Days, low down in the hold with the loud metallic creaking of the ship, the scrabbling of rats among the enormous containers, Spike's remembered victims preyed on him as he'd once preyed on their living counterparts. Hour by hour, horrors worse than what lurked in a case of tequila sent him crying, crawling, pleading. Sometimes Buffy was there, whispering in his ears. You disgust me. You've ruined my life. I never want to see you again. Sometimes it was Jemima. Johnny was almost always near: never quite visible, but always speaking to him in that low insolent angry way he'd put on with adolescence. I only made myself what you are. Why did you turn away from me?Barely able to distinguish sleep from waking, he wasn't sure either which was worse. The passage of time was meaningless in the pitch darkness.

There were plenty of rats, but Spike grew thin.

Some nights he managed to get up on deck. In the single-digit hours when the vast ship was at its quietest, he shivered in the sharp wind, face upturned to the stars. Beneath the open sky, the storm in his mind calmed. He could think of her, his wife, see her pretty face peering at him out of normal memory, solemn, with a sparkle in the eyes that was only for him. He could recall—always with a little start of surprise—her answer to the message he'd sent before embarking on this voyage. Of course I'll wait for you. In those few hours snatched here and there from the maze of anguish, the clear cold air afforded him a grasp of his own sanity. But the dawn always came too soon, sending him scurrying back into the dark, where the ghouls waited. He went to them as a whipped dog to his only righteous keepers.

He didn't know how long he'd have to remain with them, before he could find a way out. Meanwhile, the ship steamed north.

Buffy meant to go back to Reykjavik, to the one home that was not a place allowed to her by the Council, like the London flat, but was hers and Spike's. They lived in that bleak country at its bleakest time, when the northern nights were long and sheltering. It was where their keepsakes stayed, where they had a few friends who believed they were eccentric globetrotters but had no clue they were vampire and slayer.

In Spike's absence, she wanted no other company. Certainly not that of Dawn, who was disgustingly happy in her early days of pregnancy. And not Jemima's. With her, Buffy was stifled, embarrassed, and self-conscious for feeling that way. She couldn't talk to her about her love affair, and there was nothing else to talk about with her; Jemima was suffused with the irrepressible glow of new love, of sexual fulfillment and pride.

Angel was making her happy, his soul still firmly in place.

Buffy couldn't leave Los Angeles fast enough.

She still meant to get back to Iceland soon, but, two weeks after that email message from Spike, she was in London, trying to clear out Johnny's flat. She had three piles going—Trash, Oxfam, and Keepers. Every item in the apartment was charged with significance. The volumes of history and literature, so many of them gifts to her son from Giles. The half-full bottles of gin and vodka and scotch, obviously kept to entertain friends, and the empties of lager scattered everywhere—on the dresser, the desk, under the bed—that he drank alone. His clothes, that were somehow both conservative and scruffy and the opposite of what anyone wore in Southern California. She put them all on the Oxfam pile, except a few pullovers Tara had knitted; Spike might wear them, or Jemima might want them, or something. They were too nice, too personal, to give away.

The edges of the dresser mirror were stuck full of photos of his English friends. Buffy recognized the Honorable Penelope Leigh-Palmers, whom Johnny loved, and had killed. She'd seen her that day—the one after Johnny's birthday—coming out as she was going in. She'd spent the night, and probably broke up with him moments before Buffy encountered her.

There were other pictures too, a shoebox full of twenty years of snapshots, some Buffy had missed and thought lost: pictures of herself as a little girl with Joyce and Hank. Others of Giles and Anya, of Tara, of toddler Johnny with his big sister. A slghtly blurry one of Faith sitting on Xander's lap, on the sofa of the Sunnydale house, the pair of them looking tough, and pleased with each other. Buffy wondered how it came to be here. Faith died before Johnny was born, and she couldn't recall that they'd talked about her much in his hearing.

Some Polaroids gathered with a rubber band proved to be of her. Shuffling through them, the heat rose to her cheeks—they were stalkerish, badly-framed and intrusive shots of her in a bikini at the beach in Mexico, taken without her knowledge. The last few in the group made her gasp: nudes she'd reluctantly let Spike take some fifteen years back, shortly after her leg was restored. Johnny must have filched them from their bedroom. Buffy tore all the Polaroids into little bits, shoving them deep into the big plastic trash bag. She didn't want to know that her son lusted after her even before he was turned, and now she could never unknow it.

She gathered the other photos into a big manila envelope to take away with her.

In the next few weeks, grief zagged in like lightning bolts, jarring Jemima with guilty recollection in the midst of lovemaking, work, sleep. Her brother, whose last minutes gave her cruel dreams, whose dead silence left an absence, in contrast to their steady daily stream of texts, emails, phone conversations. Milo, with a sharp-toothed guilt at not missing him, not loving him, not protecting him. Wesley, whom she'd had no chance to get to know, and could love only in retrospect. She worried about the families of the people Johnny and Dru killed. She worried about Spike, and about her mother, who acknowledged emails and calls but didn't have much to say.

She felt she should do nothing but sit in sorrow for all these people, that they deserved her unremitting attention. But life was speeding along.

After the expedition to Venice Beach to pursue the three-tusked demons, which were right where Jemima had known they'd be, there were more visions, regular not in schedule but in her inner sense of their rightness. They came easily, like good ideas popping into her mind. Not all of them were as detailed and obvious as the first; the ambiguity sent her to Wesley's study, where the years in which she'd worked, at the direction of various stodgy Casaubons, in the Council archives, paid off in the reclamation of wide-ranging knowledge she'd never had a chance to apply to anything real. Wesley's workroom in the Hyperion, his desk, his chair, his books and objects, all seemed to be waiting for her, welcoming her. She slipped in among them without fuss or difficulty. In the well-organized volumes she found connections, made inferences that turned up good, got confirmation of own instincts. She had, all unawares, real expertise.

"I think," she said to Rita one night, laughing, "that Angel should pay me for all this!"

The next day, with a solemn expression, Angel presented her with a folded slip of paper, on which he'd written a sum of money.

Jemima looked up at him. "What's this?"

"Annual. But paid monthly." He paused, anxiety rising to the opaque surface of his face. "Do you think it's enough?"

"What, for me? But, I wasn't serious!"

"The work you've been doing is serious."

"Yes, of course it is. Your work. Well, ours now. But you don't have to pay me."

"You sound so sure." He gave her a cautious look. "Why?"

"Well, because I'm not doing it for money. None of us are doing this for money."

"No, not for money. But I pay Rita, Darryl and Noel. I paid Wesley." He paused again. "I'd like you to be independent."

She noticed, with some amusement, how Angel was keeping his distance from her while they talked about this. Not using the influence of his hands. "I am. I don't want to take your money. I have plenty of my own, from Uncle Rupert. And even more now, because ... Johnny's half comes to me, now he's dead."

"Oh." Angel sat down heavily in the chair beside Wesley's—now her—desk. "You should still take it. I don't want you to feel you're not valued. You're on the team. I'd prefer you to be paid. It's more ... regular."

She caught it then, his anxiety about this mixture of roles: she was his mistress, which none of the others were, of course, and she was the one with the visions, which was certainly important, but also, in a way, quite passive. She could be seen as a kind of hanger-on. Except that by stepping into Wesley's place as well, making it her own, she brought something that didn't rely on the favor of the Powers, or of Angel himself.

"Yes, that's proper, then. But it doesn't have to be so much." She wrote a lower figure on the slip of paper, pushed it back to him.

He held it for a moment, looking at it, at her. She couldn't quite fathom his expression.

"You needn't worry that I'm going to sponge off you. I can perfectly afford L.A. I can afford a spacious place to live, a nice car so I don't have to drive yours, a real California girl wardrobe, and when my books and things come from York, I'll make myself a beautiful home right near here."

Angel didn't return her smile, but he'd lightened. There was humor in his glance. "That's your plan, then? Live nearby? Work with me?" He leaned closer to her, so that his face, his eyes, were all she saw. "Are you an independent woman? A rich woman?"

Jemima couldn't stop smiling; his joke surprised her, gave her pleasure. She answered carefully, pulling the words up from memory. "If you won't let me live with you, I can build a house of my own close up to your door, and you may come and sit in my parlour when you want company of an evening."

His smile widened at their shared recognition. "Oh, could you?"

