Ayesha moved through the night with the Eye hanging like a glowing coal between the swells of her breasts, her eyes mirroring its red glow like a pair of cigarette-ends in the dimness. She had forgotten what it was like to possess this sort of power. It was like being drunk on fine wine, like flying on the warm winds of pure sweet hashish. Her blood thrummed in her veins.
It had been like this, she remembered, in Kor, all those years ago: only she had been wearing yards and yards of pale gauze, her beauty wrapped and bound to protect her subjects from its merciless glare. The wind whispered against her bare arms now; her body was young and lovely as it had been young and lovely all those thousands of years ago, unchanging, untouched by time.
The night was still young. She could feel the pain of the young vampire, like a soft ache on the edge of her consciousnes, and enjoyed it. He wasn't going to last much longer.
It had not been hard to reach back into his history and find the memory of that particular pain, and map its pathways through his body, find the loci of the disease still present in his dead lungs, the old cavitary lesions that had collapsed when he ceased to breathe, all those years ago. It had been even easier to flick out a thread of her energy and fill up those lesions again with magic. He did not breathe, but she reactivated that reflex with another thread of magic, and his blood began to circulate once more through the dead lungs, and met the voracious hunger of the resurrected disease, and spilled its red tide through the ancient holes gnawed by long-dead bacilli. His fever rose, and rose again, as her magic worked its way through his body.
It wasn't, perhaps, one of her best vengeance curses, but it was amusingly ironic, and she found herself partial to the feedback from his suffering. She would have to remember this, another time.
And now, she was hungry. Mortal life-force thrummed all around her, lighting up the night like little candleflames. She smiled sharply to herself, the sort of smile seen on Great White sharks just before they burst out of the water and bite helicopters in half.
Buffy patrolled, walking with the easy, rhythmic gait of one who intends to keep walking all night. Mr. Pointy was firm and slightly splintery in her hand, a comforting solid chunk of reality. She was trying, with most of her mind, to not think about the vampire lying in her spare bedroom with his hard-earned blood staining her damned Martha Stewart sheets; it was something of a relief when a snarl from her left distracted her, and she let herself fight the vamp rather than staking him immediately; the rush of adrenaline did something for the creeping feeling that she should be elsewhere, sitting beside a bed in a darkened room. He didn't last long, of course. They never did.
She grinned as a couple more of them—she recognized one as a kid who'd been in her graduating class at Sunnydale High—leapt out from the bushes, and sent one flying with a roundhouse kick while she hit the other one so hard under the chin that he actually left the ground and flew backwards in a rather elegant arc, breaking his back on a convenient tombstone. Taking her time, she turned both of them into dust, blew a wayward strand of blonde hair from her eyes, and shook her leather jacket back to hang elegantly, before proceeding on her way.
There was still something wrong with the night, even though she'd done the vamps; she could sort of feel something else out there, something bigger than ordinary undead jerks. It was not unlike the feeling she'd had when the Master was around. Something big, and something bad.
She scowled and turned left, making another circuit of the cemetery. Whatever it was, it would probably come and find her. They always did.
"What do you mean everything's gonna be okay?" demanded Dawn, her eyes huge in the darkened room. "Spike, you're all...bleedy. You can't die."
He coughed again, wincing at the taste of his own blood. "Kid....like I said...there's not much that can stop that now. This has got to be some sort of curse."
"But can't we do something? Uncurse you? I mean we have all this magic stuff, right, and we have Giles and books and potions and things..."
Spike reached out with a hot hand and traced the curve of her cheekbone. "It's all right, nibblet. It's probably for the best, anyway."
"What do you mean?"
He turned away, closing his eyes, unwilling to tell her whose face hung in the blackness of his mind, whose elegant, vicious body he saw every time he closed his eyes. He knew damn well she hated him, that she'd never in a million years turn to him with those wide too-old eyes in her girl's face and speak the words he longed to hear. And he was old enough—Lord, he was more than old enough—to know that there wasn't a way to get her out of his mind while he still had a mind.
Perhaps whoever had done this to him had really done him a favour, after all.
Dawn was talking again, a long way away. He did rather regret the idea of disappointing her; the younger Summers meant rather more to him than he wanted to admit. He dragged the wandering edges of his consciousness together and looked up at her.
"Spike," she was saying. "What do you mean it's for the best? Do you wanna die?"
He smiled a little, painfully. "I'm tired, nibblet. Bloody knackered. I've had it with creeping around in graveyards like a bad special effect, and I've definitely had it with this bloody chip in my head." He coughed, and didn't add And I'm fucking tired of pretending I don't love your sister like deserts love rain.
Dawn's eyes were too bright, in the darkness; for a moment she looked oddly like Buffy, that so-effective mixture of steel and vulnerability, and he sighed. "Relax, Dawnie. Shouldn't you be doing homework or something?"
She scowled at him. "Screw the homework. I wanna be here with you. And you don't get to die, Spike. I don't care how tired you are. You do not get to die, okay?"
"Dammit," he said weakly. She gave him a bit of a smile, and perched beside him on the bed.
"Think of it like this, Spike: without you, Xander'd have to find someone else to pick on. Like me."
He closed his eyes, wearily, not sure how to make it all right for her, to make her understand, and drifted again into the half-doze of the desperately ill.
Willow, in a pink fuzzy bathrobe, waved a bunch of smouldering herbs over a circle drawn on the floorboards of Tara's room. The other witch was murmuring words in Latin, her hands cupped around a crystal ball that glowed a dim blue-white in the darkened room. As the chant progressed, a spark of red began to glimmer in the crystal, slowly growing brighter and brighter as the words went on: Willow, her herb bunch still in her hand, came to join Tara at the other side of the circle, and stared into the orb.
"There it is," she whispered. "It's moving."
Tara opened her eyes, made a strange gesture with one hand; the room seemed to freeze for a moment, and then reality came back. "I've got it. It's....changed, Willow. I think I know what the Eye was supposed to feel like, and it's different. It's lost some of its power."
"Why would it do that?" Willow sat back on her heels and put the herbs gently down in a copper bowl. "Could something have been draining it?"
"I think so," Tara muttered. "Hang on." She handed the crystal to Willow, warm to the touch, slightly tingling in the tips of her fingers, as if it were radioactive. Putting the tips of her own fingers to her forehead, Tara shut her eyes and concentrated: her mind spread out, like a drop of oil on a hot pan, thinning and expanding at once; she felt little sparks of energy flash through her and pass on, as her consciousness flickered through the minds of people on the streets, and suddenly came upon a mind that was a blowtorch flame in the darkness. "It's her," she whispered. "Ayesha. She's on the move."
"Oh God," said Willow. "Buffy's out there."
Tara let her mind contract in on itself, opened her eyes, and met her lover's gaze. "Buffy's out there with a vengeance demon who's got a nasty power surge," she said. "A really, really nasty power surge."
As if they'd rehearsed it, both girls jumped to their feet and reached for their coats. "We have to get out there," Tara muttered. "We have to do something."