“I am the guardian of this great being who separates the earth from the sky. If I live, she will live.” – The Book of Going Forth by Day


Spike’s eyes focused on his intended prey, the old demon he had thought dead.

“This won’t take long.” Dawn strained against her bonds at the end of the tower’s walkway, frightened and desperate.

Doc’s deceptively gentle face creased with the slightest of smiles. “No, I don’t imagine it will.”

Suddenly, the demon wasn’t in front of Spike, but behind, tearing through flesh and bone with the long knife he held in his hands. The pain blossomed like fire in his back and an agonized cry burst from his lips before he could stop it. Dawn cried out too, surprised as he was by Doc’s sudden attack.

Spike managed to stumble around, putting himself between the demon and Dawn.

“You don’t come near the girl, Doc,” his voice rasped, but defiance gave them strength.

The old demon looked slightly confused. “Why do you even care?” he asked, face a disconcerting mask of earnestness. “I don’t smell a soul anywhere on you.”

Despite the pain, there was a certainty in Spike’s mind that let him pull himself up straight. “I made a promise to a lady,” he said simply.

“Well, give the lady my regrets.” Suddenly Doc was attacking Spike with his tongue of all things, striking out with surprising force. Spike instinctively dodged the first attack, but the second caught him by surprise. He felt himself loosing his balance and grabbed at the first thing he could, the demon’s whip-like tongue.

When Spike plummeted from the tower, he took Doc with him.

*****

Day 13

Spike wasn’t going crazy. Crazy people talk to themselves, mumble and jibber and live inside their own heads. He’d seen enough of Glory’s unfortunate byproducts to know that. So, no, he wasn’t going crazy. He was thinking out loud and absorbed in the problem at hand. Not crazy. Focused.

Yeah right.

“Hearts. Eats hearts,” he said under his breath. “Specialty meat stores?” A new note made its way onto the margins of an annotated Egyptian Book of the Dead that he had found in the touristy book display in the Magic Box’s front window. He had taken it and retreated to the far corner of the store, escaping Anya’s over-enthusiastic bustle and Giles’ suspicious glances, to read.

“What’re you grumbling about?” Dawn asked, looking up from her homework. Well, glancing up from the American history textbook that she had been dully flipping through for the past half hour. Homework implied that some variety of ‘work’ was being done, and that was far from the case.

“Nothing.” Spike replied distractedly. There were various allusions in the book to a slayer. He had underlined every one he found in the text, sometimes multiple times. It might be important, even though he wasn’t sure if the word meant the same thing in translation, especially since there were no mentions of vampires. Unless some of the passages about preserved corpses referred to the undead instead of mummies. There was no way of knowing what the original hieroglyphics had said, especially in a copy whose cover sported gold glitter. “Esses. Slayer with an S, slayer with an s. Patterns in patterns.”

Dawn just looked at him, eyes wide and worried. A small corner of his mind noted her expression with some concern, but the lack of food and sleep was really starting to tell. Spike was still in the driver’s seat, but only just.

He reached towards the book, meaning to turn the page, but stopped when he caught sight of himself. His hand was thin, almost skeletal, and so pale against the red, red pen hooked between his fingers. He barely recognized it. Shaking off his distraction, but not the odd tremor that seemed to be overtaking his arm, he flipped to the next plate, repeating to himself, “Can’t die, can’t die, can’t die…”

“Spike?” Dawn again, voice measured and oddly calm. He ignored her.

His face tingled, and the page seemed crisper, the colors brighter suddenly. That was interesting. He leaned in for a closer look. “Tryin’ to tell me something, love?”

“Spike?”

That voice again, higher pitched and louder, but this might be important. There she was, the missing demigod, picked out in paint on papyrus. “Heart, feather, scale… Scales. Lion fur and hippo hide. Hungry chimera. Where are you?”

The voice in the back of Spike’s mind commented that for someone who claimed to not be crazy, he was sure doing a damned good impression. He blinked, realizing that he had been circling the picture of Ammut over and over again with his red pen.

“Spike, look at me.”

Noise again… unimportant… not like the picture. Means something, but what? Spike looked at the caption: The Weighing of the Heart. His heart had been weighed. And found wanting. ‘The only chance you had with me was when I was unconscious,’ Buffy had said. Funny, maybe that was why he dreamed of her every night.

“Giles, something’s wrong with Spike!”

The picture was fading, black eating along the edges of the page, closing in on the strange picture there. Ammut, blending crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus, all the animals the ancient Egyptians feared most. She ate the hearts of the damned, but the darkness was eating her. How strange.

His mind slipped under when she winked out of sight.

*****

The taste in Spike’s mouth was heavenly. Warm, rich, and smooth. He swallowed greedily, liquid spilling from the corner of his mouth, leaving a sticky trail down his chin. When it was gone, he heard a plaintive sound, which he was surprised to realize came from his own throat.

“You can’t Spike.” Dawn’s voice, gentle but pleading, made him open his eyes. Her face was drawn and pale, she must have been crying again.

Spike tried to lift a hand to brush away the loose strand of brown hair that had dropped across the girl’s face, but his arm shook so much that he had to give up. It had been a silly, sentimental move anyway.

