire slayer, sister and mortgage in tow, put together a life with one vampire of infinite heart and limited ethics?  With a shake of her head she went over to the dresser, pulled out the top drawer and started tossing things onto the bed.  Answer: One drawer at a time.

"Hey, are you coming down to breakfast or not?" Dawn asked, poking her head around the door a minute later to find her sister sitting on the edge of her bed surrounded by piles of clothes and gazing blankly at the now-complete disarray of the dresser.  "Tara's making pancakes.  Are you zoning out again?"

Buffy picked up a pile of sensible slacks, all calculated to assure an interviewer that this, by golly, was a reliable team player, and eyed them with loathing.  "I do not zone.  I engage in clothing feng-shui."  At one halcyon time, she'd owned six-count'em-six pairs of leather pants, seven if you included the pair that didn't quite fit because she'd lost ten pounds the year before starting college but couldn't bear to get rid of because Angel had once admitted to liking them.  Maybe she could find out which thrift store had gotten the bulk of her pre-death wardrobe and buy it back at bargain prices.

Dawn looked from the clothes to the empty drawer hanging out of the dresser, and back to her sister.  "Earth to Buffy!"

She was not going to blush; there was nothing to blush about.  "It's for Spike.  Here, hold these."  Maybe if she moved the underwear to the bottom drawer...  There wasn't much, mainly because half of it had been ripped to shreds in the last week and now resided in Spike's squicky-flattering collection of Stuff That Smelled Like Buffy.  She was going to have to talk to him about that, though it might be a good idea to hide that t-shirt of his she'd snitched before she did so.

"Ohmigod!" Dawn squeaked, clutching the uninspiring slacks and bouncing up and down.  "Is Spike moving in?"

"No!"  Jump the gun much?  "We've only been...um...for a week."  Buffy shoved some t-shirts to one side and scrunched the slacks in beside them.  "This is purely for slaying emergencies, so he'll have some things on hand if he can't get back to the crypt before sunrise."  Maybe she ought to hunt up an ashtray--for the porch, because no amount of great sex was going to buy him a ticket to smoke in the house.

"Riiiight.  Riley never got a drawer."  Dawn flopped across the bed on her stomach and propped her head up on her hands.  "You're, like, serious now, right?  I mean, you're having sex.  That's serious, isn't it?"  At Buffy's stunned-deer expression she scowled.  "Don't go all Mom-like on me.  You're not Mom, you're my sister.  We're supposed to talk about boys.  It's in the manual."

Buffy sat down beside her.  "I know, it's just--" When had Dawn gone from 'eww, boys' and safe, chaste crushes on Xander to using the word 'sex' in a grammatical sentence?  "Yes, it's serious.  In a way.  It's--" She shifted sideways, pulling a knee up on the bed and taking Dawn's shoulders in her hands.  "Complicated.  Dawnie, please don't pin all your hopes on--I know you like Spike a lot, but there's all kinds of... issues.  It may not work out.  Things could happen--"

Dawn snorted.  "No way can he lose his soul more."

"As if--I'm sure the next Buffy boyfriend disaster will be something entirely new and original."  Buffy picked up one of the least objectionable sweaters and began re-folding it.  "I just don't want to get anyone's hopes up for an ever after here, much less a happily."

Dawn regarded her with the smug and infinitely irritating wisdom of a younger sibling.  "Then you should stop with the happy every time his name gets mentioned.  So what's it like?"

"What?"

"Sex.  Does it hurt?  Is it like in those books where the--"

Buffy dropped the sweater and clapped her hand over Dawn's mouth.  "Aaahh!"  Deer weren't big and stunworthy enough for this expression--elk, maybe, or wildebeests.

Dawn rolled over and crossed her arms.  "Geez, Buffy!  It's not like I'm a quivering virgin or something--I've kissed!"

"You have?  Who?  Who have you kissed?!"

"It was over the summer.  This guy I met at one of Janice's parties.  Spike killed him."

"WHAT!?"  Visions of Spike-as-chaperone, gleefully strangling some pimply and presumptuous suitor while Dawn stamped her foot and complained that he was embarrassing her swam through her head.

"Willow helped!"  Dawn went into a defensive sulk.  "He was kind of a vampire, and no, I didn't notice, it's not like I'm Miss Slut-Bomb 2001 with vast experience of what a vampire doesn't kiss like.  Unlike some people I'm related to."

