Devlin returns to his room as the sun rises, and finds Debbie. Awkwardness ensues. "I see you didn't go back to sleep."

"Neither did you."

"I'm nocturnal."

"So am I," Deb replies. "Seems the longer I fight, the more I become like my enemy."

"I am not your enemy! Dammit Deb. I'm your lover."

"Who says you can't be both?" Dev can't believe what he's hearing.

"You're letting them win."

"You mean the other enemy? The one that fights my main enemy?"

"The one that wants to take away your freedom and draft you into a war we're already winning."

"Good point. Wouldn't they just send me back home? Seems a lot easier than bringing in another Slayer to take my place."

"That's not how they work. They use roving teams of Slayers to sweep one city before moving on to the next. Now that she has almost unlimited girlpower, now that she's left Sunnydale, Buffy's forgotten everything she learned there. She's given up on the indigenous approach." Devlin chuckles. "Now, you're more like Buffy than Buffy herself is. Except you have far less disastrous taste in men."

"You sure about that?"

"Who knows? Maybe I'll snap after my thousandth Moment of Perfect Happiness."

"The difference between Buffy and me is, I knew the risks from the start."

"And your bet's paid off big time." He tries to touch her hand, but she stands up and scurries away. "So this is it? You catch a glimpse of what you've always known I've done, and you don't want to be around me no more?"

"I never said that, Dev. You and me, we're chained together. Like two people on a cliff. One of us falls, we take the other one over the edge with us. I just want to loosen the shackles a little."

"Are you afraid of me?"

"Please," she scoffs. "You try anything, I'll stake you."

"Are you comfortable sleeping in the same room with me?"

"If you're asking Do I trust you?,' the answer's yes. I got no choice. Remember the chains. Just give me time to recover from the sensation of you raping and killing me."

"I'm a patient man."

"You mean like how you'll lie in wait for days just to make a single kill?" Another disquieting sign that she's focusing more on his ugly past.

"You should go get some breakfast. I'm gonna take a nap. When you get back, if you don't feel safe around me, drive this stake through my heart. Cause I'd rather die than live without you." He places the stake on the night table to the right of the bed, and looks around to find two sets of hand cuffs, using these to lash his wrists to the bed posts. They'd been used for an entirely different purpose the night before, as Deb remembered all too well. Debbie shakes her head at Dev's melodramatic display.

"I can't kill you. I don't wanna fuck you. There are a lot of options between those two extremes." She gets on all fours and looks around for the keys, which she uses to open the cuffs. "I could be gone for a while, and I wouldn't want to leave you stranded." She fills her purse with still-copious betting chips, puts on her shoes and leaves the room.

"Oh well," Dev says to himself. "Least I'm not the only vampire Champion not getting any." Spike, and especially Angel, would object Devlin's self-characterization. He happens to figure that nearly eliminating vampires in a region of ten million people qualifies him, even if he is soulless and averse to masochistic self-sacrifice. But that's not the part of his statement which is demonstrably false.

Spike climbs out of bed and puts on a shirt so he can answer the door and stop the incessant knocking. "I'll be right there. Don't get your knickers twisted." He expects this to be work-related. So he's pleasantly surprised to see Claire on the other side of the door.

"Can I come in? Wait, I'm not the one who needs permission." She leaps across the threshold and wraps her legs around his mid-section. Spike backpedals, trips over his boots, and falls on his back. "Never done it on formica before."

"Couldn't we have a nice night out first?" Claire walks into the kitchen and opens a window, shining light down the center of the apartment.

"I have plans tonight. But I have, oh, ninety minutes before then. My thinking was you could help me kill some of that time. Excuse the pun."

"I been known to like girls who pun."

"It's not as if you have anywhere to go." She puts her left foot against Spike's chest, pushing him into the bedroom. Then she opens another window, effectively trapping him.

"I've also been know to like girls who are forthright about what they want." The odd thing was, Claire had been a shy girl, rarely assertive, especially in sexual matters. A few months earlier, she tried turning over a new leaf by brazenly coming on to a guy at art school she was attracted to, but it didn't work out because "The New Claire" intimidated him. But Spike is not so easily intimidated. Claire slowly steps into the band of light five feet in front of Spike's bed.

