Chapter 4
"Fred...Fred."
"Hnnwhaaa?" She raised her face slowly from the seatback, muzzy with sleep.
"El Paso city limits comin' up. Need directions now."
"Oh. OH! Turn here, turn here!"
They rolled through the old, dozing city and into suburbs, and then down a country lane dotted with forty-year-old ranch style brick and stucco homes and a Depression era farmhouse of wooden clapboard.
"Here." The farmhouse was white, with a large front porch and glowing windows. Someone inside was awake and waiting.
Fred was out of the van before it even came to a full stop, charging across the yard and up the steps, thumping on the door and calling in a not quite wake-the-neighbors voice, "Daddy? Mama?"
The door flew open, spilling light onto the porch, and Fred was enveloped in Roger and Patricia Burkle's embrace. Squealing, booming, they dragged her across the threshold with cries of "Let me look at you!" and "Been watching the road all day!"
Spike came up silently, halting on the top porch step. The pool of living room light almost reached his toes.
"Spike!" Fred untangled herself from her parents' hugs and stretched an arm out to him. She caught him by the hand and tugged him toward her, chattering and heedless. Before he had time to remind her, she gave an enthusiastic yank and towed him headlong into the doorway. The Burkles watched in amazement as their guest slammed to a stop on the sill as if he'd smacked against a glass wall, bounced backward, winced, and gripped his nose.
"Oh my god, I'm sorry! I forgot!" Fred gasped, fluttering at Spike's face. "Oh, is it broken?"
" 'S' aw' ride," he assured her. He leaned back against one of the roof posts and shut his eyes. Blood began to seep from between his fingers and drip onto the porch. Roger Burkle stared at him, baffled.
"Son, do you want a tissue?"
Fred flailed. "I keep forgetting. One of you has to invite him into the house."
Trish Burkle blinked at her distraught daughter. "Won't you come in?" she asked Spike in a sweet and ladylike Melanie Wilkes of Twelve Oaks voice. She turned back to Fred. "Will that work?"
Fred nodded. "Daddy, have you still got that bag of Blue Ice in the freezer? Or one of your Popsicles?"
"Fred, I'm fine, really. Wet towel'll do it. I'm dryin' up already, see?" Spike blotted his nose on his sleeve and gave the Burkles a rueful smile. "Sorry about the dramatic intro."
Mr. Burkle chuckled. "Oh, you ain't the first fella here to bust his nose walkin' into a door. You're just the first one who didn't do it commode-huggin' drunk." He held the front door open wider and waved his hand. "Y'all c'mon inside before you let all the flies out."
The house was worn and comfortable, just the way Fred remembered it: same old green and yellow subway tile in the kitchen; same out-of-tune upright piano in the hall. In the living room a tree had been erected, with boxes of decorations stacked beside it. "I sent your daddy out to get it this morning," her mother told her, "Something to keep him busy for a few hours. Tomorrow I'm going to string lights all over this place."
In the back of the house, the spare bedroom was made up with fresh sheets and a bowl of potpourri. "Orange and cinnamon," Fred reported, sniffing it. "I can move it somewhere else if you don't like the smell."
"No, I like it fine. Listen, are you sure your mum and dad are okay with us sharing a room under their roof?"
Fred smiled, a little embarrassed. "I don't think dads are ever completely okay with the idea of someone getting naked with their daughters. Mama was real discreet, though. She just said, 'Will you need one room or two?' like she was asking how many lumps of sugar I wanted in my coffee. But I think she would have drawn the line at putting us in my old childhood bedroom. It's still got my high school stuff in there. I really am sorry about bumping your face," she added, kissing the offended nose tenderly.
A surrealistic feeling washed over Spike, as it often did when he found himself the recipient of one of Fred's displays of affection. It's just a dream; any minute now fist's gonna pop me in the mouth, gonna say she don't want me, ask if it has to mean something.
Nothing happened.
Fred curled up in his arms the same way she curled up every night, radiating heat and perfume and womanscent, and Spike allowed himself to relax and sink deep into the sheer bliss of being unequivocally loved. "'Oranges and lemons,' say the bells of St. Clement's"...oranges and lemons and cinnamon...daft thing to be falling asleep to...
In the wee hours of the morning, long before daylight, Fred went to her old bedroom and sat down among boxes piled on the floor. She picked through them slowly, gazing at some of the contents for minutes at a time before putting them down.
