Sometimes waiting for a vamp to rise was like watching paint dry.

Which was a stupid expression, and who sat around watching paint dry, anyway? The boredom thing though? Totally relatable. Fortunately, this particular vamp was in one of the nicest family plots in Restfield, with little winding pathways and a bench for contemplating the dearly departed. Which is where Buffy sat, contemplating other things (like the fact she was at Restfield where a certain vampire of her acquaintance happened to reside,) and sipping from her free take out cup of diet coke. One of the many benefits of working for the Doublemeat Palace. All the beverages you could drink, absolutely free. Not enough bathroom breaks really”

She uncapped her pen, and opened the spanking new spiral bound notebook she'd purchased, three for a dollar.

Tonight at work ( my other work, the one where I get paid even if it's only slightly above minimum wage) this elderly man came in Ç very dignified, dapper, but really sweet, you could tell. He was wearing an overcoat, and carrying a hat, and a cane with a silver knob on it. Jason was at the counter and he asked may I help you, and in the sweetest, politest English accent, this old guy asks for "hot tea, if you please."

Where was I? Oh yeah. Ernest Simonson Bledsoe (you should hear him say it Ç Uhnest Simunsin-Bledsuh. Of course if you were hearing him say it you wouldn't be noticing the way he says it on account of you all talk like that so never mind.) I told him I was off work tomorrow. (Yeah, they gave me Saturday off. Why? Because they had to change the schedule because somebody quit and now I have split days off this week, so won't be off again until Thursday and it sucks, but hey, all the beverages I can drink.) He's going to meet me at the Magic Box around two. I wish this stupid vampire would hurry up a rise already. I kind of have to pee.

Gosh. The Initiative sure had their fingers in a lot of pies. Just a quick look through the uncorrupted disk, and Willow found files on bio-mimetic engineering, behavior modification drugs designed for a brain chemistry that she didn't recognize at all. A cure for liver cancer being developed from harvested demon organs.

Amongst the papers in the box she found a sheaf of handwritten equations that appeared to be an attempt to map multi-dimensional pathways. She'd have to brush up on her calculus before she tackled that one, but it looked like someone was definitely trying to open portals to other dimensions.

Willow had also managed to find, readily available and online, dozens of articles and papers Maggie Walsh had written. Even now her printer was busily spitting out most of them under the table at her feet. Pretty dry, technical journal, psychology stuff. None of the documentation of the more "interesting" work that Professor Gossett said had gone missing. One paper though, written as a kind of joke, was about how human beings could travel in time using memories as vehicles, which must have been the paper he referenced in his book.

From the looks of the stuff on the uncorrupted disk, the Initiative hadn't catalogued even half of the species Giles knew off the top of his head. Of course the demons mostly had numbers to identify them, with brief descriptions and links to other reference materials. There were only two actually named, both with the Latin prefix for human. These were the hybrids: homo-anthropophilous and homo-anthropophagous. Vampires and werewolves. She had to giggle, imagining Xander's glee, and the reactions of Spike and Oz to these labels. There were also some intriguing notes citing studies done at an Institute for Paranormal Psychology during the 50's and 60's using demon infected human mind readers. She got the impression that some of these mind readers had been infected on purpose. Very Spy Who Came In From the Cold War stuff.

She'd lost the maudlin mellow from the alcohol, and her mind was now racing ahead of itself, flying on caffeine and the thrill of discovery. She scrolled up and down and sideways. Connect the dots and move through the maze, the fastest game of Tetris ever, each block a new piece of information she slotted into place. At the moment she was running a recovery program on the corrupted disk, while making notes about the properties of live blood using the margins of someone else's notes about analogous neurotransmitters in the brain of ST32b Test Subject 4.

She'd forgotten how much she loved research, working out scientific picture puzzles with only a few key pieces. And really, wasn't that why she'd got into magic in the first place? Because of how much it looked like chemistry and physics? Once she'd figured out that magic was chemistry and physics in metaphor Ç poetry with a vocabulary not only of words and ingredients, but of acts and intentions Ç she'd begun figuring out how to manipulate metaphor to achieve a specific result. And each branch of occult knowledge, like each branch of science, had its own history and culture, and each culture its own set of metaphors from which to draw. There were limitless ways to combine the metaphors, until eventually the practitioner became poetry itself; every thought, word, and gesture capable of writing something new into the world.

If she'd never gone with Amy that night, never gone to Rack (Strawberry, he'd called her! What a metaphor that was,) she'd still be—

The front door opened with a bang. "I'm home!" Dawn cried. "Is anybody else?"

