Spike handed her a bottle of beer. "Now, you go wriggle your sweet little box on the dancefloor, and in ten minutes you'll have your pick of punters. Can fuck anyone in this place you fancy."


"Except you."


"Except me."


She didn't like how he was managing her. How, in spite of her escalating levels of obnoxiousness—the verbal cuts she'd dealt kept reverberating back at her, putting the lie again to her notion that vampires had no remorse—he stayed on the whole magnanimous. A demon magnanimity that drew blood, left bruises, but then it wasn't all that different from the slayer variety.


"Quit pouting. Petulence doesn't suit you." He turned away from her, his lip curling as he raised his own beer bottle.


She didn't want to have sex with some random guy, either. But she'd run down her capital with him--he needed to drink beer and talk to women who weren't her, and she had to let him.


There were a lot of young men in this dance-hall/bar—tourists, locals, she heard a jumble of languages spoken. Some of the guys were cute—at least, they'd have been cute to the old Buffy, high-school Buffy. Right now they just looked like food, the kind you weren't eating because you were on some kind of crazy drop-dead serious diet.


But she danced, and as Spike promised, they came to her. Then she got caught up in dancing—she needed the movement, it wasn't as good as fucking or feeding but it was in the ballpark. Once in a while she'd look around for him, see him at the bar, chatting to some girl or other. Then she looked for him and he wasn't there. The man she was dancing with by then had managed to discourage other comers. He'd bought her drinks, given her long looks and smiles—he spoke neither English nor Spanish, so they hadn't had to talk—and now he was trying to lead her off into the shadows.


She didn't understand his whispered words, but she knew what they meant.


Knew that if they began kissing, she would end in devouring him. The certainty of this made her feel sick at herself, and tired, and desperate to just give in.


It took a little while to get rid of him—she had to act her sudden change of mind out big, and finish it off with a pointed shove before he really got the message. Then she had to endure his hollered curses as she walked away unencumbered, threading through the crowd, feeling along the air for the whiff of Spike. His scent was subtle, compared to that of the humans, but she was needy enough to parse it, to follow it out of the bar, across the square with its trickling fountain, down some narrow lanes to the water front.


Of course he wasn't alone. She could smell the girl, and when she got closer she could hear her, how she gasped, and giggled.


She sounded like she was being very well taken care of.


They were in a rowboat among a score of similar boats, pulled up on the rocky beach well clear of high tide. Buffy caught sight of Spike's yellow hair in the starlight, could see his head and shoulders, but not the girl he was covering, lying beneath him. She gave off a continuous trill of happy sounds. Sometimes he laughed too, low in his throat, and she could hear him murmuring, but not the words.


Though she knew what those were likely to be.


He knew how to give pleasure, and receive it.


How to do that without causing pain at the end. He'd let that girl go when they were finished, because of the chip, yes, but also because she was part of the world he didn't want to see ripped up and ruined.


The smell of his lovemaking, the sound, the sight of his head rising and sinking, brought her out in fangs. For a long minute she couldn't control her face; couldn't control the tight stab of sheer starved misery.


She fled back to the square, sank onto a bench, let her head sink down to her knees. She wasn't going to interrupt again, wasn't going to make a scene. That hadn't worked before, and it was pathetic, to act that way. Especially with Spike.


Spike. God, what was going to happen to them? How long could they go on like this, drifting around Central America, getting her from one nonlethal feed, one fitful sleep, to the next? Night upon night upon night of it, with nothing to look forward to.


Closing her eyes, stopping her breath, Buffy brought her focus inside. It was still there if she forced her mind to be quiet: that last little sliver of heaven. It was real.


But she couldn't inhabit it. And now she was separated from her soul—wasn't she?—she'd never go back there again.


Maybe her soul was there already.


Would Giles say that? If he was telling her sister what had happened to her, would he console her that way? That Buffy's body, her consciousness, was a monster, but her eternal soul was in heaven?


