The moment before she'd opened the door Buffy had thought she couldn't possibly be angrier. She was wrong.

The first thing she saw as she entered Spike's apartment, was a naked Spike tied to the bed with one leg bent. Between his legs was the head of a blond who was wearing only pink leather knee high boots.

Just as her mind wrapped around the first image, the blond lifted her head. It was Harmony. A vamped out Harmony with her face covered in blood.

That was when the rest of the scene snapped into place. Blood was running down Spike's arms from the wounds where his hands had been cut off. In fact his whole body was covered with blood. He was even paler than normal. Buffy hadn't seen him that pale since he had fist come to the Scoobies half starved after the Initiative had chipped him. His face was turned toward her, but his eyes were closed. He wasn't moving.

Harmony's face slipped back into it's human form and the knife she'd been holding in one hand dropped to the floor.

"Hey Buffy. How are you? Don't mind me. I was just leaving."

Buffy wasn't really aware of moving. One moment she had been standing in the door. Frozen by the sight in front of her. The next she was on top of the female vampire. Pounding her face. By the time she realized what she was doing, Harmony was already unconscious. Her face unrecognizable.

Buffy looked around for something to finish her off with. She remembered the knife, but when she looked back at the bed she noticed for the first time the bite mark on Spike's neck. That stopped her. There was something about that. About vampire's and biting, but her mind wasn't working well enough to figure out what it was.

Instead she moved to the bed-stand and got out the handcuffs. She then dragged the naked vampire into the bathroom. Unfortunately the bathroom wasn't like Giles old apartment, so Buffy couldn't handcuff her to the shower, instead she had to settle for the pipes under the sink. She just hoped that Harmony didn't try to get free bust the pipes and flood the place.

Her brain was starting to work. She got a couple towels some bandages and a wet rag. Then she went back out to check on Spike.

First she untied him. As she did so she noticed how his stitches had come undone. Or rather, the skin around the stitches had torn. She washed and bandaged these first.

Spike still hadn't woken or moved. His whole body was covered in cuts, although none of them seemed to be deep. His neck however had been pretty badly torn. It must have been a particularly savage bite.

Then she remembered. When she'd first gone to England after Sunnydale had been destroyed, the whole gang had helped Giles go through and catalogue all that remained of the Watchers library. In the section of books that were written by Watchers, she had run across one book called "Blood and Sex Rites Among Vampires". She couldn't help herself. She couldn't imagine what a bunch of stuffy old Watchers could possibly know about vampire's and sex (and figured she had to be the foremost living expert on the subject) so she had taken it to read.

Leave it to a Watcher to make sex clinical and boring. Still she had read a lot of it, and she remembered that there had been something about mating. How if a vampire bit someone during sex they 'mated' with that person. There was maybe more to it, she thought but she couldn't remember. It formed some kind of bond and was the vampire version of marriage.

She couldn't seem to remember all of the details now, Watchers really were long winded, it had been hard to pay attention despite how interested she was, but she was pretty sure that it was bad for one if the mate was killed.

She shook her head. She could worry about that later. She figured Spike would know better than her, and better than some Watcher who died centuries ago.

Right now, she figured, he needed blood. She went to the refrigerator. There wasn't much pig's blood left. There was however the whole days supply of human blood. She hadn't gotten rid of it yet.

The human blood would be better for him, but she had promised. She looked over at the unconscious vampire. No, she wouldn't give him the blood Wolfram & Hart had supplied. Looking at how badly hurt Spike was, the last thing she could do was break a promise, break his trust. Even if it was for his own good.

She took the pigs blood and sat down on the bed, she held him in her arms. She tilted his head back and slowly poured the blood in his mouth. All too soon the pig's blood was gone, but Spike still hadn't moved except to swallow the blood.

She wrapped her arms around him then, and held him to her, like a small child clutching a large doll. Tears began to roll down her face and she began to sob. Letting the tension flow out of her.

After a few minutes, she stopped herself. This wasn't doing any good. She needed more blood for him, but she couldn't leave him, she didn't trust the cuffs to hold Harmony for long. Then she remembered the knife. Gently she put Spike back down, and reached over the side of the bed to grab the knife Harmony had used.

She sat back and stared at her arm. Beneath the skin she could see the dim blue outline of her veins. Those were veins right? The last thing either of them needed was for her to pass out from blood loss. She took a deep breath in and made a small on the inside of her arm just below her elbow. She didn't cut very deep, and the cut was only and inch and a half long. She figured she could always make a bigger cut if she needed to, but she couldn't make the cut smaller.

For a moment she just watched the blood, then she held her arm to Spike's mouth. She sat there, waiting, but nothing seemed to happened. She wondered if maybe she wasn't bleeding enough. She was just about to pull her arm back when she heard a snarl and pain ripped through her arm.

Instinctively she started to pull back before she remembered that this was what she wanted. Her heart started thrumming in her hears. Spike wrapped his arms around hers, pulling he closer, holding her tight. The pain faded, instead there was a dull ache in her arm.

She was suddenly aware of the blood flowing through her veins. The life she was giving to him. She could feel her heartbeat, her pulse, throbbing between her legs.

His rough tongue licked her wounds, and she let out a gasp. Then a moan. She was vaguely aware that she was calling his name.

Time seemed to stop, nothing was real except the gentle pull of Spike's mouth. It went on and on. Her need rising. She began to feel light headed, and then suddenly the pulling inside her stopped, the weight in her lap shifted, and she found herself staring into golden eyes.