Without my darkness

Your star couldn’t shine

—“Need,” Picture Center

         The vampire’s mistress wore a turtleneck sweater to keep private the marks of impassioned kisses on her throat.  The vampire’s mistress was seen at the meat wholesaler’s on the edge of town, buying blood in bulk.  The vampire’s mistress was often dreamy-eyed, and when called back to the moment, would blush and stammer.  The vampire’s mistress yawned in the middle of the afternoon. The mouth of the vampire’s mistress always looked a little swollen, and she laughed more, although her friends were often not quite sure what she was laughing about.  The vampire’s mistress was improving her pool game.  The vampire’s mistress had very little use lately for tampons.  The vampire’s mistress often sat with her legs crossed and one foot hooked around the other ankle, but when she walked there was a swing to her hips that was new.  When the vampire’s mistress went out in public, men stared after her, and women asked her what her perfume was.

The vampire’s mistress didn’t wear perfume.

         When she opened the door, the air smelled of beeswax and of the rose heads floating in a bowl of water, and somehow also of the hush. The room was like a side chapel in a cathedral, all little flickering candles and shadows and stained glass.  The sleeper made no sound at all, but she knew he was there.

         Buffy approached slowly, and leaned over the sleeper with caution; if startled in the wrong way, he could be savage.  She reached out and tugged gently on the black cover.

         His face revealed, the sleeper stirred.

         She whispered.

         “Spike?  Wake up now, okay?  I want to air the room out before the sun goes down.”

         He didn’t raise his head from the pillow.  “I wasn’t asleep.”

         “I know, just resting your eyes.  ‘Never admit weakness in front of the Slayer,’ that’s the code, right?”

         “Right.”

She’d let him look after the changes to her mother’s former bedroom, which was why it was as much like his old crypt now as the master bedroom of a craftsman house could be.  Spike had actually had the windows replaced with dark stained glass in a pattern of sapphire, emerald, and ruby.  Even at its brightest, the sun could do no more against that than set its tints aglow as if they were alive.  Really, Buffy thought, admiring the effect of the slanting rays of late afternoon, it was pretty.  Certainly unique.  None of the other houses on Revello had anything like it.  Or anything, probably, like the new curved iron bedstead either, an impregnable fortress of crenellations just made for bondage games, or the little trunkful of toys stored under it, or the massed array of tapers and votives Spike kept constantly burning. 

Her mother would certainly not recognize the room anymore, in its new guise as an altar to Weird Undead Mating Practices.

She went to the window, turned the catch. “C’mon, up.  I’m going to open these wide.”

Suddenly he was at her back, the cool naked length of him pressed close to her, one hand cupping her chin and his mouth at her ear. 

“I am up.  And you are going to open wide . . . .”  His other hand was already under her dress, and she felt his thick erection against her backside.  She gasped, her whole body pulsing with the electricity of his touch.  It took nothing for him to stir her into heat, just the sound of his voice might do it, the merest idea that he might touch her. 

“Open for me, Slayer.  Open.”  He lifted one of her thighs, so her knee rested on the windowsill, and the cooler air suddenly reaching her soaked pussy was like a refreshing breeze on a humid day.  His cock rubbed in the cleft, and she pressed back against him, desperate to be taken.  She wanted to touch herself, to touch him, guide him inside, but Spike laid his hands on hers and held them to the window frame.  He spoke again into her ear.  “One-eyed Jack will find his own way.  Meanwhile I’ll hold your dainty deadly little hands . . . do you know I love your hands, Slayer?”  He brought her right one to his mouth, sucked one by one on the fingers, slowly, the way his cock went on rubbing slowly in her wet channel, never entering her, but catching her clit at the end of each rolling stroke. 

Sometimes she wondered if this wasn’t a sickness: were other women like this, so crazily repeatedly responsive?  She felt like one of those trick birthday candles that doesn’t go out no matter how persistently you blow on it. 

“Spike, I need—“

“What do you need?” 

“You—“

“Aren’t I here, pet?  Aren’t I all around you?”  He drew more tightly against her, his arms laid over hers, his face alongside hers, so she knew he could see her blushing excitement, her struggle.  As all the while he plowed the channel without entering, and her clit throbbed.

“I had a dream about you just now,” he murmured in her ear.  “Shall I tell it you?”

“Yessss—tell me.”  She had to touch herself, had to make something happen, but he gripped her fingers, kept them where they were on the window frame.

“In this dream, I was Spike, and you were the slayer.  But it was a long long time ago, and we were . . . I don’t know where exactly.  A long gallery in some grand house, with gilt mirrors all along one wall, and great tall windows along the other that let the moonlight in to gleam on the parquet.  There was no light except that silver moonlight.  And we’d stalked each other all up and down that house for hours, fought little skirmishes, but nothing big.  Not yet.”

Over and over the velvety head of his cock touched her clit, and she wanted desperately to seize it, to hold it in her fingers and rub it there until she melted into sobs of pleasure.  She was tensed now, quivering from the friction between her thighs and the tickle of his speaking breath against her ear, and the languorous, insinuating way he talked.

