Buffy tried to lift the dead-weight that Spike had become, but it was all that she could do to stand on her own. Her healing, though rapid, had never had to deal with the kind of massive injuries that she had been forced to sustain at the hands of Drusilla which, she reflected as she gritted her teeth and put pressure on her shattered knee, had been the point. Drusilla had been less concerned with the infliction of pain immediately than the assurance that she could inflict it indefinitely. She had learned well at the hands of Angelus.
'I said leave, Slayer,' Jur-Khan Chung ordered absently, all his attention fixed on Patricius and Drusilla as they stood two yards from each other. 'I keep my bargains, and you have kept yours.'
'What do you think that I am trying to do?' she asked sarcastically, hefting Spike with one arm and biting back a scream of agony as she slipped in a pool of dirty water, putting additional pressure on her wounded left. She had made a bargain with a vampire, her mind whispered to her as the tension mounted with every slowly passing second, but she ignored the bite of conscience that told her that she had betrayed everything for which she had once stood. Bitterly, she reflected once again that it had been Angel who had forced her to do that for the first time, setting her on a road that had led to nothing but pain and suffering.
The Mongol general jerked his head to one of his men who was standing behind, though well away from the potential battle zone, small though it was and amplified in perceived size by the sheer power that was contained within it. For a moment, the rotting cellar seemed a cavern, primordial and intimidating for what lay within it. All it was missing was primitive drawings on the sodden walls for the picture to be complete. The other vampires, powerful though they were, were lesser creatures, grotesquely inferior creatures from the three vampire Masters who stood beyond them, the distance far beyond the physical. They belonged on a different plain, and the reluctance of the forms into which they were bound to exist here could be imagined with little difficulty.
One of them, the one that she had first seen when she had entered the war hall of Jur'Khan Chung's granite palace, lifted Spike without difficulty, helping her to her feet also, dragging them both towards the door with an eagerness that, the Slayer was sure, had little to do with any concern for their health and far more with his own. He had no place here, and he knew it.
Patricius' voice rumbled through the chamber, though it had lost whatever semblance of grim amusement that it had once contained and was filled now only with the remorseless determination that had seen him survive millennia when most vampires fell after less than twenty years. 'She will not leave so soon' he decreed, without looking in her direction, his face assuming a mask of effortless concentration.
Where the open door leading to the faint light of the evening had beckoned like the warming light of a home fire promising the comforts of familiarity and safety, now was replaced with a glowing blue barrier that promised torment if crossed. Buffy had now idea how she knew that crossing it meant death. She just knew that she did.
'But, I think,' the Roman continued, 'that she should have her health for this.' He pointed at her without meeting her gaze, worried though it was, and she felt an incongruously pleasant tingle start at her feet and move its way up her body quickly. As it passed her limbs, she felt the cuts, bruises and internal damage healing as though it had never been. She gasped with the pleasure of it, for it was the closest thing to sexual release that she had felt since Spike had left Sunnydale, an eternity before.
She was once again the Slayer.
As the odd feeling suffused her totally, she was unable to see the detached, analytical expression on the face of Drusilla, something that would have seemed alien before had the Slayer not seen the insanity literally melt from the face of the vampiress in front of her as the power that she had stolen had taken over, driving her with its relentless will to expand. Nor did she see the expression of fury on the face of her Oriental ally as he saw and sensed what was happening.
All she felt was the renewed strength and power that coursed through her. Even at her peak, even when training and practising every day to defeat Glory, to use every tool in her unnatural arsenal to save the apparently doomed life of the sister that had become her whole life since the death of her mother, she had never felt as powerful as she did in that moment.
She could challenge the Gods themselves, she was sure, resisting the urge to scream with the pure pleasure of it. Spike, prostrate beneath her and barely conscious, a ragged hole through his chest, was oblivious to the change.
