Chapter 8

"Spike."

Oz's voice was calm, his expression still mild, but Spike saw the way his entire body stiffened and the phrase "fight or flight" came immediately to the vampire's mind.

Dunno who the kid is, but I'll wager if I so much as leaned in his direction Dog Boy'd go for my throat. Might even be able to do me some serious damage. Good on you, Mate.

"You're Oz from Sunnydale?" Fred chirped, visibly pleased and excited. "Angel and Cordelia told me so much about you! So has Spike! Although, well, a lot of that was about you guys trying to assassinate each other." She laughed and rolled her eyes. "It's so nice to meet you! I'm Fred."

Oz watched her carefully, keeping Spike in his peripheral vision. He took the slender hand she offered.

Smells human enough. Feels too warm to be a vampire - could have had her hands in front of the heater vents, though.

"You from L.A.?" he asked.

"Not really, I mean not anymore. We're on our way back to Arizona."

Jordy's face lit up. "I live in Arizona."

"You do? Well, if you can't get your car fixed, maybe we could give you a ride home." Her smile for Jordy was kind, and Oz wondered what she was doing traveling with a vamp. Guess he's still harmless. Initiative equipment must be built to last. He relaxed - very slightly - and looked back at Spike.

"So, the chip thing still working out for you?"

"Worked out fine. In fact, I upgraded to a soul."

There was something in his demeanor in spite of the flippant words that made Oz realize that Spike was absolutely serious. A subtle undercurrent of maturity and sadness, almost but not quite hidden. From the driver's seat Fred chimed in, "It's true, he really does. He found a magician who was willing to re-soul him if he went through all kinds of awful tests and things, and he passed them with flying colors!"

"Black and blue's not exactly flying, Pet."

"It doesn't matter; you passed them and you earned your soul back." To Oz she added, "And then he stopped an apocalypse." She rattled off a recap of Sunnydale's final history that lasted a good three minutes. When she was done she looked back at Spike proudly. Oz gazed from one to the other.

"Huh."

"That's his impressed face," Spike said to Fred.

"I'd heard a little about the cave-in...Willow called my parents right after it happened and left them a message that everyone was all right. They'd seen the footage on the news. Not every day the ground collapses and swallows an entire town."

"Everyone wasn't sodding 'all right.' Handful of girls got killed in that battle. Anya was one of 'em," Spike snapped.

Oz's brow knit in surprise. "No, she never mentioned that. Maybe she just meant everyone my folks knew. Man, that's rough. I didn't know Anya that well, but..." His words trailed off sadly.

"Lorne met some of the demons who'd evacuated to Los Angeles," Fred remembered. "They all said they'd felt the same thing Spike had; that something huge and dangerous was coming out of the earth, and they wanted to get out of its path. 'From beneath you, it devours.' "

Oz glanced down at his cousin. "I think Jordy felt it, too. A few months before the quake he started keeping all his toys on top of the furniture. He said he was afraid that something was going to reach up through the floor and eat them."

"Young'un's a bright lad. Took the adult humans almost up until curtain time to notice." Spike shook his head with exasperation at the memory. "World's on the verge of exploding, but buggar all as long as Old Navy is still having a sale."

The casualties, Oz learned to his sorrow, had kept mounting: Doyle; Joyce; Tara; Wesley; Cordy; Jonathan. The last few miles into Las Cruces were solemn ones.

The one repair shop that was not too busy to take a look at the car was a grimy little building, staffed by a grimy little man. Fred bought a couple of sodas and some candy bars and took Jordy outside to stretch their legs, while Oz made arrangements for a tow truck. "Looks like rain," the grimy little man observed. "You boys were goddamn lucky you didn't get stuck in a thunderstorm sittin' out in that busted car." He ambled over to the large plate glass window in the front of the office and peered at the threatening skies. A fat little Corgi dog snored on its back underneath the window like a sausage, all four feet sticking carcass-like in the air, and an orange cat groomed itself on a shelf stocked with bottles and cans of automotive fluids until the mechanic clapped his hands at it and called out, "Get away from that antifreeze!"

Oz took a seat beside Spike in a row of plastic chairs. "Nice pets," he commented.

