Chapter Eleven

"Why won't you come with me?" Buffy asked him. Her voice was vulnerably small, childishly petulant. She had both arms crossed over her breasts, her head turned slightly at an angle so that she was not looking directly at him.

"I can't leave here," he told her, motioning to the marble crypt just behind them. "I thought you knew…that I couldn't leave."

"I did," she replied. Her eyes met his briefly and then looked away again. "But I didn't believe it. Neither should you."

"Fact is fact. You can't predict history anymore than you can rewrite the future. I belong here."

"Why? Because it's where your history began? A life that comes full circle doesn't go very far. I would think a straight line would be more suited to your tastes. You like to keep moving…Why move if it isn't getting you anywhere?"

"I went as far as I could," he said. "If it holds me back I hardly think I am to be blamed."

"But does it? Hold you back, I mean. Does it?"

"Takes more than a spark to light a candle."

"A spark is a flame," she replied casually. "A flame is a candle and a candle is light. Why are you confused?"

"You should know. You're the slayer." He took her hand and pressed it to his chest. "It's all dark in here."

"Maybe it's supposed to be."

"But it isn't what I want."

"What do you want?" she asked. Her hand was on his chest and she was looking him full in the eye now.

"Light. I want light. I want to give it to you."

Buffy cocked her head at him, appearing to consider his words. For a moment neither of them spoke. Then she drew back the hand that had been resting against his chest and plunged it forward again. It sank into his chest, tunneling through pain and something else to pull out a dripping, throbbing bundle. She held his heart up to the light to get a better look at it.

"That's okay," she told him. There was a line of blood snaking down her arm but she didn't appear to notice. "You don't have to give it to me. I can get it on my own."

Spike pressed a hand against his gaping, hollow wound. "It hurts," he said.

"It's supposed to."

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Spike woke up with a start, wrenching himself from the arms of sleep so abruptly he felt dazed for a moment. He had to look around the bedroom several times to figure out where he was. The room was blue with the fading night, sparsely furnished and very plain. He didn't come back to himself fully until the kitten climbed up from its post on the foot of his bed and swatted him with a playful paw, demanding affection.

The dream had left him shaking, holding one hand to his heart and wondering why the pain hadn't ended when he awoke. He could still feel it, the wound—the emptiness. Deep inside him, it hurt. He wiped the sweat from his brow and sat up, knowing that sleep, always an elusive thing, would be impossible to capture just now. He climbed out of bed and ignored the kitten, which eagerly scampered to the kitchen, hoping for a bite. Spike made his way to the living room instead, switching of the lamp and flopping into the comfortable depths of his one chair.

He closed his eyes and tried to think about her. Buffy, her golden hair soft and flowing, a gentle smile curving her lips as—

Spike opened his eyes. It was no good. All he could see was the Buffy from his dream and he didn't like that picture so much. It upset him, not being able to see her as he wanted. It was his favorite trick, his way to find comfort, dreaming of her. Usually, he could imagine her in any situation he wanted, in any mood he wanted. He didn't usually make up stuff on his own, choosing instead to remember the softer moments they had spent together. His favorite memory was that of their last night together, the night in bedroom before he knew— before he knew. It was the most painful one to think about, the ending that could have been happy but wasn't. Yet something in him made Spike revisit that moment over and over. Her soft, soft lips brushing against his mouth…her smooth tongue dancing across the tip of his own…It was both extremely pleasant and extremely painful for him to think about. The moment of ecstasy, that would never be repeated.

Dream Buffy refused to let him envision the tender, demonstrative Buffy of that last night. Every time he tried, he saw her in the nightmare, looking at him matter-of-factly as she pulled his bleeding heart from his chest. He knew all dreams were supposed to mean something, and this one depressed him greatly. It wasn't so much the violence of the act that bothered him as the underlying message: she had his heart, whether he wanted her to or not.

