AN To Spikeluva: Well... I'm kind of in favour of a Spike/ Erica relationship, but nothing's certain yet. If I do write it, it won't be until after the next part ("Part 3: Off the beaten path") because I've got something else in mind for the new heroine. Mwahaha.(Evil laugh)

11: Deadly Mistake

"Don't leave her side, and stay back." Angel ordered Lawson, who nodded.

They were outside a high school. It was nighttime, but even Erica could make out the buildings because of the security lights and the big, bright moon. The buildings were peach, the windows were mostly blue-tinted, and there was a lot of grassed areas, with concrete pavement leading between classrooms.

Spike had a sword, Angel had his double half-moon axe and Lawson only had some rope. He wouldn't be entering the fight unless it was absolutely necessary. Erica was armed. She was too light to wield anything like a sword or an axe, and she hadn't practiced with any long-range weapons, so Angel had allowed her a short knife. He was counting on her staying far enough out of danger that the creature wouldn't even know that she was there. Cordelia had also loaned her some pepper-spray, just in case. The knife was tucked into her belt and the pepper spray was in her right jacket pocket.

Even though Erica didn't smoke, she now always carried a lighter around in her pocket, and it was currently in her left jacket pocket. It was also 'just in case'. She hadn't healed anyone since Kara, but with the lighter handy she had the means to do it if she had to.

Lawson was standing next to Erica, a hand on her shoulder. Technically this was her second hunt, and she wasn't supposed to have been involved in the first one. Despite her inexperience, she had helped them to defeat the witch. That time it had been a human and humanoid zombies. This time she would see her first demon. Lawson expected her to be nervous, but she looked calm. Her heartbeat told him that she was a little anxious, but not too frightened.

"What time did Cordy say this would happen?" Erica asked.

"It's an amateur raising, so they probably won't start until midnight." Spike said. Erica looked at her watch and nodded.

"All we know for sure is that it's here, tonight." Lawson said. They hadn't even managed to identify the demon, but a standard dismemberment was usually enough to kill them. They just had to hope that it didn't have any special skills like breathing fire or a paralysing stare.

Angel glanced at Spike. "Let's go to work." Spike nodded, and the two left Erica and Lawson standing a little way away from the main buildings. Cordelia had seen shelves of books in her vision, so the two vampires circled the library. Erica got restless and checked her watch again, pressing a button on the side so that she could see the numbers illuminate.

"Once they're inside," Lawson told her, "we can go closer so that you can see what's happening. We just have to be quiet and out of sight so that the kids or the demon don't realise that we're out here."

Erica nodded, still staring ahead of them. Her mouth was pressed hard into a thin line, and her hand had unconsciously found its way to her belt, resting lightly upon the handle of the blade.

"You'll be fine," Lawson reassured her while lightly patting her shoulder. He looked back toward the library and watched for a few more moments. "Come on, we can go closer now." He walked across the grass to the wall of the library and paused beside a window. Erica followed and stood at the other side of the window, with her body out of sight and only part of her head visible to any within, if they had known where to look.

A group of blood-red robed kids were gathered around a circle of incense, candles and coloured powders. Their hoods were up so their faces were obscured. Most of them seemed to be humming in low tones, all as one in an eerie rhythm. One was reading softly from a piece of computer paper. They must have gotten the ritual off the Internet or something. One of them was tapping a tiny silver hammer to an ornatesilver bell. Erica could faintly hear the tones through the glass of the window, and she wondered where a bunch of kids could have gotten something like that.

Angel and Spike were just getting inside the building when Erica saw every particle of the incense and powder bounce up into the air and explode in a puff of coloured cloud. As the dust cleared in the circle, a bronze-brown lump could be seen, crouched on top of a burn mark on the carpet. The demon got to his feet. He had a narrow skull with a pointed nose and chin. His fingers were claws, and his teeth were sharp. One of the kids cried out, "Summoner!" and the beast howled.

The howl seemed to split Erica's every vessel, and it was unlike anything she had ever heard before. She gripped her head and covered her ears with her palms to try and drown it out, but it ended in a few seconds. It had seen the vampires advancing from the back of the room, and it's long claws clacked together menacingly. It growled, and grew taller; its bones cracking as it stretched. Fur sprouted frantically all over his body. Its narrow skull ended in a muzzle, and its stubbly ears unfurled into triangle-shaped ears and seemed to crawl up his skull beneath the skin to rest atop his head. All of this happened in seconds as the vampires ran to stop it before it could hurt one of its 'devoted followers'.

