Cold Comfort
Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)
Chapter Eight
The first place they paint red is a glitzy demon bar by the shore of the lake.
Spike, with cautious headmasterly charm, sits Anya down while he goes to buy drinks. She looks around appreciately. Velvet sofas, pale green like shallow water; swinging bead curtains and mosaic floors; a mirror-ball turning slowly.
Anya closes her eyes for a moment and feels the smoky, perfumey, demon-rank air rise warmly around her.
She's still shuddery from the misery that hit her in the hotel room, the cold eye of the storm that suddenly sucked her in. He's gone. He never loved her. She should have known.
But Spike's at the bar buying her a gin and tonic, and the mirror-ball's glittering like a sequinned sun in a demon dimension, and the world's shrinking to a noisy, jazzy, dry-iced swelter of din. Merry hell. She's safe here.
Spike's standing over her, holding out a wide-rimmed glass that clinks deliciously. He looks concerned, but also manic, like an electrocuted school counsellor. Anya takes the drink gratefully, her thoughts scrambling spider-leggily. He cares so much, he cares not at all. He's bringing her peace: in the clattery haven of the bar, in the fiery calm of the drink in her hand, in the roaring oblivion of his loveless, passionate... a small noise escapes her. Spike sits down, still eyeing her warily.
Anya smiles widely at him, hoping she doesn't look too nuts, and then gulps at her cocktail. His eyebrows hover for a moment; then he lifts his own glass.
'Carnage,' he nods and necks the bloody-looking contents, leaving Anya wondering numbly whether it's a toast or the name of his cocktail, or possibly an extract from his to-do list.
He's scanning the room, slightly hyper, not like detectives in films who play it cool.
''No Fyarl in here tonight,' he reports, eyes still searching.
'Are you sure?' says Anya, trying to sound intense and focused.
'Sure,' confirms Spike. 'Not for miles. They smell like ditch.'
Anya nods. She doesn't care if they smell like roses in May. She's here for the ride; she's here for the rest.
She can't shush her thoughts; she can't shush the endless I wish.
Wishes - she knows how disastrous they are. She'd always known; she'd lived on the proceeds. But she'd never thought her own were. Hadn't known she could want something - a man - so much it could rack her invisibly with cold-falling despair. The world she's come to believe in threatens to unravel. She looks into her glass and thinks of Spike.
Wings that beat rapidly in her throat when he was near enough to reflect back her breath. Last night he'd taken her over. This was why they shut the door at that moment, in those films - on Vivien Leigh and that attractive man with the moustache. She'd never understood before. Sometimes there's no more story left that you can tell.
Spike's watching her, the shade of a frown lurking, his Fyarl hunt forgotten. Going off her rocker, he thinks with a pang. Not that he minds the company of fragile-minded females, usually. Never happier than when his baby's got the bends. But Anya - he wants to keep her sane, if he can. Protect her from the vultures in her brain, as no-one protected him. A foolish thought .
He glances across at her, one elbow leant on the table, vacantly eating her glacé cherry off the point of her paper parasol.
All the time, behind her brightness, she's raw, dreary, quietly helpless - he can feel it. She's like a charming flapper on the brink of alcoholic breakdown. Rouged, bobbed, bead-bedecked. Hollow. It's what he loved in Buffy, what no-one else could see, the secret of her rawness, her youth, her despair.
He watches the coins of disco-ball light trailing over her cheeks and hair.
Suddenly he's sick to the gills of old things - long-preserved passions and grudges; pale, mummified beauties with bedsores of the brain.
What's to keep him from staying here? On the road with a girl who thinks her brown-eyed sweetheart was holding up the world, who was born yesterday, who wears her heart on her sleeve?
What does he have to go back for, really?
Anya jabs his arm with the chewed end of a cocktail stick, and he looks up.
There's a girl standing by the table. Her skirt is leather, and teeny. There's a pink streak in her hair.
'You guys from Sunnydale?' she says.
It's the girl they saw outside the hotel gates, Spike realizes.
'I saw you at the hotel,' she says. 'Trevor's place.'
'You know Trevor?' says Anya, sounding surprised
'That son of a hellhound,' confirms the girl, glumly, dropping into the seat next to Anya's. 'Got you ghostbusting for him, has he?'
Anya looks uncertainly at Spike. He pauses, not sure how under-cover they're supposed to be.