"Come here." Spike walks to within a foot of the light. Claire reaches both hands out. Spike intertwines his fingers with hers. She suddenly pulls her hands six inches back, causing his fingers to sizzle. As she expected, Spike rather enjoys the pain. After smoke begins to rise, Claire leans forward and kisses Spike in the shadows. Spike, letting go of her hands, reaches them out into the light for few more seconds, groaning and grimacing as she kisses his neck. As suddenly as she burned him, Spike spins round and hurls Claire onto the bed, leaping on top of her and putting his hot hands under her shirt. This was one creative way to get around the cold hands dilemma inherent in a vampire-human hook-up.

Another was to take a dip in a jacuzzi, where Diego and Sidney are skinny-dipping in their complementary suite, drinking complementary chilled champagne, both fruits of their profligate gambling the night before with chips plundered from the vampires they slayed. His glass in his left hand, Diego wraps his right arm around Sidney's waist and kisses her left shoulder and neck. "This is definitely the life," she happily declares.

"I love you." He kisses her on the lips. She demurs and slides to Diego's left.

"Whoa."

"What's wrong?"

"I thought we had an understanding."

"I never knew I could be this happy."

"That's the sex talking. We just screwed. You're a seventeen year-old guy getting your brains fucked out on a regular basis. Of course you think you love me. But you don't. You love what we do."

"It's more than physical."

"Don't say that."

"You're a great person. I love being around you. You're smart, funny, beautiful, unpredictable."

"Let's focus on that last one. Being with you like this is fun. I also find killing people fun. So what's to stop me from one day drinking your blood and leaving you for dead?"

"You don't want to be lonely?"

"True. But I have been lonely in the past. And it's not like I'll feel any guilt for betraying for."

"If I believed you, I wouldn't even be with you. Are you trying to break up?"

"No. No, no, no. I just don't want you to get too attached."

"Because you care about my feelings?," he asks with a hopeful smile.

"Oh God, you're right. I do. But, like I said before, that can change."

"And you could kill me. Or, sire me. Which, by the way, I'm not hoping for. I'm not that much of a vampire groupie."

"I would never kill you."

"Because, once again, you care about me?"

"No. Because you're friends with a Slayer." She puts down Diego's glass for him and put her arm around his shoulders, kissing his neck. "This is fun."

"Great fun. Huge fun."

"But nothing more."

"I can live with that."

Nina picks up the phone in her kitchen. "Angel?"

"Nina, I can't make it tonight. I'm sorry. There are demons that need urgent killing. I hope you understand."

"Sure. It's not that important. You can see my works some other night."

"Actually, I saw them last night."

"How?"

"I snuck into the gallery after hours through a skylight. Maybe we could talk about them over coffee later tonight? I should be through with work by eleven."

"Great. I'll see you then. Say, is it alright if I take Oz to the gallery?"

"Sure. Why are you asking me?"

"I think you know."

"Oh, that. I've already forgotten about that, Nina. Have a good time."

"You too. Can you have a good time demon fighting?"

"Depends on who you're fighting with. Since I'm going to be with Spike, probably not."

Claire and Spike lie in bed together, Claire on Spike's right. She's telling him about some memorable moments from her past relationships. They're both laughing. "You cut a foot off a corpse and put it in your boyfriend's locker?"

"It was already severed. The guy was a baker who died in a gruesome accident involving a dough mixer."

"As acts of revenge go, it's morbidly poetic."

"He told everyone at school that I sucked his toes. I couldn't let him get away with that."

"Who needs Vengeance Demons?" She laughs for a second.

"What?"

"Never mind." The phone rings. Spike reaches his right arm out at picks it up. "Angel." He chuckles. "Sounds like you need me." Claire wonders what that means. "Can't handle the demons on your own." That's a relief. Claire rolls over on top of Spike and nibbles on his left earlobe. "Meet you there." He hangs up.

"You don't have to leave right away?"

"Course not, pet. It's not even dark out."

Jeta wakes up inside a pile of hay. She finds her way out and brushes herself off, realizing, to her horror, that she is wearing a long red skirt and a red blouse. "Honest Gypsy girls wear red never," Ivan says in broken German. "You honest no longer." Jeta leaps at him. Really leaps. Twenty feet through the air from a dead stop. She gets on top and tries to strangle him. Ivan just laughs. Then he reaches his right arm up and wraps his hand around her neck, squeezing it as he slowly pulls her head towards him. For a while, she gasps and wheezes. But soon she gets his point that strangling is rather pointless He pushes her body away with his left hand and stands up. "You are like me."

