A vampire emerged from the deep shadows behind her, appearing as
though from thin air, though she had long accustomed herself to the ability
of the undead to meld with any area devoid of light, better than any
chameleon. She left the barman to his pain and his skull lacerated from the
glass that she had broken on the bar, and turned slowly.
Most of them in this room were barely better than fledglings, strutting around in game face, masking their inexperience with a show of brutality. She had seen their type so many times before, little more than bullies, little more than strong humans. The one that emerged at her shoulder was different – he radiated power and menace, though he made no hostile move.
The light above from the shimmering bulb flickered on the dirty glass of the bar, casting a myriad of reflections onto the pale face that stared through her. The noise itself seemed to recede as he spoke. It was as though the room, and those pitiful creatures within it, didn't exist for either of them as she lost herself in those black, deadly eyes.
He was slim, and well dressed, with short black hair, immaculately combed. His well-tailored suit was dark grey, his tie black, his shoes perfect. He was the embodiment of Anne Rice's conception of what vampires should be – dark, beautiful, immortal, and lethal.
His voice was sibilant, but resonant at the same time. His eyes, black as the Pit, never left hers. She could feel herself falling into those eyes. Only one other that she had ever met could do that to her, and she had spent the last five months searching for him.
'To stay in this city, you must do homage to the Lord of the North,' he told her, the cadence of his voice enticing, like a spider drawing a fly. 'Your reputation precedes you, Miss Summers. I am sure that Lord Jur'Khan Chung would welcome the homage of a Slayer.'
The music stopped dead, the DJ, himself a vampire, having heard too what had been announced. The sudden break from the graceless pulses of hard rock was shattering. The only noise made was the hiss of needlessly indrawn breath as the bulk of the creatures in the room drew back as if from a sudden fire. Thoughts of mortality that they had been raised never to worry about began to surge through their minds. None left, yet, but there were few who did not glance at the door. They knew of Slayers, but were that all they would try their luck, the weak many against the strong one. But not this Slayer. Not Buffy Summers. They had heard of what she had done to the Master, to William the Bloody and his dark queen, to Angelus, and to Dracula. To them she was the worst nightmare come to life.
She was aware of the reaction among the others, but she ignored it, and that sublime unconcern was enough to push several over the edge, and the they began filing towards the door in search of prey to bolster their egos, shattered this night by a frail wisp of a girl they had first thought to be easy meat.
'Do you know where William the Bloody is?' she asked the handsome vampire who had spoken to her. He, too, had ignored the others as irrelevant.
He looked at her for a long moment before answering, not moving at all. He was dark stone in the middle of a seedy vampire bar, like herself not belonging there but forced by circumstance to be present. 'I have not heard the name,' he told her. Vampires lied, she knew, as easily as a human breathed, but she sensed honesty in this one, and it was at least refreshing to encounter one who respected her strength enough to not challenge her. Again, she felt disappointment, but she would not let it end her. The rogue Watcher that she had met in Hannover had told her specifically that Spike was in Russia, in this St.Petersburg. He had sworn to her, and she believed him.
'Have you heard of him?'
He nodded once, the barest inclination of his head. 'Most have,' he told her. 'But I know nothing of him, beyond the legends that have grown up over the years. I would know enough not to cross him. And I would know if he was here. He isn't. My lord, Jur'Khan Chung, would know, as he knew when you entered the city. No Master may hunt here without his permission.'
A wave of relief swept through her. Spike would not be hunting. Unless he got the chip out, a treacherous voice whispered at the back of her mind, but she pushed it away. She would not entertain the darkest of her fantasies now, not when she was this close.
'What if he were not hunting?' she asked as more of the others quietly left the bar to the freezing wind and snow outside.
He smiled at her, genuine humour lighting his face. 'What if you were not breathing?' he replied. 'The question makes about as much sense.'
'Answer it.'
He shrugged. 'Then, maybe, he would escape detection. But he is well known. Someone would have seen him.' He cocked his head to the side. 'He must have done something exceptional for you to follow him this far.'
'He is exceptional,' she told him coldly, her eyes mirrors of frost. She was done with this – she needed answers that this creature was not giving her. 'And I will find him.'