This whole soul racket seemed different, now she was viewing it from the other side. She'd been pretty sure before, what it was, what it did. Who had one and who went without.


Idiot. Who knew what a soul was? She didn't really feel any different since hers was supposedly gone—at least, not in the way she'd thought it would be at first. Freed of conscience. Free of everything except survival, the moment, like an animal. That could've been all right.


Instead, everything was still just hard, and weird, and bad. She wanted things she couldn't have and didn't want the good things that were offered to her.


Maybe that meant she'd lost her soul long ago. Maybe she'd lost it when she jumped off Glory's tower. Maybe even before that. It could have been leeched out of her bit by bit since she was called, by all the death. The death she made every day. With her hands. Like Spike described it.


Or maybe her soul was right where it always was. Maybe this was just the person, the soul, she'd grown up to be. A warrior, numbed out where she wasn't angry, cold where she wasn't cruel. Just a slayer who'd gone on doing the job too long. Been brought back from the dead too many times to be anything real anymore.


That seemed plausible. And being a vampire was beside the point.









When he dropped down at the other end of her bench, Buffy raised her head. "Where's your friend?"


"Saw her home." He frowned. "Where's yours?"


She nixed the inquiry with a jab of the hand.


"Want another beer or two before we go back?"


"Spike, I can't do this."


"You gonna pitch another fit at me because I got my dick wet?"


"Ugh. Crude much? No. This. The undead thing. I can't stay here with you.."


He cocked his head, regarding her through narrowed eyes. "If you really meant to fuck off into the night, you'd have done it. Not stuck around to convince me. C'mon. I could do with another drink before bedtime." He rose, holding a hand out to her.


She punched it away. "You think you know everything about me! You have all these wacked-out ideas about my eternal goodness and worth, like I'm some sort of goddess, and you are just nothing but wrong!"


"Am I?"


"You want to pretend I'm not the same kind of thing you are—!"


He darted his face close to hers. She flinched, hit out, but he was already back in his place, just out arm's reach, and her blow got nothing but air. "No blood on your breath. So didn't eat yours, close as you think you came, did you?"


The little smile playing on his lips maddened her. "It's coming, though! The night when I rip someone's beating heart out and swallow it whole. It's close. It's going to happen."


"I won't leave you on your own 'til you're over these shakes. You'll get beyond this, an' remember yourself again."


His mild stubborn look made her itch to roundhouse him. "Are you crazy? What is this insane fantasy you have about me? I'm dead, Spike. I'm undead. I'm this." She flashed fangs, making it ugly, sticking out her tongue. "Anyway, you wanted me to come to you, in the dark. Is that why you didn't stake me? Because you wanted—"


"Was just a line. Never meant anything by it except to get you to let me in. Wanted you, an' you pissed me off. But all I really wanted was to make love to you an' ease your heart."


"What we made wasn't love, and you didn't ease anything."


He barely winced. "I know it."


"This is over. We're done."


"Buffy—"


"Don't come after me!" She turned her back on him. She'd already picked out her first one—a young man with bare arms, lounging by the fountain, part of a group of loiterers who were spectating their argument, though they were too far off, and speaking the wrong language, to make a first-class show. She knew she could separate him from the others. She'd draw him into the lanes, where it was dark, and drain every hearty drop. Afterwards, all this dumb suspense would be finished. She'd be a monster good and proper, and then—


"You're goin' to give up on yourself just to prove that I'm never right about anything?" He'd done one of those lightning moves, placing himself in her path so fast that she saw him a second before she felt the backdraft of his rush. "Didn't know you cared so much 'bout what I think."


"I don't!"


"You do. Or you wouldn't be so furious with me. So bent on makin' me wrong."


"Go die, Spike."


She started past him, but he blocked her again. "Better idea. Use this."


He pulled something from his duster pocket.


The chair leg stake.


The sight of it staggered her. "Didn't we play this game already?"


"Don't use it on me. Do I have to remind you we're not the only vamps in this burg?"