“You were getting tired though, in this dream.  Tired from trying to track me through a hundred rooms, and your clothes were making you tired, because you were dressed like the girls used to dress when I was young, when they were going to a ball, to dance.  There must have been a dance going on in this house, because sometimes we heard music, very far-off tinkly music.  Tight-laced you were, and all that rushing and feinting made you pant.”  He licked her ear.  “Like you are right now.”  His left hand let go of hers, slipped down to her thigh to push her knee a little further along the windowsill, opening her up just a little more.  She groaned, and whipped her hand down, but Spike caught it before she could touch herself.  “Listen, my mistress.  I’m telling you my dream.   You were dressed for a ball, but your hair was starting to come down, and the flowers in your bodice were wilting from the salt of your sweat.  We fought all up and down that long mirrored gallery.  I could see us both in the mirrors.  Me with my bumps and fangs, and you . . . you falling to your knees, struggling for breath.  I thought I’d won, I grabbed you  and yanked you up . . . .”

“But then I surprised you.  Did I surprise you, Spike?”

“Always, my queen.”  He squeezed her fingers, brought them back to the window frame.

She wriggled.  “Spike, put it inside me.”

She didn’t see him smile, but she could feel it.  “What?  Put what inside you?”

“Your . . .”  She hated when he made her do this.  No: she loved it.  “Your cock.”

“Hush, I’m telling you my dream.  Listen.  So I yanked you up, your stake was gone, your neck bared to me, the perfume of your skin and your blood filled my senses, and in the mirror I could see the tears pouring from your eyes.  And that’s when the surprise came.  You pleaded—“
        

“For my life?” She spat the words, and stiffened.  She was ready to end this, to wrench herself around and strike him.

“No.  You pleaded for your sex.  You lifted your skirts . . . “ And here he hiked her dress up higher in the front, “and you brought my hand down

 . . .”  He moved her hand with his, their fingers interlaced, and brushed them against the curls of her mons, “and made me feel how wet you were.  You said you did not want to die intact, without knowing pleasure . . . you begged me to make you a woman before I drank you.”

Buffy shuddered all over.  Spike brushed her fingers lightly against her clit, and for a moment they touched also the wet velvet head of his prick.  “Oh God.  Oh God.”  The words escaped her before she could stop them; she flushed and bit her lip, but it was too late.  Spike’s cock, nestled tight against her, gave a little jump.

“That’s just what you said, in my dream.  You wept and begged me to take you, and the petals of the flowers you wore dropped one by one to the parquet.  I had such a cockstand as I’d never had yet, and you spread your little hand against my trousers and asked me to get it out and give it you.”

Buffy could no longer feel her one leg that held her up, or the other braced on the windowsill; all she felt was the throb of her pussy, the lips distended around his cock, his body wrapped around hers and his words winding into her ear.  Everything else was gone.  She closed her eyes, just listened and felt.

“You shivered, in my dream, just like you’re doing now, and your corset creaked as you sank to the floor.  I lifted up your heavy skirt, and all the foamy petticoats underneath, and there were your white stockings, and your chemise, but you wore nothing else, and when I parted your thighs, your quim was soaked and gave off such a scent it made me forget my blood hunger . . . .”

She pushed back against him, her head rolling on his shoulder.  “Please . . . .”

“That’s right, my queen, you said please, you submitted yourself to me completely, and I held your knees and pressed them back and went into you.  Went in where no one had been yet.  You writhed and cried, until you saw yourself in the mirrors, saw yourself tumbled on your back with your skirts all everywhere and me on top of you, between your white thighs  Me grinning down at you all fangs and ridges.  That made you quiet, fascinated, you watched, you moved under me, fucked me back—“ As he said this, Spike grabbed her hips, tilted them a little, and was suddenly inside, sheathed to the hilt.  Buffy gasped, bracing herself with her outstretched arms on the windowframe.  This was so good.  So good to be filled up finally, to begin that deep sucking movement.  Yet it wasn’t enough, not yet.

Spike was still speaking.  “The tears still came down your cheeks.  You looked at me and your lips moved but no sound came out.  I was as far up inside you as I could possibly be.  You clasped your sweet little arms around me, and your legs, and rocked up to meet me.  I heard your breath sawing between your lips, and the crinkling of your heavy satin skirts as I crushed them, and far away that music playing for the people who danced.  We danced.  Every move I made, you matched.  You clung to me and shuddered and sighed, but I knew you were sad because you already missed your life.”  His hand, which had been on her thigh, bracing it, moved now to her clit.  The lightest brush, once, again, again, just the tips of his fingers, and she arched her back, pushing back at him. His mouth touched her nape then, and slid along and up, kissing beneath the ear, tugging on the lobe.  He cupped her jaw in his hand, and she caught a whiff of herself from his fingers.

“You begged me to fuck you harder . . . and I did . . . but you would not ask me for your life.   Instead you offered me your neck.”

