The baby, barely three months old and starving, cried desperately for its mother, for anyone who would feed it and nurture it. It lay in tattered rags at the side of the alley, abandoned by the woman who had three other mouths to feed and no money with which to do it. She had cried, she had agonised, but in the end she knew that she had no choice. The children that she had left at home, in the shack that kept out nothing of the harsh Russian winter in which they huddled in ancient, cast-off clothes around a small fire that provided so little warmth against the bitter cold, needed her more than did this child. Her husband was dead, killed in a fight for some money that was not his. She had left the baby, hoping against hope that someone would look after it, knowing better. He was one among hundreds in this decaying wreck of a city.

She was wrong. The screams were barely loud enough to be heard over the wind, and then only for brief moments. There were some creatures, however, that prowled the streets that listened for precisely that, the sound of despair. Easier and safer to feed from the wretched and starving of the earth.

Pity that they tasted so bad, but the one that approached the starving infant that quieted with instinctive, animal, fear, cared nothing about taste.

'Come to mummy,' the vampire crooned softly. They should have been words of comfort, words of safety, but from that mouth they were a death warrant, said countless times before over a hundred and fifty years. Few who heard them had lived. And those that had had wished themselves dead.

'You're all cold and hungry,' the creature said as she knelt and picked up the child. She was dressed in a plain gown, totally inappropriate for the weather, but this one cared little about the cold. Sometimes, others had thought over the years, she barely noticed the world around her. 'But you're warm and happy inside, aren't you, my little puppy.' Her eyes, which had been bright with malice over a smile that was the essence of unthinking evil, clouded, the smile turning to a pout. 'But you aren't my puppy,' she chastised the now-silent child, which was staring at her with wide eyes. It was far too young to understand the danger in which it was in, for the alley was dark and quiet, so secluded that the weather barely penetrated. There was no one to hear it scream, no one to alter its fate. All it could see were the eyes of the one that held it. The eyes that sent so many to hell and beyond.

'My puppy went and died on me,' she said to it, gently pulling the soiled swaddling cloth from its face, chubby despite its gnawing hunger. 'Will you go and die on me, little one?' The baby saw that alabaster face change, and suddenly, like the thunder of a gunshot in the silence, it began to scream. 'Will you die on me, or protect me from what's behind? Do you know that something is following me, that they've forced me to choose between two halves of the past? Do you?'

With terrifying force, Drusilla turned and smashed the baby against the wall, ending its crying and its suffering forever. In the recesses of her mind, in the last part of her consciousness that retained some element of the sanity that had been twisted by the expert ministrations of her Daddy, she considered that the child was better off dead, better than being raised by her. A part of her always regretted what she had become. But it was a part easily quieted.

'The Roman thinks that he can take me back to where I was,' she told the smear of gore on the wall, to which snow clung like droplets. 'He thinks that his revenge will be all that he needs to stand once again at the head of his legions. He doesn't know about my pretty boy.'

Emerging from the shadows, where he had watched with amusement at the near mindless sadism of the insane woman, the Gentleman saw her leave the scene of carnage by which the most hardened SS veteran would have been revolted. He remembered traveling with a company of Waffen SS in the last Great War, the Liebstandarte he thought it was – yes, with Sepp Dietrich as the commanding officer. He remembered the crimes that they had committed in the name of their Fuhrer, the atrocities and the genocide. He had soon left, revolted by what he saw. He was a vampire, a Master, a craftsman of his dark arts. He had centuries of training and experience – they had had only a mindless obedience that he found sickening. He had left for America that year, 1943, braving the U-boats, the Luftwaffe, and the Council. He had sworn that he would never again return to the Old World, the scene of his greatest crimes, his most deep felt passions, and his most heartfelt rage.

It had taken this lunatic to evoke again the memories that he carried with him, and for that alone he would make her pay. Her and anyone who stood for her.



