Odalisque

By Elen

Chapter Twenty-One

It was a tense group of vampires who were gathered around the dining room table when Willow followed Darla into the dining room the next morning. After her room had been vacated she had laid awake for a while, listening for the sound of the front door opening and closing that would signal William and Dru’s departure, half-afraid that Angelus would come back. Eventually sleep overtook her.

In the salon, Darla and Angelus had listened to Drusilla’s disjointed ramblings about birds and priests. Darla had been more than willing to tune Drusilla out. A passion for religion was something Angelus shared with his lunatic childe, and she could feel William’s impatience and annoyance with the subject, tempered by a hint of concern. Wallowing in bloodshed and violence was fine with him. He didn’t get an extra charge out of it being directed at the church the way Angelus did.

Cook returned with Matilde and William left with him, to go to the place near Josephof where he had followed someone from the wharf on William’s instructions. Angelus and Dru left with Lucius to visit the tavern by the wharf and look into the curiosity that was the girl Lucius had killed who was still living.

That left Darla with Matilde for company. After she had fulfilled her usefulness by drawing a bath, taking down Darla’s hair, and helping her undress, Darla considered waking up Willow for company, and discarded the idea as soon as it had come to her.

In the course of their conversation with the Zlata Ulicka vampires they had formed a pact based on two principals. Mutual tolerance and self-defense. The Stare Mesto vampires were too large and well organized a group for either of them to take on alone, and once they were dealt with, the Zlata Ulicka vampires agreed that they would consider their presence in the city now and in the future, to be at their will. How long that would last remained to be seen. They would return in the morning, before sunrise, to stay the day to plan the attack that had been tentatively set for two days hence.

Eventually, Darla too went to sleep, aware that Angelus and William would probably not enjoy any sleep before their guests arrived in the morning and that by sleeping she was giving up a chance to find out what was going on with Drusilla’s vision and Lucius’ encounter with some unclassified creature.

Darla found Willow in the kitchen, snapping the dog’s leash on. Her face and arms were still pink from her overexposure to the sun yesterday. She had one of Drusilla’s fringed shawls to cover up with today. The shawl was a deep, vibrant green that clashed with the pink dress she was wearing. Pink dress? Sunburned skin? Darla heaved an inward sigh at how she dressed herself with the benefit of a reflection. “Leave the dog. We have company,” she said, gesturing for Willow to join her.

Willow unclipped the leash, coiling it in her hands as she followed Darla. Mr. Buttons ran after her, his nails clicking on the stone floor of the kitchen. He chased the hem of Willow’s skirt, catching it and trying to tug her back to the kitchen while she tried to nudge him away with her foot. “Stop that!” she hissed at him, trying to keep up with Darla, who had reached the stairs and was looking back at her impatiently.

Darla looked at Willow and then at the dog. Moving faster than either of them anticipated, Darla grabbed the dog by the collar and smacked him sharply across the nose with two fingers, making him drop the mouthful of Willow’s hem that he was worrying. “No!” Darla said sternly.

The startled dog abruptly sat down, looking chastened. Willow found herself starting to smile at the startled and almost sheepish expression on his face.

She thought she heard Darla mutter something like, “How hard was that?” as she took the shawl off and laid it over the stair rail with the leash looped on top of it.

Mr. Buttons looked up at her, whining softly. “Shush,” she warned him. “Be glad she didn’t eat you,” she whispered.

“I heard that,” Darla said over her shoulder, entering the dining room.

Willow followed her, nervously smoothing down her skirt. The drapes were drawn, but the chandelier was lit. Several of the leaves had been removed from the table since the dinner party and the extra chairs had been moved to places against the walls. Angelus was sitting at the head of the table flanked by two people Willow did not recognize. William was at the foot of the table. He extended his hand, and she took it as a hint and went to stand beside him. He took her hand, briefly kissing the back of her fingers, but not relinquishing his hold on her.

“This is our witch,” Angelus said.

Willow lifted her head. The words were out of her mouth before she considered the wisdom of saying them. “We have a King Charles spaniel, too.”

There was a pause as all eyes turned to her. “House broken,” William drawled.

Willow looked at him. “More or less,” she agreed.

He wasn’t looking at her. His thumb stroked her palm and he brought her wrist to his mouth, kissing her wrist where her pulse thrummed before he let go of her hand. Dru had left his hair too long in front, and a long lock drooped over his eyebrow. She pushed it back, and still his gaze was trained on the opposite end of the table. His hand came to rest on her waist.

Lulach watched them, willing to be amused. He didn’t understand the comment about the dog, but it seemed that Thomazine did, and that she thought it was at least interesting.

“Does it have a name?” Thomazine asked.

Darla frowned at her. “Willow.”

Willow looked at the vampire to Angelus’ right. “She meant the dog,” William said. “The dog’s name is Mr. Buttons. This,” he nodded to Willow,” is Willow.”

“Willow?” she repeated, looking at Lulach curiously.

“It’s a kind of tree,” he confirmed. “With shallow roots and thin, whippy branches that bow.”

Feeling like the conversation was getting away from him, Angelus gestured to a chair near William. “Join us,” he ordered. “We have a lot of work to do.”

The Stare Mesto vampires' lair was an abandoned church on the edge of a cemetery, according to Thomazine. The informal war planning council was interrupted briefly at lunchtime by Lucius’ arrival with a tray for Willow. William had left the table and was standing by the cold fireplace, smoking, using the hearth as an ashtray. She could tell by the contents of the tray that Cook had prepared the meal. There was a bowl of a thick, dark soup with what looked like red onions and bits of meat topped by a dollop of sour cream. It smelled like the soup Joyce made for the New Years dinner she had thrown for the last few years, and Willow thought the meat was probably sausage. The first time she had gone to the Summers New Year’s dinner, Buffy had told them not to ask what was in the soup, but just eat it because it was better than it sounded and Joyce had gotten a startled look on her face and asked Willow if she kept kosher. Xander had started snickering as Willow tried to figure out if she was supposed to give the parentally correct answer or admit that she did not.

It was a bigger deal to her father than her mother. Willow had a hard time imagining that God really cared what she ate, which was kind of odd considering that she was a witch and she used spell components that were very specific to focus the power of deities representing aspects of the natural world. Maybe it was because the God of her childhood imaginings seemed to abstract, or maybe it was because the deities she appealed to seemed less remote.

She didn’t keep kosher, though William occasionally remembered that she was Jewish and he rarely gave her anything to eat that he thought she wasn’t supposed to eat. Sometimes she wondered if he thought being Jewish was like being a vampire and that the foods that she wasn’t supposed to have were somehow harmful. If the wrath of God was going to fall on her head, you’d think the occasional ham sandwich paled beside the whole worshiping false Gods, and weird sex with the undead aspects of her unreal life.

The soup was served with a crusty white bread, a cup of baked custard topped with berries, and a pot of tea. It was the first thing she had had to eat today, and Willow found that she was hungry. She had woken up alone. Despite what he implied before he left, William had not come back. Assuming that he and Drusilla had been out late, and trying not to wonder why he had not come back, she had enjoyed an unusually long bath before dressing with the idea of taking Mr. Buttons out into the garden, since walking in the park seemed to be out for the time being.

She watched him surreptitiously as she ate. He seemed to be in an odd mood. She couldn’t decide if it was because of the other vampires or if it was something else. There was a slightly grim look around his mouth. He caught her peeking at him and raised an eyebrow. She let her attention return to her soup, and then drift back to the conversation around the table.

Relying on whatever surprise they could achieve, they planned an all out assault on the lair. The problem was, as Willow saw it, that the approaches were too easily defended. They had to cross a graveyard, use a long, straight road that cut across the back of the cemetery, or scale a thirty foot wall that separated the back of the church yard from a prosperous neighborhood in Stare Mesto. That was one problem. The real problem was that the optimum time for attack was more or less out of the question. A daylight attack wasn’t in the cards.

Angelus never took a charge in approach. He always had an exit strategy. The terrain suggested the kind of fight that could separate the fighters and when the numbers were not in their favor to begin with, that was a bad idea. The element of surprise only took you so far. She could only see negatives. What Thomazine and Lulach knew about the interior of the building covered the area that was formerly the sanctuary, the largest open space on the interior of the building. Churches weren’t just sanctuaries. There would be other areas of the building, galleries, confessionals, offices, and given the age of the church and the religious wars that had taken place during the reformation, Willow strongly suspected the building was a rabbit warren of hidden spaces and crypts.

She was finishing her lunch when it occurred to her that the tray gave her a reason to leave the room. She didn’t want to be there and she was convinced that William didn’t want her to be there either.

Angelus asked if she had thought of anything that might be useful. “Not anything magical,” she admitted. It was a stone structure, but it was probably framed in wood. They could try burning the building and picking off anyone coming out, but that would attract a lot of attention and the standing around and waiting for anyone to come out could work against them if every possible exit wasn’t known and covered. She was so rusty when it came to that kind of planning that it was depressing. She excused herself, picking up the tray with the idea of making good on her hasty retreat strategy.

William walked over to the end of the table. “This is bullshit,” he announced. “We have a witch who is witch enough to have detected a magical signature that protects your lair. One that she can’t penetrate. You have that kind of power lying about, and you want us to put my girl out there without risking your own,” he said, voicing his distrust of the situation.

“They won’t help,” Lulach said, sounding almost cheerful about it. “It’s what you might call an uneasy co-existence.”

Thomazine shot him a quelling look. Darla sat back with a strangely pleased smile on her face. William had just put his finger on the very thing that was nagging at her about this, and he had done it in his usual rude and irritating way, which meant that she didn’t have to.

“Then make them,” William was cold. “Make them fight. Bring the fight to them. Turn them. I don’t really care. You attacked us, and you have the bloody gall to try to make your problem ours. My vote is for tossing you out on your arse.”

Thomazine’s eyebrows rose. “Interesting. Does your vote actually count for anything?” she wondered.

“At this table? Substantially more than yours does, ducks, and where it comes to my witch, it’s the only one that counts.”

Darla gave a brief nod to confirm that claim. “William makes a good point,” she agreed. “You’ve brought a problem to us that is mostly your problem, of your creation, and we aren’t inclined to assume all of the risk.”

“Ducks?” Thomazine looked at Lulach again. “Aren’t ducks water fowl?”

“It’s a sarcastic form of endearment,” Willow put in as she rose, picking up her lunch tray. “Ducks. Cute, fluffy, quacking ducks,” she said, looking at William who was looking at her like she was vastly off the mark. “Or maybe not,” she allowed, wondering where the term came from. “I’m going to take the dog out to walk,” she tilted her head to one side, looking at William, making it a question.

He gave her a spare nod. “In the garden.”

Willow took her tray and walked to the door. Lulach rose to open it for her and she gave him a shyly wary smile of thanks as she moved past him into the hall with a sigh of relief at having escaped the dining room.

He shut the door behind him. “Charming young woman,” he commented to no one in particular. “I knew Thomazine’s mother for over twenty years. Humans can be interesting companions if you bother to keep them alive,” he nodded politely to William. “Do you have another idea?”

“Who are the local vampire, demon, witch hunters?” William asked. “What’s made you keep your numbers down? You were hunting us for a reason. What rule were we breaking? A city this size could support three times our numbers and go unnoticed.”

Thomazine and Lulach exchanged glances. She spoke. “The Order of St. Ubaldus operates out of Emmaus,” she said. “They are part of the balance of things. Our numbers are too small, and we are too well protected for them to do more than watch.”

William looked up at the ceiling, rocking back on his heels, thinking. “We have to manipulate them into attacking,” he concluded.

Angelus and Darla caught on at once. Drusilla’s vision suggested that agents of the church were stalking them, and the presence of the Order of St. Ubaldus suggested an obvious culprit. Darla and Angelus had been playing similar games for decades.

Back in the barren garden, Willow watched Mr. Buttons as he snuffled his way over to the stable, barking at the occupants and scratching at the door. She had not been in the stable since the incident with the coachman. She had gone into the stable with the idea of saddling a horse and riding away on a day like this one, that started out not particularly good or bad, but busy with vampire business since there had been a house full of fledglings to claim everyone’s attention.

The coachman had been methodically beating the small gray mare that was meant to be a riding horse for her, pausing only to snarl at her as she backed out into the sunlight and went to her knees, unable to vomit or cry or feel much except frustrated that she had been foiled again. She stayed there until it started to rain, and then made her way back into the house to tell Angelus what she had seen.

She could do that now. There were advantages to taking them so completely by surprise. Where to go? It didn’t matter, except that experience taught her that it did matter. There were worse things than a cool hand running through her hair and the feeling that she was . . . loved.

Her fingernails cut into her palms. God, she hated him for that. I love you. He didn’t even know her. He loved what he thought he knew and it wasn’t real. The real her wasn’t here at all, was she? The real her was in college, or working at a job, possibly in love with someone and living a life that made normal by the unreal life she was stuck to like flypaper.

He didn’t come back last night, no matter what he implied to the contrary last night, and he was in an odd mood this morning. What did that mean? William’s moods weren’t to be taken lightly. Reading his moods was as much a part of her continued existence as feeding herself, but she knew that her awareness was also tied to an uneasy sensation of loss. She refused to acknowledge it.

At dusk, their guests departed. Last night William had gone with Cook to investigate the store front mission that Cook had trailed the old guy fishing off the wharf to, while Angelus had pissed about with Lucius’ mysteriously alive victim, who had disappeared by the time they returned to the tavern. It wasn’t hard to sort out Angelus’ priorities on that. His interest in all things exotic and magical was almost compulsive.

The odd greeting ritual at the mission made William suspicious from the start, and now he was certain that there was a connection. Feeling energized by the prospect for creative mayhem, he was whistling as he sought out his girls, finding them in Willow’s room. She was lying on her chaise reading, while Drusilla worked on the throw she was making for the chaise, sewing buttons on it seemingly at random. There was a pot of tea on the table and a plate of cheese and crackers with a branch of grapes that had probably been Willow’s idea. The dog, curled at Dru’s feet, dashed over to him. William fed him a grape, curious to see what he would do with it. After mouthing it with a perplexed expression, he spat it out and pushed it around on the floor with his nose until it developed enough momentum to roll a few feet. Barking excitedly, he smashed it with his paw and then shook off the mushed grape with an air of disgust.

William plucked another grape and shot it across the floor with a flick of his thumb.

Willow picked up the furry dog toy that Dru had made and shook it to get the dog’s attention after he smashed a third grape missile. He raced across the room and snatched it out of her hand, growling in a doggy show of dominance over the toy. She set aside the book and got up to pick up the squashed grape mess on the floor. William caught her around the waist, drawing her back against him. He nuzzled the bite mark on her throat. She stilled, tensing a little. “What’s wrong, pet?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said in a tone that could have been read as ‘everything’. He was tempted to let it go, or at least ignore it while he savored the downy texture of her earlobe. Instead he sampled her scent, seeking hidden cues to her current slightly disgruntled attitude. It was a possible miscalculation. She had been out in the sun again, and sun warmed Willow made him forget her unsaid ‘everything’. His hand dropped below her waist, fingers kneading her lower abdomen. She had light, infrequent and painful menses usually proceeded by mood swinging tension.

If that was bothering her, her abdomen would be tender enough to wring a reaction from her other than the patient way she was putting up with his handling of her. He kissed the back of her neck and started unbuttoning her dress. She had a dark mole on her back under her shoulder blade and he kissed that as the dress parted enough for him to slide his hands inside of it to lightly stroke her ribcage with a knowing laugh as she shivered.

Drusilla set aside her sewing to pick up the dog and carry him over to her room. William peeled one capped sleeve down to lay slack against her elbow as Willow brought her arms up to keep the dress from falling away from her chest.

They had argued about using Willow. Angelus had some idea about her casting a glamour to aid his deception campaign. William knew that she wouldn’t help them harm humans again without resorting to extreme persuasion. That line had been drawn in the sand after they had their fight in the kitchen. There were things she could be made to do, things she had been made to do, but that was no long one of them. Aside from that, he didn’t want her anywhere near any agency of the church that had witch hunting on its agenda. She was too likely to view them as potential allies and blunder into a trap that she couldn’t get out of. Burn his witch? His hands tightened briefly on her sunburned arms.

He’d see them in hell. He buried his face in her neck, finding the reassuring thrum of her pulse under his lips, impatiently tugging on her dress to make her let go of it. He wanted it all off. The dress, the chemise she was wearing, the knickers, the stupid wool stockings that he was pretty sure he had suggested burning.

She took a stumbling step forward, stepping on the hem of her dress and pitching forward. Drusilla, gliding back into the room, caught her under her arms and carried her down to the floor, laughing at Willow’s startled expression before her hands delved into her hair, pulling out hairpins and a bit of ribbon wound through her curls. The hairpins and fingers pulling on her hair made her make a sound of pained protest. Dru’s fingers tightened in her hair, her dark eyes drinking in the blanch of pain and the overextended line of Willow’s throat as William undressed, watching them. Willow had managed to get her knees under her and Drusilla held her hair back with one hand, pulling the dress off of her with the other, carelessly scratching her sunburned chest.

His shirt was open when Dru rose on her knees, beckoning to him. With Willow between them, she unbuttoned his trousers, freeing his erection, her cool hand stroking him as she guided the head of his cock to Willow’s lips. She jerked her head back, looking up at him with an expression that held expectations that shouldn’t have been there. He cupped her cheek.

“Where do you think you are going?” he asked in a voice made more threatening for it’s softness.

For a moment, before her eyelashes swept down to veil her expression, before she took him into her warm mouth, he saw something die a little in her eyes and tried to pretend that he was imagining it, concentrating on the skillful way she sucked him, taking him deeper as Drusilla’s hands roved over her body, pushing her legs apart.

He blamed her. Keeping her stupid fucking secrets. That business last night about the wards around the house focusing dark magic, was it truth, guessing, or just a pack of plausible bullshit? Her journal hadn’t gone untouched, but the last few entries were so banal that they were suspicious, nothing more than a rehash of events. There was fodder for more. Nothing about what Dru had done to her the other night. Nothing about their talk under the Charles, and even more curious nothing about the attack on the house except one observation. “When she said Bohemian Reii, I thought, great, vampires with a club, and a name, and a secret handshake. It sounded like something Spike would have said.”

No effort whatsoever to move or find a new hiding place for her journal. He knew that she knew he read her journal. He didn’t expect to open it and find some version of ‘I love him, I love him not’, she simply wasn’t that transparent, but she picked at the edges of every fucking thing, and the fact that she wasn’t picking at the edges of anything that had happened between them was setting off alarm bells. He had enough on his plate not to have to be distracted with whatever crazy scheme was rolling around in her brain.

The nightmares she had had after they took her out of that hospital in London painted a picture of the tender mercies she had been exposed to. She consistently made the mistake of seeking kindness and mercy from people, and she refused to beyond her trifling moral qualms about what he was to what he was to her. She had a beautiful home, and there weren’t any luxuries that he would stint on where she was concerned.

A pained whimper vibrated against the head of his cock and he looked down to see Dru pinching her nipples hard enough to leave bruises. “Dru,” he shook his head, feeling the last twenty-four hours without sleep catching up in a rush. “Don’t hurt her.”

Combing his fingers through Willow’s hair, he pulled back until she understood that she could stop, and he sank to his knees. Lingering anger at her for lying to him kept any semblance of an apology stuck in his throat. Drusilla’s arm circled her waist, her hand slipping between Willow’s thighs as he pushed her back into the cradle of Dru’s body, cupping her breasts and gently laving her bruised nipples, nursing his own feeling of ill-use.

He picked Willow up and carried her to the bed, dropping her there unceremoniously and then went back to find his coat, seeking out his cigarettes as Dru undressed. He lifted the lid on the matchbox on the mantel and lit his cigarette. The sun had gone down enough to push back the drapes and open a window. He made himself comfortable on the chaise, smoking and flicking ash out the window as Drusilla crawled across the bed, pushing Willow’s thighs apart and settling between them.

The wounded look in Willow’s eyes made him grit his teeth. What the fuck was she upset about? To the best of his knowledge the first real lover she ever had was her pimping friend, and long before he ever got anything from her but the satisfaction of fucking something warm, Dru was the one who got her hot, made her whimper, made her arch her back and beg for more. Bitch. Lying, treacherous, scheming bitch.

If Angelus suspected for a second that she was dangerous to any of them, her life wasn’t worth a brass farthing.

He squinted through a cloud of smoke as Drusilla loomed over her, using her thigh to rub against Willow’s cunt as she wound her fingers through her hair and nibbled at her lips until Willow was kissing her back. So coy, he thought with a derisive smirk. Those pretty shows of reluctance, of modesty, of shyness, suckered them every time. He watched as her shoulders flexed as Drusilla copied his gentle approach to her breasts. As sore as her bruised nipples were, every cool, wet touch of Dru’s tongue would send icy little jolts of sensation through her.

He took another drag on his cigarette. Angelus was determined to find some way to make use of Willow’s newly discovered abilities. If she couldn’t be used to further their deception, than he wanted her on hand as they executed the divide and slaughter elements of the plan. Picking off the Stare Mesto vampires. It made sense. It was going to be hard to convince the Stare Mesto vampires that humans were hunting them unless there was a real human to hunt them. Angelus’ plan was to let it get around that the Order of St. Ubaldus had a Slayer. They would be on hand to back her up, to keep her from getting into too much trouble, but it still meant having her out there, staking vampires.

And, hello, they were vampires. What was to stop her from staking one of them?

They were whispering to each other now. Dru’s husky intonations mixed with the silky sound of Willow’s voice, her breathless laugh when Dru did something that tickled. He could feel the heat of the cigarette growing perilously close to where he had it between his fingers. There was a tea cup and saucer on the small table by the chaise. He put the cigarette out and lay back, closing his eyes. He didn’t need a lot of sleep, but he knew that he was tired.

He had not pointed out the downside to encouraging her to kill vampires. He had simply pointed out the high probability that she would be hurt. Or killed. The other night she had demonstrated surprising creativity. In his head he could still hear that slight catch in her throat as she recounted the sequence of events. It started with a plan. A bad plan, and it all went wrong. She went to power that she didn’t know she had, and claimed she had little control over–there’s nothing to focus it, it goes right through me–and from there she had blundered her way into the slenderest of advantages. What he told Dru held true. If it had been them in the yard, they would have killed her. If the vampires who had attacked the house had meant to kill her, they would have killed her.

Angelus' answer to that was to tell him that it would not be like Lisbon. If she was hurt, badly, there would be no waiting to see if she lived. They were no longer in the business of keeping Willow alive. The Zlata Ulicka vampires hadn’t come here to kill her with the idea of revoking the invite protection she provided the house as a human occupant. They came to take her and it went without saying that they intended to turn her.

He rubbed his temples feeling a headache coming on. Fuck, fuck, fuck. A muscle twitched in his cheek as he heard the way her breathing had shallowed out, coming faster, soft pleasured sounds trapped in her throat. Wet sounds, lips and tongue tasting. He could do it. Get it over with, get Angelus off his back. Wipe that pitying look of disdain off of Darla’s face. Make a childe that the two of them would burn with envy over. He didn’t like being manipulated, feeling pushed beyond the timetable that had already been established. There were things that he wanted to do while she was still like this. He wasn’t that impressed with their way of doing things, and he knew her, knew her better than anyone else.

An agonized cry of pain snapped his eyes open even as the scent of fresh blood registered. Dru had bitten into Willow’s thigh and his temper, barely held in check, exploded. “God damn it, Dru. What part of ‘don’t hurt her’ do you not comprehend?” he roared, coming up off the chaise like he had been shot.

Startled, Dru lifted her head, blood dripping from her lower lip, a spray of dark red blood spattering her skin from shoulder to chin. She had knicked the artery. He ripped his shirt off and wadded it up, pressing down hard on the open wound to slow the bleeding.

Dru sat up on her heels, licking her lower lip, looking abashed. “I got carried away,” she confessed. “Voices shouting in my head, so loud,” she murmured, looking at him pointedly.

He frowned at her, and at himself for being so thickheaded. Dru was acutely sensitive to mood, and he was in a mood for violence. He looked down at Willow whose eyes were closed, her face twisted in a grimace of pain. “Pet? Willow!” he snapped at her. “Stay with me, love. I need you to hold this." He placed her hand over the makeshift bandage and went to the door.

Angelus was strolling down the hall, and he made a point of sniffing ostentatiously. “Problem?” he drawled.

William brushed past him to the back stairs, taking them two at a time. In the kitchen he chipped off a large chunk of ice and wrapped it in a clean-ish towel before flying back up the stairs.

Angelus was in the room, leaning against the bedpost with Dru curled up next to him when William returned. “That’s a lot of blood going to waste,” Angelus observed.

His wadded up shirt looked saturated. Willow was still holding the shirt, but she wasn’t pressing down hard enough. Blood was soaking into the counterpane under her.

In Lisbon he had carried her half a mile while her blood soaked his shirt and trousers down past his knee. The bullet had torn through her side, but it still had to be cleaned. There were fragments of wood and cloth that were embedded in the wound. Dru was useless, moaning as Willow screamed and screamed until she passed out. Angelus and Darla refused to help. They were indignant about it.

“It’s not that bad, baby,” he said. Her lips were pale.

“Dru?” Angelus lifted her chin. “Get another towel, Princess,” he said.

Dru scrambled to the bathroom to obey. “You need to elevate her feet,” Angelus added, “and–“

“I know,” William said impatiently. “I know.”

Dru brought a thick bath towel and Angelus ripped it in half and started folding it to make a pad, handing it to William. He switched bandages as Angelus tore strips of toweling to use to tie the bandage and ice pack in place. Darla walked in. “Who opened a tap?” she quipped, taking in the domestic drama. Just another day in the vampire home with a human pet. As soon as William got the bandage tied off, he covered her up by pulling the coverlet and blanket over her from either side of her body.

His hand grasped her jaw. He shook her when her eyes stayed closed. “Open your eyes, Willow,” he insisted.

She opened one eye, peering at him suspiciously. “I’d rather bleed to death,” she started to say.

He answered that with a sharp crack of laughter, his fingers sliding down to test her pulse. It was a little rapid, but strong. “You aren’t dying, pet.”

He realized that she believed him when he saw her grimace. Her tongue stole out to wet her lips. He laid one finger across them, and only then noticed how much of her blood was on his hands. Bloody fingerprints marked her face and throat.

Angelus’ hand landed on Dru’s bare ass with a crack, making her squeal in girlish delight. “Someone has been very naughty,” he told her. “Should I let William punish you, Princess?”

She looked intrigued by the idea. “Oooh, my William?” she breathed, and then nodded. “Yes, please,” she agreed.

Angelus stared at her for a moment a cold smile forming. “Then it isn’t much of a punishment is it?”

Confused, Dru’s eyebrows pulled together and she lowered her head, her shoulders bowing in a kind of cringe that made William want to put his fist through Angelus’ face. “The show is over,” he said, deliberately rude. “If you don’t mind, shut the door on your way out.”

Angelus ignored him, moving from the end of the bed to sit beside Willow. She had enough presence of mind to be frightened. Unexpectedly, Angelus took her free hand, chafing it. “There,” he said. “Nothing to fret yourself about. You’ll be fine. It’s just the shock,” he tucked her hand in close to her heart. “You’ll be yourself in a day or two.”

He looked at William. “Won’t she?” he challenged.

It took him a second to process it. Stupid bastard thought he had fixed it so that Willow couldn’t be used in his master plan. He let him know what he thought of that by rolling his eyes. “She’ll be fine,” he said.

Darla linked arms with Drusilla, “Come along, Dru,” she encouraged, pulling her into the hallway. Angelus tucked the blankets Willow was loosely wrapped in around her closer before he too left the room, shutting the door behind him.

Left in utter silence, William closed his eyes and ran his hand through his hair, rubbing the back of his neck. “You so much as whisper that you want to die and the next words out of your mouth are going to be, ‘I’m hungry’ and it won’t be for a hearty English breakfast unless I can drag that prat you were sitting next to for dinner over.”

He laid down beside her, stroking her head. “Just shut up a while, all right? I’m so fucking tired. I just want to go to sleep.”

He worked his hand in, under the blankets, between her breasts. Her hand curled near her heart brushed the back of his hand. He stared at her face in profile, watching her lick her lips again, and a moment later, again. Closing his eyes for a moment, he sighed. She was so literal minded. He was such an idiot. “You need something to drink, don’t you?”

She nodded.

“Yeah,” he made himself sit up. She needed fluids and something to warm her up. He got up. “I’ll take care of you, baby,” he said, looking down at her.

Dry eyed, she returned his gaze. “Close your eyes. Rest. I’ll be a moment,” he pointed out.

He found Lucius on the third floor in his Spartan room. “I need you,” he said, nothing more, turning on his heel to walk back to Cook’s door, hitting in once with the flat of his hand. “Kitchen. Food for my girl. Now,” he barked, and heard a chair squeak across the floor.

Lucius was right behind him. “I want her bed changed, fresh linens, and a fire laid in with the crap that she likes,” he shot Lucius a look that warned him not to pretend that he didn’t know exactly what he meant. “Four hours after she’s fed, I want another tray ready for her, and again four hours later,” he specified, leaving the stair on the second floor to return to Willow’s room, “And bring up a pitcher of well water before you do anything else.”

From the depths of Angelus’ room he could hear the rattle of chains and Dru. She sounded coherent, but it was early.


Chapter Twenty-Two

She felt like she was swimming in dense layers of sleep without any idea of what direction would allow her to break the surface. She could hear William, but she really didn’t want to talk to him. She couldn’t remember why, and decided to go with general principles. Vampire. Bad. Sleep. Good.

“Wake up,” he insisted going to a tone of voice she recognized.

With a groan, she opened her eyes, half expecting to have to cover her eyes with her hand to block out the light before she realized that she had no idea what time it was and strong light wasn’t likely to be a problem with William in the room. He disliked the gaslights and usually turned them down at night.

“Rise and shine, Duchess,” he said, callously cheerful.

Duchess? That was new, and sounded like something that would be shortened to Dutch. Eeeew. Fun facts about social etiquette drilled into her head by Angelus surfaced. “I think the proper form of address is Your Grace,” she said woozily. “I don’t feel . . . right.”

Before she could think about what the wrongness was, William was throwing back the blanket and scooping her up. The top of her head felt funny and she put one hand on it to feel it gingerly. It didn’t hurt. It just felt odd. He moved around the foot of the bed to the other side where several pillows had been stacked. He pushed the hem of a nightgown she didn’t remember putting on up over her hip and started unwrapping a bandage around her thigh.

It was starting to come back.

She stared at his bent head as he checked the bite mark on her thigh, and nodded. “Not bleeding anymore, so you can go without this,” he held up the bandage.

“What happened?” she asked, pushing the hem of her nightgown back down, somewhat relieved that it probably didn’t involve a procedure that removed parts of her brain.

“Knicked an artery,” he was matter of fact. “Hell of a mess, blood spraying everywhere. I had Lucius scrubbing the ceiling half the night.”

He drew a blanket up over her lap and went to get a breakfast tray for her. Willow stared at him feeling like she had dropped into another unreal life. There could be more of them. Infinite versions, and in this one, she was having a strange waking moment with a domestic and cuddlely vampire who was currently unfolding a linen napkin for her.

“This isn’t real,” she told herself.

He stroked her cheek, his hand startlingly warm. When she got started on things not being real it wasn’t a good sign. “None of that,” he scolded.

The unexpected, unreal warmth of his hand made her heart twist in her chest.

“You’re a vampire,” she blurted out.

He tilted his head to the side, peering at her. “What’s wrong?”

She stared at him, baffled. “You’re all warm.”

“Ah,” he nodded, “Carried your tea pot up,” he explained, moving back around the bed to the side that she had vacated. “What did you think it was?”

That was part of the problem. She couldn’t think. Her head felt so thick and fuzzy.

“What’s going on? Why are you being . . . nice? Why do I feel so slow and–“ she figured it out. Laudanum. “You drugged me?” she was incredulous.

“You needed a rest, pet.” He made himself comfortable where she had been sleeping, laying on his side.

Maybe she did, but she still resented it on behalf of her fogged mind. There was something that she was almost remembering that was nagging at her, and she wondered if it was something he had done deliberately, to keep her off balance, though she didn’t have any reason to think that it was anything but what he claimed.

She applied herself to eating her breakfast without helpful interference. It was an English-y breakfast minus the more revolting food groups. There was oatmeal with bits of fruit in it and a pear, cut in half and poached. There were times when she longed for a large bowl of sugary cereal with ice-cold milk, the kind of cereal that was after school snack fare at Xander’s house. His Mother shopped at Sam’s Club Warehouse and bought things like the triple package of Quisp. She and Xander had collected the prizes–glow in the dark stars, moons, and phallic looking space ships that they had added to an old shoe box with the vague notion that someday they would paint a ceiling black and stick the decals on so at night the ceiling would be glow.

Willow had once had a wistful idea that when that day came they would be sharing that room, though at the time, she hadn’t the least notion of how to bring that about. A wealth of experience in the unreal world later, she had ideas that in conjunction with Xander, made her feel a little queasy on top of the disorienting feeling that her head was still swimming around in a half asleep haze of disjointed and inappropriate thoughts.