Jeta laughs and shakes her head as she stands up. "No. I'm better that you."

"Really." He leaps on top of Jeta, spreads her legs and pins her arms. She goes bumpy and bites the left side of his neck. He likes that. "Try something fresh." Jeta stops biting when she realizes she has fangs. Ivan gets off her. She stands back up and feels her face with her hands. It's the first time Ivan's ever seen a new vampire act so self-conscious. Usually they seem to know what they are from the moment they open their eyes. "You are hungry. Let us feed." He leaves the room, then returns a few seconds later with a fifteen year-old Gypsy girl and her seventeen year-old husband. They've seen a lot of things since arriving at this awful place, but Jeta makes them scream and try to run. Ivan and his henchmen kept their human faces around the victims. He grabs the frighten youngsters and tosses them on the hay pile. Jeta circles them.

"Where are you from?," she asks in Romani. The couple huddles together.

"Bosnia."

"Bear-trainers," she spits back. Since many of the Bosnian Gyspies who came to Western Europe worked in the circus, all Bosnian Gypsies in Germany and France came to be called this. "Undercooked," she says of their lighter complexion. There is a very old Gypsy story that originated in India about how the Creator made man out of clay and underbaked him, producing white people. Then He made another man and left him in the oven longer, producing black people. But on the third try, He left the clay in for just the right amount of time and produced brown people, like the Dom/Rom/Sinti. "I like my meat raw. At least I think I do." Jeta goes for the girl, which surprises Ivan. She grabs her from behind, puts her right hand over her heart and her left hand on her stomach, lingers over the neck with her mouth open before biting down, then drinks deep. When the blood stops coming, she lies the girl on her back, fixes her hair to hide the bite marks, straightens her legs and puts her hands over her heart. Ivan holds the boy in the air by his neck. Jeta looks up at him and growls. Ivan realizes his girl's still hungry. He drops the boy. Jeta pursues in slow motion, stepping on the balls of her feet like a cat, methodically cornering her victim. He begs for his life.

"I know what you feel. I lost a husband. Don't fear me. Don't fight it. I bring you peace." She grabs the guy and bites the front of his neck, grabbing his arms as he struggles. Slowly his sinks down, and she lies on top, finishing the job. Jeta returns to her human face and wipes her mouth on his shirt tails. She walks over to Ivan. "They were doomed. I ended their suffering. Now I want to cause suffering."

Claire arrives at the gallery and meets Anita out front. "You look happy."

"Had a good day. Really good."

"Y-you're flush. Your face is - "

"Is it that obvious?" Claire feels worried.

"Are you high?" Claire scoffs.

"No. Not in the, sense that you're thinking." She leans in close and makes sure nobody's near them. "Spike crashed at my place last night."

Anita's jaw drops. "Did you fuck a vampire?"

"Quiet!" Claire looks around at the people passing by and walks away from the door and onto the grass in front of the gallery, near a large modern sculpture. "Are you crazy?"

"Am I crazy? You're the one who's fucking vampires."

"A vampire. Named Spike."

"How was he?," a very curious Anita eagerly inquires.

"Last night, I had my first, you know."

"Claire! I'm so proud of you," Anita jokes, hugging her friend.

"Then I had my second. Then I had my third. That's when I passed out."

Anita gasps. "He fucked you into unconsciousness?"

"I was just out for a couple seconds. You should have seen his face," she says with a giggle. "He must've thought he'd killed me. He looked so worried. And, adorable."

"Wow."

"Yeah. Then twice more this morning, and once right before I came. At his place."

"You came right before you came? No wonder you're in a good mood." She takes a few seconds to take everything in. "You know, this makes a lot of sense. You didn't like guys, so for a while there I thought you were going lesbo. But I was wrong. You like dead guys."

"He's not dead. He's just, differently living."

"You've spent your whole life around death."

"I assure you that he's very much alive."

"Mind if I take him out for a spin?"

"Spike is not some toy."