"Well ..." She rose from the desk chair, and let him, as she knew he would, pull her instead onto his lap. "You'd have to let me out of bed long enough to—"

"You're not in bed now. What are you doing up, and dressed, and—" His hand stole up beneath her hem, coasting cool along her thigh. "—but you're not—"

"—entirely dressed, no." She parted her legs further, so he had room to curl his whole big hand around her bare sex. Angel pulled her higher into his lap, so she felt the hardening knot of him, restrained by his trousers. "But as I was saying—"

"Don't you want to live with me?" He lifted her, as if she was light as a child, set her kneeling on the chair arms. Even as his hand went back beneath her dress, he gave her a solemn look, as if they were still carrying on their conversation of a few moments ago, but also not forgetting the joke, that he was Mr Rochester, and she was Jane Eyre.

At first she had to bite her lower lip to keep from crying out as he caressed her; Rita and the others must be nearby, outside the study. "Don't you?" Angel said. "Or I don't suppose you like living in the Hyperion. My rooms are dark, and impersonal, and the furnishings aren't what you like. Anyway, you want something that's yours. That's natural."

"Na—natural. Oh God."

He'd undone his trousers. The tip of his tall cock touched her inside leg with a liquid kiss; she dipped herself towards it, thighs straining. Angel took her weight in his hands, raising her again, so her knees slid off their perch, and she hung poised above his erection. He kissed her, a light brushing of lips that made her shiver all over. "Fuck me?"

He always took care to obtain her permission.

"Oh God. Yes."

In the cradle of his big hands, he lowered her onto his cock. Jemima pulled up her skirt, to watch it disappear into her, but her attention was split between that sight and Angel's face. He was never very expressive, but she was learning to parse his subtle signals. Could see how moved he was by her. Could feel it in the way he supported her, sure and gentle, as she took him in.

"You all right?" he whispered.

She shook her head, because "all right" didn't begin to describe the sensations, the emotions: pride at his desire and her power over him, amazement at her own sheer greed for this, and at how fucking him put her into a state at once frenzied and serene; then she realized he couldn't know that, so she nodded instead. Nodded and laughed. "You stir me all up inside. Scramble my brains." She'd believed all those magazines articles, that size didn't matter, but it turned out they were bullshit. Bigger was better. The heft of his cock, his big corded shoulders and arms, the hands the size of bicycle seats, the impregnable bulk of his whole body compared to hers, had an indescribable appeal, afforded an intensity of pleasure she'd never experienced before. With him she felt free to do anything, move any way she wanted to, vocalize and fantasize, forget herself and be selfish all at once. And the awareness that she pleased him, that he was similarly fascinated by her inverse charms—delighted and incited by the round little breasts Milo had never paid much mind to, the curves of belly and back and thigh, her small hands and sturdy legs, and most of all her pussy, which, in response to its starring role in her life, had developed its own personality, needs and will. It was always wet, always sensitive, always twitching in response to her idlest thought, to Angel's merest glance. They made love constantly, and still she found herself masturbating when she went to the bathroom for a pee, or after an hour or so of hitting the books. She knew that to him she smelled like a cornucopia of sex, he could sniff out the minutest details of her nearly-constant arousal, and this should have made her self-conscious, but she was beyond that already, coasting on pheromones a mile high.

Knees hooked over the chair arms, her own arms balanced on his shoulders, she took langorous downthrusts into his lap. Together they watched themselves, or looked into each other's eyes, or kissed, hard hurried kisses that gave way with gasps to looking once more at their union. With no reflection, this was the one best way for them both to see it. Angel seemed to need as much as she did this visual confirmation of their improbable piece of luck.

Bearing down, Jemima gasped, "I don't dislike your rooms."

"But you don't really feel at home. Like they're yours."

He passed his thumb up and down her stiff clit, slowly, as if feeling the texture of some finely made object. She clenched, panting, straining into that touch. "Do that ... that ... there ... oh God ... !" She wanted to say something else about the rooms, but she was coming, every thought draining out into her body's jerking. Purring encouragement in her ear, Angel rocked her faster, thrusting up so the chair back struck the wall. Bang bang bang bang and then a sharp jarring clatter as the front legs crashed back to the floor.

Vibrating, Jemima clung to him, face buried in his neck, taking deep snuffing breaths of his hair gel and the faint aroma of his body. She'd never understood why cleanly vampires had no smell, but then she also didn't understand how, without circulation, they could function sexually.

It wasn't something you asked your mother.

Boneless, she straddled his lap, his cock, softening, still inside her. He held her close, and she didn't want to move, even as her legs began to cramp.

"I was thinking," Angel said.

"No you weren't. You were sending me out of earth's orbit."

"Earlier. I was thinking earlier. That there's whole floors here we don't use. We could renovate. Build an apartment on the top storey. Have it any way you like. Tempered-glass windows like I've got in the car. Lots of light, views. A good kitchen, so you don't have to use the communal one down here. You could decorate it however you like. Be home."

"Home for just me?"

"It could be ... whatever you need it to be. If you need your own space ... we'd still be under the same roof. Or—"

"Ohhh. Sorry, I need to get up. Give me a little boost—oh. Where's a towel when you need one?" His trousers and the skirt of her dress were soaked. Suddenly the surroundings—Wesley's tiers of books, the dark clubby Englishness of the furnishings—embarrassed her. They should have gone upstairs.

"What do you think?" He set her on her feet.

There was a strangeness to living with Angel: he could be touchingly eager at times, touchingly thoughtful, as he was now. He could also, as the last weeks showed her, be obtuse, silent, morose, and inconsiderate, but Jemima found those episodes more reassuring than off-putting. He was a man, not a prince charming, and she was learning him.

They were learning each other. As Angel helped her claim her own sensuality, the sensations and pleasures that, from long denial, she'd schooled herself not to want, she discovered that he too had a secret naivete. For all his centuries of erotic experience, he'd never had the chance, with a woman he loved, to have her repeatedly. She sensed his anxiety, stronger some times than others, a dread that something would rip her from him, or that he might drive her off himself, by getting it wrong in some undefined way.

She wanted to allay it, but not too much. She took a wicked satisfaction, after a decade of Milo, in feeling herself mysterious, in not being taken for granted.

"Well?" he said. "Don't worry, I'll mop this up." He smiled. "Don't imagine nothing like this happened here during Wesley's tenure. This room could tell some tales." He paused, frowned. "Not, though about ... Wes and me. I meant about Wes and ... other people. You understand."

"Yes."

"So? What do you think of my idea?"

"I think it's what I'd like the most in the world."

A little girl was there. Her prattling voice sounded like Jemima, though the brown hair that fell to her shoulder blades wasn't straight, but wavy, almost curly. Still, sometimes Buffy would indulge the child by putting hot rollers in her hair on a Saturday morning, so it must be her.

Spike stayed where he was, lying on the cold bulkhead, and watched her. She sat with her back to him on the floor in the aisle formed by two hulking containers.

She said a great many things that he couldn't catch, things that didn't seem addressed to him. Again he wasn't sure, because she never turned in his direction. She seemed to be playing with something, he couldn't see what. Maybe a doll. Jemima always used to have a great deal to say to her dolls, remarks that he and Buffy found astonishing coming from a little child. They would stand outside her room listening, watching each other and repressing their laughter. Buffy's eyes would shine as she mouthed at him, Where did she pick that up? How does she think of these things?

Spike liked this new presence. She made the darkness less, and while he strained to hear what she said, he didn't have to listen to the howling wind inside him. He wished she would turn around though, so he could see her sweet little face. It was bothersome that she wouldn't. That she shielded her toy from his gaze.

He began to be afraid of her. Maybe she wasn't Jemima. Maybe she was one of his victims. He thought he remembered them all—they'd shown themselves to him during the tortuous nights here—shown him their empty faces, their wounds and bruises and spilled insides, reviewed their screams and pleadings and whimperings and moans. What if he'd forgotten her? What if this one was the worst of all? What if she wasn't turning to him because she had no face? Because he'd torn it off or stove it in, or— He struggled to remember.

After a very long time—or maybe it was only a minute, he couldn't tell anymore—it occurred to him that he might speak to her. "Girlie ... let me see you."

"It's not time for that, Papa."

Relief flooded through him; for a moment he was positively high on it. "Pudding! You here!"

"What are you doing, Papa?"

"I ... I'm in trouble."

"Oh, I know that." Her voice went sing-songy. "You're on the way to Coventry. But who sent you there? What will you do when you get there? No one ever says what happens in Coventry."