It made her stop eating for a moment, the spoon resting on the side of the bowl as she closed her eyes.

“Eat a bit more, baby,” William admonished. He had folded her pillow in half and was using it to prop his head up. His eyes were heavy lidded, and she had an impression of him, like a reptile, absorbing the lingering heat on the side of the mattress that she had slept on, lulled into lassitude by warmth. “Then you can go back to sleep.”

She had a brief recollection of him waking her up earlier and forcing her to eat soup. He hadn’t been soft spoken and cajoling then. Her eyes opened. “You were mad at me,” she recalled.

“Was I?” he looked mildly interested. “When was that? I loose track.”

Willow shook her head. She wasn’t that out of it. “Before. You were mad at me about something, and I thought that you had been mad at me all day, but I didn’t know why.”

She stirred the oatmeal. It was congealing around the spoon in a sticky mess. She couldn’t make herself eat another bite. “I don’t want this,” she said, nose wrinkling in disgust. “I hate oatmeal. I’ve always hated oatmeal.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. “Drink your tea, then,” he prompted.

She looked at him warily. “I don’t get to know why you were mad at me?”

He nudged the teacup. “It’s not complicated, pet. You’re up to something, and I know it,” he told her, “So, drink your tea.”

His idea of up to something and hers were mutually incompatible subjects. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “I don’t think I’m up to something.”

That made him smile. “That native to your way of thinking, is it?” he mocked, affecting a thoughtful air. “Well, I think it may be a focal point of dark magic,” he raised an eyebrow. “Does that sound familiar?”

She just looked puzzled. “It’s a theory.”

“You never mentioned it before,” he pointed out, in hint of coolness creeping into his voice.

“You never asked,” she frowned at him. “And,” she warmed to the topic, “I didn’t think you were all that interested either.”

He looked at her like she had said something remarkably stupid.

He had managed to get some sleep around the schedule he had established for feeding her. She kept waking him up, mumbling in her sleep. That was the reason for the laudanum, to force her into a deeper, less disturbed sleep. The drug slowed her heartbeat and respiration to a point that left him lying awake, listening to her. She was going to die. She was dying a little bit every day, and when she was dead, by whatever causes, there would be parts of her that would never come back.

“I’m interested,” he assured her. “I’m interested in everything that has to do with you,” he watched her expression change in degrees. She had secrets and no intention of sharing them with him, possibly ever.

He regretted the laudanum. Drifting through restless dreams, her body caught between the relaxation of sleep and the tension of her dreaming, she felt more alive to him. He was used to her sleepy mumbling. It wasn’t always understandable, but it was coherent. Odd names populated her sleep, names that sometimes appeared in her journals, usually as characters in little stories she told herself.

Once upon a time . . . a different time, in a less exotic place, there was a girl named Willow who loved everyone who ever loved her the least little bit and she was happy without ever understanding that it was mostly because she decided to be happy. That was her real gift, but she didn’t know it. She thought magic was her real gift and that she was meant to make other people happy because magic made her feel her happiness like a drug, and that was what made her think she could change things that were not meant to be changed. She saw the one moment that was crucial to Buffy and Xander and Cordelia and Giles and Jenny and even to Spike, of all people, and she set out to change it.

She drank her tea, and he insisted on the second cup. She needed the fluids, and when she was done, he let her go back to sleep and went back to reading a two year old journal that she probably thought had been lost in Portugal. Angelus was pouring over books about Slayers, unaware that William had one in his hands. It wasn’t Willow’s first story about a Slayer, though it was the one that made him understand that her stories about Jane were stories about a Slayer.

How in the name of hell did a former prostitute from Bristol know anything about Slayers? What was she hiding from him? Why did he have the feeling that it was all there, right in front of him and he simply wasn’t seeing it for what it really was?

He fell asleep on the chaise and when he woke up Willow’s bed was empty and someone was knocking on the door. The bathroom door was closed. The diary he had been reading was half under the throw blanket Dru was still working on. He got up and walked to the door as Angelus was opening it.

He looked at the empty bed. “Where is she?”

“Having a bath,” William guessed. It seemed likely. “What do you want?”

“Dru’s dog needs to be walked,” Angelus pointed out in a tone that was meant to sound unreasonable.

“Just let him out in the garden,” William pushed past Angelus to cross the hall to his own room. “We’ve done this before. Do you think it counts as banter?”

Angelus followed him, called on being nosy and bored enough to seek the two of them out. “You live to entertain me,” he told William, and it was said so dryly that it did constitute a joke, if not actual banter.

“Un-live,” William corrected. “There is a house full of vampires for you to play with Angelus, if you are bored, make more, but if we do this, you have to let me handle it.”

That bordered on insolence, which would have made Angelus angrier if he wasn’t accustomed to it. “You are a rude little shit, you know that?”

He got nothing more than a slightly pleased smirk out of William.

“I thought it was a crazy idea?” Angelus drawled.

“It is a crazy idea,” William nodded, “I didn’t say it couldn’t be made to work.”

“There’s a party tonight,” Angelus tone indicated that this was a reminder, and William looked at him curiously.

“We are all going. Do you think she’s up to it?”

He raked his fingers through his hair. “Probably not,” he thought about it for a moment. “No. Not tonight, tomorrow. Supper party with some middling royal,” Darla had reminded him about it at least a half dozen times.

“And tonight, at the Hamilton’s. Willow was invited for both,” Angelus said.

He remembered the Hamiltons, and shrugged. “She’s indisposed,” he offered up the excuse.

Angelus tilted his head to one side. “It’s a small party. Just us and the Hamiltons,” his voice was silky. “Are you sure you don’t want to bring Willow?”

The tone was the tip off. The Hamilton’s were destined to be the main course at their dinner party. Angelus would have something creative in mind for both of them. He had been cultivating Claire Hamilton, stringing her along. William felt that slightly itchy feeling that he had when he was in the mood for something violent. It wouldn’t just be the brother and sister, either. There would be servants. There were always servants.

“Positive,” he confirmed, without a shred of properly demony shame over his reluctance to expose her to an evening of murder and mayhem. “I keep telling you that we are working out what is amusing and what’s not,” he said, his tone mildly complaining.

He found a fresh packet of cigarettes, the last of them, in the pocket of a coat. The inference was clear. Willow had sensibilities, feelings and opinions that he didn’t share, and as far as he was willing to let it, they counted.

When he looked up, expecting condescension, what he got was something a bit more thoughtful. Angelus looked like he wasn’t surprised by the reciprocity. Mostly he seemed unwillingly intrigued. “How do you do that?”

“Badly, most of the time,” William admitted. “Are we sorted? Yes, I’m going. No, Willow isn’t. She’ll go to the other thing tomorrow night. I want Cook, Paulus and Andreas left here with her. Our new friends have an invite, and I won’t have her left with a token guard. Does that sound about right to you?”

Angelus nodded. “We weren’t planning to leave her without protection.”

William cocked his head to one side. “Is Darla giving this a pass?” he asked.

“Some one has to stay with our ailing cousin,” Angelus pointed out. “Dru isn’t a plausible nursemaid.”

William smiled at that. “Fine, then,” he agreed.

He didn’t have long to wonder how Drusilla fared. When he went back across the hall to look for Willow he found the two of them in their bathroom. Dru was sitting on the side of the bathtub while Willow smeared an ointment on her back. She reeked of blood, sex, and arousal. Whatever Willow was putting on her back, it was causing her pain, and she wanted more. Willow was being too gentle. It was like teasing without the malice.

Willow looked like a water sprite. Ethereal, too pale, her wet hair falling in coils that clung to her back and shoulders. A bit of sudsy soap stuck to her jaw, unnoticed, a smudge of cleanness. He sat on the hamper, ignoring the slight sound of the wicker crackling with his weight. Dru’s nose wrinkled. He was smoking in their bathroom, their little sanctum of sweet smelling soaps and fresh water. Angelus had been careful to leave her arms, chest, neck, and face untouched, otherwise she was a mess. He didn’t like seeing her in this condition. Knowing Angelus, he had probably told her that she wasn’t to bathe, and nothing on earth would persuade Dru to defy him.

“We are going out tonight,” he told her.

Willow looked at him, and he gave a spare shake of his head. “Not you, pet. You’ll stay in.”

“With Grandmummy,” Dru’s eyelids slid down. Her hands clutched the lip of the tub, her thighs quivering.

Willow paused in what she was doing. “Am I hurting you?” she asked.

Dru turned to her, her face in profile to both of them, smiling beatifically. “Not nearly enough,” she said, and then she laughed and laughed at the startled expression on Willow’s face.

William was smiling too, seeing the humor in it. Willow didn’t. She managed to get to her feet, yanking the chain that held the drain to empty the tub, staggering a little as she reached for a towel left hanging on a rod near the bathtub. Watching her through a haze of smoke, cigarette clenched between his lips, he felt himself not tensing precisely, but ready to move if she fell, even though Dru was closer and probably wouldn’t let her fall.

Dru plucked the cigarette out of his mouth, crushing it out between her fingertips. “No smoking in the bathroom you bad thing,” she censured.

He slouched against the wall, head tilted back, eyes narrowing as his lips pursed in an unwitting pout of annoyance. Against the white wall behind his head, his hair was honeyed brown with a hint of blond. Spike had looked dangerous. No one could accuse him of false advertising. William still had an almost babyish softness that made Willow wonder if Spike chose to look a certain way for a reason. Was it to impress the other vampires or was it some kind of warning that he chose to wear?

Drusilla dropped the remains of the crushed cigarette on the tile floor, whipping her head around so that the trailing ends of her hair caught him across the face as she stood, stretching, her hands running over her body, pressing into the worst of the bruises. For her to be showing so much damage nine or ten hours after Angelus had finished with her she had to be starving, and yet there wasn’t a flicker of fang in his direction or Willow’s. He had plenty and would have given it gladly, but she wouldn’t ask, and tonight she would be ravenous.

He took a deep breath, annoyance fading, replaced by anticipation.

After Willow’s bath they had a tea party on her bed joined by Miss Edith, Miss Anne, and Miss Georgina a haughty little regency miss with a fringe. Willow brushed her wet hair until William got exasperated with her technique, which was to start at the roots of her hair and tug the brush through it. She fell asleep with her head against his thigh after he took the brush away from her and brushed her hair until it was dry and shining. Dru left the dolls, save for Miss Edith and beckoned to him to follow her into her room.


Chapter Twenty-Three

Dreamless sleep eluded her. As if to catch up with the hours lost to laudanum Willow’s mind busily supplied images to her. She woke up with a vague impression of having a long and mostly amiable argument with Spike, who had been invading her dreams more and more of late. Sometimes they were in the old Sunnydale High library, pre-Mayor roasting. He was almost always in motion, pacing in front of the bookshelves, swinging down the stairs to challenge her to snoop in Giles’ office. Today they were in the bathroom, the one with the beige and institutional green decorating scheme, and he was sitting on one sink, his booted foot propped on the other as he smoked and picked at the label on a Snapple bottle labeled passion fruit that looked full of blood while she dyed her hair back to the nearly uniform darker auburn that she had favored going back to high school.

Oh, yeah. Her’s was a subtle mind at work.

The first time she had dyed her hair had been the night before she started her sophomore year at Sunnydale High School. She had the academic success down cold, so this year was going to be about other kinds of success and they required a new look. She made an extensive study of hair color products before settling on a product with henna that would, according to the package, give her not quite red hair a richer, more lustrous color.

The results were exactly what the package suggested, though the only people who had noticed were Xander and Jesse. They knew their stuff and told her it was a great color. Her parents noticed, but pretended that they didn’t, providing no opportunity for her ‘it’s my hair’ speech.

Her hair in the bathroom rinsed red and dried black, and Spike told her it was because it was a more rebellious color. Same as his, but less cool.

Dream Spike was very weird tonight. She kept waiting for him to do something that William would do, like comb her hair or touch her like she was a point of reference, or call her by one of a half dozen pet names, but dream Spike just followed her through empty halls commenting on everything and nothing.

She woke up to the two dolls staring at her. The bedroom door from the hallway was open, the gaslights from the hall spilling light into the room, making the dolls’ glass eyes glisten. Miss Georgina had been rescued from a house in Ghent. Her petticoats had been yellow with age and brittle with dry rot. She had a tiny silk purse dangling from her arm on a cord and inside the silk purse had been a child’s baby tooth, probably forgotten long ago by whomever once had her. She was an expensive doll with a bisque head and arms, human hair, beautifully crafted glass eyes the color of whiskey with sunlight coming through it and a slight overbite.

From what Dru said about her Miss Georgina was more assertive than the other dolls. She had been left alone too long and tended to be bossy and talkative. It was a description that reminded Willow of Buffy and a familiar pang of loss made her close her eyes and try to recapture the sense of long, rambling, pointless conversations that they had had.

“I miss you all,” she included Xander and Giles, her parents, and Oz in her list. Angel had been dropped off a long time ago when she lost the capacity to entirely separate him from Angelus.

Darla was sitting in the arm chair, looking out the window. At the sound of Willow’s voice, she turned her head. For a moment she tried to think of anyone she missed, but drew a blank. “Who do you miss?”

Willow sat up then, clearly startled that she was not alone. “People I used to know,” she stammered. “A long time ago.”

“It’s just you and me,” Darla told her, a malicious smile curving her lips. She knew Matilde was in the hall, listening, and she knew that she would register how utterly she was dismissed.

Willow remembered William saying something about going out for the evening. The smile made her feel uneasy. Darla rose, walking over to her wardrobe, taking out a dress that she held up to the spare light. “This will do, “ she announced. “You and I are going to find out what we haven’t been told about Zlata Ulicka.”

Willow got up and started getting dressed. She shared William’s skepticism about their guests and Darla’s curiosity about what they might be hiding. “How?” she asked.

“You are a witch,” Darla pushed her hands away and helped her button the dress, smoothing her hands over Willow’s corsetless waist.

Angelus had taken the coach, so they were left with the smaller Brougham. Willow had a purse stuffed with notes and coin. She was finishing a hastily prepared sandwich as they crossed the river. Looking out the window, she saw the Palencho Bridge in the distance. She was set down within sight of Zlata Ulicka, and for a moment she hesitated. The sandwich had left her thirsty and a hard spasm of anxiety made her feel like she needed to pee, the two seemingly contradictory messages her body was sending her made her take a deep breath to steady herself.

Zlata Ulicka lacked nothing for atmosphere. She had seen it in daylight on her tour of Hradcany. You saw places like it all over Europe. It was an addition made hastily, and left, like an afterthought, but it had charm in daylight. At night, with a strange fog that seemed to flow up from the cobblestones, it was creepy. The sound of her own sturdy walking boots on the cobblestones made her feel more conspicuous. She was wearing one of Darla’s hooded cloaks, with a fringe of fur and fox tails that hung on the shoulders. The fur served a purpose of sorts. It was meant to compete with her scent, an insight that William had casually dropped once. The evening was too warm for such a heavy garment.

She started to pass a lamp post and then stopped as something cool and fine, a knife edge of sensation, passed through her and she saw not an empty alley but one teeming with shadowy figures that turned towards her with indifferent eyes, and amongst them the more solid forms of people. She had the distinct impression as the knife point rested inside her that if she took one step forward it would all disappear, so she waited until a boy uncurled himself from a seat he had taken on a stoop. He was tall and thin, sharp featured, reminding her of Templeton the Rat from Charlotte’s Web as he slinked towards her in a bad imitation of a vampire’s loose jointed grace.

For a moment she felt dizzy and closed her eyes. When she opened them, a wizened old man stood before her, stroking one of the foxtails in a blatantly lascivious way, begging for a coin, and the knife edge that hovered at her midsection reminded her of Jane’s lessons on the subject of beggars. Never open a purse to them. Never feed anything that won’t work as hard as you did for a coin.

The rat boy was gone. Everyone was gone. She stared at the beggar, refusing to move off the focal point. It was a threshold, or a kind of magical trigger to something. She stared at him as he repeated his request in the same tone.

She breathed in to steady herself and smelled the damp night air and a spicy stew of burning herbs. It was the smell that tipped the scales. In every other detail it was complete down to the buckled, filthy fingernails and skinny fingers, gray with dry, dead skin, except for the scent. Beggars didn’t smell of incense.

Glamour, her mind classified, and the cool, sharp sensation became thinner and finer, feathering under the skin over her breastbone in a way that made her want to shudder.

The rat faced boy was at her side, sketching an elaborate bow. “You’ve got more power than any idea of how to use it of any witch I’ve seen in a long time,” he said conversationally. It sounded like solid, American English, though she knew that was impossible.

He patted a leather pouch on a cord around his neck. “It’s just a charm, and useful,” he told her. “Are you here to buy or sell?”

“Buy,” she said.

He nodded and gestured for her to walk with him. “I’m Gripe,” he said. “If you don’t have a man and you are looking for one, the house numbered 23 comes to me when my old man passes and we wouldn’t have to share a room with anyone else.”

Willow looked at him to decide if he was being outrageous or if he was serious.

He looked at her hopefully, and then sighed. “There’s a man,” he guessed. “Well, you look about a decade too old for me, but it never hurts to ask.”

The part of her that was stuck in remembering who she was at sixteen was shocked into awareness. A decade too old. Eight years gone. They walked past 23 and he stopped at 25. The door was painted blue, with woad. “Don’t bother haggling. The prices are fair and the quality isn’t what you’d find out there,” he gestured to the world beyond the barrier.

He left her there, ambling back to the corner, and she raised her hand to knock on the door, but before the gesture was completed, it was opened and a woman, heavily pregnant with a fringed shawl that Drusilla would have approved of draped over her shoulders smiled at her, gesturing to her, offering what Willow recognized vaguely as a blessing.

“Come in, come in,” she urged, stepping back a little to make more space in the narrow doorway.

Willow found herself in a small room could only be appreciated in layers. “Arik!” the woman called out. “We have a guest!” She nudged Willow towards a couch shaped piece of furniture nearly buried in what appeared to be fresh laundry. “Just push it out of the way. I can’t seem to keep up these days,” the woman told her with an eye-rolling gesture to her rounded stomach.

“Ari–“ before she could finish shouting a short man with curly blond hair appeared. He was wearing a leather apron and gloves and from the lingering pressure marks on his face, Willow guessed that he had taken off some kind of mask to protect his nose and mouth. “Oh! There you are,” the woman beamed at him. “Look what the boy brought us,” she said, gesturing to Willow who started to stand.

Arik waved her back. “I see,” he said, sounding amused. “You’ll be wanting tea, then?”

The woman cocked her head to one side, her shrewd gray eyes appraising Willow. “Don’t stint on the rose hips,” she told him, settling into a rocking chair near Willow. She reached out and took her hand, unceremoniously stripping off her glove. “You are much too warm,” she scolded, waving to the cloak. “Take that off. You can tell Arik what you are here for when he comes back,” she said. “It was starting off as a slow night, and I was hoping for someone to come by, and here you are.”

“Here I am,” Willow agreed, starting to wonder where here was. “How do you know why I’m here?”

“The boy brought you, didn’t he? He wouldn’t have brought just anyone, even if he is a nuisance,” she gave Willow an amused look.

“I think he asked me to come live with him,” she found herself saying.

“Not at all. He probably asked you to marry him. He does that,” she smiled again. “It’s a modern world. Scary, isn’t it? I think it must have been easier when your parents just told you whom you’d marry. If it was a mistake, at least it wasn’t yours.”

Willow undid the silk frogs holding the cloak together and unwound let it slip over her shoulders.

The woman released her hand and Willow removed the other glove. She had a crazy urge to ask if she could help fold the laundry that she was trying not to lean into.

Arik returned with the tea in a round glazed pot with two mugs and a plate of bread and butter. He pushed a small table closer with his foot and set the tray on it before pouring for both of them. He had removed the gloves if not the apron and squatted down a little until he was below eye level. “What will you be needing?” he asked.

Willow opened her purse and took out her list, aware of the couple exchanging pleased looks at the glimpse of crisp banknotes. She handed it to him and he scanned it, nodding to himself. It was a supply list that she had started in anticipation of the trip to London. There was nothing on it that would have set off alarm bells, though some of the crystals she was looking for were very expensive and difficult to come by. They were last minute additions to the list when she realized that Darla wasn’t being close fisted with the money.

“We’ve got most of this lying about save for the red jade sticks. I’ve got a set, but they are brittle, and you don’t want them breaking on you. I can get something better if you can wait a few days. Most of this we can give you tonight.”

She agreed to come back and the woman clapped. “Wonderful!” she chirped. “Try the tea, won’t you?”

Willow found herself smiling back. “My name is Willow,” she said.

“Oh, dear! Manners,” the woman shook her head. “This is my husband, Arik, and I am Terese, and this,” she patted her stomach, “Is my sadly unnamed first child,” she shot a laughing look at her husband. “He wants to name it Baby Bunny. Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous?”

Arik gave a good-natured sigh. “If you’d agree to winnow the list down to something that doesn’t rival the Book of Saints, I’d be willing to compromise,” he told his wife and then excused himself.

Willow picked up her mug. The tea smelled of chamomile and she sipped it. What was she doing here? She was supposed to be getting an impression of the occupants of Zlata Ulicka. Her first impression was that she liked them in a way that made her chest feel tight.

Terese touched her hand again, to bring her attention back to her, and Willow realized that she had missed something that she had said. “I’m sorry,” she began, embarrassed.

Terese shook her head. “I was just asking how long you’ve been practicing,” she explained.

“Only a few years,” Willow said, looking down at the bread. William had been shoving food at her for the last day. She didn’t want to seem rude, but she didn’t think she could eat another bite.

“Do you, that is, are you a witch?” Willow asked.

Terese let her head fall back against the back of the rocking chair, setting it into motion with her foot. “My mother,” she said with a fond smile. “That’s how I met Arik. We come to Prague every few years. Mother swears by his mugwort.”

To pass the time while Willow waited, Terese gave her the abridged version of the list of baby names that she had settled on. Willow was finishing her second cup of tea when Arik emerged from the back room with her parcels, wrapped in brown paper and twine. He squatted down beside her and went over her list with her, reminding her to wear gloves while handling the more poisonous herbs on her list. She thanked him and opened her purse. He named a figure, and Willow understood the rat faced boy’s injunction not to haggle. She could have had the lot of it shipped from England for less, but she didn’t hesitate, counting out the notes and handing them over.

“Come back in a week for the rest,” he told her, handing the money to Terese, who tucked in inside her blouse.

“I will,” Willow agreed, hoping that she would be allowed to return.

“Stay and have another cup of tea,” Terese invited even though she looked sleepy.

Willow smiled, “Thank you, but I should go,” she said, rising from the couch. Arik went to the door to open it for her as Terese called out a blessing and Willow stepped back into the narrow alley. Mist swirled at her feet, making her feel like she was walking in a cloud. She turned back to the door and Arik was standing there, holding her cloak and her packages. He handed her the packages and settled the cloak around her shoulders. “Remember what I said about the henbane,” he cautioned.

She nodded. “I will, and thank you,” she added.

His hand came to rest on her shoulder for a moment as his eyes scanned the alley. “Maybe you should come back in,” he said quietly.

“Mica, mica, parva stella,” a thin, high voice mocked.

Willow turned slowly to see the small vampire from the attack on the house drifting through the mist toward her. Now that she knew that she wasn’t a child at all but a very old vampire, Willow was amazed that she missed it. Not the vampire part, but the fact that she was not a child when she died.

The rat boy was loping down the alley with a stake in hand. The small vampire looked at him with delight and contempt. He came to a halt a few feet from her. “Don’t you look like a little darling tonight,” he crooned to her. He looked over his shoulder at Willow. “The offer stands, even if you’re a bit old, so off with you,” he gestured to the opposite end of the alley.

“But–“

Arik gave her a nudge. “You should go, quickly,” he advised. “Come back in daylight. It’s safer,” he told her.

“She’s safe if she wants to be,” Sian said. “She killed seven of us with nothing but a pair of minions to help her.”

Arik frowned at that. “All the more reason for you to go,” he told Willow.

The numbers at the dinner table were always guranteed to be uneven. If Willow and Darla had come they would have been seven instead of five. Claire announced that the uneven numbers meant that they should sit anywhere they liked. Her brother looked at her as if he thought this was silly, and he took his place at the head of the table after seating Drusilla to his right. Flustered by the lack of enthusiasm for this idea, Claire allowed her to be seated at the foot of the table and William, following the two paired off couples took the place across from Drusilla.

Bored by the dinner table conversation which was largely a breathless flirtation between Claire Hamilton and Angelus while her brother ineptly tried to engage Dru in conversation while obviously finding his sister’s behavior distracting, William prodded a gray green asparagus spear with the tines of the fork he was pretending to eat with. Mushy. Overcooked, mushy asparagus, yet another reason to thank Dru that he was no longer human and polite. He entertained himself with ideas about what Darla would do to anyone who spoiled one of her soirees with over cooked asparagus.

There was, in addition to the Hamiltons, a houseful of servants. Lucius had their numbers sorted out. Containment was an issue since they were planning to remain in Prague.

He tried one of the beef medalions in a cloying mushroom sauce. The beef was also undercooked, which made it palatable. He scraped the sauce off with the edge of his fork, smiling blandly when George Hamilton caught him at it, and then looked at Drusilla only to notice that she wasn’t eating at all.

“It isn’t to your liking?” he ventured hesitantly.

Dru flashed him a dazzling smile, the kind that could make you feel like you were amazingly perceptive, even as she was confirming his guess.

He smiled back, shyly. William watched all of this with a smirk.

“Would you like something else?” George asked.

Angelus’ head was tilted towards Claire, and now he lifted it just a bit to look at Drusilla. She was wearing a blue silk gown that was as severe as a nun’s habit. He smiled, recalling the first time he had ever seen her, with that pinched look around her mouth, great dark haunted eyes finding him. Despite the severity of the dress, she looked like a little girl with a wonderful secret that she was eager to share. He smiled at her, feeling indulgent. “Do tell Mr. Hamilton what you would prefer, Princess,” he invited.

In a move too fast to follow, William picked up the blunt knife that rested by the edge of his plate and brought it down hard, through the back of George Hamilton’s hand, pinning it to the table.

Drusilla clapped. “Naughty, naughty. Hands aren’t meant to be on the table,” she told their host, whose mouth had fallen open on a gurgling gasp of pain.

In the moment between understanding what she was seeing and seeing it, Claire was simply puzzled by what she had seen. Angelus had turned back to her, unconcerned. “It’s a game,” he said.

The startled footman waiting to serve the next course had stepped toward the table, still holding a wine bottle to refill glasses. William left his chair and feinted left. The footman saw not a man but a man shaped thing wearing a monsters face. He swung the wine bottle like a bludgeon, and was blocked. Absorbing a punch that snapped his head back, he tried to shake it off with no thought of fighting. Turning away from that face was instinctive, and he had a moment to realize that it was also foolish as impossibly strong arms pinned his to his sides seconds before his throat was ripped out.

Claire Hamilton’s hysteria edged scream was all the signal Lucius, in the kitchen needed. He had been whiling away the time in a chat with the servants who were not occupied with the meal that was being served in the dining room. He watched the reactions of the servants, who froze, and then started moving. The English butler who had been with the Hamiltons for over twenty years, rushed to the dining room followed more slowly by the lady’s maid. The cook was a locally hired servant and had not been with the Hamilton’s long enough to have any notion of whether this behavior was odd or alarming.

“Probably a mouse,” the footman standing by the door said.

“It’s not a mouse,” Lucius told him. “Listen,” he nodded to the hall. Claire Hamilton’s undulating scream had been abruptly cut off. A breif moment of silence before the maid screamed.

“That’s not surprise, or anger. That’s terror you are hearing,” he explained to the two men left in the kitchen. He finished the bottle of beer.

The cook picked up a long, sturdy looking butcher knife.

Lucius let his face change. He was across the table and on the footman in a matter of seconds, taking his face in his hands and then snapping his neck with a ruthless twist that he had seen Angelus and William use.

He advanced on the cook holding the knife in front of him like he knew how to use it. For a fat man, he was unexpectly agile, darting around a work bench to grab a poker from the cold kitchen hearth.

“Bad choice,” he observed. “I didn’t run when I had the chance, either.”

William strolled through the door, blood splattered. He wiped his mouth. He paused to nudged the dead body at his feet, and then looked at Lucius. “Ah, a happy trip down memory lane?” he said snidely. His attention switched to the cook, “Just kill him, will you? Nothing worse than juvenile vampires waxing philosophical.”

Armed with the poker, knife, and an arm accustomed to hefting heavy sacks of wheat and cutting meat, the cook was proving to be more of a challenge than Lucius anticipated. William hoped up on a counter drinking from an openned bottle of wine offering suggestions, mostly to the cook, who was sweating heavily, but still fighting.

The poker from the fireplace hurt, but it wasn’t anything that would slow him down, or so Lucius thought until William’s helpful suggestions started to sink in with the cook, and the tide started to turn. “Eyes, throat, groin, and work on his legs,” William called out. “He’s faster than you. Slow him down,” he added, turning at the waist to open a cabinet door to check out it’s contents.

Changing tactics, the cook dropped his head and charged at Lucius, hitting him squarely in the chest while using the knife to stab him in the side. He slid the blade in and twisted it, wrenching an angry howl out of the vampire.

“Hurt him with that one,” William announced as the cook used the poker, beating Lucius’ head with it until he let go of him. The cook staggered back, hunched over, panting as he stared at Lucius, clearly waiting for something.

“You hurt him. Ouch. He’s a vampire. Hurting won’t stop him,” William coached. “Now,” he hopped down from the counter and strolled over. “Vampires? Heard of ‘em, I expect? Fast, strong, bloodsuckers,” he chuckled a little, “though some of us do eat. The asparagus was awful, you know,” he chided the cook.

Lucius started to approach the cook again, but William held up one hand. “Don’t interupt. I had to eat the mushy asparagus. The beef, very rare, not bad, but the mushroom sauce?”

“I’m a pastry chef,” the cook huffed.

“Oh, well then. Something edible for dessert?”

“Bittersweet chocolate tarts with spiced almonds,” the cook nervously shifted his grip on the knife.

William glanced at Lucius to see if he was watching for him to attack. “There are three ways to kill a vampire: Immolation by exposure to fire or direct sunlight. Decapitation. And stabbing them directly in the heart,” he told the cook in a hushed voice.

Holding the poker like a sword, the cook charged, and Lucius waited for him, pivoting at the last moment and propelling him forward into the brick surround of the fireplace. His head hit with a sound like a ripe mellon exploding.

William strolled over, removing the poker from a hand that was twitching. He looked at the poker, smiling to himself, and before Lucius could figure it out, the tip of the poker was punching through the wall of his chest with enough force to drive him back against the wall. He gritted his teeth against the pain.

“That won’t kill me,” he said.

“You are already dead,” William reminded him, pushing the poker in deeper, making the younger vampire moan.

“But, no. It won’t kill you. It just hurts,” he said, pushing the poker in deeper. Lucius could feel it scraping against his spine and went utterly still.

Cold blue eyes bored in. “Last chance,” William told him. “Listen carefully. She’s mine. Menace her, touch her, make her worry, even for a second, neglect her, and it’s me you answer to. In thought as well as deed. You don’t think Angelus kept Dru because she was eccentric, do you? That goes for you and the rest of the minions, and you are the one that is going to make that stick, aren’t you, Lucius?”

He found himself nodding, and then screaming as William jerked the poker out of his chest.

“Next time I’ll poke a few holes in you and fill them with holy water,” William told him, stepping over the cook. “He’s still breathing. Deal with it,” he ordered as he walked over to the countertop by the oven, opening the oven doors. As he suspected the chocolate tarts were left in the oven to keep them warm. “Box this when your done,” he added, grabbing the half empty wine bottle on his way out of the kitchen.

In the dining room, George Hamilton was still alive, and still pinned to the table by the butter knife. A pool of blood was congealing under his hand. Dru had used one of the tiebacks from the drapes to improvise a gag. The butler was dead, and his heart was on a plate in front of George. The maid was still alive but barely breathing, and slumped over the butler’s lap.

Claire Hamilton was on the table, naked, on her hands and knees. She wasn’t a bad looking chit under normal circumstances but no one looked their best when they were crying like that. Mucus ran from her nose over her lips. Dru picked up a napkin and made her blow her nose.

George was being treated to a version of Claire’s relationship with Angelus, and it was probably all true, but Angelus knew just how to make it sound. It was probably never more than a flirtation, stolen kisses in gardens and empty hallways, a little excitement for a girl who hadn’t found anyone interesting enough to marry, but in Angelus’ hands it was an indictment.

William found himself checking his pocket watch. He was fed, he’d given Lucius something to think about and now he was eager to get on with the torture and death portions of the evening. He had a girl to get home to. The thought made him shake his head.

Leaving Angelus enumerating Claire’s sins, William went to walk through the first floor, eventually finding what appeared to be a more masculine room with books. His nose led him to a humidor and he smiled to himself. He had not had a chance to visit the tobacco shop he was patronizing and was nearly out of cigarettes. Cigars would do in a pinch. He had more or less decided to give up the cheroots.

Stuffing an handful in the inside pocket of his coat, he lit a cigar and sat down at George’s desk, going through the drawers without looking for anything in particular. He heard Claire shriek and Drusilla say something about her being a very bad girl, and rolled his eyes. Predictable.

