A/N; Ha! An update! Yay me! Or not, because frankly, I'm not happy with this chapter. It felt... forced somehow. Really hard to write. Oh well, it's out there now. I'll try to hurry up with chapter 8, hopefully it will be easier to write that one. As I said, I'm not really happy with the result of chapter 7. I hope it's readable any way. Thank you for haning in there with me!

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As soon as Giles had left the room, Spike's head began to spin. He felt almost dizzy, and the outline of his vision had began to blur, as if he hadn't fed for a long time. His fingers had began to tremble.

He felt numb. He tried to form a coherent thought in his head, but he couldn't get any longer than to 'no', or 'please'. He couldn't even form the sound of her name in his mind. He'd never had a problem with that before. The trouble had always been to not think about her, not to have the two vowel sound spinning round and round inside his brain.

That name.

Buffy...

As soon as he first was able to think that, it was like a lever had been pulled somewhere. All of a sudden he felt eerily calm, and he began to try thinking about the situation rationally.

He had been left alone in the room. Giles had rushed out the door as soon as the girl had finished talking, and had almost knocked her over in his hurry to get out and to the phone. She had quickly followed him ('Like the well trained little lapdogs the slayers are supposed to be', the small part of his mind that wasn't entirely paralysed had thought,) and it seemed like they had forgot that he was there. No one had come to check on him since Giles had left. If he had been paying attention to the time, he would have realised that he had been left alone for about ten minutes now. It could have been ten hours, or ten seconds. It wouldn't have made any difference to him.

Slowly, the chock receded more and more. He began to come back to himself. And even though his fingers still trembled and his thoughts were hard to keep in control, his eyes had cleared and he felt like he could stand up without toppling over. Not that he could stand anyway. He was still bound to the bloody chair.

Damn!

The chair was an heavy old thing, made of dark, solid wood with a seat cushion of faded, woven read linen that felt like hadn't been stuffed on this side of the industrial revolution. The rope they had used to bind him with was thick hemp and smelled faintly of tar, and they didn't budge when he tested their strength. They had tied the rope painfully tight. It wasn't like he had any circulation to worry about any way.

He had to get out there and find out what had happened. It couldn't have been as it sounded, he forced himself to be certain of that. She wasn't hurt. She was not dead! She was not...

He slumped back in the chair, eyes tightly shut. He tried to control his body's physical reaction to his cripplingly painful thoughts. Tried to persuade his body to stop trembling like a leaf in a strong gale and fighting down the feeling of nausea he hadn't felt the likes of since he was alive. He had to pull himself together to find out what was going on. He couldn't help her if he didn't know what was wrong. And he had to help, if she was in danger. Every decision he'd made about staying away from her to save himself the heartache of seeing her with another and to give her the happiness he'd always known she deserved was forgotten in an instant.

The night she jumped from Glory's tower replayed itself behind his closed eyelids. The utter despair he'd felt when he'd seen her broken body on the ground, nothing more than a corpse. And then he relived the excruciating months after her death, when the only thing stopping him from walking out in the sunlight was the promise to look after her sister. He had failed her. He hadn't saved her. She was gone, and he was left behind, shattered into a million, aching pieces.

'Every night I save you...'

He would notfail a second time!

***

Dawn was sitting on her bed with her arms crossed over her chest, her foot tapping impatiently on the floorboards and with a frown marring her pretty face. Something had happened, probably something bad. And she had no idea what it was. It irked her. No one would talk to her.

She and Andrew had flown to London when she left school for the vacation, and she was going to stay with Buffy and her niece for he entire summer. She knew Buffy and Heather had been forced to move out of London to some small village she'd never heard of, but she was still a little hazy on the details. Her sister had promised to fill her in as soon as they saw each other again, so she had waited, unusually patiently for her. There was no point in asking Andrew, no one ever filled him in on anything anyway.

It had begun almost as soon as he had stepped out of the plane from Italy. Rona had met them on the airport, as was promised by Giles, but she had barely said two words to them and had clearly been stressed out and nervous the entire trip back to watcher central. When they had arrived, Andrew had been told that Giles wanted to talk to him immediately, and had been led away in the opposite direction of Dawn, who was practically being dragged to her room and then dumped there, all her indignant shouts and questions ignored.

And if it was something Dawn Summers didn't like, it was being ignored.

Something bad had happened, and they didn't tell her! It was like being fourteen all over again. Well, she would have none of it! She refused to be kept in the dark. If they didn't want to tell her what was going on, she was going to have to find it out for herself. It was like the thing with Glory all over again.

Mind made up, she left the room and headed towards the smaller study in the left wing. All books of importance at the moment had the ability to migrate there, since it was Giles favourite room for research. It was in the most quiet part of the building as far away from chattering teenage girls with big clomping feet as possible.

