Chapter 9
She pulled away from him suddenly, and he wondered if he only imagined the lingering touch of her fingers at the back of his neck.
"Did it work? Do you feel saved?"
He said nothing, because he knew it was not the reason she had kissed him, anymore than this was anything the sky above them had not witnessed before.
"Guess not." She walked a little way past him, taking a sudden interest in the lettering on a memorial just beyond them. He watched as she traced her fingers around the carved stonework.
"Looks like it's you or me then, Vampire."
He didn't imagine it then, the whisper of her fingers against his face, as she reached out, almost involuntarily, towards him. But he lifted her hand gently away from him, and she saw something like hurt in his eyes.
"I'm sorry, Spike, I – I didn't mean – " She bit her lip. "You're not a vampire."
"I'll always be a vampire."
They stood in the churchyard, the hundred steps stretched out before them, the rain coloured with afternoon and scattered shafts of stained-glass sunlight.
It's all you are Spike. What you are in this conversation, what you are in my head.
"It's all I am to you, Buffy, it's all I'll ever be."
"You're more than that, Spike." And in her head she acknowledged the truth. You've always been more than that.
"In three weeks' time it won't make any difference what I am."
"Why three weeks? Why did she say that?" She moved across a little way in front of him as she asked the question, her eyes fixed far into the distance.
"I had a month. A month from the moment I became human to find you and persuade you to save my life." He looked up. "Buffy, I swear I didn't know what it meant."
He heard the wry smile in her voice. "Of course, a month. The thirtieth day." She turned back to face him. "What do we do now?"
We. He heard that one word above the sea, and the rain, and the wind, and he would still have heard it if every seagull in the world had chosen to open its beak and scream at that moment.
He walked towards her, the faintest trace of a smile playing around his mouth. "What would you do, if you had three weeks?"
"Don't think like that."
"You offering to die for me, Slayer?"
"There must be another way."
"There is no other way; it's you or me, you said it yourself." He smiled at her, quietly. "The world needs you, Slayer, the Little Bit, the Watcher, the About-to-be-sucked-dry, they all need you. And I need you, Slayer. I need you too much to go on without you. So three weeks from now I'm going to go, and I don't need tears, or flowers, or even one of these." He nodded his head towards the gravestones assembled behind them. "I'll just be gone, and then you needn't worry your little head about me any more."
She was silent, and he said, suddenly, his voice low with gentle irony. "Greater love has no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends."
"What?"
"It was the inscription on the tombstone back there, the sailor that died saving the rest of his crew in a shipwreck."
"I didn't see that one."
"Yes you did." He was looking straight at her. "You were standing there reading it."
Buffy was quiet for a moment, but though she changed the subject, he had not missed the confession in her eyes. "What is that over there?"
Spike followed her gaze, across the opposite cliff. "The arch? Whalebone."
"Look, don't you think she looks like the Dracula woman?"
He saw what she meant, the silhouette of a figure standing beneath the arch. But he heard the catch of her breath beside him, and he knew she was reliving the woman's prophecy.
"Oh, god, Spike."
She turned to him with eyes that glistened with something more than rain, but he was looking at her with that old blue invitation, and he was exactly the way she remembered him.
"Can I take it you'll cut me some slack then, Slayer?"
She wound her hands around his neck, and her eyes were very wicked as she leaned into his. "Do you want me too?"
The rain had stopped, and the glow of a sinking sun illuminated a mirror world by the time they walked back, through the puddles.
She lifted her head from his shoulder as a sudden thought struck her. "You know, Spike, I'm a bit freaked by this Slayer eye thing."
"Now you put it like that, love, I'm freaked too."
"Do you think Elizabeth really sees everything I see?"
"I don't know. It seems – " He paused, searching for the right words. "When I first met her, Buffy, it felt like she was the first person to look at me and not judge me. I knew she couldn't see me, but it felt like she believed in me. She trusted me, Buffy, just like that. And I thought then that it was because she couldn't see me, because she didn't know what I really was."
"Spike, this doesn't make sense." She looked across at him. "If Elizabeth truly saw you the way I saw you she wouldn't have trusted you for a moment."
It was only half a joke, and she saw the sudden tightening of his jaw. But he, too, recognised the truth of it.
"None of it makes sense. Buffy, I think we should go and find Elizabeth and see for ourselves."
Karen was a lawyer, and a successful one, and in a way that was subtle and yet unmistakable, everything about the hotel reflected that. It was smart, and confident, and expensive. Nothing opulent, everything calculated to impress. She had made a career out of persuading people to believe that what she said was the truth, and when she told them, brightly, that, "Elizabeth was fine, absolutely fine, and they were all having a lovely holiday," she intended them to see exactly that.
Buffy watched, in silence, as the tiny, beautiful girl who had seemed so cold in her arms that night in London made her way, hesitantly, into the room. She noted the change in her demeanour as she recognised Spike's voice, and she looked on with something not so very far from longing as the little girl climbed into his lap, and he ran his hand gently, absently, over the back of the black-braided head.
And suddenly it didn't matter any more; none of it mattered. She couldn't carry on holding onto a past that had no bearing on the future, any more than she could think about a future that stretched no further than the next three weeks. She watched as Elizabeth prodded soft, brown fingers into Spike's face, and she knew what she wanted. Deep within her mind she traced the line of his shoulders with the fall of her hair; drew the length of his back with the cool of her hands; pressed the wall of his thigh with the curve of her knee.
She could need him and still be the Slayer.
Spike watched the face of the little girl as she clung to him, her hands skipping with silent laughter. But it was not the touch of her fingers he felt on his face. It was the eyes of the Slayer.