He thumbed through George’s diary, which was full of appointments, mostly evening. The Hamilton’s had been invited to the same party they were going to tomorrow night. He considered for a moment whether the news of their death would be generally known by then. Probably not. George’s diary was unrevealing, so he moved on to George’s correspondance.

It was mostly garbage. Letters from friends in London full of gossip. The Hamiltons were nearly twenty years his junior, there really wasn’t anyone that they might gossip about that might interest him. There was a letter from his bank, very polite, thanking him for the large deposit that cleared an overdraft. William frowned. What were the Hamilton’s doing in Prague if their finances were that tenuous? He waded through a few more letters without finding an answer an decided that in less than four hours it would all be academic anyway.

It also occurred to him that he was starting to act like Angelus, snooping through desk drawers while Angelus and Dru entertained themselves. He frowned at the idea, fairly horrifying, and yet undeniably funny, that he had switched places with Angelus tonight. Checking his pocket watch again, he folded his hands over his chest. “If I was a pompous, arrogent, sadistic bastard, what would I be doing?” he asked himself aloud, doing what he considered a credible immitation of Angelus’ brogue.

It took him less than a full minute to figure it out and then he was out of the room and taking the stairs two at a time in search of Claire’s room. Her diary was lying out on a bedside table next to her bed. He picked it up and went down to rejoin Angelus and Dru.

Despite her well earned reputation within the family for impatience, waiting was something that Darla endured patiently. She let her head rest against the upholstered seat cushion and stared straight ahead until her eyes lost focus in the middle distance. She could have had Paulus light the lamps inside of the Brougham, but she didn’t need the light to see even if Willow did. Angelus was thinking in the short term about Prague. Darla was not. She liked the city and the house, and it had already occurred to her that it could be home before attack on the house, and before they met the Zlata Ulicka vampires.

Angelus was content with a mutual non-agression pact, but Darla was looking past the immediate problem of the Stare Mesto vampires. Eliminate the older vampires in the city, and they could rule it. Angelus would see to the day to day details while she kept her eye on the horizon. As tempting as it was to write Drusilla out of that picture, her timely warning about the Order of St. Ubaldus had proven again that no matter how difficult her madness made her to deal with, she was worth the effort. William had impressed her today, and Willow . . . well, it remained to be seen what would be made of her, but Darla was cautiously optomistic.

She let her mind wander. One part of it was quietly going over a mental list of things that needed to be done. Dru was hard on clothing, and she was almost constantly in need of new dresses. She sewed her own small clothes which were also frequently in need of replacement. Willow’s oyster satin was ruined, and she needed at least one more evening dress and a day dress. She made a mental note to schedule an appointment with a dressmaker for both of them.

Another part of her mind was planing for tomorrow night, sifting through her own wardrobe, though she knew exactly what she would wear and had decided on it as soon as she had received the invitation. In some ways William was a better judge of social situations than Angelus. He was handicapped by an utter lack of concern, but she had absorbed a quick impression that in relative terms Princess Stavarsky, their hostess for tomorrow night’s supper party, was of no greater or lesser consequence than an English Countess. Angelus wasn’t always clear on the nuances of their social interactions, but William had been raised with the hope that he would participate in what he once refered to sneeringly as ‘elevated company’.

Darla had the most vague impression of him when he was still human. For years she puzzled over Dru picking him out, literally plucking him out of no where. It was the kind of thing Dru would normally have forgotten, but the boy was hardly in the ground when she began her vigil at his grave, waiting like a child on Christmas morning for him to claw his way out.

The antagonism Darla felt towards him was most habitual. In his early years he had wavered between a need to please that had earned her contempt to a violent, rebellious attitude that had threatened their ability to pass unnoticed. Then Willow came along, and he started settling down. He kept her because it pleased Dru and irritated Angelus, and ultimately because it suited him, and they allowed it because it suited them all, completing them in a wholely unexpected way.

He had been on edge for days. Going out for the evening with Angelus and Dru was just what he needed to remind him of what he was. He had been spending so much time with Willow lately, and he didn’t understand what had been obvious to her, and to Angelus when since Lisbon. His instinct was to save her, and he might not recognize the moment when she was beyond saving. It made sense to Darla. She wasn’t sure what love was, or that she had ever felt it, but she knew what it felt like to know that someone was utterly yours, even if it only came in moments.

She could be patient. It would all work out in the end, and it it didn’t, they could spend the fall in London and bide there until a better idea came along.

Cutting someone’s throat with a dull butter knife just wasn’t as fun as it used to be, William reflected. George Hamilton had gotten off easy. After William had brought Claire’s journal down and read a few amusing passages aloud, Angelus claimed the volumn and was chortling over Claire’s wistful entries.

That left William with nothing to do but toy with George. Lucius had finished off the cook and footman, draining both. The extra blood helped close the wound in his chest, though he still moved like it hurt.

Drusilla and Angelus were busy with the girl. He had seen it all before and done most of it himself, though he tended to get bored and move on to the killing faster, before the begging started. Not the please, no begging, but the please kill me begging. Stupid girl had gotten there too early. She was no where near dead, and Angelus was inclined to draw it out if they got there too fast. It was annoying. He was inclined to tell her to stuff a sock in it. A short list of some of the things Willow had survived made him want to tell her that a little pain and humiliation was the least of it.

Except that she wasn’t going to survive. Darla would have Angelus’ balls on a platter if he brought this one home.

He held her gaze while her brother died in front of her, finding it interesting that she wasn’t looking at George. William had taken off the soiled gag and he was making a wet, gurgling sound as air passed through his crushed windpipe around the butter knife. She was still on her hands and knees and her arms were shaking. Her journal was open, resting on the small of her back as Angelus turned pages with one hand and worked his fingers into her with the other.

She was looking at him, almost hopefully, and he smiled at her, leaning down to listen to her whisper, “Please, I want to die.”

It reminded him of Willow, except that she had never sounded so abject, and she had more reason to. When Willow said she wanted to die there was enough determination in it that he knew that she didn’t want to be killed. Killing herself was quite another thing.

He shook his head. “We don’t always get what we want,” he told her.

He straightened and Drusilla came to him, winding herself about him. “Not staying?” she guessed.

He cupped her cheek, wiping away a bit of blood from the corner of her mouth. “There’s not enough to go around anymore,” he pointed out. “And, I’m full.”

Drusilla raised her hand to rap her knuckles on his forehead. “It’s too early,” she pouted, and then tucked her head against his shoulder, smoothing her hand over his lapel. “Stay?”

It took it a moment to sink in. Drusilla, who was always best content playing with Angelus, was asking him to stay. It didn’t happen very often. He kissed the top of her head. “If you like,” he agreed.

They left Angelus and Lucius in the dining room with Claire and went off to explore the house.

While William and Dru went on their tour of the house–Dru could distract herself for hours searching for something only she would recognize as being a perfect memento for the evening, Angelus changed tactics with Claire, removing his fingers from her cunt, wiping his hand clean on a napkin. He removed the open journal that had rested against her lower back and helped her down, off the table, wetting the napkin in a water glass that had not been spilled with the tableware and food that littered the floor, he wiped her face off.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding like he meant it, “but you’ve seen what they are,” he said, sorrowfully.

It wasn’t enough for trust or forgiveness, but it awoke something in her eyes that he recognized as hope mingled with shame. Her brother was dead. The butler, a long time family servant, was dead, her maid was dying, and she was discovering that she really didn’t want to die herself. Angelus wished William was here to see the idea reach her, because he thought that the younger vampire put too much stock in Willow’s periodic suicide dramas. Even in their worst moments, people wanted to live.

She slapped him. It wasn’t a ladylike slap. She put her arm into it and slapped him hard, and might have slapped him again, if he hadn’t stepped back, taken his suit coat off, and wrapped her up in it, effectively trapping her arms.

“They are monsters,” Claire spat at him. “And you . . . you are a monster, too,” she said, her voice shaking.

“I was a man once,” he told her. “I wasn’t a very good man, but I was a man once, and then Darla came. I’d never seen anything like her before. She offered me the world, and I don’t know if I would have said no even if I knew what she meant to do.”

Sitting on the edge of the table, her back to her dead brother, Claire stared at him. “Are you going to kill me?”

His smile was tender. “Of course,” he assured her. “But, you won’t mind so much. Being dead. Waking up again. It will be dark. It’s always dark, but there will be a string, touching your face. Remember that. A string, and you’ll pull on it. A string attached to a bell that will ring for you, and I’ll be there, because you will leave that grave and you’ll be like us.”

She didn’t know what to say, distracted by the soreness between her legs where he had forced his fingers into her, not for his pleasure or hers, but to hurt her, to humiliate her with the crudest possible interpretation of what she desired, her mind was blank. “Why me?”

“Because you aren’t good either,” he told her without malice. “Not like Drusilla and William once were. They were good and well meaning if flawed people wallowing in the pain of being good and well meaning people in a world that never prizes those qualities.”

She reminded him of Darla, despite her darker blond hair and the upper crust accent that came so easily to her. It was the slight hint of calculation in her gaze.

Leaving the alley, Willow crossed the avenue and considered, briefly, her options. She had a purse that was lighter, but filled with notes and coin. Enough for a carriage, enough for a train ticket, though she suspected that it would not take her far. She had no papers. The spell ingredients she had purchased were worth something, and there was enough in there to cast a spell, similar to the tongues charm the boy in the alley had used. She had read about such charms. They could be used to enhance the wearer’s charisma to the point that they became highly persuasive.

A little lost in these thoughts, she didn’t notice the vampire who had quietly fallen in step beside her until he spoke, startling her badly.

He apologized at once, and not just for the fright he had just given her. “Sian isn’t used to loosing,” he explained. “But, she wouldn’t have hurt you.”

She blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “How old are you?”

Rather than take offense, he laughed, seemingly charmed by the blunt question. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I was born in a time when what year it was was a great debate that took place in hearts and minds caught between the death of one world of ideas and another. I was born in a place whose name is lost,” he sounded like he was savoring the idea, “I make up stories about it,” he admitted. “When you live so long, you do that, but after a while, it’s hard to remember what is true. I saw MacBeth on the stage, and they got it wrong. He wasn’t a monster or even a bad king.”

“It’s a good play,” she ventured.

“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “Your carriage is over there,” he gestured to it. Paulus was on the box, standing, watching them, clearly unsure about what to do.

“It will keep a moment,” he told her. “While you think about what you’ve seen. I thought you might have questions,” he smiled. “Thomazine would not have answered them, so it was inevitable that you would come here. Did you enjoy the visit?”

She had. “Yes.”

“No questions?” he seemed surprised by that, studying her face, and then he took her parcels from her. “These are too heavy for you,” he said. “You look like you need to sit down for a moment,” he took her arm in a light grip, meant to do nothing more than guide her. They crossed the street like that and he handed the parcels up to Paulus before opening the carriage door for her, looking at it in a puzzled way as it dawned on him that it sat up too high for her to climb into, and there was something like a chair in the way. He smiled when he figured it out and he put the stair down for her and held out his hand to steady her as she climbed in.

She sat, straightening her skirt as he put the step back up and then rested his arms on the padded surface that could be used for a seat for a third passenger. Darla did not seem startled to see him again. She made a brief mental note at how he used his hands, careful to conceal the long, talon-like fingernails that had been clipped and filed as much as they ever could. She thought it was amazingly stupid that he gave such an obvious sign of his discomfort about how he was changing.

“You are welcome to return, day or night,” he told Willow, and grinned at Darla. “Not you,” he said without rancor. “Even if you got past the wards, crossbows, from the second story windows,” he explained.

“Why do they let you stay?” Willow asked.

“We were there at the beginning,” he told her. “When they were brought here from every corner of Europe and the East. It’s a long story,” he said, “and I like long stories too much to stint on it, but dawn will come before I could finish the beginning,” he looked at Darla. “Tell your childer that nothing would persuade Ekaterina to return to Zlata Ulicka. She lost that battle two centuries ago.”

He stepped back and closed the door carefully. Willow automatically leaned forward, despite the dark and secured the latch on the inside of the carriage door before sitting back against the upholstered seat back, feeling tired and energized at the same time. The complexity of the ward that she had passed through went beyond anything she had imagined and made her own seem crude even if it was effective.

“Did you find out anything useful?” Darla began, only to be interrupted by Paulus who wanted to know if they were leaving.

“Home,” she said, and he snapped the small window between the driver’s box and the interior of the carriage shut. A moment later, the carriage lurched into motion, and Willow banged her knee against the jump seat while Darla hissed in annoyance.

“Andreas is a better driver,” Willow noted, rubbing her bruised knee.

Andreas wasn’t as sharp as Paulus or Cook, but he was steadier, which is why Darla left him behind with Cook and Matilde. For a moment Darla wished that Angelus was there. He was better at asking questions. “Just tell me what happened,” she said, returning to the topic at hand.

On the drive home, Willow went over it. She had a tendency to babble that Darla found irritating. Her voice warmed with enthusiasm and unspoken admiration of the wards that protected Zlata Ulicka. The general impressions she gathered were that the wards were sophisticated and interesting to Willow, that the occupants of Zlata Ulicka were prepared to defend themselves, and that Willow liked them, in a wistful way that was a little interesting to Darla. Ever since Angelus had decided that Willow’s presence would be more or less acknowledged as a part of the public face of their family, Darla had opportunities to observe her interacting with other humans.

The supper party a few nights ago was a good example of this. She was polite and a little reserved, if not standoffish with the people she came into contact with. She was the person at a party who was talked to, but not talked about. An excessive amount of interest in her made her visibly nervous, probably because she was afraid of what conclusions were being drawn about her and possibly because she had learned not to consider attention as being flattering or benign in intent.

The hint of wistfulness was new. There was something about these people that she was attracted to, though what it might be eluded Darla. Willow was still talking when they returned to the house. Paulus drove up the alley behind the house without bothering to bring them around to the front door to be let down. They went through the carriage house and stable into the garden. The flagstone path had been weeded and swept recently, and Darla wondered what made Willow bother. The only sign of life in the garden were the overgrown tulips around the sundial in the center.

Darla sat on the bench under the slight overhang that provided cover for the coal bin beside the house. Willow sat next to her after a slight hesitation. Andreas opened the kitchen door for them and after giving them an incurious look, went to the stable to help Paulus unhitch the horses. Matilde hovered in the doorway.

Darla interrupted Willow to ask if she wanted anything, gesturing to Matilde.

“No, thank you,” Willow answered.

Darla nodded. “We don’t need anything,” she told Matilde pointedly, and she was forced to withdraw.

There was an odd moment of silence that lingered and then Darla nodded in the general direction of the ruined garden. “What do you think about when you sit out here?”

Willow followed her gaze. The garden was more desolate and beautiful at night. In full sunlight it was depressingly dead, but at night, the desiccated plant life had a stark, austere beauty, black against the radiant light in darkness from the stars, the streetlamps, the filtered light from the house.

“I think about . . .” she hesitated for a fraction of a second, an almost imperceptible pause, “what was, what might have been.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Darla observed.

“It reminds me of who I was,” Willow did not add, ‘who I might have been’, but it was there, unsaid, hanging between the small, sharp thorns of a dead rose bush caught in the open space like the cobweb that was spun in the branches.

“It passes the time,” Darla acknowledged, casting her a sideways look.

Even in the worst moments, maybe more so in the worst moments, Willow found that it was possible to be glad for something. During the time in Bristol, she had been glad for Jane. Glad to be not left alone, even when she was numbly holding the mass of her skirts above her waist, her shoulders pressed hard into rough brick as the commercial property below her waist, her only commodity was filled and fucked and vacated to ensure that she wouldn’t starve.

You think you’d rather starve, but she knew from experience that starvation was too slow.

She had been glad to not be alone. Glad to have someone to tell about herself and her friends, no matter how sick it made her feel inside to know how badly she had screwed up. Glad to promise, and mean it, that when she figured out a way to reverse the spell–and she had thought in those days that she would figure it out–that she would bring Jane with her. She would have the room across from Willow’s in her parent’s house and they would never talk about what had happened, only what could happen.

It helped to remember that she was once an ordinary girl with a small gift who saved people, especially when she could not save herself.

With that sideways look, Darla revealed that she knew the value of anything that helped pass the time.

Their gloved hands touched, the edge of Darla’s pinkie nudging hers until Willow lifted her finger the slightest bit and Darla curled her finger around Willow’s.

“And sometimes, you don’t think of anything at all,” Willow said, her voice raw to her own ears.

Darla’s finger tightened briefly. “Sometimes it’s too much,” she agreed, sounding like she was talking about yesterday and a hundred years or more of living.

The weight of breathing against the pressure in her chest made Willow close her eyes and grit her teeth. The glimpse of a world that she was no longer part of left her painfully aware of how limited her options were, and how futile her efforts had been. She sought to change something small, and the only thing changed was her.

“Say the word, and I will make it go away,” Darla said.

She was tempted enough to want to lay conditions on it, to make it something simple and final. To have someone take her head in their hands, almost tenderly, and kiss her forehead before severing her spinal cord in one short, welcome burst of violence. Darla might be persuaded to do this for her, but her mind supplied another face, stark and pure. It flashed through her mind that she would have to remember to ask Spike the next time she dreamt him, if he would do that one thing for her.

She started to say ‘yes’, with no conditions, in the fragile hope that Darla would understand what she was agreeing to, but William walked through the open kitchen door with a lit cigar in one hand and an open wine bottle in the other, and the moment was lost. He joined them, cool blue eyes picking out the tentative hand holding and registering surprise before his eyelids lowered and a smirk twisted his lips.

“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” he wondered.

Willow and Darla answered at the same time. Willow’s ‘no’ was defensive. Darla’s ‘yes’ was curt.

He drank from the bottle, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Where did you go?” he asked.

“Zlata Ulicka,” Darla told him. “Where are the others?”

Their night of killing had not ended at the Hamilton’s. They had gone from there to the cemetery abutting the Stare Mesto vampire’s lair. Lucius had dug a grave and on the freshly tilled earth, they had taken turns raping Claire Hamilton. Angelus had pushed her semi-conscious body into the casket that Lucius had broken open and closed her up inside it. Sick fucker that Angelus was, he buried her alive. He had read about it in a volume of short stories. The vamps that frequented the cemetery would hear her.

What they would do about it was anyone’s guess.

If he had come home early he would have missed the denouement. A part of him appreciated the artistry of it. They were vampires. All of them, except for Lucius, had clawed their way out of a grave. It had a special meaning for them. He was blood gorged and the need for violence was sated, and another part of him wanted to seal up the evening, call it complete and fall asleep between cool sheets inside of a warm body.

Thinking about why Darla had seen fit to take Willow on her fishing expedition or why she was flirting with her in a Darla-ish sort of way, was the last thing he wanted to do.

Lucius had brought the larger carriage around to the alley where it stood for the moment. Willow remembered her parcels and went to retrieve them, leaving Darla alone with William. He waited for her to volunteer something that would explain what was going on, but she rose from the bench, looking out at the garden. Drusilla drifted through the doorway, eager to tell Darla about their evening.

“Tell me upstairs,” Darla interrupted her, and Dru linked arms with her, pausing to run her hand over William’s face.

He kissed her dirt caked fingertips. “Are you coming?” she asked.

“I’ll wait for Willow,” he said.

Dru smiled. “Is she coming?”

“No,” Darla answered for him. “You would give her nightmares, Dru.”

Dru made a dismissive sound. “She has her own,” she said, as if this were a foregone conclusion.

Darla’s brittle laugh rang out. Drusilla’s gift for saying the most obvious and unwittingly funny things was almost endearing.


Chapter Twenty-Four

It was so unusual for her to be the only one awake in the house at night that it almost felt like an adventure. William had been waiting for her when she came back from the stables with her parcels. He was drinking from the bottle of wine, but he wasn’t drunk. He pointed out the dessert that he had brought home for her and followed her as she went to the library.

She took her supplies down to her cubbyhole under the library and started unpacking the contents. He had prowled around restlessly until she thought that he would tell her to leave it and come to bed with him, but he said something about wanting a bath, without a shred of innuendo, and he left her alone to finish with her organizing and sorting.

When she finally came up, near dawn, Cook was dozing in a chair by the door and she almost made it past him before he opened one eye and sort of smiled at her, without really smiling. She went into the kitchen and found the chocolate tarts, taking one with her to eat with a glass of water before brushed her teeth and went to bed.

He was in her bed, reading, when she came in, and he looked up from his book briefly, before returning to it. She decided to save the tart and the water for when she woke up, and left them on the table in front of the window. The bathroom was a mess. William had left his damp towels and dirty clothes on the floor and she shoved them into the hamper before completing her nighttime rituals.

When she came to bed, he turned down the linens on her side of the bed without comment. She was just starting to fall asleep when she felt him find her hand under the covers, holding it lightly, his thumb stroking the side of hers once before falling still, and she felt a pang at how familiar it felt before she finally fell asleep. When she woke up a few hours later, he was still awake, still reading. She turned her head enough to read the embossed title on the spine. It was a volume of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.

If they were normal people, this might have been mistaken for cozy domesticity, but they weren’t normal people. He must have gotten up at some point while she slept, probably to make sure that the windows were covered. He was lying on top of the coverlet, one knee slightly bent. Feeling oddly removed, Willow watched her hand move from under the covers to over them, to rest on his bare hip. Not looking at his face, her field of vision was restricted to his narrow, well-defined abdomen and thighs. A sparse line of light brown hair arrowed down below his navel to denser, wirier pubic hair that looked coarse and felt silky. Her half asleep mind automatically drifted to a catalog of body hair textures she associated with him until she made herself stop.

In the cradle of his thighs, his flaccid cock lay motionless. She remembered wanting to ask Xander what it was like to have an appendage, and saving the question up for some time when she really felt like freaking him out, just to see the horrified look on his face.

She used her fingernail to trace the line of hair downward, and heard him turn a page, and felt him briefly touch her hair. If they were normal people, would she feel this need to take him in her mouth while he was like this, soft and quiet and undemanding, and make him hard? She knew that if she kept touching him, she wouldn’t have the opportunity to feel the softness that would disappear.

A moment later, she discovered that she was right. She took all of him into her mouth, and he made a sound like he had just remembered to start breathing. She let her lips slide over the hardening length of him twice, which was all it took. He was hard and full, coolly silky under the press of her tongue.

She felt him moving around as he put the book away and adjusted the pillows at his back before running his hand up her spine to tangle briefly in her hair.

He edged down in the bed and touched her, fingers slipping through her hair, over her back. His hands providing direction until she was poised over his mouth, shuddering at the light, teasing pressure of his tongue. Making him shudder in turn at the scrape of her fingernails on the inside of his thighs. His hand massaged her ass, staying as far away from the bruise on her other thigh as possible, working out the tension in her hip since she had unwittingly favored the leg where Drusilla had bit her so hard.

She wanted more. His fingers in her while he took his time, nibbling and sucking on any part of her his mouth lingered on. Later, when they kissed she thought if they were normal people they might have kissed at least once before they had come in each other’s mouths, but what did she really know about what normal people did anyway?

He might have settled between her thighs, but his hand brushed the scabbed over bite mark that Drusilla had left and he had a quick flash, not of the other day, watching them together while he silently seethed, but of tonight. Angelus holding Claire’s ankles, her legs spread, her bruised cunt, swollen and smeared with traces of blood and semen and he rolled Willow over on her side, supporting her uninjured thigh with his own as he guided himself inside her, and the feeling eclipsed the lingering memory of the last few hours. The scent of incense was thick in her hair.

He watched her pull her lower lip into her mouth as her eyelids drifted down, the back of her head settling against his shoulder. He rested his chin on her head, his own eyes closing as he concentrated on the way she felt around him and against him.

“Do you ever wonder what this would be like if we were just normal people?” she asked.

His eyes opened and he lifted his head to look at her. “Died a virgin. I don’t know what normal people do.”

“Me either,” she said, touching his face. “Sometimes, when you are behind me, and I can’t see you, I imagine you, and you’re,” her hand curved into a claw, “Grrr,” she growled at him in an almost comic version of a vampire.

“Yeah?” he thought it was one of the oddest things that she ever told him. He started to tell her that if she was that curious about what it looked like, Angelus could show her sketches of them together like that. Sketches of beauty, unaware, defiled by a monster who was all too aware, and savoring every inch of her. He kissed the corner of her mouth instead. “Don’t close your eyes,” he said. “We’ll pretend to be normal, if that suits you.”

“How?” she asked.

Good question. How? He sifted through a sea of memories that were available to him. A bit of her hair tickled his nose, distracting him, and he smoothed it back, behind her ear, which proved to be another distraction. He traced the outer edge of his ear feeling something like awe at the delicate shape and texture of the humble curve. Other body parts tempted, all available to be touched or rubbed up against. He sank into her a little deeper, feeling the way her ass nestled against him. Then he smiled, and kissed the corner of her mouth again.

“You are probably thinking we should put the lights out,” he said. “But, I think I’d want to look at you, and if we were normal, I’d need the lights for that.”

She turned her head a little more towards him, and he read in her eyes a willingness to indulge in this game that she had started between them. “I’m shocked,” she said, a little too mechanically, and she rolled her eyes at how trite that sounded.

He nodded, acknowledging her contribution. “I can tell,” he teased, bending his head to kiss the upper swell of her breast. “I’d be thinking about how I wanted to shove my hands inside your dress all night, how I drove myself crazy thinking about playing with your sweet tits and kissing all your freckles, and maybe how this would be the night that I’d figure out a way to convince you to hold still while I tasted your cunt.”

To his delight, a hint of color stained her cheeks. She frowned at him. “You already did that,” she pointed out a bit tartly.

His lips found her nipple, and he closed his eyes, his tongue swirling around it before he caught it between his lips, tugging, feeling muscles in her back flex in reaction. He drew back enough to give his admiring attention to her breast. “And I’d think about how pretty your tits are after I’ve had my hands and mouth on them.” He blew on her damp nipple, feeling her shiver. “See?” His tongue etched a wet circle around her nipple, “hard, and wet, and so fucking pretty.”

She tugged on his hair. “Hey! Language,” she sniped. “I don’t think normal people talk about ti–breasts,” she substituted. “And nipples. And they don’t say fuck.”

He laughed. “Of course not, darling. They just think it. I was telling you what I was thinking,” he stressed. “Tell me what you’d be thinking,” he urged, giving the slow, shallow movement of his cock inside of her a slight twist of his hips.

He watched her absorb the sensation. It was the little things with her that fascinated him. The small ‘oh’ of surprise and pleasure that was there for a second, channeled into curiosity and recognition, or in this case curiosity, recognition, and reluctant interest.

“I’d wonder what you’d think if I took your hand and showed you how to touch me,” she said, with a hint of triumph in her expression.

A wickedly pleased smile curved his lips. “I’d think I was the luckiest bloke on the face of the earth,” he told her, “but, I’d want more–“

She snorted. “There’s a shock,” she interrupted.

He kissed her to shut her up. The position was more awkward for him than her. He couldn’t quite get deep enough with his upper body slewed around the way it was, and she elbowed him in the ribs trying to squeeze her arm out from between them as he greedily rubbed his tongue against hers, trying to suck it into his mouth while his hips rocked into the yielding softness of her ass.

When he managed to drag his mouth away to let her breath, he rolled her on her stomach, nudging her legs further apart with his knees. “I always want more,” he agreed, propping himself up on one elbow to keep some of his weight off of her, though he wanted to stretch out against her, hold her down with his chest and arms and fuck her until she was shuddering from his cock. Her hair had started sliding down over the side of her face and he finger combed it back, sweeping it over to pool over his arm.

“Sometimes I’d hate you for that. I’d imagine that I’d been caught, because you never looked like a girl I’d want to fuck into a mattress. You always seemed too quiet, and shy for that,” he kissed the back of her neck. “I’d think about witches and red gold hair, and wonder that I didn’t see it coming,” his fingers tightened in her hair, almost painfully. “Look at this hair,” he breathed. “It was meant to catch someone’s eye.”

The lamplight muted the auburn in her hair and caught the gold.

She got one elbow beneath her and twisted around, frowning at the way he was pulling her hair. “I’m a normal girl, I mean, woman,” she corrected herself. “I’m not a witch.”

He laughed at that, feeling her push back against him as she tried to disentangle herself from a pillow caught under her. Or maybe she was just pushing back against him because he was fucking her so slowly.

He let her hair fall back, spilling from his fingers, half covering her face, kissing her shoulders and any part of her back that he could reach as he got his knees under him. His hands shaped and then lifted her hips. She had to brace her other elbow on the mattress to keep from falling back into the pillows or hitting her head on the headboard. He watched himself withdraw from her, and then slowly slide back into her, feeling her legs quiver as he filled her.

“Normal girl,” he felt her fingernails scrape him when she got her hand between her legs. “Showing me how she likes to be touched,” he withdrew until the head of his cock was just outside of her, and she made a frustrated sound. His fingertips stroked her hip bones, just inside the margin of the underlying bones where she was ticklish. Her left shoulder was against the mattress at an awkward angle and he moved his hands up, spanning her waist, her rib cage, coaxing her to lift up a bit so he could cup her breasts as he slid back into her with a sigh that was eclipsed by her moan.

“I was going to make you talk to me,” he told her, he withdrew from her again, one hand moving up, following the shape of her arm, trembling a little from holding herself up. “Make you tell me all your ‘normal witchy girl-woman’ thoughts on the subject,” he kissed her back. His cock brushed her fingers and she nudged the head of his cock back where she wanted him, pushing back when she felt him against her, and the sound that vibrated in her throat made him laugh again.

Annoyed with being teased, she lashed out with the hand that had been between her legs, and he caught it, his fingers closing around her wrist, and then wrapping the arm holding her wrist around her waist.

“Want to fight me for it?” he asked.

“You’re an asshole,” she sounded bitter about it. “I don’t know why I ever tell you anything. You just rub my nose in it and laugh at me.”

If she had burst into tears, he would have been less astonished. Annoyance crept in. When was the last time he’d had a decent shag without someone, including him, enacting a drama? He was mildly tempted to say something along the lines of ‘you started it’, but it was beneath him.

He couldn’t see her face, too much of her hair was in the way. Just fuck her and let it go, he counseled himself, even as he was slipping out of her body and making her roll over on her back. She started messing about with her hair, pushing it out of her face and out from under her shoulder, stubbornly avoiding his eyes.

“What in the name of hell do you want from me?” he demanded.

She frowned. “To not make it a contest that you have to win without ever once admitting that the deck is stacked in your favor.”

Oh. That. It was so apt a description of the substance of their relationship that he was left to sit back on his heels without a comeback in sight. It wasn’t something he was inclined to even want to change, because he liked winning, though it was less about beating her since she was also his prize. His hands stroked her skin, feeling how warm it was, and damp. He moved enough to stretch out, propping himself up on one elbow, her thigh beneath his armpit.

“How is the deck stacked in my favor?” he asked, and he was doing it again, pushing her to bend to everything between them that made it possible for him to come out ahead.

“Why were you reading Poe?” she asked, declining to answer.

She felt him react, though he hid it well, ducking his head to spread kisses over her stomach while he lazily stroked the inside of her thigh.

“What did you do tonight?” she asked. Foreboding was a sensation that gathered in her lower back and crawled up her spine.

He looked up at her, and there was something a little pitying and pitiless in his eyes. “Don’t do this, Willow,” he warned. “I’ll tell you, and it won’t bother me in the least, but it will hurt you.”

He had no intention of telling her. If she knew that Angelus had buried Claire Hamilton alive, she’d go crazy trying to get to her, not having an idea where to start looking. Angelus might tell her. He would make her work for it, and then he would watch Willow dig his latest victim up with her bare hands for fun as soon as it was sundown. Except that they had a party to go to and Darla was looking forward to it, so there would be hell to pay if anyone ruined her plans.

He changed the subject. “What did you do tonight? What put the idea of what normal people do into your head?” He could tell that he had scratched at something that was bothering her when she looked away.

He kissed the underside of her breast, feeling her heart beat, thick and heavy. Heartache has a sound. “Tell me,” he coaxed, kissing his way up between her breasts, absorbing the salt of her skin.

She tried to shrug it off. She met people, who were not exactly normal she conceded, but . . . and it was all there in as much what she didn’t say. A pregnant woman, a happy couple, a small, cozy, safe home; the substance of a life that she would never have. He didn’t point out that she had lost any hope of those things long before he came along, because it didn’t really matter what had taken them from her. It didn’t ease the hurt of it. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t give her children, because she couldn’t have them. Her painful and irregular menses hinted at problems that could never be resolved. He didn’t point out that if he hadn’t come along she would have lived a short and brutal life, among the ‘normal’ people who would have never seen her beyond what she did in dark alleys, against the side of a building.

He reminded her of who she was, with his hands and his mouth, and words whispered against her hot skin when she had run out of words and there was nothing but her fingernails scoring his back as she struggled to hold him.

“Nothing normal would have ever been enough for you,” he told her.

She didn’t say that he was wrong, but it was there, in her eyes, in the stubborn set of her mouth. Trapped, like she was, because if she said it and was proven wrong it would be too hard to bear.

