When the telephone rang hours later, a little after nine, Spike couldn’t help but feel a sense of apprehension, remembering the last time he had answered the phone, and the traumatic verbal assault that had followed. Slowly he approached the phone. He swallowed hard, staring at it as it continued to ring.

*Warren can’t hurt you anymore,* he reminded himself for what seemed like the thousandth time, realizing in a moment of clarity that this time it was really true. By this point he was surely physically stronger than Warren, and with the chip controller gone forever, at this point, the worst that Warren could really do to him was to threaten and insult him from a distance.

Dawn had seen to that.

With a deliberate force of will, he picked up the phone, hesitating for just a beat or so before he said, “Hello?”

There was a brief pause before a woman’s voice spoke, sounding uncertain and a little confused. “Um…do I have the right…I mean…is this the Summers residence?” She seemed surprised at the sound of a male voice answering the phone.

“Yeah, who’s this?” he asked, releasing the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding, leaning back against the wall beside the phone and closing his eyes as relief washed over him in waves.

“This is Mrs. Morrison – Janice’s mother? I was just calling to check on Dawn, to be sure she was all right,” the woman replied. “She sounded really bad when she called to tell Janice she wasn’t coming, and I was just a little concerned. Do you – do you know if she’s contagious?” Understandably, the woman’s concern was obviously more for her own daughter’s health than for Dawn’s.

But Dawn was the one she should have been worrying about, Spike thought with rising anger toward the girl.

So she’d done it again, just as he’d suspected. He really wasn’t the least bit surprised.

“No, love, I’m fairly certain she’s not contagious,” he said dryly, and quickly excused himself from the call, hanging up the phone much harder than he needed to. “Not a bit contagious,” he muttered to himself. “ ‘Less of course getting beaten senseless is catching!”

Little Dawnie was becoming quite the delinquent, he thought grimly. Lying about going to Janice’s so that she could sneak out of the house, not once but twice now – and probably all to go see some hormone-infested teenage prat like the one she had danced with at the Bronze the other night! And then lying to Buffy and basically forcing him into going along with the lie…

Well, she was not going to get away with it, not if he had anything to say about it! He was going to find her and bring her home, drag her kicking and screaming if he had to, and give her a very unpleasant piece of his mind!

If he could just manage to leave the house.

A fleeting fear came over him as his hand closed around the doorknob, and he hesitated, realizing that this would be the first time since his rescue that he had left the house alone.

The controller was gone, he reminded himself. It was perfectly safe for him to go outside. Warren couldn’t hurt him – not really. The chip might still prevent Spike from actually hurting Warren, but surely he would be able at least to keep *Warren* from hurting *him*.

He gathered his resolve with a deep breath, opened the door, and walked out into the night. He paused on the porch for a moment, allowing his sensitive vampire senses to pick up the lingering scent of Dawn’s distinctive peach-scented shampoo and the candy-sweet fragrance she usually wore.

After a moment, he took off down the sidewalk in the direction Dawn had gone, hours earlier.

When he found himself standing at the entrance to the old cemetery where he used to live, he stopped, angry and more than a little afraid for his reckless young friend. What the bleeding hell was she doing, alone in the cemetery this late at night? Surely after all this time growing up on the Hellmouth, Dawn should know better!

But there was no doubt; if his senses were not deceiving him, she had been here recently, was likely *still* here.

Then he spotted her, just stepping out of the doorway to his old crypt, her head bent down against the chill of the rising night wind as she made her way across the cemetery and back toward the street.

His face set in angry resolve, determined not to give in to her this time, not to let her get away with trying to play him and Buffy for fools, he stalked across the grass toward her, at exactly the right angle to cut off her progress across the lawn.

She didn’t notice him until he was directly in front of her, and she jumped, letting out a little shriek of fright that was carried away and muffled by the increasing strength of the wind whirling about them. A storm was blowing in.

“Don’t *do* that!” she gasped, her eyes wide with startled fear. “You scared me to death!”