'Little Willy told me all about it,' the girl reassures them. 'Figured I'd come see if you needed a hand.'
'You know Willy?' says Spike.
'Sure,' nods the girl. 'I'm Susie.'
Blank looks from Spike and Anya. The punk girl looks hurt. 'Willy never mention his little sister?' she says.
Recognition darts into Spike's eyes.
'I never listen to Willy,' he assures her, hastily and courteously. 'Probably talks about you night and day.'
'Right,' says Susie, sounding bitter and drunk. 'Him and his trashy, deadbeat demon-hole. He can go right to hell.' She pulls an illegall-looking cigarette from behind her ear and lights it.
'So, how come you know Trevor?' says Anya, rather too incredulously. Susie takes a deep toke.
'We useter go steady,' she admits.
This seems to jump-start Anya out of her lethargy. 'You're the Willy's- sister who used to date Trevor?' she says. 'That's very disturbing. He's way too wrinkly and old to take out girls of your age.'
''Ah, he can still show a little girl a good time,' says Susie with a regretful smile.
Spike recoils slightly. Amidst the rich mélange of cultural detritus in his mind, there's a deep core of soap-opera moralism.
'He's no good, though,' Susie says, unsteadily, blowing out a stream of brown smoke. 'Skunk ruined my life. Like, for good.'
She looks about fifteen to Spike, so he doesn't take this weary defeatism too deeply to heart. Anya, he notes grimly, is getting a warm, concerned look on her face, and seems to be settling herself more comfortably into her seat, all ready for girlish confidences and second degree murder.
'Did he ever… hurt you?' she asks in a serious tone, gravelly with compassion. Whatever they say about Anyanka, Spike thinks, she knows her job.
'Yeah, right,' says Susie. 'That sissy. Only thing of mine he ever hurt was my knuckles.'
'Maybe he ignored your emotions, didn't make you feel special?'
'He dropped me like a stone, the bum. Took off with some old Dynasty cleavage. After I'd stuck him all these years.'
'Years!' says Spike, momentarily losing his vamp-cool. For an instant, he can't help it, he thinks of Dawn.
Anya shoots him an irritated glance.
'Sometimes it can feel good to talk about things that upset you, Susie,' she says. 'Especially to someone who understands how poisonous a man can be. Why don't you tell me all about it?'
A cold shudder runs down Spike's spine.
Susie kicks the table shyly. 'Nothing to tell,' she said. 'He owned the skating rink, useter give me free rides.' She wipes a trail of mascara across her round pale cheek. 'He had a cool car,' she sighs. 'But then he goes in on this hot-crap hotel and suddenly I'm not good enough for him. I got no class, he said. Couldn't take me anywhere. That skunk.' Her voice trembles. 'He - he said he loved me only-'
'Well, that's nice,' says Spike, hoping to round things off on a cheery note.
'Only, he needed to get ahead in the hospitality business.' Susie wipes her nose. Spike glances at his watch.
'He hated my family - he thought Willy was a no-hope bum. He useter say mom was a - a lousy old tramp who only got out of bed to steal rubbing alcohol.'
Anya makes a face of raw disgust, and hurriedly covers it with a sympathetic noise.
'So he scrams out of Sunnydale, dead of night, like the plague-rat he is, and, time I hunt him down here, he's married to this old acid nightmare, and running the fanciest place in town.'
She sighs, and draws on her joint, sadly.
Anya leans forward and lays a hand on Susie's.
'Don't you sometimes wish-'
Spike clears his throat,
'So, Susie. You. er - know anything about these Fyarl raids?'
Anya looks from Spike to Susie, then rolls her eyes, withdraws her hand and chips in,
'Like, who's organizing them?'
Susie, however, isn't easily de-railed.
'Who do you think,' she says, scathingly. 'The dirty skanking whore-bag who makes that reptile's desperate, snotting life as crappy as it oughta be.'
Spike has severe trouble with this, but Anya's fluent in woman-scorned language, and translates.
'You mean Trevor's wife?' she says doubtfully, looking at Spike. 'That seems kind of unlikely. She appeared very concerned about the raids. And also mystified.'
