Note: This fic is my way of saying thank you and happy birthday to my regular beta t_geyer for her unending patience, perseverance and support... but I still got her to step in once the first draft was complete to beta it for me.

Over the course of the writing process, while t_geyer was taking a well-earned rest, alwaysjbj was a ready 'ear' on Yahoo and an extra pair of eyes when it came to spotting my mistakes.

Chapter 4

It took several attempts on Ethan's part before Wes realised that he was attempting to point at something, rather than simply flailing around in his pain. "Spike." Wes leant in towards the vampire's ear, trying to shout over the din of the sirens. "I think he's trying to tell us something."

The vampire turned his attention to the mage, focusing all his attention on the man's lips. After a couple of seconds his face tightened, and he pointed clearly in the direction that Ethan's flopping limb had seemed to indicate.

Wes didn't bother trying to get an explanation. He'd never be able to hear it. He simply did his share of the work of dragging Rayne, who had gone back to clutching his head in both hands as soon as Spike appeared to understand his message, along with them. They had covered almost forty feet and had another fifty or sixty to go before they reached the end of the corridor when the mirror at its end slid up like a portcullis, and green-clad men began to spill out.

Wes and Spike dropped their burden instantly. For a second, the watcher considered drawing the tranquiliser pistol, but a dart would simply be too inaccurate at this distance, and he reached under his right arm for the other holster instead.

"Who the—" The foremost of the men didn't get any further with his challenge. The bullet hit him three inches below his left clavicle. He dropped his submachine gun as he tumbled to the floor clutching the wound.

Spike was sprinting down the corridor, a gun in either hand, firing both, apparently indiscriminately, as he ran.

What had looked like a wall of green only seconds before had scattered like ashes in the wind. Some had dived for the scant cover of the concrete pillars that separated one cell from the next, some had hit the floor and were shooting from prone positions, and three or four disappeared out of Wes's line of sight behind the last pillar on the left.

Wes followed the soldiers' example and took cover as best he could behind the three inches of concrete that protruded past the heavy steel screens. He tried to choose his shots carefully, aiming to incapacitate where he could. Spike would probably nag all the way back about him taking cover rather than joining the charge, but, as a vampire, Spike could afford to get shot half a dozen times over. Wes couldn't.

Their job done, the klaxons lapsed back into silence.

Spike barrelled into the men who were left at the end of the corridor. It was a brutal ballet that Wes had seen a hundred times over in the years since he had returned to Sunnydale. The vampire pirouetted to sweep the legs out from under three men at once. He whipped the now empty gun so sharply across another's face as he rose back to his full height that bones cracked and the man slumped to the floor.

All the time shots rang out from behind the last pillar. Wes rolled diagonally across the corridor, so that he came up two cells nearer the corridor's end and hugging the opposite wall. From there, he was able to see the doorway where at least four of the soldiers had taken shelter, one crouched low at either side, another two firing over their heads. At this angle the concrete gave little or no cover. He knew he didn't have time to take careful aim. As soon as he fired the first shot he would be as much a target as Spike. He took a breath and, as he exhaled, he snapped off four shots in rapid succession.

The first three bullets each lodged in the upper torso of one of the soldiers, but, as Wes fired the fourth, a shot grazed his left arm before lodging in the screen behind him. The momentum of the shot twisted Wes's upper body slightly and the last shot hit his target in the arm. Before he could fire again, Spike was there, a high kick canting the man's head over at an angle it had never been intended to form.

"Estúpido!" Wes muttered under his breath. "So much for not leaving DNA or fingerprints behind. Come on." He headed back to where Rayne lay curled in a foetal ball on the floor. He pulled the mage semi-upright, gritting his teeth against the pain in his arm as he did.

"Couldn't the missus at least teach you some proper swear words?" Spike asked as he grabbed Ethan's free arm and began to jog back along the corridor, forcing Wes to match his pace. They didn't get more than twenty feet before a shot rang past their heads.

"Get him in the room!" Spike ordered as he loosed his grip and focused on the new threat.