Without time even to register shock on his pale, handsome face, he exploded into ash with the customary scream of the dead, his remains littering the bar lie grey snow, reflecting in the neon light of the bar. The other vampires looked on, shocked but knowing better than to interfere.
'Without your help,' she told the scattered ashes that moments before had been an immortal. She turned to the fearful crown.
'Where will I find Jur'Khan Chung?'
The vampire known as the Gentleman observed the one he knew as Joachim entering the lair of Jur'Khan Chung, followed by the Slayer. His lip curled as he thought of the Mongol. He remembered the soldier from the siege of Kiev. He had been a coward then, and eight hundred years had not changed him. Still he clung to society, to his minions and his thralls, when all others his age had realised that to hunt alone was the fountain of all strength.
She walked through the empty streets of the old capital of the Empire of the Tsars. The snow was no less fierce, the wind no less biting, but she barely noticed. She rubbed her stomach absently, though she could barely feel it through the heavy layers of clothing. She could feel Spike no more than she could have felt him when they were back in Sunnydale, secure in the mutuality of desire that had been thrust upon them by the caprice of Fate while bound in hatred that went to the core of their very beings - she was not so naïve that she did not believe that his pure hatred did not still simmer beneath his sincere belief of his love – but she knew that he was close, knew that the search was nearly finished. She would have known even had she not believed the earnestly, bitterly tendered word of the rogue Watcher that she had met in Hannover. Something was drawing her to the East, something that had been pulling at her since she had started. Somehow, she knew that he was here.
She doubted that he knew that she was, for she did not think that he could ever believe that she would follow him here.
A shiver crawled up her spine slowly, chillingly. She stopped and turned, suddenly fearful.
She knew when was being watched, and she knew when the watcher was not friendly.
'He's coming for you, Slayer,' came a ghostly voice through the chill air, as though the noise of the wind did not exist, as though the voice was from another plain.
'Who?' she asked, helplessly. There was something about that voice, something tantalisingly familiar, whose familiarity was too near to simply instinct and far from memory to be analysed. She knew enough to know to be afraid.
She heard a faint laugh as the voice receded into the distance, leaving her to feel, once again, as alone as she ever had. 'Call him Legion,' it told her.
'Dramatic much?' she laughed, though her humour was forced.
Turning back, nearing her destination, she realised that he had recognised the reference, though she was no Bible scholar. Legion, she mused as she turned down yet another alley towards the large house that, the terrified minion had screamed to her while his fellows looked on with equal terror and even less inclination to resist, was the name of the demon cast out by Christ. She knew something about demon possession, had learned much while on the road, and knew enough to know that there was little of which to be frightened - a demon spirit in a human body could not enhance its strength. But the voice … the voice was eerie. She knew it, somehow, she had heard it before.
Come to me, my love. She remembered that, also, a brief, titillating invitation, a large, empty room, sparsely furnished. But she knew that she had never heard those words, and she nothing of the room that she could see in her mind.
She stopped before the entrance to the house. Staring at the iron gates, tipped with sharp spikes like a palisade in front of a fortress, she could barely make out the outline of the forbidding building within. She could see that it was big, though, and old-fashioned. Pre-Revolution, she thought to herself, having taken care to familiarise herself with the history of the city before she had arrived. Vampires, she knew carried their history with them, and could often be tripped up by intimate knowledge of the eras through which they had lived. She had known nothing of this in Sunnydale – Giles never had enough confidence in her abilities as student to allow her to study, she remembered bitterly. She still loved the man like a father, but he had been insufferably arrogant in his attitude.
She placed her gloved hands on the gates, feeling the steel, as of the sensation would somehow tell her of what was within.
'You're losing it, Buffy,' she told herself, thinking back to the almost ghostly warning that she had received. 'Betcha there never was a voice.'
She should call Dawn and the others, she knew. It had been two weeks since she had last spoken to them, she thought as she stared through the railings to the courtyards beyond, obscured by clouds of snow that swirled through the icy air. Reluctant to go in, her heart hammering within her chest at the thought of the end of her search, she thought back to her family.
