Chapter 3: Of Sunnyhell and High Water
The first word Marco heard that morning was "Dormo" meaning sleep. He was then slammed against the wall, thrown there by invisible hands. He opened his eyes, and half bleary with sleep, he was able to assess the situation with clarity and calm, even though he faced over two dozen black knives ready to cut him to pieces as they hovered in midair next to Willow's head. Her eyes were almost solid black, and glaring straight at him. He could understand how the image must have looked, given that he was in bed with Buffy.
But this is a bit much, isn't it?
The knives outlined his body perfectly as they hit the wall, and two more were headed his way. One stopped below his crotch, and the other stopped just in front of the bridge of his nose.
"How dare you take advantage of her!" Willow snapped.
Marco blinked. "Since you obviously cast a spell to make sure Buffy stayed asleep, why don't you take the time to look around inside my head, eh? See what happened before you decide to do something you'll regret."
Willow lowered his eyes toward Marco, and dove into his mind.
Marco and Buffy, simply lay on the bed, holding one another.
"Ah, okay," Willow thinks, standing off to one side of the room in the memory.
"Feel better now?" Marco's conscious mind asks her, an image of him standing behind her.
Willow "turns" to him and says, "Yeah. Sorry about that."
"This is the last time I let you into my mind. You do know I could have kept you out, right?"
"Huh?"
Suddenly, the room dissolves into swirls of math problems, almost looking like lines of binary code. Beethoven's music floods Marco's mind, drowning Willow in it. Images of his life come at her like flashes of lightening, striking her, choking her, strangling her to death.
"YOU THINK YOU CAN RIP THROUGH MY MIND LIKE SOME CHEAP ZIP DRIVE WITHOUT PAYING A PRICE FOR IT!" Marco bellows as the currents of his mind toss her to and fro. "HOW DARE YOU, YOU VICIOUS WITCH! NOW GET OUT OF HERE BEFORE I FORGET TO BE NICE!"
Willow fell backwards, reeling from the experience. Marco dropped to his feet, the knives gone. He merely glared at her as she stood and fled from the room.
Buffy woke up on her side, facing outward. She rolled over, finding the other side of the bed empty. She closed her eyes, thinking, Not again. Of the three men she'd ever been with, only one had been there in the morning, and he was now in the back end of nowhere.
Apparently it doesn't matter whether or not I have sex with them, either.
"Darn, you weren't supposed to be up yet."
Buffy rolled over. Marco stood in the doorway, holding a breakfast tray with actual food on it.
"I thought you were gone."
"Well, I thought it would be nice to feed you. You were kind enough to let me sleep in your bed, the least I could do would be to cook."
Buffy grinned. "You're sweet. We should keep you around to make breakfast."
As much as she fought against consciousness, it was ever more persistent to keep her from falling into blissful darkness again. Cassie sighed, finally giving up the fight to stay asleep, and opened her eyes to dim, indirect sunlight.
Someone had drawn the blackout curtains across the one big window in the room. That someone had his head down on the table, pillowed on his folded arms.
Cassie couldn't keep a smile from her face as she watched him spring into focus with her glasses. With his closed eyes and a close approximation of bed hair, he looked nothing like the monster he had once been.
She stretched out on the mattress, wincing at the popping and cracking of her joints. With as much stealth as she could muster, she got dressed and ran a comb through her tangle of hair. She had the strong feeling that he was a grump when his sleep was interrupted, but it might be a good idea to tell him what was going on.
She tapped his arm. "Spike," she called softly, trying to not startle him. "Spike!"
He started awake, his eyes snapping open. "What? What?" His dark blue gaze focused on her. "Oh, it's you."
"Good morning to you, too," she teased gently.
Spike ran a hand across his face. "What time is it?"
Cassie glanced at the clock radio on the bedside table. "Nine o'clock. I just wanted to let you know I was going out to breakfast then the shop."