Willow sighed. "In here," she called. She heard the tread of another pair of feet coming up the front steps and for a fragile moment, her heart fluttered in anxiety and desperate hope before she saw who it was. Relief and disappointment. "Spike. What are you doing here?"

"Great to see you too, Will. Give us a hug then."

"He gave me a ride home." Dawn said on her way to the kitchen.

"Oh. You could have called, you know. I would have come to get you."

"Chhyeah, no offense butÇ" Willow could practically hear the unspoken end of that sentence: Never riding in a car with you again, bee-otch. Quick. Change the subject—

"Um”so how was the movie?"

"Movie?"

"Weren't you going to a movie with Tara? There was a message on the machine. I thought that's where—"

"Oh. Oh. Yeah." Willow heard the fridge door open, and stay open while Dawn meditated on it contents. "We ended up not going. Just hung. Ate pizza. Talked and stuff."

The refrigerator door closed, and many cupboards doors were opened, rifled, and shut again. In the living room, Spike was likewise rifling Ç through the stack of magazines on the coffee table. He chose, not surprisingly, the TV Guide. "Buffy not home yet?"

"Kinda think you'd know if she was." To Dawn in the kitchen she ever so casually called out, "So, how is Tara?"

"She's good." Good? Good? Did she ask about me? Does she miss me? Is she—

"When's she gonna be back, you think?" Spike asked, oozing out of his coat and into the sofa cushions, like he was settling in for the winter.

"I don't know!" she snapped.

He angled an eyeball at her. "Look who's got her knickers in a twist? What's the matter, Red? Love life got you down? Old black magic got you in its spell?"

"Don't you have evil do somewhere ?"

"Need to talk to the Slayer."

"What about?"

From the kitchen came an anguished cry, "Who ate all the Oreos?"

"Not that it's your business, but she owes me money, for one." At Willow's expression, he added, "Bought the kid her dinner, didn't I?"

"Wait. I thought she had dinner. Pizza with Tara. Dawn! Didn't you say you had pizza with Tara?"

Dawn came back to the dining room, wide eyed, mouth full of a cookie-not-Oreo. "Oh, um, yeah, but that was like, hours ago. Like four or something." She looked at Spike, trying to send him a message in semaphore with her eyebrows. Willow crossed her arms over her chest and scowled.

"Why, you little scamp," Spike said, the very image of completely fake outrage. "You told me you hadn't eaten all day." He gave Willow a helpless shrug. "Teenagers. Hollow legs. What can you do?"

"Were you even with Tara?"

Dawn sighed her most thoroughly put upon sigh, and added an eye roll of exasperation for good measure. "Yes. Call her and ask if you don't believe me." Boldly, she went to the phone, picked it up, and held it out to Willow. "Go ahead."

"No! I mean, no. That's, that's okay." The thought of calling Tara and actually speaking to her was”too much to handle right now. But Dawn didn't need to know that. "I believe you. For now."

Dawn considered that last part for a second, then, phone in hand, blithely threw herself onto the sofa next to Spike. Spike turned on the television. Dawn handed him the bag of Chips Ahoy, and started making calls.

Though Willow didn't feel secure enough to actually speak with Tara. Or hear her voice. Or run into her on campus. Or look at her picture, or at anything, really, that remotely reminded her of Tara, she still wanted to hear about her, pluck every tiny morsel of her from Dawnie's bored teenaged lips. Which meant Spike had to leave. "Will ten cover it?" she asked, going to the sideboard for her wallet. He didn't answer. "Spike?"

"Huh?"

"Will ten dollars cover the meal?"

"Oh. Well. Had to put petrol in the tank to get her home. Not cheap you know."

"Fine." Willow said, and turned with a twenty in her hand, only to find he was right behind her. She hadn't heard him move. She really hated that about vampires.

"What's all this?" he asked, munching on a cookie, while the other hand went through the piles on the table Ç poke, shuffle, poke.

"Nothing." She gathered some papers up, shoved them into file folders. "Notes from my biology lab." Folded the screen of the laptop down in what she hoped wasn't a glaring attempt to be furtive. "Nothing you'd—"

Hey," he said, grabbing up a disk. He turned it over, then turned it again, his frown of puzzlement turning quickly into bug-eyed alarm. "Hey! What the hell are you doing with this?" His gaze swept over the stuff on the table and back to her. Something uncomfortably close to betrayal was in his eyes. Like she was somehow betraying him, or planning to, which was just silly, because he was the one who betrayed people. She was the one who—

Well, it wasn't betrayal, that's for sure!

