CHAPTER THREE: He Who Cannot be Named

Buffy stared down at the street into the lengthening shadows. Snow had begun to fall and she shivered. Chantal and Erica were preparing to patrol and she could hear them bickering as they suited up in the large foyer. Their voices carried up the spiral staircase as they argued the merits of guns and stakes.

Slaying had changed, Buffy thought to herself, for the hundredth time. And sometimes, not for the better. She stepped into the hall and leaning over the banister, watched the girls don tuques and scarves. Dressing for slaying in California had been so much easier. Short skirts and fashionable but affordable high heeled boots, she remembered with a smile. Now it was down parkas, hats, scarves, gloves, and sorrel boots.

“Don’t forget the Kevlar vests,” she called down.

Erica looked up and grimaced. “It’s too difficult to maneuver with the vests under the parkas.”

“It’ll be more difficult to maneuver when you’re six feet under,” Buffy pointed out.

“Demons are old school,” Chantal pointed out. “They don’t use guns.”

Buffy nodded. “You’re right. But drug dealers and other human criminals do. If you aren’t going to wear the vests, then be careful.”

Erica grinned. “We’ll stick to the cemeteries where the drug dealers are too scared to hang out.”

They both snapped their pagers into their holsters.

“Check in and keep your eyes open for that vampire Chantal sensed.”

The girls nodded and opened the door. They let in a cold blast of frigid arctic air and Buffy yearned again for California.

“Buffy?”

She turned and spotted Dawn coming down the stairs.

“Hey, Dawnie,” she said.

Dawn stepped into the office and Buffy followed her and sat at the desk. She put her feet up and eyed her sister. Dawn sprawled on the leather chair and looked back.

“You okay?”

“Okily Dokily,” Buffy said, breezily.

Dawn rolled her eyes. “No one uses that expression anymore. “

“A-okay?” Buffy asked, hopefully.

Dawn shook her head and smiled. “Just stick with okay or cool or fine. You’ll be safe with those and not age yourself.”

“How did things go over at the university today?”

Dawn shrugged. “Fine.” She glanced at her sister closely. “You had an odd look on your face just then, in the hallway,” Dawn said. “What’s going on?”

“What makes you think something’s going on?”

Dawn stared at her. “Um, because there is always something going on?”

Buffy sighed. “The cold is getting to me.”

“You miss California.”

“Especially in January. Not so much in October.” Buffy looked outside the window. “I love it here in October.”

“Buffy, no one loves it here in January and February. You’d have to be a masochist.”

“And of course, I’m no sadist.” She grinned and leaned forward. “Enough about my sad state and hate of the northern winters. Tell me how your first day on the job went.”

It was Dawn’s turn to shrug. “Making the switch from student to teacher is difficult,” she said. She’d been hired by the University at Buffalo as a junior professor in their English and Communications department. She was teaching a first year poetry course and a Popular Culture course on Soap Operas.

“Any hotties in your class?”

“That would be unprofessional.”

“Dawnie. It’s me.”

Dawn flashed the wedding band on her left hand. “Married remember?” That doesn’t mean, Dawn thought, that I wouldn’t check them out for her sister. Dawn looked at Buffy sadly. She needed to find someone for her sister; Lord knows, Buffy wasn’t out looking for herself. For years now she’d been preaching the love’s labor’s lost approach to romance. No men. No hotties. No commitment or emotional entanglements of any kind.

Not since Spike.

“Do you still miss him?”

Buffy shot her a cold glance. “Miss who?”

“Spi-“

“Don’t speak that name!”

“Buffy come on! You act like he’s Voldemort!” Dawn said angrily.

“Voldemort? Is that a new demon in town?”

Dawn grimaced. “You are so out of touch. I’m not even going to answer that.”

“I am NOT out of touch with popular culture. I happen to be completely plugged in to popular culture. I watch The Simpsons.” Buffy pointed out.

Dawn rolled her eyes. “Buffy, no one cool watches The Simpsons anymore.” She walked over and took her sister’s hand. She lowered her voice. “I miss him too. All the time. Why can’t I talk about him with you? Who else can I talk about him to? Xander doesn’t like to talk about him and neither does Giles when he’s here. Only Andrew likes to talk about him and he just gets all weird about it.”