"It's nothing to do with you, sweetness."

"That's a mistake. Mistakemistakemistake!" she sang. Then: "Don't go to Coventry. Go somewhere else."

"Why won't you let me see you?"

"You'll never see me, Papa, if you don't go where you belong."

Sadness rose up all around him, like water in an artesian well. He didn't know where he belonged. Crying, he covered his face. Sometimes he felt she was still there watching him, but the oppression on his soul was so great that he couldn't lift his head, couldn't check.

In Liverpool, it was raining. Spike slunk away from the ship in the early evening darkness, passing like a shadow through old brick streets, nearly lightless, deserted of people. The city felt unreal after the atmosphere of the ship, the atmosphere of his head. He'd been there for a month, wrestling with himself, but it felt longer; he was unmoored from time. As he walked through the downpour, memories of earlier disembarkations here layered themselves over what he saw now: traversing these same streets with Angelus and the others in Victorian times, when sickly gaslights flickered at too-great intervals over expanses of grey cobblestone. In the second world war, when the black-out made it an easy feast, though the air raids terrified Drusilla as much as they thrilled her. He'd last been here in the nineties, stopping off on the journey between Prague and Sunnydale. That time, because Drusilla was ill, they'd stayed for a few days in a demon hostel: an old, unplumbed, crumbling and glamoured house in a narrow lane near the port, run by something ancient that mostly took the form of a nondescript fat Irishman in carpet slippers. Spike bent his steps there now. Imagined himself in one of the tiny rooms filled almost completely by a sagging smelly bed, the wallpaper peeled into sinister patterns. He'd lain beside Drusilla as she twitched in fitful sleep, staring at the ceiling and smoking, waiting for nightfall so he could go out and get someone who'd tempt her to feed. He'd killed so many people in that week, out of his fear and frustration for her, that it made the papers.

He thought it might be an asylum again, from the world of the living.

Finding the street, he walked more slowly, though the rain was drenching. His boots squelched, water dripped into his eyes. He didn't remember the house number, but he'd know it when he saw it, smelt it. A place of demon refuge as old as the city itself.

But he reached the end of the crooked street without finding it. Turned and traipsed back, examining each house front carefully. He was certain he was in the right place.

There was nothing here. Nothing but human habitations, most of them abandoned, some reeking of squatters, junkies.

Then he understood. It was as the proprietor had said, in his silky whisper as he led them to their room: Exclusive we are here, an' cozy. Nothing with a soul knows about this place.

Nothing with a soul. Comprehension came with a sickening fall. He couldn't go backwards. There was no retreat into the dubious comfort of that sullen subterranean milieu.

A little while later, trembling as if he was proposing to step out into the sun, Spike walked into a hotel in the city center. The desk clerk, seeing a shabby, filthy figure, streaming with water and with no sign of luggage, stared, reaching for the phone.

Spike laid a credit card and his passport on the counter. "No need to summon the beaks. Got the proper creds here. Had a bit of an accident, but I clean up all right. Just need a room."

The clerk looked suspiciously from the passport photo to Spike's face. But it was all right, as it always was. The Council kept him in very proper British passports, issuing him a new one every year, with the birth date changed. He was always William Grieves, always thirty-two years old, five foot nine and eyes of blue, native and resident of London.

Accepting it and the credit card, the clerk at once became bland and accomodating. Fifteen minutes later, having tipped the bellhop to find him a clean change of clothes, Spike was soaking in a hot tub with a glass of scotch in his hand. He was ravenously hungry—the last rat he'd brought himself to catch must've been days ago—and disoriented, as if he'd been spun around very very fast and then let go.

The bleak winter rain kept up. It allowed him to go out in the morning, to walk the traffic-clogged streets to the public library. Along the way, at a public phone kiosk, he paused to send a text to Buffy. But he didn't know what he could promise her. Certainly not a date for their reunion. He longed to see her, to speak to her, but she was so entwined with the horror of his failures that he could no more ring her than he could swallow holy water. After staring at the screen for a while, fixating abstractly on the rattle of rain on the kiosk's roof, he typed Arrived England. Unable to say more.

At the library, where the reading room was lit with yellowy grey watery light from the tall windows, Spike sat at the end of a long wooden table, and read the accounts in the London papers of the murders of George ffolkes and the Honorable Penelope Leigh-Palmers.

Buffy found no diary, no computer. It was clear that Johnny had taken his most personal possessions with him after he was turned, and that these were now lost. Thinking of the photographs of herself she'd found, Buffy decided this might be for the best. She already knew too much about her hapless son.

The things worth salvaging from his flat filled one medium-sized box, which she sent to herself in Reykjavik. In a fog of efficiency, she'd arranged for the donation or disposal of everything else, and was about to depart for Iceland herself, when Mina's watcher called. Could she come at once to South Africa?

It was only half way through the conversation, which was more like a briefing about an imminent Big Bad Situation, that Buffy understood that O'Dowd had no idea of anything that had transpired with her since the end of the mission in Nepal. She was on the verge of telling him when she realized it was altogether better for him not to know. She could go where he and Mina were, immerse herself in the battle, and not have to talk or think about how spun around she was, or accept any commiserating looks.

She was on the verge of departure when the text message came from Spike. Unable to say more. There were so many ways to parse that, that Buffy decided not to parse it at all. Spike didn't have his mobile phone, or else he wasn't using it. But he could access his messages from anywhere if he chose.

Still waiting, but not waiting around. Off to S.A. tonight. Stay in touch.

Spike had never confronted any of his own victim's survivors. The closest he'd come in that department was telling Buffy, early in their relationship, that he was sorry he'd tried to kill her, although not sorry—obviously—that he'd met her. Sometimes he'd thought of saying something to Willow about that time he came to her dorm room to bite her, but considering what she'd put him through with that so-called impotence spell, he'd thought it better to let sleeping dogs lie.

As for the other Scoobies, he'd made no explict amends to any of them either, but trust and then affection had grown up gradually, naturally. He'd demonstrated himself, and they'd come to know him.

This wouldn't be like that.

It was still raining, and now darkening towards four o'clock, as Spike drove into the tiny Yorkshire village, which was probably a pretty place in summer. Now it was grey-green and water-logged, like something fashioned out of mold. He asked for directions in the only shop, which was also the post office. The woman behind the counter blinked and shrank a little. "You're not a journalist, are you?" The way she said journalist he thought she'd be reassured if he replied, No, just a vampire. "Because they don't need any more of those, hangin' about. Anyway, all that's over now. The police never caught nought. The family wants to be private."

"I'm nothing like that. I wanted to pay a condolence call."

The postmistress eyed him for a frozen moment before she unbent with a sigh. "Well, it's not a secret. It's a listed building." She drew a crude map on an envelope. When Spike thanked her, she just stared.

He didn't expect the Leigh-Palmers to be at home, or to let him in if they were. He wasn't sure what he'd say to them. Their small Georgian house seemed to crouch in its truncated stretch of greensward like a neat grey hare. Idling before the front door, Spike gazed up at it through the rainy windowglass of the car. The windows were dark. This was idiotic. What was the point? What could he say to these people? Their daughter had been horribly murdered, they'd never know by whom or how or why, and he wasn't going to be able to offer them any comfort.

His whole reason for being here was just thoroughly selfish, anyway.

Putting the car into gear, Spike was about to back out when the door opened, and a man gestured to him. He hesitated; one touch on the gas and he could be gone. But he didn't go. He rolled down the window.

"You've come about Penelope?"

Spike started.

"They rang up from the village, bit of a warning. They're like that about here. Protective, you could say." The man gave a humorless dry chuckle. "Or, put it another way, nosy."

"Sorry to disturb you."

The man shrugged. He was tall and solid, in country clothes, mid-fifties, Spike guessed, with a full head of salt-and-pepper hair flopping half across his forehead.

"How did you know my daughter?"

"I ... I never met Penelope. The thing is—"

"Can't talk like this." The man gestured. "Why not—"

Spike hastened to cut him off. "Don't invite me in! You shouldn't—" The rain was letting up. He got out of the car, came up to the small porch. "Look, didn't mean to intrude. Just wanted to say I'm sorry for your loss."

"And you are—?"

"Name's William."