Buffy was overwhelmed with the feeling that the world in general and her sister in particular had breezed past her. Dawn lay there glowering at the ceiling, the treads of her sneakers shedding tiny flakes of dried mud onto her older sister's quilt.  Fifteen was still a little kid, wasn't it?  At fifteen she herself had been... stealing lipstick, shaking her pom-poms at any member of the football team whose eye she could catch, cutting class to kill vampires.  OK, bad example.   "Valiantly attempting to be the cool yet authoritative older sister here, but you can't just drop the whole sex talk thing on me like that.  I have to prepare.  Work up a speech.  Find some hand puppets."

Dawn's eyes revolved, blue but not so innocent.  "I know how it's done, doofus.  We had the whole 'put the condom on the banana' demo in health class.  I just want to know what it's like .  It's not like you guys were exactly quiet that night on the couch--which is still all creaky and weird to sit on, in case you care."

"Um..." How the heck did you answer a question like that?  Great, until your boyfriend loses his soul and tries to destroy the world?  Way to give your impressionable sister a complex.  "I guess that depends on who you're doing it with.  And why you're doing it.  If you're with someone you love, who loves you, it's..."  She bit her lip.  "Life-changing.  So be darned sure you want your life to change."

Maybe that had sunk in; there was a thoughtful moment before Dawn smirked in a manner entirely too reminiscent of certain vampires.  "I think I'll tell Mrs. Kroger that my juvenile delinquent behavior is due to being exposed to my sister's perverted love life.  Unless I get something like, say, an XBox for Christmas to drown out the gross smoochy noises in the middle of the night--"

Buffy threw a rolled-up sock at her and Dawn disappeared down the hall, cackling.

The house was filling with the heavenly odors of coffee and Tara's pancakes when Buffy came downstairs a few minutes later, mingling with the pervasive pine-scent of the Christmas tree.  Buffy stopped to give it a wondering look on the way into the kitchen--decked out in tinsel and lights under Dawn's exacting artistic direction, it was the most perfect tree she'd ever seen; it could have been torn from a Currier & Ives print.  She ran her fingers over the needles, plucked a few off, bruised them, held them to her nose; tiny drops of resin oozed from the broken flesh.  It looked, felt, smelled... alive, and yet it was growing up out of the same old tree stand.  Was it all just an illusion, or had Willow really transformed their scroungy old fake Douglas fir into the real thing?  Buffy had managed by dint of great effort to avoid learning anything about magic theory over the past six years, but whether this was just a fantastically detailed glamour or a real transformation, it argued serious power.

And raising you from the dead doesn't?

"Hey, Buff!"  Willow was sitting at the kitchen table with Dawn while Tara stood over at the stove, pouring another dollop of batter into the skillet.  "You made it!  We saved you a few pancakes.  Anya e-mailed me a copy of the ceremony we'll be doing."  She passed Buffy a sheet of paper.  "We're meeting at the Magic Box at nine.  You get to be the la-place, whatever that is."

Buffy gave the printout a cursory glance.  "I'll assume that's a good thing to be.  I'm going to have to talk to Giles anyway--I think I had a Slayer dream last night."

Willow's cheery expression morphed into unease.  "You think?  You don't know for sure?"

Buffy shrugged and poured a generous helping of syrup over her pancakes.  Mmm, buttery goodness.  "As prophetic visions go, it was low on predictiness, high on annoyingly cryptic symbolism."

"I'll bet it predicted lots of broken furniture in your bedroom," Dawn said.  "Ow!  You can't hit me, I'm normal!"

Buffy bestowed an angelic smile on Dawn, who was rubbing her arm with an exaggerated look of agony.  "That's debatable."

"Kind of a Brunel thing, sans slashed eyeballs?"  Willow didn't wait for an answer, but got up and started rinsing off her plate.  "I've got to head over to the Magic Box now and help Giles set up--oh, and don't take the lid off that saucepan on the back burner, cause Miss Kitty getting into it would be of the bad, unless we want a pet hermit crab--nothing against hermit crabs, they're kinda cute, but no fur, which makes the petting thing problematical--"

Buffy interrupted the babble-stream before it could develop into full-blown free association.  "Dreamwise, we have death, small amounts of gore, and formless guilt.  The usual."  Self-analysis came about as naturally to her as the milk of human kindness did to Spike, but it didn't take Sigmund Freud to figure out that part of her was expecting cosmic retribution any minute now.  Good girls didn't sleep with soulless vampires.  "Do you guys have the spells online for tomorrow night?  I've got a job interview before lunch, and that appointment with The Kroger after lunch, but I should be free by four."

