Spike sat on the couch in the living room. As the saying went, the lights were on, but nobody was home. Even Dawn had finally given up talking to him when nothing she said or did managed to drag him out of the dark corners of his mind.

The dark corners where Meret’s mind overlapped with his.

She was in a grove at the moment, circling the clearing in Breaker’s Woods from above while Buffy searched the perimeter from the ground. He had never before stayed in this kind of contact with Meret for so long. He could feel the wind against his skin and the dizzying dip between thermals. He could feel the sun on his back, warming him. The longer he stayed with her, the more he could feel.

The flex of the muscles along her spine, moving the wing joints.

The shivery tingle of air moving around feathers.

The odd taste/scent of the air on a forked tongue.

Even with the sun riding lower and lower in the sky, it was easy to see that is was still too early for the vampire to join them. The woods around the clearing were dappled with sunlight, and the breeze made sure the shadows shifted unexpectedly and often, exposing everything to the light.

Buffy was poking around an old fire pit, probably the remnants of some teenage camping trip or maybe even a small-time ritual, that is if the local amateurs even knew the history of the area: druids, wyverns, and everything in between.

He could hear, as if through cotton, Buffy’s voice calling to Meret. Down, down he went, plummeting at speeds that sent the vampire reeling back into his own body. He sat up with a shout, fully back in the Summers’ house again. The room tilted and spun. Spike’s head dropped into his hands as he tried to regain his own equilibrium.

The vampire looked up to find Dawn shoving a mug of blood into his face. He quirked an unsteady smile at her and accepted it gratefully. He shakily fished his hip flask out of his jacket pocket and splashed a little of the liquid into the blood. That would help settle his stomach if anything would.

“That was kind of creepy. What were you doing?” She plopped down on the edge of the coffee table.

The flask ended up on the table when replacing it in his pocket proved to take more motor skills than he seemed to have at the moment. Half of the mug went down in one, unsteady gulp. “Seein’ with Meret.” Spike knew that he sounded a little crazy, but with the room still lurching drunkenly, he couldn’t bring himself to care.

“So what, you can, like, totally be in her head?” Dawn’s excited face bled through his vision. “That’s so cool! What’s she doing right now?”

“Droppin’ out of the sky like a stone.” At Dawn’s worried gasp, he continued sardonically. “A highly controlled, perfectly safe stone.”

“Oh. Well that’s good,” the girl said in relief. “What’s it like?”

“What?” the vampire mumbled distractedly.

The girl clapped her hands on her knees and leaned forward. “Hearing her all the time. Being able to see what she sees and hear what she hears. I just get flashes.”

“Dunno.” Spike was muzzy enough from the extended link with the coatl that his guard was down. “Sometimes s’like I’m her and she’s me. If I had multiple personalities and enjoyed tormentin’ myself.” His face took on a wistful expression, he really knew how to pick ‘em. He looked up and caught Dawn watching him with wide, expectant eyes. The mask was up in a flash, smooth lines and an uncaring cant to his lips firmly in place again.

Tara poked her head in the door. “Spike?”

The vampire looked up, thankful for the distraction. “Yeah?”

“Any news?” The witch looked hopeful.

Spike pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Breaker’s Woods are a bust. Think they’re headin’ to the ruins of the mission next.” He dropped his hands, and rose unsteadily. “I can meet up with them there.”

“Hey! Curious teenager here!” Dawn spun around on the table and watched as Spike stumbled to the weapons chest.

“No time, Bit,” he mumbled. “Gotta get goin.’ Sun’s about down.”

“Dawnie, you can grill Galahad when he gets back,” said Tara. Her voice was quiet, but her eyes were twinkling.

Spike eyed the witch with some amusement. He was too bemused with the girl’s teasing to take offense. “Galahad, huh?”

Tara had the temerity to wink and disappeared back into the dining room where Willow was giving Anya a list of spell components, rapid-fire over the phone.

Spike snorted to himself, the bridge of his nose pinched between two fingers as his vision finally cleared. Then he dug around in the chest, pulling out a set of brass knuckles. “Got a tarp or something I can snag?” he called back to Dawn.

“Whatever.” She got up and stomped into the kitchen. When she returned, she was carrying a cheap red and white checked tablecloth. She tossed it at him. “And for the record, eyes rolled up in your head is not a good look on you.”

