Chapter Thirty-Eight




Romania
1898




He had never been a great believer in Fate, not in any higher force or all-knowing being that controlled the universe like some omnipresent puppet master. Truth be told, he hadn’t believed in much of anything since his mother first developed her cough, and he’d publicly denounced religion and God in the middle of communion at the Church of All Saints. Some vague faith in the divine could have returned to him in his relationship with Elizabeth. If she’d stayed—if they’d married—it almost certainly would have. He would have gone down on his knees and thanked God in all His incarnations for allowing him that gift. As it was, however, he had convinced himself that life—and unlife—was little more than a series of meaningless events connected only by the people who were affected by them. Even Dru’s second sight struck him as something caused more by coincidence than any relationship with the Beyond.

Still, it was delightfully convenient. So convenient that one night in the late autumn of 1898, he actually began to wonder if there was something behind it.

It was Dru, after all, who wanted to come to Romania, to that specific spot deep in a wood at the southwestern edge of the Carpathian Mountains. She was drawn to it, she said. A voice behind her eyes begged her on. Spike didn’t argue with her in the matter. He rarely denied her what she wanted, and, anyway, he really didn’t give a damn where they ended up.

They had arrived only that night and made camp near a riverbank, against the edge of a clearing inside the forest and underneath the shelter of an outcropping of rock on the mountainside. To the back of their camp was nothing at all for miles, nothing but animals and wilderness. Yet, just across the river, there was a commune of travelers, their brightly painted wagons forming a protective circle around a large campfire. They had been there for weeks, having settled in well before Dru and Spike discovered them. One of the draw horses had fallen ill and could not pull. To shoot or abandon the animal would have been a much greater loss than that of their time. Besides, there was the river, and a decent array of fish. They were content to wait it out.

Now the horse was almost well. Though still unable to pull, it had strength enough to follow them if tied behind the wagon. Preparations were underway for their departure the following morning.

Although the night was hardly more than well begun, Spike did not bother crossing the river to hunt. He had already eaten a woodcutter, and besides that, the journey had been a long one and he was tired. Dru looked as if she wouldn’t have minded a bit of killing, just for the fun of it, but when Spike threw together a rough campsite, she made no attempt to leave him. Together, they stretched out on a bedroll made of several rough blankets, and Spike stared at the stars and considered the odd chain of events that had brought him to that point.

There had been little direction in their movements, these past seventeen years. With the Slayer removed from the equation, there was nowhere it was necessary for them to be. Aimlessly, they had roamed the whole of Europe, stopping for days or weeks—even months—in some particular spot that pleased them. They had become known for their savagery: Dru rarely made a kill without torturing the victim first, and Spike had developed the reputation of being a pyromaniac. They had laid waste to more than one small village, and word traveled fast. Newspapers called them “The Scourge of Europe,” and fearful whispers about their exploits could be heard in hundreds of different parlors in a half-dozen different languages.

However, irritating though it was, they were not the only ones who could lay claim to the title, or the infamy. Because their patterns of destruction were somewhat similar, and because few people saw them in close proximity and lived to tell about it, Spike and Dru were often mistaken for Angelus and Darla. Not that any of their names were internationally famous—at least, not in civilian circles. The Watchers’ Council that controlled the Slayer knew them well, and attempted to track their movements—but the Scourge of Europe was often reported to be in more than one place at a time. Angelus might be slaughtering nuns in a French convent, while at the same time Spike was setting fire to a brothel in Spain; there was no distinction made between them. Only in England, where he had first cut his teeth as a fledgling, was Spike famous in his own right. Rather, he was infamous.

He liked that. And in his ever-growing self-confidence, the foolish fancies that had lain dormant for so long began to plague him once again.

The Slayer.

The sting of his last failure had long since left him, and being so often mistaken for Angelus had once again sparked his desire for notoriety. For true distinction. For worldwide recognition. With a slayer’s death to his credit, the whole of Europe would know his name. With her blood on his lips, the Council would never again mistake him for Angelus. It was a heady thought, and given past experiences, a stupid one. Yet it would not leave him.

But the Slayer was not on his mind, as he lay upon his crude bed in the Romanian wood. She did not invade his dreams in a battle for death and glory. Instead, there was someone soft and warm, someone alive whose blood he did not crave.