Dawn, though she bitterly protested otherwise, was happier with Willow and Tara than she ever had been with Buffy. They had grown apart since the death of their mother, the only tie that bound them beyond the natural bond of responsibility and duty. Too often, Dawn had seemed a duty to Buffy, and too often the younger sister had responded in like fashion. Only the events of the two months between Spike's departure and that of Buffy had brought them closer, but it had not been enough to help the Slayer resist the call of her lover. She had to find him.
She had to tell him.
Willow, Tara and Xander had been tearful at her leaving, but they had accepted the necessity of it. There was nothing keeping her in Sunnydale by then but memories, mostly bad ones. She had to leave to find the one creature that bound her to this world, the one reason that she still had to go on. The one thing that brought her love and hate, relief and despair, joy and sorrow, all in one uncontrollable flood of sheer emotional sensation that otherwise missed.
She had to find Spike. To tell him, mainly. To not have to rely on the empty pleasure of the hunt to feel alive.
'The Slayer approaches, lord,' the vampire said quietly, his yellow eyes on the camera that showed the slight girl rip apart the cast steel railings that marked the end of the private preserve of Jur'Khan Chung, Lord of the North.
The vampire prince brooded on the his throne-like chair, staring at the VDU, his darker than coals, and deeper than the pit. People had lost themselves in those eyes. His frame was large, though not huge, his shoulders broad and his waist thin, his eyes slanted, his face broad and unlined. He had been turned by Julia Erenia, she who had sired the line of Aurelius, when he had been only thirty one, in his prime, glorying in the bloodlust that had overtaken him at the sacking of Kiev. She had crossed the battlefield like a ghost, unseen by most, her beauty so profound that it should have drawn the eye of every man on the field. But she had been ignored.
Except by him. He had turned, his sword still in hand, his bow over his shoulder, seeing her for the first time. And he had known. Known that he would spend the next hundred years serving only her. The next two hundred as her equal. The next hundred as her lover. And the last half millennium searching the earth for her killer, the Roman whose name he still refused to allow to seep through his dark mind. He would find the back-stabbing bastard, he who had the temerity to kill his own Sire. And he would meet out such punishment as the world had forgotten. He had not forgotten. In his memory lay the details of eight hundred years of education in the lost art of torture.
As he stared at the Slayer, who braved the storm, ignorant as yet of being closely watched by technology that vampires were by their nature meant to despise, he was reminded of the slim, perfect form of his Sire. They were nothing alike, physically. The Slayer was shorter, her hair golden blond were Julia Erenia's had been raven black, her chest relatively flat where Julia's had been full and inviting, her nose squat where the Roman noble's had been aquiline, typically Patrician. But the spirit was there, the same sense of endless yearning, the same grief.
'She searches the face of this world for William the Bloody,' he told his men. Two of them turned, the rest had heard the story, and reacted with fury that one of the mightiest of their kind could be so corrupted. They wondered, Jur'Khan Chung could see. They asked themselves if the same contagion of conscience could infect them.
'She loved him,' he continued as he watched her approach the first line, which she could not see, nor expect. He knew she would pass it. They were young minions, no match for the likes of her. 'And he her. Their love consumed them both, even to death and after, ending only in him leaving, knowing that such impure emotion would eat him alive. He sought a return to himself, burying himself in the dreary comforts of the Old World, terrified of the vibrancy of the New. But he cannot run forever. She has found him.'
The two watching him carefully chanced a glance at each other. William the Bloody was not here, not in this compound, surely not in the city of St. Peter. Surely they would know, their Lord would tell them.
He could see the question in their eyes as he watched the Slayer dispatch the first fledgling that crossed her path as she might swat a troublesome insect. Oh, this one had experience married to skill, he could see with the delight of anticipation. So few Slayers did, so few lived long enough to appreciate their exquisite skill, so many felt the irresistible pull of the grave beckoning them.
'No,' he answered the unasked question. 'He is not here with us. But he is here, in this city. He attracts little attention, he never hunts. He wants only to left alone in his anonymity.' He sighed with pleasure as he watched the Summers girl take out another of his guards with a back spin kick and perfectly, beautifully executed follow through with the thin sliver of wood in her hand. 'But his reputation had caught up with him, as it would no matter how far he tried to run.'