“I—oh my God—“
        

“You offered me your neck, and I saw there was nothing of you I could not have, and knowing that brought me off so deeply I lost my senses.  When I found them again . . . .” 

“What?”

“When I found them again, you were sitting on my chest with the stake in your hand.  The triumph in them made your eyes flash and sparkle.  You waited only to be sure I knew how you had bested me, before you harvested the heart you’d already taken from me.  The stake pierced me and . . . I felt entirely satisfied.  —But you—the real you—woke me up before I died.”

She sagged then, and nearly fell before he caught her.   “Oh God, Spike . . . you . . . you still fantasize about killing me.”  There was a fluttering in her chest that made her cough.  She could not deny that his narrative—every word of it—excited her.  How often had she brought herself to orgasm with him by imagining his bite at the moment of spending?  It was her guiltiest bedroom secret, the one thing, of all the filthy things he’d taught her, that really made her ashamed.  She tried to push him away, but made no resistance when he swung her up in his arms.

“No my queen.  Not a fantasy.  It was a dream . . . an interesting dream.”  He carried her to the armchair in the corner, where she let him arrange her in a favorite position.

Impaled once more in his lap, she leaned back against his chest, indolent and almost feverish, while he caressed her, his hands moving from her breasts to her belly to her spread thighs and the sex stretched open around his engulfing prick, as if she was some fine instrument he was playing.  He brought his fingers, wet with her own nectar, to her lips, and she sucked them.

“It wasn’t a dream about killing you . . . or you killing me . . . .”

“No . . . ?”  She didn’t believe that, or that it was a dream either, an innocent emanation of his subconscious, but still she traced the motions of his hands on her body with her own, warm over cool, and clenched herself fervently around his cock.  Reached down to touch the stem of his cock, to gather the balls into her hot palm.  He was kissing her now, her shoulders, back, neck, wherever he could touch.  Shifting a little, threading one arm around him, she brought a breast within reach of his mouth.  He caught her right nipple in his lips.    She watched him intently as he worried it, mouthed the areola with gentle teeth. I saw there was nothing of you I could not have.  Kissed it like another mouth, and met her eyes.  His full of ardor.

“No . . . don’t you understand it?  It was so clear to me.  It was a dream about the ecstasy of perfect surrender.  Perfect . . . delirious . . . surrender . . . . yours to me.  Mine to you.”  

He strummed her clit, and she spread her thighs even wider, bracing herself on the chair arms, her gasps coming faster now. 

Surrender.  Surrender.  It might be about that.

Or else, she thought, right before the climax swam up to engulf her, it was about how neither of them could ever really transcend what they were.  That all this sinking into one another, all this mutual display of trust, would still end in them being vampire and slayer. 

Still end with her stake in his heart.

***

Sunday dinner was over.  Tara and Buffy were almost finished with their coffee, and Spike was peeling an apple for Dawn, sheering off the bright green skin with his knife in one unbroken loop, to her smiling admiration.  This was the fourth Sunday in a row that they’d gathered for this meal, a real cooked one with meat and vegetables and a dessert that didn’t start out frozen, so in Buffy’s disjointed life it was beginning to feel like a tradition. Xander and Anya weren’t here, but they’d been there last Sunday and probably would come next Sunday.

Xander still wasn’t happy about Spike’s presence, but he was learning to deal, and Spike seemed not to want to give him a hard time. She’d spoken to Giles on the phone while she helped Tara cook.  Later on she’d patrol, like almost every other night, but now and for the next couple of hours she was free to bask in the feeling that she was almost a normal person again, with her family around her. 

Her dots were all connected.

Dawn took the long peel Spike passed across the table, and tipped her head back to dangle it slowly into her mouth.  Buffy watched Spike watch her sister: did her exposed throat tempt him?  If so, there was no sign of it in his expression; he looked at Dawn, when he wasn’t giving her the brotherly smirk-of-knowingness, with a quiet, avid affection, as if she was too good to be true.

Tara said that this was how Spike looked at her, too, but Buffy knew it wasn’t.  His gaze at her was full of far more fire and mystery, amusement and abasement and conspiracy.  Sometimes his eyes taunted her that he knew her all through, that she could not fool him and shouldn’t try, that she loved him because they were a pair: two beings straddling shadow and lapsing always towards the dark.  And other times she saw nothing there but the most abject gratitude, as if she’d hauled him, in the nick of time, away from some terrible debacle. 

And right now, glancing away from Dawn and catching her eye, he just looked straight at her, a clear, unflinching look that made her feel seen and . . . safe.

Safe in the vampire’s regard.

He carved a slice out of the denuded apple in his hand and held it out to her, impaled on the point of the knife.

She took it, wet and slippery in her fingers, tart and winey on the tongue.

The next slice he offered to Tara, who accepted it with a half-lidded smile.

Buffy wondered sometimes what there was between Tara and Spike.  She knew they talked to each other, because they always stopped when she came into the room.  Which should have made her feel paranoid, except that nothing about Tara could evoke that feeling. Tara was completely benign.  And she knew that Spike had cut way back on his TV watching because he was reading more—books that Tara lent him.  Maybe that was all they talked about, in which case, she wasn’t really interested anyway.  Books had always seemed pretty slow to her.  Okay if all you wanted was something to put you to sleep.

