"They all caved. Like that." Xander snapped his fingers. "Marla wasn't supposed to cave. I'd pegged her for a non-caver." He paced in front of Giles' desk.

Giles removed his glasses, rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "She is Buffy. And I doubt even Robin Wood would've been unmoved by that address."

"So that's it? You're caving too? He just gets to stay here? The wolf right in the middle of our flock?"

"The girls are hardly sheep, Xander."

"I realize that and yet I do not let it interfere with my analogy."

"Xander, this situation behooves calm. The more you allow your emotions to unsteady you—"

"Hey, I'm steady. I'm a rock."

A knock at the door; he jumped, and maneuvered to hide it; a cramp shot up his ankle. Damn it.

Xander opened to Buffy.

"Oh, hi. I didn't know you were here too. Hi."

She was all pink and gold, rosy from sleep and he didn't want to know what else, hair freshly washed and bouncy. Wearing a pretty summer dress, legs bare, feet in skimpy sandals. Smelling like shampoo and cologne. Xander realized he hadn't seen Buffy in such girlish clothes since they'd been in Scotland. These days she was always wearing cargo pants and hiking boots and hoodies, ready for action.

"Where is he?" Xander said. He'd meant to say hi back to her, meant to acknowledge how friendly she looked, but then his impulses betrayed him.

"He's having some breakfast with Dawnie and Willow." No affront, no combativeness. She came in, sketched a little wave at Giles. "We need to talk. We need to get this situation into the here-and-now."




They were sweet little women, the witch and the sister, perky and accomodating, treating him a bit like he was an invalid, but clearly trying not to. He liked them, for themselves and because they were dear to his brand-new dear one, his sweetheart Buffy. But he couldn't help at the same time seeing them, like a photographic double-exposure, as bags of the hot live human blood he hungered for, even as he sipped warm hog from a mug. Seeing them too, even more maddeningly, as two folders full of secret information, things he longed to know, the enigma of himself. What could they tell him? What did they see when they looked at him, how many different exposures laid and laid and overlaid on his own face and form?

He thought of those books in the safe house, the images of the slick sharp-faced vampire, William the Bloody, his hard hard eyes, the scar on his brow, the hollow cheeks and outthrust lip. Pleasure in having his picture made, showing off his potent stuff for the lens, sure of himself, those cheap good-looks.

Other images in the books, the true faces of vampires, hideous, stayed with him too. He looked like that when his fangs came down. He looked like that, and she, incredibly, sadly?, liked it. How could that be?

"Want more?" Dawn asked, pointing at his cup. She was clearing away the dishes, remnants of buttered toast, dregs of coffee. He knew these two were 'minding' him while Buffy was gone on certain business elsewhere in the castle, and that they were doing everything they could think of to make it seem that that was not what was happening, that they were just breakfasting with a guest, sections of The Guardian and The Independent littered across the table, the witch with her laptop at one end, scanning messages.

"Ta, love. Had enough."

She smiled. "I don't know if I'm allowed to say this—" The witch glanced up, but Dawn kept talking, "—but I missed you a lot. I hope ... I don't know if you'll want to, but I hope we can spend a little time together, do some of the things we used to do."

"What would that be, then?"

The witch really was giving her the stink-eye now, but still not saying anything. Dawn stacked the dishwasher. "We played cards. Monopoly. Watched movies together, bad ones, the dumber the better. You'd tell me—" She blinked, sucked in her lip. "Never mind that. But we could play cards—"

"I'd tell you what?"

"Stories."

Willow shut the computer's lid. "Dawnie."

She was shutting this down too, but he had to try. "What stories? Tell me one."

Willow repeated, "Dawnie."

She flicked her hair back off her shoulder. Little defiance, he liked that. "Just ... stories about what London was like, back when, you know. I was starting to read the Sherlock Holmes books then, and you'd answer my questions about stuff in them, because you'd been there then."

Willow's smile was a little tight. "I guess you don't need to check your email, Spike. Want another section of the paper?"

"Wonder if I do have email. Would be pilin' up a bit, wouldn't it? Suppose I'm not the only one, not keepin' up my correspondence." Willow looked a question. "I mean—these others, my supposed comrades. Angel an' them."

"You know who Angel is?"

"Buffy told me he was another vampire, wore the white hat, I was apparently workin' with. Wouldn't credit there'd be so much of that. Blood-suckers on the side of light."

"There's just him and you."

"Huh. Angel? Funny name for a bloke. Say ...."

Willow spun around to the sink, turned the water on full, and began banging around last night's dirty pans.

Spike followed her. "This Angel. He's not t'other one, is he? Who Buffy ...."

"We could play a hand of cards now!" Dawn said. "If I can find a pack. I have some in my room ...."

