Chapter Thirty-Seven




Delft, Holland
1881




As cocky as he had been, rejecting Angelus’ proposal for information, Spike soon came to regret his decision. He’d never been to the Netherlands before, and he realized upon arrival that its scope was far vaster than his atlas had led him to believe. Not only that, but it belatedly occurred to him that he did not speak Dutch and that the vampires of the region—who could have helped him in his quest to find the new Slayer—did. Suffice it to say, this did not make his search any easier.

He did discover, a few months into his journey, that she was somewhere in South Holland. Of course, as luck would have it, he was in North Holland at the time, which fact only served to annoy him further. Still, the information did significantly narrow his search, though it hardly offered him an exact location. He assumed—incorrectly—that since Emiliana had resided in Rome, this new Slayer must also base herself in one of the larger municipalities of her country. Amsterdam seemed a likely place to start, and when this proved fruitless, he moved on to Rotterdam and finally, to Den Haag. It was in the latter that he finally found someone who could speak his language. Well, not his language, exactly, but at least a common language. And in an exchange of broken French with a demon who looked like an overgrown reindeer with algae on its head, he finally learned what he needed to know: the Slayer was in Delft.

Spike knew little to nothing about Delft, other than the fact that it was set by canals and it was the home of Johannes Vermeer, a 17th century painter who had only found fame twenty or so years before. Neither of these facts was particularly useful to him, and by the time he actually reached the city, Spike’s temper was wearing thin. He thought to himself that if he did not find her here, then he would burn the city to the ground for spite. He also thought that if Dru whined one more time about not liking the way Dutch people tasted, he would abandon her in the charred ruins after said burning. He even went so far as to tell her this, although the empty threat did nothing to curb her complaints.

It wasn’t really Dru’s fault, his sudden wretchedness of spirit. His mood had fluctuated wildly in the first months of his search: days or weeks of euphoria, followed by anger, followed by melancholy. There was no accountable reason for it, only that he was growing tired. Tired of the journey. Tired of a game where all the rules were set in his favor. He wanted a challenge; he wanted the Slayer.

Perhaps if their expedition had not taken so long, Spike’s expectations of the new Slayer would not have been so high. Yet he had searched for the better part of a year to find her and in that time, he had built up in his mind the vision of their first meeting. As with the Italian Slayer, this vision was idealized and almost wholly unrealistic. He saw her, again, as a small woman. Not necessarily petite, but at the very least, fine-boned and slender, graceful. His assumptions of the Dutch Slayer were drawn not only from his own imagination but also from his dealings with Emiliana. He expected this new creature to be just as pretty, just as fluid, and just as sharp as her predecessor had been. In other words, his standards were enormous.

That first night, he had no opportunity to seek her out. They were barely in sight of the city when the sky began to turn gray with approaching dawn. Spike cursed at their bad luck, but Dru tugged at his arm eagerly, like an excited child. He turned to where she was pointing, and far to the left of them, on the very outskirts of the city, stood a small cottage. A man was standing in the dooryard, his suspenders down and his boots unlaced. He was yawning. Behind him, the top half of the cottage’s door was opened inward.

They left the road and walked down the gentle, weedy slope into the man’s yard. He startled at their approach, his sleepy eyes widening with surprise. It was, after all, quite early for visitors. He rubbed a calloused hand over the back of his head and spoke to them questioningly, but as it was in Dutch, Spike had no idea what it was he said. At any rate, it made no difference. His animal face dropped like a theater curtain, and before the frightened man could react at all, Spike’s hand was on his throat.

“I know you don’t understand me,” he said quietly. “All the better for you, because I’m going to kill you. But first…”

He dragged the struggling man nearer to the cottage door—through which he could detect the scent of several people. As he drew closer, he could see them moving about in the dimness of the lamplight, preparing breakfast. A woman and two little boys. The woman was plump and ruddy; the boys were younger versions of the man whose throat he now held. Spike rapped sharply on the doorframe with the knuckles of his free hand.

“Oi!”

The three people within the cottage all jumped and then spun around to look at him. The woman immediately began screaming in terror at his devil’s face, but the boys were curiously quiet, their jaws opened wide, their cheeks pale, their eyes stupid with fear. They stared at him even as their mother shoved them violently behind her. She spread her arms as if to shield them, and then jabbered a string of hysterical words Spike couldn’t understand. Somewhere to the back of him, he could hear Dru laughing softly.