Although she did like the way Spike looked when he was reading and smoking, the rangy ease of his body while he concentrated on the page.  Once in a while she’d ask him to read to her, but only for the sake of the sound of his voice.

When they were bringing her things from her old room to their new one, he’d come across the volume of poems Angel had given her.  Sonnets from the Portuguese.   “Here’s a splendid book,” he said, clearly surprised to find it among her possessions.  He opened it, and she saw something go dull in his eyes when he spotted the inscription.

“You’ve never even tried to read this, have you?”

“S’not really my speed,” she said.

“The great poof should’ve known better.”

“Did he read much poetry when you were with him?”

Spike only snorted, and tossed the thin volume into the box with her others.

At the table now, Dawn finished the last bit of apple peel and started to get up. 

“Wait—don’t go yet,” Buffy said. “Spike, I’ve got something for you.”

Dawn dropped back into her chair.  “At last!”

She’d had the presents for a couple of weeks already, waiting for the right moment.  First she’d thought to give him them when they were alone, but then it occurred to her that Dawn would feel cheated if she did that.  And then she’d tried to get Spike to tell her what his birthday was—perhaps, she’d reasoned, if that was close, it would make a good excuse—but he’d laughed at her for asking, and when she pressed him, said dead men didn’t have birthdays, because they never got any older.

So now, while they were all together with the bowl of fruit on the table and the scent of coffee hanging in the air, was as good a time as any.

Buffy got the packages out of the sideboard drawer where she’d hidden them, and put them on the table in front of Spike.

For a moment he just looked at the two oblongs wrapped in a plain paper of midnight blue, with silver ribbon, and then up at her, standing at his shoulder.  A question in his eyes.

Dawn leaned across the table, grinning eagerly.  “Open your prezzies, Spike!”

He took the first one in hand, hefted it.  “What’s the occasion?”

Before Buffy could answer, Dawn said, “We’re not poor anymore!  Presents for everyone!  We already got ours.”

Spike couldn’t have failed to miss the heaps of booty Buffy had bought her sister and herself since the money came in. 

He glanced at Tara.  “This from all of you?”

She shook her head.  “Buffy consulted me, but . . . .”

“What are you waiting for?” Dawn said.  “Open open open!”

Spike smiled at her, and pulled off the ribbon.  Buffy had never seen him unwrap a gift before: he barely tore the paper, which somehow surprised her.  Lifted the lid off the box with something akin to trepidation.  “What’s this?”  Parted the tissue paper.  “Slayer, what have you done?”

Buffy realized she was holding her breath.

He didn’t lift it out, just stared at it, and as the seconds ticked by she began to fear she’d chosen wrong.

Then he took it from the box, held it in his hand.  The silver frame—a very simple one, with a wide chased border, chosen in an agony of indecision after she and Tara had combed through what seemed like hundreds in three different high-toned shops—suddenly seemed like a horrible affront.  Wrong wrong wrong.  She’d kept the wooden oval that had held them before, even preserving the shattered glass, in case there was some reason she didn’t know about for his being attached to it.  But now she thought she should never have taken this upon herself at all.  He’d be angry that she’d gone into his things again without asking permission.

Dawn broke the silence.  “Let us see!  Don’t you like it?”

“Dawnie!  Ssssh.”

He looked up at her then.  “They’d have been all covered in confusion, my sisters, to find themselves in such a grand setting.” He traced the edges of the silver frame with his fingertip.

 “I’m sorry!  It’s just, I thought, rather than being hidden away in that box, you could put them somewhere where you could see them all the time, like, I dunno, the mantelpiece, or the bedside table, or—“

“Yes.”

“—but if you hate the frame, I could take it back, there was this other one—I told Tara maybe we should have gotten the other one, only—“

“You’re babbling, my queen.  The frame is beautiful.  Does my darlings proud.” He threaded an arm around her waist and squeezed.  Looked up at her, and at Dawn and Tara, an almost sheepish pleasure in his eyes.  “I didn’t expect this.”

“Open . . . open the other one.”

Spike handed his sisters off to her, and took up the second package.  Buffy examined again the sepia image of Arabella, Sophronia and Jemima, their unsmiling old-fashioned faces, so composed and patient.  Knowing what she did about them, she couldn’t help but see death in their faces, although she didn’t know if they were already ill when the photograph was taken.  1876.  These girls had posed in 1876, and were dead by 1879, and Spike was their brother William.  He always spoke of what killed the two eldest as ‘consumption,’ and this usage struck her as more fanciful than real, as if to say they’d died of broken hearts, or melancholy, or home-sickness.  Spike described them as merry girls, full of laughter, liking to sing, but it was difficult to credit that description with the decorous silence of their portrait.  Thin arms wound around one another’s tiny waists as if to anchor themselves against some unseen gale.  Jemima was in the middle, designated thereby as most precious.  She alone showed a hint of a smile, but perhaps it was merely the shape of her mouth that suggested it.  Like her brother, she had a rather protruding lower lip.

