For the blood is the life...
He hurt, waking up. This was in itself odd; normally, the pressure of the cold stone on his hip and thigh were comforting, reassuring, like the warmth of a coverlet might be to living flesh; tonight he felt cold and stiff and sore. No one had beat him up recently, either; he was relatively bruise-free, and the pain of his snapped ribs from the last go-round with a chaos demon was nothing more than a tight ache.
Spike sat up, absently rubbing the back of his neck, and wondered what time it was; wondered if she would be there yet, doing her sweet and deadly dance with her prey. He'd been watching her for months now, secretly, whenever he could. It reminded him of the one he'd killed on the train years before. She, too, had danced rather than fought; it was beautiful at the same time as being dangerous, and holy fuck had it turned him on.
Buffy was different, of course. Spike got up, stretching, and wandered over to the little fridge in which he kept his blood—pig's blood, now, dammit, but better than nothing—still thinking of her. He almost wished another crisis would present itself, another demon would attack, so that he could feel useful somehow, instead of sitting here in his wretched crypt and sucking pork blood from little bags like Capri-Sun fruit punch and trying to not think about Buffy. Yeah, getting beaten up by demons wasn't exactly his idea of a great time, but he didn't mind physical pain, and it made him feel...
He sighed. It made him feel alive. The thrill of the hunt had done that too, but the damned Initiative wankers had taken that away from him too, when they'd put their chip in his brain; the only things he'd ever really loved had been taken away from him, and the one thing he really loved now was completely beyond his reach.
Sod's law, he told himself, hoovering around the bottom of the blood bag with a straw. Whatever bad shit can happen to Spike, will happen to Spike. Always has, always will. Like right now, for instance: of bloody course it has to be insanely cold in here when I lost my coat in the last scuffle. I'm freezing.
Wait, he thought. Hang about. I'm freezing, and I'm a vampire. This is odd.
Now that he thought about it, he didn't feel all that great in general; he ached all over, and he was dead tired despite the full day's rest. Odd.
What the hell. I'm just not getting all my recommended vitamins and minerals from this rubbish, he decided, and tossed the empty bag into a corner. "I'm going out," he announced to nobody. "I need a new fucking coat. Got to have a cool coat to be the big bad."
**
"Wow," said Buffy, shaking her hair out of her eyes, "do you smell bad. I mean, Bog of Eternal Stench bad. They don't have Old Spice in the dungeon dimensions?"
The demon growled at her, revealing a charming set of eroded and multicoloured dentition, and leaped; she darted aside and neatly plunged the knife deep into the grey-green corrugations of its chest. There was an unpleasant squelching noise, and the demon abruptly turned into a heap of writhing slugs before vanishing entirely.
Buffy looked with distaste at the black slime on her knife and knelt to wipe it in the grass. "Why can't it ever be interesting?" she muttered. "That's three Ligur demons I've done in the past week. One, two, three jumps, they're out. Talk about boring."
"Um," said Xander behind her, "not to interrupt your monologue here or anything, but man was that gross." He peered down at the blackened stain where the demon had been. "So that's it for Mr. Slimy? No more monsters coming out of nowhere?"
"Nope," said Buffy cheerfully, turning to join him as they walked out of the cemetery. "All done. Now we go back to the clubhouse for juice and cookies."
"Oh boy," Xander drawled. "I bet Giles will have a gold star for you, too." He shoved his hands in his pockets and looked back over his shoulder at the graveyard; for a moment he thought he'd caught a glimpse of something pale flitting between the gravestones, then it was gone. "No vamps for a while. I wonder if they know something we don't."
Buffy shrugged, pulling Mr. Pointy from his inner pocket in her coat and regarding him. "Maybe they finally figured out that this thing works."
"Never stopped them before." Xander folded his arms. "I don't get it. I mean, you averaged about two a night last month. Where'd they all go? Your favourite Evil Dead hasn't shown up recently either."
Buffy shot him a look. "He's not my favourite anything."
"Yep," Xander said, smiling and nodding. She punched him lightly in the upper arm, turning left and heading down the main street toward the Magic Box.
**
In a dark and mostly-deserted warehouse by the docks, a vampire and a demon were arguing. The vampire didn't need light to see by, and the demon's eyes glowed dim red, like cigarette tips in the night; the entire effect was one of danger and supernatural venom, until you got close enough to hear what they were saying.
"He is totally hotter than Angel," Harmony insisted. "Angel's hair is stupid."
"Pff," said the demon. "Angel's hair is stupid? Spike looks as if he's been visiting a beauty parlour for the over-seventy crowd. And what is the deal with the gel, I ask you?"
Harmony snickered. "It's Dep Ultra Hold. He buys it in these big tubs and gets all pissy if anyone else uses it. Like I would. Ugh."
"Yeah, totally. That's so 80s." The demon flipped her carefully layered golden locks over her shoulder and folded her arms. "You wanted the curse, I've done the curse. Now it's time for me to get what I want."