"Online, on board, on track--we are the essence of on.  Be vewy quiet, we're hunting cwazies."  Willow grinned, waved, and was out the door.

Buffy leaned back in her chair and watched her all but skipping down the driveway, then eyed Willow's coffee cup.  "Maybe it's time to have that talk with her about decaf again."

Tara flipped the last of the pancakes onto her plate and brought it over to the table.  "I think she's just jazzed about having her powers back."  She didn't meet Buffy's eyes.

Well, that was understandable.  If being unable to cast spells had felt anything like the dull grey misery she'd recently clawed her way out of, Buffy couldn't blame Willow for being the extra-bouncy human superball now.  She felt moderately bounceable herself.  She speared herself another bite of pancake and swirled it around in the pool of syrup.  Plus--lucky Wills!--she wouldn't be battling the persistent worry that her recovery was bought at too high a price.

"So, what's my part in the ritual?" Dawn asked, snatching the printout and scanning it for her name.

"Right there.  'Dawn Summers, staying home and being grounded for her sordid life of crime.'"

"What?" From the tone of her sister's anguished wail, Buffy might as well have said 'Stay home and have your liver removed without anesthetic.'  "That's completely unfair!  I'm so telling The Kroger you abuse me!"

"Oh, yeah, you do that.  'Mrs. Kroger, my mean old sister won't let me participate in dangerous Satanic rites!'  Did it ever occur to you that mystic Keys to the universe and rituals to open doors to the spirit world might possibly not be mixy things?"

"Good point," Tara said.  "Though strictly speaking, Satanism isn't anything like... oh, never mind."

Dawn shot her a look of wounded betrayal.  "I'll bet you just made that up."

Buffy sipped her coffee and adopted her best Sphinx-like-adult smile.  "Since you're not going to be there, we'll never know, will we?"

The gym mats were rolled up against the walls, fat blue coils of tarpaulin and foam.  The pommel horse had been dragged aside as well and sat watching the proceedings with cockeyed dignity from the corner.  Willow and Tara sat on one of the rolled-up mats, the floor at their feet awash with books dragged in from the front room of the store.  Xander sat opposite them, playing around with the drum they'd lugged up from the basement, a big-bellied, cowhide-covered instrument of uncertain provenance.  In the center of the training room floor, Rupert Giles crouched beside a circle of white chalk, an unlikely houngan in sneakers and sweatshirt.  His hand moved over the floor, dispersing a thin, even trail of yellow corn meal from between thumb and forefinger.  In its wake the sigils grew like living things: the vèvè of Legba, a crossroads atop a stylized globe, crowned with a second globe, one arm pierced with a walking stick; and the vèvè of Ghede, a tau-cross atop a mausoleum, flanked by a stylized rake and shovel on one hand and a coffin on the other.  Various other items for the ritual were scattered about the floor--a squeeze bottle of water, the dish of cornmeal, and a large gourd rattle.

Buffy knelt at the edge of the circle, taking candles as Anya handed them to her from the box and setting them up around the circumference. "...nineteen, twenty.  There is no way that the people who come up with these things don't own major stock in a candle factory," she grumbled, setting the last of the fat white cylinders in place and rocking back on her heels.  She was dressed in training gear--leggings, a pair of worn Nikes and a white tank top, with her hair pulled back into a ponytail.

Willow flipped through a few more pages of the book she was consulting.  "Are we sure this will work without the... you know?  'A speckled cock for Legba--to be killed by wringing its neck, not cutting its throat.' Cute little fluffy chickies?  We can't kill cute little chickies."

Tara wrinkled her nose.  "Not to encourage the blood sacrifice concept, but you've never met any roosters personally, have you?"

"There are other acceptable sacrifices," Giles said, keeping his attention on the near-complete vèvè and carefully releasing another thin stream of corn meal from between thumb and forefinger.  There was something ironic--or a touch frightening--in the fact that Willow had been more willing to sacrifice a human soul than a rooster.  He sometimes thought that it wasn't entirely for the best that some branches of modern Wiccan practice had so thoroughly expunged the darker aspects of the craft; it left the practitioners with no sense of proportion.  "Voudoun ceremonies are remarkably amenable to, er, customization.  It's the thought that counts, as it were.  I've even corresponded with a vegetarian Quabbalist Mambo."