The first two continued to look at the monitor, glad as the snow began to abate. Their eyes were powerful, far more powerful than those of any human, but they had limits. They were as impressed as their lord with what they saw, but unlike him it was appreciation tinged with fear. Old though they were, powerful though they had proved themselves to be, they knew that they were not invincible.
The second two were younger, more arrogant, not bothering to watch as the Slayer contemptuously brushed aside the challenge of the four fledglings. One was still alive, unconscious, with a twisted neck that it would not recover from for some weeks.
'She has learned from her lover,' the first observed to the second as Jur'Khan Chung leaned forward imperceptibly, savouring everything he saw, his mind for once ignoring the physical feeling of pure hatred and malice that had sustained it through the long centuries in search of a creature that he had never met. 'That was not a move in which Slayers are trained. The Watchers are too orthodox in their methods. That was the move of a vampire, and a powerful one.'
The other murmured his agreement as she neared the massive bolted door that swung open before her as Jur'Khan Chung depressed the button on the side of his massive chair. The second two did not know why he was allowing her to enter, but they knew that they did not like it. They moved to stop her.
'Halt,' the voice of the Mongol came from the shadows into which he had, unseen, receded. 'Let her come to us. Let her be.'
'But why, Lord?' the last demanded with more force than, on another day, would have been tolerated. He backed off, slightly, when he realised the degree of insolence that he had shown. Had his heart functioned, it would have been pounding with the terror that he would feel at his likely punishment, but his Master's mind was elsewhere on this long winter's night.
'I can feel him,' he told them. All knew to whom he referred, the unnamed that their Master had hunted across the continents for centuries. 'And she will bring me to him.'
Buff barely glanced behind her at the snow-covered grass and concrete, rapidly covering over the thin layer of dust that was all that remained of the four vampires that had attacked her. They meant nothing, and probably had meant nothing even when they had been alive. Or undead, whatever. Spike had abolished the distinction in her mind, blurred her idea of what life meant.
The door in front of her was open, she saw. Massive steel, crossed with bars of solid iron, it was designed to stop anything but a direct hit from an artillery or tank shell. She would never have been able to break through it nor, in this weather and in this poor light, would she have been able to scale the sheer face of brick that confronted her. But the door invited her. Like cheese to a mouse, she thought to herself, knowing that it had to be some form of trap. But she had faced the Master, Angelus, even a God, and she was not frightened of any vampire.
The voice that she had heard and the strange images in her mind that it evoked continued to trouble her as she crossed the threshold, into the darkness beyond, but she tried to ignore it, to concentrate all of her sense and faculties on what faced her, on the end to her seemingly fruitless search for the one creature in the world that had loved her without reservation or hesitation. The one whose passion matched her own, the only one who could bring that passion to the surface through the haze of deadened emotion that cut her off from life.
'I need you, Spike,' she whispered to the cavernous, empty silence. She could sense something, but it was not yet near.
As she walked through the chamber, it was illuminated suddenly by motion-sensor lights. She stopped to look around, though she was sure that she could have navigated the near pitch-black even without lights that merely made things easier.
'Let slip the dogs of war,' she breathed as she saw the room.
It was large, like a ballroom, and mostly empty, through there were some wooden stools and a plain table at the far end, beside a door that was closed. But her comment to the emptiness was caused by the décor. Paintings of all sizes, styles and eras hung from the plain stone walls, like those a medieval castle, depicting every scene from war that could be imagined. One she recognised vaguely as the Rape of the Sabines, depicting the Roman legions sacking a city. She had seen that when in college. Another was Wolfe's siege of Quebec, the first large-scale portrait of battle. She recognised none of the rest, though there must have been more than a hundred, maybe a lot more, covering the walls from top to bottom, end to end. The room was a monument to the Art of War, in the literal sense.
'Impressed, Slayer?'
Shocked at being so easily surprised, she turned quickly, her hand flashing to the crossbow that she carried beneath her heavy coat. The voice echoed throughout the chamber, bouncing from the paintings of organised military violence.
She saw the speaker, standing on a balcony above the door that she did not notice when she had walked in. He was big, and muscular, his skin dark for a vampire and his eyes slanted and vicious, expressing unexplored depths of malice.