She was so absorbed by those hollow-eyed girls that she missed Spike’s first reaction to the other present.

“Oh love . . . this is . . . .”

His eyes shone, as he looked from her to the pictures in the double frame.  Her portrait was on the left, and one of her with Dawn on the right. They were posed in the greenhouse at UC Sunnydale, amidst flowering tropical trees and sun that made their hair and eyes sparkle, made Buffy’s bared shoulders glow.

“Tara suggested it,” Buffy said.  “You’re not so easy to think up presents for.”

Tara has listened to her worry the problem over for days—what to give Spike that wouldn’t be stupid or redundant or just not very special.   She’d even known someone at the university who was eager to take the shots and did a much more interesting job of it than the photographer at the mall could boast, and for less money, not that that mattered anymore.  They were flush.

“Do you like ‘em?”  Dawn was now pressed in on Spike’s other side, hanging over his shoulder.  “Aren’t we cute?”

Spike was drinking them in, and didn’t answer right away.

Then he looked up at Tara, and spoke in a low intimate voice.  “You’re a good little friend to me, Glinda.”

Tara colored up and murmured something Buffy couldn’t catch.

“So you like these?” Buffy asked.

“No, I hate them.  Hate them with all my black heart.”  He squeezed her about the waist. “You’re so good to me.”

Suddenly, they realized they were alone.  Spike pulled her down into his lap, embracing her with his face in her hair.  She held him, feeling the reverberation of her own pulse against his still, solid body.

She blushed.  “I’m really not—“  He had no idea how often she betrayed him in her thoughts, how often she went back over their convoluted history, trying to understand how things could have changed so between them and not quite able to grasp it, how her feelings for him could nonplus her, make her think that she’d fallen off the edge of the world and never would be a good person again.  Even as she couldn’t imagine loving anyone else, not anymore, the way she loved him.  Only Angel, forever removed as he was, burned so brightly for her.  But she saw now that she’d loved Angel as an ignorant girl does, with a pure, desperate, simple love that saw nothing besides him.  She wasn’t that girl anymore, couldn’t love that way, even had she wanted to.  Spike she loved as a conflicted, lust-ridden, apprehensive woman, her satisfaction mixed with bitterness and doubt.  She needed Spike’s daily sexual alchemy.  Needed the reflection of herself she saw only in his eyes.  Needed the foundation he laid, minute by minute, for her to walk forward upon.  But the thing would not lie smooth in her mind, no matter how she turned it round and round. 

She never spoke of this to him.  She wanted him to feel at home in her house, in her arms.  Wanted to be able to feel, with him, like a woman.  A woman who could keep her man.

And after all, he was the one who’d reconciled her to life again.

Being alive still felt weird, even when it wasn’t downright painful; she had to start off each day by wrenching her attitude back into the right groove: it was good to be here.  Not good still felt like the default setting.  But Spike held a chunk of happiness in his hand and was constantly breaking pieces off and feeding them to her; pieces that dissolved deliciously on her tongue and left her always hungry for another and another.

She’d not yet found another source for that.  Maybe there wouldn’t be one.

Slayers weren’t supposed to be happy.

Giles had never said so, in so many words, but she’d figured it out on her own.

“You’re not good to me?”  He looked into her eyes for a moment, then seemed to take pity on her and dropped his gaze, fixing it instead on the placket of buttons on her blouse, which he began to undo.  Parted the edges and kissed the point of each breast through the thin lace of her bra.  “You’ve got me fooled, then.”

Oh, he made her feel helpless!  Her body sang for his.  She tipped his head back and fastened on his mouth.

Whispered, when the kiss broke, “No fooling, Spike.”  It was never easy for her to say she loved him, not since that first time, in bed before Willow’s spell.  She seldom said it directly; more often like this, making herself understood by more oblique means.  Spike, on the other hand, told her all the time, straight out; Spike’s talk was full of ripe endearments and bawdy compliments and commentary about her.  She couldn’t bring herself to call him anything but his name.  ‘Spikey’ occasionally, but never without an edge of facetiousness to it, even now.  Sometimes, in the depths of passion, William.  But nothing else. 

“I know it, my queen.  Know it right well tonight.”  He curved one hand around the orb of her breast.  “The pictures are just the thing.”

“I’m so glad.”  She covered her hand with his hand, and for one minute, enclosed in his gaze, feeling his touch light her up somehow from the inside, Buffy felt perfectly alive.

“There’s one other thing would please me immensely.”

The seriousness of his face made her heart hammer.  “What?”

“I fancy one of us together.”

“Us together . . . ?”  A sudden dismay filled her. 

How surprising it was to her, the force with which she did not want to give him what he asked for.  She’d never had a picture taken with Angel, but that wasn’t it.  Her reluctance had a far more basic feel to it, like the primitive peoples who believed their selves would be stolen by the camera. 