Tara laughed.  "You're kidding!  I love it!  Go syncretism!"  Buffy and Anya exchanged blank looks.  Tara looked as if she were about to launch into an explanation, then thought better of it and sighed.  "I guess you have to be there."

"We are here," Anya pointed out.  "And yet the humor escapes us."

"All things considered--" Giles propped a small wooden cross up in the center of the circle.  "We should be grateful we're only dealing with the Rada loa.  The Petro loa demand pigs, goats..."  Occasionally people... He stepped over the ring of candles and out of the circle, careful not to disturb any of the cornmeal patterns.  He contemplated the assemblage.  There was something missing, the most important thing.

What were the questions he should be asking?  The obvious, of course; what was drawing the powers to Sunnydale in the absence of Hellmouth rumblings, ill omens, or prophecies of any type, and what, if anything, ought they do about it?  But if one was summoning up a being reputed to give unfailingly accurate advice, the temptation to ask a few personal questions as well was nigh-overwhelming.  Or even, he thought, a few less-personal questions.

Candles disposed of, Buffy was limbering up, doing stretches by the weapons rack.  She took one of the fencing sabers from the wall and began running through a few basic thrusts and parries, warming up for what was to come.  She danced through the movements, graceful and deadly as the blades on the wall behind her, and Giles tried to put aside his personal affection and observe her with a Watcher's clinical detachment.  She was near the top of her form these days, whipping through her training exercises with enthusiasm both gratifying and daunting.

Any casual observer comparing the Buffy of four or five weeks past to the girl before him now would have opined that her health, physical and emotional, had improved immensely, and the degree of improvement correlated closely with the amount of time spent with Spike.  The question was, was this something which would have occurred on its own as the effects of the Raising spell faded?  Was it, as a sentimentalist might have claimed, the effects of true love?  Or was some other factor at work?

Buffy's exercises culminated in a full-extension lunge with the saber-tip pointing at the door.  Spike appeared in the doorway a second later with a paper bag in the crook of one arm, looking sleepy (ten in the morning was an unholy time for him to be up) but unsinged; he must have come through the tunnels in the basement.   Now the vampire raised an eyebrow at the sword leveled at his chest and waggled his free hand at Buffy.  "Only five fingers here, Inigo."  Buffy lowered the point of her sword with a grin and bounced to her feet, flinging her arms around his neck.

"They look good together, don't they?" Tara said.

"I'm not certain," Giles admitted.  "I avert my eyes whenever it appears that physical contact is in the offing."  Still, Tara was right; Buffy wasn't the only one who looked... he wasn't certain that one could apply the term 'healthier' to an animated corpse, but he couldn't think of anything more apt; Spike had quite lost the gaunt, hollow-eyed look he'd acquired over the summer.  Giles adjusted the position of one of the candles by half an inch with the toe of his sneaker and risked a glance across the training room.  Buffy still had an arm around Spike's waist and a proprietary thumb hooked through one of his belt loops, but the unseemly snog-fest had broken up and Spike was pulling things out of the paper bag: a pair of covered Styrofoam cups with the Kohlermann's logo on them, and a bottle of cheap white rum.  "You have it?"  Giles asked, walking over.

Spike nodded.  "Yeh, buckets of it.  Benny was glad to be rid of it; normally he can't give the stuff away.  At least pig's blood's got body to it.  Gave me a ten percent discount too, and don't mention that to his Dad--not that one, you git, that's my breakfast.  Give over."  He tossed Giles the other container.

Giles made a show of inspecting it, though he wasn't certain what he should be looking for; one pint of blood looked much like another to one unequipped to smell the difference.  Blood from chickens of indeterminate sex and color, slaughtered at a civilized remove from the proceedings to spare the feelings of tender-hearted Wiccans; was there any virtue left in it, or would the loa dismiss it with as much disdain as Spike?  Only one way to find out.

He picked up the bottle of rum, and took it and the chicken blood over to the circle of candles to join the other offerings: a plate of roasted peanuts and cornbread, a handful of pennies and a wad of pipe tobacco.  He unscrewed the cap and poured a measure of the rum into a paper cup, ripped open a little restaurant packet of pepper, and dumped it into the liquor.

