THE AWAKENING. Spike woke up with a start. The sun was still shining; maybe it was 3 P.M., and yet he was terribly hungry. He got up of the stone lid of his grave and he opened the fridge to get some blood. He gulped it down and immediately he felt it spread throughout his body, stirring the senses and restoring him strength. To tell the truth, it was a relative feeling, rather passive. But once the things were different. Before he got the "food" by himself, killing and bleeding. He was the dark nightmare; his name was enough for strike terror. He was looking forward to the sunset, when he went out to find any frightened girl and to bleed her dry. Oh God, how much he loved raping and killing girls! They were so innocent, so pure and so ingenuous. None of them could run away from his clutches. He thought he could still hear their begging screams. Nothing better to lead him to keep on. The smell of the fear and the shiver of dread made his victims more tempting. He adored to be that big mother fucker that he was. Now instead, he felt sorry for himself, looking at the state he was in, compelled to steal the sacs of blood from the hospitals only because the soul of that hateful looser of William was returned in him. He could still remember that worthless poetaster: he had never been able to conclude something in all his life. Threw out of the poetical circle and of the high society because he was an incompetent. Hated from the woman he loved secretly because he was insignificant. He always obeyed all and everybody, included his mother, that controlled him in everything. He couldn't move, because she was already there, ready to bother him with a talking-to. However, in spite of all that, he has loved her. Always. Even when he had sunk his fangs in her neck. No tears have damped his cheeks while she was screaming for the pain, because he didn't know anymore what cry was meaning to. He didn't regret the moment when the life abandoned his mother's body. He was a creature of the dark by then. Nothing would be the same. No more books and poems, or soppy sonnets written at the moonlight, hoping that Emily would notice his desperate love; then only Drusilla counted for him. Her, that with the silence of darkness and with the lightness of a butterfly had came up to him in that dark alley. Her, that promised him eternal love. And so it has been. She had deprived him forever of his life, taking him with herself in her perverse and damned demoniac world. From that moment he would never woke up in his bed on a lukewarm spring morning, but at the sunset between his Sire's arms. Together, they would have faced everything; she was his Princess. It is said that a vampire can't love. In part, it's true. But, besides the respect that he felt for his Sire, there was something else... A sort of magnetism, of pure complicity that kept him tied at his Drusilla. Even if the demon that was in him forced him to kill, to torture, to slaughter and to rape, there always was a part of him, hidden who knows where, that let him love. That's why that night he returned home to bite his mother: to break any bond that was still connecting him to the dead William. That old woman wasn't the one who has given him the life anymore, but that one was Drusilla. With her he would have stayed for eternity and with none else. And so for over a century they had plundered, killed and tore to pieces; even two Slayer he could count between his victims, that had made him stronger. He thought that nothing could have stopped him, until he arrived to Sunnydale. There his world collapsed, there he was reduced in that state. There he lost his beloved Drusilla and his identity. He wasn't a man anymore, but neither a vampire. He couldn't bite or kill because of that bloody chip in his head, even less he could live like other people, because he was still a monster. And it was only Buffy Summers's fault. That odious, stupid girl entered in his life little by little, like an unbearable and painful cancer that corrodes the structure of the body. How much he teased Angelus for his love affair with the Slayer! Seeing the big Angel, that one who had fun torturing him so that he could take away from him Drusilla, went soften because of an idiot school-girlish, it was priceless. After all, it was all that his Grand Sire deserved; he was nothing but a crawling worm, rubbish. He didn't care of what end Angel would come to, but he sincerely hoped that it'd be hugely painful. Angel... he had enjoyed the moment when the Slayer captured him in her net and that big moron has been trapped. On the other hand, he had never had so much confidence in his Grand Sire's intellective abilities. But now also he has committed the same, terrible mistake and he fell completely for it, especially now that that stupid William's soul has been returned in his body. His only target was kill Buffy, from the very first time that he saw her. Every day he imagined the sweet sound of the Slayer's bones cracking under his lethal grip and her hot blood that wetted his throat. But he would never have seen that dream come true. And only because he has been so much stupid that fall into her enchantress net, even believing that that stupid bitch was important somehow. He wanted her more than ever. He had ever courted her, losing all his dignity, in exchange for a love that, he knew it perfectly, he would never obtain. How could he have thought that someone sane would fell in love with a bloodthirsty monster? But at last she had surrendered: she led him enter in her bed, staying hugged with her. She gave him esteem, respect, affection. But only after that he has fight for this and finally he has obtained it, he realized that that wasn't what he wanted. Sure, the dearest William would has been happy for this; he, that had never been able to love and be loved. Oh, yes, sure; but only if he were human. But he wasn't. For ages he has learnt how to forget the meaning of being human. That dimension was deleted from his memory. Now he was nothing but a beast. A killer demon with a human skin. A damned creature that every night rose again from his grave to suck blood from innocent souls, devoid of God or of any hesitation. There were no value or regrets to him. Only the blood was important. It was arrived the moment for Spike to bury William forever. The killer vampire that was in him would rise again and all this thanks to the same Buffy. After all, he has to thank her, if she has been so stupid that think that he would have loved her even without the bloody chip. But she was wrong. Rather if she was wrong! Now that that sophisticated electronic contraption wasn't a hindrance anymore, Spike was returned himself. He was thirsty now, and he had a unrestrainable wish to kill. He had only to wait that the sun will set, then he would started to hunt. He knew who would be his first victim. He couldn't let Buffy to keep on her stupid existence after that she has humiliated himself in that way, taking and leaving him like a pretty toy. Nobody can wrong Spike without paying the consequences. In a few hours, someone would have paid with the blood. That night he would be return to Drusilla with a very important trophy: the Slayer's head. At last his Princess could be proud of him. He lay down again on the stone lid of the grave, folding his arms behind the head. While he was tasting the moment in which Buffy's blood would has wetted his body, a fierce sneer appeared on his pale and immortally handsome face.

Tremble Sunnydale: Spike is back.

"I plan each charted course, each little step, along the highway. And more, much more than this...

...I did it my way."