'Jur'Khan Chung,' she breathed.
She lowered her weapon as, from hidden doors to the right and left of her, four vampires surrounded her.
Most of them in this room were barely better than fledglings, strutting around in game face, masking their inexperience with a show of brutality. She had seen their type so many times before, little more than bullies, little more than strong humans. The one that emerged at her shoulder was different – he radiated power and menace, though he made no hostile move.
The light above from the shimmering bulb flickered on the dirty glass of the bar, casting a myriad of reflections onto the pale face that stared through her. The noise itself seemed to recede as he spoke. It was as though the room, and those pitiful creatures within it, didn't exist for either of them as she lost herself in those black, deadly eyes.
He was slim, and well dressed, with short black hair, immaculately combed. His well-tailored suit was dark grey, his tie black, his shoes perfect. He was the embodiment of Anne Rice's conception of what vampires should be – dark, beautiful, immortal, and lethal.
His voice was sibilant, but resonant at the same time. His eyes, black as the Pit, never left hers. She could feel herself falling into those eyes. Only one other that she had ever met could do that to her, and she had spent the last five months searching for him.
'To stay in this city, you must do homage to the Lord of the North,' he told her, the cadence of his voice enticing, like a spider drawing a fly. 'Your reputation precedes you, Miss Summers. I am sure that Lord Jur'Khan Chung would welcome the homage of a Slayer.'
The music stopped dead, the DJ, himself a vampire, having heard too what had been announced. The sudden break from the graceless pulses of hard rock was shattering. The only noise made was the hiss of needlessly indrawn breath as the bulk of the creatures in the room drew back as if from a sudden fire. Thoughts of mortality that they had been raised never to worry about began to surge through their minds. None left, yet, but there were few who did not glance at the door. They knew of Slayers, but were that all they would try their luck, the weak many against the strong one. But not this Slayer. Not Buffy Summers. They had heard of what she had done to the Master, to William the Bloody and his dark queen, to Angelus, and to Dracula. To them she was the worst nightmare come to life.
She was aware of the reaction among the others, but she ignored it, and that sublime unconcern was enough to push several over the edge, and the they began filing towards the door in search of prey to bolster their egos, shattered this night by a frail wisp of a girl they had first thought to be easy meat.
'Do you know where William the Bloody is?' she asked the handsome vampire who had spoken to her. He, too, had ignored the others as irrelevant.
He looked at her for a long moment before answering, not moving at all. He was dark stone in the middle of a seedy vampire bar, like herself not belonging there but forced by circumstance to be present. 'I have not heard the name,' he told her. Vampires lied, she knew, as easily as a human breathed, but she sensed honesty in this one, and it was at least refreshing to encounter one who respected her strength enough to not challenge her. Again, she felt disappointment, but she would not let it end her. The rogue Watcher that she had met in Hannover had told her specifically that Spike was in Russia, in this St.Petersburg. He had sworn to her, and she believed him.
'Have you heard of him?'
He nodded once, the barest inclination of his head. 'Most have,' he told her. 'But I know nothing of him, beyond the legends that have grown up over the years. I would know enough not to cross him. And I would know if he was here. He isn't. My lord, Jur'Khan Chung, would know, as he knew when you entered the city. No Master may hunt here without his permission.'
A wave of relief swept through her. Spike would not be hunting. Unless he got the chip out, a treacherous voice whispered at the back of her mind, but she pushed it away. She would not entertain the darkest of her fantasies now, not when she was this close.
'What if he were not hunting?' she asked as more of the others quietly left the bar to the freezing wind and snow outside.
He smiled at her, genuine humour lighting his face. 'What if you were not breathing?' he replied. 'The question makes about as much sense.'
'Answer it.'
He shrugged. 'Then, maybe, he would escape detection. But he is well known. Someone would have seen him.' He cocked his head to the side. 'He must have done something exceptional for you to follow him this far.'
'He is exceptional,' she told him coldly, her eyes mirrors of frost. She was done with this – she needed answers that this creature was not giving her. 'And I will find him.'
Without time even to register shock on his pale, handsome face, he exploded into ash with the customary scream of the dead, his remains littering the bar lie grey snow, reflecting in the neon light of the bar. The other vampires looked on, shocked but knowing better than to interfere.