"Is he?" Spike said, standing close to Willow's shoulder, able to gauge the answer just fine by how she colored up, the gallop of her pulse. "Don't insult me now, Miss Willow."

"Okay, yes. You figured it out. She's always loved him. But it's been over for years."

"Still, she should be mourning."

"She's been so taken up with you, she probably hasn't had time to start processing that yet. She got the news at the same time—that Angel was gone and that you weren't." Willow looked up at him then. "But when it really hits her, which it will. It'll be hard."

He slotted this big new piece into his meagre inventory of knowledge.

Willow wiped her hands. "Please don't ask me anything else. I can tell you more about this place, who's here, what we do. Things you should know."

"All right." He sat down to listen.



Giles wasn't helping. Before she showed up, Xander had been sure he was the engine on the anti-Spike choo-choo, but now Buffy was here, speaking for him with such plaintive reasonableness, Giles was listening and asking the occasional neutral question and failing entirely to remind her that Spike was absolutely no-doubt-about-it Evil Bad and Worthless.

"Doesn't it amaze you, even a little bit," she was saying now, "that he got himself souled? That he came back afterwards to help us, even though he knew he wasn't going to be welcomed? I mean, you're so scholarly, Giles, it never excited your curiosity, to find out more about that? It's never happened before that we know of, a vampire choosing a soul?"

"Potentials were dying, the First was closing in—I had more on my plate than I could handle."

She looked at him now. With the patented darling-little-Buffy expression that he had no defenses against. Usually. But whenever he thought about Spike, he thought about Anya. That's how it was—that shit-heel had managed to pair himself up with her such that now she was gone forever, he couldn't uncouple them. Anya whom he'd wronged, Anya who'd let Spike seduce her. Anya had suffered and fought and died in battle too. And nothing had brought Anya back for another bite at the apple, the human life she'd loved so much.

Buffy laid a hand on his leg. Xander thought of her leg, that glimpse he'd had of it, shockingly bare, bruised, beneath the disheveled grey bathrobe. How she'd been just crumpled there on the bathroom floor, her face distorted by tears and pain. Spike had done that. Spike had tried to rape her, and okay he'd failed, of course he'd failed, but he'd mauled her and bruised her and shocked her, and that was unforgiveable. How could Buffy not understand that getting a soul didn't change that, that there was nothing but obscenity in her taking for her lover that vampire, who'd brutalized her, brutalized them all.

"I didn't want to have to remind you," she said, all soft and sweet, "but it was Spike who got you away from Caleb when he put your eye out. He'd have blinded you entirely ... he'd maybe have killed you. If Spike wasn't there."

She was sitting on his sighted side, but he turned his head, so he couldn't see her.

"Right now, he's just a person who needs help. No memory, no family, he's lost. Xander, you know how it feels to be lost, to need support. Who else can help him, understand what he needs, but us? And I really think you'd like him. He doesn't know you and you really don't know him."

"So I'm supposed to befriend him while he's all Charley, and then when he remembers that we hate each other's guts, I'm supposed to—what?"

Now Buffy looked sad. She was dragging out all her big guns. Xander glanced at Giles, but the big man on the far side of the big desk was being irksomely passive.

"Xander. I know what it is, to be so angry for such a long time. I do. And I think I understand, really truly, that I'm asking you to go counter to your sense of good order, which has always been so strong. But please. Please, for me, can you try? I need your help. Like I always always do."

Her words went through him like the proverbial hot knife in butter—when it came to Buffy, he was all too often weak like veal—and he probably should've eaten something before he came in here, to stave off the food-related ideation.

But veal or butter or buttered veal, he was sticking to his truth.

"Giles, why am I apparently the only one who hasn't forgotten that Spike was helping Angel start another apocalypse over there in L.A.? I get that he has the power to cloud womens' minds, but you—?"

Giles sighed. "Buffy has pointed out that our intelligence isn't definitive. Willow believes Angel was still on our side. I have to acknowledge that I might well have made the wrong call."

"You really did," Buffy said, her voice low and gentle, graceful in triumph, hate the stupidity but love the stupid.

He couldn't take it. "I'm the one with one eye but you, Buff, have a blind-spot the size of the North Sea when it comes to that peroxide turd. He should be dead. He should be in hell. Him and Angel both, rotting in hell."

"Xander. Is it really good for you, to be so bitter?"

"Yeah I'm bitter, I'm bitter as triple, cold-brewed FUCK."




"Why you little minx. Won again."

Dawn beamed. "That's because you taught me to count cards."

"Did I!"

She nodded, looking ready to burst with the pleasure of it. He couldn't quite suss this, how anxious the girl was to sit with him, to have his attention. Couldn't be all down to his beaux yeux.

Which, come to think of it. "Look here, Miss Dawn, could do us another good turn. Got one of those cameras that shows you your picture soon's you take it?"

"A digital? Sure I do. Why?"

