For all that William Pratt, 4th Viscount of Wincott, had spent a shamefully large portion of his childhood daydreaming about gallant knights and fairy princesses--or better yet the ancient Bards who could entrance their audiences for hours upon hours with their stories; for all the delightfully terrified hours he had spent shivering under the sheets as his governess told him old Irish tales of cluricaun, banshees and pookas, he had never imagined he might actually come face to face with a demon. After all, he lived in an enlightened age, one in which men of science were making grand discoveries on five continents and were even now working to harness the power of steam and electricity for mankind's benefit. Though the wonders of the natural world still had the power to hold him spellbound, he no longer believed that evil could be reduced to the misshapen creatures of folklore, nor good to radiant beings descending from above with divine instruction.

He had read Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species with lively interest, flipped gingerly through his grandfather's book on human anatomy by Bartolomeo Eustachi, spent hours gazing at the lovely vivid pictures in The Temple of Flora, his father's favorite, and returned again and again to the gloriously illustrated The Birds of America, the pride of his own collection. He considered himself a well-read, well-educated, and broad-minded man: a man of the world and a man of his era. But nothing in his world could explain the hideous creature lying at his feet: a human-shaped monster covered in some dark red substance that looked disturbingly like blood.

Nor could it explain the angel standing in her undergarments in the middle of the road doubled over with laughter.

For angel she must be, beautiful as she was; blood-stained but undaunted, she fearlessly faced the pale demon snarling at her with its long wicked fangs bared and its amber eyes aglow with hatred. He, for his part, was incapable of moving a muscle for fear of attracting attention to himself. Yet as the seconds ticked by and the angel continued to laugh, clutching her stomach in what was (he had to admit) a most undignified manner, he frowned. Why, instead of bringing the wrath of God down on such an obviously evil creature, was she laughing at it? And why did her mirth seemingly redouble every time she looked at him? William cleared his throat. "Madam..." he paused. How did one address a holy messenger of God? "Lady..."

"He-you-he even sounds like Giles! Wait 'til I tell Willow and Xander about this!" she gasped, before being overcome by fresh gales of glee.

"Slayer," the demon growled menacingly. And then, faster than William could scream, he was lying in a heap on the ground with the demon's forearm held tight against his throat. Rainstorm, his gray, the swiftest horse in his stables and the most high-strung, startled at the sudden loss of his rider and spooked, running with his empty saddle for home. William's heart began to race faster than his horse's churning hoofs as the precariousness of his situation hit him fully. He was nearly two miles from home, alone on a deserted road at night with two supernatural beings who had emerged out of fanciful tales written to terrify children into his perfectly ordinary viscountcy for God only knew what purpose. He gagged, struggling against both the demon's implacable grip and the overwhelming cloyingly sweet smell of blood at close quarters. What if he had been wrong about the angel? After all, the tales claimed that the sirens who sang sailors to their sudden rocky deaths and the succubi who visited men in the middle of the night to choke the life out of them were also beautiful beyond imagining…

The angel had stopped laughing. "Spike..." she said warningly, taking a step forward.

William clawed at the demon's arm as it tightened still further. "Ah-ah. Not another step, or this git gets to find out why I'm the one and only William the Bloody around here."

"Let him go." There was no humor at all now in her voice. Then she paused and looked at him. "Uh, you do want him to let you go, right? You're not in some kind of vampire cult or anything? Do they have vampire cults in this dimension?"

Vampire? Cult? William nodded his head frantically at the first question--or as much as the arm around his neck would allow--and shook it at the others, hoping he would be understood.

"Or what, you're going to dust your only chance of getting home? In case you haven't noticed, Slayer, we're not in Kansas anymore." But the steely grip did loosen enough to allow William to draw in grateful gasps of air.

The angel--the...Slayer? reached behind her and withdrew a short pointed object from some hidden fold of her garments, though he could not have guessed where in a costume that hugged her every curve she might have concealed it. William began to blush as her hand closed hard around the smooth wood, and he shut his eyes in mortification. This was no time to be distracted by trivialities, he told himself. You must devise some plan to extract yourself from this situation. Think of Mother. How worried she will be if Rainstorm arrives home without you.

"Know what?" the angel said in a mildly contemplative tone, and William opened his eyes cautiously. "Think I'll take my chances." She raised the stake.

And the demon struck. A bolt of some indescribable feeling shot through him as cool lips fastened themselves to his neck, followed half a second later by the hard burn of needle-sharp teeth sliding into his carotid. He arched, gasping. "Oh God!" Then, as it began to hurt, he cried, "Ow. Ow!"

The demon tore away from him. William touched his hand to his neck, stared for a moment at the bright scarlet blood smeared on his fingertips, and fainted dead away.

"Ow! What the bloody hell?!" Spike yelled, feeling his neck and staring at the fresh blood he found there. And then--"Ow! Bloody hell, woman!" --as Buffy's angry fist met his nose with a resounding crack. "What was that for?"

"What was that for?!" Buffy's voice rose an octave, and she gestured at the unconscious Spike look-alike incoherently for a moment. "You bit him! You're not supposed to bite the hostage!"

"Vampire here, love," Spike snarled, shoving the slumped form to one side. "And I didn't kill him, did I? 'Sides, he annoys me."

"He said all of two words!" Buffy protested.

"I could hear him thinking his poncy thoughts, the poncy bugger," Spike said sullenly.

"You bit him for thinking?" Buffy yelled. Then she stopped. "You bit him," she repeated slowly, her gaze suddenly shooting to his neck.

Spike clapped a hand over the already-closed pinprick holes. "Yeah, so?" he said defensively as the realization crept into her expression.

"You bit..." her eyes widened. "You bit yourself! He's you! Not just in a Vampire Willow kind of way, but-- He's the human you! We're not in another dimension, we went back in time!" Her eyes narrowed. "Which you would've already known if you're the one who had the spell cast."

Spike smirked. "Never said I did the spell, love. You came to that conclusion all by yourself."

Buffy rolled her eyes and huffed. "Fine. Whatever. Now what?" They looked at each other, then at the unconscious form lying in the middle of the road.

"Ménage à trois?" Spike suggested, wriggling his eyebrows. He got another fist to the nose for his trouble.