'Without your help,' she told the scattered ashes that moments before had been an immortal. She turned to the fearful crown.
'Where will I find Jur'Khan Chung?'
The vampire known as the Gentleman observed the one he knew as Joachim entering the lair of Jur'Khan Chung, followed by the Slayer. His lip curled as he thought of the Mongol. He remembered the soldier from the siege of Kiev. He had been a coward then, and eight hundred years had not changed him. Still he clung to society, to his minions and his thralls, when all others his age had realised that to hunt alone was the fountain of all strength.
She walked through the empty streets of the old capital of the Empire of the Tsars. The snow was no less fierce, the wind no less biting, but she barely noticed. She rubbed her stomach absently, though she could barely feel it through the heavy layers of clothing. She could feel Spike no more than she could have felt him when they were back in Sunnydale, secure in the mutuality of desire that had been thrust upon them by the caprice of Fate while bound in hatred that went to the core of their very beings - she was not so naïve that she did not believe that his pure hatred did not still simmer beneath his sincere belief of his love – but she knew that he was close, knew that the search was nearly finished. She would have known even had she not believed the earnestly, bitterly tendered word of the rogue Watcher that she had met in Hannover. Something was drawing her to the East, something that had been pulling at her since she had started. Somehow, she knew that he was here.
She doubted that he knew that she was, for she did not think that he could ever believe that she would follow him here.
A shiver crawled up her spine slowly, chillingly. She stopped and turned, suddenly fearful.
She knew when was being watched, and she knew when the watcher was not friendly.
'He's coming for you, Slayer,' came a ghostly voice through the chill air, as though the noise of the wind did not exist, as though the voice was from another plain.
'Who?' she asked, helplessly. There was something about that voice, something tantalisingly familiar, whose familiarity was too near to simply instinct and far from memory to be analysed. She knew enough to know to be afraid.
She heard a faint laugh as the voice receded into the distance, leaving her to feel, once again, as alone as she ever had. 'Call him Legion,' it told her.
'Dramatic much?' she laughed, though her humour was forced.
Turning back, nearing her destination, she realised that he had recognised the reference, though she was no Bible scholar. Legion, she mused as she turned down yet another alley towards the large house that, the terrified minion had screamed to her while his fellows looked on with equal terror and even less inclination to resist, was the name of the demon cast out by Christ. She knew something about demon possession, had learned much while on the road, and knew enough to know that there was little of which to be frightened - a demon spirit in a human body could not enhance its strength. But the voice … the voice was eerie. She knew it, somehow, she had heard it before.
Come to me, my love. She remembered that, also, a brief, titillating invitation, a large, empty room, sparsely furnished. But she knew that she had never heard those words, and she nothing of the room that she could see in her mind.
She stopped before the entrance to the house. Staring at the iron gates, tipped with sharp spikes like a palisade in front of a fortress, she could barely make out the outline of the forbidding building within. She could see that it was big, though, and old-fashioned. Pre-Revolution, she thought to herself, having taken care to familiarise herself with the history of the city before she had arrived. Vampires, she knew carried their history with them, and could often be tripped up by intimate knowledge of the eras through which they had lived. She had known nothing of this in Sunnydale – Giles never had enough confidence in her abilities as student to allow her to study, she remembered bitterly. She still loved the man like a father, but he had been insufferably arrogant in his attitude.
She placed her gloved hands on the gates, feeling the steel, as of the sensation would somehow tell her of what was within.
'You're losing it, Buffy,' she told herself, thinking back to the almost ghostly warning that she had received. 'Betcha there never was a voice.'
She should call Dawn and the others, she knew. It had been two weeks since she had last spoken to them, she thought as she stared through the railings to the courtyards beyond, obscured by clouds of snow that swirled through the icy air. Reluctant to go in, her heart hammering within her chest at the thought of the end of her search, she thought back to her family.
Dawn, though she bitterly protested otherwise, was happier with Willow and Tara than she ever had been with Buffy. They had grown apart since the death of their mother, the only tie that bound them beyond the natural bond of responsibility and duty. Too often, Dawn had seemed a duty to Buffy, and too often the younger sister had responded in like fashion. Only the events of the two months between Spike's departure and that of Buffy had brought them closer, but it had not been enough to help the Slayer resist the call of her lover. She had to find him.
