Disclaimer: Please see Part 1, Chapter 1…

Sugar & Spice

Part 3

Chapter 3

"Bah-goo," Cordelia commented, looking at Spike with big, velvet eyes that conveyed her uncertainty regarding this travel itinerary.

"Yeah, I know, pet, but needs must when the Devil drives," Spike informed the tot, wishing he could dial down his olfactory abilities to her human level.

He was stiff and sore, and mostly not because of his and Harmony's sexathon; if you could call it that. He had submitted to the blood-maddened demoness to save his and Cordelia's life; not that he hadn't been sexually violated before and with more cruelty – Drusilla; Angelus – both had liked their 'fun'. However, unlike Harmony, he hadn't had the advantage of gorging himself on several pounds of raw meat for his inner demon to really get stuck into and boost the mystic healing process; the blood bank's cold comfort had helped short-term but he could really have done with the nutrient-rich protein of the definitely nothing like winsome Winson.

Fortunately the demoness's frenzy had rapidly given in to sheer exhaustion as the energy that sustained vampires concentrated on healing the terrible wounds; it had simply slumped to one side, deeply asleep before it touched the carpet, the raw reptilian features fading back into Harmony's human-form face. As her body rested the demon within was eagerly seizing upon her rich meal of Mr Winson and repairing the tremendous damage done to her form by the battle.

Spike on the other hand had barely been able to crawl on his hands and knees a few feet away. He had eaten what little was left of Winson, which had given him sufficient strength to get his arse into gear. Standing up and dressing shakily he had checked but 'Cordelia' was sleeping as deeply as her 'mother', exhausted by the prolonged crying jag.

Rolling up Winson's remains in the ruined rug, Spike had incinerated the lot in a nearby factory furnace and then combed it out and re-incinerated the residue, ensuring even every scrap of bone was reduced to fine ash, because that was what got a lot of murderers – they tried to burn the scene of the crime without realising that the human body was eighty-percent fluid and fat and needed fierce flames for a prolonged period to get rid of the evidence.

Then he'd made a trip to another local blood donor clinic and broken in; he'd downed a full fifteen pints of much needed haemoglobin on top of his previous binge-drinking session, but had left the last of his ready money with a note claiming as before it was a UCLA frat house prank gone wrong. He could do no more – he was desperately injured and in his condition, completely vulnerable to a day old kitten. The two vamps he'd dusted earlier on in the night would have been able to slice him and dice him like calamari.

Coming back to Harmony's apartment he'd cleaned up around her prone form, his vampiric senses enabling him to ensure that no microscopic dab of blood or fingerprint of the victim remained for any CSI-wannabe to find, should such an unlikely situation happen. Not that he expected it to. Mr Winson had left his home of his own free will and simply disappeared. He had also had wealthy associates whom it would not benefit for the police to be prying too deeply into Winson's life, associates who shared his vile perversion. Winson would become just another never-solved LAPD cold case.

His offer to take Cordelia to the crèche had been sincere, but Harmony had hurried off in her own Volkswagen Beetle (with necrotempered windows) before Spike remembered that he had walked from the Hyperion last night rather than stealing one of Angel's cars and by that time it was 11:30am. Hence this scenic route through the sewers from Harmony's apartment building to Wolfram & Hart with a quick detour via the Hyperion Hotel for a fresh T-shirt and jeans.

His self-surprised fondness towards the baby had hardened into a feeling of savage protectiveness when he'd walked out of 'his' penthouse suite's bathroom at the hotel to the sight of Cordelia gurgling and chortling away at two amorphous shapes in front of her – a little girl and a boy toddler in translucent pre-Prohibition era clothing he'd seen once before, when they were amongst the spectral dead manifesting as Angel and Wesley began their Ghost Roads trip. As they faded away they seemed to look at him with silent appeal – we had no protector, but you can be hers. Not a problem.

Spike also hadn't realised the sheer amount of paraphernalia that one human baby required for optimum functioning. He'd certainly never had as much stuff! Harmony had apparently managed to get hold of a baby bag with the qualities of the TARDIS and filled it with the entire My First Baby section of every store on Rodeo Drive. There were diapers and pacifiers and warm bottles of milk and two thousand acres of fresh clothing.