She glanced back at the photos on the table.  William’s sisters.  She’d retrieved them from Spike’s box one evening when he was at his poker game.  That one picture had seemed to her to hold the key to who he was, an unfortunate young gentleman who’d known unbearable loss, and in the end was robbed also of his soul.  The vampire who, even soulless, was still replete with memory and humanity.  Now she wondered how the hell she could’ve ignored the hoarded photographs of Drusilla that outnumbered those family mementos by the hundreds.  Never were those two caught together when Spike wasn’t touching, holding, kissing, groping her.  Looking at her as though she was the rarest and most delightful jewel.  He’d adored Drusilla completely, his partner in every sort of bloodlust, violence, and depravity.  He’d adore her still if not for . . . .  There’d been nothing else for Spike but Drusilla and the pleasures of the kill.

A century of those images proved that out, against one of those three dead girls.  Who were lucky, perhaps, to have died before their brother could have turned on them, raped and ravaged them.

This was the man she’d abandoned herself to.

Before she could marshal her expression, she saw him take it in.  His hand dropped from her breast.  “Never mind, my queen . . .”

“Spike, I . . . .”  She didn’t know what she was trying to express.  Her mind rebelled against all its thoughts.

“Shouldn’t have asked . . . photographs are so permanent.  It’s enough, what you’ve given me here.  More than enough.”

She brought her mouth down to his again.  Her heart fluttered when she kissed him, and the sudden rush of moist heat in her groin made her squirm.  He couldn’t fail to be aware of that—to smell it.  But his mouth barely moved beneath hers. “Let’s go upstairs,” she murmured.  “We have time before we patrol.”

He shook his head.

“What?  No?”

“There’s no moon tonight, they’ll be out in force.  Don’t want you all jelly-legged before we get there.”

She began to protest, but he was already firmly doing up her buttons.

“Want to change your boots first?  Then let’s go.”

Since Giles had gone away again she’d trained hard with Spike.  In the back room of the magic shop, and, just after dusk, in the warren of alleys that gave off from it, she practiced tracking and killing him.   Adept as she was, he still found ways to surprise her. 

Some of them scared her. 

Because she could not anticipate them. 

Because they reminded her too vividly of when he was not her friend.

Once in a while he killed her.

Then hauled her to her feet, saying, “That wasn’t good enough.  Now let’s do it again.” 

There was no lover’s talk while this went on.  He was all business.  Hard, game-faced, unsmiling.

Most nights they patrolled; almost every time, they slew. 

He kept her at it.  Took it far more seriously than she had for years.  As if he had something to prove to the whole demon underworld.

Once, when he was goading her into another round of sparring, she heard him mutter,  “Gonna make you unkillable.  Even if it kills me.”

They’d start at Restfield, the furthest cemetery out, and work their way through all the graveyards to the south and east.  He was quiet as they walked, and lacked his usual swagger.  Kept his hands in his pockets, didn’t even light a cigarette.  She fretted for some way to call him out of his funk, short of promising what she’d just refused. 

“Spike.  Tell me a story.”

“What story?”  His voice was dull.

“Tell me about—“  In her head, she ransacked his box again, glancing at and tossing aside the images she’d seen.  “—about Paris.  In, when was it?  1881?”  She glanced at him then, saw him wince.

“You don’t want to hear about that.”

“Yes I do.  What was it like?  What did the women wear?  Did you drink—“ she struggled for the word, “what is it—absence?”

“Absinthe, darling.  Yes.”  He sighed.  “William had always wanted to go to Paris, you know.  But he was always frightened of it, too.  Nice clergymen’s sons went there, of course, but they pretended it was purely to see the glass at the Ste Chapelle, and the gargoyles and the Louvre.   They stayed at nice safe English pensions, ate all their meals at the table d’hote, because,” here he pitched his voice high and broad, like some fussy old lady, “of course the real French cooking was just filthy my dear, all that oil, terrible.” He gave off a laugh.  “But William never got there.  I never saw it in the sunlight.”  He sighed again, and his hand came out of his pocket and curled around hers.  “Still, I’d argue that Paris is best at night.  It really is all its cracked up to be.  I wish I could show it to you, my queen.”

“Well, unless they open a branch of the hell mouth under the Eiffel Tower, I’m not going to be flouncing off to France.  Go on—tell me about gaslight Paris.”

“I didn’t see much of it that time in ’81.  Angelus kept me on a very short leash.  I was a fledgling then.  In Coventry most of the time.”

“Coventry?  I thought you were in—“

“It’s an expression, Buffy.  Never mind.  Anyway,  I hadn’t the right clothes yet.”

“What do you mean?”

“You were nowhere—couldn’t go anywhere worth going—if you didn’t have a proper suit of evening clothes, boiled white shirt, pumps.  I hadn’t any sort of kit in ’81, and Angelus was in no temper to introduce me to his tailor.  But when we’d worked our way back there again, fifteen years later—ah, then!  That was a time!  The black silk top hat I had was a wonderful thing.  Hung onto it for decades, I did. Wore it again a great deal in the sixties.”