He smiled to himself bitterly. It was almost amusing. Once he had been the Big Bad…killer of women and children, barroom brawler, renowned executioner of vampire slayers. He had been at the top of his game, on the top of the world. Then he came to Sunnydale…and he saw her. And that was the end of everything. She fevered his blood, infected his brain. She seized his heart. She burned in him, hot and relentless. She possessed him, twisted him…molded him into something else.

At first, he had wanted to kill her for it. That wasn't all just tough talk—he would gladly have given his eyeteeth to have the chance to snap her neck. But it was all a cover. He knew that now. Not that he wouldn't have killed her—he would have killed her. He was honest with himself about it and he knew that, given the chance, he would have broken her neck or laid open her throat. But he wouldn't have done it because she was a slayer…or because he hated her. She turned his world upside down, made Dru seem something less than what she had been. She had invaded his dreams, haunted his wakefulness. She made him feel something he didn't want to feel and, in the beginning, he would have gladly slaughtered her just to make the feelings stop.

Spike wondered if killing her would have been the answer. Would the longing have ceased if the object of longing were no longer present? It was hard to say. Her death had not stopped the longing. He had wanted her just as much as ever, maybe more so. But he was so gone by that time, so lost in her. Who knows what may have happened had he or Drusilla been able to kill her as planned? Would he have been cutting a continual, bloody swathe across the country, happily oblivious to what he had never had? Would it still have hurt him, early on in his madness as he was? The funny thing was that no matter how often he toyed with the idea he always reached the same baffling conclusion: no matter how much it hurt he would not give up loving Buffy for anything. Not even happiness.

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Spike had been gone two weeks.

It was the first thing that popped into Buffy's head as she opened her eyes that morning. Two weeks—half a month—and no word from him whatsoever. She had gone to his crypt as soon as she had found his note that morning, hoping, praying that he would be there. Instead, she found Clem, moving furniture and humming along to the score of The Sound of Music. Even after she had slammed him into the wall a few times the demon had sworn he knew nothing of Spike's whereabouts, only that the ex vamp was gone from the crypt for good. Still not satisfied, she had searched the place, convinced he must be hiding from her. When this proved untrue, she left the crypt to search the cemetery…and from the cemetery, she went to the Bronze… For over a week, she had combed the entire town at least ten times a day, hoping against hope that she would run into him. She never did.

When he had been gone for ten days, Buffy came to terms with the fact he was gone for good. At least, she thought she had come to terms with the fact that he was gone for good. But admitting it and accepting weren't the same thing. She had managed the former (after much internal struggle) but the latter kept eluding her. She knew he was gone. She knew from his letter he was not planning to return to her…yet she could not stop hoping. She couldn't stop dreaming of him. She didn't want to. Dreams were all she had of him now.

No one was permitted to speak his name in her house. On the morning she found the note, she had stalked into the kitchen and ordered them never to speak his name to her again. So they didn't. They thought she was angry with him for leaving, but that was only a half-truth. She was angry, but more than this, she was hurt. It was her fault he was gone, and this was what hurt more than anything did. He had given her so many chances—had practically begged her to look into her heart and see what he knew had to be there. And she wouldn't. Now he didn't believe. Now he thought she couldn't love him because of the material from which he was made.

She accepted her share of the blame in this fiasco that was her love life, but that didn't stop her from being angry with him. He had been so stupid to believe she didn't know he was a demon. She was the slayer. He should have known she would be aware of this. He should have known that her presence in the bedroom that night was a clear indication that she didn't give a damn how he started out. Or where. Or by whom. She loved him for what he was now, and she was angry with him for not knowing it instinctively. He hadn't even tried talking to her about it, hadn't even given her the chance to see if it would matter. He just stormed out in the middle of the night without a word to anyone, had left that damn note on the doorstep the following morning.