He didn’t turn it into a debate. He let his eyelids drift down and shifted her around to hold her more comfortably while they slept, feeling her fingertips move over his throat as her hand folded in against his chest. He let his chin rest on the top of her head. He had no desire to be what she thought of as normal, but it was there, in his head, the idea of them. He unlived, suspended at the moment of his death. She would have been a child. There were other reasons he would have never known her, or even more likely, would have looked away had he ever had occasion to meet her.

It wasn’t as hard to suspend his disbelief as he thought.

“Are you still awake?” he asked.

She made a sleepy sound, nodding and moving just a bit, pushing her forehead into his chest. “I’m hungry,” she admitted. “Too tired to eat. Tired of eating.”

He had made a point of making sure that she ate as much as she could stand over the last day. “Go to sleep. Dream about being normal. I’ll be here when you wake up, and there will be chocolate for breakfast and I’ll wash your hair for you, if you like.”

She frowned into his chest. “Will?”

“Hmm?”

“Are you still pretending that we are normal?”

His eyes opened and he leaned back to see her face. “A bit,” he allowed, watching her eyes open and settle on him. The hand curled against his chest, moved to his jaw, resting there for a moment until he realized that she was trying to bring him closer. Her lips brushed his and then came back, fastening on his lower lip and kissing it tenderly while her fingers stroked his cheek.

“Tell me that you love me?”

He bit his lower lip, savoring the lingering warmth from her mouth. “I love you.”

For a moment he thought she was going to say it. He could see it wash over her face, chased by doubt and he laid his fingers over her lips, willing to loose himself in the look in her eyes until her eyelids started to droop and they kissed again, softly.

They had the party Darla wanted to go to in the evening, and he knew that would be nothing remotely normal for Willow. He caught her looking at herself in a mirror when she was dressed for some soiree, taking pleasure in a pretty dress and he wondered if she ever thought about how far she was from the night they had met. He never forgot it. He puzzled over it. Marveled at it and her in all of her mysterious, incongruent aspects. On the edge of sleep, he smiled crookedly at the memory of the elderly cousin keeping his house in London, and her disapproval, not of Willow, but of what he made of her.

He let himself go to sleep with the idea of a picnic in bed, a long meandering chat about their trip to London–half the fun of which for Willow was in the planning–and a quiet afternoon before they had to dress to go out. For the briefest moment he had a glimpse of her, of what they might have been under entirely different circumstances. It wasn’t cruel or disturbing to imagine. It was a validation. If he had known that she was part of all that awaited him on the other side of his grave, he would have bared his throat to Dru and asked her to bite harder.


Chapter Twenty-Five

Darla clenched her fists, glaring at Dru. “No,” she said between gritted teeth. “You cannot bring the dog to dinner. Angelus!” she appealed to him.

Dru was equally adamant. “Mr. Buttons is a very good dog, and Miss Edith says he shall go!” she ended on a shriek, stamping her foot.

Mr. Buttons yowled when she smashed one of his feet and danced around before crawling under the hem of Willow’s skirt. “Please don’t bite me, please don’t bite me,” she chanted under her breath.

William reached under her skirt to fish the dog out, holding it by the scruff of his neck. “I say we kill him, and have him stuffed,” he told Darla. “With any luck, she’ll think he’s just like Miss Edith.”

Darla’s eyebrows rose at this remarkably astute idea.

Willow looked down at the ground trying to summon some kind of feeling for Mr. Buttons that didn’t greet the prospect of his untimely end with relief.

“Naughty William,” Dru pouted at him, retrieving her dog. Conscious of her clothes, she held him at arm's length with a frown and then turned to Willow, ready to dump the dog in her arms.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Angelus got between them. “You take the dog, and he’s your responsibility, Dru. No dumping him on Willow when you get bored, or he starts barking to go out. She can’t walk alone at night.”

Dru scowled. She looked at the dog and at her dress. The dress won. She shoved him in Matilde’s arms, patting him on the head. “Bye, bye, Mr. Buttons. Mummy will be home soon and shall tell you all about the pretty people.”

Still offended by Darla for starting the argument, she linked arms with Willow instead, her elegant fingers smoothing the smoky gray of her bodice. Willow’s dress was very simple. The bodice was gray satin with a soft drape of nearly translucent tissue silk in a matching shade of gray that swathed her shoulders. A jet lozenge chocker circled her throat. A matching bracelet circled her wrist. The skirt was black, and sewn with tiny black beads that glittered in the light.

She still looked a little under the weather. There was a slight chalkiness to her complexion that the gray silk underscored.

Darla was wearing a more elaborate evening gown with huge sleeves that narrowed at the elbow in lace from the elbow to the wrist in shades of gold and cream. A pendant pearl hung above her décolletage. She ignored Dru’s display of petulance, frankly relieved not to have her hanging on her as she donned her outerwear, carefully arranging the hooded cape over her elaborately styled hair.

Willow dipped her head towards Dru. “You look very . . . regal,” she said.

Dru was wearing a purple velvet gown. It was a newer style. The bodice appeared to crisscross from waist to shoulder forming a modified raised collar to frame a softened v-neckline. The overskirt was velvet, pulled up towards a slight bustle and held with velvet roses in white. The underskirt was ivory.

“I am a princess,” Dru reminded her.

When everyone was ready to go and the carriage was drawn up at the door, they left the house, trailing Angelus and Darla who occupied one seat while Dru, William and Willow were forced to squeeze in on the opposite side. William solved the space problem by picking Willow up and seating her in his lap.

Angelus watched them. William was being very pointed in his attentions to Willow over the last two days. There had been the incident with Dru, who had been more confused than anything about why she had almost accidentally killed Willow, shooting down Angelus’ theory that William had goaded her into it to make it impossible to incorporate Willow into his plans. When it came time to walk the dog today, William flatly refused to let Willow leave her bed, slamming the door shut and apparently joining her there.

One of the minions was dispatched to take the dog out on the semi-shaded shed side between the house and the stable, so it wasn’t a problem but it was odd that William hadn’t acquiesced. Dru wanted the dog walked by Willow and what Dru wanted, William made his mission to provide. He had also made it very clear that he didn’t welcome any further interruptions.

He took a discreet sniff of the air, wondering if the girl was bleeding. Her periods were light and irregular, something to do with her checkered past, according to Darla. When she was having one, William was more possessive and attentive.

He picked up no trace of blood in her scent.

They weren’t going far, barely two blocks, that could easily have been walked, but Darla wouldn’t even consider walking, and he knew better than to suggest it even if he privately agreed with William that it took more time to go by carriage, especially since they had to wait in a slow-to-advance queue of arriving guests, similarly minded.

William’s head bounced on the upholstered back of the seat. “Bloody hell,” he muttered. “We’ll be here half the sodding night,” he grumbled, sliding his hands inside of Willow’s cloak.

She made a protesting sound as he settled her against his chest. “Oh, hush,” he grinned at her. “I’m cold, and you’re all toasty warm in there.”

“Miss Willow is deliciously warm, especially between her legs,” Dru observed.

Darla’s fingernails dug into Angelus’ arm. “Angelus,” she growled.

He sighed. “Drusilla? Company manners, princess,” he reminded her.

Dru waved her hand airily. “Miss Willow does not mind.”

William rubbed her back, and Willow allowed herself to feel comforted, though for all she knew he was just warming his hand on her.

The carriage lurched into motion and Darla snapped her fingers at William. “Behave!” she hissed at him. “When that carriage door opens, I do not want to see Willow hopping off your lap like a bar maid.”

He cast a long-suffering look at Dru. “Shove over a bit, Princess,” he requested, setting Willow between them. Dru took her hand to hold lightly.

When they arrived, Angelus was the first to exit the couch, handing Darla down. William followed him to help the girls and they approached the door as a group. This was always a tricky moment. Willow felt herself tensing as they approached the open double doors and the barrier that the vampires could not penetrate without an invitation, though Angelus had her working on a spell to negate that that she, in turn, had no intention of ever finding.

The majordomo welcomed them formally to the house, bowing the party in. The host and hostess were standing at the back of an oval-shaped foyer on a gleaming black and white marble floor. Willow guessed that their hostess chose her dress with the colors in mind. She was wearing crimson satin, and she looked very striking against the black and white of the floor.

“Princess Stavarsky,” Darla executed a very credible curtsey when she was introduced to the woman.

Princes and princesses were, at least in certain parts of Europe, a dime a dozen, on the order of an English baron or earl depending on the country of origin. The Prince and Princess Stavarsky were from Walachia. The princess was an Anglo-Irish hybrid from Boston whose father had made a fortune. Her husband was an older, thin, graying man who might have looked distinguished if he'd been able to tear his gaze away from Darla’s breasts.

Angelus introduced Drusilla, “My sister, Drusilla,” he introduced.

Dru’s courtesy was deep and graceful. “I am a princess too,” she announced loftily.

Darla’s brittle laugh sounded as she launched into a sotto voce explanation that was cut off by the Princess Stavarsky who clasped Dru’s hand. “Anyone could see that,” she said kindly.

Dru preened, shooting Darla a triumphant look before graciously allowing herself to be introduced to the prince.

“Our cousin, Miss Willow Grant, and my wife’s brother, William Crawford,” Angelus completed the introductions.

Concentrating on controlling her skirt and executing a credible curtsy, Willow found herself committing the social solecism of “How do you do?”

But the princess, recognizing both the greeting and the accent, simply smiled at her. “An American! How wonderful,” she enthused. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“C-california,” the improbable, but utterly true answer came.

“California! How exciting!” the princess enthused, handing her guest to her husband before greeting the last of the group. “Welcome to our home, Mr. Crawford,” she murmured as he air-kissed the back of her hand.

They were ushered into a grand salon that was at least four times the size of the room, but with the same dignity as their smaller and much more modest town house. Two huge rock crystal chandeliers glittered from above. Willow guessed that there were at least two dozen people milling around the room, more seated and perhaps a dozen more waiting in the foyer. She concentrated on not stepping on anyone else’s skirt, as well as her own. The unnatural profile of skirts never seemed so perceptible as in a crowded room when her natural inclination was to draw in her shoulders and make herself a little smaller.

She felt William’s hand tap her waist lightly and realized that she was doing the thing with her shoulders, and made herself stand with her shoulders back without looking down to see if her shoulders were back too far, in which case her chest would be sticking out in a terribly embarrassing way.

Harry saw her in the shifting crowd, and felt an enormous sense of relief. David had torn a strip off of him for being so forward with her in the park. Sensitivity wasn’t something he expected to find in a young woman who had spent years as the consort or pet of a vampire, but David insisted that she was embarrassed and alarmed by his behavior. Now that he had a chance to observe her, Harry wondered if perhaps David hadn’t exaggerated. She looked absolutely charming, and beautiful in a very simple evening gown, but also uncomfortable from the slightly stiff way she was standing, as if she was trying very hard not to fidget.

He felt a shiver of excitement. The man whose hand was resting very lightly on her waist was, if he wasn't mistaken, none other than William the Bloody. What was less clear was which of the three vampires sired him, but it had happened in London approximately eighteen years ago.

David joined him, careful to put his shoulder between Harry and the vampires who had joined the party. “Need I remind you that it is very unlikely all of the people in this room would survive if they provoked into an attack?” he asked pointedly in a very low voice.

“No,” Harry admitted. Actually, he hadn’t given it a thought and it was a difficult thought to hold on to now that they were so close. “I think that may be–“

“There’s no mystery to it,” David handed him the calling cards that he had gotten from a footman, steering Harry to a window, so he could paw through them without being noticed.

Bold as brass, their names were engraved on cream vellum, with assumed surnames that he ignored. Darla. Sired by Heinrich Joseph Nest. Angelus, sired by Darla. Drusilla, sired by Angelus. William, again a bit of a question as to his origins, but undoubtedly sired by one of the elder trio, and, he came to the last card. Willow. It was an unusual name. Pretty. It suited her very well, he thought before he handed the cards back to David who tucked them in an inside pocket.

“Well . . . “ Harry grinned. “Shall we mingle?” he suggested.

Frau von Borselin was looking for them as the room filled up. “There you are,” she waved them over.

David wanted very much to throttle Harry, who made his way over with difficulty. “I was just telling Herr and Frau O’Niall how anxious you were to make the acquaintance of the young lady with the dog,” she said. “This is Lieutenant Windom, and Mr. Giles,” she introduced the pair to Angelus and Darla.

“Ma'am,” Harry bowed over Darla’s hand. “Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said. “Mr. O’Niall.”

David followed with bland greetings.

“You’ve met our Willow?” Darla said, sounding like she didn’t much care for the sound of that.

“Hardly that, ma’am,” Harry hastened to assure her. “I have seen her walking her dog,” he gestured awkwardly with the cane. “Part of my convalescence is to hobble around useless with Mr. Giles to keep me from falling flat on my face,” he said with a self-deprecating air. “I had the great fortune of being mistaken for a sapling by the dog,” he said wryly, “and occasion to speak to her very briefly. I’m afraid I imposed on our inadvertent acquaintance and may have offended the young lady.”

Curious, Angelus scanned the crowd for William and gestured for him to join them. He arrived a few moments later while Harry was still apologizing for any offense he might have caused, and accepting a scolding from Frau van Borselin, who thought she smelled a potential romance in the air.

Willow’s step slowed when she saw who Angelus and Darla were speaking with, and William handed Dru to Angelus to be introduced.

Harry started to explain the Mr. Buttons connection and Dru, delighted to have someone to talk to about her beloved dog, happily chatted with him, giggling over his account of his two meetings with Mr. Buttons.

She heard Angelus making the introductions. Lieutenant Wyndham. Mr. Giles. Wyndham. Giles. Wyndham. Giles. WyndhamGiles WyndhamGiles WyndhamGiles. The two names crashed around crazily in her head. It was too ridiculous. It was . . . there were no coincidences in the unreal world, she reminded herself, wondering if she looked over her shoulder, would she see characters from the Mad Hatter’s tea party, or maybe Xander in a really old-fashioned suit.

Then Angelus was introducing her, and she knew that everyone was watching her, waiting for her to say something, but she was terrified of what might come out of her mouth if she let her lips part. They would think she was crazier than Dru. She felt the room swimming around her. Overly-loud voices, Harry Wyndham bending over her hand–he looks nothing like Wesley, and yet he sounds like a prig. She heard David Giles responding to something Angelus was saying, and there was nothing of Rupert Giles in him that she could see.

William put it together effortlessly. He rested his hand on the small of Willow’s back, keeping her by his side as they were introduced, feeling through the silk how her heart started to pound. His arm circled her a bit more firmly, not sure exactly what set her off, but aware that something was frightening her. Not giving a good rat’s ass what anyone made of it, he gently turned her face to his.

“It’s too close in here for you, isn’t it?” he said. Her eyes were huge and a little wild and she was as white a sheet.

“There’s a chair over hear,” Frau van Borselin said, shooing an acquaintance out of the chair for the faint-looking English girl.

“I’ll get a glass of sherry,” David volunteered. He had a very bad feeling about this. His concern that they were going to get the girl killed resurfaced.

Willow forced down her rising hysteria, taking a deep breath, then another. She cast an apologetic look around. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I never can seem to relax when there are so many people around,” she offered. “Hello . . . Lieutenant Wyndham, is it?”
He bowed over her hand and she had to resist the impulse to snatch it back. “And Mr. Giles?” she inclined her head, managing to evade his eyes, afraid of what she would find there.

“You met in the park?” Darla questioned.

“Mr. Buttons makes your acquaintance whether you like it or not,” Willow pointed out, feeling William beside her, standing too close from the looks Darla was shooting him. Replaying the comment in her head, she felt her cheeks warming as she realized how rude it sounded.

“Mr. Crawford, your obedient servant,” Harry declaimed, tongue firmly in cheek.

William’s left eyebrow lifted. “And yours,” he batted back.

Harry Wyndham’s head cocked to one side. “Crawford? You didn’t go to Charterhouse? 82?” he asked.

“Winchester,” William corrected. “Why?”

“No reason. Thought you looked familiar. Played cricket,” he said. “Not much of a batsman. You didn’t play, did you?”

“No,” William said shortly. “I was a bit of ponce, back in the day. Nose stuck in a book.”

Willow resisted the crazy desire to slip in an, “Eh, wot, old chap.”

“Giles, here is a Wellie,” he said. “Right, old man?”

A semi-hysterical giggle escaped Willow. Pretentiousness could be a hereditary trait she thought.

“It is ridiculous,” Giles followed up on her giggle. “Grown men, prattling about their old schools. We would be in a scrum over who has the best cricket tradition, were we not shamed by your mirth, Miss Grant.”

For the briefest moment their eyes met, and David Giles felt old and a little shaken at the fleeting glimpse he had of a soul in real torment.

William lifted her hand to his lips, catching a warning glint in Darla’s eyes if he raised eyebrows about the nature of his relationship with his brother-in-law’s cousin, Willow’s official designation in the family of late.

“I don’t suppose I have any hope of convincing you to allow me to take you in to supper, Miss Grant?” Lt. Wyndham begged.

“Not a single shred of a hope,” William answered before she could.

There was an awkward silence which Angelus filled, with a cough, and a blandly improvised, “There’s been no formal announcement, being as it is a bit awkward that they are living under the same roof,” he said to Frau van Borselin in a tone that conveyed awkwardness with the subject. “But, it is understood that–“

“Oh. Oh!” she caught on at once. “Of coarse,” she smiled her understanding, slipping her arm through Harry’s. “Miss Drusilla could not lack for escort, I’m sure,” she hinted.

Dru, in no way annoyed at being second choice, beamed at him happily. “We shall have ever so much to discuss,” she said, leaving Giles to offer his arm to Frau van Borselin when supper was announced.

They were dining in a conservatory, which delighted Dru. It was very informal, Willow deduced. There were several buffets scattered the length of the room and round tables set for as many as twelve and as few as four. They ended up at a table for twelve. Harry Wyndham made a beeline for the chair beside Willow, but Dru, accustomed to sitting next to William ,simply ignored him, forcing him to hastily follow her to assist with the cane-backed chair at William's side.

He noticed that Drusilla did little more than move food around on her plate, not even bothering to taste the punch in the dainty cup she had been provided with. There was a kind of art to not eating at these things, or at least not appearing to have eaten a lot, so this behavior went unremarked. William, who had not even bothered with a plate, wasn’t above eating from Willow’s, occasionally catching the disapproving glare of the older female vampire and responding with an utterly unrepentant grin.

Giles was also observing the interactions, and marveling at how effective they were. Darla was perfect as the disapproving and somewhat put-upon wife and sister saddled with a charming but mentally-deficient sister-in-law and a rather provoking, borderline rude brother. Angelus played off her neatly as patriarch, and protective older brother, keeping one ear cocked for any conversational drifts Drusilla meandered off on, gently steering her back on topic. The younger vampire was a bit more playful and astonishingly demonstrative and affectionate with the lone human in their bizarre ménage.

In a slight break with protocol, the Princess Stavarsky had graced their table sitting beside Willow, which is how David and Harry discovered that the girl was an American. It was the reason the princess had made a point of joining their party. It disrupted the male/female composition of the table, and required the removal of a place setting, since the prince was dining at the other large table nearby in an effort to divide their attention amongst the large party.

“California?” the Princess prompted. “It might as well be another country,” she commented. “How did you come to live there?” she asked.

“I was born there, Your Highness,” Willow explained.

“Where?” she asked. “Your Highness from a fellow American sounds . . . very undemocratic.”

“And that would be the trouble with hereditary monarchies . . . ma’am,” Willow substituted gamely.

“Very true,” the Princess murmured. “You were telling me where you are from in California,” she prompted.

Nope, just stalling, really, Willow thought. “Sunnydale,” she said, and she made a face. “It sounds ridiculously prosaic, doesn’t it?”

“Massachusetts is full of Indian and English names. Penobscott on top of Quincy,” she pointed out. “Sunnydale,” she repeated. “It sounds charming.”

“Well, it’s not,” Willow assured her. “It’s a little bit of nowhere in particular with not much more than missionaries and repressed indigenous people.”

“Ah, and since you aren’t a repressed indigenous person, I take that your parents were missionaries,” the Princess deduced.

“Were,” Angelus, looked up at the ceiling, “God bless them. Taken in '79 in an epidemic of typhus,” he said. “Tragic loss. Wonderful, Godly people,” he told her. “Willow’s mother was my cousin on my mother’s side, one removed. Darla and I,” he gave Darla a mournful look, “were devastated to learn that the very mission, to bring the word of our lord and savior to the savages of the plains, that we underwrote, took dear Clara and Daniel from us, leaving Willow an orphan.”

Willow stared at Angelus, indignant. These were her fake parents, not his. “My father would turn over in his grave if he heard you referring to the Chumash as savages,” she told him. “They were a peaceful tribe, driven off their land, hunted into extinction, and left to die in squalor and disease.”

Sensing a kindred spirit the princess seized her wrist. “Tell me, what are your views on suffrage?” she asked eagerly. "I heard Mrs. Stanton speak at a Unitarian Church in Boston, and I must tell you, she was absolutely thrilling!”

Suffrage. Oh, crap. Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified . . . when? She had no idea. Most of the newspapers that Angelus favored were published in Europe and news from the United States was sparse. “In the United States? It’s hard to follow U.S. politics in Europe, but since the territories have been enfranchising women, it seems to me that it is a tide that has turned,” she ventured cautiously. “As for the ownership of property, I would say to anyone who is foolish enough to believe that my cousin,” she inclined her head to Darla, “is anything but competent to make decisions and to act on her behalf in any realm, that they have made a grave mistake.”

Princess Stavarsky turned her attention to Darla, and Willow practically slumped in her seat in relief. “Care for a stroll?” William suggested, since supper was drawing to a close.

Darla wasn’t that lost in her conversation. “Take Dru with you,” she told William when he rose, giving his hand to Willow.

David Giles watched as annoyed resignation appeared on the younger vampire’s face. His expression cleared when he looked at Drusilla, becoming openly affectionate. “Princess? Shall we walk under the stars?” he asked her.

“Walk, and spin, and dance,” Drusilla agreed with a dreamy smile.

“No dancing. There’s no music in the garden,” Angelus told her.

“William can make music,” Dru announced.

He offered her his free arm, but Dru was looking at Mr. Wyndham expectantly. Willow’s eyes flew to his cane. “Dru, it is dark, and with Mr. Wyndham’s--,” her mind sorted through words, rejecting them as too personal or pointed or overly aware that Mr. Wyndham had legs, which she understood to be a bit of a gaffe. Stupid manners.

“How very considerate of you to notice Harry’s difficulty getting around,” David rescued her. “And, Harry, really, old man. You should rest a bit. I’m sure Mr. Crawford is happy to walk with the ladies while you wait here.”

“I’m fine, David,” Harry bit out as he rose, leaning on the cane. He knew why David did not want him to go out in the garden, and yes, it was dangerous. But, my God, the opportunity. To be able to say that you dined and chatted with half of the Scourge of Europe in the thick of a night in a foreign city. David had the heart and soul of an archivist. He lacked the imagination to appreciate the opportunities their work afforded.

“I think I can manage a simple turn around a garden,” he said testily, not about to be denied. “Miss Drusilla?”

Dru looked up, eager to be out under the star-strewn sky. “Let’s walk outside,” she smiled beatifically.

There was a terrace beyond the conservatory and they were not the first who thought to explore it, and the gardens laid out on three levels below with a fountain spraying a large plume of water on the second to lowest level.

Dru wanted to dance and William was his usual obliging self, humming something suitable to waltz to for her. They were off to one side of the second-to-lowest level of the garden, which was paved with broad, flat stones. A balustrade created a barrier to what appeared to be a steep slope, populated with tall, thin evergreens and scrub. Lt. Wyndham let his weight rest against the balustrade with a sigh of relief that seemed genuine.

“I’m afraid that I let my stubbornness exceed my stamina,” he said ruefully. “I did not expect to contend with so many stairs. Mr. Giles is a good friend, but he can be a bit of a mother hen at times. It’s embarrassing,” he confessed.

Willow cocked her head to one side, wondering what was really going on. She did not think that encountering William the Bloody in Bristol was an accident. The presence of two men who bore the surnames of the two watchers she knew in the real world was probably not a coincidence.

William and Dru were dancing farther away, carried in great, swooping circles. It was in part due to their enhanced physical abilities. When she danced with William, she always felt the twitchy restraint as he held himself in to keep from moving too fast for her to follow.

She could hear the music of their voices. William humming, and Dru chattering away. They were too far for her to make out the words. Vampire hearing, being what it was, she shrugged and hoped for the best. She was facing away from the two vampires, and it was always possible that they were too wrapped up in each other to be paying attention to her.

“I’ve never met watchers without a slayer, except once, and I wasn’t impressed,” she said. “I’m still not impressed. If this is an exercise in observation, you’ve already failed. You’ve drawn too much attention to yourselves.”

This cool, emotionless appraisal left Harry gaping at her.

“What do we know about you? You are foreigners, guests of Frau van Borselin,” she recounted. “You’ll be missed if you disappear entirely, but there is no guarantee that you will meet such an easy end. Angelus or Darla might consider either of you an interesting project, in which case, they will probably turn you and learn everything you know,” she said softly. “And then? Maybe send you back to the Council in . . . London?” she guessed. “Start looking over your shoulder from this night on, Lt. Wyndham,” she advised.

He recovered his composure. “I mistook you,” he bluffed. “You are very much their creature, aren’t you?”

“Are you laboring under the delusion that they give fair warnings?”

His gaze flicked to the two vampires, judging the distances. “What you must know of them,” he began. It was another misstep, he realized, trying to read her closed expression, though he wasn’t sure why. “We could guarantee you sanctuary under the Council's protection,” he offered rashly, too flustered to remember David’s advice about how she should be dealt with, and that he had absolutely no authority to offer her anything. He was simply curious as to how she would react to the offer.

“In exchange for which, I trade one cage for another,” she concluded. She knew what her choice would be, but she had no illusions about it, either.

He had a feeling that she would know if he lied, so he said nothing.

“Well, we all die,” she observed with a shrug. “But I won’t die stupidly, and I won’t deal with you,” she added. “Tell your Mr. Giles that.”

Before he could respond, she walked over to a rose bush, seemingly intent on admiring the flowers.

The dancing slipped the restraints that Dru had maintained on her wavering sanity. She wasn’t violent, but she was in her stream-of-consciousness mode, which meant that anything could come out of her mouth at any moment. She flitted over to Willow, stripping rose petals by the handful and showering them over her head, raising her torn palms and fingers to her mouth to lick the blood off of them with a wicked, mischievous look on her face.

Her arms slid around Willow’s waist and she leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “The stars whisper lovely things, psst, psst, psst,” she said teasingly, “Midnight tea parties, honey and cakes,” she swayed sinuously. “We should have a garden. I would braid flowers into your hair,” she promised.

On the plus side, it was a good mood, Willow thought with a sigh. “Then, we should go home,” she said diplomatically, raising her voice to carry. “Lt. Wyndham, if you would be so kind as to let my cousins know that William and I are taking Drusilla home, I would be in your debt,” she said.

William looked amused. “That’s right. We’d be eternally grateful,” he mocked, collecting his two girls and leading them to the house, leaving Harry to limp behind them.

He lost sight of them before he reached the house and had no choice but to rejoin the party at the table, conveying the message Willow had charged him with. There were sympathetic looks all around that could be interpreted as, ‘pity, such a lovely girl, but clearly not all there’, which left David to marvel again at how adept they were at playing this game.

“We’ll see you home, pet,” William told her as they walked back to the house.

She knew without his saying anymore that he was taking Dru out to hunt. Mostly she felt relief at the prospect of having a few hours alone to process the events of the evening, and then the wrongness of that as the inevitable conclusion of their hunting nibbled at her awareness.

He used to take her with them. Sometimes he used her as bait, playing on her past, or what he understood of it, recreating the night in the alley when he had met her, only in a bizarre twist he ‘rescued’ her from her fate before it went too far, killing the men who thought that they were getting a quick fuck in some filthy alley from a whore.

The subtext to this was, she supposed, that they had it coming. That they deserved it. In William’s twisted mind it was purely, she suspected, because they had been stupid enough to be lured. In her mind, it was more complex. The attitudes that shaped her understanding of prostitution and the hideous plight of the women and children forced into the trade made her see the seller as a victim and the buyer, holding all of the power, as an aggressor. It wasn’t that simple. Jane carried a knife for a reason, not just to protect herself, but to enforce her position in a territory that she considered her own.

In Calais, it had been a private establishment for gentlemen and women with exotic tastes. She had thought that they were going to a party, and had been moved to a mild sense of wonder when she saw herself fully dressed for the evening. It had been in the early 80s, when full skirts were just passing out of fashion. The dress was oyster satin with tiny puff sleeves. The overskirt was caught up with satin roses.

Her hair, just growing out to shoulder length was pulled up to the crown of her head and carefully arranged in artless curls and a long pearl necklace was doubled around her throat and secured with a ribbon tied in a neat bow at the nape of her neck.

She had felt like a fairy princess, watching the great bell of the skirt float around her. Unable to process the conventions that would have told her that all was not as it appeared, she was completely unaware of what kind of establishment they had entered. There were other equally well-dressed people, mingling in nicely-furnished rooms, and they fell into conversation with another English couple, retiring to what appeared to be a sitting room, sipping champagne.

Stupidly, she had fought, not realizing that that was what was expected, even desired. With her wrists tightly secured in leather manacles over her head, her face to the paneled wall, the older English girl, blond, beautifully dressed, with a blasé accent, beat her with a flogger. It didn’t hurt particularly much. It was a toy, designed to deliver an element of pain without damaging the skin. It was just . . . startling, and humiliating, and it made her feel stupid for being so naïve.

And deep down, as each blow fell, she knew what was bound to happen.

She was on the floor, in the tattered remnants of her seemingly virginal ball gown, the wool carpet fibers scratching the raw, reddened skin of her back. A bolster pillow had been pushed under her hips to force them up at an obscene angle and the English girl, still dressed, a hair hardly out of place, had her head buried between her thighs. She could see the hairpins and the false hairpieces worked into her coiffure.

On the sofa, William had the man bent over, his trousers down around his knees, groaning and writhing as he fucked him. He pushed his head to one side, licking his victim’s exposed throat and drained him dry in a matter of seconds while his wife, or lover, or whatever she was to him, frantically flicked her tongue over Willow’s clit, two fingers fucking her. With each stroke Willow could feel a ring scraping the delicate, tightly stretched tissue at the gulf of her vagina.

Later, William had ripped the ring off her finger, holding it up to the light. It was a cluster of four pearls with small diamonds. He had pocketed it while Willow numbly dressed in the dead woman’s clothes and he arranged the bodies in a grotesque tableau that made her think of a History Channel program that she had watched about serial killers and their habits.

When she didn’t dress as quickly as he wanted, he simply pushed her hands aside and finished it for her, dragging her out into the night. She had thrown up somewhere between the house and the lair, and he had finally given up on her walking and picked her up, humming a bit of a song that sounded familiar.

When he stopped taking her hunting, she had stopped worrying about who he was killing. It wasn’t right, but it was a kind of conditioned response that kept her from losing her mind. Dru was gliding ahead of them, graceful, powerful, and completely batty. Her insanity frightened Willow as much as she sometimes envied Dru her most uncomplicated moments.

William unearthed a cheroot from an inside pocket. He had smoked the last of the cigars pilfered from the Hamilton’s and he was out of cigarettes as well. He had more or less decided to give up cheroots altogether. Willow hated the things. They stunk worse than cigarettes. He started to light a match and looked at her with a playful smile. “Don’t suppose you could, presto, give me a light?” he said.

“In case you’ve forgotten. You are a vampire. Highly flammable,” she reminded him. “Want me to practice on you?”

He chuckled, “Put that way, no, but it would be bloody convenient in a strong wind or absent a match,” he pointed out. “Feel free to practice on the more annoying minions,” he joked. “Just don’t get caught at it,” he warned, so maybe he wasn’t joking.

Dru was walking along the edge of the curbstone, like a tightrope walker, without her arms extended for balance.

“Did you get enough to eat tonight? You picked at your dinner,” he pointed out. “Do you want me to order someone to bring you a tray?”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I’ll fix something if I get hungry. I’d probably find a dead rat or ground glass in anything the minions prepared.”

He shot a sharp look at her. “That’s a joke, isn’t it? Has anyone threatened you?”

If there was one thing she understood a little of, it was the dynamics of vampire relationships, which were predicated on proximity to the golden circle, of which Angelus reigned supreme. Nothing endeared a minion to a master like personal attention, even of the most unpleasant variety. “I’m human. They hate me. It’s a vicious cycle. I trust them as far as I could throw them.”

“Well, keep your baby claws sheathed, kitten. If anyone seems intent on hurting you, you bring it to me and let me deal with it,” he counseled. “Lose your temper again, and I will be cross,” his tone was light.

Dru spun around, walking backward on the curb. “The night calls,” she reminded him.

“Give me a mo’, princess,” William said, walking Willow up the stairs. The door opened revealing Andreas, on duty.

“Safely home,” he announced. “You? Take her things and hang them up. I’m sick and tired of you stupid bastards playing your silly sodding rivalries out. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You’re a demon, not a four-year-old. Grow a set and quit worrying about what is no bloody concern of yours in the first place.”