"Oh poo!" She snatched the disk from his hand and dropped it into the tin box. "Don't be such a drama queen. Not everything is about you, OK? It's nothing. Merely a little therapeutic research. Idle hands, et cetera." She did a little Al Jolson wave and a sharp black snap cracked the air.

Spike gasped, and stumbled back, hand pressed to his chest.

"Oh god," she whispered, covering her mouth. Then a nervous mortified laugh came stuttering out. "Oopsie? Uh. Oh. Wow. Eek. Don't know my own strength. Whoo. Sorry about that."

He pulled his hand away slowly and seemed surprised there wasn't a hole where his heart should be. She could see the muscle twitching along his jaw. His eyes were a little too wide open, and he'd pressed his lips together tight. He was guarding his words and actions carefully. With a sudden guilty thrill, she realized he was afraid of her.

"What's going on? What are you guys talking about?" Dawn asked coming in from the living room, a twinge of panic in her voice.

He rubbed at his chest, but his eyes strayed back to the tin box on the table. "Willow's playing at mad scientist now."

"No! That's not what I'm—Spike, I'm really sorry, OK?"

He still didn't look at her, "Yeah. All right."

Dawn picked up a color print-out from the floor. "What's this?"

"Demon brain X-ray or some such."

"Close." Willow extracted the paper from Dawn's fingers. "It's a copy of a brain scan. This area here is supposed to show the levels of serotonin. But there doesn't seem to be a heck of a lot of serotonin present. Because, why? Because it's a vampire's brain. Which explains so much about vampires, I can't even tell you. There's tons of stuff like this on the disks—" She couldn't contain her excitement, and hoped to dodge the bullet from her magical faux pas, gung ho the troops with her enthusiasm. "Now, a lot of it's sketchy, and there are some giant holes in the information we have, but some of this is bound to be useful. Vital, even. Maybe. Like, like this." She snapped up the top sheet from a stack of her own notes, and held it out to Spike as evidence of her good will. "Partial schematics for the chip in your head. It's actually not designed to detect living organisms per se, which makes sense because otherwise you'd be crippled with pain every time you walked on the grass. It's definitely not about sentient species either, because, well, you can kill demons and you can't kill animals. A lot of demons are sentient. Plus, most are technically living organisms, right? They eat, poop, reproduce Ç hence, alive. I figure the implant has to recognize something unique to mammals."

"Perhaps it recognizes the fact that I want kill them and drink all their blood." He was watching her with an almost clinical reserve that made her feel guilty and irritated at the same time.

"Perhaps. But, you don't have an overwhelming desire to kill a cow do you?"

"Would if I could. Live blood at least."

"But if you could you wouldn't bother, because if you could kill a cow you could kill a human being. The chip sends a signal, right, a shock to the brain if you try to harm a mammal? How does it know you're getting aggressive urges towards a mammal?"

"Well, take now for instance. Definitely feel a migraine coming on."

"So okay. That means you want to tear my head off. I get that. Is it adrenaline that triggers the effect? Do you even have adrenalin any more? And if you do, wouldn't that trigger the chip when you're fighting demons? So, see, point proved that it may have something to do with the properties of live blood. Oh my gosh! What if it's something as simple as oxygenation? Not hemoglobin or platelets. None of the rarified stuff you get in a buffy coat—"

"What's Buffy's coat got to do with anything?" Spike asked.

"Did she get that coat from The Limited? 'Cause that's so not fair. She doesn't even need another coat—"

Willow took a deep breath and counted to ten. "No. Buffy didn't get a new coat. I'm talking about a blood product full of leukocyte goodness. You have to spin the blood really hard in a centrifuge, then collect the top layer of white cells and platelets—" Both sets of eyes glazed over. "Never mind, not important for you to know. What is important, Mr. Chip, is I'm thinking if I can figure out how the signal works, what actually triggers it Ç "

"You might could shut it off, then?"

"Oh! Oh god no, I wouldn't do that. What am I an idiot? No. Absolutely no. But, okay, what about this? What if I could figure out how to adjust the signal so it can distinguish between intent to harm and defense from harm, huh? You could beat up the human baddies then. Which would make you a much more effective fighting tool —"

Dawn snickered. "She called you a tool."

"Or force. Fighting force," Willow amended. Spike's hooded gaze was starting to make her feel like a bug squirming on a pin. "Fighting guy?"

"You fixing to build yourself an army, Red?"

"What? No. Of course not. I don't even like to play Risk."

"Oh, you'd play if you knew you could win. That's only way you like to play, isn't it? S'all right. Got you sussed. That little addiction to magic is the least of your problems."