He nodded, trying not to give in to sleep again just yet. "Right then. Let me get in a few more hours and I'll meet y' there."
She smiled. "Thought you might. I'll put up the 'Do Not Disturb' sign. Consider the bed yours until then."
Spike managed to drudge up a little smile in return. "Thanks, pet. See ya." With that, he shed his duster, stumbled to the unmade bed, and almost immediately surrendered to the coma tugging at him.
Cassie picked up the coat from the floor and draped it over the chair. Carefully opening the door, she slipped the little sign onto the outer doorknob and stepped out into the warm daylight. Sleep well, Spike.
She found the Espresso Pump on the way to the shop, much to her delight, and indulged her caffeine and sugar habit with a double-vanilla mocha and a chocolate croissant. It was only once or twice every two weeks now that she gave in to her guilty pleasures, just to keep her from going completely insane from the cravings. Not unlike a vampire for blood, she thought idly, then smiled at herself, shaking her head. Okay, no more thoughts of vampires until the Magic Box. Bad enough I have one setting up house in my motel room.
The bell over the door sounded as she entered the shop at ten a.m., seeing that she was the second-to-last to arrive. Marco was leaning against the countertop with Willow's laptop in front of him, into which she had scanned most of Giles' library the previous summer. The others were seated at the large round table, piles upon piles of real books open before them.
"This is going to sound incredibly stupid," she began, "but any luck yet?"
"Not yet," Tara replied, taking her eyes from the yellowed pages for a moment to give her a glance. "But we haven't gone through everything."
Cassie smiled. Research was one of the few things she had become really good at during her college career, and it hadn't waned for lack of practice. "Make room and hand me a book."
Hours passed as the sun traveled its appointed path, keeping most unwanted nasties away from the shop. Spike arrived via the sewers about two in the afternoon, lending them another pair of eyes to help search. They all spent much of the day, with brief breaks for food and coffee, looking over the books with no result.
Cassie removed her glasses, her fingers pressed into her eyeballs to make them stop hurting from the strain. She took a moment to glance around, lenses held in front of her face. Everyone was either in deep concentration over Giles' books, looking for something, anything to give them a lead; or simply dead to the world.
The only one who wasn't hunched over a book or napping was Spike, taking a break with a lit cigarette. He looked up to see her eyes on him, and gave her a little smirk. Cassie bit her lip to keep from laughing out loud. It was almost funny seeing him trying to keep up his image of the "big bad vampire." But there was one thing that she wanted to know, and only he had the answer.
"Hey, Spike, join me in the training room for a bit?" she asked, slipping the glasses back onto her face. "I need a short workout and I hate doing it alone."
He cocked a questioning eyebrow at her, and she knew that Marco was doing the exact same thing. Spike shrugged and nodded. "Fine with me."
Marco shot Spike a questioning look, which was ignored, sighed and went back to the notebook computer, tapping the "page down" key repeatedly. Spike couldn't hurt her, and he knew she could beat him red, black, and various other colors of the rainbow… and some that weren't.
Spike and Cassie sparred for a while, he blocking every punch and kick she threw at him. She even tried a gymnastic-type move she'd seen Buffy use. She wound up losing her balance and would have hit the floor had Spike not caught her.
She looked up at him with a self-deprecating smile. "Well, it's confirmed: no way am I a Slayer."
"No, but I wouldn't worry." He carefully set her back on her feet.
"Thanks." She picked up the water bottle from the corner and took a swig, looking at him again. "Spike, do you mind if I ask you a personal question? You don't have to answer if you don't want to," she added quickly.
Spike smiled at her attempt to not embarrass him. It was almost endearing, really. "As long as the option's open, pet, shoot."
She couldn't help but grin. "You're lucky Marco's not around to hear that."
Spike laughed, realizing what her brother would have done with the straight line. "You're right… So, ask."
"Why didn't you attack me that first night we met?"