Two more soldiers, flanking a white-coated man in his forties, stood where the mirror had once reflected the corridor on into infinity.

"Wait!" Wes momentarily dropped Ethan, slotting a fresh clip into his gun before tossing it underhand to the vampire.

Spike caught it with preternatural ease and twirled it into a firing grip. "And make it bloody quick," the vampire added as more men in green spilled down the staircase behind the doctor and his bodyguards. Spike flew at the enemy, getting between them and the open doorway before they could advance far enough to close off the Englishmen's retreat.

Wes hooked his arm through Ethan's and ducked down the corridor at a crouching run, dragging his fellow countryman along the floor behind him, and trusting that Spike would make sure no one got an easy shot at them. He ignored the bullets that ricocheted off the steel to either side, his attention focused on the door that he had to reach and on Spike, ready to drop Rayne again and charge in if the vampire appeared to need his help.

Meanwhile, as soon as Spike had passed the open doorway, he strode deliberately towards the end of the corridor, raising his arm and taking aim as he moved. His first shot hit true.

The doctor hadn't even ducked or taken cover, obviously believing that the blond would go for the more heavily armed targets first, but Spike had seen enough in those files to know who was truly dangerous, and he wasn't about to take any chances. The shot spattered brain matter over the men behind.

He was hit by another couple of bullets, causing his second shot to go high, taking one of the doctor's escorts in the throat rather than in the chest. Then, he was so close that he was able to reach out and grab the remaining bodyguard, pulling him in front of him as a human shield and pointing the pistol at his forehead. "Slowly and carefully, without bending down, take your gun by the barrel and slide it across the floor toward that room," he instructed his hostage. The man complied.

The men behind hesitated, and Spike backed himself and his hostage into the doorway that Ethan and Wes had just entered, kicking the assault rifle his unwilling companion had been using into the room ahead of him. "Back behind the line," the blond ordered, nodding at the slight groove where the mirror habitually rested. The other men retreated, but Spike knew it was only a matter of time before they would try to rush him. "Get a move on," he hissed at Wes from the corner of his mouth.

Wes stood in front of a panel with hundreds of flashing LEDs, trying to make sense of what was there. Every light in the display was flashing, and underneath each one was a printed label with a number. Some of the labels were layered four and five deep. Next to each indicator was a switch, and Wes quickly found the one marked one hundred and ninety seven and flicked it. The light above it continued to blink red. Wes scanned the row of buttons at the top of the panel until he found one that was marked 'Code Red'. With a mental shrug, he pressed it. All bar one of the little red LEDs stopped flashing. He quickly reversed the switch next to light one nine seven and Rayne's convulsions immediately stopped.

"Got to smash it," the hoarse whisper came from the floor. "Got to destroy the whole damn thing, or the guards will just reactivate it using their remotes."

Wes looked at the solidly constructed panel doubtfully. "Can't we just get out of range?"

"Oi! Maybe you two have forgotten, but I've got a dozen guys out here who're far from friendly and a hostage who doesn't seem to realise I could snap his neck like a twig..." Spike called out.

"Maybe we should let the other prisoners out?" Wes suggested. "That would keep them more or less occupied, and I think I worked out which controls—"

"For Christ's sake! You're like a broken record," Spike bit back. "Leave those bloody buttons alone and just give me a hand."

"Sorry," Wes answered, sounding abashed as he reloaded dart after dart into his remaining pistol. When he finished, he pointed the gun at the leg of the soldier Spike held and fired, drugging the vampire's hostage into submission. Then, he flattened himself against the wall by the door.

Freed from the need to keep his gun trained on his human shield, Spike began to pick off the men by the stairs, while they surged forward in an effort to mob him.

Wes swung around the edge of the door, firing three carefully aimed shots and then ducking back into cover before the advancing men could draw an accurate bead. His eyes widened as he rolled back against the wall. The metal screens were dropping back to their original position and, behind them, the glass barriers were opening.