“What happened to it?”

“I gave it to a hippy bird in San Francisco who admired it, round about 1967.  She looked charming wearing it and nothing else but her red hair down to her hips.”

“I don’t suppose it was much good to her after you’d killed her.”

“Didn’t kill her.  Sometimes, believe it or not, I just like to fuck a woman and leave her be, replete with glad memories.”

“Huh.  Funny how you always only tell me about the ones that got away.”

Spike paused, and something flickered in his eyes that made her curl her fingers around the stake in her pocket.

“I don’t tell you what I know will make neither of us happy, pet.”

“Right.”

“And it’s perfectly true that some women are too splendid to deprive the world of.  Sometimes even Angelus would do the same.  I expect he learned that from me.  When we were in Paris, that second time, 1896, he was crazy for an opera girl.  Reckon you don’t know about that, do you, pet?  Kept her for half a year, from rainy November to the soft nights of May.  Kept her very well, too.”

“What’s an opera girl?”

“Ballet dancer.  In those days, operas had dance sequences.  Hordes of little ballerinas trooping across the stage between the singing bits.  Young things, barely pubescent, poor … being an opera girl was next door to being a prostitute.  They all had patrons, protectors, as they were called—for that, read married blokes needing a bit of fluff on the side, or wild rich boys from the Jockey Club who were the despair of their mammas back at the old chateau.   Of course, in Paris in those days, a woman could make quite a good thing out of being a horizontale, if she kept her wits about her.”

“And you say Angel—“

“Round the twist he was about his Fifine.  Bitty blonde she was, with plump cheeks and big eyes and a wobbly little chin.  If she was sixteen it was all she was.  Dumb as dirt, and illiterate, but she could float like a fairy and had a smile that could kill in its way just as surely as my own.  He kept her in a flat we’d, ah, inherited from a fellow with no more need of it.  He couldn’t get enough of her.  He drank from her, of course—not at the neck, not with the costumes she had to prance in every evening—but from the thigh.  Kept her just off balance enough to never forget whom she belonged to, but not enough to prevent her dancing.  Mostly.  Those girls were always swooning and falling over, nobody remarked on such stuff—they were half-starved, most of ‘em.  Angel made sure to feed his—he’d take her to Brasserie Lipp after every performance and stuff her full of sausages and sauerkraut and beer.  She could eat like a coal heaver, that girl.  An’ every morning I’d come in at dawn and hear them going at it behind closed doors.  He’d roar while he had her, and she liked it, she’d roar back and laugh.  She was too naïve to know there was anything unusual about Angelus. She liked it all.”  He chuckled.  “Honestly, she was a sweet little thing.  She’d sit on Angel’s lap and coo to him in her pretty French—it all sounded pretty, mind you, even when she was talking about stuff that would make a stevedore blush—and he’d just smile an’ smile at her.  An’ she was lucky to have him instead of someone who’d give her the clap one night and a bun in the oven the next.”

A whole quiverful of questions presented itself to her stunned mind; when Spike paused to light a cigarette, she chose one of the less pointy ones.  “Where was Darla?”

“There’d been a falling out in Vienna that autumn.  She’d gone off.  She did that sometimes.  She always found him again, or he’d find her.”

Buffy realized she was more fascinated than repulsed by all this new information about Angel; it was all so long ago and far away they might have been talking about his great great grandfather, or a movie he’d seen that she hadn’t.  It was still difficult to wrap her head around the idea that Spike, who was strolling beside her, looking young and handsome, really had been and seen and done all these long ago things he described.  Six years into slayering, she ought to be used to this kind of thing—she’d met plenty of vamps and demons far older than Spike.  Christ, beside Anya, Spike was a toddler.

 “So what were you up to, in your silk top hat, while Angel was with his opera girl?”

“I used to like to go to the Ba-Ta-Clan and see Jane Avril dance.  Good company—could always make friends there, or other places like it.  Sometimes I’d go to a place I found out, an atelier where the people lay about all night and smoked opium.  That was a nice new taste in the sang.  On the whole, I made a lot of friends in Paris that winter.  Some even were left to tell tales about me come summer.”  He grinned.  “Some.  A few.”

“And did you take Drusilla around to all these places?”

“I’d have liked to.  I did later.  We spent the years of the Great War in Paris, me an’ Dru.  But at that time—she’d trotted off with Darla.”

Buffy squinted at him.  “Ah.  You were lonely, weren’t you?  Angelus wasn’t paying any attention to you anymore, and Drusilla was gone.  You were used to looking after her and then you had no one who needed you.”

“Found plenty who thought they needed me.  Beautiful ladies an’ lovely lads both. Did just fine.”

“You were afraid you’d never see her again.  But Angel wasn’t interested in going looking for them, and he wouldn’t let you go alone.  Or maybe you dreaded meeting up with Darla when you didn’t have Angel there to back you up.”

“Slayer.  Goddamnit when did you get to be so clever?”

“So what happened to Fifine?”

“Darla happened.”

“Oh.”