"Please. He doesn't breathe. He has no body heat. No heart beat. But he can get a hard on. The guy's the world's greatest Real Doll."

"Well, he's my toy. And I don't wanna share him."

After her first meal, Jeta meets the other five members of the group. Vasha, Devora and Lukina are all older vampires who joined Ivan's gang when the German invasion of the East made life too difficult and dangerous. Jobyna and Nili were sired by Ivan the previous year at the camp. None of them appear to welcome the newcomer. Ivan expects this sort of resentment from the women, but not from Vasha. "I'll still have time for you," Ivan assures him, putting both hands to Vasha's face. Once Ivan steps to the side, Vasha stares at Jeta, who calmy looks back, not understanding what he's doing.

"Fayina!," Vasha yells, meaning "free one" in Russian. He leaves the barn and escapes into the darkness. Ivan has no idea what that was all about.

"More of me for the rest of you!," he announces. The competition walks past Jeta one-by-one, sizing her up as she sizes them up. She definitely thinks she's far prettier than any of these other women. Unless Ivan goes for fair-skinned blondes, in which case Devora and Lukina have her beat hands down. But if that was Ivan's preference, why did he choose Jeta in the first place? The five of them pretty much ran the gamut of shades, shapes and sizes. Clearly Ivan likes variety. Jeta was going to see if she could change that. She grabs Ivan and kisses him passionately.

"You are my salvation! It is time I thank you for making me." She puts her hands under his shirt, rubs his chest and gazes up worshipfully at his face. He picks her up and carries her off to his room. It doesn't occur to him that perhaps she laid on her obsequiousness a bit too thick for it to be genuine.

"It's a nice ashtray," Oz jokes. Nina punches him in the shoulder.

"It's a vase."

"I know. Just jealous. I used to think I was creative. It's intimidating to finally see the real thing."

"You're just saying that."

"Yes. But I also mean it." He looks around at some of the sculptures.

"I know. It's crap. Or, it looks like crap unless you've taken the classes that teach you why it isn't crap."

"Some of these pieces are really good. I don't know which ones." She laughs.

"You're the epitome of anti-pretentious. Which is why you're perfect for something like this, where everyone takes themselves way to seriously. As they walk by the photographs, Nina stops behind Claire and sniffs her.

"I think that girl is coming onto you," Anita whispers in Claire's ear. Nina, who doesn't hear this, backs up a few steps. She can still pick up the scent.

"What's going on?," Oz whispers. "She doesn't smell like a werewolf."

"I know. She smells like a vampire." From behind, Claire looks almost exactly like Willow, which is kind of freaky for Oz.

"I guess hot blondes have a thing for you," Anita jokes.

"Shut up." Nina walks up to Claire. Oz grabs her.

"Are you sure that's smart?" He's not eager to pick a fight with a vampire without Buffy or Angel nearby.

"What are you afraid of?" She taps Claire on the back. Claire and Anita turn around, expecting a come-on.

"He's all over you," Nina begins.

"Who?," Claire asks, mildly annoyed.

"That other vampire. Spike." Oz gasps. The vampire was Spike's girlfriend. Or maybe she wasn't a vampire at all. Which seemed even more disturbing.

"Other vampire?," Claire responds, moderately annoyed. "Spike's the shit."

"Sorry. I didn't mean to get in your face like that," Nina replies, commenting on how it's Claire who's getting in her face.

"Then why the fuck did you get in my face?"

"I've met Spike."

"And what? He turned you down?" Nina bursts out laughing.

"No, no. I'm Angel's girlfriend." Claire suddenly gets a lot friendlier.

"You mean the other vampire?," she jokes.

"You've met him?"

"Just a couple days ago. I live in a funeral home, and two of our corpses came to life. Spike and Angel took care of it. Spike saved my life."

"What a coincidence. Angel saved me from being eaten alive."

"What the fuck?," Anita asks. She never heard of that around Sunnydale.

"I'm a werewolf. There were these people who liked to eat our kind."

"So does he like doing you more or less on the full moon?," Anita asks.

"That's disgusting."

"You're not dating any vampires or werewolves, are you?," Oz wonders, since Anita seems very casual about these matters.

"No. My boyfriend's just a regular old bisexual art student. You?"

"None of the above."