"Fred?" Spike opened the door a crack and looked in at her from the dark hallway, then stepped inside the room and closed the door again. She gave him a sad little smile, not saying anything. He watched her for a moment, then walked quietly to the side of the bed and sat down on it. He looked around the room, taking in the private world of a younger and more innocent Fred: withered chrysanthemum corsage from a long-ago football game, chemical-stained desk littered with textbooks and scientific instruments, flowery blue bedspread, white wicker rocking chair, an ancient home computer. Photos of a skinny, laughing little girl with brown braids and of a slender, laughing young teenager with geeky spectacles. A frilly goose-with-blue-ribbons bedside lamp and a poster of Billy Ray Cyrus with a cowboy hat and a mullet and an Achy-Breaky Heart.
"Scanner Girl's inner sanctum. 'Bout like I'd imagined it," Spike commented. "This your stuff from L.A.?" he added, nodding at the boxes.
"Yeah. The things the landlord and my parents packed up after I die- …after we disappeared. And the things from my office that Wesley packed and took to my apartment." She reached over a toy rabbit and picked up a thin, black pair of eyeglasses. "Look, these still haven't gotten lost. I was wearing them when I got sent to Pylea, did you know that? And look, here's my old driver's license; it survived Pylea, too. Pylea and Wolfram & Hart and Illyria, and here it is, still safe with me. I used to look at it and read it over and over when I was a slave, so I wouldn't forget what I really was."
She looked up at Spike again. "You're a good listener. You're lucky you weren't in that cave with me; I'd have talked your ear off."
Spike dropped his head and chuckled. Fred placed the rabbit, glasses, and license carefully back in an opened box and peeled the tape from a sealed one. Spike leaned forward and raised the lid flaps. He almost shut them again when he saw what was on the top of the stack of contents: an old photograph of the Angel Investigations team - Cordelia, Fred, Angel, Gunn...and Wes.
"Sorry, Love," he said apologetically. "I wasn't sure if you felt like seein' that just now or not."
"It's okay." She fingered the torn strapping tape, and then added quietly, "I know what Wesley did to Charles."
Spike's eyes widened in surprise. "You know? Did Charlie tell you?"
"No. Michael saw it in a vision. One of his flashbacks. I saw it, too. Nobody knows that I know about it but you and Michael."
Her hands fell still in her lap.
"He had no right," she whispered. "Taking his rage out on people - innocent people-"
"Don't know what to tell you, Pet. I didn't really know him that well. I know he was grieving for you."
"I don't want to inspire that kind of grief. Or that kind of love. It wasn't..." Fred wiped her eyes and searched for the right word. "It wasn't healthy. I shouldn't have started encouraging it."
She closed the photo box's lid. "And I shouldn't have started digging through Memory Lane in the middle of the night. Let's go back to bed."
" 'Kay." Spike stood up with her and dropped a kiss on her shoulder, then peered past her at a framed high school yearbook picture. "Were you really a member of the marching band?"
Halfway back to the guest bedroom, Fred stopped. "I remember when we made that AI photo. I could swear Angel was holding something when we took it. A cat? A puppy?"
"Himself?" Spike suggested.
Fred clamped her hand over her mouth to stifle a burst of laughter. "You pervert." She shook her head and resumed walking. "I guess it wasn't anything."
They slept late, and at midmorning found Fred's parents in the living room untying a Gordian knot of outdoor lights. De-tangled strings lay across the floor like merry tripwires.
"Breakfast is on the back of the stove," Trish called out. Her foot bobbed in time to the CD player, where Jose Feliciano was singing "Feliz Navidad" joyously, relentlessly, and at the top of his lungs. Spike smiled at her and nodded.
"Right, thanks," he called back, his voice lost among the stereo speakers.
"It gets worse," Fred whispered into his ear.
"How much worse?"
"Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer worse. Daddy likes Burl Ives."
They dished up plates of food. Jose's voice faded and was replaced by the oooh oooh OOOH oooh oooh / oooh oooh OOOH oooh oooh of Elvis Presley's backup singers. Spike searched the table for marmalade unsuccessfully, and settled for grape jelly. "Speaking of Blue Christmases, when are you going to tell your family about Illyria?"
"Who's Illyria?" Roger asked, coming into the kitchen behind them. He opened the freezer door, pulled out a bag of chicken blood, sniffed it curiously, and set it back.
Fred grimaced. "Now?"
"Who's Illyria?" Roger repeated.
