“O He-Who-Acts-as-he-Wishes who came forth from Antinaopolis, I have not waded in the water.

O Ihy who came forth from the Primordial Waters, my voice was not loud.

O He-Who-Prospers-the-Common-People who came forth from Asyut, I have not cursed a god.” – The Book of Going Forth by Day

Spike’s sense of irony had been many years in the making. It was funny how year after year of immortality had twisted his poet’s eye into a keen hunter of the dark ironies of mortal life.

He had stolen the shotgun to kill the slayer. He hadn’t been able to pull the trigger that night. Her tears had taken him by surprise, temporarily driving away the memory of his own.

It had spent the time since collecting dust in the corner of his crypt, forgotten until last night.

Now, it was the shotgun that he had meant to turn upon Buffy that was blasting away the right side of Doc’s suddenly less-than-placid face.

He couldn’t help bust laugh in the wake of the gooey, blue spray. Spike was a great fan of irony.

*****

Day 72

Spike had finally gotten around to telling the others about the demon clan that was moving in on the UCSD campus. For his pains, he had spent the last week slogging through the sewers and cleaning leathery bits of skin and smears of green blood out of his hair.

Well, when he wasn’t trying, very unsuccessfully, to weather Dawn’s current school drama. She was acing her classes under Giles and Willow’s tutelage, but her fellow classmates were less than impressed with her scholastic aptitude. Temper tantrums aside, Spike figured that Dawn showing even a glimmer of interest in her social life was a major improvement.

On the other hand, there was only so much college sludge and high school melodrama a vampire could take, so this evening had been flagged for a little Ammut hunting.

Of course, the others didn’t know that. They thought he was dead drunk in his crypt, their standard assumption that more often than not held more than a few grains of truth.

He had started the evening off with another round of cards, going light on the liquor this time, and determined that a) Clem could teach him a thing or two about palming cards and b) the loose-skinned demon’s brother was still complaining about the dearth of stray pets up in his neck of the woods. After trading his few kittens back to the dealer for cash of a more human variety, Spike set off for the northernmost strip of Sunnydale’s coastline.

There were worse ways to spend an evening. The wet sand and broken bits of shell made little crunching sounds under his booted feet as Spike skimmed the shorefront, hands in pockets and senses wide open to his surroundings. The moon hung low over the water, bathing the surf with silver light and highlighting the multi-million dollar mansions that were set on the bluffs overlooking the sandy beach.

Unlike the public areas further south, this stretch of coast was basically abandoned, free of the partying teens and late-night trysts that drew others of his kind to hunt the shorelines and boardwalks of Sunnydale. He’d already passed more than enough ‘No Trespassing’ signs to wallpaper an entire house, but at three AM, or thereabouts, even the few guard dogs that were still awake were too tired to care much about his passing.

Either that or they were so used to the ghosts and ghoulies and long-legged beasties that inhabited the caves along the bluffs that one more vampire didn’t even earn an ear twitch among the other things that went bump in the night. Clem’s brother Earl lived in one of the rocky depressions, as did many other members of Sunnydale’s demonic community. There were only so many crypts in town, and the subterranean corridors of the karstic outcrops could and did provide more comfortable, less conspicuous housing for those who couldn’t pass for humans.

Spike could appreciate the dogs’ point. Even though none were within sight, he had heard enough from the bluffs to know that his passage wasn’t entirely unnoticed. The low-lying hum that let him know when other demons were near had remained at a constant tingle since he had left his car.

Nevertheless, the only other living thing he had seen since arriving was the tiny figure of a man in the distance, throwing a stick to his dog out in the waves. Not the smartest thing to do in the wee hours of the morning in Sunnydale, but then again, maybe the man wasn’t a man at all. He was still a long way off, and Spike could always hug closer to the brush surrounding the cliffs if he needed to avoid any complications, like indignant landowners or territorial demons.

Distance was sometimes hard to figure out by the water with nothing but flat sand and scrubby plants with which to get some perspective, but Spike judged the tiny speck of a figure to be a little under a mile distant. If his late night company was a human, Spike wouldn’t be visible to him or her for some time. If not, well, he’d deal with that when he got there.

Virtually alone, with no one to challenge his passing save for the tiny phosphorescent sea creatures littering the waves and sand that had used to so fascinate Dru, Spike let his mind wander. Even if this night’s search was probably going to turn out as futile as every other, it wasn’t like he didn’t have anything to think about.

Like Anubis’ promise, Judeo-Christian theology, and whether anyone he might want alive again would actually want to leave wherever they were.

Like whether or not his chip would recognize teenaged boys, like the one who had been giving Dawn so much grief in class, as human.

Like the fact that Willow, fluffy-sweatered, elfin-faced Willow, was rapidly starting to give off the kind of vibes usually reserved for demons and serious dark magic users.

Come to think of it, vibes like the ones that were starting to gnaw their way up and down the back of his spine.

Throw a frog in boiling water and it will immediately leap back out, but place it in a comfortable temperature and increase the heat slowly? That way leads boiled frogs. And Spike suddenly found himself neck-deep in roiling eddies of magic.

He froze, taken by surprise by the strength of the sensation and attempting to pinpoint its location. The cliffs weren’t much help. He had left the cavern-ridden areas behind and was faced with craggy, if solid, walls of crumbling sandstone. Behind him, the beach was as empty as ever and ahead, still distant, was the figure with the dog.

The dog that was currently looking down at the figure.