His look of confusion prompted Dawn to explain, “Giles says that you can’t eat too much, or you might get sick.”

Eat. How long had it been since he had last eaten? Spike thought back, struggling to remember. Four days, and another week since he had swallowed more than a gulp or two during any given night. Just enough to keep flesh and demon together. And those last couple times had involved rancid pig plasma.

Spike glanced around, noting that he was propped against the pommel horse in the workout room. The scent of slayer and Buffy’s floral perfume coated everything, a fact that was both comforting and intensely painful. He couldn’t for the unlife of him remember what he was doing in the Magic Box.

“What happened?” he finally asked, surprised at how hoarse he sounded.

Dawn smiled in obvious relief, and the fact that his weak condition still earned that kind of response was almost as disturbing as the evidence of her tears. “You kept scribbling in some book. Then you started mumbling weird stuff, vamped out, and passed out. Giles says he didn’t know vampires could get malnutrition.”

Spike shut his eyes. Not malnutrition. Self-starvation. How utterly pathetic. Then again, he should have seen this coming. He could eat and drink human foods, but the only thing that could really sustain him was blood. The alcohol he had turned to in lieu of blood had filled his belly, taken an edge off of the pain, but nothing else.

He felt so weak. Prolonged starvation did funny things to a vampire. He was lucky that he hadn’t attacked anyone.

He opened his eyes again and found himself confronted with Dawn’s fear, Dawn’s worry, and Dawn’s accusation. It was well hidden, but still there.

“Don’t have any money,” he blurted out by way of an explanation, or maybe an apology. He hadn’t meant to scare her, but after his failed raid on the hospital shipment, the problem had slipped his mind again. After all, blocked near-undeath experiences and visits from powerful and demanding gods tended to supersede less significant matters, such as feeding, in the best of situations.

The non-sequitor didn’t seem to faze the girl. She understood. It was funny how often she understood.

“Giles went and got you the blood. There’s more in that bag,” she nodded towards the brown paper grocery sack at her side.

“Why the hell would he do that?” The question was out of Spike’s mouth before he could stop it.

Dawn’s young face looked at him seriously. Her rite of passage had been more brutal than most. There was a steely glint in her eyes that had not been there before Buffy’s fall.

“I asked him to.”

At Spike’s skeptical look, she rolled her eyes. “Okay, I told him that if he didn’t help take care of you, I’d tell my school guidance councilor that I was thinking about dropping out of school and becoming a porn star.” That earned a flare of golden eyes and a snarl, but Dawn just waved away his angry complaint. “Get a grip. I don’t think he believed me, but he did turn purple and run out of here pretty fast. Anything to shut me up, I guess.” Her eyes twinkled in a muted mimic of her former exuberance.

The vampire snorted in amusement. Hers was a kind of backwards, underhanded logic that couldn’t help but tug at his heartstrings.

“Can you walk?” she asked.

Spike nodded without really stopping to deliberate, but the blood really had helped, so he managed to lever himself up without falling. It was something.

“C’mon. Let’s get out of here.” Dawn’s voice sounded normal, but to a practiced ear, to the ear of a friend, something was wrong. She was too tense.

“Slow down, Platelet.” He leaned back against the pommel horse, trying to conceal that fact that he really did need its support for the moment. “What’s got your knickers in a twist?”

Dawn pursed her lips, and looked ready to argue, but contented herself with dropping the cup she had used to feed him into the bag and looking him directly in the eye.

“The only reason why Giles isn’t in her interrogating you is because he’s out there,” she nodded towards the door into the shop, “talking on the phone with Willow. She and Angel will be here in an hour.”

“Oh.” Spike had to admit, that sounded like as good a reason to leave as any. He didn’t have the heart, or the energy, for that particular confrontation yet. Especially since neither one of them could be killed.

He closed his eyes and took a long, steadying breath, stretching out with his senses. “Sun’s still up. Don’t see you as much of a sewer rat,” he said after a moment.

She flipped her hair over her shoulder and looked down her button nose at him. Well, more like up her button nose, even though the difference in their heights was lessening day by day. “Mom always said I was supposed to try new things.”

Oh god, Joyce. Her death was another knife in his heart. Dawn’s barb, tossed aimlessly into the conversation, had drawn heart’s blood.

Spike jerked his head in an abrupt nod, instantly regretting the sudden motion. The fresh blood might have helped, but he still felt light headed. Instead of commenting further, he just turned to go. Dawn’s soft footpads following close behind him.

*****

They weren’t five minutes underground when the complaining started.

“This stinks.” Dawn’s voice was sharp, petulant.

“Well yeah, it’s a sewer,” Spike drawled. “Your place or mine, Bite Size?” The words and tone were familiar, even if his heart wasn’t in the banter. He had started forcing himself to fake it for her sake, and the learning curve was steep.

“Yours. Giles and Willow are the dumbest smart people I know.” She paused, and he could almost hear the bitter smile in her voice. “They’ll never look for me there.”

“Whatever you say, Bit.” He took the next winding tunnel to the left, turning further away from Revello Drive, and aiming instead for Restfield. “Just don’t make a habit of this. Gotta keep up my reputation.”

Dawn’s voice was a mocking shadow of his own. “Whatever you say, Spike.”