Leigh-Palmer's hand came up, and before Spike could consider, he was shaking it. The man's eyebrows rose. "My, you're chilled through. Hadn't you better come—"

"No! No ... don't want to trouble you. Just—" Spike had to look up to address the man; not only was he taller, but he had a few inches' advantage through standing up a step in the doorway.

"So you weren't acquainted with my daughter ... and you claim not to be a journalist ... so just what can I do for you?"

"Nothing. There's nothing. I wished there was something I could do for you an' your missus, but ... but ...." Spike trailed off. This was insane. He had no idea how he was going to extricate himself from this. He had an uncanny feeling that part of himself had been scooped out, so that his love for Johnny, too late to be of any use, was exposed and bleeding. At the same time his son was standing behind him, sniggering. Belittling him, and the people he'd killed both before and after.

"Mrs Leigh-Palmer is abroad. She—she lives abroad, actually. We're no longer married."

"Ah. Well then—"

"Look here. Why did you come here? Do you know something about this? Do you know who murdered my daughter, is that it?"

For a moment the man's blandness, his good-mannered reserve, slipped. In his eyes Spike saw the hell of it, the violence, the loss. How it just hung there in the man, ruining everything. He could share that, the sheer gobsmacking wrongness of one's child being dead. But for Leigh-Palmers it was worse: he had no reason, nothing he could understand about, that might let the hole start to scab over a bit. Penelope's death was an unknown that had the power to suck all of life into its maw.

He wanted to tell him everything. Explain it all to him, show his own game-face. Hand him a stake and tell him how to use it. Johnny was beyond punishment now, but couldn't he offer this man the ultimate satisfaction it was in his power to give?

"... yeah, I know. Was a friend of mine. He was a student with your daughter at the university. He ... he went mad. Hurt a lot of people, an' ended up dead himself. I couldn't get on with mourning him, knowing you were mourning too, and didn't even know who'd done it."

"A friend of yours? What was his name? Why—why would he—"

"StJohn Summers. An' I can't explain it." To you. "Something terrible happened to him, and afterwards, he wasn't himself. I'm sorry for what he did. I'm sorry his trouble brought trouble to your family."

"Good God." Leigh-Palmers had paled. Spike could feel him trembling. His hand curled around the doorjamb "But why—why would he—what was he—"

"Your daughter never mentioned him?"

"She ... she wasn't in the habit of telling me much about her acquaintance. She was a popular girl, always. Always busy. She was closer to her mother than to ...."

"I'm sorry," Spike repeated. This wasn't working. "He loved her, or thought he did. I don't think she felt the same. But there's no excuse for what he did. I wanted to apologize for him, because ... he didn't used to be evil. There was always a part of him that would've been appalled by what he did." Again Spike felt that heavy presence at his back. His son, his futility. He'd murdered Cecily Addams, who would not love him. Stolen her one irreplaceable life, murdered her children and her children's children. And here he stood, like a po-faced twat, trying to talk to someone who ought to be trampling him underfoot. "... there's no explanation. No excuse. There's nothing, it's just—I'm sorry for your daughter. I'm sorry, I'm sorry."

Leigh-Palmers stared at him, blinking.

"There's no ... no retribution you can have, but you deserved to know, her killer's not out living his life, enjoying himself somewhere. He's done, he'd gone. An' I'd better go now too. Nothing else I can say or do here, really." Without looking at the man again, Spike ducked back into the car. He still stood there in the open door; Spike could smell his rising tears and the sour outpouring of his sadness, as he rolled up the window. The dark sky spit more rain as he put the car in gear, backing out too fast, so the gravel crunched loud beneath the wheels. His own eyes flooded too; he rubbed at them with the heel of his hand.

When he'd driven for ten minutes, Spike pulled over and gave way to his sadness. Rain hit the windows in irregular splats. His hands, in the light from the dashboard, looked clammy and dead. How did they do it, the human beings, how did they suffer such rape and degradation and yet go on? After a minute he was aware of a presence in the back seat. It wasn't Johnny. It was smaller, much smaller, and just entirely different. It was quiet and still and patient. He felt that he might see it, if he turned quickly, or even if he looked into the rearview mirror. But he didn't look.

As his sobs slowed, a warm breath tickled the hair at the base of his skull. He pictured the child that visited him on the ship, but this time as he thought of her, there was no fear.

For the first time since leaving LA, he didn't feel alone.

He whispered, "You're a good girl."

"I may be." Her giggle, her breath on his neck, were impossibly sweet. Then they were gone, but the good they'd done him remained. He drove on.

By time Buffy got to Johannesburg, Mina was dead. O'Dowd was playing his cards close to his vest, which was fine with her. They drove in silence and scorching heat for almost a day out to the bush. It took three more to defeat the demon king and his hordes—fortunately, the hordes fell to dust when he did.

That night they both got drunk on the palm wine that was the only thing available in the tiny local settlement. Now that it was all over, O'Dowd's facade began to crack. Mina was the second slayer he'd lost in five years. Why, he wanted to know, must it be like this? Buffy had lasted thirty-five years as a slayer, whereas Mina—Mina—

Mina was eighteen years old.

"You know I'm an anomaly," Buffy said, wiping the sweat from her upper lip for the hundredth time since they sat down together. "You can't base your expectations on me." Huge insects whirred and battered themselves against the netting that shielded them, desperate to get to the thirty-watt glow of the portable lamp. "Anyway, I've been dead twice." She suggested it might be time he take a break from the field. O'Dowd, already too wasted to stand up, nodded.

Buffy escorted him back to London. He never did sober up. She kept her own griefs to herself. What would be the point in telling him about Johnny? O'Dowd had his own problems.

She found another email from Spike.

Dear Buffy:

Do you think the boy was always evil? We sling that word around every day like it means almost nothing, when really we should keep it for the lowest of the low, should utter it only in whispers. Evil. Can't stop thinking about what he did after his soul came back. Can't help comparing that to the place I find myself. And not saying this to be aggrandizing, but I can barely swat at flies at the moment, let alone imagine killing anyone else with a soul. Why'd he do it? How could he? Those poor buggers in the mall. Sure, Dru egged him on, but that's nothing. He didn't have to go to Dru. I could understand when he tried to off himself, that makes sense, the way the memories oppress ... but how he could attack his auntie Tara, who was never anything but his friend. How could he bear the pain of that? Did he think more death would erase the earlier ones?

What does it mean, a soul, if not to impose a conscience, and a check? That's how it was with Angel. 'Course, every human killer's all souled up from birth. I can't figure it, what went wrong with our boy. Was he going to be a murderer whether Dru got to him or not? I can't think that. He was a good boy. He had his troubles, and he could be bloody minded and stupid and obnoxious, but he was only twenty.

My soul is so heavy in me, I can't imagine it wasn't for him too. It's not the same, what I was before and what I am now. It's doing my head in, Buffy. I can't even describe it to you. It's like, everything I did to my victims, is now being done to me. Except that's crap, because no matter how much I'm suffering, I'm still walking and talking and quaffing beer, and it's that feels wrong. Yet at the same time, I know I've got to do it. I can't check out on all this.

I'm confused.

Is Jemmie with you? Kiss her for me. I miss her. But when I think of her too much, and of you, it hurts me, like I've got hold of some consecrated thing that's meant to burn me.

Oh love, I know this is none of what you want to hear. Try not to be too angry at me. Or—bloody hell, who'm I to tell you what to feel? Please understand, I know it's bad, me being away from you now. But I know it would be worse still if I didn't stay away while I'm in this state. Be patient with me if you can.

Your

Spike

She read this in her office at the Council headquarters—a room she seldom visited, but which was set aside for her nonetheless. The first paragraph, about Johnny, overwhelmed her, asking as it did questions she didn't want to dwell on. Spike was clearly trying to hang on to a son whose memory he could love. Whereas Buffy found herself, as the days slipped by, mourning not Johnny as he was but the boy she'd imagined him, for twenty years, to be. This distinction made her heart seize up with remorse. She shouldn't do that—she shouldn't let anything about him, however awkward or horrifying, deflect her maternal love. But it did, and that, more than anything, disturbed her days and roiled her sleep. She hated her own fiery judgement.

She answered the email.

Sweetheart,

I don't know what to say about Johnny, I think about him constantly, like you, and there's no peace there. It tortures me too. Don't imagine that it doesn't. And the pain you're in now, it doesn't bring me any satisfaction either. Not that I think you believe it does, but ... Spike, you've been a good man for a long time, atoning for a long time, and this doesn't change it. Getting your soul back doesn't make your past crimes worse, nor does it negate the good actions you've taken since, however it seems to you. Believe me. I love you and I need you. As the slayer and just as Buffy. You're my best friend.