He had winced when he'd hoisted the thing over his shoulder, as Harmony had nearly shredded his scapula during their fight; still his duster provided a bit of cushioning. Cordelia, thankfully, seemed to be a placid baby – no correlation to the personality of the woman she was named for, then - and had merely cooed when he'd picked her up in his arms and made his way to the basement. Her little fingers stroked the lapels of the leather duster with interest and she seemed fascinated by his bright blond hair, though she had a painfully strong grip for something that little.

Now though, Spike admitted to himself a sense of concern. Had Cordelia been an abandoned newborn, he wouldn't have been so pensive about Harmony's enthusiasm for the baby, but reason and instinct were both singing a duet – something beyond the obvious was going on. From birth to the age of five, human infants didn't just absorb knowledge like a dry sponge soaking up water; they craved new experiences like a junkie needing a fix.

Cordelia however had not shown any fascination regarding something unusual around Spike, which as he'd told Harmony, suggested familiarity with an adult human male – a baby of eight months age was more than capable of telling the difference between a male and female adult and familiar adults versus 'and just who might you be, then?'. That in turn implied the regular presence of a man in the father role, biological sire or not.

During his clean-up he had checked out the holdall Harmony had found the baby in, and the original clothing. Likewise, though they didn't match up to the Armani and Christian Dior Harmony had obviously cleared off the shelves for Cordelia to wear, the baby's original attire and accoutrements had been clean and of good quality. The stuffed sky-blue Teddy Bear the baby even now clutched happily was also very expensive, a top-of-the-range item. Why go to the expense of providing these things for an infant you intended to dump in the trash? Why wait until the infant was eight months old before deciding it was too much bother and abandoning it?

Logically, the answer to such questions was that the abandonment had not been intentional or was an act of desperation. The important question was why? Was it something mundane, or mystical? Should they be looking out for some run-of-the-mill gymslip mom who couldn't cope in a moment of depression or were there hordes of demons hunting this babe down like mediaeval knights hunting for the Holy Grail, only in a bad way?

At which point the Fell Brethren popped unhappily straight back to mind. Angel had whinged a while back something about him and Lindsey McDonald, no less, having to protect three of 'em at once, but to be honest mystical children were not all that uncommon in the world; in some places the local kiddies made you feel like you were living in an episode of Smallville or The Vampire Diaries, or Children of the Corn – he should know, he'd spent a year as the personal Champion of one.

The thing was Harmony was already way too invested in this kid for her own good. Again like he himself could testify, lacking a soul did not necessarily make you incapable of emotion. Harmony herself had said it – she'd never been bad at anything, but by the same token she'd never been good enough at one particular thing to stand out from the crowd; in essence she'd been a female Xander Harris. Not like Cordelia Chase who had brains and bravery aplenty, or Willow Rosenberg who even as a wilting wallflower had had the brain-the-size-of-a-planet gig like that hot blonde bint, Amanda Tapping, as Sam Carter in Stargate SG-1…there was a woman who could exposit about sub-atomic wormholes all day on the TV screen as far as he was concerned. Had it not been for her – then – good fortune to possess blonde beauty and extremely wealthy parents, Harmony Kendal would have been Little Miss Average, a straight grade-C student.

The one thing Harmony had wanted was a family – children, a nice home – so she could be a better parent than her own had been. Being a suburban housewife and soccer mom with a part-time job in some upscale fashion boutique for the rich and frivolous ladies-that-lunch crowd would have suited Harmony down to the ground, and it was the one thing she'd never have now. She would have given her all to her children – just like William de Vere's mother had.

It was true that there were a nasty number of 'parents' who shouldn't be allowed within a mile of babies and children, but the vast majority of schmucks genuinely tried hard at the job…it might be true what that TV doctor had said – not Dr Sexy, the other one, grumpy, gimpy git…Home…House…whatever…all parents screw up all their kids all the time…somehow…but most parents at least did their best. That fact was why he could not shake an unpleasant feeling that Cordelia had not been abandoned deliberately, or at least not out of anything other than desperation, by her biological parents. Experience had taught him to listen to his inner instincts at times like this and he also had an unshakeable feeling that they were already seeking their lost child.