The note was Buffy's secret. No one knew about it, not even Willow and Dawn. Buffy wasn't sure why she kept it hidden. She knew that had she told them about it they wouldn't have asked to read it or pressed her to tell them what was in it…but for some reason she was loath to share her precious treasure with them. It was, after all, the only thing she had to remind her of him. His other gifts had been more subtle, things that one could feel but could not see. The soul, for instance. But the letter she could see, could hold, could keep under her pillow at night to chase away bad dreams. It was hers and she could not bear the thought of anyone else even knowing it existed. It would have been a betrayal to him, like letting someone look into his heart. Not to mention her own.

The note was folded safely in the hip pocket of Buffy's jeans as she slid into the kitchen for breakfast on the fourteenth fully Spike-free day of her life. She returned the polite greetings of her sister and her friends, but she wasn't really paying attention to what they were saying. She felt disconnected from them, separated by her grief. Her head hummed dully as Dawn went on and on and on about the twenty dollars she would need to go to the movies with Janice, and she held out the money without her usual grousing about how Dawn never made it last.

Her melancholia blanketed the room and slowly the conversation around the breakfast table dwindled. Xander, who had been attacking his pancakes with relish, suddenly pushed his plate away and stared at the tablecloth. Giles sipped coffee with an air of studied tranquility and steadfastly read his morning paper (or he appeared to—as Dawn noticed, he was holding the Literature and Arts section upside down). Willow, who was manning the stove, plopped the last pancake on the stack and smacked the plate on the table. She fell into her chair wearily, completely ignoring Xander's silent pleas for help. Only Dawn, who pocketed her money with thanks, seemed content to eat without talking.

Buffy picked at her pancakes morosely, completely unaware that the rest of the gang was staring at her. She was thinking of all the meals Willow had been making them lately—an attempt to apologize to them for lying. "Penitent" food, she called it. Buffy was remembering the last time Willow's conscience had goaded her into baking. It was their freshman year at college and Oz had just left. Willow had performed a vengeance spell on him that inadvertently affect the rest of the Scoobies. Giles had gone blind, Xander had been trailed by hoards of demons, and Buffy fallen in love with Spike.

Spike.

She smiled at her breakfast, thinking of him, of how he was then. Obnoxious, stupid, vulgar Spike tied to a kitchen chair, sipping blood from Giles' Kiss the Librarian mug. Spike eating Wheatabix and watching Passions, shushing anyone who tried to speak during the show. Spike demanding to know why blood couldn't be on the Thanksgiving dinner menu. She had hated him then…or thought she had…or pretended she had. Yet even then, even when he had driven her completely nuts, she had sought him out. He had energized her, made her feel completely alive. Without him, she felt lost. A lamp without light. A toy without a battery.

She closed her eyes for just a moment, imagining him just waltzing back into her life one day. Just like that. Completing the painting.

"Ahem!"

Dawn cleared her throat loudly, banging her hand against the table impatiently. "Buffy, hello! Am I mute as well as invisible now?"

Buffy snapped to attention. "What?" she asked. Dawn was standing by the table, a book bag slung over one arm. She tapped her watch when Buffy looked at her.

"It's seven-thirty; I need to get to school. So if you're riding with Xander and me then you better get off your butt and into the car."

"Oh…yeah…"

Buffy stood up, leaving her plate of untouched pancakes on the table. Her hand brushed the pocket of her jeans as she pulled on her coat, checking to see if the note was still there. It was. She headed for the door but paused with her hand on the knob.

"Uh…you guys go on out to the car," she told Dawn. "I have to answer a call of nature. I'll meet you out there."

"Soon!" Dawn said. "We're late enough as it is."

Buffy nodded. She walked into the bathroom and locked the door behind her. Then she pulled out the note. The large, tissue-thin page was wrinkled and dog-eared from travel, but the blunt black print stood out stark and clear on the creamy page. Spike's blue ink-scrawled message seemed obscenely bright by comparison. Buffy read the words, her lips moving silently as she repeated sentences she had almost memorized. When she finished she folded the paper into a neat, small square. She gazed at it thoughtfully for a moment.

And she ripped it in half.