'It's a put-on,' says Susie with conviction. 'She's behind it. She wants to make him suffer. She's a Lamia - she feeds on pain. Anyway, she just married him for his money. Bet she beats him every single night. He shoulda stuck with me.' She shakes her head, slapping out a hot rock that's melting her fishnet knee.
Anya sighs. She feels that everyone's conspiring to make a simple case of beat-the-bad-guys unnecessarily complicated.
'Why would she want to make bad things happen to the hotel?' she points out. 'That way they both lose money.'
Susie gives a raucous laugh, making Anya jump.
'Oh, sure,' she says. 'Cause a Lamia-devil's gonna stick around for, what, couples therapy with the guy whose pain she's sucking on? You guys are good! All she's gonna do is drink him dry, take his cash and scam the heck out on those skinny little legs.'
'So she's really a Lamia?' says Anya thoughtfully. 'I thought you were just name-calling.'
Spike's attention-span is straining. He doesn't know what a Lamia is and he wants another drink. Susie's holding a pint of what smells to him like apricot brandy. She takes a slurp.
'Anyway, if you guys think she's so daisy-fresh, watcha doing tailing her?' she demands.
Spike and Anya exchange looks.
'We're not tailing her,' Anya says.
'What, you here on a double date?' says Susie. She jerks her head towards a couple laughing by the bar. They follow her gaze.
The guy's a Scavenger demon, hulking and chain-mail-skinned. The woman is ash-blonde, shimmery with green sequins, leaning with casual grace against the wall. Spike raises his eyebrows at Anya. It's Trevor's wife.
'So she sees other… creatures,' says Anya. 'Maybe she just Digs The Look.' Spike watches as a slender, heavily-jewelled hand appears, sinuously, around the demon's big neck.
'That's not a woman who thinks killer possums ate her chef,' he says, lighting a cigarette. 'She's got something to hide.'
'Don't sprain your brain, Einstein,' mutters Susie. She throws away the stub and stands up. 'I gotta go,' she says. 'Give me a call. I told little Willy I'd help you out if I could.'
Spike nods his thanks, not feeling optimistic about this.
'Are you staying at the hotel?' asks Anya.
Susie snorts.
'Like they'd let me in to scrub floors. I'm hanging with Dave the Teeth. Over the tattoo parlour. You guys have fun at Trevor's, now - don't let the bedbugs bite.' She drains her brandy-glass. 'They leave real ugly scars.'
'Nice to see good old-fashioned insanity hasn't gone out of style,' says Spike when she's gone. 'What's a Lamia?'
'Kind of snake demon,' says Anya. 'You have to kill them with an iron blade. Over running water. I think,' she adds. 'I never have.'
He lights a cigarette.
'This could be your big chance then,' he says. 'Once we track her down.'
Anya looks across at the bar.
'We're not James Bond,' she says firmly. 'Why can't we just kill things, get paid and move on?'
'Touch of vengeance in the air did you good, did it?' he says rather sourly. She's looking several rungs up the ladder of sane.
'You know I wouldn't have,' she says, with a blithely unconvincing smile. She leans back in her seat, looking almost serene.
The mirror-ball stops spinning, slowly, and changes direction.
''Nother drink, pet?' Spike offers, feeling suddenly lavish and irresponsible.
'It's on me,' says Anya in a careful voice, smiling broadly. Xander must've had a tough time teaching her that one, thinks Spike.
'Thanks,' he says. 'Scotch, straight-up.'
While she's gone, he watches Trevor's wife and wonders if she's a Machiavellian snake-devil or just a demon-groupie, and what on earth he's meant to do about it anyway.
'What the hell's this?' he asks, when Anya comes back with his drink. It's a rich green colour, with a mauve paper parasol poking over the fluted rim. 'Where's my scotch?'
'Well,' she dodges, setting it down on the table. 'They recommended this.'
'Who did?'
'I'm sure it's delicious.' She sits down, sipping a gin and tonic.
Spike swivels towards the barman, holding up the green drink with a furious look on his face. A man in a lemon-coloured suit, with tusks, seated at the bar, holds up his own glass and beams back at him.
'Anya,' Spike says, a terrible suspicion gripping him. 'You did pay for this yourself?'
Anya busies herself reapplying her lipstick.
'Oh, he wanted you to have it,' she says. 'It's called a Sweet Nancy.' Spike stares at her.
'What? I think he's very handsome.' She lifts her glass. 'Cheers!'