Buffy splashed water on her face in the filthy bathroom in her tiny hotel room. Her eyes closed, she concentrated on the feel of the icy liquid against her skin, letting it run down her neck as she sighed. She opened her eyes slowly, staring at the mirror at the alien reflection that faced her. A vain child, she remembered spending hours before the mirror, brushing her hair, doing her make-up, applying her lipstick. It seemed like at eternity ago now, a different lifetime. Someone else's life, not hers. The woman that stared back from the chipped, dirty mirror hanging badly on the tattered wallpaper that reeked of damp, was no longer her. Her skin was dry, her cheeks sunk with fatigue and stress. Her eyes were lifeless, framed by black and purple. Her lips were pale, her hair straggly and damp. Her clothes were tattered and used, barely changed for the last five months. She could not remember the last time that she had even cared. Maybe when that bouncer looked askance at her clothing in Paris, saying that she was not well enough dressed to enter the club. She had quickly convinced him otherwise, but had bought fresh clothes the next day. That, she was certain, was the last time that she had entered a clothes shop. Her underwear, bra and panties, were soiled and dirty, her socks holed, her shoes thin.

All in search of a man whom she believed to be the partner of her soul, and whom she know knew to be back in the company of the woman who had held his heart for more than a century.

Tattered and threadbare, lifeless and cynical like she never had been before, how could she compete with Spike's Dark Queen? How could she appear to him to be more worthy of his love than the awesome majesty of Drusilla?

A tear fell from her eye, and she brushed it away defiantly. It was enough that she found him, and told him. Told him what his leaving had meant, to where it had led her, what he had left behind, and the consequences. Let that be enough, Buffy, she told herself. She had learned so much in the last five months, about herself and the world, about the darkness that lay in the human soul, enough to eclipse tenfold the most dangerous malice of any demon. She had learned more about herself than she ever could have on fifty vision quests. She was comfortable with the darkness that lurked at the edge of her will, embraced it, used it.

But she was not whole, and would not be until Spike lay once again beside her. That she had learned in Sunnydale.



EIGHT MONTHS EARLIER.

'Spike?' Xander shouted fiercely, Anya at his side, her head cocked to the side as she struggled to understand both Buffy's decision and her boyfriend's reaction to it.

'Yes, Xander, Spike,' Buffy answered wearily, rubbing her stomach. It was dark as they stood on the porch. They were all there, Buffy and Dawn, Willow and Tara, Xander and Anya. Only Spike was absent, and she could feel that more than she could feel them.

'But, damn it Buffy, he's nothing but a killer!' he almost screamed at her. He ignored the gentle slap to the head delivered to him by Tara, he was too far gone with fury. He stood on the bottom of the steps, looking up at her as she stood tiredly against the doorframe, the white moonlight reflecting from the wet grass below. It was raining, rare for Sunnydale, but appropriate to this most dreaded of occasions. 'You said it yourself, you told me that you called him a serial killer in prison. What if he broke out, Buffy? What if the first thing that he did was to come after people who pissed him off the last couple of years?'

'Worried, Xander?' Dawn asked snidely, sitting with her legs crossed at Buffy's feet. 'You'd be the first one to die. Some of us wouldn't have to worry.'

Xander looked at her bitterly. He knew that Spike could be charming when he put his mind to it, but he had never expected that that charm would work on his little Dawnie. Though he could barely understand how Willow and Tara were fine with this. Was he the only one who could see a truly obvious parallel with what had happened before?

'Spike wouldn't kill anyone here,' Willow told them, her voice firm, her head thrown back with a confidence that she genuinely felt. She didn't like Spike, but it was a personal matter, not about Buffy. She looked up at the bright moon in the clear black sky above, seeing the gentle wind ruffle the leaves on the tree in the garden, a tree that both Spike and Angel had spent endless nights in protective vigil.

'I thought that you didn't like Spike,' Anya said quietly. She was least comfortable at night, the heavy darkness reminding her of her past.

'I don't,' Willow answered shortly. 'Its hard to like someone who twice singled you out as the weakest link in the chain. But I know that he's changed. I know that he values Buffy more that any cheap thrill that he might get from killing one of us.'

Strangely, a wolf howled in the distance. Buffy shivered, holding herself closely to stay warm, though the night was not cold. She glanced around, feeling only tension. Damn them for putting her in this position of having to defend something that she had only lost because she had listened to their irrational prejudice in the first place. It truly was an irony.