“There were bits of poor little Mam’selle Fifine strewn from garret to cellar of that house.  After that we found it better to leave France.   We spent the summer in Odessa.  But I didn’t mind so much.”

“Why not?”

“Because for once it wasn’t my fault we had to scarper.  And because, if you must know, Drusilla was back, and wanted a lot of soothing which I was quite happy to provide.”  He glanced up.  “Ah, here we are.  Restfield.”

“Even though Angelus wouldn’t let you have her.”

He paused, let his cigarette drop and stubbed it out.  “He couldn’t stop me caring for her, though.  Made me happy just to have her there.  Of course I wanted to possess her.  But I didn’t need to possess her in order to love her.  She was my princess from the moment I first saw her.”

“And did she love you back, do you think?”

He began to walk past her, into the cemetery.  She caught his arm.  “Spike.  Did she love you, your princess?”

“Of course she did.  Eventually.  Not nearly what I did her.  I always knew that.  But I was her wicked darling Spike, though she never did stop longing for Angelus, even though he wasn’t ever really good to her.  That’s what you an’ her have in common, my queen.”

This threw her; she stood planted while he walked on into the cemetery.  Then she sprang after him.

“Oh no!  Don’t do that.  It’s not fair!”

He spun around.  “It happens to be the truth.  And it’s just as fair as what you were doing just now—trying to make me say Dru never really cared about me.  You’ve never believed in us, you still think vampires are incapable of real love.”

“No—I don’t, I—how can you say that?”

“’Cos it’s true.  You want to hang onto that idea, all evidence to the contrary, or else you’ve got to admit to yourself that you’ve only ever loved vamps, and only ever been properly loved by vamps, and then where does that put you?  You’re still trying to pretend you’re a regular girl.  Who just happens to be The Chosen One.  Give over Buffy, I know you’re not at peace.”

His words chilled her.  It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair that he should understand things about her that she didn’t want to understand herself!  “Spike . . . no.”

“Yes.  It’s all right, though.  Vampires understand love, pet.  What else have we got?  Not work, not children, not religion.  It’s either hate, or it’s love, we’ve got an intense need for one or the other, else we die of the eternal tedium of existence.  Vampires know how to celebrate passion, attachment—the senses.  They’re what we’ve got, and we work them to the hilt.  You think I lived a lie with Drusilla for twelve decades because she didn’t love me as deeply as I loved her?  Newsflash, Slayer—that’s the way with every couple, that ever was or ever will be.  Love’s never equal.   An’ it’s always better to be the one who loves more.  Always.  The one who loves more gets more.  More desire, more pain, more ecstasy.”  He spread a hand against his chest.  “I’ve always had that good fortune.  It’s my great talent.  I had few others, but I don’t complain.”

“Spike—“

“Bloody hell—!”  He leapt towards her.  She feinted, and in that moment the enormous vampire looming behind her fell under Spike’s thrown weight.  Buffy spun and staked it just as he leapt out of the way.

There were more; the conversation was dropped for fighting, and Spike became almost giddy with it.  Not for the first time, Buffy decided he enjoyed slaying far too much.  

Or maybe that was another thing he knew, that she was still trying to deny.

Even as she concentrated on taking the vampires out, part of Buffy’s mind stayed fixed on what he’d said; fixed like a live butterfly on a pin.  Thoughts fluttering but no real movement going on at all.

One of the problems, not the biggest maybe, but still pretty troubling, of having boyfriends who counted their ages in the hundreds, was that they knew so damn much, and they knew they knew it, so arguing with them was an uphill battle.

By midnight, the word, or whatever it was, seemed to have gone out amongst the vampires.  They traversed most of the big cemetery on the south side of town and saw nothing.

In a memorial grove where the breeze tossed the treetops, Buffy pushed Spike against a poplar and went up on tiptoe to kiss him.

“Are you still sore at me?” she whispered.

“I never was.”  She could just see the contours of his face in the starlight that penetrated the shadowy grove; his eyes reflected a gleam.

She continued to whisper.  “This is a nice shady spot.  Why don’t we have a picnic?”

 “We didn’t bring anything along to eat.”

“Are you sure?”  She took his hand and pressed it between her thighs; knew he’d feel how drenched she was right through the cotton crotch of her jeans.

“Mmm.  My favorite pudding.”  He dropped to his knees at once, and began undoing her fly when she heard a sound.

“Sssh!  Wait.  What is that?”  She stepped back from him.  “Stay here, I’ll check it out.”

She crossed the grove.  The sounds coalesced as she neared into those of feverish necking.  A pair of young men were secreted on a stone bench beneath an ivy trellis.  They looked, by the clothes they’d half-shucked, and their youth, like maybe they were from the university; she saw a shape beneath the bench that might’ve been a knapsack.   She’d run into her fair share of gay cruisers in the cemeteries of Sunnydale over the years; her warnings to them about the perils of the night seemed to go unheeded.  Still, she wasn’t about to disturb these two.  No need, since the place was deserted otherwise.

Buffy started to back away.