Chapter Seven
Spike left the dorm, taking more than usual care to let his senses provide information about his surroundings. Although he’d followed the commandos far enough to be sure they were heading toward Lowell House, he didn’t necessarily believe that small squad wouldn’t have counterparts other places on the campus. He kept to the shadows and used his enhanced hearing and his nose to tell him if there were any humans sneaking around the outskirts of the campus.

The sound of footsteps and voices made him pull back into the shadow of a big tree where he watched the two girls he’d seen in Buffy’s dorm walking along, chattering and paying no attention to their surroundings. Growling at their stupidity, he popped out in front of them, startling them both into small yelps. Their faces relaxed when they recognized him as the good-looking man they’d seen earlier. The brunette smiled.

“You scared us to death,” she said, batting her eyes. “I think you owe us for that.

“That so, pet?” he purred, going heavy on the accent. “And what is it you think I might owe you?”

“The least you could do is walk us back to the dorm,” she said. “You know, to keep us safe from dangerous men...”

Spike couldn’t help his snort, but quickly recovered. “Not sure you’d know a dangerous man if you fell over one, luv,” he said with a leer that made her blush. “But you’re quite right about needing an escort at this time of the night.”

He began walking in the direction of Buffy’s dorm, wondering to himself how many times he could make that trek before he stumbled across another set of black-clad vampire hunters. When two newly turned vamps wearing UC Sunnydale sweatshirts and game faces jumped out in front of them, earning shrieks from both girls, he sighed and shook his head.

“Are you gits really this stupid?” he asked in conversational tones. “Or just feeling invincible?”

“Huh?”

He sighed again, turning his back to the girls and flashing his real face. “Little lesson for you, boys. That building there...” He pointed at the dorm and gave the frightened girls a little nudge in that direction. He ignored the “But...I thought we...” saying, “Get yourself into the building and go to bed. And stay away from unlighted areas the next time you decide to go for a late-night stroll, yeah?”

Turning back to the puzzled vamps—which were trying to decide if he was seriously sending their intended meals out of reach—he continued as if he hadn’t interrupted himself. “That building that you’re looking at with so much interest has a Slayer living in it. She’d sense you before you got off the first floor. Not to mention, this campus is crawling with soldiers looking for things that bite.”

“We’ll take our chances,” the bigger one blustered, stepping closer to Spike and snarling his contempt. “Maybe you’re scared of—“

He never finished. Spike had punched him in the diaphragm, doubling him over and robbing him of any ability to speak. Before the other one could run, Spike was on him, one hand wrapped around his neck. He squeezed for a while, then let the terrified demon drop to the ground. Bending down, took hold of each vampire’s head, and banged them together so hard he could hear the skulls crack. He was staring at their unconscious bodies in disgust, wondering if he should drag them into the brush or just twist their heads off when he was startled into alertness.

While his instinctive solidarity with other demons was fighting with his unspoken agreement to help Buffy with her slaying, his ears had caught the sound of human voices. He immediately faded back into the shadows. As soon as he recognized the approaching commandos, he left the unconscious and badly injured vampires to their fate, running silently through the woods until he was well away from the campus.

With so much of the night already spent, he headed for Restfield cemetery and the large crypt he’d decided to live in. He smiled in approval at the double doors leading into it, closing first the outer, metal door, and then the interior one made of heavy wood. Although he doubted anyone would bother trying both doors, he made a mental note to get some sort of lock or bar that could be used to keep out intruders.

Too wound up to go to sleep, he wandered around brushing dust off some of the horizontal surfaces, including the large sarcophagus that he intended to use until he could find a real bed. He thought longingly of the big bed in Harmony’s cave, but decided it wasn’t worth the effort it would take to coax it out of her. When he found the hole in the floor, he listened carefully, dropping a rock down to judge how far it was to the bottom. Pleasantly surprised to hear it land almost immediately, he leaned over the opening and flicked his lighter on. All he could see in the small illuminated area was the dirt floor and a rough ladder leaning against a wall.

With his lighter running out of fuel, Spike reluctantly left the rest of his exploring until he could get some candles or torches, standing up to take another look around the more easily explored first floor. Moonlight coming through the small windows provided plenty of light for him to see his way around. Finally satisfied with his new dwelling, he dropped onto the sarcophagus and put his hands behind his head.

As he dropped off to sleep, his last thoughts were that he hadn’t yet brought Buffy to see his crypt, and that he probably shouldn’t do so until he’d fixed it up. Preferring not to examine why he thought that was so, he put one hand over his eyes and resolutely put the Slayer and their strange new relationship out of his mind.



“Your boyfriend was awesome last night!” Buffy’s late morning stagger to the bathroom was brought to an abrupt halt by the girl she couldn’t help referring to by Spike’s “cute little brunette” designation.

