Cold Comfort

Set after 'Entropy' (Buffy Season 6)

Chapter Nine

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Spike walks through the streets alone.

It's all gone wrong.

Nothing's going according to plan. Predictably, he supposes, as he hadn't a plan to begin with.

Or he had. He'd meant to cut free, get noble, make like a good guy, impress Buffy at show-and-tell. He just hadn't worked out the details.

Planning isn't his style; he has no talent for it - spends about as much time on thinking things through as he does on fine embroidery.

Anya's excellent at it.

He sits down on a stile. They'd met up with a couple of Fyarl on the way back to the hotel. On his white hand is a band-aid.

Out of her compact beaded purse she'd produced it, handed it to him casually. He'd stared at it in non-comprehension and she'd taken it back and unwrapped it; taken his hand briskly and smoothed it on. He can still feel the pressure of her two small thumbs.

He hadn't bargained for any of these minor, unprecedented attentions. She takes them so for granted that he feels he no longer exists. Where's the Spike who tastes his own nose-blood, who saved the world to piss off Angel, who would have drunk his pledge to the Slayer in the blood of his dark darling?

In the cool dawn of Anya's matter-of-fact gaze, his blood-and-thunder gestures seem grossly overblown. His sense of overpowering evil is slipping, is already gone.

He feels the embarrassed emptiness of a man who realizes that the other person's already hung up. He's been shouting at thin air.

Those lines from Keats - they haven't crossed his mind in all these years of being a vampire.

'La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Hath thee in thrall.'

Why had they come back to him tonight?

Reminders from the days in which a boy he no longer thinks of as himself looked at himself in a mirror and fretted over the unfashionable wave of his hair; slept with Tennyson's Maud under his pillow; stood beneath a staircase and watched Cecily flow down it, whispering in shamefully heated breath,

'She is coming, my dove, my dear,

She is coming, my life, my fate.'

What if he'd stolen up those stairs two minutes earlier, he thinks. Burst into her room unannounced. Caught her pulling up her stockings or staring out of the window picking her nose. Dethroned her. He'd thought of her as a queen, as a blinding vision of austere purity. Andersen's Ice Queen, Diana surprised by Actaeon. What had he been to her but the plodding, sentimental son of a poor clergyman?

'You're beneath me,' she'd said. He'd mistranslated.

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Tara dips her finger into the potion beside her. She writes a red arc into the air, then a blue. They fuse into a hovering mist that shimmers violet over the circle of power.

'There's nothing wrong with it,' she says, wiping her hands on her jeans. 'Sometimes mixtures that use magnolia root can lose their potency if you keep them on the boil, but...'

'Why isn't it working?' says Xander, rather brutally. He's been awake for two nights, procuring the key ingredient for this spell; and time, as they're all aware, is trickling away.

'Xander. Spells can be tricky.' Willow turns to Tara. 'Maybe if I...' She catches her eye. '... Had another look at the translation?'

Tara stands up, breaking the circle of power. She hands Willow a grubby handwritten page.

'The incantation's on the front,' she says. 'The extracts from the Books of Dagon are on the back, in purple.'

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Buffy sits on the floor by Dawn's bed, listening to her sister breathe. It's like listening to butterflies think.

Dawn's cheeks and hands are cold; her skin is as soft as her breath. Hardly there.

'I need to know that you'll take care of her.'

Hardly visible, hardly tangible; she's slipping through the net of the senses as Buffy watches on, filled with a pulsing fear that makes everything hazy but the whitening features of Dawn's stone-still face.

She knows what's happening. Willow and Tara explained it to her gently. The monks did a spell. Dawn was never meant to be permanent. The borrowed energy that kept her in place would be dispersed, gradually, once the threat posed by Glory was averted. The Key would be restored to its sacred and hidden location. Dawn would be gone.

'But we're working on a spell,' Tara had assured her. 'We've found one in the Diaries of Ard Daraich.' She'd glanced at Willow. 'It seems to be a way to completely reverse the - the disappearing process. It uses pretty basic ingredients; except for - um - vampire-blood - and we're taking care of that tonight.'

'Vampire blood?' Buffy had said, catching at the words. 'I can get vampire blood.' She'd been horrified, in a far-away place, to hear that her voice sounded halting and thick, like a drug-addict's.

'Oh, sweetie, no,' said Tara, distressed. Buffy, in a flash of clarity, realized she didn't look up to swatting wasps; never mind super-powered hand-to-hand.

'We have everything under control.' Tara stroked her hair. 'I promise.'

Buffy took hold of her stroking hand in a convulsive movement. 'Will my memories go?' she whispered, tears of terror coming to her eyes. 'Will they take her right out of my head?'

Soothing words like peaches in syrup silt up the floor of the bedroom. The words she hears from downstairs are different, madder and more helpless.

That was the third goddamn vampire. This is all going to hell. It's not working, we're losing her. The sonofabitch just left town and he's taken her with him. Buffy's going crazier than a coot up there, and we're all sitting around reading library books about it.

She puts her face in her hands.

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She can still hear their voices, downstairs, through the open door. Willow's intoning something, haltingly, as though she's reciting a poem she hasn't properly learned.

'I overturn the Disjointed... the Dissertation...'

'Dissolution,' says Tara. 'Give it to me; I'll read it to you.'

Willow hands the paper over apologetically.

'It's not your hand-writing,' she says. 'It's - I think it's doughnut grease.'

Tara smooths out the page and reads aloud:

'Cast in bone and sinew

Hidden in flesh,

Committed to the form of the adored child,

Defended at high cost by the Guardian of the Race:

The Key of the Gates.

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'I halt the recanting of the word.

I halt the reclamation of space.

I overturn the Dissolution Rites of Ganash.

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With the free-flowing blood of the hungry dead,

I buy you from the Prophets of Dagon.

The name, the body, the life of the Key

Pass to Dawn, the daughter of Hank.'

'That's the spell,' she finishes. 'I didn't have a whole lot of time to work on the poetry, but the sense is right - I think. I don't know where we went wrong.'

'"The free-flowing blood of the hungry dead,"' muses Willow. 'That has to mean vampire-blood, right? I mean, it couldn't be about zombies, or - or eating-disorder patients?'

'Maybe it wasn't free-flowing enough?' suggests Xander. 'Maybe if we brought the vamp right to the circle of power and serve him up freshly-squeezed?'

There's minimal reaction to this. Willow gives him a small smile. Tara's still studying the crumpled page. But then she looks up at him, frowning.

'Free-flowing...' she says, vaguely perturbed. 'When I was translating that part, there were some variations...' She slides the Diary out from under a pile of volumes, opens it to a post-it-note-marked page and reads out her own pencil jottings. '"Free-flowing blood. Can also mean gladly-flowing, but unlikely.' She looks up.

'What if it means gladly-flowing?' she says, bleakly. 'What if that's what it means? Vampire's blood, willingly given.'

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