“And now I’m going to *kill* you to death!” he snapped, glaring furiously at her, not about to back down. “What the bloody hell is wrong with you, Bit? What do you think you’re doing out here, this time of the night, alone? Do you *want* to get torn to little bloody bits by some nasty thing out here?”

“I’m not a little girl, Spike!” she shot back, irrationally irritated by the protective anger in his voice that usually made her feel warm and loved. “I can take care of myself.”

“Right,” he nodded, his tone sarcastic, his eyebrows raised in a skeptical look. “That’s why we’ve never had to rescue you from a psychotic hell-goddess, or – or Harmony…”

She gave him a withering look, her own eyebrows raised, and he shrugged. “All right, granted, not so scary,” he admitted, before launching right back into his rant, “…or any number of other evil nasties, just because you decided it’d be a great lark to bloody *run off*!”

“*You* didn’t save me from *any* of them!” she pointed out in a deliberately cutting tone, then tried to take advantage of his momentary stunned reaction to her stinging words by slipping past him while he was distracted.

But that was an old trick, and Spike was not about to buy it again. He gripped her arm and yanked her back around to face him, in an act that was more forceful than any she had seen from him since his return.

“No!” he said roughly as he made her face him. “You’re not gonna just throw me off my game by saying the bitchiest thing you can come up with, Bit! Not this time! You’re not getting out of this that easy!”

“Let go of me!” she snapped, yanking free of his hand on her arm, glaring at him in outrage, but mostly just in irritation that he had seen through her tactics. But she didn’t move away; she just stood there, facing him with fire in her eyes.

“What were you doing in there?” he demanded, waving one hand backward toward the crypt a few hundred feet away.

The sudden flash of guilt and fear in her eyes was all the answer he needed to know that he had hit on something important. He turned without waiting for any further response and stormed toward the crypt door.

“No!” she cried out, her voice swept away by the wind, utterly ineffectual as she rushed after him, trying to catch up to his long, furious strides. “Spike, wait! *No*!”

At the door, she somehow managed to catch up to him, her small hands clutching at his arm and trying desperately but uselessly to pull him back away from the crypt. “Don’t go in there!” she insisted, her voice rising, becoming shrill and almost panicked.

At the door he whirled around on her suddenly in anger and impatience, his eyes sparking blue flames of fury. “Why the bloody hell not?” he demanded, and without waiting for a response he turned back to open the door. He was through playing games with her. She was hiding something, something important, and had been for a long time.

He fully intended to find out what.

“Warren’s in there!” she blurted out in a high, strangled cry that froze him in his tracks.

For a moment, it was as if everything around them stopped. His mind simply refused to process her words for a few long moments, as he slowly turned to face her again, his eyes wide with disbelief and wild with rising fear that he tried to control.

“What?” he whispered, his voice low and guttural with his effort to control the depth of emotion it held.

Somehow she still heard him clearly over the whistling of the wind that surrounded them, as her eyes met his, panicked, pleading, and full of a terrible realization of guilt. She repeated the words softly, her voice trembling and fearful.

“Warren’s in there.”

She could clearly see in his expressive blue eyes the battle that raged within him, as he struggled against the instinctive terror that had become so painfully natural to him, fought to maintain the fragile control and confidence he had been working so hard to slowly rebuild.

She felt sick with the overwhelming sense of guilt over bringing this torment on him – again. Why did it seem like all her attempts at avenging the pain he had been through seemed only to bring down more suffering upon him?

“He can’t hurt you! He’s chained up in the basement, and he has your chip now!” she blurted out in a desperate rush to explain. “Look!” she took the device from her pocket with trembling fingers and held it up for him to see.

She was utterly, completely unprepared for his reaction.

He flinched back away from the sight of the thing, his wide, startled blue eyes full of such a look of confusion and betrayal that she wanted to cry. And all at once, the impact of the secret she had been keeping, the things she had done, the lies she had told to the people she loved more than anything – all of it came crashing down on her in a moment of clarity and understanding.

“You said…” he began, his voice hurt and accusing. “You told me…” He stopped, shaking his head, disbelieving at the extent of her deceptions, as the realization of just what she had done began to slowly register with him.