Andreas opened his mouth and shut it with a snap of teeth. “Thank you. I’m sure that will clear everything up,” Willow told him.

“Ah-ah,” he pointed at his lips. “None of your cheek, if you please. Give me a kiss and go inside,” he demanded.

Feeling oddly shy about it, standing on one step above him so that they were nearly eye level, Willow leaned forward and placed a dry, chaste kiss on his lips.

He looked amused by that. “You call that a kiss?” he scoffed, giving her a little push to get her moving, “I’ll collect on that later,” he told her.

Left in the foyer with a very annoyed vampire, Willow removed her gloves and the dressy cloak she was wearing, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s bossy. He just gets that way sometimes. It has more to do with making you do what he wants than anything else. It makes him . . . happy, I guess.”

Like the rest of the minions, Andreas had a full compliment of memories of the young woman before him. The only thing he had against her really is that she smelled like something he wanted to eat and was forever out of reach. Which really wasn’t her fault. She was some peculiar fetish of Master William’s, who was not one to be crossed. After the set to after the dinner party it was apparent to him that she was probably not as helpless as had been assumed.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said neutrally, and then cursed himself for assigning a title of respect to her. “Is there anything else you require?”

She looked a little taken aback at the question. “Is everyone out this evening?” she asked.

“Yes,” he nodded.

“Oh . . .” she gestured to the stairs. “I’m going up to my room, then,” she said. “Thank you, Andreas.”


Chapter Twenty-Six

Darla could see the flicker of reflections in the crystal and flatware lying unused on the table, temporarily abandoned in favor of conversation. A blur of color trapped in cut crystal, an elongated perspective on the older Englishman in the flat of a knife slightly smeared with butter. His contributions to the conversation were negligible. Exactly what you would expect of someone who had become a part of the circle at the table almost by accident. If he had other intentions for the evening, they became moot when Lt. Wyndham renewed his slight acquaintance with Willow.

Mr. Giles placed his finger on the edge of a spoon, tilting it to catch the light, and Darla glanced up at him, mildly surprised to have her inattention noted and acknowledged in such a way. He smiled, almost apologetically, glancing across the table at Angelus who had turned his chair slightly away from the table, invited to join a conversation there.

She expected a compliment on her family, an observation about the weather, or some other banality that fit the role she was playing tonight.

"Has a date been set for the wedding?" he asked instead.

It didn't track immediately, but then she remembered that Angelus had covered for William's overly familiar manner with Willow by suggesting that there was an understanding between them. She couldn't decide if that was an even greater mistake.

She shook her head, letting her gaze drift down before she turned more fully toward him as if she were about to share a confidence. "Nothing has been done yet, but I think this winter, possibly around Christmas."

Weddings were not expected to be grand affairs. A small gathering of family and friends in a chapel and an announcement to acquaintances was the norm. No one would think it particularly odd if the newlywed couple did not set up their own household. Extended family living together was more common than not. David's appreciation of how the Fanged Four blended seamlessly, appearing interesting, but not extraordinary, expanded even as he tried not to appear overly curious in the woman sitting beside him.

She was fussing with the gloves that she had unbuttoned and tucked under her wrists while she pretended to eat. He considered asking her if she wanted to take a turn around the garden. He was anxious about Harry, alone with the two younger vampires and the girl, though if anything happened to him, it was a trap of his own making and there was nothing David could do to save him without endangering himself or others.

Instead he made small talk about Prague. It was a neutral topic, one that Darla warmed to after she finished fastening the small buttons on her glove, struggling a bit with the buttons on the other glove. Harry returned to report that his companions in the garden had departed. He looked a bit done in from the walk around the garden. Unnerved by something he had seen or heard? They could not leave without Frau van Borselin, and it was very late before their hostess was ready to leave.

Settled in the bachelor's parlor that they shared, ostensibly to enjoy a cigar and a drink before retiring for the evening, Harry slumped into a wing-backed chair and took a moment to order his account of the evening, and then gave up.

"She knows who we are," he blurted out, and then realized that as a beginning it was too abrupt. "Miss Grant? She knows what we are," he corrected himself. "I didn't say anything. She just . . . knew. Claimed to have known other watchers," he went on in the face of David's silence.

David looked puzzled. "How on earth could she know?"

Harry had thought about that too. "I don't know, but she was specific enough. Watchers. London. She said that I had drawn too much attention to myself and that it would go very badly if Angelus or Darla figured out who we are."

"Begging the conclusion that they don't know?" David was skeptical. "That seems very unlikely."

"The thought crossed my mind," Harry was testy. "But, I think they don't. She was careful to speak to me when we were alone. Out of the hearing of the other two, and she spoke as if she was in as much danger as us, should she be found out."

"This won't do," David said decisively. "Stop dancing around it and tell me exactly what was said."

Harry hesitated, aware that he had gone well beyond anything that he should have said. The temptation to edit his own contributions to the brief conversation was there, and it all happened so fast that what remained was impressions. The walk back to the house from the garden had been unnerving. As soon as he had gained the illusion of safety in the house he had taken refuge in a glass of champagne from a passing waiter's tray and tried to calm his racing heart while he watched David across the room chatting with Darla. It was hard to describe what had gone through his head at that moment.

The Watchers' Council had passed David by. He was too old now to be considered as a Slayer's watcher. Harry had time on his side. Slayers did not live long once they came into their power. Over the next twenty years he could reasonably expect to have a chance to be assigned to one of the girls. It was what he was trained for. But somewhere along the line of that unstated ambition he had come to the conclusion that he had to prove himself to be as good as any Slayer without the mystical gifts they were imbued with. He had not thought that it was enough to simply observe, but to be prepared to destroy the Scourge of Europe, not to save lives, but to secure for himself the distinction of being entrusted with a Slayer.

A girl with extraordinary abilities who would look at him with the understanding that he was extraordinary. A very ordinary girl in extraordinary circumstances had shattered that idea. It came to him belatedly that there was a lesson in being placed with David in these circumstances. If David had been his Slayer he would have gotten him killed by now and never understood until he was dead that just because Slayers died at an early age, he wasn't meant to aid in that process.

"I will," he said. He would tell David everything. "Every idea I've ever had about what we are supposed to be has been wrong," he confessed. "I know that now. A watcher with a Slayer is responsible for witnessing the death of a Slayer. I thought it was a prize," he cleared his throat. "I suppose I thought of it because she said something that made me think of it," he paused, and found that it wasn't so hard to recall after all. "She said that she's known watchers without Slayers and–" he frowned, "No, that's not right. She said that she had never met a watcher without a Slayer, except once, and that she was not impressed."

They both knew that in the last decade there were no accounts of Slayers coming into contact with the Scourge of Europe. David leaned against the back of the other armchair. "Start at the beginning," he instructed, refusing to be distracted by working out that peculiar detail. "When you went to walk in the garden, you were with Drusilla," he reminded him. "How did you manage to speak to Miss Grant?"

After she changed out of her evening clothes and brushed her hair and teeth, Willow smeared on her homemade mud peppermint facial and started putting things in order. She had never been a neat freak, but she liked a certain amount of order around her, and that characteristic had gradually grown more pronounced as time passed. It was a coping mechanism that had something to do with control.

Once she was satisfied that her own room was clean, and the peppermint mask was starting to itch and flake off her skin, she went to the bathroom and rinsed it off, fussing over the arrangement of folded towels.

Returning to her bedroom, she scooped up her jewelry on her dressing table and left her room, crossing the hall to William's room. She placed the jewelry next to the rosewood box where he kept his smoking things, the first place in the room he was likely to visit.

She had to leave him. It wasn't running away. It wasn't because something terrible had happened. It wasn't because she was starting to wonder if she was crazy and she just didn't know it because what had happened to her was so mind-bending that crazy was the least of her concerns as long as she didn't think too much about Drusilla. This was different. It felt different in her head. There was no panic, no hurried thinking, driving her toward the nearest exit.

In panic there was simplicity. There was no one in the house except a few of the minions, and she had managed to hold her own the night they were attacked. There was money in the house, papers, documents, the jewelry that she had returned and other pieces too valuable to be left in her room that she could gather quickly. To hide through the balance of the night wasn't so hard. Prague was a large city. In the morning she could buy a train ticket and be gone with at least twelve hours head start.

But not gone in such a way that she wouldn't spend the rest of her life waiting to be found, stuck in a century that she didn't belong to. Bound to age and die before she was born in 1981.

She was thinking calmly, coolly, rationally when went to the windows, opening them to give the room an airing-out while she picked up discarded clothing to carry down the hall to be laundered.

Almost as an afterthought, with the laundry balled up under her arm, she opened the box that held his smoking things and grabbed a handful of William's cheroots. He never kept a close track of his things, and he wasn't smoking the cheroots as much now that he had started smoking cigarettes. She suspected that he had smoked them tonight because he was out of cigarettes. She wrapped them up in one of his shirts, frowning at the dirt and grass stains ground into the fabric. The shirt was ruined, and it wouldn't be missed.

If this was any kind of normal household there would be a compost heap, but Darla could not abide the smell. There was, however, the refuse bin from the stable that was emptied daily. After she left the laundry in the small closet between Angelus and William's rooms, she went down the back stairs to the kitchen.

Unaccustomed to leaving the house alone, at night, Willow crossed the garden to enter the stable through the side door, pausing just inside the door to get accustomed to the dark. One of the horses made a soft huffing sound, and another nickered. She had never really gotten used to horses. They looked pretty at a distance, but up close they were too large. William had made attempts to teach her to ride. At first she just sat perched on a sidesaddle that wasn't as uncomfortable as it was precarious. It was like having a chair set on the back of a large, moving animal. When she looked down at the ground going by in sweeping circles, it made her feel dizzy.

Moving carefully, conscious that the stable was full of seemingly benign objects that were also heavy and potentially dangerous, she moved along the line of stalls, with one hand against the wood, jumping when one of the horses in the stall stuck his head out right in front of her. A blast of warm air hit her face; a damp velvety muzzle nudged her shoulder. Thin, flexible horsey lips nibbled at the sleeve of her dressing gown.

Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. She should have brought a lantern, but being in stealth mode, she hadn't thought of it. Not that a light was going to draw any more attention to her.

"Good horsy," she whispered nervously, carefully stepping back to avoid a swipe of horse tongue or the grab of big horse teeth.

If William had been here, he would have diverted the horse with a chirping sound while moving her away and shaking his head at her for being intimidated. In the center of the aisle, she moved toward the wide double door where the two carriages were kept. The Brougham was still out. The refuse bin would be just outside the outer door, at the edge of the alley. It was metal and the lid was heavier than expected, but she managed to get it open, shuddering at the trapped odor that was released before she dropped the bundle inside.

It didn't seem so hard now. She just had to go back inside, take a bath, write something boring in her journal for William to read, and try to sleep or at least to pretend to sleep. He would run out of cheroots during the day. It wasn't much of a plan, she realized as she returned to the house. She didn't actually know where the tobacco shop was, but it was a start. She would find a way to get out of the house during the day.

On the way back she ran into Matilde and Andreas, the former stuck in the house to wait for Darla to return, the later on guard duty. Heeding William's injunction she stepped around them, hearing the female vampire, her former maid, growl at her.

She remembered him telling her that she should bring things like this to him as she stopped and turned to look at Matilde. She was in no mood to be trifled with. Just thinking it made her smile. Smiling made Matilde's lips draw back in a snarl.

"If you aren't careful, your face might freeze that way," Willow said, feeling something like a rush of charged air around her.

Andreas felt it, too, and stepped away from her. He had heard her leave the house and had been on the verge of following her when Matilde came down. The status of the lone human in the household was unambiguous in his opinion. She was off the menu. That had not been a complicated notion to absorb. Then she became something else, equally uncomplicated, when he saw her defending the house. She was off the menu and not without her own defenses. That was simple enough to follow.

Matilde knew it, too; she just didn't like it and was inclined to let it show. Now, she looked almost as confused as frustrated by Willow's refusal to be bullied or intimidated. She was not afraid of Willow. She was afraid of Darla.

Willow felt the rush of charged air wrap itself around her, burrowing into the spaces where she could still feel hurt, soothing the sting of rejection with a warm bath of anger. It was . . . interesting. She was tempted to see if she really could freeze Matilde's face like that, and was rescued in a way by her own sense of humor.

She shook her head, amazed and a little gratified that she could still feel hurt by the idea that someone didn't like her. Using magic to retaliate was probably wrong. Using magic that she didn't understand that felt like an answer to something she never admitted was possibly dangerous. If the unreal world didn't end soon, she was going to need psychotherapy, which was only now being invented. In the real world an apocalypse rolled around with stunning regularity, so the unreal world was, by her estimate, long overdue.

She looked at Andreas curiously. He seemed to be expecting something. He was generally polite to her, she remembered. "I guess you've never heard that before," she murmured. "I don't think it's true. It's just something that people say to children when they make faces."

He nodded slowly, "Yes," he agreed. "Is there anything that you need?" he asked, willing to fetch and carry for her if she didn't start looking like she might be tempted to start staking someone.

She blinked, startled by the question. It was a reminder of what it had been like in the house before they had been murdered, when they had simply been hand-picked by her to be murdered.

"Tea?" he suggested.

She nodded slowly. "I'm going up to my room," she told him. "I need a bath."

"Matilde will bring it up, then," he told her, casting a warning look at Matilde.

Willow went up the stairs, unnerved. The whole night was one self-contained freak-out after another.

"Tea and cakes, moonlight, and dancing," Drusilla turned to him. "You didn't dance with Miss Willow. Neither did I." She said it as if it was an omission that puzzled her.

"The evening is not complete," William told her, wondering what she would do with that idea.

She tucked her hand inside his arm, smoothing his coat sleeve. "I dreamt of dancing, all the time. I saw it. No one had to teach me to dance. I knew all of the steps from my dreams. But it was never right. Not like flying. Feet stepping on the hem of my gown, sweat running down my back," she pressed against him, one hand going to her ribs to finger the whalebone stays under her gown. "Too tight to breathe."

"Too tight to breathe," he echoed, thinking it was an apt way to describe the lives that they had left. "I remember that."

They walked in silence that was richest for Drusilla. Between each step was a waking dream, like a window that was gently closed between footfalls. She saw the entire evening in a kaleidoscope of images that had undiscovered meanings and incomplete beginnings. A shower of rose petals falling around Willow's shoulders. That happened. Her own fingers peeling back the gray silk of her gown, slipping it over the point of Willow's shoulder where her skin would be warm from the gown. That didn't happen, but it might have and it was all the same to her. Hard light dancing on the ceiling from great swags of crystal pendants hanging from a chandelier seen out of the corner of her eye. A new catalog of faces and scents had been imprinted on her memory, and she felt as if she could command them at will, selecting one to hunt. Just one out of the great many.

William's thoughts were not scattered like a field of stars, nor were they open to her as he sometimes assumed. It was because of the way he had come to her. He thought she could read his mind because she had seen in him a life that fit him too tight for breathing. A life for which the only remedy was to no longer need to breathe.

"What are we hunting, my William?" Dru wanted to know.

From his sideways look it was clear that he thought she had read his mind. He wanted to find the van Borselin home. He probably would have considered Harry a meal just on his own annoying merits, but he had upset Willow, and aside from her tendency to cry over trifles, she was a levelheaded girl, not prone to flights of fancy. Ridiculous stuffed shirt, nancy boy, public school prat, he had to know better than to accost young ladies in the park. The fact that those rules didn't bind him didn't move William in the slightest.

He explained it to Drusilla. Her eyebrows drew together as he told her about Willow's experience in the park. She didn't understand it. William thought there was something unseemly about the young man's interest in Willow, that Willow existed as an object of that kind of attention. She wasn't stupid. She knew very well where and how William had found Willow and what he kept her for.

He seemed to have forgotten, or this was the part of the something that had been changing with the weight of inevitability that she was aware of but unable to name. She could have found him without effort, simply by following the threads that were connected to him now that William had pointed them out to her.

And she might have, if William had understood that she had a purpose of her own. He lacked a proper feeling for anything that he couldn't kill or maim. There were men who sought to do God's will, willfully unaware that she was a part of the design. She was created to destroy, not for revenge or justice, but as a reflection of the caprice of the natural world where birds fell dead in mid-flight and disease struck without warning.

Smiling her mysterious smile, she let him work it out on his own. His methods were slower. In the shadows they waited while the guests left the party they had been a part of earlier. Moving between houses, he tracked the progress of a slow-moving coach to a house not far from the one they occupied.

Unaware of Drusilla's lack of participation in his mission, William noted the location of the house. It wasn't the enormous pile they had spent the evening in, but it was a big, stolid-looking house of three and half stories, with a dozen chimneys. Nothing about it suggested that the Van Borselins were taking boarders, so the Englishmen were probably social acquaintances.

Harry Wyndham would wander out for a late-night stroll and he'd be there, at some point, probably sooner than not. When he got a yen to kill someone in particular, he wasn't given to the drawn out gamesmanship Angelus preferred. He'd terrify you to death before he killed you. William was all about the kill.

"What would you like to hunt, poodle?" he asked now that he had satisfied his curiosity.

She licked her lips, eyes dancing. "Oooh! I know," she moaned, rubbing herself against him. "I smell something young," she said enticingly.

"Great," William muttered. He hoped it wasn't babies. It was like draining a small dog. Hardly got a taste and then it was on to the next one, and then there was the squalling, and the weird smell. Babies and old people were not high on his list of things to eat.

It wasn't babies. Just a pair of lads, probably not yet sixteen, larking around and sharing a bottle of apple brandy between the two of them. Dru found them behind a shed, and they gaped at her in a stunned sort of way. William shared their bemusement as Dru danced around a tree, pulling her hairpins out, flinging them around. He perched on a garden wall, unnoticed, as she dazzled and charmed, and wooed them out into the open until one of the boys, emboldened by drink, the realization that the beautiful young woman they were watching was probably not in her right mind, or just by the nearly unbelievable prospect of what she seemed to be offering, chased after her.

His friend pursued him, hissing at him to leave her alone. Timid or principled, or both. He really wasn't surprised to find Dru favoring the second boy. Cooing to him. "You're a knight, a noble and virtuous knight," she said.

They crashed into a bed of lilies, and William smiled at that, knowing his Princess. She'd leave the boy laid out neat as a pin, minus his heart, blood stained flowers clasped over his chest.

Springing down lightly from his perch, he slipped up silently behind the other boy, who was straining to see what was going on, drunken envy twisting his face. William relieved him of the bottle. "Surprised me, too, mate," he told him. "You always think they'll go for the bigger, stronger, bloke, but sometimes for reasons only they understand, it's the weak ones they crave between their legs."

As observations went, William thought it was one of his better ones. Pity the boy wouldn't live to mull over it or recognize the irony.

They were still feeding when someone came out of the house, swinging a lantern, cursing, and William had to give up his mostly-dead prize. He snapped his neck, and retrieved Dru, who was not happy to be leaving without her laying him out completed, so they stayed close enough to hear the first body discovered, and then the second. The horrified moaning and crying appeased Dru, putting her back into a good mood. She daintily licked her fingers clean and placed the heart in her beaded handbag, squashing it in amongst the pate she had nicked for a late-night snack for Mr. Buttons.

"It's still early," William pointed out. "Hours to go until dawn. What can we do to entertain ourselves?"

She waved her bag at him. "Treats for Mr. Buttons, William. He must be ever so sad and lonely," she declared with a pout that had regained a great deal of its charm.

The purse was dripping blood, which was creating a trail to be followed. That gave William another idea. He led Dru through the streets to the mission and persuaded her to relinquish Mr. Buttons' treat, depositing it at the threshold of the door, thinking that the mayhem that was likely to follow would liven things up after it was discovered.

She heard Matilde in the bedroom while she was in the bathtub. She had said something earlier that evening to William about not trusting the minions to bring her anything, and she meant it, but she had not imagined that she would find Matilde doing anything for her without being instructed to and resenting it.

When she left the bathroom, Matilde was still there, examining the dress worn that evening, hanging in the wardrobe. The bed was turned down, and a small fire had been laid in the fireplace with kindling, not so much for warmth as to take some of the damp out of the air. The dress was removed from the hanger and laid over the end of the bed while she went to her dressing table where a pot of tea was waiting for her.

Without comment, Matilde came to her, reaching around her for her brush before unwrapping her wet hair from the towel Willow had wound around the length. She started brushing her hair, working from the ends to remove the tangles and then setting down the brush to retrieve a pair of scissors from her pocket to trim the ends. The whole time not one single word passed between them until Matilde was done.

She asked if she should leave the tea and said that she was taking the dress to clean and press.

Left alone again, Willow considered going to sleep, or at least pretending to sleep. It could not be a coincidence that the watchers' names echoed the names of the two watchers she knew in Sunnydale. She debated about leaving her room again to go down to her cellar under the library to look at her books.

The meager collection of books she had accumulated were ones she knew well by now. They were not going to offer up new insights into her time travel versus alternative universe meditations. It was more the idea of books that drew her. She had done her research once surrounded by books. Now, as then, she found them inadequate. The good stuff, the books that Giles kept in his office, had been at her disposal through long nights of sitting quietly in the library while Oz was locked in the cage.

She had to get more books. Better books. The kind of books watchers had access to.

If it was time travel, could she find a way to write a note to be handed to one of the watchers with a stern injunction that it was to be kept for Giles to read a century from now? If she did that, if she accomplished that, would it erase the last eight years? Would Giles read the note before she started researching ways to keep Angel from losing his soul and explain to her that there was a disaster in the making, that her efforts were doomed to failure?

Would she listen in the future?

Was it a sign that she should try again? The ritual was the one thing that she had made herself memorize. Every detail of it was sorted and organized in her mind. The ingredients, the precise measurements. The symbols, painstakingly copied over and over again in her notebook before she cast the spell, when she was still working out the perfect moment to go back and change one thing, just one thing that would make the most difference. She had drawn on the floor between lines of masking tape, because she wanted it to be perfect.

In a few days she was to go back to Zlata Ulicka to pick up the rest of the spell ingredients she had ordered. There were things that were not on her list that she would need to attempt the spell, and she was at once wary and intrigued about attempting any spell casting inside the barrier wards she had created around the house. It was drawing on power that made her feel more powerful when she needed to feel powerful.

"It's just a teensy temporal fold," she heard Anya's voice in her head, but the memory offered no guidance. It suggested that it was possible even as Willow remembered that it was dangerous.

She paced the bedroom floor. If it wasn't a bizarre coincidence, then she was supposed to meet the watchers. It made sense in a way. She had always been puzzled by how unlikely it was that she would find herself in a place that she had no way to associate with Angelus–no watcher's diary entry that she had found had ever suggested that Angelus had been in Bristol. The first time she had seen it on the page of an atlas, a dot hovering in Gloucester near Somerset, she realized that she had had not understood where the spell had taken her.

It couldn't be coincidence that she met William there. She hadn't even recognized him. It wasn't until she saw Drusilla that she realized that William was Spike.

The idea that there was some purpose served in her being here was infuriating.

She couldn't try the spell now, and she wanted to badly, so much so that she considered for a moment leaving the house and making her way to Zlata Ulicka, before discarding the idea as impractical and dangerous. There were vampires there, too. She had no reason to trust that they would keep her presence a secret unless it served their purposes to do so, and she had no idea what their agenda was, though the fact that they were vampires made altruism unlikely.

There had to be a reason. A connection. Something that explained what had placed her here. The books she was allowed to have were, half of them, full of folklore and nonsense and the rest of them, jammed with benign spells, petitions, and recipes for good crops, health, and protection against malign spirits.

Fingers pressed against her lips, she tried to think clearly, coldly, logically. She had tried to escape before, but running away never addressed the real problem of being stuck in a dimension or time period that she did not belong to. She ran without having anywhere to run to and she didn't want to live out her life here, alone.

She didn't want to leave him.

Her vision blurred for a moment. That hadn't always been there. She was sure of it. There had been times when getting away from William seemed like the only thing she could think of. Until she was sent to Prague, to live alone in a house full of people that she could not allow herself to think of as people, for two months. They were hundreds of miles away, and she could have left at any time in those two months.

"No," and what she heard in her voice made her squeeze her eyes shut, shaking her head, before trying again. "No."

It was firmer the second time. It didn't mean anything. Not really. Life wasn't about how you felt about the people who were part of your life. It was about what you did despite how you felt.

She was more or less confined to the house during the day, thanks to her freak-out about the way the two men approached her in the park. She had to figure out a way to go out more, to move about more freely during the daytime. She had been formally introduced to Mr. Giles and Lt. Wyndham. That made them social acquaintances. By the rules that governed these things, she now had a defined context in their social circle.

There was no reason that she couldn't resume walking in the park. She didn't have to invent excuses. She simply had to pretend that she had read too much into Lt. Wyndham's interest in her, and, in a way, she had. Convincing William would be difficult. He didn't care about maintaining social contacts or appearances.

Darla did.

Darla considered the evening a success. If she was keeping score, and she was, Willow and Angelus took the top honors for the evening. Willow was likely to be invited back, having established a rapport with their hostess, and Angelus had covered so beautifully for William's lapse in manners that he made her appear intriguing and sympathetic all at once without saying anything specific. Darla didn't want to be entertaining potential suitors for Willow, and the implication that she was practically engaged was a stroke of genius.

She was not so preoccupied with these thoughts that she failed to notice that they were visiting a graveyard. She allowed herself to be assisted to the ground, feeling moderately curious as she picked her way over the slightly uneven turf to a freshly laid and untidy grave.

"Your work?" she guessed.

Angelus nodded, looking solemn. "I've always wondered if a human could get out of a grave." He gestured to it. "It wasn't a fair test. The coffin was broken and we just pushed the dirt in to cover it up."

She studied the grave. It looked pretty much like any other grave, except not as neat. In a few days, after the ground settled again, it would need more dirt. "If I had known, I would have brought flowers."

He looked back at her. "She reminded me of you," he told her.

She smiled at that, genuinely amused by his tone. "What every woman wants to hear."

He glanced over at her curiously. She never sounded jealous, but he knew it was there. It had to be. Holding her skirt to keep it from trailing across the fresh dirt, Darla's foot nudged a bone white object just peeking from the dirt. Inert and slightly misshapen, it took him a moment to recognize it as a part of a hand. So, she had almost made it out. He watched for a moment, waiting for the fingers to twitch or show some sign of life.

But the hand remained inert, half in and half out of the ground. He was struck by the expressiveness of hands. They were difficult to sketch, so much so that they were avoided entirely by otherwise competent artists.

Darla took a step back as he reached down, grasping the exposed wrist. He could detect no pulse. He considered pulling her out of the grave, not really caring if he took her arm off, or broke her neck. It hadn't been a good test, and she had failed it anyway. She was dead, useless, and no longer interesting, but it was fun to imagine the reaction of anyone visiting the cemetery during the day and finding a body half in and half out of the grave.

Darla was already turning away. The only time he had managed to shock her was when he had turned Drusilla for no other reason than to preserve the master work of her madness.

Willow was still awake when Darla and Angelus returned. There was a great deal that went on around her that she had been committed to sleeping through. Despite living with them for so many years, she wasn't nocturnal given a choice in the matter. Having her own room was a relatively new development. It added a layer of privacy that still felt private even if it was violated more or less at will. Hearing the house gain occupants made her want to go to sleep, mostly to avoid being found awake.

She dozed off, sleeping fitfully only to wake again when William and Drusilla came home. A muscle twitched under her eyelid and she tried to grimace it away, dreading the possibility that William would notice that his supply of cheroots was greatly diminished or that he would simply seek her out. If she had gone to sleep right away, she would have had the energy to deal with him.

When she heard her bedroom door open she couldn't contain the nervous start it gave her, but she decided to pretend to be asleep. It wasn't that hard to do. She just kept her eyes closed and used the small involuntary movement to roll to her side as if she was startled but not awake. She didn't really think that it would work. Sometimes, when she pretended to be asleep, he would slip in bed beside her and carefully, cautiously arrange her to lie against him, stroking her hair or her back until he took one, shallow involuntary breathe, like a swimmer going under, to fall asleep himself.

William smiled at the performance. He knew that she wasn't asleep. She was pretending. Faking sleep. Lying on her side, with her face in profile and her nose pressed into a feather pillow, a picture of what she thought she looked like when she was asleep. Her lips were pressed together though and her hands were inside the covers. Too neat. Too orderly. She tended to clutch at blankets and pillows, balling them up against her body. She slept with her lips parted, breathing through her mouth. For a moment he stood, one hand on the door, content to watch the performance. He could practically feel the tension gathering in her body, and then flash across her face when she realized it.

She made a sleepy sound and snuggled into the pillow, kicking away part of the blanket to push one foot out off the edge of the bed before settling again. When she was too warm under the covers, she put a foot outside them. But only when she was awake. When she was asleep and she was too warm, she just moved to a cooler place in the bed until she was pressed up against him.

He finished untying his cravat while he watched her. He had come home intending to spend the night with Drusilla. He hadn't spent enough time with her of late and she seemed to recognize it, too, tonight. The two of them, alone, was rare enough to be special. She felt it, too. Killing, kissing, laughing softly at nothing.

He could hear Drusilla in the bathroom they shared and gave Willow one last look, before stepping back into the hall and shutting the door gently behind him. He walked down the hall to Drusilla's room. The drapes had been left open, letting in the moonlight, giving the room a faintly purple glow. The rooms in the master suite were the most opulent in the house, but Drusilla's room was the most attractive. A bank of windows formed an open space that had been converted into a amphitheater for Drusilla's collection of dolls, arranged across a box seat posed in doll-sized furniture or doll stands.

She emerged from the bathroom, still dressed, and he felt an old ache of pleasure and longing. She had waited for him to help her with her dress. She was the first woman he had ever undressed during the brief and unforgettable time after she had made him when they had been like husband and wife, acting out cozy domestic scenes that they had never enjoyed when they were alive.

He unfastened her dress and helped her step out of it, smoothing his hands over her shoulders, holding them as he kissed the nape of her neck. She smelled like the bed of flowers she had crushed beneath the boy she had killed, and the hand she raised to touch his cheek, fingers trailing to his lips, was still stained with blood. His lips parted for her and he kissed her fingers, smiling when she made a game of it, kissing each one.

She gathered up the dress, frowning over a blood-matted spot in the velvet, and then laying it over a chair, because there were other uses for the rest of the fabric if the dress was ruined by bloodstains. He withdrew a cheroot from his pocket, waiting for her to nod her assent before he lit it. He was going to have to ration himself. The prospect of a long day spent indoors without anything to smoke was annoying, but he only had himself to blame for not paying more attention.

"Did you have a good time tonight?" he asked as she started taking her hair down.

"Wonderful," she said, twisting her head, pretending to admire herself in the etched-glass oval mirror behind her vanity. "Did you?"

He laid his arm across the back of the chair where her discarded dress lay. "Tolerable," he drawled, playing at pompous for her.

He was rewarded with a dazzling smile. When Drusilla was caught up in a pretense she was heartbreakingly lucid. She removed her hairpins and shook out the length of her hair until it fell around her in coils that still held the shapes her hair had been wound into. He watched her finger comb her hair, soothing the sore places on her scalp. Everything he had ever learned about taking down a woman's hair or running a brush through it he learned from watching her, and he never got tired of it.

Willow waited a few moments after the door shut. It would not have surprised her to find that he had shut the door from inside her room, waiting to see if she was really sleeping. The longer she waited the more certain she became that this was not the case. It was an impression that seemed to seep into her, wiggling past the sense of accomplishment at her acting ability. She didn't want to open her eyes to confirm what she had started to suspect.

She hadn't really wanted him to stay, she had just expected it.

She rolled over again, pulling one of the unused pillows close, muffling the achy feeling in her chest in eiderdown. She opened her eyes, letting them adjust to the almost total absence of light. The drapes were closed. The furniture in the room was shape in shadows that had grown familiar. Her room. It really didn't look like it was her room. She was too conscious of what her room was supposed to look like when she had been picking out the furniture for this room. She didn't treat it like it was her room. There were no books piled next to her bed, nothing pushed under the bed because she didn't feel like picking it up, nothing piled on a chair or her chaise.

She didn't even have a writing desk, just the vanity. It was a room for a woman that she had pretended to be for so long that the thought of being anyone else, even the girl she had once been, was frightening.

That wasn't all bad. Scary, but there were possibilities, and it wasn't about a trip to London that would probably never really happen when she might slip out for a day to see the Tower of London and figure out where the Watcher's Council was. It was more than possible that it was fate. It was, like finding William, or being found by him, a part of something incomplete that would bring her one step closer to home.

The word made her take in a shaky breath. Home. It was an idea more than an actual place. If she did go home, back to the day or the moment she left, would she be the same age or would she be a younger Willow with first-period Calculus and second-period Advanced Chemistry before she had a class with Buffy or Xander? Would she be sitting-in-the-quad Willow, holding hands with Oz?

There were so many things that she had missed. Prom. Graduation. The first day of college. Mochas. Helping Buffy study while patrolling. Bronzing with Xander and Buffy. Listening to Oz play. Watching the glaze of boredom settle on Oz's face as Giles or Wesley said too much about something that he had already figured out.