"This will, of necessity, be an abbreviated version of the full ceremony," he said, passing out photocopies of the responses as everyone took their places.  "Unfortunately it wasn't possible to obtain the proper drapeau or--"

"And the model's not to scale and you didn't have time to paint it." Xander rolled his copy up and beat out an experimental tattoo on the drum.  The resulting noise was startlingly deep, rolling through the enclosed space of the training room like tame thunder.  "Spinal Tap, here I come."

Giles ignored him--ignoring Xander was often the only possible option--and picked up the rattle.  "Places, everyone.  Now, Xander."  The drumroll sounded again, and Giles took a deep breath.  "Annoncé, annoncé, annoncé!"

Buffy leaped into the center of the room, twirling the saber behind and before, dancing backwards round the ring of candles and central cross and then forwards, saluting the cardinal points of the compass on her way.  Revolution completed, she brought the blade up, poised for an instant on her toes.  Spike stepped into her path, weaponless, an anticipatory grin on his face.  Buffy smiled back, and struck; Spike dodged, and they were off, two magnificent animals evenly matched in speed and nearly so in strength.

This was for show, only a shadow of the real battles they'd fought in the past, Giles knew, but even the shadow of that power and savagery was enough to catch the breath and speed the heart.  Spike, of necessity, fought defensively, blocking, dodging, evading the lightning-swift darts of Buffy's blade.  Now and again pain arced across his face as he made some move too aggressive for the chip's liking.

Giles had rather expected the glint of lust in the vampire's eyes, but it was unnerving to see it reflected in Buffy's face.  Both of them were breathing hard, completely absorbed in their dance.  Buffy lunged forward, the tip of the saber aimed straight at Spike's heart; she was not holding back now, as the mock-battle reached its culmination.  He doubled over backwards, falling to his knees and avoiding the thrust.  Spike knelt before her, visibly aroused and grinning ear to ear as she pressed the sword-tip to his chest, nicking the royal-blue fabric of his shirt.  Her eyes never left the his.  Slowly, Buffy lowered the sword, dropping the point to rest on the floor between Spike's knees.  Just as slowly, still with his eyes fixed upon hers, Spike bent his head and kissed the hilt.  A tremor ran through Buffy's body as he did so, as if the weapon were an extension of her hand.

Disturbing, very disturbing, but Giles couldn't afford to think about it just now.  The spell broke; Spike rose, and the two of them backed away from one another, returning to the outskirts of the room.  Willow and Tara, water bottles in hand, paced from opposite ends of the room towards the circle, pouring a stream of water behind them.  As they passed, Giles intoned, "A Legba, qui garde la porte."  Feet moving to the rhythm of Xander's inexpert drumming, the women pinwheeled out to the opposing set of walls and came back to the center once again, completing the crossroads of water.  Giles set the offerings within the circle of candles, then knelt and picked up the dish of cornmeal, raising it overhead and drawing a crossroad in the air over the vèvès.

Papa Legba, ovirier barriere pour moi agoe

Papa Legba, ovirier barriere pour moi

Attibon Legba, ovirier barriere pour moi passer

Passer Vrai, loa moi passer m' a remerci loa moin.

He set the dish down and picked up a candle, repeating the gesture.  "Aux Loa de feu au Sud."  He passed the fingers of his left hand through the candle-flame, too quickly to take hurt, and held his hand over the vèvè.

"Ago!  Ago-é!" the others chorused.

Giles picked up another water bottle, feeling a frightening elation.  Save for the summoning of the First Slayer, it had been years since he'd been part of this kind of ritual, and in those days he'd been calling on beings far more dangerous, but oh, yes, the rush was still there, the feeling of being outside oneself, caught up in something vast.  He poured out the libation of water at the cardinal points around the circle, calling on the proper powers at each one before swinging into the mind-numbing repetition of the lapriyè.   By the time it was over, eyes were beginning to glaze. Giles picked up the gourd rattle--no proper asson, lacking the beads and snake bones, but it would do, would serve--and made a sweeping gesture over the vèvès, as if to fling aside a veil.  "A l'Espirit surtout, royaume de Bon Dieu.  Pour les Marasa, Jumeaux sacrés qui se refléctent de chaque côté di mirior."  Water spilled clear and lovely from the lip of the bottle, the drops spattering the carefully drawn lines of cornmeal, but that was right and proper at this stage, and Giles felt no regret.  All things passed in their time.  "Ago!  Ghede!  Ago!  Ghede!  Ago!  Ghede! Ago-é!"