Mina was killed in South Africa late last week. I'm in London waiting for the new slayer to be brought in. Still trying to get back to Reyk but it looks like it won't be for a few more days.

If you need me, call me and I'll come at once to wherever you are. I miss you so much. I hope you're getting enough blood.

All my love,

Buffy

P.S. Jemmie isn't with me, she's stayed on in LA, but of course I gave her your message.

In York, it went on raining. Afternoons, Spike got shit-faced at the pub near his hotel. Every night he went out prowling for vampires and demons, more interested in the fight—the more knock-down-drag-out the better—than in the kill. But his kill rate the first few nights was enough to get the word out. Some things fled the city. Others stepped up quite brazenly to the challenge.

Each hard fight for his life was crowned with that crazy vivid lusty feeling of triumph, sheer joy in existence, strength, cunning. In being Spike.

Each battle in a smelly back alley was another incremental battle with himself. I'm bloody well here an' here's where I don't hang my head.

That largeness didn't last. He crawled into the narrow bed each morning in the tatty damp little hole of a hotel with an ache on his heart, in his head. Dawn was his lowest time. The haunters were at their strongest then; they jeered him. You're just a killer. It's you killed the boy. And through him, everyone he killed, is on your head.

His dreams were convoluted and ugly. He couldn't remember them when he awoke, except for the overwhelming sensation of his mouth and throat being full of clotted blood.

One morning, springing awake before noon from a nightmare that made him cry out, the little girl was there. She was kneeling up on the chair to look out the window. The shade was still drawn; she'd thrust her head and one shoulder behind it, so pale wintery sunshine filled the far corner of the room. From where he lay, Spike saw only her body, and some of her brown curling elf-locks.

Whatever she was, she wasn't a vampire. The sun was full in her face. She was singing under her breath, the kind of tuneless song children make up as they go along. Spike listened absently, thinking of his daughter. He'd never been happier in all his living or undead life than during those years of her early childhood, when, for her, he was a different person than he'd ever been for anyone else. She'd known nothing about him but what he was in her present-tense. With Jemima there was nothing at all to live down. He delighted her nearly as much as she delighted him, and he'd found whole new superhighways of love in his makeup, for her.

Would he have fallen back into his old ways, without that child? The idea had never occurred to him. After all, it was Buffy he'd remade himself for, Buffy who was his most shining star.

But Jemima gave him what Buffy couldn't: innocence. Hers, and therefore, his own.

All illusion, falsehood, stupid stupid self-deception. Spike groaned.

The shape of the light shifted, expanded, and then narrowed fast into one intense pencil on the faded wallpaper as the girl moved away from the window glass, and the shade fell back in place. Spike was dazzled, and couldn't see her face, though she was looking right at him. He blinked, squinching his eyes, and then she was gone.

The day was so bright he couldn't, for the first time since arriving there, leave the hotel. He stayed in bed all afternoon, dozing and thinking of his daughter and his wife and what it all meant that he had been allowed to have these connections when he was dead and damned. The pencil of light moved and dimmed and died. When he got up to dress, Spike found that the dust on the dresser was disturbed. Some small finger had traced words in it. You know you must do it, so you'd better go now.

Just what I was thinkin', girlie. Just that.

While Rita wrestled with the big umbrella, Jemima, shading her eyes with a hand, glanced around. It was still early, so there were plenty of empty stretches between the little encampments. Some young men were surfing, others stood around holding their boards, chatting near the edge of the water, watching their companions ride in.

She hadn't been to the beach—in the sense of showing up in a bathing suit, with a cooler and a book and a blanket—for years now. She'd spent her twenties living like a middle-aged matron stuck in beleagured post-war Britain, where it rained all the time and there was a ration on sugar. At least, it seemed that way now, looking back on it, stale and drab.

"I'm pasty," she said. "Everyone here is all tawny and toned, and I'm ..."

"Don't make me compliment you on your complexion. Your oh-so-lovely-and-enviable English rose thing."

"No, I'm pale, and— I'm not English."

"You're half English," Rita said, still struggling with the umbrella in the stiff breeze. "The hottie half, too."

Jemima was used to ignoring other people's lustful remarks about Papa. "I want to be what I am. American. A girl of the golden west. But I'm not golden."

"Don't be golden. Really. Are you wearing enough sunscreen?"

"I think so."

"I'll do your back again. Stay under the umbrella until you go for a swim."

Rita had shown great friendship for her, and Jemima liked her too. But she wasn't quite sure yet whether Rita's attention was entirely genuine, or if it was about pleasing her boss. Or even if it was about following some directive of her boss's—Angel might, for instance, have put her up to suggesting this Sunday outing, perhaps because he was afraid she was becoming too nocturnal, too tied to his side, and the dark rooms of the Hyperion. She couldn't ask Rita about this, it would be insulting.

She wanted a friend. She was hard up for them. Those from her married life were gone with Milo—they'd mostly been his to begin with. She'd lost track of her old high school cohort—twelve years out made them ancient history. And she hadn't gone to college.

The umbrella finally fixed, they stretched out beneath it and opened cans of Diet Coke.

"You look worried," Rita said.

"I'm fine. I was just thinking."

"I really don't think Angel minds. I mean ... he must, on some level. Miss the sunlight, the day. But I don't think he dwells on it. He wouldn't want you to be here thinking about how he can't be here."

"Oh, I wasn't!" Jemima smiled. "I'm used to it. My father, don't forget ...."

"How could I forget?" Rita said, smiling slyly.

"We used to take family vacations at this wonderful beach in Mexico," Jemima said. "The moment the sun dipped below the horizon, Papa would bolt out of the house and run into the sea—he'd be this streak of white in the twilight, coursing across the sand." Even as she spoke about Spike, Jemima squinted at the surfer boys in their colorful jams, tanned and blonded by the sun. Johnny had done that one summer, after high school graduation. Spent two months doing nothing but surfing, baking himself with sun and hash. He'd never gotten very good at the actual surfing, but that didn't seem to be what he was after anyway. It was more, she thought, about taking a turn as something he wasn't: a carefree jock who never touched a book, never had a dark thought. By halfway through the summer, when she'd gone to visit him for a week, he'd been like these young men: brown as a nut, beautiful and vapid, with a thousand yard stare and a detached smile.

He'd always been strange, hadn't he? How could she not have realized that? There was very little she didn't know about him—he'd been far more candid with her all his life than he ever was with Papa or Mamma. Yet she'd taken each incident—even the overdose—as an incident, a one-off in an otherwise usual adolescence. And maybe it was. Certainly if he was still alive, she wouldn't be thinking this now.

She couldn't think about him without seeing him on fire. That mental image, inescapable, ambushed her multiple times a day.

In her dreams, it was often Spike whom she set on fire. Or Angel. She'd scream and scream as they burned, until she woke up, to find she hadn't been screaming at all, that her hand was half-stuffed into her mouth. And Angel would look at her with such tenderness, as if he knew all about it, and draw her into his arms.

"My brother liked the beach too." She needed to practice referring to him in conversation, even though every time she thought of him her mind was flooded with conflicting emotions: sadness and anger and worst of all, the misgiving that she'd done the wrong thing. That she shouldn't have killed him, because that meant giving up on him. Why had she given up on him? Yes, he'd been in the act of biting her; the sense-memory of that, the wrongness of how he pressed up against her, of his lips on her skin before the fangs bit down, made her ripple with disgust. But she could've done something different. She had no regret for burning up Drusilla, but she needn't have pushed Johnny against her so he'd catch too. She could have waited, to see if the shock of seeing Drusilla on fire might've snapped him out of ....

"What?" Rita said.

"Huh? What? What what?"

"I could knit a big scarf with all the wool you're gathering."

"I know. Sorry."

Rita hesitated. " ... no, it's cool. I don't know if you realize this ... I lost my whole family to vampires. That's why I'm with Angel. He gave me a home at the Hyperion, so I didn't have to fall into the clutches of social services."

"My God. How old were you?"

"At the time, almost seventeen. Almost old enough to be on my own. And I just really didn't want to be anyone's troubled foster child with the too-much eyeliner and the gang affiliation and the home-made tattoos and the waking up in the night with the shakes and the sticking myself with razor blades, and, you know."