* * * * * * * * * *
"Buffy, thank goodness you're here." Buffy could see he was agitated, by the finger tracks running through his hair, and his glasses resting precariously near the table edge.
"Giles, what is it?" She felt Spike hold his breath as the eyes he held in his flared green impatience. "You know she lied to us, don't you? Your strange cake woman at the Dracula place?"
"Unfortunately, Buffy, she wields the power of something rather more sinister than strange cakes."
"What is she? Demon? Hell god?"
They looked at her, the two men that loved the Slayer: the one touched by an affection he might have felt for a daughter, had he had one; the other broken by a fast-held, long-treasured emotion that ran deeper than his very soul. And they saw a woman who, just then, was everything she needed to be, and knew it. She stood there, beautiful and determined, her conviction set on her face. I can do this. It's nothing I haven't come across before.
Giles shook his head, slowly. "She's neither hell god, nor demon, nor anything so far-removed from what the world would want to call reality. She is exactly what we saw: a woman; an ordinary, lonely woman. Her power lies not in what she is, but in what she is capable of becoming."
"What do you mean?"
"From everything I have learnt this evening, I believe she means to engage in an ancient ritual that will tap into a power source that has lain dormant for thousands of years."
"Don't look so serious, Giles. I'm good at rituals, remember? Ancient ones especially. Are we talking world-endy class ritual here?"
Giles spoke, automatically, as if his words were set in stone and could not but take the form they did. "The power she seeks is darker than any power the world has known. It is rooted in an evil that has neither the fire of anger, nor the passion of hatred, nor the depth of pain. It is evil beyond feeling and beyond thought. If she were to succeed in reaching it the force of it would strike her dead instantly."
"Is that good?"
"Unfortunately, not." He paused, his voice suddenly tired and old. "The ritual dictates that there is only one way this surge of dark energy can be withstood."
"Giles, I'm not liking your tone of voice right now. You have the 'somebody has to die' look on your face."
He continued, his face drawn. "If the energy first enters the soul of an Innocent the force will destroy that soul instead. If she could find some, pure soul to shield her from that initial blast of darkness she would be free to channel the remaining power for her own purposes."
Buffy replied with a levity that refused to give in spite of all that weighed upon it. "Wait, I think I know this one. We have to find her and stop her before she can get to anyone that answers to the words pure and soul."
"We may be too late. If I'm right, she already has a hold on just such an Innocent."
"Anyone we know?" The words were lightly spoken, but Buffy heard them echo back at her like a gunshot in a mineshaft. "Oh my god."
Giles saw the realisation as it cracked across her face, and he explained quietly, "Buffy, I've just heard from Willow. She and Angel followed up the information we had, and it was they that pointed me towards this. Do you remember when you first heard that vampire call Elizabeth 'Lycaena', I told you Lycaena was a species of butterfly?" He hesitated. "In Greek mythology, the butterfly is the symbol of Psyche."
"Psyche?"
Spike volunteered an explanation. "Girl was offered as a sacrifice to appease the gods."
"Her name, Psyche, means – "
"Soul." Spike took the word from him before Giles had a chance to finish his sentence.
"And the Slayer's eyes? What does that have to do with anything?"
"Nothing at all. It was a fantasy propped up in order to sustain an illusion, keep us out of the loop. Elizabeth is just an ordinary little girl who happened to be out sleepwalking in the wrong place at the wrong time."
Buffy got to her feet. "Then we have to get to Elizabeth before she does."
"It's too late for that. They already have some kind of hold on her. She hasn't spoken because she's under some form of enchantment. Until we can find a way to reverse the spell, there is nothing we can do to protect her."
"We can at least try, Giles." Buffy stood, and the square of her shoulders dared anyone to stand in her way. "You keep working on a way to break that spell. Spike and I will get over to the hotel and keep watch over Elizabeth."
Giles nodded. "Wait a minute, though. We don't know for sure that that's where they are right now, and you need to go straight to them. I have Karen's mobile number; I'll give her a ring to check." He paused, briefly, as he got up and walked towards the door. "Oh, and Buffy? Don't…tell her any of this. The longer we can keep her from knowing, the better."
Spike saw it, as Giles left the room: fear, shadowed across the face of the Slayer, and he knew they were both thinking the same thing. And he knew from the moment Giles appeared, again, in the doorway, his face darkened by the same shadow, that it was more than a thought.
"She's gone." Giles hung his head in a gesture of quiet despair. "She's already gone."
Buffy looked across at him, her hands fixed to her hips. "Then we need to do something about it and we need to do it fast. Do you have any idea when the ritual will take place?"
"Sunset, on the thirtieth day of the Festival of Psyche."
"Which is? Come on, give me a clue. What letter does it begin with?"
"Tomorrow." His face twisted with the irony of it. "It's tomorrow."
"Why is it always tomorrow? Just for once, couldn't somebody schedule their apocalypse at least far enough in advance to give us time to reply to the invitation?"
"The ritual itself began on the first day of the Festival. Tomorrow is just the culmination of it."
"But Giles, you said yourself she's only human. Surely if we find her we can stop her?"
He longed for her assurance to be enough, but the truth of it was inescapable. "Like I said, the ritual is already underway."
"But there must be something we can do." She was still looking at him with those same eyes that had trusted him and believed in him all the years he had known her, her implicit confidence in him staring him in the face.
"There is only one way the ritual can be stopped."
"What? Giles, what is it?"
His head was bowed, and he did not reply. But she thought back to the vampire's words the night before, and she already knew the answer.
TBC
[Come on, I gave you a nice cliff hanger last time…!! Chapter 10 up very soon!]