The dog-beast went to one knee and ripped a hole in the carpet with its claws, splintering right through the wood floor below it. A hole stretched and gaped open, and Erica was reminded of the school, where terrible beings had crawled up from below. A sense of foreboding gripped her like a hand of ice. Just as she'd feared, something was crawling up from below, lending more growls to its master's howling.

"Hell-hound," Lawson whispered, glancing at Erica to make sure she was still within reach if he had to drag her away quickly.

"I thought it was a werewolf," Erica whispered back, her eyes riveted on the scene as the first hellhound leaped out of the hole.

"Those are bigger, and they look more like wolves. Hell-hounds are pure demon, they are not human so we can kill them, but we can't kill a werewolf because the person inside them is innocent." Lawson was explaining quickly as they watched Spike going for the dog that leaped for a kid, and Angel went for its bestial master.

Erica remembered the moon that had made it so easy for her to see. "Oh shit, what if it's summoning werewolves as well?" She looked up at the sky as Lawson looked around with growing alarm.

"Look out!" he cried, pushing her away. Erica landed on her back on the grass as a large mass of fur and teeth and claws leapt at them and shoved Lawson into the wall behind him. It was bigger than a hellhound, and the snout was longer, and Erica had a split-second to think 'werewolf', as it tried to tear Lawson apart.

"Run!" Lawson yelled as he struggled with the monster, barely holding its muzzle away from his throat. Still on her back, Erica scrambled backwards with her hands for a couple of frantic metres before turning and pushing herself to her feet. There was no question of her helping Lawson, because more of the beasts were on their way, howling and snarling as they raced toward their master, even as more hell-hounds emerged from the deep crevice inside. Grimly, she knew that Lawson was capable of surviving a lot more damage than she could, and she'd likely be torn down in seconds if she stayed, so she ran for her life.

At least she could see where she was going, and the grass was uncluttered apart from the occasional planted tree. But her frightened mind pulled up images of how fast wolves and dogs were. She couldn't outrun them; she had to find a refuge quickly. She pelted toward the other buildings, wondering how on earth she would find an unlocked room to hide in at this time of night.

At the main building she found that she was right about the locked doors, but she kicked in a window and climbed inside as she heard howls from somewhere behind her. She ran to the classroom door, wrenched it open and slammed it shut behind her as she heard a terrible thud and felt something crash against the door. She didn't know how many of them had followed her, but she doubted it would take them long to break through the door.

She backed up and looked up and down the corridor. How would the others know where to find her? What could she do to throw the beasts off of her scent? She was overwhelmed with the urge to get out of there, to somewhere safe and out of reach of her canine pursuers. She looked up and saw sprinkler heads dotted along the ceiling. She had read somewhere that rainy conditions made it harder for wolves to scent their prey. She could hear scrabbling and grating behind the door as she searched for a fire alarm.

She found a smoke alarm next to one of the classroom doors. She pulled out a loose piece of paper she'd found on the floor and lit it with her lighter, and then held the flame up underneath the smoke detector as she put the lighter back in her pocket. She looked nervously back at the classroom door as it splintered when the beasts threw themselves against it.

A beeping alarm went off and the water started cascading down from the ceiling. Erica dropped the paper and ran down a bend to the next corridor as the door definitely started giving in to the onslaught of the beasts. Her steps were a little shorter as she tried not to slip over, but she hurried as much as she could. The double doors to the gym were open, and she could see that it wasn't 'raining' in that room.

Thinking in terms of a weapon, Erica thought she might find a baseball bat or something among the sports equipment. She pushed the doors shut behind her and slid the locks at the top and bottom of the door into place. She was happy to note that there were no windows in the gym, so that any beasts that were still outside wouldn't have easy access to her.

She saw a door marked 'storage' in the wall to the right, and she ran for it. The door was locked, so she broke the opaque window with the hilt of her knife. She never seriously considered using the knife as a weapon, because these creatures were too big and could easily get her with either claws or teeth if she tried to stab them with her little blade. She reached past the glass and yanked the handle from the inside, letting herself into the room.