He furrowed his brows at her. "Why would I want to?"
"Well, I would assume that a vampire, and as far as I can tell a soulless one at that, would want to drink a girl to death rather than stake a fellow vamp to save her life." She gazed at him expectantly.
He sighed and launched into an abbreviated explanation of his being wired with an electronic muzzle. "And even if I get it out, I don't think I wanna go back t' the way things were before."
She smiled at him. Thanks to Giles and Anya, she had heard a lot of horror stories about Spike pre-chip, but she had a good feeling about him now. He wasn't Angel, not by a long shot, but he had his own demon to rein in and fight against. And it wasn't just because of the chip, but because, and for, the Slayer. It also helped that she could still read eyes well, even when they supposedly didn't have a soul behind them.
"I don't know why they doubt that you care about her, or any of them."
Spike smiled. "Well, your brother doubts it," he reminded her. "With the threats to m' person an' all."
"If you didn't have the chip, you could have hurt me and you didn't. Besides, I can be just as bad tempered as Marco." The look on his face told her he didn't believe her, but she smiled anyway. "Hey, just don't give him an excuse to hurt you." She tugged on his sleeve. "Come on, let's get back out there and figure out what's going on."
The vampire made a mental note as he watched her walk into the shop again: never get the Cattalano family pissed.
Page down. Page down. Page down. At last, he encountered the same tangle of red hair, the green eyes staring out from a demonic vampire face. "Gotcha, you bitch!" Marco snarled, startling the others with its ferocity. He swiveled in place to look at the others, his eyes bright with an odd sort of joy. "I've got her!" he roared.
"Finally!" Spike said. "Startin' t' get eyesore lookin' at all these books."
Cassie rubbed her own eyes behind her glasses. "How do you think I feel? And I like reading!"
Marco showed around the digitized hand-drawn picture of this new and powerful vampire. Buffy nodded. "Yup. That's her."
"Who'd you think I'd find? Bela Lugosi?" he asked. He spun the computer around so the others could see. "Check out the bad news."
Buffy squinted at the words. "Um, anyone here understand this?"
Cassie motioned for the screen and looked over the text. "It's a really bad scan." After another moment, she began, "Okay, her name is Nuala na Connemarragh." The "ua" came out with a long "oo" sound.
"Is that some sort of disease?" Xander replied.
Anya nodded. "Sounds nasty."
"Isn't Connemara where they get all that nice marble?" Willow asked.
"It is," Marco replied. "But in this case, it might be talking about where she's from, where she was born. So her name's literally 'Nuala from Connemara.' Although she could have been born in Belfast for all the name means now."
"Actually, it says she was from Ulster…. To continue," Cassie said pointedly, returning to the text. "She was born in 1183." She cocked her eyebrow, a small smile quirking her lips. "Talk about your good years."
Marco frowned at her poor attempt to joke. "Keep going."
"She was sired in 1201." She paused, regret briefly tingeing her blue eyes. "She would've been eighteen." She shook her head and kept going. "There's something here about who—no, what she was before she was turned, the explanation for why she's so powerful. She—" She stopped, her eyes widening to dessert plates (dinner plates seemed to be impossible for her). "Oh God," she breathed.
Buffy fidgeted, starting to feel nervous. "What? What is it?"
Cassie swallowed. "It says that, before she was turned, she was a Slayer." She brought her gaze up from the screen. "Guys, we're dealing with a Slayer vampire."
Everyone was shocked into silence.
"A Slayer," Buffy whispered. She looked around the table, her eyes settling on Spike. "That even possible?"
Spike shrugged. "First time I've heard of it happenin'. Didn't even think a Slayer could be turned, but it's the kinda thing a really old master vamp has wet dreams about. Turning the enemy of his kind—our kind—into one of his own."
Silence again descended on the room, as everyone was lost in thoughts rife with implications. Some vampire had been lucky enough to not only kill a Slayer but also turn her. Somehow, this had automatically made her stronger than vampire or Slayer human. Buffy silently mourned for the soul of the vampire that they now had to fight.
