For a few minutes the house was a blur of activity as the unlikely little band of fugitives began gathering a few things they thought they might need. There was no telling when they would be back. Fortunately, as soon as she had brought the vampires into the house, Buffy had insisted that her mother take Dawn and go out of town for a few days – just in case. Now, it was a small relief to know that Buffy’s family was not in any danger.

As a sudden sickening thought occurred to Spike, he turned in the foyer and went up the stairs to Buffy’s room. Frowning when she noticed, Willow followed him silently. When she reached the doorway to Buffy’s room, there he stood at the closet, quickly going through her clothes.

“What are you doing?” To her credit there was only a hint of suspicion in the red-headed witch’s voice, as she slowly crossed the room to stand beside him.

He half-turned to glance at her, still running the clothes along the rod, looking for something. “She’s – she’s not gonna have any clothes when we find her, love. If Cordova’s trying to use her for some kind of bloody experiment….” His voice trailed off, and he added, softer, his back to Willow. “She’s gotta have something to wear.”

Willow watched as he settled on a soft, loose bathrobe. Easy to get on in a hurry, and providing a lot of coverage. He started to turn away, when something caught his eye.
He whirled back around and pulled the clothes all to one end of the rod.

There it was. His black leather duster. His eyes widened in surprise, and an almost-awe, as he slowly took it from the hanger, staring at it. His mouth opened and closed a few, times, not knowing what to say. “I – I thought it’d have been long since gone,” he whispered. “Hanging in the closet of some bloody soldier…not…not…” He looked back up at her with some indefinable emotion in his eyes.

Staring at the coat, as surprised as he was to have found it in Buffy’s closet, Willow gave him a small smile. “Well it looks like this,” she waved her hand in a general gesture that he somehow knew to indicate his relationship with Buffy, “wasn’t as sudden as I thought.”

“She’s had this here…all this time…” he murmured thoughtfully.

Thinking back over the past few months, in light of what she knew now, Willow nodded slowly. “I think she missed you, Spike. A lot.”

“I wouldn’t have thought she’d have cared. I *didn’t* think she cared. I thought – I thought she was – bloody glad to be rid of me.” His voice was a whisper by the end.

“No,” Willow quickly, gently assured him. “She never mentioned you after she went to your crypt and found that you were gone. I – I think now that it must have been too painful for her.”

He stared at the coat in his hands for a moment, then slowly, deliberately, put it on. He looked back up at Willow with fire in his eyes. “Well, I’m not gonna lose her now!” he declared in determination. “That bloody bitch is not gonna take her from me! We’re gonna get her out of there.”

He strode toward the door quickly, on a mission, and as Willow followed she heard him whisper under his breath, “Hold on, Baby…I’m coming.”


The same intense, all-consuming pain that had driven Buffy from consciousness, now yanked her violently back to it. She tried to scream again, but even had she not been gagged, her throat was raw and bleeding from hours of previous silenced screams.

Apparantly, the way Cordova saw it, if a being was low enough in her opinion to be a potential test subject for her experiments, they were also too low a life form to warrant the use of anesthetics. For hours now, the general had been prodding, cutting, taking various samples, and the sedative had worn off shortly after Buffy had awakened strapped to the table.

She thought again of the vampires in her care at her house, and hoped desperately that they had escaped the soldiers Cordova had sent for them. She suddenly realized that the surgery to implant their chips had probably been done like this – with restraints in place of anesthetic. Spike had told her that he could not remember the chip being implanted in his head; she wondered now if he had told her the truth.

When she thought of Spike, she wondered if he would have figured out that something was wrong by now. No, she realized with a sick, sinking feeling in her stomach. The “hunt” was supposed to last all night. Cordova would be long since finished with her “experiments” by morning – she hoped. So there was no help coming. Ironic, that she, the vampire slayer, should die not by the hand of a demon or vampire, but by that of a twisted, sadistic *human*, she thought.

*You were right, Spike,* she thought, as tears streaked her face. *About all of it. And now I’ll never get to tell you.*

And then Cordova’s blade sliced into her flesh again, and all thought was stolen from her, and all there was, was pain.


The first couple of minutes in the van were silent, each one lost in their own private thoughts. Xander and Anya sat in the front of the van, Xander driving, since he drove the fastest. The children sat in the seat behind them, and Willow and Spike sat in the very back. They had both sensed that they might have more to talk about, and best said without the listening ears of Xander Harris to make his judgments.

After a minute of so of driving, Xander spoke in a frustrated, tense voice that spoke of his fear. “I don’t even know where the hell I’m going! These government types probably know where we live!”

“I know!” Spike suddenly said, after a moment of pensive silence.

The suggestion he made was met with a very mixed response, but eventually, as there was nowhere else to go, they headed off in that direction. Once Anya started talking to Xander in the front, drawing the attention of the two younger vamps with her animated, often shockingly blunt monologue, Willow turned to Spike.

“How long?”

“How long what?” Spike asked innocently, really not wanting to have this conversation.

