The vampire gets close, looks Buffy over, and starts laughing. "I don't believe it! I don't believe my eyes!" He pokes her. "It's really you! Tied up and helpless. Is this a sexual thing? See, cause I've heard you like it a little kinky." Buffy grinds her teeth in frustration. Death would be preferable to enduring ridicule from some lowly, anonymous vampire. "I gotta get my buds!" He runs out.

Kit and Carlos exit the Bronze and walk to their respective cars. As Carlos opens the door, he hears footsteps and turns around. "Actually, Dawn liked my hair," Spike says before snapping the young man's neck. He quickly makes his way two blocks down the street to catch up with Kit before she can leave get in her car and leave. "You and that fellow aren't an item, are you?," he asks. Kit turns round to see Spike. She smiles nervously as he approaches.

"Umm, no." Spike grins. She bites her lower lip with excitement and nervousness.

"Good. That's why I didn't introduce myself in there. Didn't want to look like a bloody fool, embarrass myself," he offers self-deprecatingly, trying to hint at his sensitive side. Sometimes playing the shy bad boy reels in girls who would otherwise be repelled by an aggressive come-on.

"That's okay. I'm Kit."

"Spike."

"That's a funny name."

"My real one's William. Friends call me Spike."

"Why?"

"It's a little embarrassing, actually." Spike looks down at the ground and puts his hands in his back pockets. "I write poetry. Some of my schoolmates found it a little dodgy. One of them told me he'd rather have a metal spike driven through his head than listen to one more line of my twaddle." She laughs. He laughs. Spike may look bad, but to Kit he seems harmless.

Connor knows better, but he can't find his erstwhile partner/enemy. The First can mimic smells, and it sends Connor on a series of dead ends tracking phantom Spikes. Connor tires of the wild goose chase before he ever gets close to the actual Spike, and elects to return to Buffy.

Three vampires enter the station. "Take a look!," the one who first spotted Buffy proudly yells. "In the flesh!"

"And in chains."

"Ropes, technically."

"Whatever."

"What do we do? What do we do?," one of the two new vampires giddily asks.

"We kill her," the lead vampire responds.

"What about siring her?," the third vamp proposes.

"Are you insane?"

"We could play with her a little bit first." The other two smile. All three get within five feet.

"I hear you like our kind." For Buffy, this was woefully undignified. Once she figured out how to break free and kill these urchins, she'd teach her captor a very painful lesson. Maybe have Connor flayed before staking him. Buffy accepts that plenty of neer-do-wells want to kill her. But nobody turns her into a victim and gets away with it. The lead vampire runs his right hand through her hair. He leans in to bite the left side of her neck. But before he can dig in Buffy sinks her teeth into his left ear. He screams, backs up and notices that the ear is bleeding. Even if she can't use a single one of her limbs, Buffy still has some fight left. Another vampire kicks her in the chest, and his friend starts choking Buffy with both hands. Connor enters. He is horrified by what he sees.

"Leave her alone!" The three vampires stop attacking Buffy and turn to their left.

"You can have a bite if you want." Connor hates being mistaken for a vampire. A look a fury – a look Buffy's seen before – comes across his face. Connor leaps twenty feet forward and decks the injured vamp with a left hook. "Okay, I'll give you the honors. You can kill her." Connor knocks this vampire down with a right hook. The final vampire tries to bite the right side of Buffy's neck, putting his right hand against her chin to prevent her from biting him. Connor grabs the vampire and throws him twenty five feet backwards into a wall.

"Are you okay?," he asks Buffy. She's too shocked by the question to answer. Connor turns and faces an onslaught of two vamps. He downs one with a right hook and the other with a left roundhouse kick. The vampire he threw into the wall leaps fifteen feet in the air and nestles himself in the roof's support beams. That way, he's safe while his friends battle this extremely selfish vampire on the ground. But Connor leaps up, grabs a support beam, swings his legs up and kicks the vamp twice, knocking him to the ground. Connor then falls down, lands on his feet, and finds himself surrounded on three sides. He smiles. Buffy's seen that smile before - when he attacked her. Connor appears to be a vampire who's an equal opportunity killer. (He has to be a vampire. How else to explain his strength, or his leaping ability?) Connor exchanges punches, lands a kick, blocks a punch, lands a roundhouse kick, gets clobbered in the back, knocks a vampire down and stakes him, knocks another vampire down, but takes a hard punch from the original vampire. Connor now focuses on him, landing a left hook and a right uppercut, followed by a right kick to the chest that sends his back into the wall. He stakes the vampire, and watches as the final vamp makes a run for the door. Connor lets him get most of the way there before hurling his stake and nailing the vampire just before he exits. Buffy's a little offended by that. That's her move. Connor rushes over to her. "Are you okay?"

She takes a long pause. "I'd be more okay if I wasn't tied up." Connor appears to be unable to appreciate that she was only in danger because of his actions. Buffy's cell phone rings. Connor takes it out of her pocket and disconnects the battery. Then he calmy puts the battery in her right back pocket and the phone in her left back pocket. She cringes at the idea of him touching her, though Connor doesn't seem to enjoy it either.

"That's weird," Willow says to Dawn and Xander. "Her phone rang. Then it stopped. Now it's off."

"She could be in the middle of a slay," Xander suggests.

"Still, she was supposed to call more than an hour ago to report on Spike."

"Maybe you should go home and see if he's returned," Dawn suggests to Xander.