She had to tell him.
Willow, Tara and Xander had been tearful at her leaving, but they had accepted the necessity of it. There was nothing keeping her in Sunnydale by then but memories, mostly bad ones. She had to leave to find the one creature that bound her to this world, the one reason that she still had to go on. The one thing that brought her love and hate, relief and despair, joy and sorrow, all in one uncontrollable flood of sheer emotional sensation that otherwise missed.
She had to find Spike. To tell him, mainly. To not have to rely on the empty pleasure of the hunt to feel alive.
'The Slayer approaches, lord,' the vampire said quietly, his yellow eyes on the camera that showed the slight girl rip apart the cast steel railings that marked the end of the private preserve of Jur'Khan Chung, Lord of the North.
The vampire prince brooded on the his throne-like chair, staring at the VDU, his darker than coals, and deeper than the pit. People had lost themselves in those eyes. His frame was large, though not huge, his shoulders broad and his waist thin, his eyes slanted, his face broad and unlined. He had been turned by Julia Erenia, she who had sired the line of Aurelius, when he had been only thirty one, in his prime, glorying in the bloodlust that had overtaken him at the sacking of Kiev. She had crossed the battlefield like a ghost, unseen by most, her beauty so profound that it should have drawn the eye of every man on the field. But she had been ignored.
Except by him. He had turned, his sword still in hand, his bow over his shoulder, seeing her for the first time. And he had known. Known that he would spend the next hundred years serving only her. The next two hundred as her equal. The next hundred as her lover. And the last half millennium searching the earth for her killer, the Roman whose name he still refused to allow to seep through his dark mind. He would find the back-stabbing bastard, he who had the temerity to kill his own Sire. And he would meet out such punishment as the world had forgotten. He had not forgotten. In his memory lay the details of eight hundred years of education in the lost art of torture.
As he stared at the Slayer, who braved the storm, ignorant as yet of being closely watched by technology that vampires were by their nature meant to despise, he was reminded of the slim, perfect form of his Sire. They were nothing alike, physically. The Slayer was shorter, her hair golden blond were Julia Erenia's had been raven black, her chest relatively flat where Julia's had been full and inviting, her nose squat where the Roman noble's had been aquiline, typically Patrician. But the spirit was there, the same sense of endless yearning, the same grief.
'She searches the face of this world for William the Bloody,' he told his men. Two of them turned, the rest had heard the story, and reacted with fury that one of the mightiest of their kind could be so corrupted. They wondered, Jur'Khan Chung could see. They asked themselves if the same contagion of conscience could infect them.
'She loved him,' he continued as he watched her approach the first line, which she could not see, nor expect. He knew she would pass it. They were young minions, no match for the likes of her. 'And he her. Their love consumed them both, even to death and after, ending only in him leaving, knowing that such impure emotion would eat him alive. He sought a return to himself, burying himself in the dreary comforts of the Old World, terrified of the vibrancy of the New. But he cannot run forever. She has found him.'
The two watching him carefully chanced a glance at each other. William the Bloody was not here, not in this compound, surely not in the city of St. Peter. Surely they would know, their Lord would tell them.
He could see the question in their eyes as he watched the Slayer dispatch the first fledgling that crossed her path as she might swat a troublesome insect. Oh, this one had experience married to skill, he could see with the delight of anticipation. So few Slayers did, so few lived long enough to appreciate their exquisite skill, so many felt the irresistible pull of the grave beckoning them.
'No,' he answered the unasked question. 'He is not here with us. But he is here, in this city. He attracts little attention, he never hunts. He wants only to left alone in his anonymity.' He sighed with pleasure as he watched the Summers girl take out another of his guards with a back spin kick and perfectly, beautifully executed follow through with the thin sliver of wood in her hand. 'But his reputation had caught up with him, as it would no matter how far he tried to run.'
The first two continued to look at the monitor, glad as the snow began to abate. Their eyes were powerful, far more powerful than those of any human, but they had limits. They were as impressed as their lord with what they saw, but unlike him it was appreciation tinged with fear. Old though they were, powerful though they had proved themselves to be, they knew that they were not invincible.