'If he values her so much, why did he leave?' Xander asked, one step from explosion, so hard was he trying to keep his temper.

'Because I forced him to,' Buffy whispered, more to herself as she looked down at the ground, unwilling to face them. 'We all forced him to.'



'Would you kill for him, Slayer?' she asked the reflection in the mirror. It was more likely to answer positively than the girl that would have stared back at her months before. 'Humans? Demons? Where will you stop?'

The small bulb hanging limply from the ceiling above the tarnished mirror flickered once, twice, then slowly died, plunging the tiny, cramped bathroom into unrelieved darkness.

She left the hotel, marching confidently past the front desk where an unshaven fat man in a string vest sporting a variety of crude tattoos leered at her, stopping when she looked at him and hurriedly putting his head back to whatever her had been reading.

She could barely believe that she had spent the whole of the previous day in that tiny room for which she was paying an exorbitant price. So quickly had the time gone that she had barely realised that what passed for the sun in this, the darkest of nations, had risen and fallen in the time that she had spent in continuous introspection.

The early evening air was chill, though the snow had abated. The hostel in which she was staying was located at the corner of a long street, dominated by high buildings that hemmed her in on all sides. There had been no thaw over the previous day, and the streets were a dark grey carpet of dirty snow, illuminated occasionally by the flickering of red neon signs that announced, in Russian, every pleasure for which money could pay. Occasionally, cars with chained tires would drive carefully up and down the streets, their windows darkened, barely the outline of those within visible as they huddled over the wheel, hoping that through the darkness they would be able to see whatever was rushing forward.

As she left the dingy building, she was surrounded by the usual hoard of beggars, wailing with practised ease about their starving children and crippled husbands. Her face impassive, she ignored them all, pausing once to punch one in the face who became too aggressive. The others backed off as they saw the woman fly back fully ten feet, making a trail in the snow, blood pouring from her crushed nose. She twitched once, and was still. The silence that fell was deafening. She walked on as it began to drizzle.

The address that she had been given by the vampire lord Jur'Khan Chung was barely five minutes from her hotel, if it was correct. The line of black and white between vampires and human having been blurred by experience, she trusted him more than she ever would have before, for she believed what she was told about a commonality of interest between them. Certainly, she could think of no other motive that a powerful creature such as he would have in telling her where Spike was.

The images in her mind continued to flash like flickering light at the edge of her vision.

She could see the soldiers in their segmented armour, holding their javelins, their shortswords sheathed as they stared out at the grim forest beyond a clearing. They stood in perfect order, their armour gleaming in the cold sun as their breath was visible in front of their faces. Behind them was the panoply of Roman war – catapults, ballistae, archers and siege engineers, though this, she knew as she stood in the line – what? – that there was no one here to besiege. The Senate had decreed the protection of the northern frontier of Italia beyond Transalpine Gaul, and for that the savage tribes of the Helvetii had to be crushed by the might of Rome. Fully five legions had been sent to deal with the barbarian threat, and now they endured the one permanent feature of warfare throughout the ages. – the wait before the battle. They were long service veterans, all of them, some but a year from retirement to a life of rural simplicity, but until then, they would fight. For their standards, for their units, for Rome.

And for their general, who rode at the front, his gaze never wavering from the forest ahead. He knew from where the threat would come, how to deal with it, how to crush it. In him, they placed the confidence gained from years of near-continuous victory. In him resided the hopes of Rome.

And the fears of the Senate.

Buffy shook herself as she trudged down the road, past people who struggled against the wind in their heavy coats and fur hats, their thick boots insulating them from the cold. She knew nothing of where the Gladiator images were coming, but she knew them to be some form of link with the vampire that Jur'Khan Chung would refer only through teeth clenched with hatred as 'Legion.'

'Ready for him, yet, child?' came that same ghostly voice that she had heard yesterday evening. She stopped, and listened, barely noticing that the narrow street, dirty and foul smelling with the refuse of the local tenements, was empty of people.