"Need to see myself. Got a glimpse the other day, an' wasn't best pleased. Need to make some changes."

Her face fell so quickly you'd have thought he'd proposed to hack off all her long hair. "Why? You look fine. You haven't changed."

"Clothes're all wrong. Hair—"

"Your roots aren't showing."

"Not s'posed to look like this. Not proper."

She was flummoxed. "How are you supposed to look? You look like Spike." She pouted. "Wait, I'll get the camera, I'll show you."

She scampered off. Willow was in the sitting room, working. He went to the doorway. "I look like always to you?"

She glanced up from the mesmerizing screen. "You're banged up. But yes, you look fine."

"I need a suit of decent clothes. I need—" His head started to ache, trying to think of what he needed, like trying to retain the fragments of a dream upon awakening.

Dawn came dashing back, the little silver camera with its cord in hand. Five minutes later he saw a half dozen images on Willow's laptop screen.

"See?" Dawn said. "You're perfectly normal looking. You're Spike."

The pleading in the girl's voice stirred him up with confusion and dismay, even more confusion and dismay than he felt at the sight of himself with the yellowy-white hair, the dark scored brow, the black tee-shirt. A variation in kind of the brute in the watcher's books, a little dandy of despicability. He wanted to slither free of all that, like a snake sloughing its skin, but at the same time he wanted to please this little sister, who seemed to have so many warm ideas about him, whose idea of his proper appearance was this, with any proposal of change an upset.

At least this morning he was able to see the images and not have a psychotic break. He turned away from the screen. "I'm Spike. That's as it should be, then." He gave her a smile, that lit the girl up like a flower. She seemed to love him. How could that be?




Buffy's lashes fluttered. Then she grew still, steely. "If he hadn't fought for his soul and won it. If he hadn't come back to us and helped in ways no one else could've done. If he hadn't willingly died to save us all. I might be able to understand your stance. But Xander—"

"So he's Jesus now." Words of vinegar, acid across his tongue, acid flung in Buffy's face. She jerked from the splatter, her mouth falling open. But he couldn't stop. "He's your new religion. You worship him. With your body. The rest of us have to believe or be cast out."

He couldn't see Giles, but heard the man's chair scrape sharply back, felt him coming swiftly around the desk, before the hand clapped down on his shoulder.

"Xander, perhaps you'd better leave us now."

"Yeah. Yeah, I need to get out of this." Rising, he was afraid his knees would collapse; his body felt like it was made of molten taffy. Fury so intense he could barely see out of the one eye. Aiming himself for where he thought the door was. Slamming it behind him.




The girl, promising no more cheating, dealt another hand of cards. Willow switched on the radio, dialing through various stations, iterations of English and Scots accents melding together with dissonant blasts of music. Paused for a few seconds on some Chopin, then as Dawn wrinkled her nose, kept going. Passed then returned to a loud, scratchy jazz number.

The nose twitched. "This is old. Corny."

"It's not corny, it's great. My Dad used to play this stuff all the time when I was little. He used to dance with me to it. He'd say I was his little flapper." Willow did a few steps, rolling her knees, waving her hands. Dawn's laugh was a bark.

"Dumb!"

"Nah, it's great when you get going." He sprang up, the music getting into him in a way that felt familiar, comforting. Like in that bar the other night, Neil Young. Something he knew without knowing how, floating up strong and distinct out of his blackness. Hotel ballrooms, a blaring band, a crowded dancefloor, everyone in evening clothes, the images—memories?—flooded his head. He caught Willow's hand, swung her in. Awkward at first, but then she wasn't bad. Soon they were exchanging grins—hers full of incredulous delight.

"Wow, you're good!"

"Done this before."

"Do it with me." Buffy was there in the doorway. Willow lurched into a chair as Buffy stepped in to take her place. The song changed just then, something slower, a foxtrot. She didn't know how to foxtrot.

"Lemme lead."

She giggled, nervous, flushed, smiling. "Show me." He took her through the steps, marveling at his ability, his sureness, unmoored to anything specific, how he'd learned himself, whom he'd danced with before. As they moved around the room, hugged up close, their feet occasionally colliding, he picked up hints of what she was was trying to conceal, a pulse high when she'd come in, a flush already going too. She'd been angry, a little while ago. On her errand, elsewhere in the castle. Now she was intent on this foxtrot as if it there was going to be an exam.

"Just glide with it," he said.

She frowned. "I'm all about the gliding."