As the years slipped by, his waking memories of her had become muddled and not exactly reliable. The details of her face were harder to picture, though no less dear for it. She had become an indistinct vision of white and green and gold. Her features blurred not entirely, but enough so that he couldn’t quite recognize them.

But that was only when he was awake.

Nights, she came less frequently, because he tended to dream less these days. However when she did come, she was almost alive to him, every feature thrown into sharp focus. In his dreams, he remembered everything, relived everything. The silky flesh that shivered beneath his touch…the curve of her back…the line of her collarbone…he remembered it all. The first night in Romania, his dreams were no different. Not really dreams at all but a projection of his most tender memories, like those moving pictures that were so talked about in London. Sometimes he remembered them afterward and sometimes he didn’t. The times when he could remember, he wished he had not. This was his life now, and he did not need it impeded by recollections of the past one. Yet he had no control over it.

She was so close to him, that night in the forest. So close that it seemed that if he reached out in his sleep, he might have been able to touch her. So close that he could breathe her scent, the faint perfume of violets and the warm, sweet smell of her sex. In his dreams, he was kissing her there, the smooth skin of her inner thighs brushing against his temples, the silky curls tickling his nose. He had discovered, quite by accident, that she enjoyed it. On the night she promised never to leave him, he had taken her a second time, the very last time, and it was then that he found out. He hadn’t known she would like it; in his general ignorance of the fairer sex, he never knew what might please her. It was only that he had wanted to kiss every part of her, mark each inch of warm, bare flesh as his own. If he’d had more time to explore, perhaps he could have brought her to climax. As it was, he nuzzled and kissed until she gasped and pulled him into her. He tried to be gentler, that last time, to make up for the clumsiness of their coupling earlier that evening. But he found he couldn’t hold himself back from his desperation. And though it lasted much longer than before, he found it impossible to stop once he had started.

It had been lovely.

Now, dreaming of it, he was restless. He turned in his sleep, fists clutching at the edge of his bedroll as his body tensed, preparing to come right there in his trousers like some pathetic adolescent boy. Only before he did, Drusilla sat up beside him and shrieked, startling him awake.

“What, what?” he sputtered dazedly, groping about in the dark for a candle. She was on her feet in an instant, moaning and clawing at her face.

“It’s come—it’s come. I knew it was coming, but I didn’t want to believe it—”

“What’s come? Dru, what did you see com—”

But she was already gone in a flash of trailing chemise and bare feet, streaking toward the river like a creature gone mad. He was still fully dressed but for his boots, which he pulled on while hopping awkwardly behind her. Bloody insane she was, he thought. She’d be carried away by the current.

But she wasn’t. There was a ford some hundred feet down from their campsite, and she had found it blindly, instinctively, and plunged across. He followed her, dropping waist deep into icy water, his boots sucking at the muddy bottom. The gypsy camp on the far riverbank was in an uproar, gone as barmy as she had; maybe it was the reason for her madness. Torches and lanterns blazed brightly, and there was the wild keening of a woman, a dark, plump woman, clutching the bloodless body of a child to her chest. She was soon drowned out by shouts from a bearded traveler holding a ragged leather book, his crooked long finger stabbing at the air before him—

Spike pushed his way through the crowd in search of Dru, but he couldn’t find her in the pandemonium. At the western edge of the forest something staggered past him at an ungainly run and it was—

Angelus?

“What the fucking hell are you—” he began incredulously. But Angelus ignored him, didn’t seem to see him at all. He fell to his knees, fingers digging into the black soil as he shook his head from side to side and moaned.

“Oh, Jesus,” he wept. “Heavenly Father—didn’t want—didn’t mean—”

“Didn’t mean—” Spike echoed in bewilderment. He heard Darla’s voice from somewhere behind him and turned quickly, thinking she was speaking to one of them. But no, she was standing in front of the bearded man, talking rapidly in a frantic tone he had never heard her use before.

“You took him from me—you stole him away. You gave him a soul!”

Spike’s eyes widened, darting from Darla to the still-hysterical Angelus. “Soul!” he exclaimed under his breath. “A soul? Bloody God—”

The gypsy looked at Darla dispassionately, knowing her strength and not at all afraid of it. “He must suffer as all his victims have suffered,” he said in broken English, his voice calm and hard in the bedlam of the camp.

