"Can one of you move your knee?" Jonathan whined as he was accustomed to doing when uncomfortable.

"Sod off, nerd. I'm already shoved into this little bit of a corner and so my knee can do what it damn well pleases!"

Xander snapped back at Spike. "Lay off the kid, Spike."

"Hey! I'm right here, you know."

"As if you'd ever bleeding let us forget. And will someone tell me why you're here again?" Spike snarled in annoyance at the blossoming mage.

Jonathan pleaded his case matter of factly not to be thrown out of the confession booth. "Well, I'm the one that cast both that containment spell and..."

Spike shot back harshly. "A little too late might I add."

Xander shook his head, warning Spike against bringing it up again. They had enough bad blood between them, pardon the pun, that this should not add to the discomfort.

"Still, if someone could just..." Jonathan tried to force Spike by shifting his weight over to one side, thus sending one of Spike's precarious feet launching out of the booth. Spike snarled as the sun hit through the gap left by his foot. They had already knocked out the inner portion of the divider between the confession booths. The walls were too thin as it stood.

Xander tensed, moving slightly closer to the door. "Well, there are some positives to your hot-hotheadedness Spike."

"Such as?" Spike growled incredulously.

Xander pointed to the hole. "I'd say that by the position of the sun that it's got to be nearly three. That means we'll be able to move in a few hours."

It was clear by the silence that followed that Xander was thinking of Willow in all of this. True, he'd mourn for Charlie. But, lets be honest, this was Sunnydale and further than that, there was almost no chance that any of his ashes were still sitting on the steps after having been blown away by the early morning entrance of pissed-off Willow. Or perhaps it had still been later at night. The clouds had made it difficult to decipher.

Jonathan couldn't stand the silence. He didn't like being left alone in his own head or trapped in a box with two vampires, even if one was as good as a mentor to him. "Well, at least we'll be out soon then."

"I'm going to eat you."

Xander shook his head. "No, you're not Spike. Leave Jonathan in peace."

"I'm gonna leave him in bloody pieces."

"Yeah, well, then that'll just add to our lovely little embryo, won't it?" Xander's voice deflated somehow, sounding smaller.

Jonathan's face screwed up in confusion. "Excuse me...our what...?"

Xander tried to wave his hands around a bit while continuing to be flustered. "You know...our embryo...plot confusion..."

Spike gave him a pity nod and then heard Jonathan and his voice talk at the same time. "I think you mean imbroglio."

"Don't snarl at me for knowing a lot of words!" Jonathan shrank even smaller against Spike's fowl attitude.

There was raucous movement outside the booth. Two of the occupants of the booth tensed up. The scent in the air was neither familiar nor ambiguously good. It was a patron of Sunnydale and that could mean anything. Charlie's entrance last night had proven that whatever sanction on the ground remained from the fact that it was still a church was eradicated. This was no longer a holy place.

The door was jerked open and it was the vampire's turn to jerk back from the sunlight, even as it was continuing to dim and fade. Patrick was disheveled, his eyes wide and his mouth fumbling for stammered words. There was a large cut over his eyebrows that seemed to be healing with a bit of a glaze over it.

"I didn't want this." He tried to absolve himself, his form so pale that you'd almost have thought he was a vampire.

"And what did you think was going to happen living over a Hellmouth?" Xander hissed from where he huddled in the corner, angered that the man didn't seem to understand they weren't just cowards hiding in a confession booth.

"Dear God....I didn't know. The Council just told me that."

Spike groaned. "Of course, the council. Roddy bunch of pencil pushers stickin' their necks in where they don't belong."

"But how did they know about the chalice?" Jonathan wondered aloud.

Patrick gave a half-hearted shrug. "I assumed they knew through Dane. He told me that Ethan was a virtual encyclopedia of knowledge."

Xander's voice trembled with something akin to rage. "Please tell me that you're not referring to Ethan Rayne."

"He's the black sheep of my family." Patrick's voice rang hollow.

Spike snorted. "Well now you know why."

Patrick repeated himself. "I didn't want this. I just wanted to cleanse the town." His forlorn eyes settled on the currently almost silent Jonathan. A silent Jonathan is almost never a good thing.

Jonathan lunged for the preacher as the last vestiges of the sun fell behind cloud and mountain. Inky spots of twilight battled with the last rays of the sun. Jonathan's face twisted in an unheard of display of nerdy rage. Some of the pews were still intact, most of them not crumbled completely were at least broken into half.

Fresh blood from Patrick's head joined the dirty, dried blood stains on the fake marble stairs. When the boys had followed Charlie, they had found Spike watching from the trees. He had been passing through on his way to Buffy and he had heard it all.