The cellar, dark and dank though it was, entirely fitting as a place of torture and torment of indefinite promise, seemed brighter before she realised that even her eyesight had been improved. The joy was sexual, and she whimpered with the intensity of it. Never mind that she feel parts of her wither and die, parts that she would never have sacrificed before without first dying. Parts of her that she had once died for, parts of her that had brought her here in the first place. In their place remained the primal urge to dominate, to gather what power she could and use it as she saw fit. For who else could stop her.
The vampires behind, the four servants of Jur'Khan Chung, drew back from her with a mixture of both horror and awe. As she ignored the awakening form of her lover beneath her, dismissing from her mind whatever foolish misconceptions had ever led her to believe that such a puny creature was ever worthy of her, she realised something, something wonderful and simple. So pure in its clarity. She, the Chosen One, the Slayer, relished their obeisance.
And wanted more.
The respect that she had earned and the fear that she caused among the undead legions in Sunnydale had been one thing, a function of that with which she had been born, the strength over which she had no control married to the duty that regulated it. With icy clarity, she realised the weakness that that duty had always brought out, the reluctance to take the final step necessary. The removal of the inhibitions that had bound her, the realisation of what it meant to be a Slayer, now meant that so much more would be hers than a short, violent life spent protecting those who would never thank her for her efforts, efforts for which she had twice willingly sacrificed herself. Once, she laughed bitterly to herself, they had even tried to arrest her for protecting them.
Such folly.
The names washed over her in a tide of familiarity and hidden knowledge that she had never suspected that she possessed before but that she knew were linked inexplicably with the company that she was in, the power that surrounded her and the evil that arose within her, that she greeted like an old friend whose assistance she missed. With the power, came the knowledge and, with that, the awareness of what she was and what she meant.
Aurelius.
Akheneton.
Thakoiris.
Jounn'i.
She looked down once at Spike. Seeing for the first time his weakness, she felt only contempt.
Spike began to stir, the wound in his chest healing slowly, but still unaware of the dread power that had been unleashed above him. He was ignored by the rest as a toothless insect, easily swatted if he dared to bite. Clawing his way back to consciousness, ignoring as best he could the burning pain in his chest from the wound and his side from his ribs, he pushed himself up against the wall as best he could, though it took so much energy to rise a few inches that his body threatened to betray him. Only three lifetimes of practised endurance allowed him to stay where he was, and that only with all the strength that his wounded body could muster.
'What the bloody hell?' he muttered to himself as he looked up, trying to understand what he was seeing.
He had seen power before, he had tasted it himself at times and he had been in its company, had scented it, been tempted by it. But the power in this room shared between the three vampires and Buffy was like nothing that he had ever heard of, read about. It was solid, like a wall of darkness that pushed at its limits to expand beyond the confines of the tiny chamber that bordered it. He had expected Quintus Eranus to show that kind of ability, had seen it in Drusilla and shrank back from it with instinctive fear. He would have understood Jur'Khan Chung pushing the edges of it, a vampire lord who as a mortal had ridden with the Great Khan himself.
But his Slayer was suffused with it. His lover, the woman for whom he would sacrifice a world with grim resolve to see a smile from her tanned face, stood at the centre. Above him, her head turned away, her eyes drawn to the nexus in the centre of the four of them. Beneath her, he had never felt so excluded. No small power in his own right, he understood now what it was to be mortal in the presence of the Ancients. Though Drusilla was barely older than he and Buffy but a fraction of his age, he had not felt so young since he had been young. Nor had he ever felt so helpless, even when trapped in the chair to endure the manipulation of Angelus' thwarted desires. An immortal who for a century had stalked his mortal prey with the reckless abandon that had built a dark legend to be whispered by lessers as a lesson to learn, he now was but a child in the presence of teachers who, he knew, would share nothing with him.
'You betray everything,' Jur'Khan Chung spat at Patricius as Buffy tried to assimilate the limitless knowledge that had been placed at her disposal by the outstretched arm of the Roman. 'This was between us, and only us.'