“Why do you need to talk about him at all?” Buffy argued. “It’s been ten years Dawn! Let it go.”

“You haven’t!”

Buffy stared at her coldly. “I – have – let – it – go,” she bit out.

Dawn scoffed. “Oh yeah? How? You think that little affair you had with the Immortal in Rome was letting go of Spike? Please – you didn’t fool anyone. That was a lapse of judgment and nothing more. And since then? That lawyer you dated briefly. And then there was that professor. But none of those lasted. You made sure they didn’t.”

“Dawn, this conversation is so over. My love life or lack of it is not your concern.”

“Of course it’s my concern,” Dawn said. “I’m scared for you.”

Buffy looked at her incredulously. “Scared? How is that any different from any other day Dawn? Take a look at our lives – we live in fear every day!”

“There’s a difference between fear and cowardice,” Dawn whispered.

Buffy stood up. “Are you calling me a coward?”

“When it comes to facing demons, you know no fear,” Dawn said. “But sometimes I think that’s only because when it comes to your heart, you’re a coward. So you’ve got nothing to lose.”

“Get out.”

“Spike,” Dawn whispered.

Buffy closed her eyes. Immediately she was assaulted with at least a hundred images of him. His long leather coat, those fierce ice blue eyes, that cocky grin, that long, lean body. Spike smoking. Spike staking a vamp. Spike making love to her. Spike burning to save the world. A devil may care grin on his lips and a brilliant joy in his eyes.

“Get out,” she whispered.

“His name isn’t a curse! I need to talk about him! I need to remember him. I loved him too and he loved me!”

“And he left us both!” Buffy screamed.

Dawn stared at her incredulously. “What?”

“For someone who loved us, he sure had a funny way of showing it, didn’t he?”

“He sacrificed himself to save the world, Buffy. He didn’t abandon us.”

Buffy gestured violently, sending the vase on her desk crashing to the floor. “Not then! Afterwards! After Wolfram & Hart brought him back from the dead and he was in L.A with Angel! He left us then Dawn!”

“Buffy-“

“Get out!”

“But-“

“GET OUT!”

There was no disobeying the order when it was screamed at the top of the Slayer’s lungs. Dawn froze for a split second and then she ran from the room.

***

Spike stared up at the lit window. He took a drag on his cigarette and pulled his coat and scarf closer as the wind tore through the yard.

He knew she was there. He’d seen her standing in the window, his vampiric sight enabling him to pick out the details. Her hair was shorter, a straight chin length bob that swung enticingly against her jaw. She was pale, as if the long northern winters had drained all the sun and heat from her bones. Little lines around her eyes revealed that the stress of being a slayer had started catching up to her. But the sight of her, from dozens of feet away, still managed to make him catch his breath. She was still his slayer.

Now if he could only figure out a way to let her know that.

***

“He was in the yard,” Willow said. “Last night.”

Buffy glanced up from the computer. “What?” she asked absently.

“That new demon in town.”

Buffy finished off the email to Giles at the Watcher’s Council and turned her attention to Willow. “How do you know?”

“I went out this morning to check the perimeter. Whoever was there last night has a major aura. It was strong enough to leave traces.”

“How did he manage to get that close and no one in the house sense him?”

Willow shrugged. “It’s possible that the protection spells I’ve placed around the house to block demons from getting in are also blocking us from sensing them. Does it matter?”

“I don’t like the idea of a demon standing outside our house watching us.”

“I don’t think he’s a threat,” Willow said softly.

Buffy trusted Willow’s instincts. As a practiced witch, Willow felt things on a multitude of levels and her instincts were solid. “What makes you think that?”

“I don’t sense any danger or evil in him,” Willow replied.

“He’s a vampire, Will.”

Willow nodded. “Yeah, I guess that’s what Chantal was having such a difficulty explaining. He’s a vamp, but there is no evil intent.”

They stared at each other.

“A vampire with a soul,” Buffy whispered in horror.

Willow nodded.

“Impossible,” Buffy said. “Im-freaking-possible. They are both dead.”

“It happened before, maybe there is another one.”

“Another vampire with a soul? Cursed or earned?” Buffy looked at her in disbelief. “And why the hell is he here? Is he seeking me out for some reason?”

Willow shook her head.