“Right fond of you too, Bit.” That earned an almost smile hastily covered with a disparaging sniff. Spike just grinned while he palmed his flask back into his coat pocket.

The girl stomped into the dining room, followed by the amused vampire. Tara and Willow looked up when Dawn flopped down into one of the empty chairs. Willow nodded distractedly and returned to her notebook.

“Got a date with a necromancer,” Spike said lightly, trying to smooth over the worry he saw in the blond witch’s eyes.

Tara tried, and failed, to look optimistic. “Please be careful.”

Willow added an unexpected, “Good luck,” before hastily sticking her nose back into her books. He had to give it to the redhead, she could do awkward to the T.

He nodded and ducked back into the foyer. It took a second to shake out the tablecloth, and a few more to shake his head at how stupid he knew he was about to look. Still, donning a ridiculous pizzeria cape was better than turning extra crispy on his way to the sewers.

He was still arranging his impromptu armor when Dawn slipped around the corner. He stopped, feeling a little silly in his red and white checks, but the girl just tugged the vinyl lower over his face.

“Hey, Spike,” she said quietly.

“Yeah?”

“Dying? So not allowed.” The words were followed by a little grin, but there was real emotion behind them too.

“Already dead,” he returned, eyebrow arching.

She slugged him in the arm, not that it hurt, but it got her point across. “You know what I mean.”

“Yeah, I know.” He wanted to reach out and ruffle her hair, but his Little Bit wasn’t so little anymore and would more than likely take offense. “Gotta run. I’ll tell Meret to keep an ear out for you.”

With what he hoped was a reassuring smile, he took off into the dying rays of the sun. His demonic nature screamed inside him, wanting nothing but to escape from the dangerous light, but Spike liked the fear. He liked the rush of the dizzying uncertainty he felt in the mad dash or the fight he wasn’t sure he could win. Whatever the demonic version of adrenaline was, it was surging through his body, making his movements a little faster, his senses a little sharper. He was drunk on the sensation, running on muscle memory until he dropped into the open sewer grate.

He crammed the tablecloth behind the unused ladder and opened his mind again to the coatl. Moments later he was running for the far side of town, visions of sunset over Sunnydale guiding his steps.

*****

Buffy and Meret hadn’t gone to the mission. Spike found himself wandering around in the sewers, turned around by the coatl’s perspective of the wet, stinking tunnels. He knew he was getting close. He also knew he was somewhere under the warehouse district, but he wasn’t entirely sure where. As for the slayer and her feathered shadow, the various odors wafting through the sewers had covered their tracks well.

The vampire slogged through the icy water, looking for any sign of Buffy’s passage. He stopped to run his hand over a long scuff on the wall when he heard it: a wisp of sound down one of the winding tunnels. It sounded like a low hum, rising and falling at irregular intervals.

Spike crept down the passageway, wary of disturbing whatever was making the sound. As he got closer, his senses started humming with something else. That was why he wasn’t surprised when he rounded a corner and found Buffy with Meret firmly wrapped around her neck.

“Took you long enough,” she whispered teasingly.

Spike hooked his thumbs in his belt loops and smirked. “Thought absence made the heart grow fonder?” Even with his exceptional night vision, it was hard to tell if she was blushing, but her heart rate certainly picked up. His thoughts turned immediately to her little goodbye present, and he clenched his fists and focused back on the matter at hand.

Talk about snogging later. Find Giles now.

She finally rolled her eyes and turned around, slipping further down the tunnel towards the source of the noise. Meret’s crimson head peeked out of her hair, unblinking eyes meeting the vampire’s with amusement.

The tunnel soon opened into a larger room, lit with a sickly yellow glow. The walls were covered in dripping, waxy constructions, which hung stiffly like the folds in a honey comb. Slayer and vampire hid in the shadow of a particularly large waxen drapery, Spike watching the activity before them with some surprise.

“What are they?” the slayer whispered.

Spike shook his head ruefully, remembering when he had last seen similar demons. “T’kinians,” he muttered. “Fought some a little while ago. Ill tempered bastards, but stupid. And flammable.”

The slayer nodded. “Tara says this is one of the mystical hot spots.”

The vampire nodded, unsurprised. T’kinians often congregated on magical convergence points. He cursed himself silently, wishing he had remembered that little detail when he had been going over the lists with Tara. Giles wasn’t here.