Cassie tipped some water from her glass and dabbed at her eyes, causing her to cry a little. She was sore and tired and she felt like she could sleep for a week. It was hard getting her brain to work after her long-ago caffeine fix that morning.
"So why Ireland?" Marco asked. "Why a Gaelic vampire?"
"Well," Giles began, taking off his glasses. "The Council… the Watcher's Council… started in Africa, as was proper for the first Slayer."
"Yeah," Buffy said, "she did talk with a bit of an accent."
Marco cocked a brow, but said nothing.
"Wait a second," Xader exclaimed, "there were Watchers even before there were books? Is that allowed?"
"In any event," Giles continued, cleaning his glasses, ignoring him. "The Council moved with the rest of the human race. Unlike some movements up through Spain, Italy, and Turkey to get to Europe, the Council went through the Middle East, arriving at Russia through Afghanistan. After that, they traveled with the Celts through Europe to Northern Spain. Apparently, with their ability to spin and believe faery stories, they had no problem with a woman who could snap swords in two."
"And under Druidic law, they were almost equal in status to men, and just as ferocious," Cassie noted.
"And that was just the normal woman," Marco added. "I take it these Celts had no problem with vampires or demons, either?"
"Patently not. They would have great whopping attacks against demons, and having a good time of it too, apparently. They were a good part of the army that first disassembled the Judge."
"They had…fun?" Buffy said, a little incredulous.
"Yeah," Marco said. "They spent a lot of days raiding as a pastime…. From each other and anyone else around, usually."
"They even made an epic over one," Cassie added.
"What Herr Giles managed to leave out," Marco continued, "was that the Celts sacked Rome at one point, even Turkey."
"Gobble, gobble," Xander joked, and chuckled at his own pathetic joke.
Spike lit another cigarette and looked at him. "Don't you ever get any thought in your head that stays there?" He inhaled deeply and puffed out smoke in Giles' direction. "So how did they all end up like you?"
"1601," Marco stated. "Hugh O'Neil's rebellion. The Council moved to England from Ireland?"
"Not exactly. They moved in 1200s, under Henry II, after Richard DeClare arrived at the head of the King of Lenster's mercenaries. The Council has been there for seven hundred years. The Slayer, however, has shown up multiple places, though a good deal of them has managed to reside in Ireland. Something about the breed that works."
"So if a staking won't work, what will?" Buffy asked, finally asking the question no one wanted to voice.
"Maybe we need some overkill," Marco commented, his tone sounding as if he were thinking out loud.
Everyone gave him curious glances, prompting him to go on. "Well, you know about Rasputin?" he asked. "He had to be shot, stabbed, poisoned, beaten, and drowned before he finally died. How about you burn her, stake her, toss her into the sunlight, and cut her head off? There's a reason my stakes are doused in turpentine."
"It's not that staking her won't work," Giles said. "You must understand, a Slayer vampire is something new and extremely volatile."
"New?" Spike choked. "The bleeding girl is more than four times my age!"
"I guess that means dating her is out," Willow said innocently.
"It's never been done, before or since," the Watcher replied. "Nuala seems to come out of the shadows every few years, kill someone important, then disappear again," he said quickly, exasperated. He breathed deeply, and continued, calmer. "No one knows what exactly would kill her. She seems to have the strength of a Slayer times that of a vampire, therefore we can reasonably assume her healing powers are just as great. Maybe it's just a matter of putting in the stake and making sure it stays there long enough for it to have effect."
"You're rather annoyed for someone who only just encountered this thing," Marco observed. "It sounds almost personal. What is it?"
Giles sighed and removed his glasses once more. "You see… the Council suspects that Nuala is directed somehow, though she's not of the Order of Tarraka. Her targets seem too well picked to be random guesses from a list of intended victims. In fact, she almost never feeds from them, or even kills them at close range. Her preferred weapon is a rapparre: a light Gaelic spear."