"You're single?"

"And a werewolf."

"Interesting," Anita replies with a smile. "Not the werewolf part. Actually, that is interesting. But you're plenty cute without fur."

"We should double date sometime," Claire suggests to Nina.

"I'll have to talk about it with Angel."

"I get you. If he's anything like Spike, he skips the whole date part and goes right to the - "

"Okay. That's a little more than I'd want to get into with a complete stranger." Nina fights off Claire's offers of friendship, while Oz parries Anita's overtures.

"When were you bit?"

"A little more than six years ago."

"So you were in high school. That must've been a nightmare."

"I had understanding friends. And a cage."

"How conscientious. Back where I was from, they always said to be careful on a full moon."

"Really. Where's that?"

"Lompoc. It's right outside of Sunnydale. The town that got cratered."

"I know Sunnydale. I went to high school there."

"Oh my God! What a coincidence!"

"Yes," Oz wearily replies. Anita's a little too aggressive for his tastes.

"How can you deny what we have in common?," Claire asks Nina.

"You go to school here?," Nina responds, avoiding the obvious.

"No. L.A. County School of Design. You enrolled in U.S.C. Arts?" Nina sheepishly nods. "Wow! Two things in common. I'm in photography."

"Ceramics." Nina's eager to point out their differences.

"The whole art school gal thing aside, we're probably the only two women in this whole fucking city dating vampires."

"I would hope so."

Jeta rubs the reddish-brown hair on Ivan's chest with her left hand and fingers his beard with her right. "I hope I made you happy."

"You did better than that," he replies.

"Let's stay today. Just you and me."

"A man needs to eat."

"Have the women bring you food. They should be waiting on you hand and foot, catering to your every need."

"You Gypsies know how to treat a man." Devora, Lukina and Nili are sent over to the camps in the back of a covered truck. Jobyna is kept around to stand watch against angry villagers while Jeta continues her campaign to win over Ivan. After he falls asleep, she gets dressed and walks over to the large doors, opening one of them partway, and setting her skirt on fire. Jobyna laughs at the foolish neophyte.

"The sun is my enemy," she says to Jobyna after putting out the blaze. Jobyna gives her a "well, duh" look. Without warning, Jeta grabs Jobyna and hurls her outside. When she tries to run back in, Jeta, kicks her in the chest with her right foot, sending her back out. "But also my friend," she adds while watching Jobyna get incinerated. Jeta shrieks twice. Ivan comes running out. "She tried to kill me. She tried to burn me up in the sun." Jeta buries her head in Ivan's chest and hugs her. Her badly scorched clothing seems to attest to the veracity of her story. Jobyna, the woman he sired before Jeta, must have been jealous.

"You ever dream about those you sired? From their point of view?"

"Sometimes. Usually as a warning. Is this about Devlin?"

"It wusn't a prophecy. Old news, actually. I experienced him killing that Slayer."

"That does sound like a warning. We need to tell Debbie."

"Nothing's changed for them. I think the dream was about me."

"Did you enjoy it?"

"I'd forgotten how thrilling a great kill could be. I'd also forgotten how vicious Dev could be. Or, maybe he's gotten worse. The things he did to her. The way he completely broke her down. Mere killing wusn't enough."

"I think Debbie's in danger."

"Are you bloody listening? They're the same. As for me, well, do you remember Claire?"

"I thought I smelled a woman on you. Wait a second. Claire, the teenage girl at the Fisher Funeral Home?"

"She's twenty. And you are the last bloke who has any bloody right to accuse anyone else of cradle robbing."

"I'm telling Buffy."

"Then I'll tell her about Nina. And Eve."

"That was a spell! Anyway, what does Claire have to with your Slayer-killing dream? She's not a Slayer, is she?" Spike takes a few seconds to fantasize about this.

"No, you stupid git. I had the dream after we'd - "

"Oh no. You think you're also Cursed?" Spike was such a copycat.

"Even if I wus, it wouldn't be that bloody simple." Spike likes to think he's complex and deep, while Angel is obvious and transparent. "There's a fine line between sex and violence. Actually, there's no line at all. Usually, they overlap. Things become confused." A large green insect demon knocks Spike down.

"Thank you," Angel says to the creature before engaging it with his sword.