Giles braced himself, took a mouthful of the peppered rum and spat it onto Ghede's vèvè; his mouth burned, but he scarcely noticed.  Everyone except Xander shuffled into the center of the room to join the dance, and as they swirled round the ring of candles.  Xander, still seated off to the side with the drum, was concentrating on keeping the beat, with no attention to spare for anything else.  Willow and Tara stamped and swayed exuberantly, completely caught up in the rhythm of the ritual.  Anya danced carefully, copying the steps he'd demonstrated earlier, as if she expected a test later.  Buffy looked determined, and Spike looked embarrassed enough to combust on the spot, but this, Giles had made it very clear, was a participatory rite; there were no spectators.  The drum rumbled on, counterpointing the slap and scuff of feet on concrete; each beat clear, very clear, each note distinct yet blending into an overarching framework of sound which permeated the room, the building, the world.
  

Bugger this.

It wasn't that he didn't like dancing, because he did, and he was bloody well good at it, thank you very much, but that was dancing--be it waltz or a foxtrot or free-form modern dance club writhing, the point was you were talking to someone, body to body, pure communication unsullied by words.  Dancing was a primal shout--yeah, world, this is me!  And this thing they were doing now, he didn't know what it was, but it was all about talking to something too big to listen, one with the hymns he'd suffered through in his youth, and what if there was a beat to it?  The whole purpose was to sublimate the self, not express it.

Besides, how could he concentrate on some sodding ritual dance with the maddening scent of a Slayer on the rag in his nostrils?  Blood and sweat and the hint of arousal, oh, more than a hint, she'd enjoyed their little dust-up every bit as much as he had and Christ he wanted to drag her away from this farce, spread those taut golden thighs and...

White.

He blinked, staggered.  There was an illusion, when you stood on the platform at the back of a train while it pulled out of the station, that you were standing still and it was the world that was rushing away with ever-increasing speed, and it was like that now; everything was receding--well, why not, the universe was expanding at the speed of light... or something like that; what had he been thinking...?  The drumbeat was a roaring in his inhumanly sensitive ears.  His limbs froze, and he stumbled again.  He was supposed to keep dancing.  It was important.  Giles had said so, and he respected old Rupert--didn't like him, of course, hello, vampire, and vampires don't like anyone and why the hell was he dancing again?  And where was everything and everyone and who...

White.

Spike's gone.

Buffy whirled around in time to see Spike stumble and catch himself, breaking rhythm.  Despite the fact that the familiar black-clad body was standing there right behind her, part of her remained absolutely convinced he was nowhere in... not sight, but whatever it was that told her he was here. Giles and the others broke ranks, piling up behind Spike.  The drum faltered and fell silent as Xander realized that something had happened.

Spike, or whatever was inhabiting his body, looked at her and broke into a lascivious grin, tongue-tip dancing across sharp white teeth--Spike, but not-Spike.  "It's you again!" she blurted out.

He bent over, and picked up the remains of the peppered rum, tossed it off and licked his lips.  "You went and opened the door, ti-blanc," he said.  It was Spike's voice, a touch more nasal than usual, but the intonations, the accent, were all wrong.  "Why you so damned surprised when we walk through?"  He stretched out one arm and examined it, twisting his hand back and forth so the muscles of his forearm rippled under the pale skin.  "Fuck me, I got to get one of these.  You smell good enough to eat, ma Cherie."

It had been bad enough when Tara had been the one ridden by the loa; this was somehow infinitely worse.  An irrational and extremely pissed-off voice in the back of her head was screaming Give him back, give him back, give him back! Buffy forcibly muffled it and pulled away as Giles stepped forward, the gourd rattle still clasped in his hand.  "Papa Ghede," he said respectfully, "please accept the offerings we've brought, and favor us with your advice on the questions which trouble our minds."

"There's offerings and offerings."  Not-Spike grinned at Buffy again and grabbed his crotch.  "You found the cock you was chasing, no?  You had your mouth full of that drumstick often enough, Cherie; how come you still so hungry?"  Buffy clenched her teeth and felt her face heating up; was it kosher to give the god you'd just summoned a good punch in the nose?  Not-Spike just laughed and dropped to the floor cross-legged, grabbed the chicken blood and the roast peanuts and began crunching them down happily.  "Good stuff.  I like the barbeque flavor better, just so you know.  So what's so damn important to ask Papa Ghede?" he said with his mouth full.