There was no point in trying to talk to the Dutch woman, and Spike didn’t bother. Instead, he nodded his head toward the opened door and the room beyond it, motioning with his right hand to indicate that she should invite him in. At first, she did not understand what he meant. When she finally figured it out, she shook her head violently. The morning sun was already climbing the horizon, and Spike didn’t waste time asking her again. Narrowing his yellow eyes, he wrenched her husband’s head to one side, and bared his fangs to the exposed throat. The woman shrieked and words like pleading spilled from her throat. Behind her, the boys were still unnaturally silent. Spike raised his head and made the motion toward the door again, more aggressively this time. And this time, the woman obeyed him.

“Kom binnen,” she whispered, falling back fearfully when he did. Her rough hands groped at her back, reaching for her sons, and Spike could see from the look in her eyes that she was trying to pull them from behind her, to send them running. They did take a few staggering steps forward, but Drusilla walked into the room at that moment, and she kicked both halves of the Dutch door shut behind her.

What happened afterward was no more than the usual. Just mindless feeding. Spike killed the man and drank of the woman, while Drusilla took the two boys. The first of them she killed quickly and drank the blood, but the second of the two—the youngest—she laid out on the rough plank table and tortured.

After he finished with his own meal, Spike left Drusilla to her game. He wasn’t particularly bothered by what she was doing, but he had no desire to watch it either. He wandered through the house on a self-guided tour. There wasn’t a lot to it. Just the front room, a narrow, dark bedroom, and a lean-to that held a cook stove and some dry goods. It was very loud in the front room, what with Dru’s playing, and Spike lingered in the relative quiet of the lean-to. There was a jar of pears on one of the dusty shelves, and he took it down and inspected it. The contents seemed good, so he settled himself down on the cold ledge of the stove and opened it, pulling out pear slices on the blade of his jackknife.

He hadn’t eaten more than three or four when a sharp scream sounded from the front room. Annoyed, he extended one leg and still seated, kicked the rickety door shut, muffling the sound of the boy’s torment. However, before he could resume his eating, another sound startled him. This one was much softer, and it came from within the lean-to.

Spike paused, a pear halfway to his mouth, and he listened intently. At first, nothing. Yet he waited carefully, and in a few moments he heard it again, a sound like a sigh. Hoarse and so very quiet that had he not been a vampire, he likely would not have heard it at all. However, being a vampire, it wasn’t difficult for him to locate the source of the sound. There was a battered brass coal bin beside the stove on which he sat, and as he strained his ears, Spike was absolutely certain that the sound came from inside it. He was mystified. Carefully setting down the pear-jar, he jumped off the edge of the stovetop and onto the dirt floor. He stepped a bit nearer to the bin and leaned over it, listening. And this time, he could hear its heart beating.

Without making a sound, he pulled the lid off the bin, sliding into his demon-face as he did so. The creature within jerked its shoulders but did not otherwise move, nor make a sound other than the one he had heard before—something he could now easily identify as terrified gasping. It was a girl. A very young girl—not more than three or four—poorly dressed and dirty from sitting in the coal. Her round baby-face was framed by dark blond hair, and when she looked at him fearfully, he saw that her eyes were hazel and full of horror. None of this held any meaning for Spike, beyond the fact that she was blond and therefore despised. And although he had never killed a child before, he reached in to grab her small arm, fully prepared to do so now. However, before his fingers closed around the small limb, something struck him, compelled him to stop. An odd tingling sensation, as if some invisible onlooker had suddenly rested its mouth on his ear and whispered, don’t.

And he didn’t.

Instead, he stared at the girl, his head tilted slightly to one side. The demon’s mask slid away and her eyes widened at the sudden change, her pale cupid’s-bow lips parting as if to speak, or maybe to scream. But Spike was acutely aware of Drusilla’s presence in the front room, and he shook his head at the girl, pressing his index finger to his own mouth in a gesture for her to be quiet. She obeyed instantly.

Another brief moment of consideration and silence, and then he turned on his heel and walked out of the lean-to. Part of him expected her to try to follow—or at least to flee—but she didn’t. When he glanced back over his shoulder, he saw through the open door that she was still in there, kneeling in the coal.

In the front room, Drusilla was just finishing her morning’s work. Spike grabbed her by one blood-slick arm and pulled her to him. He put her up against the wall nearest to the bedroom door and took her roughly; and even as he did so, he thought that he could hear a scuttling sound, something passing through the room at their backs. But his mouth was to Dru’s ear, muttering into it, and she heard nothing, noticed nothing.

Later, while Drusilla was sleeping, Spike looked into the lean-to.

The girl was gone.

