Chapter 4
The drive to the home of Doper Dave didn't take much time; Kay's sedan pulled over just long enough for Paloma to dart into a grocery store and return with a Fresca and a pound of raw hamburger, which she ate from the Styrofoam tray with a plastic spoon. Several blocks from their intended neighborhood, they parked the car and got out.
"We might as well do a sweep of the area, and meet at the nest site," the goat-eater decided. "Kay and I'll do this side of the road, and you two can take the other. That'll put a human on each team. Sometimes the smell draws 'em out."
Spike took the stake offered him, and with the little slayer trotting at his heels, crossed the street and began to make his way through the numerous alleys and yards. He was finding it difficult to concentrate on the job at hand - his mind kept drifting back to the odd little motel and its precious cargo. If Fred still existed, Illyria was quite probably the only link to her. The sheer number of dimensions she could have been transported to was endless.
He tried not to think of the worst of them.
"What?" It took Spike a moment to realize that Thu had spoken to him.
"I said I'm sorry about your friend," the girl repeated sympathetically. "But Michael and Dilip are really smart. Maybe they'll be able to find her."
"Hope so," Spike replied. He regarded the kid and almost shook his head in amazement. Little denim jacket and jeans; bobbed hair held away from her face with one of those stretchy headbands; four-foot-something and couldn't weigh more than six stone soaking wet.
"They're really robbin' the cradles for you birds now," he commented, "What are you - ten, eleven?"
"Thirteen. I'm small for my age." Thu's eyes continuously scanned the darkness ahead of them as she spoke. "I've only been activated a couple of months. A slayer in Anchorage got killed, and I was next in line, I guess. Michael flashed on it, and found me and explained what was going on."
"Must've been a shock, gettin' hit with slayer memories and a bolt of superpowers out of the blue."
Thu screwed up her face. "I just thought I was finally starting my period."
A search of a small, ancient cemetery came out clean. When they exited, Thu picked up the conversation again:
"What was it like getting your soul back? That must have felt pretty good."
"Not exactly, growin' a conscience after murdering people for over a hundred years."
"Oh...yeah." She mulled the thought over for a moment. "Did you go see a psychiatrist about it or anything?"
"No. Did go crazy, though...an' then an evil power talked me into hiding in a basement over the hellmouth and tried to convince me to do m'self in."
Thu's eyes widened. "No shi- I mean, really? Why didn't you leave?"
"Didn't know how."
Thu obviously found this notion hard to conceive. "Well, I mean...just walk out. I got out of a gymnastics class that way once. The instructor told us to go on some lame starvation diet, and then he saw me eating a jerky chew, and he yelled 'Put that damn thing away' and I said 'Okay, bend over'; then I just went outside and sat in the parking lot. And then my dad showed up and cussed him out in four different languages."
Silence.
Then:
"The Wankers' Council must've screamed in terror when they saw you comin'."
The nest was located in a decrepit mobile home with a vacant lot on either side. The surrounding houses were similarly run-down, and most appeared empty. The throbbing bass beat of stereo amplifiers vibrated from the trailer house; light and screeches of laughter spilled from its windows. Kay and Paloma had pulled up cinderblocks and were using them as stepstools to peer through one when Thu and Spike arrived.
"We've counted about twenty," Kay informed them, "I can take out at least half, and you guys should be able to pick off the rest when they come out the front and back doors." Someone inside cranked the volume up even louder, and Def Leppard shook the structure.
"'Least someone appreciates the classics," Spike murmured. "Aren't you going to need a stake?"
Kay smiled at him conspiratorially and held up a small cardboard box. "Got about two hundred of them."
Paloma tore back a corner of the plastic pleating on the side of a window-unit air conditioner, and Kay held the box out on her palm and gazed at it. It rose slowly from her hand and hovered in the air, then floated through the newly-made hole and into the midst of the revelers.
"Watch - this is SO cool," Thu whispered. Still unnoticed, the box's lid opened and two hundred and fifty Ace's Best Party Toothpicks came out of the little carton and formed a ring around it, ends pointing outward.
"Bloody hell!" Spike breathed admiringly. Kay blinked, and the projectiles suddenly shot outward, piercing bodies like shrapnel, and then snapped back to the box as though pulled by rubber bands. Powdery explosions dominoed through the room with a soft whumpwhumpwhump. Twice more Kay sent the little wooden toothpicks flying, and at last the remaining vampires comprehended the danger and began to flee the trailer in terror.
The blood sang in Spike's ears now; huntsman's blood, joyous and powerful and exhilarating. He felt it emanate from Thu and Paloma as well; from the corners of his eyes he saw them racing, leaping, twirling in a mad dance as they found their prey. Occasionally a fist slammed into Spike's chest or face, and that felt good, too. He slammed back, shouting with euphoria. Satisfying thud when his foot connected with a stomach; snap of bone when he twisted a head so hard that he broke it off; sudden give when a body beneath his weight dissolved and turned into dust.
All that was missing was the feeding, and that part was tainted now; an innocent's agony no longer a source of pleasure but of misery and shame. No, that part of the hunt was scratched out with fierce, heavy strokes, but this...
Oh, this part was glorious.
At length the singing began to fade; he slowed down and took his bearings. At the edge of the yard he spotted the slayer squaring off with a whorish-looking middle-age woman in too-tight shorts and a tube top. The whore's pasty gut bulged from between the two pieces of clothing. She bared rotting teeth and hissed an obscenity at Thu. Unlike most slayers Spike had observed, this one wasted no energy exchanging back-and-forth blows with her opponents. She darted to the whore's left, cutting her off. The woman began shifting into gameface, and in the brief instant of the transition in which her eyes were refocusing from human to vampire, Thu simply reached up and popped a stake into her chest.
On the trailer's garbage-covered porch, Paloma crouched on top of the single remaining vampire, pinning him face down. She too was morphing: her ears and nose had receded into her skull; claws formed at the ends of her fingers. And now her jaw was opening impossibly wide, exposing dozens of small, pointed, razor-sharp teeth. She sank them into the back of the vampire's neck, and he shrieked in rage and pain. She set her teeth even more firmly, held the bite for a moment, then clamped her jaws so tightly that they bit completely through the neck and severed the head.
She stood up, spitting, and stepped down into the yard. The streetlight revealed that her eyeballs had taken on their natural color, slate grey, the pupils horizontal slits like those of an octopus.
"Any more?" she called up into the air, where Kay was levitating thirty feet above their heads, safely out of reach of vampires.
"No." Kay drifted back to the ground slowly and sat down on the curb, rubbing her forehead. Sweat beaded her upper lip. "I'm a little woozy, though. One of you may have to drive on the way back."
Thu popped her head out of the mobile home's doorway. "House is clear."
"You gonna be all right, Ducks?" Spike asked, looking at Kay in alarm.
She nodded. "I'll be fine in about half an hour. Levitation's always pretty draining." She fished her car keys out of her pocket and handed them to him. "Someone want to turn off that silly music?"