She kept tearing and kept tearing until she held nothing but a pile of confetti, then she upturned her palm and let the confetti flutter into the wastebasket. Tears came to her eyes when she gazed at the little pile, but she swallowed them down.

"Goodbye Spike," she said softly. Then she turned and walked out.

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Willow knew better than to get started right away. She would have to wait a few hours before she could safely begin—enough time to ensure they wouldn't be coming back for some forgotten item, a short enough to period not to worry that they might be coming home in the middle of it. So she cleaned the house, washed the breakfast dishes, took out the trash…all the while keeping one eye focused on her wristwatch. At a quarter of one, she dropped her housework and ran lightly up the stairs to her bedroom. There was a battered cardboard box sitting in the very back of her closet, concealed by a pile of stuffed animals. She knocked the toys away and dragged out the carton, dumping its contents on her bed.

Candles and incense were not technically contraband; at least, Giles had not yet searched her room to remove them. However, Willow knew that if the rest of the Scoobies knew she had them they would automatically assume it was proof of her continuing to practice the dark arts. Since she was not overly eager to sit through another intervention with them, she kept these things hidden.

She lit a stick of lavender incense and stuck it in the ceramic holder. She placed the incense on the floor and arranged a dozen or more candles in a wide circle around it, lighting each one after she placed it. Then she sat in the center of the circle, her crossed legs just a few inches from the burning incense. She didn't need the incense or the candles for what she was about to do—she didn't need anything but steady concentration. However, she had found that the incense helped her to relax, further opening her consciousness, as did the candles. They weren't necessary, but they did help improve the reception a bit. She tilted her head back slightly, breathing in the smoky sweet odor.

"Spike."

Her lips didn't move, didn't speak the word audibly. Yet in just a moment, she heard his answer. From somewhere miles away his thoughts carried back to her, as distant and tinny as a payphone call, but distinct, perceptible.

"What do you want?"

Willow smiled.

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It was early afternoon and Spike was wandering the wide aisles of the Stop 'n' Save, pushing a cart ahead of him. He had never gone shopping before, for groceries or anything else, so it was a novel experience for him. He stopped frequently, frowning and comparing brands, ingredients, prices. He watched the other patrons stroll by, some pushing carts or carrying baskets, others steering screaming children in strollers, and wondered how they lived. He wondered where they lived, what they did at their job, whether they loved their husbands, kids, parents…

He laughed to himself. Once he had thought of human beings as having no thoughts of their own, no feelings beyond that of animal instinct. They were cattle to him and to attribute any complex thoughts and feelings to them would have been counterproductive. Since he had fallen in love with Buffy, he had come to see things a bit differently. He had been able to see her as an intelligent creature, one with thoughts and feelings not unlike his own. Later, he would be able to credit the Nibblet with the same thing. But the rest of humanity? Fodder.

Now that he had become a human being himself, Spike changed his mind about much of that. For the first time in a long time, he was able to see people as…people. His understanding of them was but a little better than before, but he now felt a sense of protectiveness for them. They were weak but they weren't stupid. It wasn't their fault they were weak. He felt rather bad when he looked out on the crowd of shoppers and mentally calculated how many of them it would take to feed the vampire population in a town the size of Sunnydale. They were weak but they had no idea. They were…

Fodder.

Same as before, right? So why did he feel differently about them? Why did it bother him to see a small blonde girl clinging to her mother's hand and envision her becoming the meal of a hungry vamp? She was weak. The strong killed the weak and ate them. It was the natural order of things. So…why did he feel bad?

He posed the question to Willow.

"You feel bad because you know that physical weakness is the only thing separating you from them. You feel bad because they are like you."

Her answer rolled around in his head for a moment, quiet and remote. But real. A real conversation with a slightly different method of communication.

The first time it happened, he had thought he was dreaming…the second time he thought he was crazy. By the time he figured it out, he had grown so accustomed to the routine of it he was no longer surprised to hear her voice echoing from his brain at intervals during the day. It was just another random weird thing in his random weird existence. And talking to her, even if it was only in his head, was still talking.