Giles, somewhat nonplused at the informality of it all, squatted down beside the loa.  "Well... I suppose the most important question is why are you here?  I don't mean here specifically, or you specifically," he added hastily.  "In the last week or two there's been an unusually high concentration of... well, for lack of a better term, emanations of the divine in and around Sunnydale.  And yet we can find no prophecy to explain this--no apocalypses appear to be on the schedule.  What does this mean?"

Ghede finished off the chicken blood and took a pull from the bottle of rum.  "The world's out of balance.  Someone's got too many players on the field, and the other side's gone and bitched to the ref.  There's rules, ti-blanc.  There's limits and bounds, and someone's been stepping over them."  He shrugged.  "Something gonna snap soon."

Before Giles could pose another question, Willow interrupted, her voice unwontedly shrill.  "You mean the Balance, right?  That it's gone out of whack?  And we should all be doing anything we can to make sure the good guys win, right?  Because last time, Acathla, Hell, cats and dogs living together--major badness!"

Bright blue eyes darted to the witch's face, knowing.  "You think Light should win?  You try getting to sleep when the sun never sets.  You think Dark should win?  You try eating bread when the corn don't grow!  You can't have a world without day and night both.  Both sides, they fight like kids on a see-saw, but we in the middle, we know.  The seesaw don't work without a weight on both sides.  So we come to watch where the big fight is, and maybe we put a thumb on the scales... or maybe not."  He winked, a conspiratorial grin lighting his face.

Giles wrested back control of the conversation.  "If the Balance is indeed being upset, what can we do to restore it?"

Ghede threw back his head and laughed.  "Take the extra players off the field--or switch the team shirts!"  He finished off the last of the peanuts and began tearing into the cornbread.  Possession didn't appear to make much difference in Spike's appetite.  "Who are these extra players?"

Those eyes came back to her, sparkling with amusement.  "You see one every time you look in the mirror, Warrior of the People."

A thread of panic entered her voice. Did someone mention cosmic retribution?  "You don't mean--"

"What I mean, I say.  Now I'll answer the one you don't ask Like calls to like, and opposites attract.  Night and day make a world."  He took a final swig of the rum and wiped his mouth on the back of his hand.  "Looks like you're out of peanuts, Cherie.  Tell my horse he do okay for le mort ti-blanc."

Spike's face went slack and the blue eyes went white, rolling back in his head.  The vampire collapsed, strings cut, and the bottle left his limp hand and clattered to the floor.  Buffy dove for him, grabbing Spike's shoulders before his head could slam into the floor and pulling him upright again.  He engaged in a brief struggle to sit up on his own, then melted woozily against Buffy, head cradled between her breasts.  "What the bloody fuck...?" he croaked.

Spike's back, Spike's back, Spike's back... Anyone else would have been gasping in agony at the amount of pressure her arms were exerting; Spike just grunted a little and burrowed into her shoulder.  "You're not going to throw up, are you?"  Buffy asked.  It would have been a lot easier to sound casual and unworried if her voice hadn't kept cracking.  "Because if you are, I'm dropping you, right now."

Half a bottle of eighty-proof rotgut was barely enough to make an impression on vampire physiology, and Spike was a far more hardened carouser than Tara anyway.  "M'fine, love.  Not gonna sick up."  He showed no signs of wanting to get to his feet any time soon; the possession itself seemed to have taken considerable toll.  He aimed a bloodshot glare at Giles.  "I've got you in my book, Rupert--if you ever snooker me into another--"

"It was rather fascinating, wasn't it?"  Giles was watching the two of them with an inscrutable expression.  "I could have wished for more time..."

"Well?"  Spike hadn't grown any patience in his encounter with divinity.  "What's the skinny then?  Who do we kill?"

Giles sat down on the pommel horse and began polishing his glasses.  Buffy looked him. Go on, say it .  Giles was always the one to say the necessary and unthinkable.  But this time, all he did was drop his eyes and say nothing, nothing at all.  Buffy's mouth tightened, and she hauled Spike to his feet.  "I'm going to get him back to his crypt.  Talk among yourselves."

No sun penetrated the lower levels of the crypt, but there was always light.  Splayed in the middle of the four-poster bed, Buffy was lapped in mellow candlelight.  Her hair spilled golden over the pillows, her head arched back upon the rumpled sheets that smelled of cigarettes and him--of both of them, now.  Spike lay cradled between her legs, as still as she save for the tiny, subtle movement of lips and tongue in the secret places of her body, millimeter strokings and sucklings, all that was needed to coax her to the crest of yet another melting rapture.  He could have brought her to the peak simply by breathing on her; three, six, who-knew-how-many previous climaxes had left her whole body pliant beyond measure to his touch, held together only by breath and exquisitely sensitive skin.  She had barely the energy to sigh as the warmth within her swelled up again and flooded out through all her limbs.

