Chapter One:
"Well, answer the bloody question already, all this standing around's boring."
Draco swallowed the lump of building panic that had lodged itself in his throat. "Draco Malfoy."
"Really, oh well, that's right helpful, that is. What the fuck are you doing here, Draco Malfoy?"
The young wizard looked back and forth between the two weapon wielding Muggles, his eyes staying on the blond for a few seconds, icy grey examining the chiseled features closely. Hadn't there been something wrong with that face only a moment ago? He could have sworn that there'd been something weird about the man's face when he and the woman had appeared at the top of the stairs. His contemplations were cut off before they could get anywhere, however, as Spike's limited patience snapped.
"What, are you suddenly mute or something? I asked what you were doing here."
Draco turned his attention back to the rather sharp looking sword as the taller blond brandished it in his direction to emphasize his words. "I don't know."
"What do you mean you don't know? How did you get in here?"
"I mean I don't know, I didn't mean to come here, it was an accident."
"An accident? Well I-"
"Spike," the redhead cut him off before the vampire could say anything else, her green eyes seeming to bore a hole through their young guest for several moments before she slowly lowered the crossbow she was holding. "Why don't we continue this conversation upstairs?"
A single scared brow rose nearly to his bleached-blond hairline in disbelief. Willow rolled her eyes and gestured for him to lower his sword. "You may have the freakish strength thing going for you, but my arm's getting tired holding up this darn bow. Besides, standing around here isn't doing us any good, so the least we could do is finish this somewhere more comfortable, like upstairs."
Spike scowled. "The reason it's not doing us any good is because the little pip-squeek won't answer my bloody questions."
Draco's eyes narrowed as his pureblood ego winced at the insult. "I'm not a-"
The vampire turned a rather chilling glare in the younger man's direction and the words seemed to evaporate on his normally caustic tongue. Willow rolled her eyes yet again at the display, though her lips twitched the slightest bit at the look on Draco's face before turning and heading back into the shop. Spike waved the sword at the wizard with a curse, indicating that the young man should precede him through the door.
By the time the two blonds had made it through the training room and into the shop, Willow had put a closed sign on the front door and taken a seat at a small table in one corner, where Tara had once read fortunes on Halloween. Spike pointed the sword next to her, then took a seat across from the Malfoy heir.
"Spike. Put the sword away, will ya?"
The scarred brow rose again and the Wiccan sighed. "Really Spike, if he was going to do something, he probably would have tried to do it before we realized he was here instead of making all that noise and waiting for us to get weapons and see what was going on."
The vampire stewed over the redhead's logic for a moment before finally setting the sword on the ground next to his chair with a scowl. Once he'd done so, Willow turned to the new arrival. "So, Draco, how exactly did you accidentally wind up here?"
"I don't know. I told you, it was an accident. I was trying to get to this other shop and I somehow ended up here instead."
"Really. Well that was nice and vague. Way to answer a question without tellin' us a damn thing."
"Spike." The blond vampire clenched his jaw at the sharp impatience in her tone. "Why don't we just stop antagonizing him and let the boy talk."
Spike grudgingly kept quiet for a minute or two as they waited for Draco to elaborate. The vampire's patience ran out before the wizard's seeming determination to not be useful.
"You heard the witch," Spike growled, "talk, before I convince her to turn you into a rat."
Draco's eyes grew slightly wider at the blue-eyed Brit's use of the word 'witch', regarding the Muggles with genuine interest for the first time. The man wasn't being literal, right? Surely witch was some kind of insult or nick-name he had for the woman. Neither had once shown evidence of possessing a wand, hell, they'd used Muggle weapons. No real witch or wizard would use a sword or crossbow if they had a wand. Right? The stress of everything that had happened that night, not to mention the last few months, finally overtook him and the sixth-year lost his precarious control, blurting out his statement with none of the grace or dignity that befit a Malfoy.
"You're not a witch."