"I'm not one of them. Not inside. Inside I'm still a demon." Spike told her now. He spoke aloud, even though he knew it wasn't necessary. She was in his head, in his thoughts; she didn't need to hear his voice to know what he was saying. But there was something about thinking answers in his head and not saying them that made him uneasy. It was too much like being a schizoid.

"Then why do you feel this way?"

"You tell me."

Of course, talking aloud when you are shopping by yourself in a crowded grocery store was a lot like being a schizoid too. Spike was certainly attracting some odd looks from the other patrons. But he ignored them. He was too accustomed with odd looks to pay them any mind.

"I just did. You just aren't ready to accept it, that there are different types of humanity. Just because you started out differently doesn't make you less than them—or more. It just makes you different. Like Dawn."

"I accept it," he replied, steering his cart toward produce. "You just don't understand."

"I understand more than you think. I understand how lonely you are, out there by yourself. When are you coming home?"  It was a question she put to him at least ten times a day and it never failed to set his teeth on edge.

"I'm not."

"Why?"

"I don't have a home there anymore."

"But she misses you. Spike, if you could only see her face—"

"I don't want to see her face!" he snapped. He slammed a head of lettuce into his cart so hard he squashed it into the wire.

"That's not true at all."

"Well, I'm not going to see her face, how's that?" he asked. He picked up the lettuce and examined it. Ruined. He placed it on top of the pile and got a new head. "I told her I was leaving for good and I meant it. I'm doing this for her own good…whether you can see it or not."

"But you didn't leave."

"I—I left her."

"But you didn't leave town. You're still here…I can still sense you here. Why didn't you leave if you don't want to see her?"

"I said I don't want to see her," he growled. "I didn't say I don't want to be near her. I want to be here to protect her the next time—" He stopped.

"The next time she needs it? And how will you know? You're never around to hear when she needs help."

"I'll know. I've got my ear to the ground." He pushed his cart forward, heading for the cat food aisle.

"She doesn't need your help, dummy. She needs your love."

"No. Trust me. She really doesn't."

"Spike, why are you being so stubborn?" Willow sounded exasperated. Then the tone of her voice (rather, the tone of her thoughts) became softer, gentler. "I know you love her."

"Shut up." Spike's voice was thick, more pained than angry. "I don't."

"…I know you still dream about her."

"Shut up!" he barked.  "I'm not talking about it anymore! Get out of my head, Willow! I'm through with this."

He shoved his cart to the front of the store, heading for the registers. On the way, he collided with an old woman who had stopped in the middle of an aisle to read the back of a Phillips bottle. She smiled sweetly and blocked his path as she attempted to recover the basket of items she had dropped when he hit her.

Spike watched her impassively for a moment. Then the demon—which slept most of the time—awoke, took possession of him. He kicked the box of cereal she was reaching for, knocking it a full twenty feet down the aisle.

"Out of my way, bitch." He shoved past her, almost knocking her over with his shopping cart.

He cried all the way to the checkout.

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"Spike!"

Willow's furrowed brow began to sweat with the effort, but she could not regain her connection with him. Stupid, stubborn ex vampire. Usually, he was very good about letting her into his head. She had a feeling he was lonely and did it simply to connect with someone—anyone. Which was a big reason she did it, come to think of it. Mention Buffy to him, however, and he would close off completely.

Pulling herself up from her uncomfortable, cross-legged position, Willow began to put her incense and candles away. She packed them neatly away in the box, and then opened a window to allow the room to air. It was getting late, and she knew what Buffy would say if she came home to find the house smelling of lavender and bayberry.

She tried not to worry too much about Spike as she went downstairs to finish her housework, but the truth was she was concerned about what would become of him. He was still struggling with the same fears and self-doubt as before, and he seemed to be getting nowhere. He was still stubbornly clinging to the belief he needed to shut himself off from everyone in order to keep them safe. At this rate, he was going to drive himself crazy in no time flat and Willow was not sure he could help him. After all, she didn't have much time left.