The second two were younger, more arrogant, not bothering to watch as the Slayer contemptuously brushed aside the challenge of the four fledglings. One was still alive, unconscious, with a twisted neck that it would not recover from for some weeks.
'She has learned from her lover,' the first observed to the second as Jur'Khan Chung leaned forward imperceptibly, savouring everything he saw, his mind for once ignoring the physical feeling of pure hatred and malice that had sustained it through the long centuries in search of a creature that he had never met. 'That was not a move in which Slayers are trained. The Watchers are too orthodox in their methods. That was the move of a vampire, and a powerful one.'
The other murmured his agreement as she neared the massive bolted door that swung open before her as Jur'Khan Chung depressed the button on the side of his massive chair. The second two did not know why he was allowing her to enter, but they knew that they did not like it. They moved to stop her.
'Halt,' the voice of the Mongol came from the shadows into which he had, unseen, receded. 'Let her come to us. Let her be.'
'But why, Lord?' the last demanded with more force than, on another day, would have been tolerated. He backed off, slightly, when he realised the degree of insolence that he had shown. Had his heart functioned, it would have been pounding with the terror that he would feel at his likely punishment, but his Master's mind was elsewhere on this long winter's night.
'I can feel him,' he told them. All knew to whom he referred, the unnamed that their Master had hunted across the continents for centuries. 'And she will bring me to him.'
Buff barely glanced behind her at the snow-covered grass and concrete, rapidly covering over the thin layer of dust that was all that remained of the four vampires that had attacked her. They meant nothing, and probably had meant nothing even when they had been alive. Or undead, whatever. Spike had abolished the distinction in her mind, blurred her idea of what life meant.
The door in front of her was open, she saw. Massive steel, crossed with bars of solid iron, it was designed to stop anything but a direct hit from an artillery or tank shell. She would never have been able to break through it nor, in this weather and in this poor light, would she have been able to scale the sheer face of brick that confronted her. But the door invited her. Like cheese to a mouse, she thought to herself, knowing that it had to be some form of trap. But she had faced the Master, Angelus, even a God, and she was not frightened of any vampire.
The voice that she had heard and the strange images in her mind that it evoked continued to trouble her as she crossed the threshold, into the darkness beyond, but she tried to ignore it, to concentrate all of her sense and faculties on what faced her, on the end to her seemingly fruitless search for the one creature in the world that had loved her without reservation or hesitation. The one whose passion matched her own, the only one who could bring that passion to the surface through the haze of deadened emotion that cut her off from life.
'I need you, Spike,' she whispered to the cavernous, empty silence. She could sense something, but it was not yet near.
As she walked through the chamber, it was illuminated suddenly by motion-sensor lights. She stopped to look around, though she was sure that she could have navigated the near pitch-black even without lights that merely made things easier.
'Let slip the dogs of war,' she breathed as she saw the room.
It was large, like a ballroom, and mostly empty, through there were some wooden stools and a plain table at the far end, beside a door that was closed. But her comment to the emptiness was caused by the décor. Paintings of all sizes, styles and eras hung from the plain stone walls, like those a medieval castle, depicting every scene from war that could be imagined. One she recognised vaguely as the Rape of the Sabines, depicting the Roman legions sacking a city. She had seen that when in college. Another was Wolfe's siege of Quebec, the first large-scale portrait of battle. She recognised none of the rest, though there must have been more than a hundred, maybe a lot more, covering the walls from top to bottom, end to end. The room was a monument to the Art of War, in the literal sense.
'Impressed, Slayer?'
Shocked at being so easily surprised, she turned quickly, her hand flashing to the crossbow that she carried beneath her heavy coat. The voice echoed throughout the chamber, bouncing from the paintings of organised military violence.
She saw the speaker, standing on a balcony above the door that she did not notice when she had walked in. He was big, and muscular, his skin dark for a vampire and his eyes slanted and vicious, expressing unexplored depths of malice.
'Jur'Khan Chung,' she breathed.
She lowered her weapon as, from hidden doors to the right and left of her, four vampires surrounded her.