“Contact Gunn in L.A. Contact Giles. Call in all your coven contacts and see if there has been any word on another cursed vampire. I need to know what I’m dealing with here.”

Willow stood up and left.

As she headed for her own office, she was really glad that she’d failed to point out what else she’d learned. Their vampire had a bad habit.

He’d left a pile of cigarette butts beneath their tree.

***

Spike paced the length of his crypt, taking in a deep drag off his cigarette. He’d spent enough nights outside the house to know that there was definitely something odd going on. Every morning, just before sunrise, the Bit, who was not so little anymore, left at the same hour. Coffee in hand, wrapped from head to toe in wool and goose down, she strolled down to the bus stop and caught the 6:30 bus heading to the North Campus of the University. The first time he’d spotted her, he’d barely recognized her. She was taller and with the camouflage of winter clothing, she was indistinguishable. But he recognized that walk and the way she tilted her head down in a certain way as if she were trying to watch her step so as not to trip and fall over her feet.

He’d followed her to the bus stop the first time, ducking behind a tree once when she stopped and looked back. He’d had just enough time to slip into a sewer that morning. Hours spent wandering the cold and dark underground pipes of Buffalo had not endeared the city to him. But he had been able to map out an underground route between the slayer headquarters and the cemetery.

It had done his soul good to see Dawn. It had taken a Herculean effort not to call out to her; not to run to her and throw his arms around her and hold her close. He had so much to ask her; so many things to talk to her about. He wanted to know everything about her. Watching her, so tall and so beautiful, Spike felt like a proud father; albeit, a proud deadbeat father who had abandoned his teen age daughter at an incredibly important juncture in her adolescent life.

Night after night he had haunted the house, noting the comings and going of its inhabitants. Red usually arrived from wherever she worked at six. And then, at eight the patrols started. The slayers patrolled in pairs. There was the French girl who’d been at the bar that first night. She often patrolled with a blond girl with dreadful hair that stuck out from beneath her tuque in thick, matted dreadlocks. Then there were the twins – two African American women Spike would have guessed were six feet tall. They were magnificent. They moved in sync and he loved to follow them and watch them fight. They were like a symphony, a beautiful rhapsody of movement and dance. And then there were the last two – the short Native American girl and the New Yorker. He’d heard her talk in the bar one night and she’d reminded him of his time spent in New York back in the seventies.

The patrols were like clockwork. Two of them left promptly at eight and returned at eleven. At 11:30, the next pair left and returned at 2:30 and finally, the last pair left at 3:00 and returned at 6:30, just as the Bit was leaving and the sun was beginning to rise. They alternated their shifts, taking turns, but they never missed a shift. Buffalo had the best demon hunter coverage possible. Six slayers and a witch protected its citizens.
But they didn’t have the protection of the slayer.

In the two weeks he had haunted the house, Spike never once saw Buffy leave. And that’s how he had known something was terribly wrong. The Buffy he knew never let anyone else do her slaying for her.

Realizing just how difficult it was going to be to approach Buffy, Spike knew it was time to call in a favor. He crushed out his cigarette, then he hopped up and sat on the sarcophagus. He leaned over, elbows braced on his knees, his head down and he stared at the ground. It had been a while since he’d tapped into this particular power and he had never done it comfortably. And this time, he had to do it such a way as to not scare the hell out of the witch. Spike looked up as he suddenly wondered if he had to change his accent, if she’d recognize the voice.

“Christ,” he muttered, scratching his head. “Just how in the name of all that is unholy am I going to manage this?”

He shook his head, loosened up his shoulders and stretched out his arms. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes again and opened up his mind. Trying to remember what Willow had taught him all those years ago, he focused on his breathing. And in his mind, he lowered his voice, muffled his accent, and sent out his message to the witch.

“Willow Rosenberg!”

In a dark bedroom, on the other side of the city, Willow sat up straight in her bed. She gasped, her heart pounding, sweat pouring down her back. Chantal stirred next to her but didn’t wake.

“Willow Rosenberg!”

There it was again, the voice in her head, garbled, but clearly a male voice. Oddly familiar, but low. She could barely make out the words.

“Tonight. The Anchor Bar. Eight o’clock. Come alone.”

Willow stared around the darkened room.

What the hell?