Chapter 25: Becoming (Part 1)

Lucy

The bartender at the Shelter had come to know Lucy pretty well in the past few nights. Case in point, she had Lucy's drink ready before Lucy even reached the bar.

"Drinking alone again?" The bartender grinned, her teeth startlingly white against the midnight blue of her skin.

Lucy smiled back. "Come on, Cinna. You know I'm plotting."

Cinna laughed and pushed Lucy's drink towards her, exchanging it for the bills that Lucy placed on the bar. "As long as you keep tipping, plot as much as you want. I've got kids to put through college." Though she acted as if she were only joking, her thoughts showed concern. It proved that Cinna was too good for Sunnydale if she could worry about the well-being of a soulless monster.

Lucy toasted Cinna with her glass before the Mut'mayer woman turned away to take the orders of a Britzai couple. She sipped her O-positive with tequila (she was a vampire now, she wasn't going to get carded at a demon establishment) and surveyed the club. The dance floor was half full. The band playing that night was an all-human punk rock group from L.A. whose music was loud enough that the more auditory-sensitive demons were nowhere to be seen. It was on the very edge of what vampire ears could tolerate. That band would likely never play at the Shelter again, but the noise was exactly what Lucy needed. It stopped her from thinking so damn much for a little while.

Another vampire started making his way towards her far more obviously than he thought he was. He was a short, stocky Black man (young looking, more like a teenager really) with short-cropped red hair dressed in something out of the seventies. Lucy followed his progress and continued sipping her drink.

The vampire ordered a drink, Scotch, and leaned against the bar. For a moment it seemed like he'd lost his nerve, then he asked, "What's a pretty girl like you doing here all alone?" He'd been choosing between that and "Come here often?" The pick-up lines in this one.

Lucy sifted out of her demon face so she wouldn't have to talk around her fangs. "I'm not alone now, am I?" She looked at the vampire over the rim of her glass. "What do I call you?"

The vampire smiled, picking up flirting in her tone where she intended sarcasm to be. "I'm Andy. Nice to meet you."

"You're new in town, aren't you, Andy?" That, or his nose wasn't working.

Andy confirmed that he was new to Sunnydale, had arrived the previous night in fact. Lucy nodded knowingly but didn't say anything. In about ten seconds she wouldn't have to, so she didn't see the point in wasting her breath. Andy got twitchy after three seconds.

"How'd you know I'm the new guy?" he asked.

Lucy smiled and finished her drink. "Logic."

When she wasn't any more forthcoming, Andy growled. Lucy kept on smiling. The rule of three anti-violence spell on the club would stop him from trying anything, and if he was stupid enough to go after her later then he deserved whatever he got.

"Wait a few seconds," Lucy said. "You'll see what I mean." The D-sharp cord echoing in her brain was loud enough that she felt confident in that estimate.

Andy gritted his teeth and swallowed half of his Scotch. He didn't walk away though, so points for perseverance.

Literal seconds later, the door at the main entry opened. Spike walked into the club and headed straight for the bar. Andy had his back to the door. Spike was a few feet behind him when Andy caught his scent and made the connection. Lucy held back a laugh.

"Fancy seeing you here," Spike said. He walked around Andy to stand next to Lucy.

Lucy smiled at him. "I'm making friends. This is Andy. Andy, this is Spike."

The look on Andy's face was priceless. It was a hilarious cross between terror, awe and embarrassment that had his eyes nearly bulging out of his skull. If vampires could blush he would probably have been blushing.

"William the Bloody," Andy said. He swallowed nervously. "Hey, man, I didn't know she was your girl."

Spike grinned. "What's a little misunderstanding between friends?" His eyes flashed yellow for a split second. Andy flinched but held his ground.

"He's new to town," Lucy said. "No allegiances."

Spike looked at her and raised an eyebrow.

"Dalton would find him tolerable," she added.

Spike turned back to Andy. "Well, looks like you've got a job, assuming the missus is right about you having half a brain."

At that Andy did take a step back. "I'd be honoured but, uh..." He glanced at Lucy and lowered his voice like that was going to stop her from hearing what he said. "I hear your girl's pretty loco, and I like having all my limbs attached."

Lucy bared her teeth and growled. "Don't call me crazy." Crazy was one degree from damaged, which was one degree from broken. Angel thought she was broken.

Spike narrowed his eyes at Andy. "See, now you really have no choice." He put a hand on Lucy's shoulder. "You don't want to make my girl angry."

Andy stuttered and choked, but he finally agreed to meet them at a given location (one of the suckhouses they owned) later that night. He wasn't planning on running for the hills. He was terrified, but also he really wanted to work with William the Bloody. Once he'd bowed his way back to the other side of the room, Lucy slid off the bar stool and waved goodbye to Cinna. She and Spike got a block away from the club before Spike's control slipped. Lucy had her back against a wall before she could blink.

"So, that's where you've been disappearing to," Spike said in a low voice. "You didn't think that maybe I'd be worried one of the white hats got you?"

"You'd know if I was dust." Lucy mentally plucked the bond between them and the fading cord sounded loudly in her mind. Spike pressed the hand that wasn't holding her against the side of the building to his heart.

"Not the point," he said.