Well, he was just talking out his ass now! Trying to save face and come over all big evil because she'd put a little scare in him. Fine. "I should know better by now, than to try and help you."

"Help me? Ta ever so. You'll be sure to let me know when it's bowing and scraping time, won't you? Jesus, you're a piece o' work, you are."

"You don't know anything about me—"

Suddenly he was in her face, and her heart was beating in her throat, and she was that close to peeing right on the floor. "I know all about hubris, little girl." His voice was a subsonic rumble that rattled her bones. "Can cry victim all I want, but know bloody well why it is I'm standing here with this high tech muzzle in my head. So I can say with some authority that your hubris is gonna be what takes you down. Pride goeth before a fall, yeah? And I'm gonna be right there, with a couple of beers and a pack of smokes watching your plunge into the abyss. One thing though. Till then? You better stay the hell out of my head. You got me?"

Then, quick as a blink, the front door was slamming shut, and he was gone. Willow collapsed into the nearest available chair.

Dawn gazed at the door, which was still reverberating from his mighty slamming of it. "Wow. That was”that was pretty intense. Um. Going to bed now." She started up the stairs sedately enough, but about a third of the way she was running up them fast as her long legs could carry her.

Willow sat with her head in her hands for a little while, feeling as shaky and fragile as she had when she'd found the box of magic in the basement. After a few minutes, a muted scraping across the floor above made her lift her head and listen harder. Then she started to cry.

Dawn was pushing her dresser in front of her bedroom door.

Buffy heard the muffled pounding from beneath the ground. "God, finally," she said. She capped her pen, and with a vague sense of d»j› vu put the notebook on the bench next to her diet coke. A fist punched up through the earth followed by the rest of the vampire's body. It was female this time. Long red hair, a little worse for grave dirt, but sporting a really good cut, framed the usual bumpy brow and leonine cheekbones. Her pointy teeth hinted of porcelain veneers in her former life, and a lot of orthodontic work in her early teens. The vampire didn't spare a glance for the Slayer, instead taking the opportunity to brush off her elegant black sheath dress with the narrow flounced hem and the asymmetrically draped hip sash.

Buffy's mouth fell open, "Is that Dolce and Gabbana?"

"Yes," the vampire said, before eyeing her up and down with a sneer. "Is that Burger King?"

Buffy looked down at her uniform, awash in the shame of the fast food service industry once again. She brushed her hair back from her face and thrust her chin out. "No point in wearing my designer clothes when I know they'll just be covered in vampire dust by the end of the night."

The vampire scoffed. Scoffed! "Oh honey, if I weren't so hungry right now, I'd be as far away from your stinky little, trailer trash self as my newly swift feet could carry me." She stuck out a pointy toe, momentarily lost in admiration of said swift feet.

Buffy seethed anew, feeling a sudden solidarity with trailer trash everywhere as she realized the bitch was wearing Manolo Blahnik satin slingbacks. "If you weren't so stupid you'd be running already."

Another attempt at scoffing brought a swift fist to the nose. And then they were at it, full tilt. She'd been all prepared to make it a quick kill, like a compassionate vet putting down a sick dog, but Designing Vampire had crossed the line. Buffy was gonna kick rich girl ass, stake her hard, and then leave her dusty remains in a fitting room at the Dress Barn. Unfortunately, she was spending entirely too much time in the pre-dust period wondering how she could convince the bitch to take off the shoes first. And oh my god! How she could even consider wearing the shoes of a dead person anyway? Why hadn't her current circumstances made her more humble and sympathetic to the plight of designer shoe-less peoples everywhere? What the hell was wrong with her? While pondering these and other questions, she failed to dodge a six inch heel to the solar plexus, which sent her tumbling over the bench in a flail of arms and legs. Spilled her coke all over her diary. (Which was why she'd had that d»j› vu moment, damn it.)

The vampire stood there with her French manicured hand on her asymmetric hip sash, looking as down on somebody as looking down could possibly get. "I was thinking for a minute or two, that after a soak in bleach you might make a good minion. You know, drawing my bath, flaying my victims, dusting, vacuuming, mopping floors, but” I can see you really have no marketable skills whatso— Ow."

"More of a calling really," Buffy said, slipping the stake into the elastic waistband of her very ugly poly/nylon gabardine trousers. She picked up the notebook and shook off the excess cola. A lost cause. Another lost cause. She still had to pee, and for some stupid reason, that made her burst into tears.

