“I have gone out, I have risen up, I have gone in, I am alive.” – The Book of Going Forth By Day


The mail was heavier than it looked, and it was a little tight across the shoulders, but when Doc’s long blade skidded harmlessly across the chain links and away from Spike’s ribs, the vampire disregarded any other complaints he had and was just relieved that the quick bastard had been foiled by the armor concealed under the vampire’s thick leather jacket.

Taking advantage of Doc’s momentary surprise, Spike slammed an elbow behind him, catching the other demon in the gut and sending him flying backwards with a grunt.

With the chain mail weighing him down, Spike lost even more speed against the remarkably quick demon, but the added protection meant that he managed to turn away most of Doc’s attacks with his puny knife. After a few minutes, the vampire was bleeding from a deep cut across his hand and another on his cheek, but Doc was sporting a nice shiner, swelling one of his eyes closed and the wet rasp of his breath spoke of broken ribs and punctured lungs.

It wasn’t pretty, it wasn’t particularly heroic, but the brutal give and take on the rickety tower’s walkway stretched out into many minutes. In the end, it was Spike who got the last laugh when a distracted Doc, so focused on the vampire in front of him, was tossed to the ground below by the slayer who had crept up behind him.

*****

Day 51

Every lead Spike had already found had been a wash. That Sanderson note from the zoo? Horse breeder. The Phillips woman who had been cleaning out the Magic Box’s component shelves? Two bit fortune teller, and not even a good one at that. Callista’s, who ordered a truly impressive number of beef hearts from The Meat Market? Eurasian Fusion restaurant.

Other than contriving to drive Spike around the bend, this continuing litany of failures was serving another purpose: to send him back to the Magic Box and research.

And gods above and below, how he hated research.

His battered copy of the Book of the Dead was on the table below, read and re-read to no avail. Next to it was the ever popular Necromancy for Beginners and the ever boring Aslingar’s Extra-Planar Entities.

Anya had left him to his own devices, but only after wheedling a promise to not harass the customers out of him. She was busy behind the counter, counting newt eyes or the like. Spike could just see her, from his vantage in the far corner of the book loft. She was humming, a tuneless, happy sound which grated on his nerves. Thankfully, she and her damnable cheerfulness soon retreated to the storeroom, taking the sound with them.

Not that it really helped his focus. All it took was one stray thought about his last encounter with Anubis to shatter any shred of concentration he had left.

Trying to drag himself back into the present, because no promise from the deity, no matter how enticing, would come to fruition unless he met his end of the bargain, Spike continued reading from his next, probably equally futile tome: Shields, Gates, and Containment Fields.

The tinkling of bells and the sound of raised voices distracted Spike yet again. After an initial burst of renewed ire, his keen ears caught the words being spoken.

“But what if she is?” Willow’s distressed voice might not have stirred Spike’s unbeating heart, but her next words grabbed his attention with both hands. “I mean, Hell Goddess opening a gateway to hell, through which had all kinds of hellspawn flew. Are we seeing a theme here?”

Tara was hanging to the back as the trio walked further into the shop, eyes wide and troubled. Xander, on the redhead’s left, seemed to be the one holding up the other end of the argument.

“But, Wills,” he pleaded. “We don’t know that. Tara, tell her that we can’t know that.”

But Tara did not reply, her lower lip caught between her teeth. She shuffled to the research table and slid into a seat, staring blankly at her hands.

Spike would have paid a lot of money to know why they were talking about Glory again. The hell bitch was dead, which was the only good that had come of that night, so why the recap? As far as he could tell, they were only ripping open old wounds, his among them.

What he did know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was that when Willow joined her girlfriend at the table, she started paying an inordinate amount of attention to the books he had left strewn there.

“Look, we’ll figure this out,” she said quietly, running her fingers covetously over the cover of his The Book of the Dead. “But let’s keep this to ourselves until we have something concrete. I don’t want to upset Dawnie with it if I’m wrong.”

That was a sentiment that Spike could appreciate, but something about Willow’s tone didn’t strike him as earnest. Then again, Red had been setting off his alarm bells most of the summer. The witch tended to leak magical energy, seemingly without being aware of it, whenever she let her emotions get the better of her. It was enough to ruffle even the least sensitive demon’s feathers.

Her casual appropriation of his book didn’t help matters either. Spike’s eyes narrowed into irritated slits as she slipped the paperback, which, okay, was stolen to begin with, into her purse.

Behind her, Xander’s face was drawn and pale. Tara’s wasn’t much better.

Spike carefully kept to the shadows on the balcony, hoping that they would let something more definitive slip, but that wasn’t to be. Anya reappeared from the storerooms and the others’ topic of conversation turned to new things. A little empty banter, a few awkward silences, and they were off again, locked in the exercise room where they held whatever important meetings a slayerless slayer support group thought necessary.

After trying unsuccessfully to listen in on their discussion and flipping through a few more books, Spike finally decided that this particular method was just as futile as his nearly random searches.

And that left only one option open to him…

*****

“S’like ridin’ a bike,” Spike muttered to himself, trying to psych himself up before opening the door. “S’not like you forget how…”

He straightened his shoulders, rocked his neck to the side until it audibly popped, and took a deep breath. Thus fortified, Spike burst through the front door of Willy’s Alibi Room with all the energy and swagger he could exude after months of solitude and disuse.

The bar was just as he remembered. Filled with smoke, dirty enough to give any health inspector who stumbled into the place fits, and populated with some of the shadiest, scaliest, and hairiest citizens of Sunnydale. A few of said patrons jumped at Spike’s boisterous entrance, but most recognized him and simply sank back into their drinks with little or no further reaction.