Buffy looked at Marco. "What she used on us last night."
He raised a finger. "Tried to use on us last night."
"Just so," the Watcher continued. "She's also used a crossbow, and other various weapons. The last assassination on record was with a rifle in the 1800s. The only reason we know it was her is the mark she left on the bullet extracted from him. "
"So we're dealing with a vampiric hit-woman," Xander remarked. "Perfect. So she's after Buffy."
"And Marco," Buffy put in.
"What makes you think he's on the vampire hit parade?" Willow asked her.
Spike shot her a look. "Do you need to ask? We've been around him for weeks and we hate him. Most vamps would've eaten 'im long ago."
"Will, what about that demon you all fought last month?" Buffy said. "If he was killed, and if he were taken out by Marco, don't you think someone'd want payback?"
Cassie knew what she meant, but didn't want Marco to stake Spike for telling her. "Whoa, hold on," she said, making a time-out signal with her hands. "What demon?"
"A little problem we dealt with last month," Marco said absentmindedly. "It was a team effort, really, I just stayed with my talents and made a point to honk the guy off."
Cassie nodded, her flickering eyes saying she didn't believe him, but let it go for right now. "Okay, but what Buffy's saying makes sense. It's kinda like saying, 'You mess with me, you mess with my family'."
Buffy's eyes darkened ever so slightly. "Well, now she's messed with my family. And I'm not gonna let her get away with it."
Willow looked over at Marco, who had drifted into his own mind. "Marco? Something wrong?"
His eyes flashed for a moment and he turned to her, eyes gleaming manically. "Nothing… yet." He stood and whirled in one, smooth motion. "Cassie! How old did you say our girl was?"
Her face fell. "Eighteen."
"No!" he said, excited. "Sired when?"
"Twelve hundred and one," Giles answered. "About the time the Watcher's Council moved to England. Why? Something amiss?"
Marco's head twitched to Giles. "I know this witch." He glanced at Willow. "My apologies."
"No problem."
He looked to Cassie. "Remember our friend from Brooklyn? The big vampire?"
Cassie's mind was filled with the towering image of the giant vampire she'd had to kill. "How could I forget? I remember hearing a name like Mikhail."
Spike glanced at Cassie. "Mikhail the Bear? You dusted 'im?"
"Well, he was built like a bear. You've met?"
"Right sure I did. He beat me up back about the turn of the century. I wandered into the midst of a nest he was settin' up, and 'e was pissed."
"Back to me for a moment," Marco said. He stepped in front of Buffy and smiled. "I recently chatted with your old boyfriend, and apparently, our friendly Russian vampire in Brooklyn had been trained by a rather vicious, eight hundred year old vampire from Ulster. Sound like anyone we know?"
He whirled toward Spike. "If you were an assassin whose only goal was to kill someone, how would you do it?"
Spike looked at him funny. "Why the 'ell are you askin' me?"
"Because you're the closest thing we have to a killing machine. I'm afraid I'd want to have too much fun," Marco snapped at him. "And the only good quality about you is that you aren't a sadist, so answer my damn question, okay?"
Cassie stepped back a little from Marco, getting a small glimmer of what he'd hidden from her. His eyes sparkled with a distant…something. It was dark, it was scary, and it was her brother.
"I'd simply kill you both," Spike stated. "If I were going to do it, I'd do her first, then you, but preferably at the same time—"
"That's why she waited for us to be right next to each other," Buffy said.
Marco nodded, not looking away from Spike. "Continue."
"And I'd try to hit you when you're not expectin' it."
Marco nodded again slowly, thoughtfully. Then his eyes widened suddenly and he jumped on Buffy an instant before the sound of a pistol rang through the Magic Box, breaking through the storefront window, ripping through the shutters, and impacting in Marco's back.