She no longer remembered what Oz looked like. She knew what he looked like, but if he had appeared, like the two watchers had tonight, she had a terrible feeling that she would have taken too long to recognize him. She closed her eyes tightly. She could never be that Willow again for Oz. Too much had happened.

But she could still be Buffy and Xander's friend. She could learn to be Shelia and Ira Rosenberg's daughter. And as long as Angel and Spike and Drusilla didn't think otherwise, she could be a Willow Rosenberg that never really knew any of them.

None of this eased the ache in her chest.

"Deal with this now," she whispered to herself, feeling tears sting. It wasn't that she loved William, but she was used to him and she felt a little less lonely when he was around. That's all it was. It was easier to be a little scared of William than a lot scared of everything. It was easier to deal with his demands than to figure out a solution to her own problems.

She closed her eyes again. It was too much to think about. She needed to sleep.

Few know what it is to be exalted. To climb inside of cloudless skies and spin around stars. To be the dark star that explodes in a wordless cry of wonder and completion. Drusilla wasn't selfish. She didn't need to be transported in the moment and took her own pleasure in creating it.

For William it was all hands, lips, bodies touching, but to Drusilla it was art. It was the decorous pattern unwound on the ceiling of the Opera House. It was the tumble of words that fell in layers. It was the drama in the tension of a bow on the strings of a violin. It was not hers alone. It was all connected. The boy who had died who saw the face of a woman in the moon and felt the thrill of the connection to something ancient and pagan was present. The creature she made, who reveled in the taste of blood on her lips, was there as well. Everything he touched, felt, and yearned for until the yearning became a source of shame amongst the shameless, was in the taste of his skin under her tongue.

Beastly rutting creatures careened around her, unable to become what they were.

She resisted the lure of their dance. She had this instead, and tomorrow the other things, and the day after that another kind of dance. They all caused pain. It was there in his eyes as he realized that she had not reached the kind of fulfillment he wanted to give her. It was never what she needed from him, but he was too selfish to grasp this.

He wanted what had been taken from her.

She laid her fingers over his lips when he would have spoken, holding the part of him that fit inside of her within her body until his hips shifted under hers. Again? He looked so stubborn, so determined, so bent on his own greedy desire to reduce her to what he found. He never seemed to grasp that she had exactly what she wanted already.

"You want too much," she told him, eyes shining.

He smiled at that. "I'll have it," he warned her. "One way or the other."

"Yes, you will," she agreed. Found so seldom in her, and ever and always in the next room, even if he didn't understand that it was all the same thing. "Look into my eyes," she entreated.

He shuddered under her, fighting her when he felt her presence in his mind. Even when he was mortal and frightened, he had fought her, and the only thing she got from him was the one word that made him think that she had read his mind. It was all the insight that she ever required. He wanted something shinning in a world full of dingy things. Wanted it so fiercely, so purely, that he was able to find it in the most unlikely places.

She ran her fingertips over his cheek as his gaze became unfocused. "I love you," she whispered.

The expression that flashed on his face might have broken her heart if it functioned properly. His lips moved soundlessly, and she nodded, feeling not a shred of jealously or remorse at the way he confused their names. It was all so clear to her. He would never be what Angelus was to her, but Willow might be what he was to her.

It was what they were made for.

Willow wasn't aware of having fallen asleep when she woke. She was just aware that being awake came with a feeling like she was floating that made her feel slightly queasy. She felt something tickle her cheek and then brush over her lips. Opening her eyes she found Drusilla leaning over her with one of the scraps of fur that she had been using to make chew toys for Mr. Buttons in hand.

She was lucky that was all it was. Drusilla had left a dead cat in her bed once. With a frown, Willow took in her surroundings. Walls painted black and scored by a fire, a creepy four poster with a limp, dirty lace canopy overhead. She looked quickly to her right to see if Xander was there too. He wasn't there, but that didn't alter her conclusion. She was dreaming.

"How badly do you have to miss television and movies for this to be your twisted idea of making your own fun?" Willow asked.

She didn't really expect an answer. Drusilla's eyes were half-closed and she was swaying a little. It was the kind of thing that she did that looked a little crazy, but in an attractively crazy and graceful sort of way. Darla could snap her out of it with a hard pinch.

She hadn't ever dreamt of Drusilla in the future. Lately, it was just Spike.

She stilled, eyes opening. "He doesn't want you," Drusilla told her.

"I'll go back to sleep then," she muttered.

"I tried to make him come, for tea and cakes. You didn't dance tonight, but he wants me. I'm the one he will always want."

It was so much in evidence that the real Drusilla would never say this to her. They were not in any way rivals.

Willow cautiously sat up wondering why dream Drusilla was telling her this. She almost wanted to tell her that she was leaving. She would leave, and Drusilla would have Spike all to herself, and that was how it was meant to be.

"You won't leave him?" she asked instead. It was stupid, but the thought of him being alone bothered her more than she wanted to admit.

Drusilla's head tilted to one side. "I hadn't thought of that," she admitted. "It's not a thinkable thing."

Willow started to smile at that. "No, it's not," she agreed. An idea was forming. "But, promise me anyway, that no matter what, you'll never abandon him."

Drusilla stared at her. "You've seen this," she breathed. "How?"

"It doesn't matter," Willow argued.

"If you've seen it then it will happen. No promise will alter it," Drusilla told her.

Willow heaved an inward sigh. Trying to have any kind of conversation with Dru was hard enough, and worse when you were asleep, and worse yet if you dreamt that she was more lucid than normal. She shook her head. "I don't think I have visions like yours," she told her. "Your vision is true. What I've seen might not be true. You said it yourself. It is not a thinkable thing."

Drusilla sat back on her heels, thinking about that. "I promise," she said after a moment that stretched so long that Willow wondered if she had forgotten what they were talking about.

"You promise what?" Spike asked, having caught the last of the exchange. He walked over to the bed and looked down at Willow. There was a hint of calculation in his stare. "You brought Drusilla back to me. I suppose you think I owe you a favor," he said, moving around the bed to Drusilla's side. His hand moved over her hair and she turned to look up at him.

She understood where she was now. The factory, except none of this happened. She had never had a chance to cast the love spell to bring Drusilla back to Spike.

"What did you promise, Princess?"

"I promise that I will never leave you," Drusilla told him. She bounced on the bed, pointing at Willow. "She has visions, too."

He looked skeptical, glancing from Drusilla to Willow. "Does she now?" he drawled.

"Mostly bad dreams," Willow said cautiously. "Well, now that you two are back together again, I'll just be . . . moseying home to do . . . my homework," she started to edge away from them.

She was pretty sure that what would happen next would involve a lot of running and screaming on her part, but when she got off the bed on the other side she was in the Sunnydale High School library, just inside the double doors. She stood there for a moment, trying to figure it out.

"Giles?" she called out.

She jumped when she heard him answer her from his office, and rushed to the door. He was sitting behind his desk with a book open in front of him. "There you are," he said. "I've been looking for something that would explain what has happened to you."

She nodded. "I did a spell–"

"Of course you did. Anyone could see that," he frowned at her. "Please don't interrupt. It's very rude."

Giles didn't say things like that. He just gave you one of those looks that said that he was patiently refraining from saying it. "Be careful who you place your trust in, Willow."

"Thanks for the cryptic warning," Willow muttered as Giles' office became City Hall and she found herself tied to a post with a pile of books around her that were starting to smolder.

There was no angry mob, or Buffy, or even Amy. In secret she had practiced every spell she could find to unbind restraints. All she had to do was find the right one and rescue the books from the fire and start looking for solutions inside them. Simple. A small flame flicked to life near her foot.

The panic she had felt then came back. She hadn't been thinking of spells or clever ways to save herself. It had been Buffy that she relied on to save her. She could feel the heat crawling up her leg. There was a smell that denim had just before it reached combustion. And then Spike was there, kicking the burning pile of books away from her.

But he didn't untie her. "That's your one favor, repaid," he told her.


Chapter Twenty-Seven

No hint of resentment could be seen in Darla's face. In the absence of light she glowed against the pale gold that upholstered the headboard of her bed, pale pink lips curved into a pleasing smile that didn't quite reach her eyes. There was a trick to that too, of averting her gaze, of finding a way to appear to be looking at Angelus without looking at him. Inwardly she was not precisely seething, though there was a certain degree of anger that she preferred to simply feeling inadequate.

She might have been fooled into believing that she had been granted a reprieve of sorts in the form of a dead girl that bore a passing resemblance to her who, had she survived, would have been a new and different kind of addition to their household. She had seen Angelus at work crafting the crucible that Drusilla was shaped in. For the longest time he simply watched her, refining his tortures on others. The first person he killed who was related to the object of his attention was a little girl who looked like her. Killed, turned, tortured, the shape of a cross burned into her forehead, spoiling the visage of the vampire doll he made and dressed in an exact copy of a costume Drusilla had worn.

She was a distant relative, a cousin of some sort, broken without art in haste to torment the object of his attention.

Claire Hamilton smacked of that kind of experimentation.

She ran her fingers through his hair as he labored over her, cynically appreciating the effort more than the effect of his hands and lips. He couldn't think that he was distracting her, and yet, he did, fooled by the catalog of her responses. A sigh here, a moan there, her finger's tightening his hair and then smoothing it down as her hips lifted. She could feel his lips shape a smile against her skin before his tongue gathered flesh to suck on, answered with a throatier moan of approval.

It felt good, but she wasn't distracted by it any more than he was truly engaged by the conflicts that gathered around them. The business with the vampires from across the river didn't really capture his attention, or something would have been done about them. The presence of an element of the church that might be hunting them didn't preoccupy him. He was bored despite that and in his boredom he would craft some new game to test them.

Pre-dawn light was spreading from the bow of windows in Drusilla's room. With a small sigh of annoyance, William made himself get up to draw the drapes. He opened one of the windows to enjoy the draft and picked up his discarded coat to look for a cheroot. Failing to find one in his pocket, he slipped into his trousers and left Drusilla's room to cross the hall to his own empty room.

He found it considerably tidier than he had left it before they had left for the party. It smelt of candles and pine cones. Willow's jewelry from the evening rested on his dresser where she knew that he would find it. He opened the box that held his cheroots and frowned at the meager supply. Bloody hell. Even if he slept most of the day away and rationed himself, he was going to run out of cheroots before sunset. He lit one anyway, frowning at the flavor. What he really wanted was a cigarette, and he had run out of those yesterday, so he was left in short supply of an unsatisfying substitute.

He picked up the bracelet that Willow had worn last night, not recognizing it. He generally left procuring a wardrobe and baubles for Willow to Darla, who actually cared about the details of her appearance, at least when they were all pretending to be one happy family. She kept the blue glass beaded necklace he bought for her in her room in a cloth-covered box on her dressing table. It suited her much more so than the cold, shining jet bracelet he let fall on the dresser.

He met Lucius in the hallway. The younger vampire hesitated and William smiled crookedly at the show of nerves.

Lucius hadn't been looking for William. Not yet, at least. He had a version of this evening's confrontation between Matilde and Willow courtesy of Andreas, who seemed to find it amusing that Matilde had been cowed, at least for the moment. Lucius thought it was far more likely that she was waiting for an opportunity to complain to the mistress of the house.

Keeping his voice low, he related what Andreas had observed, watching William for a reaction. He leaned against the doorframe, smoking, his gaze flicking to the closed door of Willow's room, a small frown appearing, but when Lucius was done, he simply nodded.

"Where are you off to?" William asked.

Out of habit Lucius checked the first floor before retiring to make sure that the house was secure. He found himself dismissed, though there was nothing particularly rude or heavy-handed in William's manner.

William waited until Lucius had gone down the staircase and was out of sight before his attention returned to the door across from his. He nearly stepped on Drusilla's dog, which was scampering after Lucius, probably hoping for a treat or at least company. He crossed the hall to Willow's door and opened it quietly, walking in and shutting it behind him. He knew immediately that she really was asleep this time. She had kicked off the covers and was lying half across the bed with one knee pulled up toward her chest. He might have woken her up to have a pointed discussion about what he meant when he told her that he expected her to bring any problems she had to him, but he smelled tears, faint, but still hanging in the air.

She had feelings and they got a bit bruised. If she felt bad enough to cry over it, then it stood to reason that she would cry again if he woke her up now to demand an explanation. That was a bit of drama that would spoil the balance of the day for him. He made a note to talk to her tomorrow and cocked his head at the sound of water running from the tap in the bathroom. Using the door from Willow's room he entered the bathroom and found Drusilla filling the bathtub.

She looked up at him and then beyond him curiously. Reading the look, he shook his head. "Asleep," he said, pulling the door shut behind him. Dru went to the window, opening it incautiously in his view, and before he could react to that, she snatched his cheroot out of his hand and tossed it out the window before closing it.

"Bloody hell," he grumbled, belatedly remembering the no smoking in the bathroom rule that Drusilla was fanatic about.

"It makes the towels stink," she told him, unrepentant.

"No worse than me," he pointed out, offended.

She glided over, resting her head on his shoulder, pushing her nose into his neck. "You smell better than stinky towels."

Slightly mollified, but annoyed about the loss of his cheroot, he tried to hold out for a bit more making up. "How much better?"

She nipped his earlobe. "Not that much," she admitted, pushing him toward the bathtub.

He forgot about the cheroot and his effort to fish for a compliment, turning to touch her face, feeling something twist in his chest at how sweet she was when she was deep in this oldest of all their games. Wife. Friend. Lover.

"I love you," he reminded her.

She preened. "More than anyone?"

"More than anything."

"More than . . . " her gaze slid to the wall that separated them from Willow's room.

He started to agree and realized that it wasn't precisely true. Differently, but not more. Drusilla had no beginning or end for him, and Willow always would. Willow would always be someone he knew before he loved her.

Before he could try to explain it she turned her face into his hand and kissed his wrist. "I love Daddy more than you," she said, without malice, simply stating a fact. "First you loved her not at all. And then you didn't wish to love her. And now you love her. When you love her best then it will all be even."

That was how she had worked it out? "Who will Willow love best?" he asked.

It was an idea that had not occurred to her. She shook her head. "None. Her heart beats, but it is so loud that she can't hear what it says."

"Can you?" he asked warily.

She nodded hesitantly. "Sometimes."

He bit his lip. He probably didn't want to know. Not that it mattered. She didn't have to–it wouldn't change what he felt. "What do you hear?"

Dru's gaze drifted downward, a delicate grimace contorting her features. "Home, home, home, home, home, home, home," she chanted faster and faster until it was almost a wail, sounding so much like a lost child that William found himself covering her mouth to make her stop.

She looked reproachful, and he eased the pressure of his hand over her lips. "This is what you make her alone in. I told you I could take it away, and you said no. You said 'never again.'" Her expression turned sly. "I can make her have her home with us," she promised.

He kissed her forehead. "I think we've already done that."

His voice was less than steady. Listening to Willow chant 'this isn't real' was unnerving enough, but he really thought if it was the worst of a bad moment, then it wasn't all that bad. He settled in the bathtub with Drusilla. He knew virtually nothing about Willow's life before he had met her.

Drusilla patted his cheek with wet fingers, awkwardly comforting even as she demanded his attention. He turned his head to kiss her fingers.

What place was home that left such a sound for Drusilla to find? Where was it? Willow's chief failure in her adventures in running away had been in having no real place to go. Her journals contained no hint of her origins beyond a certain street in Bristol, beyond her friendship with another prostitute. Who was she before that? Where was she from? With her accent and her peculiar mannerisms, someone, probably Angelus, had concluded that she was American, but that had been years ago, when they still talked about her like she was a houseplant, and not to her. Then she became a dozen stories and aliases made up on the spot to explain her presence. She was a sister, cousin, school friend of Drusilla's, a nurse, a servant. To his family, infrequently met, she was his mistress.

Around him the warm bath water undulated as Drusilla moved to reach for a ball of soap. The ends of her hair trailed in the water, sticking to his skin where it reached him. He admired her face in profile, the way she lifted her arms and let soap bubbles forming in her hands roll down her arms. He leaned forward to fit her against his chest. For a moment he let his chin rest on her shoulder.

They were the same temperature, warmed by bathwater. Under his chin, her shoulder matched the temperature of his skin, under the water, his hands moved over skin that was no more or less heated than his own. There was a time when he fantasized about what they could be if they were on their own. No Angelus and Darla, just like those first few days of his unlife when his whole being was completely engaged with the wonder that was Drusilla. Disliking Angelus was a reflex. It only went so far.

There was a symmetry and logic to their interactions that he recognized. Darla made Angelus and for a century that was enough. Then Drusilla was made and in her madness and devotion, completed what Darla lacked. Drusilla made him to make up for what Angelus was unable to provide her. He found and kept Willow because she provided something that Drusilla could never give him.

He thought that it was sanity. Or distraction. Or the exotic attraction of a warm, fragile mortal lover preserved for his amusement. There was something more to it, though. In a strange sort of way she chose him, without even realizing it. When he brought her to Angelus' room, she was more his of her own choosing than when they were alone.

After their bath, Drusilla rose, dripping water on the floor, ignoring the towels to go rummage through Willow's things in the bathroom. She experimented with the facial mask and the ointments and skin creams that Willow created for herself.

"Shall we wake her up?" she asked, coming back to the bathtub where he remained, soaking in the waning heat of the water. "You can close your eyes while I whisper that I love you and pretend it's her saying it," she smiled knowingly. "I do that. Angelus loves me. I know. William says it, but in here," she pressed her fingers against her temples, "it is Angelus."

She raked her fingernails over her thighs, bringing up oozing furrows of reddened skin and blood. The lucidity that she had briefly achieved was splintering.

"Say it," she demanded as he got out of the tub and started drying himself off. "Say it. Say it. Say it," she chanted. "I'll carve it out of her chest for you," she was reaching for the door that connected to Willow's room when he grabbed her around the waist, picking her up and carrying her into her own room while she rubbed herself against him. "I love you," she said and then laughed.

He wanted to tell her to stop.

"We are a tangle," she told him. "Drawing tighter and when it comes together," she snapped her teeth together. "You can tell us apart. As if it matters."

Willow woke up with dried tear tracks on her face and the inescapable feeling that everything had changed. She found herself looking to see if she was still alone in her room, and then to see if anyone had visited in the night while she slept.

There was no evidence of it. She got up and started to go about the business of getting ready for the day. The bathroom was a mess. The floor was wet, and the bathtub was full of cold, dirty water that made her shudder when she pulled the plug on it. Wet towels had been left on the floor. She washed her face and cleaned her teeth before gathering up the wet towels and depositing them in the hamper. Mr. Buttons scratched at the connecting door from Drusilla's room and after a moment of hesitation, she opened the door to let him out, shutting it quickly.

He shot through the bathroom and into her room and she followed him, going to her wardrobe to pick out a dress to wear. Her gaze kept shifting from the mirror on the dressing table to the door to her bathroom. This house was less of a maze than others they had occupied. Places where rooms connected to other rooms and the hallways were ignored in favor of passing through the occupied spaces. She almost preferred it the other way, when she thought it was better to know where they were, when she could count on someone to draw her back from the impulse to do something stupid.

When she finished dressing and putting her hair up, she left her room to go downstairs. A bundle of mail had been left in the foyer on a table that held a silver bowl that was starting to tarnish. In the kitchen she found Matilde making up what Willow thought of as a fake breakfast tray for Darla, who liked her dainty cups of hot, strong, bitter chocolate in the morning. She had cut tulips from the garden that were too big for the narrow cut crystal vase on the tray, rendering the arrangement slightly awkward.

Without comment Willow found a taller, more substantial porcelain vase and filled it, wondering if the truce that had been established last night would hold. Matilde accepted the substitution, replacing the vase with the one Willow selected, and hefted the tray before looking at her in a semi-critical way.

"You've made a mess of putting your hair up," she observed in passing.

Willow grimaced at her retreating back. She was carrying the tray down the hall to the salon, which meant that Darla was awake and would be down soon. Intent on avoiding her, Willow decided to forego heating more water for tea and settled for a glass of water and bread smeared with butter for her breakfast. Wrapping it in a napkin, she went to the library with her meal and the mail and found Angelus there, sitting behind his desk.

He took in her bread and water breakfast and the mail tucked under her arm in a comprehensive glance before gesturing to a corner of the desk were a chair was positioned.

Feeling somewhat relieved by his lack of attention, Willow sat, placing her glass and the bread in the napkin on an immaculate corner of the desk, before turning her attention to the bundle of mail yet to be opened, read, and sorted.

Mail for Darla she left unopened since she preferred to keep her correspondence private. Invitations and social correspondence was generally addressed to Angelus, as were the bills from tradespeople. There was a bill from the furniture dealer for the chaise William had purchased for her room, less the consignment on the settee it replaced, and a commission for the re-sale. Bills went into a pile that would be addressed with a note to their bank to pay the bills out of the household account, and she felt a stab of regret at not having thought to ask the shop keeper to hold back the consignment from the bill, leaving a cash balance that she could have retrieved in person.

Working out ways to skim money off the household accounts had kept her busy for years, though in practice, she was careful not to indulge the impulse. Behind an unlocked door in a drawer was a fortune in jewelry that she could make use of when she made her escape.

Thinking back over the last few days, she looked up at Angelus. Darla would write a note to their hostess complimenting her on the party last night, but the night before, Angelus, Drusilla and William had dined at the Hamilton's. A note and a small gift were in order.

"Should I write a note to the Hamiltons?" she asked.

A small smile twitched at the corners of his lips. "Yes, do that," he said, seeming amused for some reason.

William came in while she was putting her hair up again, and stood in the bathroom door, leaning against it as he rolled a cheroot between his fingertips, possibly aware that he was facing a long day with a slender supply of tobacco at his disposal. He brought it to his lips and strolled over to the fireplace to find a match to light it. Mr. Buttons ran over to him, sniffing the cuff of his trousers, and he pushed the dog away with his bare foot.

"I thought I'd take him to the park," Willow said.

From the tone of her voice, he understood that she was asking a question. He had barred her from walking during the day before he knew what potential threat her acquaintances from the park posed. Now that they had a social context, and no connection to the assault on the house, he supposed that there was no real reason to keep her confined to the house and the grounds.

"I thought I'd ask Darla if she has any errands."

He flicked ash into the cold grate. "Errands are for servants," he said, watching her pin her hair up. "We should get some."

"I did," Willow reminded him. "You killed them."

Her tone of voice was flattened with something. Resentment? Anger?

She was wearing the gray silk banyan again. "If she sends you into town, buy some cigarettes for me," he said, watching the silk smooth over her back as her arms dropped to her sides.

Or possibly the resentment was directed toward her hair. She was scowling at the mirror, prodding at a lump in the twist of her hair and repositioning a hairpin. He considered it for a moment and decided that she had probably been reminded to feel guilty about the dead servants.

"I'll need money and directions."

It wasn't an unreasonable request. "Go eat something. I'll find you," he said, taking himself off to see Darla. He found her in her room, still in bed, but awake. There was a tray on the bed with a pot of chocolate. It was the kind of thing he might have told Lucius to bring to Willow when he wanted to be indulgent.

"This is novel," Darla greeted him without looking up from a letter she was reading.

The bedroom was part of the master suite, connecting to Angelus' room across the hall by a dressing room and a bathroom. Angelus' room was dominated by white and gold. This room was darker, the walls covered in red silk.

He sat on the corner of the bed, uninvited. "Willow is going out," he announced. "Do you have any errands for her?"

She looked up. Objectively, she admired the picture he made, lounging at the foot of her bed, half dressed. "Drusilla and Willow need new dresses. She can make an appointment for the dressmaker to come here," she said. "I'll want to see fabric samples."

He nodded, looking around the room. "I'll tell her."

Darla smiled. "Bring her back with them when she returns," she ordered.

His eyebrows lifted at the tone of her voice. Instant obedience was never one of his virtues. He thought about it, weighing it like it was a request before nodding his assent.

She went back to reading her letter. It was a missive from her sire. Angelus had been a kind of declaration of her independence from him and he accepted it with remarkable grace when he could have destroyed her and her little family. They corresponded regularly. His handwriting was oddly neat and orderly. He used a writing machine that mirrored his handwriting to make a true copy of his letters, keeping their correspondence private.

She had written to him before they left Lisbon for Vienna and Prague and again after they had been introduced to the vampires who lodged in Zlata Ulicka. This letter came between those two and it was full of gossipy tidbits about the region. As usual, there was no hint of interest in her little brood, unless she read between the lines. He had no purpose in sharing what he knew about the region, potential rivals, and possible snares other than to lay that knowledge at her disposal.

She closed her eyes for a moment, conjuring the memory of the dank underworld of Berlin. Arrested in eras that were crushed under the relentless press of time, were vampires that had been made by the Master and his followers. She came and went as it pleased her, assured of welcome when she returned to stand at his side. No visit with her family had gone well, but it did not preclude the possibility of returning again.

When she opened her eyes, William was gone. He knew what she wanted Willow for. He would refuse her. He would find some way to out of it. His rebellions were consistent and carefully calibrated. She wondered if he would ever choose, as she had, to test the limits of what would be tolerated for the sake of what could be discovered by making up rules as you went.

He went down the back stairs, barefooted, looking for Willow and paused at the foot of the stairs. Willow was in the kitchen, but she was not alone. Lucius was there with a book open in front of him, sitting at the workbench. Matilde was watching Lucius with an expression that was less resentful than usual. Willow had her back to him and didn't realize that he was there.

The book was her Baedeker. Lucius was explaining how to get to a shop where she could purchase his cigarettes, reminding him that he had forgotten to retrieve his wallet. He shrugged it off as he came through the door. "Make sure she has enough money, for a hack and anything she needs to buy," he said, passing that responsibility on to Lucius as he approached Willow, slipping one arm around her waist and ducking his head to nuzzle her throat where it was exposed above the collar of her dress.

She hadn't bathed this morning, probably due to the mess left in her bathroom. "Darla wants you to stop at the dressmaker and arrange for her to come here. She wants you to bring fabric swatches back with you."

Lucius reached into a pocket and started counting out coins for her.

"I can take the trolley," she said.

"Not with the dog," Lucius countered before William could point that out.

Her idea of a meal consisted of toasted bread with a bit of jam smeared on it. A tiny bit of the jam clung to her upper lip and William turned her face up to him to kiss it away, seeing a hint of confusion and distress in her eyes.

He had an idea of what was causing it. He kissed her again and picked up the jam smeared butter knife lying on the side of Willow's crumb laden plate. He twirled it with a flourish thinking of George Hamilton's startled face before he brought the dull point down hard, pinning Matilde's hand to the table. Men fight. Women scream. The responses didn't actually change after death.

Matilde's shriek of pain was abruptly cut off when he slapped her hard enough to get her attention.

"I'm busy right now, but you and I are going to have a short conversation. I'll be doing all the talking," he told her. "Don't go anywhere," he said breezily, taking Willow by the elbow and directing her faltering steps to the hallway.

"What did I tell you last night about bringing problems to me?" he asked.

"I didn't do anything," she insisted. "I just thought about it," which was true and very disturbing, in her view. She had just thought about it and felt the power to make her will manifest gather. That wasn't natural.

She tried to pull her elbow free and stepped on her skirt, stumbling a little. He gave her a little shake. "Willow?"

"What?" she looked shaken. "How . . ." she looked behind him, and answered her own question. "Lucius," she said.

Without bothering to check to see if he had followed them, William gestured to the foyer. "Make yourself useful and get her hat and gloves," he said, moving toward Willow. Lucius passed behind him as William backed her up against the wainscoting under the staircase. "When I tell you to do something, I expect it to be done," he reminded her.

Resentment flared to life in her eyes. "It's done and sorted out. You are going to ruin it," she predicted.

"Ruin it?" He braced one hand above her head, the other lifting her chin. His thumb traced her jaw.

Willow tried to gauge his mood as his thumb reached the corner of her mouth. She turned her head enough to kiss it, resenting him for the gesture that was calculated to mollify. His fingers nudged her chin higher, tipping her head back. For a moment they stood there, locked into a silent battle. She was probably right about having sorted something out with Matilde that his interference would undo. That wasn't the point. If he couldn't trust her to obey such a simple injunction, she wasn't going out.

"I want to know if anyone speaks to you, in the park. Do you understand me?”

Her chin dipped slightly. "Yes, William," she said, sounding like she had already figured out that she was going to acquiesce.

He placed a soft kiss on her lips. “I like it when you call me Will,” he reminded her.

She stared back at him. "I'll keep that in mind. Maybe I'll do that when I manage to teach Mr. Buttons to heel."

He pinched her chin. "Clever," he complimented, backing off to secure her hand, escorting her to the door.

Lucius had her hat and William took it from him, setting it on her head. It was an Italian straw bonnet dyed gray to match the dress with a bit of black satin trim. It framed her heart-shaped face. She accepted her gloves and a small purse from Lucius.

Lucius had gotten out the leash and was snapping it on Mr. Buttons' collar. The dog barked, springing up as he realized that he was going for a walk with his second favorite person in the world as Lucius passed the leash to her.

She was disconcerted. Two spots of color stained her cheeks. William smiled at her fondly. “Don’t be too long, sweet,” he admonished.

But she surprised him when she looked up at him and seemed to realize that he was enjoying her reaction. Lucius opened the door for her, carefully stepping out of the way of the sunlight that the open door allowed in. William could feel it crawling over his skin until she shifted to block the light with her body. Her lips moved soundlessly.

Idiot, she called him, and then she smiled, pulled to the open door the dog was bolting through by the tug of the leash.

He was grinning at the sight of her, one hand clutching her skirt as she maneuvered down the stairs, the other fighting the leash as the dog leapt ahead of her when Lucius started to shut the door. Angelus was coming down the stairs. She always hiked her skirt up just a tiny bit too high.

"Willow is going out?" He stood at the landing, resting his arms on the carved wood rail to watch from a less sunlit spot as she wound the leash around her hand and tried to pull the dog back while she opened the gate at the foot of the walk. The dog whined piteously at the restraint and she shook the leash loose again and got pulled through the gate for thanks.

William let Lucius shut the door. Pale wisps of smoke rose off his skin. Angelus smiled at him beatifically. "Remember that time in Bath when I had you chained up and Drusilla played with the drapes?"

William turned his head to look up at him. He pretended to consider. "No. Was it good for you?"

Angelus laughed. Drusilla had left him in the sun long enough to cause his skin to smolder and then she would let them down and Angelus tasted the heat coming off William's skin, licking his nipples until he was lost in the sensation for a few moments before Drusilla threw back the curtains again.

"Where is your precious girl off to?" Angelus asked.

"Errands," William told him, completing the turn to walk back to the kitchen. Angelus waited until he was passing the landing and vaulted over it to crash into him, slapping one hand across his chest.

While Lucius watched, they grappled with each other. Angelus was bigger and stronger but William was more agile and quicker. They backed off, not entirely relaxing, swaying a little as they moved to leave no opening.

Angelus feinted and lunged at William. Anticipating the move, he ducked, threw his shoulder into Angelus' midsection and nearly managed to sweep his feet under him before Angelus grabbed the hall table to check his fall.

The violent movement sent a hand-painted vase spinning to the lip of the table, tipping over, and William dove for it, catching it before it hit the ground.

Angelus looked up the stairs to see if their scuffle had drawn any attention. "Good catch," he complimented, straightening. William returned the vase to its proper resting place and rolled his eyes when Angelus smacked the back of his head as he strolled past him to the kitchen.

He found Matilde where William had left her. She could have unpinned her hand, but she had decided that the safest thing to do was to wait and try to figure out if she was really in trouble.

Angelus tilted his head to one side. "Maybe I was hasty about that whole railroad spike phase you went through," he mused as William joined him. "Are you going to start making your way through flatware? Can I expect you to fork your victims next?"

William cast him a withering sideways look at the taunt and forbore to comment.

"What has she done?" Angelus asked. He sounded mildly interested, but not enough to interfere, which neither Lucius nor Matilde understood.

William shook his head. "I don't know. I forgot to ask, and you know how Willow is. 'Little Miss Go Along and Get Along'" he shook his head. "Doesn't work that way. Eventually someone decides to make themselves an object lesson," they had switched back to English, so Matilde was unable to follow any of this.

With a slight thrill that tingled in his spine, Lucius was. It wasn't just the words that were starting to make more sense, it was the whole package. Intonation, the body language. He found himself absorbing impressions of William, from the arrogant lift of his chin to the indolent indifference that was expressed as he traced the outline of Angelus' handprint on his chest.

His lessons in English had been terminated as soon as the household was reorganized, but he still had his books and exposure to the language that was used to exclude them. 'Object lesson' rolled in his head, interestingly terse and yet full of meaning and menace.

The park was empty Willow discovered. In fact, the street had been quieter than usual. She would have expected to see trades people, like any other day, but there had been none. She was a little late. Getting out of the house had taken longer than expected and she thought that William had changed his mind at the last minute when he had been staring at her with what she recognized as a need to impose his will on her tempered by his version of affection.

He had been teasing her. For a moment she thought that he had figured out that she had something to do with his vastly depleted store of tobacco.

Was it a holiday? There were holidays, not exactly like she remembered with school let out and the mall, the movie theatre, and Bronzing to pass the time. Of course, she was twenty-four now. She should be graduated from college by now, with a job or grad school, or maybe both, and her holidays would have changed.