Spike squinted, wondering for a moment if that was a trick of perspective, but no, the ‘dog’s’ shoulder was even with the figure’s and it’s head, which come to think of it was too long and too flat to be a dog at all, towered over the man.

And it was a man. Almost unconsciously, Spike had slipped further into the shadows against the stone cliffs and was jogging along, jacket whisking through the scrub with the slightest, crackling hiss. Each step brought him closer to the source of the flood of raw magic, and each foot covered brought the pair into sharper focus. When he was close enough to really see the pair, he staggered to a sudden stop, disbelieving mind finally accepting what his gut had recognized at the first whiff of eldritch power.

The creature’s jaws were long and toothy, and its red eyes caught and reflected the moonlight. A coarse mane, thick and wild, sprouted from the crocodilian head and bristled down its back. A furred chest and forelimbs melted back into leathery, gray hindquarters, capped with a leonine tail. It, no her, the text all referred to her as a female, stood as tall as a horse, but was much, much more powerfully built. She was designed for the hunt, the kill after all. The Devourerer, she was often called.

Ammut.

And if Spike wasn’t imagining things, a possibility which had occurred to the vampire, she was wagging her short, tufted tail, killing jaws dropped open in an expression which on a dog, might have passed for a lolling grin. On her, it made his already ambient blood temperature run even colder.

He waited for those jaws to close around the man’s chest, biting the human neatly in two, but instead, the figure just gestured, sending the ‘stick’ he had seen earlier, a broken tree branch, sailing into the waves with a thread of magic, nearly buried under the demigod’s own aura.

She loped after it, behaving for all the world like a playful dog. A multi-ton, killer chimera of a dog.

Spike sidled closer. He was perhaps fifty feet away from the man now, pressed close to the cliff face and inching closer. Each step took an effort. Every survival instinct in his brain was screaming at him to turn back, that this being which was frisking in the surf could break him without trying. The crackling power was so strong that his skin was crawling and the air was so thick that it felt like he was pushing his way through soup. He had shifted into game face in subconscious self-defense. He ignored it as best he could, soldiering forward even as the tiny voice of reason screamed that this demigod had been born and bred to eat the damned. By any measure, Spike was pretty certain that particular category included vampires.

Forty feet away. The man was a little taller than Spike and built like a runner. A sandy mop of unruly hair hung down in his face. If not for the particular company he kept, company which was still sporting in the waves, the vampire would have pegged him as a surfer.

Thirty. He was wearing jeans and a white t-shirt, rumpled and covered in spots with sand and salt and other, less appetizing things. His shoulders slumped and his face was drawn. There were dark circles under his eyes and his mouth, which looked more accustomed to smiles, was pinched in a thin, gray line. All in all, he looked like hell.

Twenty. Ammut trotted back out of the waves, shaking the salt water from her mane and dropping the branch at the man’s feet. She butted him in the chest playfully, a move that sent the human staggering back, a whoosh of air leaving his lungs at the impact. He voiced some complaint, but his words were lost in the sudden roaring in Spike’s ears.

Ammut had abandoned her play and was looking straight at him, massive head cocked to the side and a low rumble starting deep in her chest.

“Damnit.” That came through loud and clear. The man’s voice was hoarse. He looked in Spike’s direction, eyes scanning the cliffs, passing, but never quite landing upon, the vampire crouched there.

The man then pulled a pendant out of his shirt, grasping it firmly in his hands. Spike tensed, for flight or fight, he did not know, but instead of raining hellfire down on him, the human simply muttered a few words under his breath and the oppressive magical field around Ammut popped like a soap bubble, leaving behind a faint trace, but none of the raw power she had once radiated.

A shielding spell then, and a powerful one. Spike’s yellow eyes narrowed, but he didn’t move from his vantage point, a shadowed depression in the rock wall.

“C’mon girl, time to go home.” His voice again cracked with disuse, but there was a trace of bitterness or grief hidden there. Spike knew it well. The same tone often colored his comments.

Grabbing a handful of golden mane, the man dragged himself onto the demigod’s back as if she really was a horse, and the two took off down the beach. Steeling himself, Spike started away from the cliff face to follow when Ammut took a sharp turn for the rocks further down the beach. A leap and a bound, and suddenly she collided feet-first with the rock face, talons digging deep trenches in the sandstone as she scaled the bluffs and rapidly disappeared over the lip of the outcrop.

Spike could hear her heavy footfalls leaving the bluff far behind. He shoved himself away from the cliff, aware if uncaring that his mouth was hanging open in shock. From the pictures inked out on scanned papyrus, he had been expecting something a little… smaller.

Another hard look at the claw marks on the stone cliff face rattled his voice loose again.

“Bloody hell.”

*****

Scaling the cliff took a little longer for a vampire, even with convenient gouges carved into the solid stone at regular intervals, but climbing back down was even harder when the lightening horizon reminded Spike of exactly how long he had been out walking along the shore.

He would just barely have enough time to make it to his car. Under normal circumstances, he would have been cursing himself for losing track of time and nearly being caught out in the sun. UV dodging was recklessly fun with a tarp or a blanket, but his jacket wasn’t quite big enough to pull the trick off over long distances and burning himself to a crisp wasn’t exactly his idea of a good time.

But these were not normal circumstances. During his brief glance around the top of the cliff, he had found two things: a track way of massive paw prints clear enough for a clueless suburbanite to follow and a scent, musky and fishy with a hint of cedar and wet dog. Not the nicest odor he’d over come across, Chanel certainly wouldn’t be marketing it any time soon, but it was sweet for other reasons.

He had a trail.