She looked around, cursing herself silently for not paying more attention. Had she not been distracted, she would have noticed that she was being watched.

'Who the hell are you?' she shouted at the oppressive emptiness.

She heard only a chuckle. 'More than you wish to know, girl,' came the answer in that same detached.

'I've heard that kind of thing before,' she shouted, turning slowly in the empty, snow covered road. 'I've buried things that said that to me before.'

'You've never come up against the likes of what you face soon, Slayer,' it replied. The wind was the only other noise that could be heard, whistling through the broken windows of the empty buildings surrounding her as the darkness grew heavier, the sun finally sinking below the horizon. The voice surrounded her, as though it was coming from everywhere at once. 'You're lover will not help you.'

The sense of being watched vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving with it only a sense of chill, a sense of dread that she did not remember feeling before. The Master had come, and died. Angelus and the Mayor had been destroyed. Adam was killed, Glory defeated. Though the cost rose with each encounter, she had learned to live with the expectation of defeat counter-balancing the hope of victory. This was different. Then she had known what she faced.

As she stood in the empty street, the tallness of the old Tsarist buildings looming over her, concealing everything and showing nothing, the wind whistling through their vast emptiness, she shivered again. Behind her were her friends, who only barely understood what she was searching for, for what she had left her home. Behind her also the legacy of unbroken victory, but also a vampire lord who seemed to share some of her interests. The snow kicked up her beneath her feet as she wondered at the nature of what lay within a ten minute walk, the wind blowing it in a small could around her feet.

To meet Spike, yes, but also his old lover. And, of Jur'Khan Chung's oldest enemy, killer of his sire, the vampire she knew only as 'Legion,' to whom she was somehow linked. It was enough to freeze her soul.

Her soul. That was the biggest factor in her bitterness, of the fear that had driven Spike from home and sent her after him. What was a soul? How was she sure that she had one, or that any human was somehow fundamentally different from the soul of a vampire. Vampire's needed blood to live, and humans were the readiest meal. The evil in their unbeating hearts was impossible to deny, but equally impossible was the depth of emotion of which they were capable of feeling.

A car sped past her, its chained tires ripping up the ill-maintained road as it drove. She felt the slight blow of the wind as she trudged through the snow.

'You can't love without a soul,' she remembered telling Spike once. And, of all people, it had been Drusilla who had corrected her. 'Oh, we can, you know. We can love quite well. If not wisely.'

So could she. She could love quite well, but seldom wisely. Angel, the product of a teenage crush, the typical desire for an older man. Parker had been nothing more than a mistake. Riley, a sweet child, utterly incapable of understanding with any depth both the strength that she wielded like the guns that defended him and the darkness in her soul.

Spike. The one man that she knew who had understood every part of her, the hesitant girl within who struggled to break the chains that bound the Slayer. The vicious warrior, killing everything that crossed her path. And the Slayer, the sacred duty that bound her by birthright.

She stopped before the door whose address that she had been given by Jur'Khan Chung. She did not know if he was following her, he had merely told her that it would serve his ends for her to find Spike, and that if she did Legion would not be long behind in search of his revenge for some wrong that even the vampire lord knew nothing of. When he did, she and Jur'Khan Chung would let him have Drusilla, and then the three of them would deal with Legion. Buffy, because it was her duty. Spike, for revenge for Drusilla. And Jur'Khan Chung for his own reasons.

The door was solid wood, though badly varnished and poorly maintained. The house itself looked deserted, a small hovel between two larger townhouses whose windows were heavily barred. The windows of this house were boarded up, hurriedly she thought as she looked over the poorly finished stone, chipped with poorly written anti-government graffiti in Russian that reflected grey in the clear moonlight and chill air.

She took a deep breath, then stopped, the incongruity of it striking her as pathetically amusing. It had always irritated Spike when she had barged straight into his crypt without any of the niceties that he observed whenever entering her home.

Something was in there, probably a vampire or maybe more than one. She could feel that much with her unnatural instincts. She could not tell if it was Spike.

She was about to knock, but stopped, leaning heavily against the door with a faint sigh as another wave of images came over her.