"I guess I don't. That's terrible. About your family."

"Yeah, it was. We'd just moved to LA from out in rural New Mexico, my folks and me and my brothers and sisters. There were a lot of us, we were broke. I guess we were succulent and marginal—not likely to be missed, y'know—perfect vamp fodder."

"My God."

"They prey on the low-end sleazy motels, you know. Where people stay who are too poor to get together the money for a monthly rental. It's easy for the vamps, there, it's a public accomodation, so there's nothing to keep them out."

"Oh Rita ... this is ...."

"I'm not saying it so you can feel sorry for me. It was ten years ago, I'm ... not over it, but it was ten years ago. I'm just saying, so you'll know, that I understand. That you've got a lot of thoughts about what happened, and that you can feel happy and sad at the same time."

" ... yes. That's what I am."

"I see that." She touched Jemima's hand. "Angel didn't just take me in after he eliminated that vamp crew. He paid for me to go to college, up in Berkeley. No strings. I could've just gone off afterwards, blended back in with the know-nothings, but I wanted to come back, to work with him. He's my family now, and I can't imagine any work more important than what he does. What we all do. And it's a life I like."

"Thanks. For telling me."

"I'm glad it's you who got the visions."

"... so am I. Only I thought ... when my brother got them, I thought it had to mean that he'd be all right. It had to. And then ... it didn't."

"There are things everywhere that'll break your heart. Just break it."

Angel hadn't put her up to this, nor had Rita taken her on as some kind of project, out of ambition or charity. Jemima was sure of that now. Unable to look at Rita, she focused again on the surfers. Had their hearts been broken yet?

"Fortunately, you can live a big big life, even with a broken heart."

"I'm getting that." Jemima hoped her father would get it too, and come back to them.

The house looked like the worst sort of Victorian vicarage: charmless, crepuscular, its deep maroon bricks somehow punitive. Harsh conical trees grew up to block all the windows. The wintery garden was fiercely neat in an unloved way. It was the only detached house on the street of Edwardian villas.

Before he could lose his resolve, Spike pulled the bell. The trill was high and unpleasant. After a few moments a light went on behind the door, spilling out through the pebbled glass of the fanlight. A finger appeared, tugging for a moment at the taut lace curtain on the narrow window beside the door.

Then a voice spoke through the heavy wood. "You cannot imagine I'm going to ask you in."

"No. But I'd like to talk to you." He hadn't seen Prima Whidders in years, and their face time was never much, but he so loathed her that his fists were already clenched. He forced his hands open. "If you would."

"I suppose she sent you. That would be her temerity. You're wanting the key to my brother's house, to take away the things she fancies are hers. You shan't have it. All that is in the hands of the solicitors. And as she didn't even have the decency to come to her husband's funeral—"

"Not here about Jemima."

Silence. Then the scraping of a chain, and the door opened a couple of inches. Enough to show him all he wanted or needed to see of her set and righteous face.

"How dare you come here? How dare you?"

How indeed? How had he imagined he could humble himself before this Miss Murdstone? That's what they were, Milo and his chalky older sister, a pair of Murdstones who'd tried to take Jemima over and break her into bits. Just because she was the daughter of the renegade slayer and the vampire who'd dragged the Council, kicking and screaming, into the twenty-first century.

The Whidders faction hated him long before that. The Chinese slayer Wu Xia's watcher was a Whidders.

"I've come to ... this is ... for condolences."

Her eyes opened wide at that. "I do not understand you." As if his words weren't plain English. As if he was something too far beneath her condescension to bother making inferences about.

Spike was self-conscious, standing here in the early evening gloom by a doorway he could not pass through. Cars went by, a few people on foot trudging home from the bus stop. The night was cold and clear, just as it was a couple of months back in London, when he'd last seen Milo Whidders splayed on the ground. When he'd decided he wasn't worth saving if it meant tangling with the authorities.

He'd gotten them all away, but he knew better than to think the Whidders faction of the Council remained unaware of the confluence of events—Milo Whidders the victim of a vampire attack at just the same time that the slayer's son was turned. The Council had eyes and ears everywhere. If they didn't know before he took Johnny out of London, their agent in Los Angeles, who watched the comings and goings at the Hyperion, would've reported their arrival.

They knew it, and like so many things they knew, they'd hoard the information, keeping schtum until the time came when they could derive advantage from it. These old Council families liked to serve things cold.

None of that changed the fact, however, that this appalling bitch loved her brother if she loved anything on earth. She was entitled to her indignation. She was entitled to every hateful thought she had about him, about his son. Inside him, Spike's soul howled, cramping and writhing around the necessity of this terrible meeting. "Please," he said. "I don't want to come into your house, or harm you in any way."

"You have harmed me."

"Yes. That's what I want to talk about. Is there somewhere we could speak for a few minutes? Down the local, perhaps, or—

Her eyes, which had always had a slight bulge, seem fixed as she stared at him, the whites strangely reflective. The seconds crawled by. She might have been stone.

Then her gaze shifted; she glanced past him, at the houses across the street, as if she believed they were being watched. Maybe they were.

"Very well, vampire. There is a church in the high street, to the left and three streets up. I will come there in an hour, and hear what you have to say."

"In an hour."

"I will not, of course, come alone."

Bugger this. Well, had he really expected she'd consent to sit with him in a pub cozy, let him buy her a sherry and nod along as he poured out his soul?

Of course bloody not. He stepped back, dropped his gaze. "Thank you."

After keeping him waiting in the apse of the dank ugly Victorian Gothic Revival church for longer than an hour, Prima Whidders arrived behind two large black-coated operative types wielding hand-held crossbows.

"Those aren't going to be necessary."

"I don't think any of us are interested in what you think is necessary, vampire."

Spike shrugged, pretending to a Big Badness he didn't feel. They'd backed him up nearly to the altar steps. Miss Whidders stood behind her bodyguards, arms folded, hands hidden up the sleeves of her large black coat. In it she looked diminished, yet her righteous fury lent her strengh. Spike was pretty sure she was holding a stake.

"What then do you want?"

"To assuage my conscience."

Her expression could've curdled milk. "You have no conscience."

"You don't know what I bloody have, woman!"

The archers each advanced a step. Spike forced himself to hold steady. Mustn't lose his temper. He'd come here because the conscience Prima Whidders didn't believe in demanded it of him. He could go nowhere else, do nothing else, but this. She was his foe, and he'd wronged her, and now he must be in her power.

This was a lonely place, with the great cross hung up behind him, and these three stark faces turned in judgement before. The last time he'd felt at once so menaced and so penitent was when he was a little boy at Harrow, waiting to be caned. In those days he'd been punished for nothing. Since then, he'd done much and was only now coming to his punishment.

In a quiet, calm voice, Spike began again. "I came to tell you. StJohn is no more. He's dust. You'll think that's as it should be. Maybe it'll make what you have to bear a little less hard."

"You could not possibly know—"

Not the time to protest that he did know, that his son was precious to him as Milo was precious to her. She probably didn't believe it and she certainly didn't care. "I also want you to know that before he was destroyed, StJohn suffered. His soul was returned to him, and he did suffer. But not ... not, I suppose, in the right way. Not in any useful way."

"I don't know what you're talking about." Again that haughty contempt that made him wince. Spike shrank from her scrutiny as he shrank from the cross at his back.

"My soul was also restored."

One of the bodyguards gasped at this, and almost dropped his crossbow. Miss Whidders' eyes blazed up, full of pain and loss, as if by imparting this news he'd taken yet something else away from her.

"I stand responsible for what StJohn did. He attacked your brother. And I stand for my own decisions as well. I left him for dead rather than risk losing my son." Spike couldn't bear to look at her; he glanced up into the shadowed vaulting of the church ceiling, his eye tripping along the supports of the clerestory, as if some audience should be there, looking down at this scene as at a play. All the victims whose blood he'd consumed and spilled and wasted. But there was no one there. He was abandoned to himself. He closed his eyes, inhaled the air he needed to go on speaking. He hadn't been sure what he would say, until now. "So ... I've come to you. To offer myself. I put myself in your hands."

He looked again at Prima Whidders. She hadn't moved. Still stood in that rather Oriental posture, hands up the opposite sleeves. Her gaze burned him, but he forced himself to hold it.

"Your soul was restored." Her mouth twisted with disgust as she spoke.

Spike nodded.

"You are despicable. Why? Was it a curse like the other one had?"