Buffy had apparently come to the same conclusion. “I can’t just leave them all here.”

Spike nodded in resignation. Duty. Always duty with her. “C’mon. We’ll figure somethin’ out.”

They crept closer, slipping from drape to drape until they could see the demons clearly. T’kinian workers dotted the chamber. It was hard to tell, what with the mandibles and facial plates, but it looked like the demons were pulling some kind of goo out of their mouths and smearing it on the chamber’s walls, adding new layers to their yellowish creations.

Buffy nudged Spike’s shoulder and made comic gagging faces until the closest worker pulled a slab of fatty flesh, probably human if the hairless, pink color of the remaining skin was to be believed, out of a fold in its crude robes, chewed it up, and started pasting more yellow drool on the growing lump in front of it. Then her choking took a more realistic turn.

As for Spike, he grimaced and wiped his hand off on his pants leg from where it had been resting on the wall of their waxy hiding place. He pulled the slayer up next to him, effectively distracting her from her focus on the worker-demon and back to the source of the sounds that had led them here in the first place: the humming chant.

A circle of taller, more heavily armored, if also better dressed, drones sat in the center of the room, clicking and droning away in their strange dialect to an even larger, if more delicate, figure on a raised throne in the center of their ring.

The hive queen was draped in a white, translucent shroud held in place by a spindly, sharp-edged crown. Her attention seemed riveted on her chanting mates, and she trilled a note of approval, or maybe entreaty, to the loudest of the group.

Spike strained to hear, but it was hard to understand a language that often fell outside of human, and even vampiric, hearing range. He couldn’t make out a word, or whistle, of their rite, and he didn’t recognize the ritual, or ceremony, or whatever it was, they were performing. Not that it was important at that point. The slayer needed, he needed, to clean shop and run. Maybe this wasn’t about saving the world for truth, justice, and the Bronze’s delectable blooming onions, but it would save this little corner of it. That was important to Buffy, and God help him, Spike was starting to care too.

He leaned in close and whispered into the slayer’s ear. “Can you spare any part of that get up for the cause?” A disbelieving flash of hazel prompted him to elaborate by fishing his lighter and flask out of his pocket. The dangerous glint left Buffy’s eyes and understanding replaced it.

Buffy pulled her knife out of her bag, and reluctantly started cutting on the hem of her shirt. Her face was drawn into tragic lines at the sacrifice of her treasured shirt. Spike managed to distract himself from the tanned width of torso visible above the slayer’s waistband by taking the strip of cloth and doused it with bourbon from his flask. He winced at the blatant alcohol abuse.

Spike started looking around for something to add weight to the little ball of fabric. Buffy poked him in the arm and took the piece of shirt. In a flash it was wound around one of her stakes. The vampire nodded and fired up his lighter. Buffy held the stake over the flame until it flared up, blue from the alcohol. She stepped into the open and hurled it with superhuman precision at the T’kinian queen’s feet.

The demoness barely had enough time to utter a click of surprise before she went up like a torch. Buffy paused long enough for the pair to see the drones, trilling and whistling their surprise and dismay, throw themselves at their mate and ruler in a futile attempt to put out the flames before grabbing the vampire and running full tilt down the watery corridor.

It was a sad truth that the warriors of light didn’t seem to take much joy in their war-making. It was bleeding tragic.

Spike finally managed to wrest his arm free from the slayer’s iron grip. He started to complain, to joke about the manhandling, but the vampire suddenly noticed that her neck was short one feathered choker. The light mental touch that marked his connection with Meret registered only one sensation: heat.

His wild eyed shout caught the slayer completely by surprise, and he hurtled headlong back down the hallway towards the T’kinian hive. He could hear Buffy taking up the chase behind him.

The frantic vampire pulled up short, the fire had spread more quickly than he could have imagined. He instinctively cringed away from the wall of flame that blocked his path, but his desperation quickly overcame his natural fear of fire, and the vampire started to throw himself through the flames.

Spike’s feet had barely left the floor when a solid weight slammed into him from behind, sending him face first into the brackish water. He managed to wrestle himself around, clawing desperately at the figure that was holding him down, keeping him away from Meret. The weight above him pressed his body into the muck, but panic overrode all other thought and instinct took over. He lashed out blindly, frantic to reach the coatl before it was too late.