He knew she would be.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




The strange interlude in the lean-to left Spike uneasy. Perhaps because it was the first time, since Matthew, that he had hesitated in killing anyone. He was a vampire and that was what vampires did. Kill things. True, he had never killed a child before. Young women, girls after a certain age, yes. But not a small child. It had never seemed odd to him before, because, given the late hours in which he hunted, he rarely came across children at all. Occasionally, Dru took it upon herself to find one, and the results were always particularly gruesome; but they had never greatly disturbed him. Generally, he just ignored them, went on his own way, to his own kills. It had never occurred to him that he might find that practice—

Wrong?

—because he had just taken for granted that nothing seemed wrong anymore.

Still, as uncomfortable as he was with the idea, Spike did not allow it to weigh too heavily on his mind. The very next night, he had pushed it aside entirely, having turned his thoughts, single-mindedly, to the Slayer.

Her name was Maertge, and she was not hard to find. In fact, he stumbled across her that very first night, as he walked down the narrow, water-flanked street in search of his dinner. He wouldn’t have known her, at first. Nothing about her spoke of Emiliana, or of his mental picture of what a Slayer should look like. She was short and lean, but so thick of bone that on first glance, she appeared overweight. Her hair was a frizzy, carroty red, and her face sallow and pockmarked. Her eyes were russet-colored, too small for her broad face, and they were hard. Whereas Emiliana seemed weary with the world, Maertge was angry at it, and it was not difficult to see that she focused this anger on the demons she fought.

There would be no dancing with this one.

Still, she was the Slayer, and his target, and he would not allow his disappointment to color his desire. Ugly as she was, she was the Chosen One, and her death would be no less of a victory for him.

He did not watch her as he had watched Emiliana. He didn’t want to. There was no admiration in him for her. He felt no pleasure in seeing her fight. He waited only until she had dispatched her current adversary. Then, he attacked her.

There was no finesse in his assault, no planning. She saw him coming a meter away and struck him with all the strength in her thick arm, knocking him to the cobbles forcefully. For a few seconds, he could only lie there, stunned. It wasn’t until he saw her swiftly leaning toward him, a roughly hewn wooden stake in her grasp, that he pushed himself upright. Then, of course, came the battle.

He did not kill her that night, naturally. He had hardly expected to. Still, he was surprised by the magnitude of it, the wounds she inflicted, the narrowness of his escape. Maertge was as brutal as a vampire, as brutal as himself, and that he had not expected. Truth be told, she almost killed him that first time, and the injuries sustained left him ill and confined to bed for the next three nights. When he stubbornly left the safety of the house on the fourth night, he was still limping on what must have been a rapidly healing—but still very broken—ankle. He caught her near a church in the Papist corner, surprised her as she was fighting a wiry young fledgling. The other vampire fled as the Slayer turned her attentions on Spike.

They did not talk as they fought; they spoke different languages and there was no point in it. But Spike thought regretfully back to his nights with Emiliana, when the battles were verbal as much as physical, and he redoubled his efforts to kill this Slayer. There was no pleasure in sparring with her. Best to get it over with quickly.

Of course, that was easier said than done. Killing her. In fact, there were several moments that evening when Spike was certain she was going to kill him. He did not usually resort to using weapons; it seemed cowardly. But he was injured and Maertge was relentless, and it was either use a weapon or allow himself to be killed outright. He wasn’t afraid of death, but he’d be damned if he’d bow down to it at the hands of this coarse, overblown young woman. There was a short wrought-iron fence surrounding the church, and with a vicious pull, Spike managed to yank one of the iron railings out of the ground and free from its moorings. Too long for a spike and too short for a spear, it nevertheless offered him decent protection from her heavy-handed assaults. He thought he was doing rather well, up until the point she decided to use one of the other railings to her own advantage.

She moved very quickly for someone so squat and thick-boned. Before he could realize what was happening, she had a rail in her hand, and before he could do anything about that, she was walloping him on the side of the head with it. He staggered backward away from the blows, but she followed him, steadily driving him in a narrow circle so that, in just a moment, he was up against the broken fence. Against and then over it, his torso bent backwards, the sharp iron points pressing into his aching muscles.

A trickle of blood ran down Spike’s temple and into his eye, but he barely noticed it. His head was pounding as though she were still beating him, and with each throb, his vision clouded. There was blood in his ears, muffling his hearing. The metallic clatter of Maertge’s rail hitting the cobbles was dim and far away, and he could barely see her through the blurred halo of light behind his eyes. But he could feel the heat of her body as she pressed into him, one strong hand clamping down on his throat to hold him, although he wasn’t trying to escape. A slight rush of warm air as her free arm drew back and then fell forward to plunge her stake home. And then—

Nothing.