The other two had gone, as if they'd been silently dismissed. They continued through three more numbers, gathering smoothness, Buffy starting to relax in his arms. Then the announcer came on. She stopped, her left hand still draped on his neck, the other clasped in his. She'd come out in a light bloom of sweat, the flowery scent of her perfume suffusing him. It came to him then, sudden as a trap-door opening under his feet, and he was there, in the moment the blatting band fell silent, the collective moaning sigh of the crowd that gave way to a hum of chatter, shuffling feet, complaining voices, a woman sobbing, the air stinking of human sweat, coffee, Irish stew, home-brewed gin, hair burnt on curling tongs, an amalgam of different cheap perfumes, colognes, oils and tonics, an undernote of urine. A hall, wooden floors, wooden walls, no windows, a mirror-ball overhead, ceiling fans slowly twirling, somewhere in one of those warm Southern places, Mobile or Baton Rouge, an all-night dance, no, not just a dance, not just one night, a marathon, young couples competing to keep going for days, the last ones down taking the prize, cash money tantalizing in that first year after the big crash. He'd been there with her, his dark princess, his light-toed Drusilla who loved to dance almost as much as she loved the squeals of babies, the cries of children, his cock in her cunny. She was grinning up at him, pretending to be tired like all the other girls on the floor, in a white silk dress with bugle beads flashing in the colored lights, her eyes liquid and half-crazy. Ten minute break every hour, when the suffering, determined humans would lurch off to the bogs, bolt down some food, weep, throw-up, pray. And they, the two vampires, would single out the strongest contenders, male and female. She had a trick, Drusilla: what, in those Southern towns, they called mojo. She could make a person come to her. Make a person submit. They could feed on anyone they liked, in the dark cloakroom, and send them back out to into the crowd, upright but wobbling, recalling nothing. Have a quickie themselves then, hot hard fuck up against the wall, then rinse their mouths with the sting of liquor from the flask in his pocket, talking trash about their victims, mockery tasty as blood, as they returned for the next 45-minute round.

The blood of the others, made them tireless. They'd won the contest, won the money, all fair and square so far as anyone knew, fistsful of crisp twenties, presented with an engraved brass cup he'd chucked in a ditch later as they careened out of town in a dark green roadster. He could feel the car around him, the rattle of the gearshift under his palm, but that was all, driving off into an abyss of absence. Memory cut off like a reel of film, flapping useless.

The sound and sensation and stink of those days and nights in that hall blew threw through him now in a giddy gross rush, a bolt of pain through his head with the memory like a vessel exploding. Reeling, he grabbed at a chair, sat down hard.
So much glee. In cheating, in violence, in bloodshed and deceit and death.

"Spike? What is it?"

Her voice startled him. The room came back into the focus. Scotsman talking on the radio about the history of American dance bands of the jazz age. Buffy all redolent, her hand back on his shoulder, face looming in close. "Are you okay?"

He didn't want to tell her. Disgusting. "Somethin' came back to me."

"A memory? What was it?" She cracked a big smile, but in her eyes he saw the pindots of fear.

"Saw myself ... dancin' with my girl. Same sort of music as was playin' just now. Took me back."

The smile faded. "Your girl ... Dru?"

"Guess so." He searched for more—beyond the white silk cut plain and narrow as a bathing costume, the beads that flashed like little blinkers, the slippy feel of her silk stocking against his hand when he put it up her skirt, her cooing as he fucked her in the hot close little ante-room. Cunny cool for all its wetness. There was nothing else—he couldn't make her appear to him in other guise, couldn't see her laid out beside him in a bed, or against any other background, couldn't find where he'd first met her. Just that one sliver, like the view through a door three inches ajar. All else blackness.

"Dancing where?"

Didn't want to tell her the whole thing, certainly not how the memories juiced him up, so he'd be hard in another minute if he didn't distract himself. If he didn't stop thinking of how they didn't feed from the neck, at that marathon—they went where the bite wouldn't show. He'd sink his fangs into a girl's inner thigh, snuff up the musk of her cunt-sweat and mute hypnotized terror as he swallowed. Battening on her. Getting strong to beat her on the floor, getting hard to fuck his Dru.

"Just dancing. That's all." He had to swallow now, once, twice, to keep his stomach from reacting to the outrage of his senses.

"That's good," Buffy said. "If you can remember that one thing, it probably means that more is coming."

More is coming. Christ.

Buffy's smile was wavering. He slipped his fingers in with hers. "Never mind that. How'd your errands go?"

"Giles is starting to see things my way. And meanwhile, he's agreed that you can work with the girls again."

"Work—?"

"Before, when they were still potentials. In Sunnydale. You helped me train them. Gave them some practical lessons in fighting with skilled experienced vampires. I was hoping you'd do that again. We have a lot of girls on the squad here who could use the practicum."

"You want me to—" He struggled to let the foul memory go; it clung around him with a palpable vitality. The vein in his temple throbbed like a flail. But what she was saying was more important. "You want me to fight."

"Spar. Do you think you can do that? We could do some ourselves first, to get you limbered up."

"Sure, pet. Whatever you like."



Thoughts? Feelings? Please comment!