He/she was standing in a long, well-tended garden with an ornate sculpted fountain of a winged angel spouting water from its mouth. The sun was bright overhead, illuminating the green grass and tastefully arranged roses that cascaded down a stone wall to his left. It was early evening, she/he saw, the sun about to fall gently below the famous Seven Hills. He sighed softly, looking down at his uniform, polished iron armour and plain belt. He was not armed, though he wihed that he was. He was uncomfortable in the heat of Rome, preferring the cold nights of the camp.

Though the villa behind was plush and well-appointed, clean marble colonnades and clear glass, silk rugs covering the floors and tended by an army of servants as befitted one of the most senior Patrician families, he hated the city. His wife bored him, the marriage arranged. The slave girls did nothing, the chattering of the servants irritated him. The political ferment was alien to his straightforward calculation, the strategic risks never seeming worth the gain.

'Are you not retiring for the evening, my lord?' he heard the melodious voice from behind him. He cursed under his breath, turning, his armour clanking.

His wife (why did that seem wrong?) was short, though exquisitely well- formed, a virgin on their wedding night. Her face was dark from the sun, for she enjoyed spending hers days in the vineyards of the south. Her features were chiselled, perfectly aquiline, the ideal of a Patrician wife, pure blood of Rome. She showed it in her stance as she stood beneath the carved columns of the house, her stance arrogant, her head thrown back with a challenge.

He sighed once again, though less in weariness than anger, well-controlled as he watched the sun finally disappear, leaving only the exquisite reed sky of early evening, lending the trees an eerie glow on their green leaves, perfectly still in air that existed without the slightest whisper of a breeze.

'Not tonight, wife,' he told the woman, who nodded once, and swept back inside. They had not made love for the better part of six months and, truth to tell, he did not miss it. Sex was irrelevant next to the pure, savage joy of battle.

He stood for what might have been hours, staring out at the city below without so much as a flicker of expression, his face perfectly impassive, his hands clasped rigidly behind his back as night fell slowly. The torches were lit by the unobtrusive servants, who knew better than to interrupt. The light from the flames and the smell of the tar changed the mood of the garden, creating distorted shadows where none had existed before, the leaves of the trees becoming gargoyles on the wall, the petals of the flowers becoming monsters of classical legend as the sputtered on the cobbled ground. The air became gradually colder, enjoyably so. The Senate, he knew, was meeting tomorrow, and he was compelled to attend. They feared his ambition, he knew. He smiled for the first time that night, a smile of pure malevolence. Let them fear me, he thought.

'That is not the smile of the benevolent noble,' a soft voice purred from behind him.

He spun and drew his sword in one smooth movement, the sharp point facing the direction of the voice, which had come from just inside the grove of sculpted trees at the side of the house to his right. He had sensed nothing, though he observed that the animals of the garden, the frogs and the grasshoppers and other insects, the horses in the stables, had fallen silent. It was almost as though time had stopped, so sudden was the unnatural silence in the barely lit black of night. There was no moon tonight.

He sheathed his sword as he saw a woman emerge from the trees, though he remained wary. Her hair was raven black, almost blue as it reflected the moonlight. Her face was exquisite, with a small graceful nose and unusually large, innocent-looking eyes. Her lips were full, inviting, sensual. Unusually tall, beneath a pure white gown that covered her from her neck to her feet, her body was perfectly formed. She lacked any flaw, beyond skin that was pale even by the standards of Roman women. She moved with an easy grace, showing neither fear nor deference. Quite the most beautiful woman in his extensive acquaintance, she should have been familiar, and yet he had never seen her before.

'You have me at a loss, madam,' he told her, his voice coldly polite, for he did not enjoy being startled, especially when buried in thought. 'And I might ask you how you were allowed on to my estate.'

'Your guards are vigilant,' she told him, her voice soft, almost sibilant, as enticing as the eyes of a cobra. 'But they presented little challenge to me.' She looked beyond him for a brief moment. 'Do you not find the city beautiful at night, the lights flickering in the starlight?'