Where was everyone? Where were Harry Wyndham and David Giles? Had she, in a fit of madness, imagined the whole conversation last night? She could have sworn Wyndham understood what she was saying. She couldn’t exactly say, I want to help the Watcher’s Council and I’ll tell you everything I know, but we have to get as far away as fast as we can. Vampire. Enhanced hearing. What little she did say could have been construed in a lot of ways if they were overheard.

On the other hand, Watchers Council operatives had not struck her as being geniuses in the other time that she had encountered them.

She was walking downhill toward the ornamental pond, when she finally saw them. Relief washed through her, so much so that she felt a little dizzy and had to step off the path for a second to catch her breath. Her hand rested on the rough bark of a tree, and on the edge of her awareness, she could have sworn she felt something, like adrenaline, but without the pounding heart.

She was sure that they saw her too. Harry started to raise his hand to wave, but David caught it before the motion was complete and they turned away, walking in the direction of the north gate.

"Okay," Willow muttered to herself, wondering if she was supposed to turn into 19th century stalker woman and follow them. She looked down at the dog and stooped down to unhook his leash.

Granted freedom, he didn't catch on immediately. He jumped up to try to lick her face, muddy paws scrambling for purchase on her silk dress.

It was a stupid idea, she realized, looking up to watch the two retreating figures before fumbling with the dog's collar to reattach the leash. She tried to ignore the way her heart was beating sickly in her chest, hollow with disappointment and a certain amount of dread.

"If this were Sunnydale and one of Spike's skanky, not-yet-dead girlfriends showed up at the Bronze to give us the poop on Spike what would we have thought?" she asked Mr. Buttons.

He danced around in a circle and barked a couple of times.

"Yep," she nodded. "We would have thought, not so fast, sister," she said sadly.

It wasn't true. Not even remotely, and she knew it. Spike didn't have girlfriends. He just had Drusilla, until he didn't and he didn't seem to have the least idea of what to do except get her back. And they would never have given up on anyone that easily.

"We've got errands," she reminded the dog.

"I knew she would come," Harry said. He wanted to stay and find out what she had to say.

David didn't. The fact that she had returned to the park confirmed that she had a freedom of movement that bore some consideration. A note had arrived that morning from Emile requesting a meeting at lunch. Harry insisted that they visit the park on the chance that she would come there again. David agreed to that, but insisted that they would not approach her. They left early for lunch and made a circuit of the park. David had been ready to leave when she appeared.

"There she is," David agreed, scanning the trees behind her. The chances that a vampire in broad daylight shadowed her were nil, but he had no intention of speaking to her. Harry started to lift his hand to wave at her and David caught his arm.

"No," he said, shaking his head. "We are leaving."

"She knows that we've seen her," Harry protested. "It's rude."

David snorted at that. "Unpardonable," he retorted. "What the hell is she up to?"

Harry muttered something about staying and asking her that very question, and then subsided. "We've learned so much from just watching."

"Was that sarcasm?" David glanced over his shoulder. She had made no move to follow them and was bent over petting her dog. "She has freedom of movement during the day," he pointed out. "Which means that she is trusted by notoriously untrusting creatures."

"You think it is a trap?" Harry concluded.

David gave him a sideways look as they left the park. "Trolley or cab?" he asked, forbearing to ask how Harry was holding up on his bad leg.

"Cab," Harry said.

"I'm not drawing conclusions. The interesting thing will be if she comes back," he said. "We won't discuss it with Emile."

"He could help us," Harry argued.

"And he might even appear to," David said dryly.

The remainder of Willow's day was more eventful than she anticipated. She went to the shop Lucius provided her directions to and purchased cigarettes for William. After that task was discharged she went to the dressmaker's shop to schedule an appointment and collect fabric swatches for Darla. Mr. Buttons' presence was tolerated for the sake of the anticipated size of an order, promptly paid for. It made Willow feel slightly guilty, like she was committing a form of extortion. Little dressmaker shops like this one were facing extinction. It was already happening. Ready-made clothing was cheaper and the quality was improving, creeping into the realm of haute couture.

The underpinnings of day and eveningwear were mostly mass-produced now, cutting into what was once a part of a dressmaker's trade. Accessories like scarves, cloaks, gloves and hats were also being made on a larger scale. In twenty years a shop like this would no longer exist. This wasn't a great mystery unraveled due to her understanding of the future. People whose only answer to it was to try to work harder to retain the customers they had understood that the world was changing.

She was offered a glass of wine, which she accepted. Mr. Buttons got a small bowl of water while they waited for Madame.

She was taking her first sip of the wine when the Princess Stazari arrived, waving off a shop girl who offered to fetch Madame for her. She walked into the small parlor Willow occupied with a friendly smile on her face. "I saw you in the window, and made my driver stop," she said, as if they were old friends.

Astonishment made Willow pause with the wine glass half way to her mouth before she remembered that she should stand up and attempt a curtsey. She was getting up while the princess was moving to the settee to sit beside her.

"Don't," she gave a spare shake of her head. "Not that I don't secretly enjoy it sometimes," she admitted with a small smile, "but I can see I caught you by surprise. You left early last night, and I hoped that we would talk more."

"Uh . . . hello," Willow put in lamely. Mr. Buttons abandoned his water dish and tried to slip past her to investigate the newcomer. She snagged his collar and made him sit.

The princess waved to her driver. "Please take Miss Grant's dog for a walk while we visit," she entreated.

The driver collected the leash from her and pulled Mr. Buttons across the slick floor a few feet before he got the idea and obediently scampered after him.

"Adorable," the princess said.

"Not really," Willow gestured to her grass and mud-stained skirt.

She was answered with a conspiratorial grin that reminded her of having Buffy to make grumbling comments to.

"I am glad that I saw you," the princess went on. "Staz suggested that I invite you to tea, but this is so much better."

Not so much like Buffy, she decided. Maybe more like Cordelia. Who was more likely to marry a Prince and give him a cute pet name? Focus, Willow, she scolded herself.

Before she was required to say something semi-intelligent, Madame arrived to greet her and ask if she had been made comfortable while she waited. Recognizing her cue, Willow said that she had been made very comfortable and introduced her companion before taking refuge in her wine glass.

The open bottle and a tray with two more glasses and assorted pastries was carried in as the dressmaker perched on the edge of her chair to pour and then to ask Willow what brought her to the shop.

She relayed Darla's request.

An assistant was dispatched to the cutting room to obtain fabric samples. While they waited Madame offered to show Willow, and by extension, her companion, some sketches that she had made after their last fitting.

She was finishing her second glass of wine before they were finished. It wasn't until they were outside the shop and the princess was insisting that they would drive her home that Willow realized what was so unsettling about all of this. It wasn't just the odd behavior of the Watchers in the park, it was the way this woman was trying too hard to be nice to her. It made her want to ask Buffy the one question that she had never asked her.

Why?

The driver brought Mr. Buttons back to her and opened the carriage door for the Princess. An afternoon of pretending to be someone she wasn't loomed before her. It was, in a way, preferable to being exactly who she was.

Once she settled in with Mr. Buttons at her feet, quiet for the time being, the princess asked where they were taking her.

"Have you ever been to Zlata Ulicka?" Willow asked instead.

A tentative smile appeared. "It's nothing special," the princess said. "Do you want to go there?"

"Do you mind?" Willow asked.

"Not at all," she answered.

In another life, William had been surrounded by servants. The servants in the home he had occupied as a human vastly outnumbered the family. They functioned independently and in concert with the family, performing their duties around their own mysterious order. Chambermaids and footmen came and went, but the core group, the butler, housekeeper, his mother's maid, his father's valet, remained the same. They were the enforcers of order.

There had been a saucy chambermaid when he had come home at the end of term when he was fifteen or sixteen. She found reasons to dust or tidy things in his room or the library when he was there. The attention was obvious, flattering, and a little intimidating. It was also a kind of test. It wasn't so much that his parents took a dim view of abusing servants so much as the cadre of servants that maintained the order of the house took a dim view of it.

His virtue remained intact through the break.

One of the things he recognized almost at once when they arrived was that a similar order had coalesced amongst the servants Willow had assembled. Lucius was the most obvious keeper of that order. He was the dominant personality. Matilde and Cook were partners. Willow would have been horrified to know it, but she had chosen well when she picked them. Out of the group that they had initially turned, only one proved unmanageable; the rest were competent, maintaining the patterns established in the household before they were turned. The house in Prague was the smoothest functioning household that they had enjoyed. Normally such a large number of newly-turned vampires would have been halved by now. Someone would have displeased Angelus or neglected some task that Darla demanded of them, or made the mistake of thinking that Drusilla wasn't to be taken seriously. Willow's presence was its own invitation to a loss of control.

When they left Prague, William thought it was likely that they would keep the lot of them. In a roundabout way he owned two homes in England. There was the Charlotte Street house and a manor house that his father had spent a decade refurbishing in Suffolk. In autumn he would take Willow to London for the trip that she had been promised. They would go to Suffolk for Christmas.

He intended to ensure that he had a stable, secure environment for Willow's last days as a mortal and her early days as a vampire. She wasn't Christian, but she got wistful around Christmas. He made a mental note to find out more about the Jewish observation of Hanukkah. This little household that she helped to create was going to be a part of that and it was high time that they got that through their thick skulls, he decided.

Still pinned to the table by the knife that was buried in the table, Matilde waited. It was a little ridiculous and she was aware of that, but she remained where she was. Her gaze flicked to Lucius who was leaning against a counter, watching this with a slightly puzzled expression.

"You might have thought that this was an inquisition," William said, sounding patient, "but I'm not interested in who did or said what to whom."

She sensed another more compelling presence entering the kitchen from the backstairs. Darla. Her head started to move to the right.

William snapped his fingers. "Look at me when I'm speaking to you."

She went absolutely still while she waited for Darla to intervene.

William shook his head. "If I think that you aren't capable of paying attention, I stake you," he warned her.

There was dead silence. Angelus was sitting on a stool, watching all of this with a small smile as he paged through the book Lucius had left open on the counter.

She didn't want to look at William. There was a voice in her head that howled that he was the least of them and not to be considered.

If Darla had stood behind him she could have pretended, but she stayed just out of Matilde's limited range of vision, and she was forced to look at him. He had his thumbs tucked into the waistband of his trousers. His uncombed, unruly hair stuck up in places. He might have been mistaken for a mostly undressed boy, but his expression was deadly serious.

"I would have freed myself by now," William told her. "The difference between you and me is that I would have gotten away with it. You won't. It is unfair, but that is one thing you will discover that life and unlife have in common. Fair doesn't enter into it. Right now the only thing keeping you from a dustbin is the fact that you are doing what I told you to do."

Lucius frowned at that, his gaze shifting from Matilde, who looked furious and confused, to William, who was infuriatingly relaxed.

"There are two ways this ends. You decide that complying with unreasonable demands is beyond you, free yourself, and try to carve my heart out before I stake you," he held his arms apart, presenting his chest with the livid handprint over his heart as a target. "No one would stop you."

For a moment Lucius closed his eyes, knowing that it wasn't true. Angelus and Darla might not, but as the muscles tensed in the back of his neck, he knew that he would, without understanding why he was certain of it.

"The other way this ends is a bit more complex," William told her. "It is a matter of accepting an underlying principle, and that is always more difficult."

Drusilla had woken and wandered down the backstairs to join Darla. Without invitation, she wrapped her arms loosely around Darla's waist and let her chin rest on her shoulder, dark eyes drinking in the tense little game being played in the kitchen.

"It's like a play," she murmured to Darla, a smile in her voice.

The presence at her back, the loose embrace, made Darla tense with a distaste for being touched that lingered. It didn't go unnoticed. Drusilla kissed her cheek, making a shushing sound and Darla let herself relax fractionally, turning her head to look at Drusilla. She had pinned her hair up away from her face, leaving the length of it to fall in uncombed waves. She was wearing William's discarded, wrinkled shirt, unbuttoned over a skirt that was banded at the bottom in three rows of red velvet over brown wool. It was part of a traveling dress with a smart little fitted bodice and a fur trimmed hat.

Darla had come down to the kitchen to find her maid. She wanted a bath and her hair dressed and while she was capable of doing these things for herself, she preferred to have them done for her and was annoyed to be required to go looking for her maid. She didn't know if William was simply bored and toying with Matilde or if something had happened that had prompted the confrontation, but she had not been inclined to interfere.

"I don't make unreasonable demands that can't be met," William said. "You could stand there all day. It isn't that hard. Pain? It's insignificant. Making yourself stand there, when you don't want to, when you think that you shouldn't have to is the hard part."

Harry watched the smoke from Emile's cigarette hang in the air and then dissolve only to be replaced by another thin cloud of smoke when he exhaled. They were meeting at the same tavern, outside in full sunlight that made him feel uncomfortably aware of how tired and warm he was.

He was starting to consider the possibility that he would never regain the full use of his injured leg. Sipping warm beer, his stomach churned as the memory of looking down at the injury he had suffered came back to him. Shredded cloth, skin, muscle, and the gleam of something that he understood to be a part of his kneecap, the only thing he recognized in the disorder of his mangled leg, made him feel the sweat dampening his skin congeal.

David and Emile were engaged in a polite exchange of carefully-edited information. It was nothing that either party would not have discovered on their own. David's account was a summary of the evening spent in the company of the Scourge of Europe. Emile's news consisted of the discovery of a human heart on the doorstep of the mission. Harry picked at the bread that was on the table, rolling the soft inside of the bread into balls that were buttered with sweat.

He was convinced that David's gamesmanship in the park was a tactical error that would have consequences for all of them. This was what happened when the hunters became the hunted.

“It could be bait for a trap,” Emile was saying.

“Or a warning,” David agreed. They were meeting in their usual place, outside, under the chestnut trees over warm, bitter ale.

"Traps are interesting things," Emile mused.

For the three men at the table there was one obvious conclusion. The quarry was aware of the mission's other activities. David wondered if there was a connection between the girl's conversation with Harry and her subsequent appearance in the park and the grisly discovery at the mission. He couldn't discount the possibility that this was all an elaborate game for the vampires and that the girl was simply more bait. If she was bait and she was as valuable to them for reasons that were not yet clear as he suspected, then it was a trap that probably placed her at low risk.

It was possible that she had her own agenda and he and Harry had to sort out how they might answer that before they were confronted with it. Harry's original idea of simply abducting her, reckless and potentially dangerous as it was, now struck David as workable. If they made any type of contact with her again, allowing her to return to the vampires' lair was out of the question. They had to have an exit strategy in place before that could happen. He briefly considered engaging Emile's assistance and discarded the notion. If they did take her alive she had the potential to be an asset of nearly incalculable value to the Watchers' Council, a position the Order of St. Ubaldus was likely to adopt as well.

A little fieldwork was in order tonight. David was curious about what Emile would do now that the mission appeared to be compromised.

Zlata Ulicka during the day gained charm and lacked mystery. A small smile played on the princess' lips as they strolled over the cobblestones with Mr. Buttons obediently walking at Willow's side, apparently having been walked by the driver into a state of compliant exhaustion.

Willow knew that she wasn't good at making the dog mind her. She tended to try to reason with him. She wasn't firm enough. When she had told William that she would remember to call him Will when she taught the dog to heel had been a roundabout way of asserting that she was no more trained than the dog. It wasn't true. She was starting to feel nervous already about how long she had been away from the house and what the consequences might be.

The carriage ride across the river had taken longer than she thought it would and it was late in the afternoon when they arrived. Late enough, with the sun slanting down over the rooftops, that there was sufficient shade for a vampire to stand in an open doorway watching them with a certain amount of curiosity. Coming here was a mistake.

"You've been here before?" the princess asked.

"Once," Willow answered.

"I don't believe in coincidences," her companion remarked. "My husband's family estate is in Walachia. It has been a sanctuary for gypsies since his grandfather's time. There is a woman who lives here who is a Rom–"

"Terese," Willow blurted out the name, startled.

A delighted smile was her answer. "There are no coincidences. We must have something in common that led to these connections," she concluded. "We are Americans in Prague, and of a similar age," she pointed out.

"I see what you mean," Willow nodded. "Not married to a prince with property in Walachia," she pointed out dryly. "Just interested in witchcraft."

"Hmm. Really? That's an interesting hobby," her new friend commented, sounding like she did not share that as an interest.

Willow made herself concentrate. "My cousin does not approve," she admitted. "He's very close-minded about anything connected to the occult."

"What about your young man? Mr. Crawford? What does he think of it?"

Having overheard some of Darla's conversation with Mr. Giles about a wedding, she was curious about the relationship.

"William?" Willow was trying to figure out if the impression that William had an opinion about her that was significant was one that had been fostered or one that her new friend had simply formed. "I don't know that he cares what I do," she said.

The princess looked puzzled by that, so Willow hastily added, "He's not the sort of person who makes you feel that you have to organize what you are interested in to please him."

Her expression cleared. "That's a nice quality. He seemed very pleasant."

A headache was forming behind her eyes and she mumbled something in agreement as the princess suggested that they visit Terese. It was precisely why Willow had suggested Zlata Ulicka as a destination, but she didn't believe in coincidence either.

Where was the rat-faced boy? Had she imagined him the other night? "I should go home," she said. "I have a bit of a headache."

"Then a cup of tea before we leave is just in order," the princess said, patting her arm.

Matilde was still standing in the kitchen with her hand pinned to the table as Cook started preparing supper for Willow.

Cook had warned her about this. They weren't one of them. They weren't part of what they were together, and in a very definable way, Willow was.

Lucius made a new list for the grocer to deliver after sunset. She had been beaten and sent to her room without being allowed to feed. It was easier than standing here, pinned to the table in a way that she could effortlessly end. Paulus was sitting on the stool Angelus had abandoned, looking at her like she had done something very stupid.

When Lucius spoke, Paulus' attention shifted to him and he appeared to be giving what he was saying greater consideration than he used to.

"When they go out together, they pretend to be a family. The way they did the night they came. It's a lie. We know that. We know what they really are. Darla made Angelus who made Drusilla who made William. Vampires. No different from us? Except in this: they are a family. They hold to that. I thought that it was something about the making of them, but I don't feel it. Not really. Neither does Cook. You think you do," he said. "But if it exists, it exists only for you."

"I think she's a part of the fiction that is the family because they can't support it without her. It is too much a part of the way they are with each other."

"And they hold together," Paulus concluded.

Lucius gave a brief nod. "I think so. How could she have survived so long if they did not support it?"

Paulus shook his head. "It's too complicated," he complained. "I don't understand it."

"Understand this: Darla values obedience. Angelus values usefulness. William values loyalty. Drusilla values nothing. Be what you have to be, and leave the girl alone. It is one of the things they agree on."

Terese and the princess, who was now insisting that she be called Maggie, were having tea while Willow talked to Arik in his workroom. Her headache had grown worse as the day grew later and when the chamomile tea did nothing for it, Terese had suggested that she consult with him.

She found herself telling him about the headache as well as the peculiar way that her magic was behaving inside the barrier wards.

He made her describe them again. It was an advanced bit of spell-casting, but he couldn't see any flaw in how it had been executed. She did not mention the other spells binding the house, like the reversal of the invite that she had executed. He made up a headache powder for her without opiates and suggested that she burn sage and larkspur for a general cleansing.

"You might want to try a magical colonic," he added, reaching for a book and jotting down the ingredients and incantations, giving her a semi-apologetic and embarrassed look. "You'll need to be near a body of water for this," he warned her. "A simple bath won't do. Spring fed water is best."

She read over the instructions. All the ingredients that were required were ingredients that she had on hand.

Dosed with the headache powder, Willow was able to relax into the cushioned seat of the carriage as they crossed the Charles Bridge at sunset. The view out the window was spectacular. Living so long among vampires she rarely had the opportunity to appreciate such sights.

"It's a long way from Quincy," the princess commented on the view.

Willow couldn't bring herself to think of her as Maggie. Princess Maggie. It sounded absurd. They had nothing in common. The few people that she felt any connection to since she had entered this century were all dead. The one thing she had in common with them, with Jane, Lucius, and Matilde, was that they lived in an unforgiving world and hadn't managed spectacularly to get by.

Seeing the grimace that contorted Willow's face, the former Margaret O'Connor patted her new friend's hand, thinking that it was her headache and feeling guilty for keeping her from home when she was feeling unwell. "You should close your eyes and try to relax," she advised.

Willow managed to nod, relieved of the pressure of making conversation that made sense.

It was twilight when they reached the house and the driver handed her out, carrying her parcels behind her as he followed her up the walk. She was a little surprised when Andreas opened the door for her. In a picture of cozy domesticity, Darla and Angelus were in the salon with Drusilla sitting at the piano and William was strolling into the foyer from the kitchen. She thanked the driver after Andreas relieved him of her packages and waved from the door at the princess in the carriage as they drove off.


Chapter Twenty-Eight

"Who was that?" Darla wanted to know.

William was less curious about that point. "That was the longest walk in the park on record," he grumbled as Willow took off her hat and gloves. "Where in the name of hell have you been?"

He had been busy for most of the afternoon, but after he got cleaned up and dressed, it had occurred to him that Willow had been gone longer than could be reasonably expected.

She bent down to detach the leash as Drusilla swept in to collect her dog, scooping him up. "Did you have an adventure?" she cooed to him.

Willow found the package with William's cigarettes. "Here," she said. "I didn't mean to be out so long." What she really wanted to say was something along the lines of 'I'm tired and I'd like to go lie down,' but she didn't really expect to be let off so easily.

He manufactured an interest in the bag that he didn't feel. "Here," she said, sounding too anxious, too eager to please, which didn't pacify him in any way. It should have. It only reminded him that she had compared herself to the dog to make a joke at her own expense, or a point that he felt more than a little annoyed about.

"Who was that?" Darla called out again, a bit more insistently.

"Princess Stavarski," Willow answered her. "I met her at the dressmaker," she hefted the package of fabric samples and preliminary sketches the dressmaker had provided her with and took them into the salon to give to Darla.

"You look a bit peaked," Angelus observed.

William followed her, leaving the bag on a table in the after he removed one wrapped packet of cigarettes to open. He paused to look at her. She looked tired.

"Headache," she said. "I'd like to–"

"Go lie down," William finished for her, only it was an instruction. "Your supper is waiting, but you can have it in your room. I'll bring it up," he offered.

Darla looked at him. This wasn't what she had in mind at all, and it didn't bother her that Willow was tired. "We will look at these later," she agreed, tempted to make her stay, but didn't say anything to stop her.

Willow retreated to the temporary sanctuary of her room as William lit a cigarette and Darla complained about him smoking in the salon. She felt something. It was like the pressure of silence, pressing against her mind as a teacher waited for an answer, except it was more intrusive and she was determined not to blurt out an answer to an unknown question. It was the house, or the magic binding the house, which was hers, trying to find her. She found herself walking to the window, pushing the heavy drapes aside to look down on the ruined garden.

Without recourse to memory she knew exactly where she buried the crystal that defined the boundaries of her ward. She felt it against the pit of her stomach. She had subverted the laws that bound the natural world. There was something out there that was evil and twisted and it was something she had created that knew her intimately.

And it was power, waiting and wanting to be called on. Power that reminded her that she wasn't helpless. It was power that rubbed up against the numbness that she had enveloped herself in when the watchers turned away from her in the park; power that could be used to punish them for ignoring her.

She flinched at the sound of the door opening from the hallway, half expecting to find William there, but it was Drusilla, with Mr. Buttons tucked under her arm as if he was as weightless as a stuffed animal.

"There were no cakes today," Drusilla told her.

The mention of food made Willow feel a little light-headed from hunger. She had hardly eaten anything today. She wanted to replace the hollow feeling at the pit of her stomach with something warm and sustaining. Was this what it felt like when they were hungry? Was it hunger for more than food, but for the comfort of filling themselves with something warm and sustaining?

She let the curtain fall and turned to face her . . . what? What was Drusilla to her?

She put the dog down and nudged him away from her with her foot. "It's the hairpins," she said. "Pressing too hard, holding things up that are meant to fall down."

Willow decided not to look for any deeper meaning, rejecting symbols and the featherweight of her own twisted work pressing against her. "My feet hurt, too," she said.

Drusilla cocked her head to one side, smiling sweetly, "And you smell," she put in, without a shred of malice, her nose wrinkling.

Willow was in the bathtub when William let himself in to her room. Drusilla was in there with her. There was another parcel on the bed with her purse; from the scent of the parcel he knew that she had made a visit to Zlata Ulicka. She was becoming too independent, despite the appearance of submission laced with resentment. Darla noticed it, too. He didn't mind it so much when it was directed elsewhere. He willed himself to be pleased that she had done no more than stay out later than expected.

The dog was on the floor, mouthing the leather of the half boot she wore for walking, watching him with the expectation of being ejected from the room. William sat on the end of the chaise and snapped his fingers at the dog. He wasn't the first pet that Drusilla had been given, but so far he was holding the record for longevity, balanced between Drusilla's continued interest in him and Willow's willingness to keep him fed and watered.

The dog had turned his head to watch him, interest sparking in his eyes, tail thumping on the floor with growing enthusiasm. He probably thought that resisting the appeal in William snapping his fingers was a kind of game, only he was playing with someone that wouldn't hesitate to snap his annoying neck. In that respect, Willow had nothing in common with the dog.

She emerged from the bathroom in a dressing gown that belonged to Drusilla. When the bathroom door opened, the dog abandoned her boots and scampered around her in the doorway to scratch at the connecting door to Drusilla's room. Drusilla opened the door enough to let him in while Willow pulled the door on her side closed, cutting off the draft of damp, fragrant steam that had been leached from the bathroom.

"Cook will bring a tray up," he told her as she went to her dressing table to sit on the bench, picking up her brush to work out the tangles in her towel-dried hair.

Everyone was on company manners tonight, Willow thought. It was a whole day of extra normal behavior if you didn't count the watchers who had seen her and decided that they didn't want to speak to her.

While she waited for the tray to be delivered, William moved from the chaise to her bed, lounging on it, rummaging through the contents of her package from the magic shop. He shot her a somewhat expectant look. "Visit to the stinky herbalist?" He picked up one of the small glass vials filled with the headache powder. "What's this for?"

"Headache," she said. "I had a headache. I thought I'd try something different."

"Where did you get this?"

"I went back to Zlata Ulicka," she said, relatively sure that he had already figured that out.

Her eyes went to the mirror. With her hair wet, she looked older to herself in a way that never failed to shock her. It wasn't a good mirror. There was a certain amount of cloudiness in it that she realized that she had sought.

"I went to Zlata Ulicka," she repeated, making herself concentrate on anything but the mirror. "The way the shadows fall there, no direct sunlight for a good part of the day, and no lurking vampires. Vampires, yes, but not lurk-y ones. I wasn't alone and no one bothered me," she summarized, cautiously shifting on the bench to turn toward him.

He looked annoyed. "That's good to know, I guess," he allowed. "Are you out of your mind?"

She gave it serious consideration. "I ask myself that on a regular basis," she said with a hint of sarcasm creeping through.

He picked up the spell that Arik had copied out for her. The moment she walked into the house she had felt her magics crawling over her skin in a distinctly unpleasant way. She wondered what he made of it, but there was a knock on the door announcing the arrival of her supper tray.

He called out to Cook to enter. Concluding that he was probably carrying the tray, Willow got up to open the door. Hesitating only momentarily at the threshold, Cook brought the tray in and William told him to set it on the bed. Moving the tray to the other side of the bed, William tugged the linens down.

"Get in bed and have your supper, love," he invited.

She put the hairbrush down on the dressing table and moved to the bed and arranging the folds of the robe to accommodate sitting with her legs crossed. Her dinner was soup and bread, which was about all she wanted at the moment. Simple, uncomplicated, unambiguous comfort food.

The note was still in his hand and William gestured with it. "What's this?" he asked.

She opened her napkin and spread it over her lap before picking up the soup bowl. Spoon be damned. She blew over the surface of the soup and cautiously lifted the lip to her mouth to drink from the bowl.

Something about that struck him as humorous and he smiled. "Hungry?"

The lip was too broad to accommodate the way she was using it and she had to put the bowl down and blot her soup mustache. "It seemed more direct," she muttered, picking up the spoon. The soup was delicious.

"Pet?" he waved the note to remind her that he was waiting for an answer.

"Cleansing spell," she said, casting a wary look at him. "My magic is all . . . weird. I can feel it grabbing at me at odd times. It's worth trying."

He read the note, eyebrows lifting. "There's the pond in the park," he said, reading the underscored, 'body of water' notation.

She looked at him briefly before dragging her attention back to eating. "I want to try it tonight."

That might put a crimp in Darla's entertainment for the evening. He had an idea of what she wanted. She had largely ignored Willow for the first few months that he kept her, and then one lazy afternoon he had woken up to find Darla sponging blood and sweat off her body. He had come to bed drunk and used Willow to take the edge off of his drunkenness.

When Darla was satisfied that she was clean, she had rubbed oil into her skin. Malnourishment and abuse had left her skin white and papery, and while he watched, dozing, seeping in the heat of her body warming the bed, he watching her skin become supple, pinkening under Darla's ministrations with growing interest and appreciation.

Darla was almost always direct. Angelus was the master of the teachable moment.

She didn't kiss her, or bite her. Fully dressed, hands covered in crocheted gloves saturated with oil, she touched her everywhere while he imagined those hands on him. His introduction to Darla had come at the lowest point of his unlife.

"Nothing belongs to you," Angelus had sneered, and William had thought that they were talking about Drusilla, watching from the bed where she had been doing things with Angelus that William thought were reserved for him.

He hadn't believed it. He believed he could change it. Beaten, he knew what was coming. It was the lesson. Nothing belonged to him. Not Drusilla, who had watched them fight and had done nothing to help him. Beaten, he would watch his sire, the miracle that was his first lover, his impious and unholy bride, go to the winner, and he couldn't blame her for it anymore than he had ever blamed Cecily for turning away from him.

But that wasn't what happened at all.

His body hardened at the memory of Darla's oily gloved finger irritating and soothing his abused sphincter. Nothing belonged to him. Not even his capacity to resist. How many moments like that had he recreated for Willow, wanting her to understand that nothing belonged to her? He had only to look around at what surrounded her. Her room, her clothes, her books, and he savored the notion of them being hers. But only because he allowed it.

He watched her eat, imagining her hunger magnified until there was no difference for her between the food she was putting in her mouth and him, shivering as he remembered how she felt, her skin hot and slippery as she lowered herself on his cock, weeping for the shame of wanting him. Of preferring his attentions to the cold fire of being cleverly manipulated while Darla told her that she barely kept herself fed and clothed when she was a whore, but when she was beyond her prime, she made her fortune this way, preparing a girl or boy who pretended to be innocent for a customer who pretended to believe it.

She did belong to him. She had started to fall asleep on his chest after he had come and as much as he enjoyed her warm body covering him, he had been unpleasantly aware that her hair, under his chin was dirty. Darla had caught his eye, watching them, expecting him to push her away now that he was done with her as well as the pretence that had been played out for his entertainment.

He started taking better care of her after that. Or demanding that she took better care of herself and providing the means to do that. There was a tiny frown pinching her brows together, and she looked tired and hungry, but in the gaslight her skin glowed and the waves of her drying hair shone. She was so beautiful, in her own way.

"We can do that," he agreed when she looked at him clearly waiting for him to comment. "Angelus has been harping on finding out what you can do outside the wards you set up to see if your theory about them interfering is correct."

She bit her lower lip. "I–" she took a deep breath. It was a cleansing spell, a spell that would be centered on her, and it felt personal. "Could we go alone? Just you and me?"

He studied her face for a moment, wondering if she was pandering to him, before nodding. "We can do that. Finish your supper."

Lying on his side with his head propped up on his hand, he watched her eat. Not unaware of his attention, the scrutiny was making her nervous. Wary. His eyes narrowed, watching the way the gaslight behind her brought out the darker auburn parts of her hair as it dried.

"How did you happen to meet the princess?" he asked, changing the subject.

She tore off a piece of bread, dunking it in the soup. "I was at the dressmaker's shop, waiting to be seen, and she came in and," a tiny frown appeared before she shrugged, "She's probably rich?"

William wasn't sure why she asked. "Probably," he agreed.

She nodded. "So . . . the dressmaker wanted to show me the sketches she had, and normally I would have–" she made a face. The odd thought that she had about facilitating the patronage of a small business owned by a woman wasn't something that he would understand. "Darla doesn't care what I think about clothes. We looked at the sketches, and had wine and pastries. Oh! And she had her driver walk Mr. Buttons and I think he did something to him because he sort of heels now."

She ate her soup-saturated bread. "Was that fun?" He tapped the glass of wine on the tray to draw her attention to it.

She shook her head. "Headache-y. No more wine for me," she declined. "I don't know. It was weird. I don't always know who to be," she tried to explain. "Um . . . I'm interested in magic? Angelus doesn't approve."

William grinned. "I suppose not," he drawled. "He was very pious with that missionary rot last night."

She tilted her head to one side. "Then that was probably right," she concluded. "She asked what you thought about it, and I said that I didn't think you cared." She shook her head. "She looked like she didn't think that made sense."