“Don’t even, Spike. I saw those notes Cordova made on the surveillance tapes, so don’t play games with me.” She paused, then added as an afterthought, “Even *I* can kick your butt right now, so don’t mess with me!” Her tone was unconvincingly threatening. But although there was not a doubt in his mind that the girl would never lay a hand on him, he could tell that she meant business.

“Just a few days, Red,” he assured her. “It all happened so fast. That tape Cordova saw from a couple days back – that was the first time.” He paused, adding in a quiet, serious voice, “She wasn’t trying to hide it from you. We didn’t really mean for it to happen, and then all this went down…”

“You didn’t *mean* for it to happen?” she echoed dubiously. “Then it was just – just sex? Just – accidental – sex?” Her tone showed him just how ridiculous it really sounded.

“Ok, we meant to,” he admitted. “But it wasn’t ‘just sex’, Red,” he lowered his voice to a whisper, gesturing for her to keep hers down as well as he glanced up toward Xander anxiously. He paused, looking down for a moment before raising his eyes to hers. “I’m not honestly sure I know what it is we have, Red – me and Buffy. But I care about her – I swear I do. I’m not in this just for some bloody trophy, just to prove I can, or some rot like that. I – she – she’s all I bloody think about,” he finally admitted, looking down again.

“I believe you,” Willow said softly. She waited a moment before going on. “Just so you know, Spike – I understand about what happened. With Riley. I – I saw you two that night – what he’d done to you and Diana. I told Buffy I – I would have killed him too.”

He was surprised by that. But after looking up at the expression on her face, he believed her.

“If you really care about Buffy,” she went on. “I think it’s great that she’s found someone. She’s been really lonely for a long time now.”

A small smile played about the corners of Spike’s mouth. “Are you giving me your – your *blessing* to see Buffy, Red?” he asked with mild incredulity.

She shrugged in a dismissive way. “Well, you know. With the whole standard ‘hurt her in any way shape or form and I’ll teach you the meaning of pain’ warning in place, of course.”

“Of course,” he nodded, smile widening. Then he added seriously, “Don’t worry, Red. I won’t.”

She smiled back for a moment before speaking. “I believe you.”

At that moment, they pulled up and stopped at their destination, a place very familiar to all of them, but especially to Spike.

The old mansion.

Once they were all safely inside, Willow set up her laptop to begin cracking the Initiative’s new controls, while Spike gave his children a stern warning not to leave the mansion. He decided as he walked to where Willow was set up that it would be wise not to say anything to them about the chips going down. There was no telling how they might react to being suddenly non-defenseless. He could almost hear Xander saying how if Diana’s reaction the last time was any indication, it would be best to keep them chipped. But Spike knew that “the last time” had been a very different matter indeed.

“Any luck yet?” he asked Willow anxiously as he reached her.

She nodded slowly, focused on the screen in front of her. “Just like last time, though, they’ve got a back-up, and I’m not sure how long it will take to get that down, too. But I can shut down the chips temporarily, and scramble the signals some so that it’ll take them a little while to get them back up.”

“How long’s a little while?”

She grimaced apologetically. “Half an hour, maybe? Maybe longer?”

He frowned in disappointment. Then he sighed. “It’ll have to do,” he said. “We can’t wait any longer, we’ve got to get her out of there.”

Willow nodded, her resolve-face in place. “We haven’t got a choice,” she agreed. Suddenly she looked up at him speculatively. “There’s something I’d like to try first, though.”


About an hour later, Spike, Willow, and Xander were in the van, parked behind the Initiative headquarters. All was dark inside; the place appeared deserted.

“Do you think they took her somewhere else?” Xander asked, uncertain.

Spike shook his head. “No. She’s here. I can – I can feel it.”

Willow just nodded in acceptance, but Xander gave him a suspicious look. “Ok, that’s just creepy,” he informed him.

“Well, I can! She’s in there! Are we ready to do this, then?” he asked Willow impatiently.

She looked down at her laptop, casting a dim glow through the dark van, and nodded. “Yeah. I’ll shut down the locks first so you can get in, and then once I see you go in, I’ll shut down the chips. It should take them at least half an hour to get them back up, but you’ll have to hurry. Find Buffy, get her, and get out. We’ll be right here, waiting. If you need any help,” she left off there, tapping a finger against her temple as she finished, a little smugly, in his mind, *Just call.*

Although he knew it was actually a very good idea, it was vaguely unsettling to him to hear the witch’s voice in his head. But they would have no other way of communicating once he went inside.

“Ok,” Willow said, her voice strained, and with a little flourish she pressed a key on her laptop, muttering under her breath, “Open, sesame.”

They waited with baited breath for a few seconds, but as Willow had predicted, no alarms broke the silence at the breach of security. The Initiative didn’t know it, but they were wide open.

Spike drew in a deep, unnecessary breath as he slid the van door open. “Right then,” he breathed out. “Back into the lion’s den. Here goes everything!”