He turned and found Rayne had levered himself into one of the seats behind the controls. The mage was chanting, and, as he finished, a weak shimmer of sparks radiated from his hands.

"What the hell?" Spike demanded as inmates began to spill from their cells. "Didn't I bloody say to leave those buttons?"

Ethan turned momentarily from his self-appointed tasks, giving the vampire the ghost of a mischievous grin. "Oh! You meant these buttons?" he drawled with feigned ingenuity. "So sorry. Won't happen again."

Spike gave a defeated sigh and returned his attention to the fight, which was suddenly turning in their favour.

Most of soldiers changed their aim, but a young woman near the front of the crowd, who appeared less emaciated than some of the other prisoners, simply raised her hand. The area in front of the advancing crowd glowed a delicate shade of lilac, and the bullets dropped from the air.

The inmates were winning, but it all changed in an instant when one of the guards remembered his remote. The magical shield disappeared and the women and men dropped to the ground, twitching like the catch on a New England trawler.

"Hold the door," Wes shouted as he dived for the forgotten assault rifle. Pushing Ethan away from the panel, Wes fired what was left of the clip into the general area. Then, with a short chant he extended his arm, palm outward towards what was left. A small ball of yellowish flame shot from his hand into the tangle of wires and circuit board under the counter. Acrid smoke began to rise from the mess, and then flames began to curl upward.

Ethan came to just as the sprinklers kicked in and drowned the flames almost before they could take hold.

"Great thinking!" Spike called back from the doorway. "Now we get to sit in wet clothes. This job just gets better and better."

This time Ethan's chanting seemed firmer, his resolve strengthened, and when he plunged both hands into the tangle of half-burned wiring, he was wrapped in a writhing blue nimbus all the way up his arms to the shoulder, and the electronics melted under his touch.

"I thought your speciality was ritual Chaos magic?" Wes inquired.

"I've been broadening my skill base," Ethan answered as he drew away from the area of destruction. He wiped at the blood that now dripped from his nose in a steady stream with the back of his hand.

"Come on!" Spike yelled from the doorway. "That bird's back up, and the soldier boys are making a run for it."

Wes reached into a pocket and pulled out a neatly-folded square of white cotton, which he passed to Rayne as he pulled the man's other hand around his shoulders and helped him toward the exit.

"My God," Ethan drawled before breaking into a racking cough. "A proper handkerchief. You really are English."

The crowd was moving forward, the young woman's shield driving the soldiers inexorably back, even as they tried to prevent their retreat from turning into a rout. Spike and Wes simply fell in with the flow.

Wes tried one last appeal to Spike's sympathy as they headed out. "Couldn't we fit some of these people on the truck? At least give them more of a chance of getting away?"

"Can we have this argument later? I'm busy right now." Spike fumbled in his pocket with his free hand to find the right speed dial key without bringing the phone into the open and making it obvious what he was doing.

It was Ethan who answered, instead. "Actually, no, not unless you have some more of these pretty necklaces or one of you happens to be a neurosurgeon, you can't. It's not just the control chips. We're all implanted with tracking devices. Apparently they had some sort of mass break out at one of their other stalags so now everyone comes with GPS."

"Bugger!" Spike retorted. "That bint could have had her uses, but not if it amounts to giving the soldier boys a route map."

Wes smirked but declined to comment on the vampire's complete about face on the matter of the other escapees. "If Tara could cast the spell on a house, I don't see why it wouldn't work on the truck... We've got three miles of private road to get it working before we get back onto the highway proper. It'll have to be quick and dirty, but it should hold for a couple of hours, maybe more."

"You got the stuff?" Spike asked.

"I wasn't a Boy Scout for nothing," Wes responded dryly. "Better to have components to spare and not need them than to come up short."

"Fine," Spike conceded. "They're on the truck when we're ready to leave and not a second later, and we'll take them as far as the rendezvous and fill it up with a fresh tank of gas. After that, they're on their own."