"Hmm? Ah," he nodded. "Angelus alluded to an 'understanding' existing between us." At her blank look, he elaborated. "An understanding that we are going to be married, love."

As soon as he said it, he wished that he hadn't. She got a very strange look on her face. "No," she shook her head. When William first brought her to London to rejoin the older vampires, before she had any idea that he was a younger version of Spike, she had woken up, starving to find herself face to face with Drusilla in a bloodstained veil. William had been lounging in bed, peppering Angelus with questions about a wedding Angelus had interrupted. "No . . ."

Stung by the horrified look on her face, his lip curled in a sneer. "It's not like I went on bended knee and asked, now is it?"

She sucked in a breath. "It's not going to happen?"

"No," he was curt.

"I used to have nightmares about it," she admitted. "Blood everywhere," her eyes squeezed shut. "Screaming."

He was getting a mental picture. No hearts and flowers for his girl. Blood spattered flowers and real hearts. For a moment he didn't know what to say.

He straightened and picked up the tray, setting it down on the floor with a rattle of flatware and dishes before coming back to her, smoothing his hands over her cheeks, slipping one hand under her hair to rub the back of her neck where the muscles were taunt and unyielding under his fingers.

"I'd never let that happen," he said, and he meant it. More or less. If she ever managed to get away from him and thought that she could give herself to someone else . . . he'd make her nightmares a bedtime story before he was through. He had crashed a few weddings in his time with Angelus, and he would never leave her stranded at an altar while people died around her. His fingers worked at the tension in her neck and he kissed the top of her head. "Sssh. No wonder you have a headache. You are so tense."

"You promise?"

"I promise," he assured her, shaking his head as he nudged her over in bed to get in beside her. "I was angry with you for being out so long," he told her. "It's hard to think of rotten things to do to you when you come up with something worse to scare yourself with," he complained.

"I knew that you would be mad," she admitted.

"Did you?" he kneaded her neck.

"I had your cigarettes," she pointed out.

He let his chin rest on top of her head as she started to relax against him. How much of the day had she spent balanced on the fine edge of awareness that he would be annoyed with her for extending her absence? "And then there was that."

"Go to sleep. I'll wake you up later."

It was hardly the first time that they had snuck off on their own in the middle of the night. For a while, it had been a bit of a habit. He would come in a few hours before dawn and take Willow out for a few hours. There had been a hotel rooftop in Paris. Stargazing with actual stars until the first streaks of light broke over the horizon. They had been out alone in the early morning hours in Lisbon when they had been ambushed. Vampires brought stakes and crossbows to a fight with vampires. The shot fired at Willow had been from a gun. Someone had noticed their late-night wanderings and come prepared for her.

First-rate thinking, really. Once she was down and bleeding, she would slow him down, or distract him, except that he had understood exactly what had to be done and nothing would have stopped him from seeing it through.

She was snoring lightly in her sleep. His cigarettes had been left across the hall in his room, but even after she was asleep he stayed, running his fingers through her hair. He was a little surprised that they had been left undisturbed for such a long time. Drusilla came in on her way out with Angelus and Darla. When he asked her to get his cigarettes for him, she answered with an indulgent smile before wandering across the hall as requested.

She came back with cigarettes, matches and a candy dish he had been using for an ashtray and he kissed her fingertips while she smiled at this new game of hushed voices and silent, meaningful gestures and turned down the light before she left them.

He dozed off at some point and he was back in Lisbon. Walking in the street, alone. She was out there somewhere. Hiding. He had told her to hide, but he had forgotten to tell her not to hide from him. He had to find her first. He had to find her before it was too late.

It didn't happen that way at all. He had known exactly where she was. The smell of blood, the harsh sound of her pain-constricted breathing had been with him, like a metronome to measure out fight and flight.

She woke him up when she started to shift away from where she was lying against his chest, and he loosened his hold on her to let her find a more comfortable position. She ended up on her side with her chin digging into the inside of his elbow until he moved to slide his arm out from under her.

It was approaching midnight when he woke her up, spooning behind her, his lips finding the soft warm spot under her ear. He thought for a moment about simply stripping her of the robe and making love to her while she was still half-asleep and the house was quiet around them, but she avoided his lips when he tried to kiss her mouth and mumbled something about needing to go to the bathroom.

She looked less than alert when she shuffled into the bathroom, but when she emerged and got dressed, tying her hair back, she was awake. There were things that she needed from her cellar and while she got them he made a visit to the weapons locker to get a crossbow and a knife.

The spell called for blood. Hers. He was taking no chances in the event that she drew unwanted attention. Cook and Lucius were in the kitchen, which was cleaned and restored to order. He largely ignored them as he got a plate of thinly-sliced turkey from the icebox and made a sandwich and wrapped it in a napkin and found an opened bottle of wine cooling. Weeks ago he had some idea of a picnic in the park, and he kept putting it off, or finding it in conflict with something else.

He gave Willow the sandwich when they met in the foyer. She had a cloth bag slung over her shoulder to carry her supplies.

"Do you really think that this has to be done tonight?" he asked when they were on the walk.

"Uh huh," she nodded. "I can't go around losing control when I get angry."

"Is that what happened last night?"

She paused, looking up at him. "You know about that?" She shook her head. "Of course you know about that. Lucius," she reminded herself. "Nothing actually happened, but I could feel it building up, trying to get out," she shuddered.

"And?"

"And what?" She took the hand he extended to her.

"Got yourself a little power, love. Don't tell me you don't like the way it tastes."

She thought about that for a moment. "Power," she tested the word. "Power that pokes at you in places where you think you could kill people."

Vampires were not people, Matilde was not people, except that they started to seem like people if you were around them long enough, Willow realized. Nor was it just vampires. When she had been standing at the window, she had been thinking about people. It reminded her of Amy, who had seen magic as an advantage that she had over people, even if she chose not to use it indiscriminately.

"I'd chose control over power," she said instead. "Does that make sense?"

For her, it did. For a somewhat graceless woman, she managed to walk an unimaginably treacherous tightrope. "Let's get this done."

From the window in the dining room, Darla watched them head off in the direction of the park. She had stayed in tonight. She fingered the fringe on the drape. She had spent a part of the evening looking at the fabric samples and patterns that Willow had brought from the dressmaker. It was a task she would have preferred to have company for. Angelus could be counted on for an opinion, but she was still annoyed by his aborted attempt to turn Claire Hamilton.

Drusilla's interest in the patterns had immediately turned to her vast collection of dolls.

That left Willow or William, or both of them, but they had slipped out of the house. She considered summoning Matilde, but she wasn't entirely out of charity with William's notion that her hostility toward Willow required containment even as she was aware that her own behavior had fostered the sentiment. She wasn't required to be fair and consistent.

Drusilla's dog appeared in the foyer, whining softly, possibly at the realization that he had somehow been left behind. Darla walked to the pocket doors, watching him for a moment. He was lying on the floor on his back, rolling back and forth, and shedding silky white and brown hairs on the rug. When he sat up, she saw what inspired the violence. Drusilla had pulled tuffs of his hair into small topknots tied with bows that ran from the back of his neck to his tail. The loathsome little dog looked up at her, panting slightly.

He lifted a paw and waved it at her. When that got no response, he flopped over on his side and started rolling back and forth again. Cook, leaving the kitchen, spotted the dog and walked down the hallway.

"Where is his leash?" Darla found herself asking.

If the idea of Darla walking the dog to any place other than a shallow grave or a dustbin seemed unlikely, Cook gave no sign of it as he found the dog's leash and attached it to his collar, half-expecting that he would be the one walking the dog. With an odd little smile, Darla took the leash from him and left the house with the dog.

Cleansing spells were less about incantations and appeals than clarity and focus, Willow decided as she held her bleeding hand over the water. She concentrated on breathing, in through her nose and out through her mouth. Her hand throbbed, but she found that the pain was more tolerable if she didn't think about it. The fresh air was clearing her head. The cold sweat that she had broken out in when her body reacted to the bite of the knife drawn over her palm was leaching out the poison of alcohol in her blood stream.

She had not drunk to excess, so the effect was fairly subtle but the focus that she was gaining seemed to expand her senses. It was a cleansing spell. It made perfect sense that any alcohol that remained in her system would be forced out. Her nose wrinkled at the slightly metallic scent of her own sweat with an undertone of onions, probably from the soup she had consumed.

When her hand stopped bleeding, she felt a twinge of disappointment but checked the impulse to make a fist to squeeze out a few more drops. If the spell was meant to do more than purge her system of impurities it would happen before she stopped bleeding. She reached out beyond her candle, feeling no resistance, no sense of breaking the circle that she had made and put her hand into the water to rinse the last of the blood off.

Her vision swum. She saw herself touching a clouded mirror, brushing away dirt and grime to see herself as she really was, wavering in candlelight, growing young and old before her face changed, rippling into a vampire's game face. She saw herself, not quite human nor vampire, her face leached of color, eyes black, hair turning black as she sucked power from the earth and was filled with the bile of things that rotted and spoiled.

There was a part of her that recognized that power. It was the power to unmake the mistake that had brought her here.

She saw herself in a room that she didn't recognize, sitting on a floor inside a circle reciting a spell that she instantly recognized without understanding where it came from. "Control the outside, control within," she heard herself say and her heart leapt in her chest. That was exactly what she needed.

Clarity and control. A spell that made her will manifest.

When her hand touched the water, her body convulsed. William saw it out of the corner of his eye. He had turned away from her ritual, distracted by the sensation of being watched. They were not alone in the park.

This wasn't part of the spell he had taken time to read. Whatever was lurking about would have to wait. She was crawling into the water, disappearing into it headfirst, the silk of her gown floating on the water for a moment before he reached the edge of the water and then sinking in the weight of the water, just beyond his grasp.

He went in after her, feeling for her, and then shifting to his nature state, eyes opening in the murky darkness of the water, full of silt churned up from the bottom. For a moment, he couldn't see at all, and then he realized that he was looking for the wrong thing. The gray of her dress was too hard to pick out. He looked for bubbles, for the air escaping her lungs. The water was ridiculously shallow, hardly four feet deep where she was curled up on the bottom. He had the stray thought that only Willow could manage to drown herself in a shallow pond before he reached her, feeling her fingernails rake his cheek as she fought him.

"Something has gone dreadfully wrong," Giles told her.

Willow sat up, staring at the thing in front of her. A black box that showed her reflection, framed in pebbled white plastic. She stared at it stupidly for a moment trying to remember the word for it. Her hands were lying on the keyboard and the processor squawked at the confusing input from her hands when they pressed down on the keys. She flinched at the sound.

Computer.

She looked up and saw that she was in the library. "What?" she looked around in stunned disbelief. Was it that simple? It wasn't exactly click her heels three times and she was whisked home, but it was close.

"Where am I?" she asked.

He crossed his arms over his chest. "We haven't been able to determine that as yet," he said in a tone that was full of annoyance and regret.

If this was another dream, it was the cruelest one yet. "But you are trying?"

"Insofar as we can, Willow," he frowned at her. "You keep changing things. You wished that there were no vampires and caused Buffy to cease to exist. I didn't believe you when you told me about her, but then you unwished it. My bloody diary reads like Kafka–were you planning on meeting him? If you stick around long enough–"

"No," she shook her head. "It's another stupid dream. You aren't making sense. Spike will show up next, and–"

"Already here, pet," he interrupted, behind her on the stairs.

"Like the proverbial bad penny," Giles grumbled. "You are remarkably consistent in including him in your adventures," he scolded.

Spike squatted down next to her, handing her a folded handkerchief that felt real enough. "Your nose is bleeding again," he told her. "Actually, it's you that doesn't make any sense, love. You keep wishing yourself into having things that have repercussions, and then unwishing them. Just tell us what you did and we'll figure out a way to undo it and bring you home."

"You aren't supposed to be here," she said.

He titled his head to one side. "At least that wasn't a wish," he said dryly, "Or I wouldn't be here." He took the handkerchief from her and held it to her nose, tipping her head back. "But, I'm always here. I guess that's better than 'I love you, too' but, I'd settle if you had a mind to say it."

His tone was dry and sarcastic, but his eyes were searching her face and she felt the subtle pressure of his expectations. He could have tortured her and made her say anything, but he had not–William had not.

"I'll give you a wish for anything but that," she said rashly.

He smiled crookedly at that.

"Where are you Willow?" Giles pressed.

She looked at him, pushing Spike's hand away from her face. "Prague. 1898. It was a spell–"

"We know that. A spell to have your will done," Giles told her. "And we know about Prague. Where are you right now? What did you do?"

"Bloody hell, she's fading again," Spike said.

"No, that's good. She doesn't belong to this reality. She has to return to where she cast this spell and undo it. You have to stop," Giles told her. "It isn't the answer."

Darla stayed on the groomed path, letting the dog lead her. She wasn't sure what she expected to find in the park. She was curious about what they were like when there was no audience to influence their behavior. Years of compelling Willow to indulge his tastes had only served to narrow what William was willing to demand of her.

She realized that she admired that.

She caught a glimpse of them through the trees, near the edge of a pond, lighting candles and stilled to watch as the dog tugged on the leash and then sniffed around the base of a dogwood. It was not a tryst. It was magic. A spell cast with William's apparent complicity or possibly at his insistence. She had never approved of Angelus' encouraging Willow's interest in magic and felt that William was even more skeptical of it than she was.

What were they up to?

Pond water bubbled up and poured out of her mouth. William rolled her over on her side, feeling her heart beating sluggishly. "Breathe, damn you," he swore at her. "I'll beat you half to death for this you stubborn, stupid bitch. No more magic, do you hear me?"

He shook her and she convulsed again, her legs folding in on her chest as her body fought to void the contents of her stomach and God only knew what else. He had never seen vomit that glittered black in the moonlight and instinctively, he pulled her heaving body away from the mess, not wanting any of it to touch her.

He was wiping her face off with a handkerchief when she blinked and realized where she was. The handkerchief was real enough. Drusilla embroidered enough of them. Real, she thought dreamily. All real. She could wish herself back, even knowing that for some inexplicable reason she would wish a version of William back with her.

"Even when I try I can't imagine a world without you in it," she whispered, closing her eyes.

A strange sound escaped him, something halfway between a frustrated grunt and a laugh. "It's not 'I love you, too' but I'll–"

Her eyes flew open, "settle," she finished for him, and then shivered. "Mega, maxi weird," she muttered, grimacing at the foul taste in her mouth as she struggled to sit up.

He stared at her, startled by the way she had finished the thought, unnerved by the odd tone of her voice when she said that she couldn't imagine a world without him in it.

Fractured moments trickled through her consciousness. Time stood still. She wished for no vampires and eliminated Buffy but not William, who was mortal in her memory. She wished to return home and found Spike there. It didn't happen, but it could happen.

She felt him lifting her to her feet and then she felt him go still, listening to something, muscles tensing. In Lisbon, he had been there every time she opened her eyes, just like this, alert, aware that there was something out there he could destroy, choosing to stay with her instead.

Did she do these things or did she dream them? Was Giles aware of what she had done and trying to bring her back?

It wasn't the answer? What did that mean? The answer to what exactly?

She rested her hand on William's shoulder and a clammy trickle of cold water ran down the back of her hand. "You are soaked," she said, confused. "When did that happen?"

His hands tightened under her arms, shaking her a little. "Less than a minute after you went into the pond," his voice was hard. "What was that about?" he wanted to know. "What the hell were you thinking?"

She closed her eyes. "It's complicated," she muttered, pushing against his shoulder to stand up. "Let go. I can walk."

He rose with her, his hands on her arms in case she was overstating. She swayed a little when he let go of her, but she didn't fall. "Very weird," she said, puzzled by the outcome of the spell. "I don't feel any different."

He wasn't listening. "We need to get out of here," he said, eyes scanning the park. "There is something out there."

"Animal, vegetable or vampire?" she asked, going back to her circle. For a second dizziness swamped her senses. The candles had extinguished themselves and the acrid smell of the smoldering candlewicks made her feel slightly nauseous. Wind whipped through the trees.

"Oh, crap," she muttered, wondering if the spell was through with her. She felt so weird. Her body was sending conflicting signals to her brain. She felt like she needed to drink something, throw up, and pee, pretty much all at once.

She made herself concentrate on picking up the candles. She started picking them up, stuffing them into the bag she had carried with her aware of a growing ache in her lower back that felt familiar and foreign.

When he didn't answer her at once, Willow looked for him and found that he was gone, probably off to find an answer to her question.

The confessional was the only confined space that had never felt claustrophobic to Drusilla. Her fingernails scrapped the latticework of the grille that separated her from the priest. There was a lovely hum of voices in the background, like music. She no longer had anything to confess, but the quiet of the confessional made her feel pure.

Angelus liked the ritual. He wanted to hear the words.

"Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned," she whispered for his benefit.

The world was a terrible place. She had known it before she had taken her terrible place in it. The petitioner's side of the confessional sang with terrible things made equal in the perfume of guilt and fear that was soaked into the polished wood and worn leather of the stall.

She had lost her virginity in the confessional. Not to man or worldly beast, but to the violence of her own hands violating her own body. She swayed as she considered whispering that sin to the priest, feeling her triumph over the creature that tormented her as if she were still human and sane.

She cocked her head to one side, her attention caught by the sound of clothing rustling and the strangled, pleasured sound of a man's voice biding her to continue.

A slightly sullen expression settled on her face. William was more polite. He always asked her if she wanted to eat first. She rubbed her tummy. She wasn't particularly hungry, but that wasn't the point.

"Drusilla?" Angelus prompted.

Her hands shaped the wood separating them, her mind wandered. She smiled at the idea of confessing that her confessions were made up.

There was another strangled gasp from the other side of the confessional.

She ignored the priest. He wasn't paying attention to her. Closing her eyes, back arching as her head fell back, she savored the images that played against her eyelids, backlit by the glow of a single candle left in the petitioner's stall. The banality of stale sins whispered to her. 'I lied . . . I cheated . . . I stole," and she savored the unspoken yearning to explain it, to give it reason that mocked contrition, to be forgiven despite being unable to forgive. It was all so delicious.

She saw them. Darla was standing in the woods under a tree, watching William and Willow. Drusilla had a fleeting sense of restlessness that flickered with the light behind her eyelids. She growled softly in the back of her throat. William cancelled out Darla, so strong were her impressions of him, hard and bright and primed to kill. He was gleaming like the blade of a knife, unable to see the blood on his hands as he congratulated himself for not killing Willow all at once.

Willow was a kaleidoscope. Humanity gave her a capacity for change that they lacked. She tumbled and whirled, always changing. Drusilla saw a sweet-faced woman child version of her with darker hair, looking solemn and slightly chastened that made her lips draw back into a silent snarl until she was replaced by an older version with sweetly-soulful eyes, alien in a vampire's visage.

More beautiful and terrible than they had any right to expect. There would be hell to pay when she understood that.

Her fingers grasped at the air as she cast her net further. Prayers. Priests. Silly plotters, plodding along in the mud of their imagination. She knew what needed to be done.

When she emerged from the confessional, Angelus was waiting for her. She paused to open her purse and drop two coins in the offering plate before she slid her hand inside the crook of his elbow and stepped daintily over the two dead bodies left in the aisle.

"Did you light a candle?" Angelus asked.

"I lit them all," she confided. "Such a lot of concerns I have," she pouted prettily, reaching out to dip her fingers in the holy water at the door.

Angelus caught them before she could complete the gesture, giving her a sideways look to remind her that she wasn't to touch things in church.

"Will we bring flowers for the girl?" Drusilla asked, wondering if they would go to visit her grave.

"Maybe another night, princess," Angelus said.

Or not at all, she decided. Maybe another night usually meant not at all. Which meant that the girl wasn't coming out of the grave to live with them. "I didn't like her," she confessed, her nose wrinkling.

If he sought the satisfaction of inspiring jealousy, Drusilla was more likely to provide it than Darla. For that matter, so was William. He wished that he hadn't grown impatient with Claire. He could have kept her around longer.

"Where are we going?" Drusilla asked.

"Anywhere you like," he answered.

She tilted her head to one side, eyes closed as she sampled the air, searching for something. "I know where there is a party," she said, turning to walk backward, eyes shining as she tugged Angelus along. "Someone is going to wake up and they will be ever so hungry, but there will be no cakes and tea for them."

"Why not?"

"You'll see," she caroled. "Such a surprise for everyone."

Emile held a stake in his nicotine-stained fingers, waiting patiently, staring at the boy laid out in the front parlor. The other boy, the one whose heart had been removed from his chest would not wake, but this one might. He had gotten his neck broken, so even if he did wake, he would be unable to do anything but lie there, helpless, unable to move. If he was fed, he might heal, but that wasn't going to happen.

The mother was sitting beside the coffin, dressed in a hastily-dyed black dress that smelled of the dye that had been used. She had a bible clutched in her hand; once white, it was stained by perspiration from her hands. He suspected that she probably carried it on her wedding day and possibly intended for it to be placed in the coffin with her son's body when it was buried. The expression on her face was stoic, but her eyes were angry and confused.

Her husband was standing nervously at Emile's side. "We'll never get over this," he said, thinking about his wife.

"You will," Emile said, masking the irritation that he felt. They had other children. Older children with children of their own who had crowded into the house earlier in the day to mourn.

He thought he saw something out of the corner of his eye. The involuntary ripple of facial muscle. He took a step closer to the coffin and turned to the few relatives and friends left in the room, looking to the priest who had come with him.

Interpreting the signal, he cleared his throat and invited the mourners to leave the parents with the deceased for a moment just as the doorknocker sounded. The woman who went to the door was the husband's younger sister, a widow who boarded with them. She invited the couple on the doorstep in, not recognizing them, explaining in a hushed voice that they had been invited to wait outside the parlor for a few moments.

She missed the look that was exchanged between them as they crossed the threshold. She noticed that they slipped inside the parlor before the doors were closed, and shook her head, trusting Brother Emile to usher them back out after they paid their respects.

David had chosen the park for the exercise in field observation because it was close and they were known to frequent the park. He really had not expected to find anything, which would confirm something he suspected about Prague in general and the Fanged Four in particular. Lesser demons would give the areas where vampires lived a wide berth. In many respects it was the exact opposite of Prague, where the German influence had trumped the Czech, and the two rubbed along together to create something splendid, albeit with a slight inferiority complex.

From what he had learned from Emile, the vampires indigenous to Prague were more parochial and territorial than the inhabitants of the city.

The exercise was more an exercise for its own sake. Harry's last real field experience had ended badly for him. He had pushed hard for them to take action, but faced with a real threat, he had been unnerved. It wasn't surprising and David was not inclined to take it as a fault, but he was convinced that he needed to get Harry out into the field as soon as possible so he could work out his own ambivalenceand, if not, so that he would have a better idea of his partner's limitations.

The last person or vampire he expected to encounter on the paths was Darla. They had no choice but to brazen it out.

William was back a moment later, "That prat from the party is limping around the park," he told Willow, not bothering to mention that he was with his friend, having a neighborly chat with Darla who was walking the dog.

What Darla was doing out with the dog on a leash was a question that was all too likely to be answered in his view. The nosy bitch had followed them.

Willow paused to look at him. "Is he still limping around the park?" she asked pointedly.

William's eyebrows lifted. "For the moment," he drawled. "Which reminds me–"

She shook her head. "No, I didn't speak to anyone in the park," she answered before he could form the question.

He took her bag from her. "But?' he prompted.

"I saw them," she said. "Leave him alone," she seemed to realize that it was a demand that might have been better phrased as a request. "Will . . ."

He caught her hand. "I'm not completely insensitive," he said, rolling his eyes, "you'll blame yourself. You'll think it was your fault."

He reeled her in, picking a wet strand of her hair off her cheek. "I didn't kill him, did I?"

She didn't answer. "I need a bath," she said instead.

"Do you think it helped?"

For a moment, she closed her eyes. As unusual, she had more questions than answers and nothing seemed to help her make sense out of anything. "Maybe," she allowed.

He didn't press and they made their way back to the house, which was probably the real test. Once she was inside, Willow waited to feel the subtle pressure of the wards. They were still there, but muted. She tried to decide what it meant as they climbed the stairs, absently rubbing the small of her back. The ache there was becoming more intense. William went across the hall to his room while she started her bath, the second of the day. She struggled out of her wet clothing. The dress was ruined. She fingered one of the flower-shaped buttons.

She had always liked pretty things, and there was no end of pretty things that she could have. She could even enjoy them if she didn't dwell on where they might have come from. This dress had been made for her, and some of the money that made it possible was from sources that were . . . she shook her head and put the dress and her undergarments in the hamper, refusing to rationalize.

She brushed her teeth twice to dispel the foul taste in her mouth and washed her hair over the side of the tub while it filled, feeling her belly cramp painfully.

She was lowering herself into the tub when William came in, offering her a glass of pale brown liquid.

She looked at it as she took it. "Whiskey," he identified the liquor. "Very much watered-down."

She sipped it cautiously as he undressed, clearly planning to join her in the bathtub. Before he turned down the gaslight jet, she noticed a fading scratch mark on his cheek.

He came to the tub and started to take the glass from her hand before he saw that it wasn't empty. "Finish it," he ordered.

She looked up at him. His hair was still wet and clinging to his head and the back of his neck where it wasn't sticking up in places. The tone of voice was more bossy than stern. She was eye level with genitalia. It was just there. A collection of parts that she was more than familiar with even in their relaxed state.

His hands moved to his hips and she found herself smiling at the picture he made. Bossy, and ridiculously boyish. His protest that he wasn't entirely insensitive came back to her now.

"Don't be dainty. Just toss it back," he insisted, wondering at the smile that flitted across her face, too charmed by it to question it.

She swallowed it down without making a face and he took the glass from her and set it on the closed lid of the hamper. There was a moment of confusion when he started to get in the tub and Willow tried to anticipate where he wanted to be. He usually preferred to have the higher end of the tub at his back, but he pushed her back against it and arranged himself between her legs with his back to her, moving down to the drain end enough to lay back and submerge his head. For a moment he relaxed against her, his head pressing against her stomach, momentarily taking the cramping feeling away.

Then he sat up, sending the water in the tub sloshing near the rim. He looked at her over his shoulder, a small smirk appearing. "Such a lazy thing you've become," he mock scolded. "Wash my hair. Scrub my back," he waved to her. "Get on with it."

Her stomach still felt crampy, but she wasn't tired, and she wasn't willing to spoil his mood even if it did make her feel guilty. She washed his hair and his back, and it felt so odd to do these things for him and to realize that her resolve to find a way to leave was in no way diminished. She was equally aware that she would probably remember this. Remember everything about how he felt under her hands as she washed his hair and ran the palms of her hands over his shoulders and back, leaning into it to knead his shoulders when he made a guttural sound of approval.

Her hands slipped on his ribs. That's all it was. Her hands slipped, but suddenly she was hugging him, gritting her teeth as the cramping in her stomach intensified. He untangled himself from her after a moment, ducking under the water to rinse the soap out of his hair, twisting around to face her. Wet hands unnaturally warm from the bathwater held her face as he sought her mouth, water splashing on the floor as it lapped over the edge of the tub.

William was in his own world of heat and lust. 'I can't imagine a world without you in it,' she said in the park and he didn't know what it meant exactly, but coupled with the way she had been touching him he was sure that it meant something. Drusilla seemed to hint that he would get some approximation of what he wanted eventually, but he wanted it now. He wanted it from her lips, from the warm, wet cavern of her mouth. His knee slipped on the smooth surface of the tub sending another ripple of water over the edge as his chest met hers.

Too hard, too hard. He knew it instantly from the way her breath gusted into his mouth, from the stifled cry of pain trapped in her throat. He braced one hand on the lip of the tub and opened his eyes, gentling the kiss until he was just grazing her lips, feeling them tremble under his.

"Something is wrong," she whispered, her hands moving down to her stomach.

His knee slipped on the tub, away from her, he recalled. "I didn't hurt you," he said, as much for her benefit as his.

Her arms were wrapped around her middle, a grimace contorting her features. She tried to draw her knees up, gasping. "Hurts," she gritted out.

Confused and slightly alarmed, he sat up on his knees and saw something like a dark wavering ribbon and flakes of something that looked like tissue or dried blood in the water. Her head fell back against the back of the tub with a thud, a low pain-filled moan clawing at his gut.

A student of behavior human and otherwise, Darla was not, but she was still willing to bet that there was something suspect about meeting David Giles and Harry Wyndom by chance in the park after midnight. They both smelled of fear, but Harry positively reeked of it. There was at least one simple explanation that had occurred to her. They were lovers and the park offered privacy that could not be gained in the house they were staying in. That was more likely than the idea that they knew what she was and that she could kill them both.

She was more curious about what she witnessed in the park between William and Willow. Mr. Giles insisted on escorting her back to the house, a courtesy that she could not very well refuse since she looked monumentally foolish for wandering around in the dark alone. He suggested to his friend that he should return to their lodgings or wait for him there in the park.

She did not invite Mr. Giles in, nor did he seem to expect it, waiting at the gate until she was safely inside the house. Lucius appeared and she flung the leash at him. "William?"

"Upstairs," Lucius nodded to the stairs.

They weren't in his room, so she crossed the hall to Willow's room. The lights were on and the bathroom door was ajar. She heard a long, pained moan from the bathroom and walked to the door.

William was climbing out of the tub when she came in, expecting him to snarl something rude at being interrupted. Whatever she might have said died on her lips. They had well-established patterns of behavior. She didn't like William and he returned the favor. On their best days they tolerated each other. On their worst days, when they were facing something that threatened them–their eyes locked.

A low cry, vibrating with pain and fear had him turning back to Willow. He started to lift her from the tub. "I don't know what's wrong with her," he said to Darla.

She did, though it seemed impossible. "Don't," she said sharply. "It's warm in there. Get a blanket," she told him, moving between the sink and the back of the tub and sinking down to wrap her arm around Willow's upper body to keep her from slipping. "Get a blanket," she told him.

He hesitated for a second, and then went to do as she told him for once.

Darla made Willow look at her. What appeared to be happening wasn't impossible, and before today Darla would have said that it was highly improbable. "You are having a miscarriage," she told her.

"It feels like it," Willow managed to say. "Spell," she gritted out. "Cleansing . . ." a harsh bitter laugh escaped her. "I had a miscarriage once," she admitted. "On a staircase in an awful place," her voice shook. "I was so . . . I hated it. I hated it," tears spilled down her cheeks. "I wasn't supposed to be pregnant. I wasn't supposed to be there! And I hated it," her hands were pressing into her abdomen so hard that Darla wouldn't have been surprised to see bruises.

The 'it' that she was talking about was a distant memory for Darla. It was the cruel cosmic joke of being used in an act of lust that unfortunately also begat life. She hated the baby she carried. She hated herself for carrying it.

"Oh God, I hated it so much," she whispered. "You can't imagine what I did to get rid of it."

Darla could imagine, but the words kept coming. "I almost had enough money. We went out every night. Every night. It was one awful thing that I had to do and the rest, to get the money, it didn't seem so bad compared to it. Jane would say, don't look at them. They aren't even people. They aren't anything but pennies to gather."

Darla nodded, stroking her hair. "She was right," she said, ignoring the tremble in her own voice.

"So, it was a lucky thing. Because I didn't have to pay to have it done. I just hated it and hated it and hated it until it . . . died."

The scent of blood was slowly reaching her. The bathwater was tinted pink with it.

"We went back out the next night," she said, so low that Darla almost missed it. "I–I don't understand that. There was a bottle on the floor and I could have broken it and used the edges. I thought about it. I think about it still. I thought it would be better if it was gone, and it wasn't."

"I hated what was left."

Darla stared at the wall beyond the end of the tub, feeling the stillness of her heart. Relishing it. Hate for the girl she had once been, the one who was dying from the curse of the trade before she was twenty-five years old thrummed in her veins.

She felt William behind her and wasn't sure how long he had been there. He had a blanket and towels. Darla shifted to sit sideways on the lip of the tub, effortlessly lifting Willow, holding her against her body. That got William moving. He put the blanket down on the hamper and started drying her skin. He hesitated only when he noticed the blood trickling down her legs and only then to look at Darla.

What she saw in his face wasn't unlike the night he came home with her bleeding from a gunshot wound in Lisbon.

He wiped the blood away and got the blanket to take her from Darla, carefully maneuvering around the door with her.

Feeling inexpressibly old, Darla got up and went to the end of the tub to yank the chain connected to the plug on the drain, watching the pink tinged water slowly swirl away. She used the discarded towel to mop up some of the water on the floor before she turned the water on to wash the nearly empty bathtub. The only reason she could have thought to give for doing any of these things is that they needed to be done and she had no intention of letting anyone she didn't trust do them.

Which was an extremely short list, she reflected grimly.

William returned to the bathroom to rummage in the cabinet before coming up with a brown apothecary bottle. "What are you doing?" Darla asked.

"Laudanum. It will calm her down. Make her sleep," he said tersely. He looked puzzled by something.

Darla felt irritation rise. He never failed to find a way to annoy. "You are welcome," she said tartly, picking his discarded pants out of the hamper and throwing them at him.

He put down the bottle to put them on. Before he could retrieve the bottle of Laudanum, Darla picked it up and returned it to the cabinet.

"She's crying," he protested.

"She's human. They do that," Darla shot back.

To Be Continued....