And Harmony was going to get very badly hurt when that train wreck happened. Granted by chance the opportunity to finally be a mother, Harmony was ignoring all practicalities and burying her head so deep in the sand that she was close to creating another metaphorical Deeper Well and popping up in Oz – the continent of Australia, not the ultra-Zen Sunnydale werewolf. Naming the child Cordelia, making no effort to locate the birth parents, spending – hell, maxing out – every credit card she had on stuff for the child.

Still, he couldn't say the baby wasn't appealing, though maybe that was just the soul talking. Truth was, he'd never been big on the slaughter of children; when not in the company of Angelus, Darla and Drusilla he had straightforwardly killed and fed without any of Dru's insane lyricism, Darla's cat toying with a mouse cruelty or Angelus's 'artistic' destruction of a human being routine (which had quickly gotten old and then simply tedious). Children simply did not contain sufficient blood volume to make the effort worthwhile. They were like nibbling on McNuggets instead of going straight for the full-on Big Mac Meal Deal and super-size the fries and drink.

Roger Wyndham-Pryce, or rather the Robot RWP hadn't had the right of it about that orphanage back in eighteen – no, nineteen – sixty-three. Dru' had wandered off on her own at early evening, and he had sensed the growing mob mentality of the Viennese locals even through all the hippie peace-and-love marijuana clouds. He had stumbled across her and a couple of opportunistic vamps whom she'd encountered slaughtering that orphanage all of two minutes before a bunch of stake-wielding Watchers showed up intending a Dust-o-rama; he'd only killed the two men because they'd gone for Dru; otherwise he would have just taken his lady and taken to his heels. But nobody would have believed he'd not touched a single child in the place, so he had never bothered about the incident.

Finally he entered Wolfram & Hart through the sub-basements, and not too soon either. In the distant sewers behind him he could hear the rustling and scraping of creatures drawn by the smell of fresh juicy baby, and because of his delay in seeking sustenance, it would be several days before he was back to full strength and fighting fit. Even now, for instance, he felt slightly warm inside, and he hadn't had a body temperature above 21 degrees-C in over 120 years. He'd definitely have to cry off his sparring with Illyria for a good few days yet – in his current condition she could flatten him with a heavy sigh.

Ignoring the few people in Records and their sidelong glances at his new accessory, he took the elevator and rode it straight past General Grumpy-Pants' floor upwards, stepping out and going to the crèche, where the assistants had, wisely, separated the human young from some of the more feisty offspring of the non-human employees. There were two baby Siliths, for instance, that looked reasonably not-grotesque, but could be tricky unless you handled them right – the farting fireballs were not insurmountable, but when in a temper tantrum they projectile vomited a corrosive effluvia that would blister human skin!

He'd seen a vamp die that way – the schmuck had irritated Angelus sufficiently for Gramps to hurl him into a Silith nest; they'd stood there along with Darla and Dru watching and laughing as the startled infant spawn vented the excess sulphur and phosphorous from their intestinal tracts en masse and started a dozen fires all over…what had his name been?...He couldn't remember, certainly none of their quartet had Sired the idiot. He been a pile of ash in short order anyway, though at that point they'd had to scarper as Momma Silith had not been impressed to find a quartet of vampires next to her nest.

The perky assistant looked human until she blinked and revealed a double set of eyelids but Spike wasn't interested in her physiology. "Cordelia…Kendal." He surmised.

"Oh yes, the nought to one-year-group," she indicated a colourfully decorated area.

Spike took Cordelia over and carefully placed her down, gratefully shedding the weight of the holdall as another couple of assistants came over. "Daddy's gotta go to work now; your great-grandpa Angel's a bloody slave-driver. See you soon, pet."

One of the assistants flashed him a plastic smile and trilled chirpily, "She'll be fine."

Spike locked his eyes with hers and let the very essence of everything he was and had ever been infuse his gaze; the assistant blanched. "She'd better be."

Cordelia looked after him for a moment but was then distracted by some bright cloth 'bricks' that she began to play with, and Spike was able to slip away and head down to Angel's office.

Continued in chapter 4…

© 2009 & 2011

The Cat's Whiskers