"She's this…thing I do," Fred began awkwardly. "See, just before we left Los Angeles we discovered a creature called Illyria, who used to be a god or an emperor or something eons ago, but its body was destroyed and its soul was encased in a sarcophagus-"
"Is this something I'm gonna need my heart pills for?"
"No! …And it needed a place to corporealize every now and then, because otherwise it has to float around all day in the ether and that can get boring and frustrating really fast, I mean just ask Spike, he did it for months-"
"Almost went bugshi- sorry, loony."
" -So we've worked out a system where every so often I turn blue all over and get superhuman strength and become possessed." Fred smiled weakly at her father.
Roger Burkle stood motionless. Then he carefully shut the freezer door.
"I'm gonna let you explain this one to your mama."
Trish took the explanation remarkably well. "Does it speak English? And when you say 'possessed,' you don't mean like that little girl crawlin' down the stairs backwards on that awful DVD, do you?" She shifted a box of old-fashioned silverware from her hip and parked it on the dining room table.
"No, but sometimes Illyria's not very…tactful. And she doesn't have much of a sense of humor. And she likes to box with Spike."
The vampire snorted. "Box, hell; she likes to dribble my head on the sidewalk to see how high it'll bounce."
"I wonder if she'd be willing to do a little silver polishing?" Trish mused as she lifted some oddly-shaped utensils from the box. "I'll swear, some of these pieces are so old I don't have the slightest idea what they're used for." She held up a spoon with stubby tines on its end.
"That's an ice cream fork."
"A what?" Trish looked at Spike in surprise.
"Ice cream fork. And those little flat gadgets are food pushers. And these are asparagus tongs, and that's a butter pick-"
"Wait a minute, let me get a pencil; I want to write this down." Trish grabbed a notepad and began scribbling rapidly. "Are you an antiques collector? Where'd you learn all this?"
"I grew up with it. Used to dress up posh for dinner every night; had stemware and serving pieces everywhere you looked."
"Spike was born right before the Civil War, Mama." Fred sat down at the table and rested her chin on her hand. As she gazed at the silver, her expression went slack. Her eyes closed, and her chin and hand collapsed limply against her chest.
"It's all right," Spike quickly told the Burkles, although he was almost as unnerved by the sight as they were. "She's just takin' a trip to Illyriaville. She'll pull out of it soon as they're done talking."
Fred opened her eyes. "Illyria wants to be solid for a few hours. I don't mind if you all don't. It's been more than a month since her last visit; she really could use a break. It'll be okay," she added at her parents' look of alarm, "I always stay conscious during the visits now. We're actually getting pretty good at this."
She beamed with pride, and slowly, like ink seeping across a paper napkin, her pigment began to change. A blue rash appeared on her skin and lips, the shade of hypothermia. Irises faded to the color of robin's eggs; aquamarine streaks crept down her scalp. Within seconds the transformation was complete.
"God a'mighty," Roger breathed. Illyria cocked her head.
"Mr. Burkle. Mrs. Burkle." She looked around the room. "The shell's former dwelling. With dead vegetation."
"Yeah, we'll be decorating the dead veg with lots of sparkly bits later on, along with a lot of other confusing rituals," Spike told her. "Want to watch?"
"I want to go outside."
"Well, stay in the paddock fence so you don't get lost. And try not to let the neighbors see you."
Illyria narrowed her eyes in annoyance and started for the front door.
"And put on some pants and a shirt. You're wearin' pajamas."
When the Old One had disappeared into the bedroom, Trish hugged her arms tightly against her chest and pressed a hand to her mouth.
"I know," Spike confessed quietly. "I've never gotten completely used to it, either."
"It doesn't even sound like her," Trish whispered. "Are you sure my baby's in there?"
They watched later from the kitchen window as Illyria traversed the pasture behind the house. She strode to each corner of the lot as purposefully as if she had an appointment with it, then ran along the fence line at breakneck speed. She jerked to a halt, staring at the mountains in the distance. Finally she dropped down on her belly and peered at the ground, her face almost touching it.
"Probably found an ant hill," Spike guessed. "The bloody things fascinate her. I think she wants to win their allegiance."
Roger Burkle sighed. "It could be worse, I guess. At least Winnie's here and not in that damned slave world or Los AngHell-es." He turned to Spike with a face weathered by years of sun that the younger man had never seen. "I can't protect her anymore, not like I used to. I want you to promise me you'll try."
"You don't have to ask. I'd give my life for her."
Roger nodded, satisfied. "I believe you."