"Oh goody!" Ethan drawled before he raised his voice. "Listen up, people. Our friends here have organised a little road trip. Numbers are limited, however, so unless you're young, pretty and can stop bullets with your mind, it's first come, first served." He let his hollow-eyed gaze take in the young woman from head to toe, admiring the way her sodden hospital gown clung to her curves.

"Not even if you were thirty years younger," Spike replied.

"Some women appreciate the charms of a more mature, compassionate, experienced partner," the mage managed despite a renewed bout of coughing.

"And some of them can spot an egocentric old bastard who just wants to give the bad guys as much trouble rounding everyone else up as he can," the vampire countered, "and they know that he doesn't really give a toss about anyone but himself... specially the ones as can read auras, which is probably a good few of these ladies."

"You wound me," Ethan protested with a hint of his old sarcastic humour.

"We read the file," said Wes. "You wanted to sell newborn babies to a demon."

"Can't we make allowances for the indiscretions of youth?" Ethan asked as Wes and Spike half-carried him along the asylum's ground floor.

"You were forty-seven," Wes reminded him.

"But a very youthful forty-seven," Ethan argued.

The young witch stalled when they reached the entrance lobby. The soldiers had spread out, some blocking the way to the front door, others taking cover in opposite wing. "I can't get us out," she muttered under her breath. "If I try to make the barrier bigger, it won't be strong enough to protect us, and if I don't, they'll come around the sides."

Without a word passing between them, Spike and Wes set Ethan onto his own two feet. "You're going to have to manage the last bit on your own," Spike announced, putting a fresh clip in the gun Wes had loaned him before passing it back to the watcher and reloading both of his own pistols.

"We'll worry about the sides," Wes assured her.

A car horn blared loudly from outside.

"I think our ride is here. Better move before someone has the idea of taking pot shots at it."

As the column moved past the end of the corridor, Spike peeled right and Wes took the left. Where he could get a clear shot, Wes used the tranq pistol, reserving the other gun for suppressive fire. A matronly woman stepped up beside him, electricity arcing from her outstretched palm into the chests of three of the soldiers. The energy discharge continued for several seconds, making them convulse helplessly. "See how you like it," she muttered under her breath as she let the spell drop, blood beginning to drip from her nose and ears.

A middle-aged man's eyes began to glow with a pale blue light, and a fierce wind seemed to swirl into existence, throwing the soldiers backward as if they were so many plastic models.

With so few people, and a short distance to cover, it should have been quick. However, those who were strong enough to use their powers were in the minority. So many of the patients were weak and having to help each other along that the exodus stretched on for over a minute.

Spike and Wes were the last to leave, ushering the last of the escapees ahead of them.

Those few soldiers who had made it outside lay scattered around in twisted poses. One of them was smouldering gently.

The salesman would barely have recognised the truck. Brandon had welded heavy steel plates over all but a two inch strip of the windshield and the other windows. There were plates over the wheel arches, too, though Brandon hadn't been able to fit those too low in case they started scraping along the ground on rough terrain. It wasn't perfect, but it would make it harder for anyone to hit either the driver or the vehicle's tyres.

Ethan had already claimed himself a space on the front seat, and Spike slid in next to him. The rest of the patients had climbed onto the bed of the truck. Wes clambered in after them and pulled up the tailgate.

"Clear a space in the middle," Wes shouted as the truck pulled away, "and pass me that bag in the corner. If it sounds like we're being followed, there's a crate behind the cab."

The once-majestic wrought iron gates bowed underneath the truck's wheels as it left the hospital behind.





"We're gaining," the soldier told his driver as he stared at his laptop screen - so many little red dots, one on top of another, that it looked more like a red square about an inch across. "They can't be doing more than thirty-five. We'll catch them before they hit the highway. Just over the hill."

Immediately beyond the blind summit, the broken glass covered the road's entire width for about six feet. Magic was so much neater than simply tipping it out would have been. The lead jeep swerved sharply to the right as its tyre blew, its front two tyres coming to rest in a roadside ditch. The second car piled into it from the rear and side, before the third was concertina-ed between it and the fourth.