At least she would get an idea of what was happening if she saw what he was researching at the moment. She hoped as much anyway. Taking care not to be spotted by any passing slayers or watchers-in-training, she made her way to the door she was looking for. Hearing a noise behind her, she quickly opened it just wide enough to allow her to slip through, went inside and closed the door behind her without making a sound.

And then she got the shock of her life.

Sitting just a few feet from her, was Spike. Or his doppelgänger. He was bound to a chair, and he had jerked violently when she'd entered the room, clearly shocked to see her too. The he opened his mouth, and croaked out;

"Nibblet?"

And all her doubts and fears flew away, and tears began to stream down her cheeks. He was here, right in front of her, alive! Or, well, undead. It was really him!

Spike!

With a wail she rushed forward and threw her arms around his neck, nearly making the chair topple over. She laughed and cried at the same time, half convinced that she had gone completely insane and was hallucinating.

Spike could feel tears prickling in his eyes too. He had his nibblet in his arms again, the girl he loved like his own sister! Or he would have had her in his arms, if he wasn't still bound to the chair. And if he wasn't currently so worried about Buffy, he would have been quite content to stay like this for a very long time, with Dawn clinging to him like she would never let go, but he couldn't. Not now.

"Dawn? Nibblet? It's nice to see you too, luv." His voice was cracked, betraying his high-strung emotions, making Dawn bawl even louder. "Hush now sweetheart, you don't want all the slayers barrelling in here, do you?" She quieted down and raised her head from his shoulder. She shook it, not trusting her voice yet. He smiled wobbly at her. "Do you think you could maybe get me out of these ropes, bit? I need to find out what is going on around here."

Dawn nodded, still not quite believing her own eyes. She started fiddling with the knots on the ropes, but quickly realised she couldn't possibly undo them with only her hands. She needed something sharper.

She reached down to her ankle, under her loose fitting pants, and drew a small, but very sharp looking knife from a sheath strapped to her leg. At Spikes incredulous look she smirked a little and shrugged her shoulders, clearly not seeing a point to explaining just now. Once she started working on the ropes, they quickly fell away. Turned out the knife was just as sharp as it looked.

When he was free from the damn chair at last, he bounded to his feet and pulled Dawn with him to the door. He turned towards her, put a finger against his mouth in a 'shushing' gesture, and pressed an ear against the door. His lips pressed together in a grim line when it was made clear by the commotion out in the hallway that he wasn't going to escape that way.

He turned towards the window instead, and looked out at the still early London night. Since it was the middle of June the sun would be up for hours yet, but the shadows between the buildings were long and deep enough for him not to fry until he could get underground. He loved the fact that the ancient city of London practically was built on top of a Swiss cheese. There were tunnels, catacombs and sewers leading anywhere you wanted to go.

He turned and kissed Dawn on the forehead, and whispered a 'thank you' quietly in her ear, then he turned to climb out the window. They were at the second floor, and the fall down to the ground wasn't even nearly high enough to bother him.

But Dawn would have none of that. He was not leaving until she got some sort of explanation. After all, that was why she had gone to the small study in the first place. She grabbed his arm surprisingly rough for such a small framed girl, and whispered urgently to him that the threat she had made to him the year before about waking up on fire still was very valid, and if he didn't tell her what was going on right this second she was going to scream her head off.

Spike had to bite his lower lip not to laugh out loud, but at the same time he knew she was deadly serious. He lowered his head and started whispering low in her ear;

"I got spotted at the airport by one of the 'slayerettes'. She called the watcher on me, and I got picked up at a pub 'bout an hour later. I came back from the land of dust 19 days after Sunnydale collapsed, but I'll tell you that story later. Right now, I gotta get to Buffy. Something has happened to her. They were right in the middle of interrogating me when a phone call came from the police, mentioning something about Buffy and a death. I have to get to her, see if I can help."

Dawn stood there with her mouth wide opened, staring incredulously at him. She was sure she needed a better explanation than that, but she also realised they didn't have the time just now. Next time she saw him they were going to have a nice long talk, starting with why she never knew he had been back for so long. She was already getting pissed about that.

But he was right. She was also getting worried about Buffy. And the one person she could be really certain would be of help, was Spike. Not for a second did it occur to her not to trust him.

"Buffy's in a village a bit outside some city called Causton. 'Midsomer Parva', I think it was called. I was supposed to go there to live with her during he summer."

She let go of his arm, and he gave her a smile in thanks. Just before he jumped out the window, he kissed her on the forehead again. Then he was out, going out of her sight.

It was not until a few minutes later it occurred to her that she had forgot to tell him about Heather. Did he know Buffy had a kid? And did he know it was his? She didn't think so.

With a twinge of regret she realised he would have to find out for himself, one way or another.