"This isn't like Buffy," a worried Willow declares.

"Are you gonna break out a locator spell?," Dawn asks with mild excitement.

"Apparently I'm the only one who thinks you're overreacting," Xander offers.

"This is Spike we're talking about," Willow replies. "Who knows what sick, twisted things he's trying to do to her."

"I'll get the ingredients." Willow's thinking torture and violence. Xander isn't. None of them imagine it's anything but Spike.

"I shouldn't have left you alone," Connor tells Buffy, sounding sincere.

"Again with the cluelessness. You shouldn't have lashed my arms to the rafters!"

"Let one monster free to kill three monsters."

"You're the monster!" Buffy's never met anyone with such an abundant combination of cluenessness, self-righteousness and cold, calculating malice. As if to prove her point, Connor strikes Buffy's face with the back of his left hand.

"I am not a monster!"

"Take a look in the mirror! Sorry, low blow. You can't." He connects with a powerful right jab to her nose, causing it to bleed heavily.

"I am NOT a vampire!!"

"Let's review the evidence, shall we?"

"You're the soul-stealing succubi," he responds bitterly. "I'm the human child of vampires."

"You keep believing that," Buffy responds dismissively to the ridiculous notion.

"You're at best a half-breed. Demon father and a human mother?"

"There's a lot of nasty things I could call my dad, but demon isn't one of them. I'm the Slayer."

"Slayers kill vampires. They don't screw them." Connor is under the impression that only people who are part demon – such as Cordelia – would consider having sex with a vampire. Therefore, Buffy must be part demon, like Cordelia, only less good and more evil than Cordy.

"Is that so? How many Slayers have you known?" Connor doesn't answer. "I thought so." Buffy tugs at the ropes. The rafter anchoring the rope holding her right arm is starting to buckle. Connor takes out his dagger.

"I can cut it off," he says, reaching the blade up towards her right wrist. "Just kidding." A macabre sense of humor. How vampiric. "That's something my father would do. I'm not like him."

"Ya think?," Buffy responds sarcastically. To her, this scrawny, callow kid was the antithesis of Angel.

"She's not moving," Willow says, looking at the map. "That's not good." The map catches fire. Dawn stamps it out.

"Maybe she's fighting," Xander suggests.

"Or maybe she's screwing him," Dawn replies acidly.

"Dawny!," Willow yells.

"We can't rule it out. Given everything."

"In an abandoned building? Buffy would never - "

"Can we stop speculating and start finding?," Xander asks. The three of them walk to the door.

"Maybe you should stay home, Dawny," Willow suggests condescendingly. "In case she returns." Dawn pouts and sits back down on the couch.

"You were tracking that vampire," Connor says to Buffy. "Why? Do you want to kill him?"

"Is that what this is about?" She thinks he's trying to protect Spike in order impress him and gain his favor.

"Killing Spike? If you want, I can stake him for you." Now things were getting complicated.

"You want to kill Spike. Why?"

"Why? He's a vampire!" Evidently Connor was a self-loathing vampire. Or maybe there's a simpler explanation.

"Spike has a soul. Is that why you want to kill him?" It makes sense: Connor evil, Spike good, so Connor is Spike's enemy. Connor laughs.

"Like Angel?" He laughs some more. "And you want to take it away. Like Angel! But, from what I saw, he wasn't interested in you. He had his eyes on other girls." This reminds Buffy that Spike might be killing at this very moment, further complicating an already bewildering evening. "Figures. Angel's over you. Far as he's concerned, you don't even exist." By this he means neither Angel nor any of his friends had ever mentioned her name.

"Your cluelessness really knows no bounds." Connor doesn't appear to listen. He seems to be living in his own private mental world.

"Spike has a soul? Does that make him good? Or is he still evil? Things are so confusing. It's hard to figure out who's telling the truth, who's on what side."

Without a doubt, this was the strangest psychopath she had ever encountered. "You're confused. Then maybe it isn't a good idea to bludgeon people you've never even met."

"You hate Cordy. That's all I need to know."

"I don't hate her. We're just not the best of friends. Why am I trying to reason with you?" Darla appears.

"Mom?"

"Case in point," Buffy quips.

"You have to leave. Her minions are coming. Go to the tracks. Wait for a southbound train. It will get you home before sunup."

"Minions? What kind?"

"Just go. Now! Listen to me, son." He looks at her face. Buffy can tell the hallucination is having a calming effect. "I want you to live more than anything. Please listen to me. Connor, I love you." And with these magic words Connor takes off. Less than a minute later, Xander and Willow burst into the garage.

"Buffy!," Willow exclaims.

"Oh God." Xander runs over. She has a bloody nose and a big welt on her forehead. "Did Spike do this?"

"I wish. Okay, cancel that." Xander gladly forgets. "It was a new vampire. Seriously disturbed. Willow, can you hocus-pocus me free?"

"Not without burning your fingers." Xander takes a sword to the rope a foot above her left hand. Now she grabs the other rope with both hands and yanks it loose, pulling down a roof support.

"Oops." Xander quickly cuts the bottom ropes, freeing her legs, and the three of them get out of there. Buffy tries to undo the knots. "He tied these really tight."

"Spike had nothing to do with this?," Willow asks skeptically.

"I was following him when this kid ambushed me and knocked me out."

"What kid?," Xander asks.

"He said his name was Connor. He obviously stopped taking his thorazine a few months ago. We're talking deeply delusional. You wouldn't believe the things he said to me."