The soldier tried to lift his head from the spider's web of the windscreen, but it was too heavy, so he moved his eyes instead, straining to see the display. The red lights blinked on and off as they approached the highway. Then, they blinked off and didn't come back.





Once he'd changed back into his original clothes, Wes passed out the bits of uniform he and Spike had worn between the remaining mages. Brandon had taken the plates back off the truck before they reached Stockton and sprayed over the bits of burnt paint so that they nearly matched.

"D'you think they've really got a chance?" he asked, as he, Wes and Spike watched the vehicle trundle out of the parking lot where they had agreed to meet Ethan's ambulance.

"More of a chance now than they had in there," Spike answered.

"And Giles' friend?"

"I think he'll land on his feet," Wes answered, letting the lights of the truck disappear before he turned and made his way toward the street where he had left his car.





Wes pulled up outside his house around mid-afternoon the following day.

"I still say you should have called Buffy from the motel," Wes argued, squeezing in one last round of what had been an ongoing argument for most of the way home.

"And who'd have been bandaging you up while I was on the phone?" Spike demanded.

"You poured neat peroxide over a graze and then taped some gauze over it. I dug fifteen bullets out of you... And you should still have called her."

"That would have defeated the purpose of turning my phone off until I got back. Just because you're hen-pecked..."

"You married a slayer. Of course you're bloody hen-pecked," Wes argued.

"It'll be fine," Spike insisted as they both got out of the car, the vamp holding his duster up over his head. "I've told you a million times. What she doesn't know won't hurt her."

"Your funeral," Wes insisted, as the vampire crossed the road.

The door to 1630 was pulled open before the vampire even got within six feet. "And where the hell have you been?" Buffy demanded. "No, second thoughts, don't answer that. I caught enough on the highlight reel. Did you really think that you and Wes could take on the whole damn army on your own?"

Spike looked at his boots. "Giles wasn't meant to tell you unless something went wrong."

"Giles didn't tell me, you idiot!" answered the slayer. "Did you forget when it comes to a fight, I see what you see? You get shot, I bleed? Well, not literally bleed, but it hurts like a son of a bitch."

"Oh!" Spike's teeth nipped gently at his lower lip. "Even all the way in Florida?"

"Even all the way in Florida, you stupid vampire."

"The old guy was really desperate, and I didn't kill any more than I could help," he offered appeasingly.

"I know."

"What about Niblet?" Spike asked. "You didn't drag her home early, did you?"

"No, Dawn's mature enough to look after herself... unlike a retarded vampire who doesn't even have the sense to get in out of the sun. Get in here..."

Buffy stepped back into the hallway, and Spike followed her in, kicking the door closed behind him.

"Missed you," he told his wife in a throaty whisper.

Buffy wrapped her arms around his neck, pressing her body close to his. "Prove it."





Ethan looked around the new headquarters of the Council of Watchers. It was more tinted glass and steel, rather than sandstone and wood panelling, but it was no less opulent than the original had been. "Which way to the guest suite, then, Ripper?"

"Guest suite?" Giles asked.

"You didn't really expect me to forget that it was you who handed me over to those people, did you?" Ethan asked. "I endured their hospitality for eight years, the least you can do is put me up in the manner to which I intend to become accustomed for the same length of time..."

"The way I remember it, you got yourself caught while I was still a Fyarl demon," Giles insisted, "and, if you think you're hanging around here for the next decade, then you'll bloody well have to do some work to justify it."

"Work?" Ethan raised a hand to the gauze patch on the back of his skull. "That's so crass, asking a guest to perform menial labour, especially when he's only just beginning to recuperate. It can be such a long process, you know."

"How about if that work involved finding an attractive young witch who can stop bullets with her mind?"

Ethan paused, looking his one-time friend up and down. Really, he'd just been pushing his luck to see how far Giles' courtesy might extend. The last thing he wanted was to join the council payroll... but it wasn't as if he had anything better to do, and the girl had been intriguing. "I might consider it." After all, he could leave whenever he felt like it, and it would be so much easier to cause chaos and disorder from inside...