For an instant, Spike’s vision cleared enough for him to see the stunned look in Maertge’s eyes as her body was suddenly ripped away from his own. She was pulled off her feet and against the body of another. A barely-detectable crunch of bone as her head was yanked violently around, snapping her neck, and then she dropped to the cobbles with a sickening thump.

Spike braced his arms on the broken fence, pulling himself as upright as possible, as the Slayer’s killer approached him. His vision was hazy again, spotted in light and dark, and he could not immediately see the face before him. Yet even without that, he found he recognized the assassin by the heavy, strong hand that clamped on his shoulder, by the cool, bloodied breath, and the low, rasping voice that murmured into his ear.

“Thought I’d find you here.”

Angelus.

Exhausted as he was, Spike found strength enough to pull away at that. He stumbled sideways, clinging to the tops of the railings. Blood welled in his battered lungs and made him cough as he said: “Jesus Christ.”

“Not quite,” answered Angelus. “But thanks for the sentiment.”

“How the bleeding hell did you—” Another bout of violent coughs, but Angelus pieced together the rest of the sentence easily.

“How did I find you?” He snickered. “Always the dim one, aren’t you? Who was it who told you where to find the Slayer? The only damned wonder is that it took you as long as it did to find the right city. I’ve been cooling my boot heels in this place for almost a year.”

Muttering an indistinct response, Spike forced himself off the fence. His knees threatened to buckle without its support, but at least it gave him the appearance of having some strength. He clenched his hands into weak fists and glared at Angelus’ indistinct form with bleary eyes. Angelus, meanwhile, only snorted derisively.

“What’s that, William? Didn’t quite catch it.”

And Spike said plainly: “Sod off.”

He turned his back on Angelus, then. Slowly and very painfully, but his meaning was clear. Angelus was beneath his notice. He wasn’t afraid.

A soft sigh from behind him—“Perisher!”—and then Angelus’ hand came down across the side of his already-injured head. The full force of the blow fell on the lump over his temple, and there was a sudden explosion of color behind his eyes. His legs buckled and the last thing he saw, before he fell into unconsciousness, was Angelus’ grimacing face.

It was the last time Spike would see his face for seventeen years.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




He awoke to pale dawn. No sunlight as of yet, but the promise of it in the soft glow of blue on the horizon. His head was aching, crusted with blood, and his ankle felt freshly broken. When he shifted, the muscle of his shoulder burned, and it did not take him very long to figure out why. There was a stake in it, sunk all the way through the muscle and past the bone.

His trousers were undone.

For the moment choosing to ignore the latter, Spike reached for the stake. A soft pressure moved his fingers aside, however, and when he squinted, he could see that the smeary white shape that knelt beside him was Drusilla. Her own slim hands closed over the wooden shaft, and Spike screamed and cursed into the darkness as she wrenched it out.

Afterward, he lay panting on the stones, in too much pain to move. He gasped, asked through gritted teeth, “Angelus—?”

He couldn’t make out her face, but her voice was sad when she answered quietly: “He wanted I should leave with him.”

“But you didn’t.”

“My place is with you.”

She leaned across him, kissing his jaw, the side of his head. Her tongue was cool, soothing to his injuries, and Spike closed his eyes and sighed.

“Did he hurt you?”

“Oh, yes. I enjoyed it quite well.”

Okay…

He opened his mouth to ask exactly how Angelus had hurt her and why it was so enjoyable, although he was quite certain he really did not want to know. But before he could speak, Drusilla startled next to him and whispered urgently.

“We must go now, Spike. The sun…”

He rolled his head to the side, staring up at the sky beyond the edge of the city. Pale peach with streaks of blue, the sun a creeping sliver of bright red. He groaned.

“Bugger all. Help me up, pet.”

He draped an arm across her slender shoulders, and Drusilla wrapped her arm around his waist, pulling him to his feet. He was little more than dead weight against her, but she was almost as strong as Angelus and bore the burden effortlessly. They were too far from their own house to bother trying to make it back there before the sun rose, so they took the first refuge they could find: the rectory beside the church.

Spike dropped onto an armchair that stood just inside the doorway, while Drusilla made quick work of the three priests. She threw the limp body of the first one to him, and he drank, grateful for the warm, healing blood. The crucifix hanging around the man’s neck didn’t give him a moment’s pause. He didn’t speak until he had drained his vessel dry.

Then, he asked: “You know what, pet?”

She looked up at him over the torn neck of the third priest, the question in her eyes. Spike wiped his bloodied hands on his shirtfront, reached down to fasten his still-undone fly.

“I think I’m bloody well done with Slayers, for the time being.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~