'Insignificant troll,' Drusilla snarled at him, turning her attention from the demon that hunted her across the world to the one with whom, moments before, she had shared an alliance of self-interest. Her eyes were hooded in the half light, though that itself seemed to amplified by what had arisen between the four of them. Spike tried not to shrink back, but it was instinctive. 'You know so little for one so old.'
'This was never between just us,' Patricius told him calmly, letting his arm fall to his side as he stood with unnatural stillness as the tension melted. 'This has been building for the millennia.'
'And you thought to stop it because you wanted something as simple as vengeance,' Buffy told the Roman general contemptuously. 'For something so petty? How far you have fallen.'
Patricius chuckled, though the sound was mechanical as it rumbled through the small chamber. 'No, woman, vengeance is a mask for what is far more real.'
'You loved Helena,' Jur'Khan Chung told him, his slanted eyes narrowed, his bulk and strength imposing as he loomed above them all in sheer physical presence. Drusilla was willowy and slight, Buffy small and seeming so weak, Patricius lean and fit. But Jur'Khan Chung was like a mountain surrounded by foothills. For all the good that it would do him, Spike knew as he pushed himself to one knee, trying his hardest not to be seen, for the attention that he would attract would make the first kiss that he and Drusilla had shared in that forgotten London alley seem like the most tender embrace that he could imagine from the Slayer above him who was being torn from him by the lure of the power that had been bestowed upon her for reasons at which Spike could only guess, despite his education and slyly acquired knowledge.
'I loved her,' Patricius admitted. 'With everything that I could muster through two and a half millennia of existence. I watched her sleep for that time, watched her for months and years on end, praying that she would wake for a moment, praying that she would be able to look upon me with something of the awareness that I remembered.'
'She spoke of you at the end,' Drusilla crooned to him, her malice barely hidden. 'But her voice was different. More scratchy.'
'You I will kill,' Patricius told her, turning slowly in her direction, though keeping a watchful eye on the other two, 'for taking what was mine and making it yours so that even I cannot take it back. And for it you will suffer.'
'As will you for what you did to me,' Jur'Khan Chung hissed at him.
Buffy laughed, the sound nothing like the pleasant tinkle of her normal girlish giggle. It sounded like nothing so much as the growl of an animal, the warning of a predator. Within it, Spike sensed, was contained oceans of bitterness and betrayal, though of what he did not know.
'You speak of wrongs done you, princeling?' she asked Jur'Khan Chung, her eyes flat as she regarded him. 'It was you and your sire who bound me and mine for millennia within this endless cycle of righteousness.' She spat the last as though it defiled her to speak of it. 'It was you and yours who despoiled my Order for your own ends. And you speak of betrayal?'
Spike understood nothing of what he was hearing, nothing of the interaction of which his beloved was in undeniable part, but he understood enough of hatred to know that he had never seen so much of it in such a small place, so much that it seemed to light the room with the purity of its darkness. Hate had fuelled him before, and he understood its incomparable strength, but the hatred around him now, he knew, had been strengthened by millennia of nourishment within the fertile minds of these ancient vampires. No creatures, he knew himself, could nurture bitterness so productively.
The pain in his chest ebbing, though he knew his heart had been pierced by whatever Drusilla had done to him, he rose to one knee, waiting. He had never felt so outmatched, but then he had been faced by more experienced opponents before and had survived. Planning and intelligence were, he knew, the best counters to brute force. And of those he had plenty.
Buffy, he thought to himself as h rose just below her field of vision. She had never seemed more beautiful to him than she did at that moment, and never before had he been less attracted to her. Gone was the deceptively fragile beauty that had warmed him mere minutes before, in its place the perverted opposite of everything that he loved about her. He could feel it. For her innocence, Patricius had with whatever he had done to her substituted an ageless cynicism. Her clarity of purpose he had tainted with self-interest. And for her humanity, he had given her the soul of a demon.
No, you stupid ponce, he told himself. Not given, but resurrected. He was young, but he knew the legends. He had merely ignored them as overly elaborate campfire stories before now, before their reality was so blindingly clear in front of them that any refutation was as much worth as howling at the moon that he could not see in the depths of the cellar's darkness, surrounded on all sides by enemies that made him seem insignificant with their strength and power.