Harmony attempted to look tough. "How do I know you've really done it?"
"Trust me, you'll know. In a week or so he'll be totally at your mercy."
"Is it gonna be gross?" the vampire inquired.
"We-ell, there's gonna be blood," said the demon, mildly; "I had a look back at his history, and he had TB."
"What's a Tee Bee?" Harmony asked, tilting her head. The demon gave an exasperated sigh.
"Tuberculosis, genius. The disease everyone had back in the 1800s. Really fashionable among the poet crowd. He was dying when he was Turned. Anyway, basically he's gonna get that back."
"Cool!" Harmony squealed, clapping her hands. "Okay, all right, take your ugly amulet thing. Here." She proffered a small lead casket banded with rusted iron and locked with a complicated and massive padlock. "I dunno why you want that thing anyway, it's totally hideous. It's like, all disco and stuff."
"I have my reasons," said the demon, removing the padlock with a twist of her wrist and opening the casket. "Perfect."
"Okay, so, like, we're done, right?"
"Oh, yes," said Ayesha, lifting out a red stone the size of a child's kidney, which gleamed sullenly in the red glow from her eyes. "We're all kinds of done."
**
Inside the Magic Box's back room, the night seemed very far away; it had started to rain shortly after Xander and Buffy had returned, and the entire gang was currently sitting around discussing the latest episode of Survivor, far from crisis mode. Giles had been mildly interested in the lack of vampiric activity, but as the last few weeks had been thoroughly stressful for all of them, he didn't protest too much when they decided to take the night off.
He sipped his tea, flipping through the local paper absently; sometimes there were articles of interest, but mostly it focused on that week's mysterious disturbances and the authorities' excuses for same. The explanation for the random removal of hearts by the Gentlemen had been particularly creative, he recalled. For some reason, the Weekly World News had never really caught on in Sunnydale; perhaps weirdness here was too normal to be entertaining.
"Hey," he said, out loud, and took off his glasses to have a closer look at the page. "Anya."
Anya looked up from counting out that day's take. "I'm counting money. Ask me things when I've finished counting money."
Giles ignored this. "Have you ever come across an amulet called the Eye of Ahriman?"
"Ooh," said Willow. "Ahriman was the devil in the Persian religion, right?"
"Yes, of course," said Giles distractedly. "The Eye, Anya?"
Anya put down the stack of twenties with an exasperated sigh. "Yes, it's a talisman used in freeing demons from servitude. It's really ugly."
"Apart from its aesthetic value," said Giles, dryly, "how powerful is it?"
"Oh, very." Anya gave him a look. "Can I finish counting money now?"
"Any particular kind of demon?"
"Let me guess." Buffy was leaning in the doorway to the practice room.
"Vengeance demons," said Anya. "I nearly got it once. I was very frustrated and annoyed when I lost it to Ayesha." She picked up the cash again. Buffy rolled her eyes and came to join them at the table.
"Ayesha?" said Xander, glancing around the table. "Some R and B singer?"
Giles, who had dropped the paper and was riffling through one of his multiplicitous books, shook his head. "Ayesha was a very powerful vengeance demon," he said, not looking up. "The legends place her in Africa. She took the physical form of a white woman of astounding beauty."
"Funny how they're all astounding beauties when they're vengeance demons," said Tara, dryly. "I mean, the other sort, the kind you fight, they look like...well..."
"Big walking horned slug guys," finished Buffy, nodding. "Why, Giles? What's happened?"
"The Eye of Ahriman," said Giles, "has been stolen. From the private collection of someone in Sunnydale."
"Oh, great," said Xander. "Lemme guess. We have to go find this thing and get it back from whoever took it, who is probably an insanely powerful demon, right?"
"Precisely," said Giles, and looked to Buffy. She sighed.
"Okay. Willow, Tara, stay here with Giles and find out everything you can about the Eye and what it can do, stay in touch with me. Xander, you and Anya come with me. What's the address, Giles?"
"Ten sixty West Darius Way," said the Watcher. "Are...er, that is....will you be..."
"Is fang-boy gonna get in on this?" Xander finished.
"No." Buffy gave them a sweet smile, turned around, and headed out. Behind her the Scoobies shared a look.
Rain lashed across the cemetery, blowing the last of the leaves from the trees and turning the paths into sticky mud. Spike, now huddled in a leather trenchcoat he'd liberated from a rack at the Bronze, hurried back between the ranks of gravestones to his crypt. He was beginning to be seriously concerned about the pain in his chest, which felt as if the broken rib-ends had been dancing a hornpipe, and for a moment the thought of seeking help from the do-gooders flicked across his mind; then the thought of seeing Buffy's contempt again followed and erased it. No. Big Bad can take care of himself.
He let himself into the crypt and shut the door behind him, shivering violently in the darkness. The water dripping from him was making the dust on the floor into mud, but he had no desire to strip off the wet leather; rather, he curled up on the top of the tomb, not feeling up to removing the lid, and almost immediately fell into a deep sleep.