Suddenly all the pieces began to fit together…her sudden closeness with Anya, the missing control device and the lies she had told to cover it up, her sneaking out and lying about that as well…

Her dishonesty hurt him, but the way she had thoughtlessly just taken it upon herself to move in and handle for him something that was so intensely personal…not even telling him she was doing it, not even giving him any say in how the situation was to be handled…just moving in and taking over, seizing from his hands control that was rightfully his, that he had just barely managed to get back in the first place… It was worse than hurtful.

It was a violation of his trust.

“I had to,” she argued weakly, pleadingly, tears streaking her face. She knew now, suddenly and completely, how wrong and misguided her actions had been – but she had to make him see why she had thought they were right. “If I’d told you what I was doing you would have tried to stop me…”

Suddenly he was right in her face, his own eyes glittering with angry tears in the moonlight, as he shot back in a voice low and trembling with fury, “Why do you think I would have tried to stop you, Dawn?” Somehow the use of her given name in place of one of his usual endearments stung her. “It’s a dangerous game you’re playing here. A bloody *stupid*, dangerous game! And if you keep playing it you’re going to get someone hurt…most likely yourself!”

She was silent, stunned by the truth and the venom in his voice, raised in anger against her as it almost never was. Her eyes dropped to the ground with her tears, in the momentary stillness that followed. She was too ashamed to dare to attempt to argue her point again.

He turned his eyes slowly back toward the crypt, staring at the closed door and thinking of the person beyond it. It hardly seemed real to him; it was taking his mind a little while to process the fact that Warren really was down there, chained and helpless as he had been for so long.

A part of him longed to go down there, to confront his abuser and vent his pain and wrath upon him. But a part of him had not yet accepted the reality of his freedom – the truth that Warren couldn’t hurt him. That same part of him was screaming inside him to run, to flee before he fell back into the hands of the one who had come so close to destroying him completely.

For a long moment he stood there, in a frozen state of indecision, just staring at the crypt door in the unearthly silence that surrounded them, broken only by the sound of the swirling wind around them.

Finally, he slowly turned his head to look back at her, his eyes full of tears that he refused to allow to fall.

“We’re going home now,” he spoke slowly and certainly, his voice low and trembling as he attempted to control the raging flood of emotions just below the surface, fighting to burst forth. “And we’re gonna get this whole soddin’ mess out in the open…get this all straightened out.”

She nodded meekly, fully aware that any word spoken on her part at this moment would not be helpful to what he was dealing with, as he stalked off ahead of her toward the entrance. She followed without a word, without any further protest, as he led her back toward the house.

As he slowly began to calm down, to really comprehend what had just happened, he reminded himself that she had done what she had done for him, out of a misguided concern for his well-being and desire to make right the grievous wrong that had been done to him. His anger began to fade, mingled with a grudging affection for the lengths she had gone to for him, even if it had been in the wrong manner.

Still, he knew that he could not back down this time from the firm stance he had taken with her. She had been lying to him and Buffy, and placing herself in a very dangerous position, not only emotionally but physically as well. He didn’t know how far her vengeance had gone at this point, what condition Warren was in or how careful she had been to conceal her actions.

Had Dawn even considered the implications of what could happen to her if the authorities found out about her holding the young man prisoner in the cemetery? He felt a cold chill sweep through him as he began to wonder how Dawn had intended for the whole thing to end.

Perhaps she had never intended for Warren to have the opportunity to tell the authorities.

It was not that he did not feel that Warren deserved death; in truth, he felt that death would be a merciful punishment for all the horrors he had inflicted upon him. But the thought of sweet, innocent little Dawn carrying out that punishment was horrifying to him. He knew too well the effect that taking a life could have on someone, and shuddered to think how such an act would damage this girl that he loved so dearly.

He simply would not allow her to destroy herself. Warren Meers was not worth that.

When they got back to the house, he determined, they would have a long talk, and he would find out just exactly how far she had taken this thing…and how far he and Buffy would have to go to repair the damage.