Willy looked at him with trepidation, and the speed with which he was scrubbing one of the pint glasses with a grubby cloth increased.

“O neg me,” Spike said, slapping a twenty he had filched from the Magic Box’s cash register while Anya had been in the back room.

At the sight of cold, hard cash in front of him, Willy visibly softened.

“Hey, Spike,” he said in his usual not-so-ingratiating whine. “Long time no see. Where’ve you been?” The question seemed innocent enough, but there was a gleam in the scrawny bartender’s eyes that spoke of an interest far above the usual small talk.

Well, that was expected. Ever since Spike had blown into town, an ailing Drusilla on his arm, he had been the focus of at least a little local gossip in one position or another.

“Y’know, around,” Spike said, aiming for nonchalance. “Been takin’ it easy of late, but you know me, bad penny and all that rot...” He gestured towards himself, sweeping his coat back is a dramatic flourish that purposefully exposed the stake and long dirk he had stuck in his belt before leaving the Magic Box.

Willy eyed the weapons cautiously, but one of the problems with notoriety was that everyone tended to know your dirty laundry. The little weasel knew all about the chip, but the display wasn’t really for him. It was a show for those patrons in the bar that he could hurt. The implication was a threat of a different kind, so Willy’s voice only stammered a little when he responded. “Don’t want any trouble here, man. Just had to repaint the walls after the fungus demon went into heat last week.” He nodded vaguely in the direction of the far corner.

Spike looked over his shoulder, and sure enough, one of the walls looked a little pit marked and covered by a sloppy layer of rapidly cracking, cheap paint. “Looks nice. Can hardly tell the difference.” It was funny, but smiling cheerfully while in game face seemed to send Willy into more fits than outright threats. “Not lookin’ for a fight myself. Was just wonderin’ if there was a game on?” He looked pointedly towards the back room. “Feelin’ a little lucky this evening.”

That got the nervous little bartender to relax a little. “Oh, yeah man, they’re just getting started,” he said with a high-pitched giggle. He poured a glass of blood, laced with anti-coagulant, into the cleanest of his pint glasses. “Here you go,” he said, pushing the glass and change across the bar.

Spike scooped up the glass and about half of the cash. After all, he could be generous when it wasn’t actually his money.

“Ta,” he said cheerfully, brushing past the rows of bar stools and into the room beyond.

Four faces, each wildly different from the next, turned towards the door when he entered. “’Lo, boys,” Spike said amicably, pulling the rest of his pilfered cash from his pocket. “Any of you up for frontin’ me a kitten or two?”

The closest demon, a Grylock if Spike didn’t miss his guess, flattened his sagital spikes, scales rustling in a sure sign of irritation. The two Dwarel demons, a large male and a smaller female, didn’t look any more welcoming, but the last, an open-faced, loose-skinned demon just grinned around a mouthful of sharp, pointy teeth. “Sure thing,” he said cheerfully.

Spike plopped down on the nearest battered chair, tossing a wad of cash across the table. The demon handed him two mewling bundles of tabby striped fur. “Thanks, mate,” Spike said, putting his glass of blood on the floor and accepting the two kittens.

“No problem,” the demon said with a happy bob of the head. “The more the merrier, I say.” He stuck out a flappy hand. “The name’s Clem.”

“Spike,” the vampire replied, eyeing the hand for a second before taking it. No need to be rude, especially since he was here to ply them for a little local information since he was forcibly removed himself from being in ‘the know’ over the last few months. Well, it was all here, gossip and kittens. No reason to turn down a profit while he was here.

Clem shook his hand enthusiastically, blithely ignoring the grumbling snarls of their tablemates. “Five card draw,” he said, finally releasing Spike from his over-friendly grasp and dealing him into the next round. “Deuces wild…”

*****

Hours later, even Spike really didn’t know how many, he was stumbling away from Willy’s and back towards his own crypt. He had only cheated enough to keep himself safely in the game, so when his winnings didn’t start bleeding the others dry, they seemed to loosen up. Well, other than that Clem guy, who had been relaxed enough for an entire Tai Chi class throughout the entire game.

Around four hands in, they had started telling bawdy stories and off color jokes. Around ten hands, it had started getting really interesting.

Apparently a new demon clan was moving in on the campus sewers, shoving out the established groups. There was bound to be an interesting fight or two involved, which of course got Spike’s attention, but he doubted that Ammut’s disappearance was connected with any kind of demonic turf war. There weren’t any obvious connections, but he’d still check it out, just in case.

The plethora of ghosts had been noted, as had the odd invincibility experienced by vampires. That had earned Spike a few jealous and curious glances, but he had just shrugged and said that he tended to not look his gift horses in the mouth.

Other topics of conversation that might bear more interesting fruit were the odd scarcity of stray animals along the more rural beachfront areas to the north of town. Maybe something was scaring off the kittens that Clem’s brother Earl was used to collecting there? Or maybe something was eating them? Either way, it was a definite lead.

So was the female Dwarel demon’s complaint that something magical was stinking up the air around the run down warehouses on Fifth Street. Excessive magical emanations brought the onset of estrus in her kind, and she just wasn’t ready to settle down and start spawning. When that had provoked a long and heated argument between the female and the male, who was apparently her mate, and Spike had musingly contemplated dissolving into a Dawn-like ear plugging, ‘La la la,’ screaming fit, because there were some things that even a hardened demon just didn’t need to know about other species’ mating habits.

A mention of demonic intrigue here, a complaint about irresponsible (or at least irritating) wizardry there, and Spike was starting to think that this information-gleaning plan was a lot better than his last few schemes.

What he wouldn’t admit, what he couldn’t admit, was that he had honestly enjoyed himself for the first time in months.