Enough of this, he shook himself, and rose smoothly to his feet. Behind him he could feel Jur'Khan Chung's cubs, but he paid them no attention. They belonged even less in this company that he did.
'So,' he drawled, snapping the four of them from their preoccupation with each other, 'we've got ourselves quite a gathering here, don't we. Aurelius, Akhenaton, Jounn'I and Thoikaris. I'd wager the four Orders haven't been in the same place for, what? Three thousand years? Maybe more?'
'Stay out of this, boy,' Drusilla ordered him, imposing all of the authority that she possessed as both his Sire and the new Master of his Order. It was all that he could do not to flinch, but he suppressed the fear that he felt. 'You don't belong here.'
'Get out, Spike,' Buffy told him, and this time he did flinch. He had endured her hatred, he had endured her coldness. All of that and more he had fought through to touch her soul. But he had never before endured her apathetic contempt. The anger within him at what had been done to her rose, but he fought it down. Now was not the time for misjudgement.
He knelt and picked up his duster from where he had placed it a pillow for his lover's head, and draped it around himself. For some reason, he always felt stronger when he wore it. Irony, he thought to himself. He had never been a soldier, but he knew that the soldiers in the room would appreciate what it meant to be more comfortable in armour. He felt the bulge in his pocket, but hoped against hope that he would not have to risk using it.
'Don't think so, Slayer,' he said to her, then turned to the others, seeing how her normally lively eyes burned when being so addressed. 'But then, she's not really a Slayer any more, is she?'
He was answered by a wall of silence that matched the desire for vengeance that matched the darkness around him for intensity.
'Thought not,' he answered for himself. 'This was never about her, or Helena, whoever she is,' he ignored Patricius' stiffening, 'or our baby, was it? This was about the Order War. This was about getting it over and done with once and for all, wasn't it, general?'
'You sired this insolent child?' Jur'Khan Chung snarled at Drusilla.
'I was bored,' Drusilla answered him. Spike stifled the hurt that he felt at the casual truth of this.
'The Order War has been too long ignored, William,' Patricius told him. 'Do you think that a creature such as I would do this merely for vengeance? Do you think that would take such a risk? I admit that I will rip your Sire limb from limb for depriving me of what was mine, but I thought that it would be better to kill two birds with one stone, to deal with everything at once. I was happy in my anonymity. It would take more than simply vengeance to rouse me from it.'
'You talk too much,' Buffy told him. 'We should get this over and done with. We have lived under the shadow of this for long enough. If it takes this puny vessel to rouse me from my sleep and have done with what was postponed by what was done to me, then I will take the chance. I, too, have a need for vengeance.'
'And you are impatient, young one,' Drusilla told her, moving back to rest against the wall. Spike, who had spent a century watching her, knew that there was something badly off about her movements, movements that were usually a bizarrely complementary mix of grace and clumsiness. There was a silkiness about the way she moved, now, a smoothness that she had never before possessed. He had known that she was different as soon as he had found her again, months before, but he had put it down to the power that she had acquired, the power for which she had to be watched. But it was beyond that, he knew. The movement of rest against the wall should have reduced the tension in the room, building with the force of a bomb that was primed to go off at the merest spark of inevitable conflict. Instead, it increased it.
'We have been waiting for this for more than three thousand years, we can wait no longer,' Jur'Khan Chung announced.
In a flash of understanding, Spike realised what was holding them back. A four way battle was next to impossible to wage on even terms at the best of times, he knew. No sane creature would undertake one, for the outcome rested in the hands of Fate. Skill might well count for nothing, indeed could be a liability of the worst sort, for showing too much strength would lead to numbers being stacked against you as a result of the fear that the other three would feel. And the odds here were too even.
Despite the proclaimed eagerness of Patricius, Jur'Khan Chung and his Dark Queen to have this done with, they were reluctant to start it. Only Buffy was eager, and Spike knew why.
