Q & A 6

She awoke with the strange feeling of her racing heart. Sitting up she wiped away the beads of sweat from her brow with the back of her dirtied hand. Lest the perspiration roll into her eyes and make them sting. She felt the thudding of her pulse through the vein in her forehead. Her vision wavered with the intense migraine her body was trying to ward off. She tried to calm her pulse where she sat. While it may beat slower than a normal human it still beat. Had anyone happened upon her while she was unconscious would have thought her to be dead. She put her hand to her head felling her matted hair. She grimaced. She must look like a disaster she surely felt like one. She dropped her hand and looked around her six by six prison remembering what she hoped had only been a very disturbing dream. The gem resting on the cold stone ground crushed that small thread of hope. A sense of guilt over came her nearly knocking her back where she'd lain. The feeling felt like a dam guarding all emotion within her had ruptured and now the angry torrents were free. She looked inward. What did she have to feel so guilty about? She reflected a moment realizing it wasn't coming from her. She slowly rose to her feet and stepped toward the cage grabbing the cool metal of the bars in her small hands. Trying to focus her vison through the blistering pain in her head she found a dark figure several feet off hunkered down in the furthest shadows of the dark room. "You." Her words were barely audible even to her own words. She cleared her throat. "You." The figured stirred. Glowing eyes stuck out in the darkness focusing on her. She shivered. So eerie, so…inhuman. So familiar. The eyes staring at her were a reflection of her own. They were the eyes of a vampire.

"She awakes." Yellow eyes hissed taking strides toward her. She watched him with interest as he approached. "Master will be pleased." His lips curled in a menacing smirk. He turned his back on her to inform his master of the change in his prisoner.

"A soulless creature, yet you still feel guilt." She tilted her head at the anomaly before her. She regarded him as if he were a science project. He turned back around to look at her he sneered.

"What would you know of it?" He asked. She smiled slightly.

"It rolls off you in waves. Your guilt weighs on your shoulders like a boulder." As she spoke she could feel something lying beneath the guilt. Her eyebrows furrowed as she tried to decipher what it was. She had to dig deep beneath the initial layer. He stepped closer to her prison cell watching her. A sick smile lit up his cruel features reaching his eyes. Making them glow brighter. Her head shot up as she peeled back the hidden layers. Beneath the layer of guilt was a layer of regret. She felt sick as his emotions washed over her like an acidic summer rain. It burned through her. "Regret. You feel regret for something you didn't do and guilt because you didn't do it." She could dig at just what it was these emotions sprang from but she was sure as death she didn't want to know. He closed the distance between them his face nearly pressing against the bars. He had no breath, but being this close she could smell the blood on him. He had fed not too long ago.

"I have an imaginative mind, creative. That didn't change when I was reborn it was only intensified. I'd come from a large family and I had a new artistic way to end each and every one of them." She backed away from the bars as she watched his head tilt to the side in his sweet reverie. She could feel bile rise in the back of her throat. "I'd broken into the butcher shop a few blocks from where my family lived and took the butchers finest set of knives. After all he wouldn't be needing them." He chuckled pacing the length of her steel cage. "I'd made the first of what would have been thousands of beautiful cuts." His awful expression turned to one of anger as he spun around facing her again. "I was rudely interrupted in the process." His fangs receded and piercing blue eyes replaced the glowing yellow. She gasped in some ways it was worse. He pursed his lips at the not so distant memory. "Looking back I traded a small pleasure for a…far greater one." As he looked at her his eyes grew hungry as he looked unsubtly from her eyes to her chest and further down. The torrent of regret laced guilt was replaced by lust. She felt it coiling through her insides stabbing her like shards of metal that had been set in a fire for a time before slashing through her flesh. She fought the urge to throw up. Her fighting proved futile she lost her hold and everything she had ingested in the last day was displayed on the floor for all to view. She went to the back of the prison cell pushing up against the back of the cell she slid down hugging her knees. She heard the haughty spells of laughter as he walked from the room. She buried her head between her knees tears streamed from her eyes wetting her filth covered arms. One vampire's emotions had made her sick a group of four or five would be intolerable. She knew what they had planned and there would be nothing she could do to stop it. The tears poured more quickly as she began to sob.