He knew she was inside of course. Didn't know if he had the juice for her tonight, not for the fucking or the fighting, not after that business with Willow. God, he was sick of the lot of them, really. Why he just didn't quit this town and—

The why was in there.

He took another long pull from his cigarette, down to the filter, then tossed it aside. Cradling his newly purchased six pack beneath his arm in case she took a notion to bowl him over at the knee level as soon as he came through the door, he took a deep breath and entered his crypt.

She was sitting in his chair staring at the television with the sound off. Still in her uniform from the DMP. "Evening, Slayer. How good of you to call first."

"Get a phone, then we'll talk."

"Really?"

"No." She turned her head his way. "Where've you been?"

He went to the fridge and put the six pack inside. "Didn't know I was required to keep you apprised of my itinerary." Grabbed a bottle and twisted off the cap, waved it at her by way of an offer. She wrinkled her nose in prissy refusal.

"Itinerary?" she said.

"Yes. Itinerary. The route of a journey or proposed outline of one. A travel diary—"

"I know what it means. Since when do you have one?"

"Since none of your business."

"Actually, it is. Slayer. Vampire."

"Oh, get off your high horse. Or get on mine." The obligatory leer felt a bit off tonight, not like she'd know the difference. "We both know why you're here. Had a rough night at work, sweetheart? Need me to make it better?" He gave her a mock salute with his beer. "Give me chance to get in the mood."

"Thought you were always in the mood."

"Yeah, 'bout that. Would it kill you to shower 'fore you came by to be serviced? 'S not like I'm getting paid to be yer stud, you know."

Instead of buggerin' off in a righteous snit like he'd hoped, she went all Keene-like big-eyed waif on him! And what was he supposed to do with the little match-girl from hell, gathering up her coat, sad trembling lip and fat viscous tears rolling down her face like he'd just kicked her puppy and ran over her cat?

Abandon his beer and rush to her side of course, "Didn't mean it, petal, didn't mean any of it, I'm a bad rude man, a right bastard, an evil blood sucking fiend who doesn't deserve to be on the same planet with a sweet-smelling blossom the likes of you."

She started to laugh, but decided she was much too crushed and angry for that. "You asshole." Hard little fists hammered his chest, painful but merely a token compared to her usual. "Dastardly. Demon. Dick. Asshole bastard!"

Dastardly. That was a new one. Needed a mustache to twirl to pull that one off.

"I know. I know," he agreed soothingly. He swept her up in the cradle of his arms, sat back down in the chair with her nestled in his lap, and she let him. "Ought to boil me in oil, horsewhip me, drip candle wax on my privates, make me sniff your armpits until I swoon—"

"Told you I wasn't gonna do any of that when you asked before. Anyway, it's not like you're getting paid to suffer the smelliness of me, remember?"

"Buffy, I'm sorry. Was in a mood. Didn't mean it."

"Yes, you did. I stink!"

And then she was in tears again. Wailing her anger and despair and humiliation onto his shirt. He caught something about shoes, and a barn, and peeing on the dead, and—

"Oh god. I could lose the house! We'd have to live in a mobile home in that trailer park near the dam!"

"Or”here's another option. You could rent a flat of some sort."

"None of the vampires respect me anymore."

"Which vamps are those, honey?"

"Well, mostly they're dust now, but they're all being really condescending and mean to me before I kill 'em. All la di da, we're so cool, we're free to pursue careers in mayhem, while you have to clean the grease trap, and scrape the gum from under the tables of Corporate America." She sniffled, then wiped her face and nose on his shirt. Completely on purpose, of course. Just to see how he'd react. When he didn't, she whispered, "You smelled the smell. You think I stink."

"In the best way. All the time. All over."

She snorted. "Please. I need a shower. I know that. I'm sticky. And gross."

"Sticky sweet." He brushed his lips over her damp cheek and on up. Right next to her ear. "Love the way you smell right now, squirming in my lap." He felt her shudder and slipped his hand into the tight vee of her closed thighs.

"Shut up," she said, sitting straighter, wiping her eyes. But her legs parted for his hand. He cupped her sex, roughed the heel of his palm over the polyester gabardine in a soothing rhythm. Soft and slow. Soft and slow. She rocked a little against his palm, her mind still on her troubles, her body moving on to something nicer. "There's only one scent you give off that drives me right round the bend," he murmured. "Can't smell anything else most of the time. Sticks to all my senses like butterscotch."

She drew in a little breath, closed her eyes, and twisted her hands into his messy shirt. He leaned in to kiss her. Through the rough fabric of her trousers, the liquid heat of her cunt leapt to his hand like water to a dowsing rod.