But even as the words tumbled past his lips, everything began to come together in his head. He'd come out of what he assumed had to be a vanishing cabinet in the basement of a store that, now that he really looked around, appeared to sell magical paraphernalia, though most of it looked decidedly different than what he was used to buying in Diagon and Knockturn Alleys. There had been other spell-related objects strewn around said basement, and when the two had first come down, the blond had looked odd, his face seeming distorted, his now blue eyes had held a golden glow and his teeth had-
"You're a vampire!" The exclamation was made in a slightly high-pitched tone as the young wizard leapt to his feet and pointed at the older man, his feet nearly tangling themselves in his expensive robes in his hurried attempt to put some distance between himself and the creature sitting before him at the small table.
Spike regarded the apparently jumpy boy with a raised brow, an amused smirk forming on his lips as he watched Willow try to calm the stranger they'd so recently found making a mess of the Magic Box's basement. For his part, Draco allowed the young woman to coax him back to his seat, part of him wondering at the sudden concern she was showing him when only minutes before she'd been threatening him with a crossbow.
The other part of him was too busy cursing itself to find her behavior curious.
Bloody fucking hell. He was one year – one year! – away from graduation, meaning he'd had six full years of DADA – and spent them near the top of his class, no less – not to mention everything his father had taught him, and yet he had still not been able to recognize a vampire when one had stood less than twenty feet from him.
And as if that wasn't bad enough, he had actually taken the vampire, and an apparent witch, for Muggles! The only thing he could say in his defense was that the woman's use of a crossbow instead of a wand supported his misinterpretation. As for the vampire, there was really no excuse for that mistake. The man had had bloody fucking fangs for Merlin's sake. How had he missed that? How had he missed any of it? And how in the name of the Dark Lord had he managed to get himself… wherever the fuck he was.
Grindlewald's balls! He didn't even know where he was, let alone how to get back. Not that getting back to Hogwarts would do him much good if he didn't have a way to kill the headmaster and get the Death Eaters into the school. The hopelessness, frustration, and despair that had been simmering in him over the past few months finally boiled over and the dignified heir to the Malfoy name and estate let his head fall forward into his hands as the long-denied tears began to gather in his icy pools.
Spike rolled his eyes at the boy's breakdown, the satisfaction he normally felt when someone had the intelligence to be afraid of him drowned out by his annoyance with the tears and theatrics. Throwing his hands in the air, he stalked off, leaving his redheaded friend to deal with the boy.
There had been fear in the blond when he'd first realized he'd been glaring at a vampire, but that had disappeared beneath the wave of self-pity that had washed over the younger Brit seconds before his tears had started. The stench had rolled his stomach. No use sticking around for the water works. The boy was obviously no threat to the witch at the moment, and there were demons out and about waiting for the Big Bad to come kick their ass. Nothin' like a nice spot of violence to cheer a vamp up, after all.
And cheer him up it did.
The peroxide-blond was in a fine mood when he returned to the Magic Box two hours later, where Willow sat with their dry-eyed but sullen looking guest. As he joined the two at the table, the redhead filled him in on what she had learned from the boy in his absence. She told the vampire that Draco was a wizard, and that he had been trying to fix his own cabinet when he'd somehow transported himself into the one in the shop's basement. Of course, this had led to an explanation of what the boy had told Willow of the cabinets' purpose and abilities, wherein Spike promptly found himself lost amongst the spell-jargon and gruffly asked the question that had been on both blonds' minds for quite some time.
"And what exactly are we supposed to do with our little guest now that he's landed his pale arse in good-old Sunnyhell?"
Willow's babbling ceased and she looked at Draco for several moments. During the course of their conversation, it had become clear that the boy had done a lot more than transport himself from Scotland to California. What exactly it meant that Willow had absolutely no knowledge of the existence of Hogwarts, or any other school of magic, remained unclear, however.
The blond seemed determined to believe the witch had simply never heard of it, but Willow suspected it was more than that. A lot of what Draco had been able to tell her about where he came from sounded, well… off. Things just didn't fit, and considering Draco's attempt at re-casting his original spell had gotten him nowhere, it looked like they were going to have to piece it all together before he had any chance at getting home.
Just not now.
The Wiccan smothered a yawn with her hand and turned to the other blond next to her. "He'll just have to stay with us 'till we figure it out, I guess."
Spike looked ready to argue, but a few seconds of the resolve face cured him of any stringent objections, and the three headed back to the Summers' house to relieve Anya and Xander of their Dawn-watching duties, the vampire muttering curses under his non-existent breath the entire way.
End Chapter One