“That is no justice!” Darla cried. “Whatever pain he caused to your daughter was momentary—over in an instant—or an hour. But what you’ve done to him will force him to suffer for the rest of eternity! Remove that filthy soul so my boy might return to me!”

It sounded like a demand, but her voice was desperate, almost pleading. Drusilla emerged from the darkness beside her. “Angelus has gone away,” she whimpered. “Where is he?”

Darla grabbed hold of the gypsy’s neck, at the same time snapping aside: “Drusilla, the camp—go on—kill things!”

Kill things.

And suddenly Spike realized what she was about to do.

He ran lightly across the camp to where he had first seen the bearded man standing. An enclosed cart with a red-painted top, the hushed sounds of crying from within. A huddled woman and three little girls, the smallest of which was no older than the Dutch child he had let escape. Yards away, the faint sound of Darla’s voice—

“In that wagon is your family. Your wife and daughters will die tonight without my protection. But if you’ll do as I say, your family can live.”

Oh, no you don’t, Spike thought savagely. And with vindictive pleasure, he stepped into the cart and closed the door behind him.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




Much later, he came across Angelus again. Even deeper into the forest this time, lying in a heap at the foot of a fir tree. He was shivering violently.

“You pathetic bastard.”

He looked up at the sound of Spike’s voice, and his eyes were so changed he hardly seemed the same creature as before.

“It wasn’t me—” he whispered, as if Spike had accused him of something.

“It was you,” the other said grimly.

“No—no, I wouldn’t—”

“Wouldn’t, huh?”

Spike took a seat on the carpet of pine needles beside his grandsire, his voice little more than a spiteful whisper.

“Wouldn’t what? Wouldn’t kill, wouldn’t torture? You did it.”

Angelus held himself and rocked from side to side. “Something drove me—something in my head—”

A sudden, fierce flash of anger at that. Spike rolled the other vampire onto his back, straddling his chest and backhanding him on his filthy cheekbone.

“You think you can tell yourself that?” he demanded harshly. “That something forced you? That it wasn’t your fault? You forget that I’ve been through it all myself. Went through that door to immortality. Came out the other side the same sodding man as before, only lesser. With a bloodlust I could have controlled and didn’t. You might not have had a conscience, but you bloody well had a choice. And you knew what you were doing and you did it anyway!”

Sobbing, tears. The cold, trembling body limp and helpless underneath him.

It made him even angrier.

Spike leaned down, his hands around Angelus’ throat. Forehead to forehead, mouths almost touching, he whispered: “You sodomized me. You think God’ll forgive you for that? Or, for tying down that tramp from the railway station and opening his stomach while he lay there alive—feeling everything—his entrails unwinding like a ribbon in your hand. For the little girl—couldn’t have been more than nine years old—that you raped up against the wall in Carfax Abbey. You think your slate’ll wash clean because now you feel remorse? ”

“I confess to Almighty God…” began Angelus, garbled and desperate, muttering excerpts from a prayer half-remembered. “…to Blessed Mary ever virgin…I have sinned exceedingly…”

“Through my fault, through my most grievous fault,” mocked Spike, pinning Angelus down as he struggled to escape. “You papist idiot. You think a mea culpa will put it to rights? You think I could walk in to the Anglican Church and ask God to absolve me? Or is it the Catholics that have the stronghold on forgiveness?”

A certain dark clarity came into his grandsire’s eyes at that. “You don’t want redemption. There’s nothing good in you. But the soul—I can feel it inside me—”

There’s nothing good in you.

If your girl saw you now…if she saw what you’ve done in her absence…would she still love you?

Something burned in him, at that. Something apart from the satisfaction of seeing his persecutor suffering. Something that was almost—

Pushing the idea aside before it could fully form in his mind, Spike shoved himself up and off Angelus’ body. He stared down at his erstwhile mentor—a creature gone helpless and frightened—and his eyes filled with disgust and a kind of controlled rage. His voice shook when he said:

“And it’s damned you. God’s abandoned you and you’re going to hell, because you’ve got something that lives on after the rest of us are dust, and it’ll do you no good now.”

Spike raised a booted foot and brought it down onto the other vampire’s stomach so brutally that he retched, and then he gave him a malicious smile.

“Give my regards to the devil, won’t you?” he said.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~