Good girls don't sleep with vampires.

Spike's moan of delight segued into slurpy noises of the sort Dawn would doubtless have parlayed into a new jacket or three.  At last he raised his head from between her thighs, licking his bloodstained lips with a dazed, glassy-eyed smile.  "Nectar," he got out, his voice husky with satiety.  "Nectar and sodding ambrosia.  God, to think you've been going to waste for years... we've got a new rule from now on.  Once a month we go to bed and don't get out for the next three days."

Good girls don't fall in love with soulless monsters.  "Spike, you're disgusting."

"Yeh, and you love it."  He pulled himself up the bed, elbow over elbow, her demon lover, terrible as an army with banners.  His body was lean and taut-muscled as a racing greyhound's, arching over hers, hard for her again--perhaps Slayer's blood really was an aphrodisiac.  He kissed her full on the mouth, and the taste of her own blood and come on his tongue was as rich and wild as pomegranates.  His whispered endearments filled all the empty aching places of her heart, as his cock filled all the empty aching places of her body--so good, so full and whole she felt with him inside her!  Spike moved within her, slow and sweet and gentle, fangs teasing her neck but never drawing blood--what need had he to steal what was freely given elsewhere?  His beautiful face transfigured as they approached completion together: man to monster and back again, every aspect of him rapt in her.

In the ruddy glow of candlelight his shoulders were scored beneath her searching hands, marked with swiftly-healing crisscross welts from the times before which had not been so gentle.  Good girls don't bite and claw.  Good girls are very careful never to break their boyfriends' bones or egos.  Good girls save the world without wanting money for it.

"Love?"  His hands cradled her face as her breath hitched and tears rose in her eyes, large, strong hands, hands which had slain their ten thousands.  His arms encircled her shoulders, holding her as tenderly as a mother her child, while Buffy sobbed against his chest, as utterly abandoned in grief as she had been in love.  "Shh, love, Buffy-sweet, it's all right..."

Good girls don't get turned on by sneaking out to kill things in the middle of the night.  Good girls put duty above love, always.  Good girls never, ever feel good about themselves.

"It's not!"  She tore the words ragged from her throat; they didn't want to leave.  "I have so much I need to do!  I have to have the sex talk with Dawn.  We have a tree now, I have to buy Christmas presents--I have t-to find a job, just in case!  And I love you, I love you so much!  I can't--I don't--I don't want to die!  I don't want to die!  Spike, I d-don't w-w-want to--"

"Then you won't!"  Inhumanly strong fingers tightened on her shoulders, candlelight flared and danced in inhuman golden eyes and limned the serrated lines of bared fangs.  Her beautiful monster, who had so much man in him.  "I won't let it happen.  I'll be dust before I let a one of them lay a finger on you or the Bit."  Her Spike, who would live for her, die for her, kill for her, whom no really good girl would allow herself to love for precisely that reason.

So you can't be a good girl, can you?

"Will you stop me, then, if I have to jump again to make things right?"  Spike's eyes dropped, unable to meet hers.  And she, stupid girl, had thought the worst she'd have to face was the prospect of Spike killing someone else.  "You know what it said.  Tara said it was always right--" She pressed her face into his chest, feeling the cool firm muscle contract and shift beneath her cheek.  "It can't just be that there's two Slayers, there's been two Slayers for years.  I came back wrong.  That's the only explanation.  I came back wrong, and--"

"Bollocks."  Spike sat up, pulling her with him, stroking her hair as she had used to stroke Dawn's when Dawn had had a nightmare.  "I'd know if you weren't Buffy.  I'd know.  There's something else, and we'll find it.  Go home.  Check on Dawn.  Change for Anya's party.  You'll feel better."  He ran the pad of his thumb across her cheek, wiping away the tears, and his voice grew light and teasing.  "Hell, pet, worse comes to worst I'll turn you.  You'll have switched sides.  End of problem."

She punched his arm, and said "Asshole," with the inflection that meant 'I love you'. Don't you get it, Spike?  I'm afraid that I already have.

Part 19

Part 21