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By the time Spike had fought the Saturday crowd at the supermarket and gathered up his bag of groceries, it was late in the afternoon. The small apartment building where he was living was five or six miles away, and he trudged the distance slowly, his feet heavy with his depression.

Willow was right. He wasn't doing Buffy any good hanging around here if he wasn't going to hang around her. His excuse for staying was to protect her…but as Willow pointed out, how could he protect her protect her when he had no idea whether she was in danger or not? With the exception of Clem, Spike had completely lost his ties to the demon world and therefore had lost his ability to find out insider information about rising evils. He wasn't around the Scoobies to hear their news…so how would he know if something seriously evil was after her? He wouldn't.

So what was he doing here?

Without the noble excuse of protecting her from afar, Spike found his presence in town distasteful. It made him think back to the days when he had hung around outside of her house, waiting for her to come out so he could talk to her. That was essentially what he was doing now, wasn't it? Hanging around town, hoping to catch a glimpse of her?

The thought made him angry. He couldn't change. No matter what he did, he would never be anything but what he was. Willow was right that night she explained his origin to him. He was mortal, he had a soul, but he was still essentially the same being he had always been. Except she had meant it to be a compliment, a comment to bring relief to his troubled mind. She didn't understand what it meant. Being the same thing he had always been…she couldn't know what that was. She hadn't known him at his worst. She had known him bad, certainly. But not at his worst.

Bathed in the fading glow of sunset, Spike kicked viciously at the cracked sidewalk, overcome by guilt. The flash of anger in the supermarket had frightened him. It had showed him just how little he had changed that he could grow angry so quickly. Snapping at the old woman had been bad, but it wasn't as bad as the feeling inside him—the feeling he could happily take a shotgun and take out everyone in the place, himself included. Willow could say that he had grown, that he was better…but she didn't know it all.

She didn't know the half of it.

Spike was so occupied with the thought he didn't know anything was amiss until she was right there on him. She was wearing spiked heels and not attempting at all to muffle the clacking of her shoes against the concrete, but he didn't notice. It wasn't until she spoke that he realized she was there at all.

"Hello, Spike."

Spike turned around slowly. After the incident in the supermarket, he wasn't in the best of moods, and the lilting mockery of her tone wasn't helping any. He adjusted the paper grocery sack in the crook of his arm and cocked his head at her. "Do I know you?"

The vampire licked her lips and smiled. She was very thin, emaciated almost. Her long brown hair was thin and stringy and her makeup thick, almost clownish. She was obviously a fairly substandard element of the demon world. Ignorant. Lowbrow. The type of crack-whore vamp that frequented Willie's place. Spike did and did not recognize her. He didn't know her personally, but he knew her face, her type. Two minutes after sunset and she was on the prowl. Just looking at her made his blood rise.

"I know you," she said. She was advancing in the slow, slinky gate of a seasoned killer. Her demon face was on and it was hungry. "I was there the night Nikolai caught you."

"Were you now?" He didn't back up as she approached.

"Yes…We all were. We believed in him, you see. He was going to kill you for us…and we were going to take turns lapping up your blood. Then your girlfriend showed up and ruined the party."

"How'd you get away?" Spike asked. She tried to slip behind him, but he turned quickly so that he was face to face with her.

"I wasn't there at that time. Lucky me." Her head rocked from side to side like a snake's as she spoke. "Lucky you, too. Now you don't have to miss all the fun…"

Spike threw down the shopping bag. He held out his hands to her. "All right, bitch. Let's see what you got, shall we?"

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Dawn was just emerging from the movie theatre when she heard the commotion down the street. Well, actually, she heard the commotion made by her friends first, then the sounds from down the street. A whole lot of people were standing on the sidewalk, watching the fight, but no one seemed to be doing anything about it.