He had the vampire's shirt gripped tightly in his fists his patience wearing thin. In fact he wasn't sure he had any left. He lowered his head so that it was merely inches away. His expression was menacing. "Where is she?" The foulness of his mood made Buffy flinch from where she stood a few feet behind him. The creature he had clutched in his grasp smiled as if he was anywhere else but in the hands of a murderous fiend.

"You're too late!" He threw his head back to laugh and released one hand and used it to punch him in the gut. In the middle of his bout of laughter he coughed. "It's quite wonderful really. It's truly her own doing. Your Quinn is just so…empathetic. Always concerned with others, her empathy will be her own undoing." His lips curled into a victorious smile. Angel pulled the vampire toward the ground and he drove his knee threw his face. A loud crack of his breaking nose rang through the silent air. Angel held him up watching blood spurt and roll from his nose.

"Where. Is. She?" Raising his voice in fury. The demon looked at Angel with an expression that conveyed a degree of grief.

"I used to be told stories of the great vampire that reined for centuries. Destroying cities burning them to the ground. A vampire so merciless, so meticulous, so masterful in his art of killing he was revered by everyone one of his kind." The awe was evident in his words as he reminisced. Buffy felt sick doing her best to push down that feeling. "What happened to you Angelus?" Angel clenched his jaw and gritted his teeth. He felt his canines enlarge feeling heat behind his eyes as they changed from their earthly brown to the unnatural yellow glow of the creature he was and loathed. Angel pulled a stake from the band of his pants and without hesitation punched it through the grinning vampire's heart. The dust settled into a pile at his feet. He turned setting a murderous brown gaze upon those who were with him. Several recoiled at the sight. The platinum blonde that no one cared for stepped around the slayer and her gang of scoobies.

"We're running out of time. I can feel it. We have to find her." Spike urged. Angel glanced at him.

"I know." He growled.

"Where could they have taken her?" Spike turned around pacing back toward the group.

"If its vampires that have taken her it has to be somewhere underground." Angel speculated. Xander perked up.

"That narrows it down." Both Spike and Angel glared at him he shrank side stepping behind Buffy and out of their view.

"We don't have time to search the entire SunnyDale sewer system." Spike's hands sprang up in frustration. Willow perked up from behind them stepping away from her friends. Spike regarded her. He had always been fond of Willow.

"Do you have anything of Quinn's on you?" She asked expectantly. She wanted to kick herself for being so stupid. How could she have not thought about this sooner? Something so simple and she had only just thought of it. So much for the high IQ she supposedly had. Spike reached down into his shirt and pulled out a necklace with a smooth fluid motion he yanked the chain from his neck and gently placed it into Willow's hand. She looked at it feeling the cold metal against her skin. It was a silver dog tag with a symbol on it she didn't recognize. The dog tag hung from a silver beaded chain. This would be perfect.

"It was given to her by her favorite author when she went to a signing." Spike smiled recalling the memory. Buffy regarded him, her eyebrows raising in surprise at the softness of his voice.

"It's beautiful Spike." Willow smiled warmly at him. Closing her fist around the dog tag she closed her eyes to concentrate. She centered herself drawing strength that she alone possessed. Picturing Quinn in her mind. She spoke. "Audient verba mea, clamorem meum spiritus inferebant. Indica mihi quid agis amissa virtute manebitis." Hear my words, hear my cry spirits of the other side. Reveal to me what's been lost by my power you will abide. Each word was pronounced clearly and concisely.

They all watched in awe as power quivered all around Willow. Light illuminated them all in the darkness surrounding Willow making her short red hair fiery and alive. Angel knew the words she spoke were in Latin but he was not fluent in the language and wasn't able to translate the words. Angel had been around creatures of various supernatural powers but what he witnessed now paled in comparison. He somehow sensed what he witnessed now was only the tip of the iceberg of what he knew Willow to be capable of. Slowly the white light faded and they were once again cloaked with darkness. Willow opened her eyes glancing between the two the concerned husband and distressed father. "I know where she is."