Charlie had never impressed him before as a childe. Truth be told, Spike thought the silent walk thing was both kind of frightening and something of a show-off move. He could run silently. Hell, he could suck silently. But there was no fun in that. Charlie had always seemed like a caricature of a vampire to him. But Spike had been wrong in other cases, and he was loathe to admit just how wrong he was here.

There had been a monster of sorts, almost of an illusory variety. It was clear by peeking through the windows that the preacher with the chalice should have been the master. But Dane was the one sitting on the steps, laughing cruelly, and giving the thing orders. And the thing's orders were murderous by any standard. Lord knows that Spike had enjoyed being a sadistic hellion while unencumbered with a soul, but the use of brainwashed children to carry out your deeds was taking it a bit far. And that was even for the man's demon. He had thought of calling Buffy when Xander and Jonathan had rolled up in Angel's old town car. The one he could use at night.

Xander's best bet was on Dane being at the center of all this. He watched from high in a tree and Spike caught a glint of something where the eye used to be in Xander's socket. "I knew that fucker couldn't be trusted," Xander growled.

"I have to go get Buffy." Spike had run off for back-up but Xander wasn't sure that there was time for that.

Then Charlie had been hit by Dane, slapped hard enough across the cheek to send him sprawling across a pew. Xander winced for his childe, the inner Eldridge snarling to get inside and protect his son. But Xander knew as a man that he couldn't go in yet. The preacher watched with lucid interest as the fisticuffs continued. Then all hell had broken lose.

Xander had felt the presence of the town's children first. It was a lucky deal that he was high enough in a tree. Three of them stopped, sensing the magick on the wind but then thankfully moving on. However, it hadn't been good enough. Xander thanked the powers that only he had heard what happened next. Willow and the children and Tara defending a small blond girl from one of Willow's attacks. Their bond shattered and the magick gone from both. Tara was destroyed by the small mob. And then the gorgon had moved through the clouds, inserting herself in the center of Willow's rage and tapping into far darker magick than anyone knew Willow possessed.

There had been a scream that sent dark red fire through the air in shock waves. Jonathan had been pushed against the wall to the point where he had gone unconscious. Xander was sent flying from the tree through the middle section of a large stained-glass St. Michael just in time to see Charlie lose his concentration and get staked by Dane.

"No!" Xander had snarled. He had lunged for Dane, using all of his fury and speed to launch farther and faster across the fissures and now broken pews from the orange shock wave. The sizzling pain of the large cross against his hands was worth slashing Dane's head off with broken remnants of the pew and then beating his body.

And then she had come, infused with the anger of Gorgon and still wearing a now-dried tee shirt with Tara's blood submerged but no longer dripping. He had wanted to run to the Willow part of the body, but scary veiny black haired Gorgessa was not particularly inviting. It was pretty clear from her shrieking rage that the blood she sought was not of any particular category.

Jonathan had woken in enough time to bind possessed Willow, Buffy came flying through and got the preacher out before the binding spell broke and Xander wasn't sure what had happened after that. He had gone into a blacked-out rage and awoke a few hours later locked in a confession booth with an exhausted Jonathan and a bored Spike playing with himself.

"What the hell happened?" Xander thought that had seemed the most pertinent question.

It was stupid for the preacher to have come back. There would be no comfort or security at this place. The hellmouth had broken it. It had taken all of Jonathan's skill and then some to exercise Gorgessa, mad kudos given to Willow's ability to survive, even if no one was making it quite clear on how or why Gorgessa had left. Running theories on either side of field both cited Anyaka, but neither was exceedingly clear on the playback.

Xander came out of his daydream recounting the events of the past evening's imbroglio to find that Jonathan was slamming the man's head against a pew hard enough that bits of skull were sure to come flying out soon.

Spike reached for his arm as Xander started to walk forward and hold Jonathan back. He whispered to Xander. "Let the mage express his rage. If he doesn't, he'll never know enough to stop."

Xander could hear the righteous anger in Jonathan's voice, each syllable and word punctuated by a deadly slam. "You don't use children!"

Xander wrenched his arm away from Spike after the enraged babbling session had started pouring from Jonathan's mind. "Enough is enough, Spike. We have to tend to the wounded."

It had taken both of them to pull Jonathan off of the corpse of the preacher as he continued slamming the skull into the pew. It was a morbid, yet almost fitting tribute to Tara that she had inspired such a sense of right in Jonathan. At least, Xander assumed that it hadn't been his working.

A piece of glass from the topmost encircled stain was the last to fall. The boys ran and jumped away as it cracked without shattering across the stairs. Looking back, Spike noticed that one of Gabriel's eyes was more than just a different color than the other and more prominent than the stained-glass trumpet that he billowed. Thinking back to what he had seen in Xander's eye socket, he held the small orange orb up to the moonlight.

Xander joined him, flipping up his eye patch to show Spike the indigo gem in his socket. Spike registered the two with fascination before speaking. "Bloody significant, I'd say."