"Might've been more on the order of a practical joke. I don't know."

"And now—what? You come to me, intrude upon me, and you expect—where is the Summers woman?"

The abrupt question threw him. "She's—not sure at the moment. She doesn't know I'm here."

"Do you not suit her ... her queer appetites ... anymore, now you have a soul? If indeed it's really true, and not some abominable lie?"

"Didn't come here to talk about Buffy. Or about me. Except inasmuch as I offer you whatever satisfaction you deem just. Whatever ... that may be."

She shouldered past the two men, sauntered right up and thwapped him hard in the sternum with the heel of her hand. Spike rocked back a little. "Why is it that vampires so love to act the leading part in absurdist dramas?"

"Uh ... was you picked this venue. I suggested the pub."

She grimaced, her mouth and eyes going blocky. Venom poured from her into the hushed grey atmosphere. Perhaps now she would stake him. The blow to the chest, right over his heart—had she done it to gauge her strength, her angle? He wouldn't stop her.

"How dare you come here and disturb my mourning with your idiotic speeches? There isn't any possible satisfaction I and my family could have from you. I never want to see you again. You are loathsome."

She turned abruptly on her heel. The two men glanced at her retreating back, but stayed where they were, keeping him pinned.

When she'd reached the last pew, Miss Widders swayed, and grabbed its back. For a moment she just stood there, hanging on, her head bowed.

When she spoke, her voice was barely above a husky whisper. It was the acoustics of the sanctuary more than her own volume that made her audible. "Go back to the slayer and do—do—do what you have always done to help her in the work. What else is there but the mission? We are all warriors, but she is the foremost. You know it as well as I, you disgusting beast." She pushed off of the pew back, with a gesture as if it stung her. "You have saved more than you ever hurt. I think that's what is the most impossible for me to forgive."

The great door at the back of the church opened; a blast of moist cold air reached Spike's face as she went out. At the same time, the two men, without a word to him or each other, downed their weapons and followed her.

He was alone. His knees giving way, he sat down hard on the altar step, his head in his hands.

He wasn't sure how long he sat there, or what he thought of. Consciousness might have fled altogether. Footsteps and a human smell alerted him to look up. A middle-aged woman in a clerical collar stood nearby. "Are you all right, sir?"

"What?"

"Only it's time for me to lock up. But if you're in some distress—I can help."

Spike sprang up. "No, I'm off."

She seemed relieved, and didn't press, following him at a distance as he made his way up the aisle to the exit.

It was still early evening, but the high street was mostly shut, nothing lit up but a newsagent across the way, and the pub a little farther on. Spike headed towards it. As he passed the shop, its bright fluorescents making an interval of near daylight, he glanced in. The man behind the counter seemed unaware of the unaccompanied little girl examining the adjacent candy display. She wore a coat and woolly cap, her light brown hair curling and twisting down her back. She touched the bright wrappers lightly, longingly, taking small shuffling steps to the side as she systematically examined the whole gaudy array.

Spike paused, thrusting a hand into his pocket to close around the heavy pound coins there. He wanted to fill those small hands with Wispas and Flakes and Galaxys, and see the child's face at last, see her dazzled pleasure in all those treats.

But he knew she wasn't real. He could stand there and watch as long as he liked, and she wouldn't turn around to look right at him.

The man behind the counter did though, raising an eyebrow. Spike made a ta, mate gesture with his hand, and walked on. Outside the pub was a phone kiosk. He sent a text.

How soon can you come home to Reyk? Want you there. Leaving tonight.

O'Dowd was finished. He'd been a wonderful watcher to the last two slayers, although he'd dispute that, and, since the return to London, was disputing it quite vividly with bottle after bottle of single malt. He needed counseling and a long long rest. For the foreseeable future at least, he was done with field-work. Buffy didn't get an argument on that score from the Board of Directors at Council HQ. There were various factions though, each with their favorite candidate to bring forward to take charge of the new slayer, Luz, a Quichua Indian who'd never, in her fourteen years, left her tiny home village high in the Andes. Buffy wanted to make sure an adequate team was in place before they brought her to London, although she wasn't interested in meeting the raw recruit herself—not until she'd had some time to adjust, anyway. Over the years she'd learned she wasn't great with the newbie-wrangling skills. She tended to frighten them, or else rouse such competitive feelings in the newly called girl that she'd do things too rashly and get hurt.

Mostly now, Buffy was in a hurry to get away. She'd helped O'Dowd, while all the time thinking of home, the clean-lined rooms of the Reykjavik house, the greenish-grey mist that hung around it in the dark mornings, the fresh cold air. There would be more daylight than a month ago, but the nights still began early. It was there she imagined she could get her head clear. She would make the house ready, make it all warm and bright and comfortable, and herself too. This preparation, she felt, would somehow hasten Spike's return. In their big bed at the top of the house, beneath the skylight that let them watch the stars as they lay together, they would talk, they would become lovers again, and they would heal one another. Thinking of all this, how she wanted it to be, how the clean rational atmosphere of Iceland would surely let this happen, Buffy trembled with longing and hope. Whatever Spike was suffering, whatever he was doing on his mysterious quest, her return to their winter home would have an effect on him. Their house would be his beacon, she would pull him towards her.

Then she got the text. It arrived in the middle of a tense meeting of the Council board, that looked like going on well into the night. There was a split over whether to leave Luz in situ or transport her to England. Much depended on who was ultimately to be named as the next Watcher-in-Charge of the junior slayer.

How soon can you come? The words lit her up inside. Tears sprang to her eyes. Buffy rose, wanting to slip out, but the others, oblivious to all but the matter at hand, went on talking to her, two factions each trying to enlist her agreement. She tried to interrupt a couple of times, but short of bellowing, she wasn't getting through. It was too late now, anyway, to start. She would fly out in the morning. But she was distressed at the thought of Spike coming there first. Nothing would be ready for him. No fresh blood on hand, no aromas of cooking, their bed still dressed in stale sheets, the rooms cold and unaired. He'd walk straight back into the undispelled atmosphere of their conflict over Saleem. They'd left in a hurry to come to London, as if London would make everything different. It had: it made it worse.

Still sitting at the big conference table, she tried to reach him. He'd abandoned his mobile when he left Los Angeles. She left a message for him on it, whispering as Lydia Chalmer's precise tones rang out from the head of the table. When she called the house itself, there was no answer before the voicemail kicked in. Damn it! This wasn't how she wanted—needed—it to be.

Lydia Chalmers was saying, calmly, "... not the first time we have had to take a girl from an alien culture and mold her into an effective slayer. We must remember that we cannot control all the circumstances. We don't know how the slayers are chosen—many great minds on the Council have dashed their brains on the rocks trying to learn that, so they could control it—but it is something belonging to the Powers. We have to do our best with what we are given. And we have to remember that it is our job to serve the slayer—who in her turn is a servant of the Powers—and not the other way around."

Okay, okay, Buffy thought, subsiding into the sleek leather chair, slipping the mobile back in her pocket. Que sera, we're stuck with.

The plane landed just as it was getting light, at nearly ten in the morning. In the taxi, traversing the neat toy-like city, Buffy was suffused with tension and tenderness. In the midst of her fear she kept thinking that when he was in her arms, it would all be good. But she was apprehensive. The sunlight struck fire off the water of the bay; her eyes stung as she blinked back tears. She tried to imagine what he was doing now. Though they only lived here in winter, when the hours of daylight were short, the house was almost all windows, made of tempered glass. Spike had certain spots where he liked to take the sun. A chaise in the main room where he'd sack out with a book, sometimes staying there for the whole duration of the sun's stay above the horizon, four or five hours. Other times he'd stretch out naked in the bedroom, not in bed but on the rug by the huge stone fireplace, where the long rays slanted in through the skylight and the windows that faced both east and west, with views of the water and lava fields and white-capped mountains. He'd doze like a cat in the warmth of the sun and a blazing coal fire. The intense light showed up how pale and fine he was, dying his white skin as it progressed into all the colors of the sky itself: purple, blue, pink, orange, red.

But he wouldn't be doing that, she reminded herself. Almost certainly not. He might still be full of trouble and doubt, he might be ill with it. The text he'd sent could be read different ways. How Soon ...? Want you there. What did he want her there for? Maybe it wouldn't be what she hoped. Maybe he wanted her there so he could tell her it was impossible after all for them to continue together. Maybe he wanted her there but wasn't there himself. She might find someone else waiting for her at the house, some messenger with terrible news to be broken in person.