'My definition of beauty is not so refined,' he answered her, being drawn into conversation against his better judgement. He was unused to having this sort of reaction to woman, long inured to their mostly superficial charms. 'And I would still ask who you are and what you require of me.'

She laughed, a silver tinkle in the still and silent air. 'Require of you, general?' she asked scornfully, looking straight into his eyes. 'Ask rather what it is you require of me.'

'Your name,' he demanded flatly, resisting the near-hypnotic compulsion of her naked sensuality.

'Julia Erenia,' she told him, without expression, moving slowly towards his left

Now he laughed, a sound seldom heard, indeed he thought his throat protested at the unfamiliar movement. 'Unfunny, madam, or merely ill- informed. The Erenia family vanished from Rome three hundred years ago with the deposition of the last king by the Senate.' He watched her move slowly around him, turning to keep her always in sight. He had seen predators stalk their prey before, and found the reversal of positions exquisite.

'Has it been so long?' she breathed, gently picking a rose from the tree beside her, closing her eyes as she inhaled the scent. 'It seems only yesterday since Romulus Superus held the throne.'

'Do you claim immortality, like a Homeric heroine?' he asked her. 'You are no goddess, for there are no gods.'

'I am no god,' she told him, moving closer and handing him the rose. He briefly touched the skin of her hand. It was colder than ice, but the texture was inhumanly smooth. He shivered once with unaccustomed pleasure. Her voice dropped to a bare whisper. 'But I can grant your wish, general.'

'And that would be?' he asked her, leaning in so that he could hear her.

'Immortality.'



Buffy slowly pushed herself from the wall slowly, crashing back to the reality of the grim, cold darkness of the Russian winter, away from the gentle evening of Roman summer. She cursed softly, not knowing if someone had slipped something into her breakfast, whether she was dreaming while awake, or whether or not she was truly linked to a vampire that had weathered the millennia. None of the possibilities were acceptable.

'What the hell does it mean?' she asked herself in English, earning a suspicious look from a militia officer patrolling the quiet streets. She flashed him her most winning smile, though it fell far short of what she might have been able to muster mere months before. He smiled back nervously, and hurried on through the snow and chill air of the narrow street, vanishing quickly into the gloom of the poorly lit area.

Buffy, Spike is behind this door, she told herself, steeling herself once again to meet her lover of seven months before. She had much to tell him and, if Jur'Khan Chung was to be believed, little time in which to do it. She would figure out the meaning of the odd visions later, if there was time. A vampire alone she knew she could deal with. Had she not killed the Master?

Forsaking courtesy as a waste of precious time, and desperate in her eagerness, she leaned back and delivered a crushing side kick that shattered the wooden door into a thousand pieces that scythed inwards like shards of glass. Taking one deep breath, she marched through the ruined doorway into the dark room beyond.

The room was dingy, requiring a thorough cleansing. Bits of rubbish and empty bottle that reeked of strong spirits were strewn around like paper. The floor was rotting, worm infested woods, the ceiling low and flaking, decrepit plaster falling from it like snow in the sudden rush of wind from the door.

At the far end of the room was a crumpled bed, unmade in an age, and covered with filthy blankets that looked as though they had been scrounged from an animal shelter.

On it sat Spike, staring at her, his deep blue eyes buried in shadow in the darkness of the few candles that lit the room poorly. Dressed in habitual black, though unkempt, his duster was tossed carelessly on the floor in front of him. Alone, he simply stared at her as her leapt at the sight of him, relief flooding through her at the end of her search, mingled only with the joy of seeing his face again, tempered only slightly by the apprehension that she felt at his possible reaction.

She stood, all the practised speeches that she has prepared for this very moment melting away at the sight of his bleached hair and sculpted figure.

The book he had been reading dropped unnoticed to the floor, the faint sound like thunder in the sudden silence of the dingy, dark chamber.

'Slayer?' he asked her, his voice faint. He rose slowly from the bed, coming into the faint light. 'Buffy?'

He was as she remembered.

That was the last conscious thought that she had as something hard and metallic crashed across the back of her neck, knocking her out cold. She had time to hear one final word.

It was said through a snarl of animal fury.

'Dru.'