She flicked on the light and looked around at the shelves. In front of her were all the nets, for soccer and the tennis courts and so on. To the left were all of the playing balls, and safety equipment was on the right, along with all of the other tools like bats and hockey sticks etc. She could hear howling in the corridors outside the gym, and hoped that if they tried to get in the doors would hold out a little longer until she could work out what she was going to do.

She shut the door behind her and tipped over all of the shelves with the playing balls so that they flew onto the floor. She shifted the stands with the nets closer to the door, and put them on an angle so that with only a nudge they would fall forward. She then went to the corner, breaking the lock on a chest with a few whacks from a shot put ball and opened it up to reveal javelins. Perfect.

She put some shin guards on over her jeans – wolves liked to disable their prey as quickly as possible, and legs were a good target as they rendered the victim unable to escape – and she leaned an aluminium baseball bat against the wall next to the door. She stood next to it with a javelin levelled in her hands. She'd already wiped her hands dry on a netball shirt.

In the seconds she had before the beasts busted through the gym's main doors she took deep steadying breaths, and hoped that one of the guys would turn up so that she wouldn't have to do this. She mentally readied herself, crouched down, and tightened her grip on the javelin as she heard the bang and the growling that told her that they were in the gym. She hastily wiped a hand over her forehead to keep water from getting into her eyes and held her breath as she heard them getting closer.

The door busted in and the first beast – a grey furred werewolf – skittered forward, straight into the nets so that they toppled over and encased him. A well aimed shot-put in the head slowed him down, but Erica didn't stab him. She remembered that he was human most of the time, and likely had no control over himself.

The next beast landed on top of its netted companion, and was leaping for Erica before she had time to register what it was. She flinched back as it impaled itself on the javelin, its outstretched claws missing her by the breath of a whisper as it swiped and squealed at the same time. The force of its jump carried the point of the javelin right between its ribs and through to its back. Erica skittered backwards as it still tried to scramble for her. She grabbed another javelin and held it before her as she realised the beast was quickly running out of life.

She was covered in its blood, and it shuddered and wheezed as the wound took its final toll. It became still. She was shaking terribly, partly out of residual fear, and partly out of relief that she'd killed a hellhound, and not a person with a soul. She shut the door again and closed her eyes, sinking against the wall and trying to bring her breathing back to normal. The werewolf seemed to be unconscious.

She had no more plans, and the nets were used up. If something else got in, all she had was the javelin and the bat. She knew that she was incredibly lucky that the last one had rushed unthinkingly at her and impaled itself. No doubt others would smell the blood and be more alert in their approach, but would end up being no less ferocious once they got past her jabs and onto her throat. What if the master had fended off the others and was now looking for fresh human blood? If the guys couldn't protect themselves, what chance did she have? She stifled a sob with the back of her hand.

She jumped when she heard shouting, and recognised her name. She tried answering and found her voice to be quite hoarse and her throat sore – she must have screamed when the hellhound almost got her. She swallowed and tried to yell again, successfully making herself heard. "I'm in here!" she cried out.

The door was shoved open, and it banged into the body of the hellhound. Erica was still sitting against the wall as Spike caught sight of all of the blood. He dodged the body and knelt down beside her so he could assess the damage. Erica shook her head as he pulled her arms up to get a look at them. "It's not mine," she whispered. "I'm okay." She was still shaking. "Is it over?" she asked. "Is everyone all right?"

Spike nodded. "Angel sent me to find you," he explained, and glanced back at the trapped werewolf and the dead hellhound. "You did this yourself?" he asked, as he tried to comfort her by holding her hands. Instead of being cold as death, as she'd expect from a vampire, his hands were warm. Erica nodded.

"I was lucky," she said simply.

"Fights often have a lot to do with luck," Spike said. "Come on, we'd better get your new friend here outside and off to somewhere secure for the rest of the night, and the others 'll be wanting to know you're safe. A couple of those kids need your help, too." He gently pulled her to her feet.

Once she had her balance he let go and started gathering up the ends of the outermost net and twisting them together. He dragged the unconscious werewolf out the door and across the polished floor of the gym.

"What do we do with the dead one?" Erica asked.

"Leave it," Spike said, "the rest of us will take care of it before sun-up. You've done enough tonight."