"Yeah, they're okay," the mechanic agreed. "Cat's a pretty good mouser. Ya just gotta remember to keep the litter pan way up where the dog can't reach it. Ain't nothin' a dog'll lap up faster'n a fresh cat turd."

Oz nodded politely and said nothing. Spike said nothing either, but quickly turned his head away, put a hand over his tightly-clamped mouth, and stared off into the distance, shaking in a palsy of silent laughter.

When the mechanic wandered out into the garage, he wiped his eyes and finally brought the insane giggling under control. "Oh, shit...Christ in a friggin' sidecar. Sorry about that, Mate."

"No problem." Oz shrugged. On the other side of the plate glass window Fred and Jordy came into view, moving in tandem in some kind of skip-step dance and laughing. "Fred seems like a pretty cool person."

"She's the best. She's..." Spike struggled to find the right words.

Oz studied her through the window. "Like The Professor and Mary Ann fused into one entity, and Fred was born?"

"That about covers it."

"Sane, smart, and nice. Gotta say, it's a step up from your former girlfriends."

Fred's voice filtered through the glass in a singsong cadence - "Whatch-you-steppin'-in?" - and was followed by Jordy's joyful response: "Bull-SHIT!"

Oz slouched back in the hard little chair and rested his ankle on his knee. "Sorta curious...why'd you want your soul back? I mean, for a vampire, that's kind of out there."

A shadow seemed to fall across Spike's face. "Hard to explain...I did some things I wasn't proud of, an' I didn't want to do them again. And I thought it's what Buffy wanted- "

He stopped, realizing that he'd revealed more than he'd intended. He had a feeling that Oz had caught the import of the words, but if so, the taciturn werewolf didn't show it.

"You know what it's like, Osbourne," Spike spoke up again suddenly. "Not knowing where you fit in. Feelin' the predator in you, knowing it's part of you. And knowing that no matter what you do or how hard you try, to most of the world you'll always be a monster."

"I know what it's like," Oz said quietly. He looked out the window again. "So does Jordy. He's one, too - a werewolf. He got bitten when he was only a year old. We think maybe it was some kid in his day care; we never did figure out who. A year later he bit me."

Spike's eyes widened, fascinated. "What do you do with him every month?"

"Phenobarbitol's always worked before; it doesn't stop the morphing, but it lets him sleep through it. It's starting to lose its effectiveness, though."

"What about you? Seem to recall you learned some kind of yoga/tambourine-banging something or other that stopped it."

"Yeah, it does the job pretty well. And a couple of years ago I found an Inuit village up in Canada where over half of the population are werewolves. They've been that way for generations. They can morph whenever they want; not just during a lunar cycle. They showed me how to do it, too - it's pretty amazing; you can freeze it in mid-morph, so you've got some of the strength and the teeth and claws, but you're still able to talk. It also resolves issues of nakedness and non-opposable thumbs."

Rain began falling in earnest now, splattering on the roof and the parking lot. Fred and Jordy came inside, flinging water droplets from their arms. The wrecker and the disabled car also arrived, and the grimy little mechanic tinkered under its hood for a bit and then announced, "Gonna have to order a part."

"Are we going to get to go home today?" Jordy asked in a small voice.

"We'll take you home, Honey," Fred promised. "Oz, we'll drive you to Phoenix. Jordy said that's where you were headed, and it's right on our route; we're going to Ashcraft - that's just north of Phoenix, not much more than a wide spot in the road, really- "

"Oh, I know Ashcraft. Jordy uses the pediatrician there."

Spike chuckled. "Small world, in'nit? Guess you know about the h-e-l-l-m-o-u-t-h there, too."

"Yeah, I've heard a few rumors."

Later, when they had darted out to the van and settled inside, Jordy looked up at Spike blandly.

"I can spell, you know."

Near dusk on the evening of the 27th, it was determined that the broken water main near the jail would make it impractical to keep prisoners there overnight. Rita, Jeep, Richard, Toni, and Barry were handcuffed and loaded into two squad cars in preparation for driving them to another holding facility. They went peacefully, even smiling a little.

The officers in charge of the deliveries were later found taking cover behind a dumpster, weapons drawn and almost emptied, whispering hysterically into their radios for backup and swearing that the smashed-out doors of the empty squad cars were caused by their vanished prisoners turning into giant hairy animals.