The taxi sped by the last of the built-up part of the city. On this more exposed stretch of road, the harsh treeless beauty of the landscape opened out on both sides, made her feel small, less than herself, yet at the same time pleasantly awed. She would never have come to Iceland, certainly not to live, if not for Spike. They were almost there now. Buffy gripped her own knees so tightly they ached.

Paying off the driver with half an eye, she looked at the house. There was a fresh trail broken in the snow up the front walk. The light glaring off the snow and the window glass was intense; she couldn't see inside the house, and when she blinked, pink and orange spots blinded her. It was so cold that her nose and mouth froze up at once, just in the time it took her to hop, putting her feet in the holes already there, to the door.

Inside, eyes still dazzled, she shut the door, dropped her bag. "Spike?" Her vision cleared. He was there, at the other end of the foyer, framed in the tall square arch leading into the main room.

She took him in, his form outlined in light, preternaturally still. He seemed to just perceptably float above the blond floorboards.

Buffy shrugged out of her coat, letting it drop to the floor, and rushed to him. They caught each other in the doorway, spinning partway into the high bright room beyond. He swooped her up so her feet only skimmed the floor; it was almost dancing.

Buffy squeezed him hard. It was all right. It was. She lifted her head from his shoulder, ready to kiss him, but Spike was already letting her go. He stepped back. His face, sepulchre-white, bore that expression she'd seen over and over on vampires she'd staked, right before they exploded into dust—incredulous shock, a wild wish to reel back time. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.

"Spike? Spike, what is it?"

"You ... my God. You are."

"I are what?"

He moved further from her, and it was still like a dance—or a duel, because he went sideways, slow and serpentine, turned so only the narrowest part of him faced her, no opening. His eyes burned with pain and suspicion.

"What? Stop this, you're scaring me." She approached; he feinted. He was at the window now, bathed in sunlight from top to toe.

He frowned, his head tilting. "No. No. I was sure you wouldn't do that to us again. You wouldn't, Slayer. Would you? An' yet here you are, with—"

This was surreal—what he was saying, how he looked at her. She could've collapsed at his feet, wailing. Was she imagining this? Hallucinating? "With WHAT?"

This made no sense, it was a dream in which all good order was extinguished. Yet there was no mistaking this, her further betrayal. There she stood with a microscopic lie burgeoning inside her.

There she stood, looking as though he'd stabbed her.

"Buffy, you must know you're pregnant."

Her face broke open. The eyes first, going wide, threatening to overflow their bounds. The mouth widening, wobbling. She went white, then green, and a laugh burst from her. A high hysterical laugh next door to a cry of despair. "Preg—! No no no no no no no—! It isn't true!"

"You are."

Spike! We're supposed to be done tormenting each other! Don't DO this!"

He didn't need to be touching her to smell it, everything about her was altered to his senses. He rummaged through every possible excuse or reason she might throw at him. Who, when, how, where, why?

She couldn't have given herself to some other man in the weeks since he'd left her in LA, then returned here to him. Two months ago, when he was sore and righteous, he'd been ready to believe anything of her, anything bad and weak and vengeful. But not anymore. He'd seen the depth of her contrition before he parted from her in California.

So, unable to believe in her wickedness, or disbelieve the evidence of his senses, he hung in limbo, staring into her stare.

She sprang into motion, waving her arms. "Oh my God. Oh my God. I think I know what this is! I know what happened!" She came to him, pressed her hand to his chest where the shriveled heart lay still. "I remember ... when we were in bed together, after the Conduit ... right before you were sick, I felt this ... this incredible heat. And, a vibration, like, like a hard thready pulse. I thought it was me, reacting to you, the way you seized up on me. And then you were up and retching in the bathroom, I was distracted and forgot it." Her eyes bore into him, large and full of hope. "There was a smell too. A heavy musky hot stink—that wasn't me. Do you remember? Do you know what I'm talking about?"

He'd nearly blocked it since, that shaming failure with her in the motel room. It flooded back now, the physical sensations like nothing he'd ever experienced as a vampire, of his body beseiged, out of control. "Yeah ... like I was burning up. Stirred up inside."

"Spike. I think you were alive." She had tears in her eyes, her face wreathed at the same time in the most beautiful smile he'd ever seen.

"Christ. Was I?" He'd been sure the sickness arose from his own self-loathing, from his soul's revulsion at indulging himself with her. Yet now, as he remembered it, the hot, roiling intensity he'd felt before his whole system revolted ... maybe that's what it was like. His dead body shuddering to life.

"For a few moments, yes, I think so. And it made you sick, but it also— it also—" She stopped, her brightness collapsing. She pressed her hands to her flat belly. "Shit. Am I really? Shit."

"How could you not know?" He counted back quickly—it was more than six weeks that he'd been traveling.

"I'm always late when I'm over-stressed. And, lately, with everything ... I didn't even notice I missed my period."

"But haven't you been ... you've felt all right?"

"Oh, swell!" Again the frown modulated, into something inward-feeling, pensive. "Actually ... yeah. I've felt fine. I've been sleeping, and slaying, and ... mourning and crying and worrying. But ... no ... no up-chucky in the morning." She shook her head. "That is not how it goes for me."

"Yeah, well, me knocking you up personally isn't how it goes for me." Despite this perplexing new problem, his mood rose like a spark on an updraft.

"The Conduit did this." Buffy struck her stomach with a fist. "Boy, that thing sure had a field day with us!"

This was all moving so quickly, revelation after revelation, and no chance to think. She was like a complex weather system, changing every few seconds. He grabbed her hand before she could strike herself again. "What are you doing? Pet, don't hurt yourself."

"What do the Powers think we are? Puppets? Little marionettes they can dance around, la la la? What do they think I am? Now I'm a vessel for mystical babies?"

"Whoa, whoa whoa. Let's not—"

He reached for her, but she pulled away, beginning instead to pace, grim-faced.

"Why couldn't you leave well enough alone? Why'd you go ask those tricksters for anything?"

"Boy didn't deserve such a grubby snuffing out."

"Deserve? Spike—he made his choices. I don't see that he was blindsided anywhere along the line."

"Guess we differ there. Wanted him to have another chance. He could've been a good man if he just—"

"He was finished, Spike. That ... presence in there, that wasn't really our Johnny."

"Yeah, well. Guess not." He could barely look at her. That desparate second trip to The Conduit shamed him, yet he still couldn't imagine not going.

"Definitely not." She stared into his face as if into a bright light, before breaking into a manic smile. "But, hey! They didn't send us away empty-handed. They gave us a consolation prize! A life for Johnny's life. Big ha ha ha." She hit her belly again. "I wonder if it'll turn out as well as those crummy second-hand souls they gave out. I don't think those worked at all."

He dropped his gaze. "... mine does."

This hauled her back from the Bitterville Heights. "Oh God. Spike, I'm sorry." Her gaze flitted desperately around the room, taking in everything but him, alighting nowhere. "You're so thin. Are you hungry? Did you call about starting up the blood delivery? I wanted to cook for us, I wanted to make the place nice for you, before you got here. I'll make you something to eat now ...." She wandered out of the room.

He collapsed onto the sofa. The sunlight that filled the high airy room seemed to pin him in place, though it had no power to more than warm him, through the special treated glass. He sat, eyes half-lidded like a cat, soaking it up, his mind drifting. He'd been asleep right before Buffy arrived, and was still oddly drowsy. Their meeting wasn't what he'd envisioned. By his own plan of events, they ought to be upstairs in bed right now, knitting themselves back together with slow silent love.

Dust motes floating silently in the sun's rays. The day was already at its zenith. It would be dark enough for him to go outside in another two hours.

From behind him to the left came a noise. A soft thwok, and something chinging. He turned slowly. In the corner formed by a blond paneled wall and another of glass, behind a large armchair set at an angle, a small splayed leg protruded, white, the knee dimpled, the calf squeezably plump. It ended in a sock and a red patent leather clog. He blinked. The thwok came again, and the hand darted out, snatching up the jacks that chinged, catching the bright ball. The low voice chanted, Onesies ... twosies ...

"No!" He was across the room vamp-fast, yanking the chair out of the way. But the nook—the sort of cozy child-sized place Jemima used to appropriate when she was little—was empty, the thin sheen of dust on the floor undisturbed.