It brought a tear to his eye as he thought of the reason, for it was something that he had never thought would happen to her of all the beings that he had known, whose strength and fortitude had challenged the very Gods themselves, only to be undone by a feud about which she knew nothing and was of which the unwilling and unknowing inheritor. Perversely he, too, was eager, for this to be done, for every moment that it lasted dragged her further and further from him. She had told him that she loved him, that she had searched the world for him. An image of his daughter, a daughter that he would never see, flashed through his mind, igniting the fury that would make him terrifying.
But not to this company, in which he belonged as much as did a child at a Council of War. A Master himself, he was in the presence of Lords. The Hierarchy had never seemed so unyielding. The only Lord that he had met in his life apart from Patricius was Nest, and Nest himself would have been hard put to take his place here.
Wrong place, wrong bloody time again, Spike, he told himself with grim amusement. Love, it seemed, would always be his most effective enemy.
'You're waiting long enough, you Latin scum,' Spike drawled at the Roman, though he got no reaction beyond a slight narrowing of this dead eyes. He felt around in the pockets of his duster. Lighting a cigarette with one hand, he hoped that they paid no attention to his other. 'Not much of a risk taker, are you?' The wound in his chest was burning, but he determined to remain impassive. 'Never were, really. I heard that you never gave battle unless you were sure of victory, that with all the laurels that the Senate bestowed on you and the parades that you marched in behind the chained leaders of the enemies of Rome, you never took a risk in your life.' There! he shouted silently as he felt the round shape in his pocket. He mentally thanked his hated grandsire for one more important lesson learned.
Prepare for everything.
'You try my patience, child,' Jur'Khan told him, backhanding him viciously, sending him flying to the ground in a swirl of old leather and cigarette smoke. He rose to his feet, though with less grace than before, such was the pain. 'Do you think that by stalling us you will gain your Slayer back?'
'I thought that you, at least, had courage,' Spike shot back. 'That you would want to face Thoikaris in the full flush of its strength, not hostage to the body of a Slayer.'
'I'm no Slayer,' Buffy growled at him from the depths of such icy coldness that he felt a shudder rip through him. Of all his nightmares, being so addressed by her was among the worst. Not her, mate, he steeled himself, though it did no good, for her didn't know if she ever would be again. 'I'm more than any Slayer.'
'Then ask yourself, why Patricius would bring you back,' he pressed her, trying his hardest to sow the seeds of doubt within her, knowing that the others were not yet ready. 'Ask him. He knows why when you jumped from the tower to save Dawn and died,' his unbeating heart shuddered at the memory, of being unable to see her shattered corpse through the fog of tears that he could not control, 'that no new Slayer was called.' He was gratified to see her swing in the direction of the Roman.
'Ask him why it was you to whom he could speak silently,' Spike pressed on, realised now what he connection to Patricius actually involved, and from where it came. 'Ask him why you haven't been the same since Willow brought you back. The part of you that is still Buffy is asking those questions. Haven't been totally taken over yet.'
'What does he mean?' she asked Patricius, moving towards him with unmistakeable hostility. He looked at her warily, as did the others. They weren't ready yet, Spike knew.
Time to strike, he told himself.
Knowing that they were distracted, he carefully removed the pin from the grenade in his pocket, the one weapon that he carried with him from America in case of anything, and hurled it at the wall. At the same time, he threw himself forward, crashing into Buffy and covering both himself and her with the leather of his coat, not knowing if she, too, would need its protection.
She tried to throw him off, and her newfound strength would have enabled her to do so easily. He had time to hear Drusilla scream at him, an outraged cry of affront, and the growl of Jur'Khan Chung, before the explosion ripped through the thin, rotting stone wall at the back of the cellar beside the door.
The rest was drowned out with the screams of the unprepared vampires as the cold midday Russian sun bathed the shattered cellar.
There was only one thing worse, Spike realised as he sheltered beneath the leather of his duster, than the smell of his own charred flesh.
It was the smell of Buffy's.