Dawn shouldered her way through the crowd until she could see what was going on. Several hundred feet down the street, a man and a woman were fighting. Not arguing— down and out fighting. The man had the woman by her hank of long hair; he lifted her off her feet effortlessly and then threw her to the pavement. The sound reminded Dawn of the time she had dropped a cantaloupe on her mother's kitchen floor—dull and solid, broken and wet. They all thought the girl might be dead, but she got up almost immediately, barely fazed, oblivious to the blood dripping from her scalp.

Janice and her boyfriend squeezed in beside Dawn, both of them watching the scene open-mouthed. "Do you think we ought to call the police?" Janice asked.

"I don't know," Dawn answered nervously. "I mean, I guess we should…"

The man flew backwards onto the pavement—the result of a kick the woman had given him. Unlike the woman, the fall seemed to faze the man. He lay still for a fraction of a second and in that instant she was on top of him, straddling his waist, and struggling to seize his hands. Her face caught in a shaft of light from the street lamp—

A collective gasp rippled through the crowd of onlookers.

"Did you ever—?"

"What do you suppose—?"

"Her face—did you see her face?"

The woman's face twisted into a grisly mockery of a smile, her lips stretching grotesquely over her bulging vampire fangs. She arched her back and prepared to deliver the fatal bite.

The man managed to pull his arm free of her grip. He backhanded the vampire, sending her reeling to the ground with the force of his blow. He rolled onto his feet. Dawn saw him reach for something on the ground, something she couldn't see because of the shadows. For a moment, she squinted into the distance, trying to see…

Then he was bathed in the glow from a passing car, and she could see both his face and his weapon very clearly.

"SPIKE!"

The word burst from Dawn's lips before she could stop them. Janice and Carlos turned to her with surprise.

"Spike?" Janice asked.

Dawn recovered herself quickly. "I—I mean—he's got a spike," she said. "In his hand. See?"

The other two glanced across the street. Carlos whistled. "Damn, she's gonna get tore up now."

Janice started digging around in her purse. "I'm calling the cops."

Dawn grabbed her friend's hand. "No—wait!"

"For what? This is ridiculous, all these people standing here while she gets throttled."

"Yeah—but look, they're leaving."

They were. The vampire had turned tail and run. She climbed the low wall of a back alley and disappeared from sight. Spike followed closely behind.

The crowd began to disperse. Janice tugged at Dawn's arm, all interest in the fight lost now that it was not in her immediate line of vision. "Dawn, come on," she said impatiently. "There's my mom. Let's get out of here."

But Dawn's eyes were still riveted on the alley. "No," she said, her voice distracted. "You guys go on. I think I'm going to stick around a while longer, see the next show."

They looked at her as though she were crazy.

"Dawn…" Janice spoke slowly, as though to a very small, very stupid child. "We just saw a girl get beaten and almost stabbed by a man who is still out there somewhere. And now you want to hang around until the wee hours of the morning? Do you want to end up buried in a ditch somewhere?"

"I'll be fine," she insisted. Now that she had seen Spike, she was dying to get away. Nothing her friends said could convince her to leave with them. She refused to say hello to Janice's mom on the grounds that Lindsey would insist on driving her home. This was too good a chance…this might be her only chance. Dawn wasn't going to miss it.

She waited until the car had pulled out of sight, and then darted across the street into the alley Spike and the vampire had taken. It was narrow and very dark, but the wall they had scaled looked much lower from this side of the street, which was a definite plus. Still, not possessing vampire strength, Dawn was forced to use her head. She dragged several empty wooden fruit crates over to the wall, stacking them on top of each other for height. When she had four of them, she climbed atop the pile and, grabbing the chain link with both fists, she managed to scramble over the wall.

Her feet hit the ground below with a painful thump. She brushed the dust from her blue jeans and peered into the darkness, wondering.

"Spike?" she called softly.

But there was no answer.

Then.

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End of Chapter Eleven