Lucy rolled her eyes. "Buffy isn't going to dust me. The others will follow her lead. They're like sheep." Well, except for the Dingoes. They were more like Buffy.

Spike sighed and let her go. She gave him a kiss that tasted like blood.

"I've been plotting," she said. "I think I know how to torture Angel."

Spike froze, staring at her. "Do you?"

Lucy nodded. "Yup. Want to help me talk Drusilla into it?"

He did. He really did.

Lucy's plan was simple. It had only three steps. The problem was step one.

"We need to reduce the number of variables," Dalton said. "Otherwise there's too much of a risk something will go wrong."

"But we'll have more of an impact if we follow Angelus's MO," Lucy argued. She paused in her pacing to glare at Dalton across the table. He didn't even flinch. "I want to hurt him, Dalton."

Dalton nodded. "I understand, but we don't want to make any mistakes. You've kept a low profile so far. That'll change if you start leaving dead girls around Angel's apartment."

Lucy sighed. "Cunning like a fox?"

"Cunning like a fox," Dalton agreed.

Lucy sighed again and sat down next to Dalton. "Okay, what was your idea?"

"A bait-and-switch with something a little less alive." Dalton opened a book to the page he'd marked (with a bookmark of course, not by a method as barbaric as folding the corner of the page) and placed it in front of her. "There are several artifacts that could work for our purposes. One of the three Jade Monkeys, a piece of the Judge, the Sanderson Candle..."

Lucy read the description of each artifact Dalton pointed out. "Not one of the Monkeys. 'Hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil' could cause problems for us. Any weapons could be used against us." She thought about it for a bit before flipping back a few pages. She pointed to one of the entries. "That could work, but can we get it?"

"There's ringing in my head," Drusilla said. Lucy turned towards the door and saw Drusilla dancing and spinning as she crossed the factory floor while Spike followed behind her. "No, buzzing. Buzz, buzz, buzz." She smiled and pecked Lucy's forehead before drifting away.

Spike placed a blood-spotted newspaper on the table. "Dru thought you might like this."

Lucy took one look at the paper and burst into delighted laughter. "Drusilla, you're wondrous!" On the second page of the newspaper was exactly the artifact they were looking for. The stone sarcophagus holding the petrified Acathla had been dug up in the process of building low-rent housing (which seemed pointless since property values in Sunnydale were so low that someone could buy a house with a paperclip) and was now at the Sunnydale History Museum, waiting to be opened.

"Ashes, ashes." Drusilla shook her head. "Good boys and good girls go to hell. What shall we do?"

Lucy grinned. "Steal the portal."

There wasn't anyone at the museum when they arrived except for the night watchman and the curator in the room with the sarcophagus. Drusilla had the night watchman under her thrall in seconds and slit his throat with a flick of her fingers. The blood that spilled out smelled foul, like the watchman was rotting on the inside. All four of them had no trouble letting it bleed out onto the floor untasted. The curator was behind a locked door that Spike broke open with a kick.

The curator jumped to his feet as they entered the room, his heart racing. "You can't be in here!"

Spike raised his eyebrows in cartoonish shock. "We can't? So how are we already in the room, then?" He scoffed and dropped the exaggerated expression. "You hungry, kitten?"

Lucy stepped towards the panicked curator. "Starving. Do you mind if I don't share?"

Spike waved her forward. "Dru and I already had lunch."

The curator screamed when Lucy let her demonic face emerge. His screams quickly turned into gurgling when Lucy darted forward, threw him over the chair he'd jumped out of and crushed his trachea between her teeth. His blood was sweeter than any she'd had before, sticky, syrupy sweet. Maybe he was diabetic.

While Lucy finished her dessert-for-breakfast, Spike studied Acathla's sarcophagus. "That's a big rock. Can't wait to tell the grandsire; he doesn't have a rock this big."

"It's glittering," Drusilla breathed. "You get us the best presents, Spike."

Lucy dropped the curator's body behind his desk. "Let's figure out how to move it and get out of here. We probably set off some sort of alarm. Dalton, is that a trolley over there?"

Spike, Lucy and Dalton lifted the sarcophagus onto the trolley. Wheeling it out of the room was easy, finding a door that was large enough to get it out of the building without meeting a flight of stairs was harder. Lucy and Spike quickly lost patience.

"Screw this." Lucy chose a side door that led to the parking lot. "It needs about another foot and a half. Spike, I need to touch the top of the door frame." Spike obligingly wrapped his arms around Lucy's waist and lifted her up the few extra feet she needed. She laid her palms against the concrete above the door. She'd practiced this. It was as easy as levitating a pencil, maybe so easy that it verged on dark magic. "Celeritate interitus."

Thirty-six square inches of the wall turned to dust.

Spike placed her back on the ground. "Well then, how'd you manage that?"

"Everything eventually rots away. I sped it up a bit." Lucy pushed the door open. "Can we get out?"

The sarcophagus fit easily through the expanded opening. Then it was a matter of loading it into the van and deciding where they would store it. Lucy had the perfect location in mind, but first they had to do something about the two police officers who'd drawn the short straws to investigate the museum's alarm and seen them leaving the building.

Lucy's stomach growled.