“My who...wha-?” Visions of Riley returning to the dorm and somehow interacting with the two girls next door flashed through her sleepy brain.

“He’s not your boyfriend?” The girl’s eager question brought Buffy more awake.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she said, biting back her disappointment at Riley for having turned out to be such a jerk. “Who are you talking about?”

“That gorgeous guy who was here last night. He’s not your boyfriend?”

“Spike? You’re talking about Spike? No! Ewwww...and what do you mean he was awesome?”

Completely distracted by Buffy’s denial of Spike’s boyfriend status, the other girl had forgotten her original remark. While she lost herself in visions of hitting on the man who was not involved with her next door neighbor, her roommate had joined them and she filled Buffy in.

“We were coming back really late last night and he...Spike?... was walking us back to the dorm when two really scary guys with gross faces jumped out. He was awesome; he sent us ahead to the building and then he just whipped up on those two guys. We watched from the doorway. It was...Wow.”

“Wow,” Buffy echoed, her face still showing her lack of comprehension. “You shouldn’t be out that late, you know,” she said, continuing her way to the bathrooms. “It’s dangerous.”

“That’s exactly what Spike said! Are you sure he isn’t your boyfriend?”

Buffy paused and turned back to look at the other girl with narrowed eyes. “We work together,” she said shortly. “But you should stay away from him anyway. He’s dangerous too.”

The CLB tossed her head. “Like hell I will! He’s hot. How dangerous can something that sexy be?”

The two girls walked off toward the stairs, leaving Buffy to grumble her way to the bathrooms.

“Stupid vampire. Stupid girls. Stupid Buffy for letting it bother me...”

“Are you talking to me?” Willow’s equally sleepy voice interrupted Buffy’s grumble and she turned to shrug and shake her head at her roommate.

“I’m just muttering to myself. Apparently after Spike left last night, he rescued the girls in 203 from some vamps, and now he has a fan club.” She splashed water on her face and raised her eyes to the mirror over the sink. “They think he’s ‘hot’.”
“He is kinda hot,” Willow allowed. “He’s got that whole ‘bad boy’ vibe going for him. And if you’d seen him jump down those stairs the other night...”

“Not really needing any more ‘hot Spike’ images, Will.” Buffy stepped into the showers and pulled the plastic curtain closed. “Got enough of those going through my head as it is.”

Willow giggled and stepped into another shower stall. “Well, my offer to do another spell still stands.”

“I don’t want to hate him. I just don’t want to...”

“Want him?” Willow’s shrewd guess was almost drowned out by the water, but Buffy heard it.

“Yeah. Not wanting would be good. My life is complicated enough”



Spike walked into Giles’ apartment without knocking, ignoring the watcher’s sputtering and going directly to the refrigerator.

“You didn’t get any more blood?” he said in an aggrieved tone.

“No. Oddly enough, I didn’t feel an obligation to keep food around for you.”

“Oh, well then, I’ll just have some of your Scotch.”

Spike’s attempt to pull the bottle out from its hiding place behind the cookbooks was interrupted by Giles’ slamming a stake down on the counter. Remembering what Buffy had said about the watcher’s limited patience, he gave an offended sniff and retreated to the living room.

“Have it your way,” he said. “I’ll just have to start stealing my food and drink.” He sat down in the easy chair and waved a hand at the couch. “Sit down, Rupert. Got some things to share with you.”

By the time Buffy and Willow arrived, Spike had filled Giles in on what he’d overheard from the commandos, as well as Buffy’s encounter with them. Their arrival interrupted Giles’ questioning as to why Spike was suddenly helping out the girl he’d sworn to kill. With relief, Spike turned to greet the girls.

“Evening, ladies,” he said with a smile for each of them. “Come to relieve me of the watcher’s boring company are you?”

“We’re here to make soap,” Willow announced, lifting a shopping bag on the table and taking smaller bags out of it.

“Soap?”

Buffy nodded. “Yeah. Our chem professor gave everyone a project to do - ours is to make soap the old fashioned way.”

Spike nodded. “Ashes and animal fat?” he asked, peering into the smaller shopping bag. He held up a ziplock bag containing what looked like ashes. “Anyone I know?”

Buffy and Willow exchanged guilty glances, causing Spike to narrow his eyes. While he quickly ran down a very short mental list of local vampires he would not have wanted Buffy to stake, she started shaking her head.

“No. It isn’t anybody you know...it isn’t anybody, period. We just...Willow... We had to leave the dorm for a while and we brought our stuff with us.”

Without further explanation, they carried their supplies into the kitchen and began puling out pans while reading their notes on how to make soap using ashes and animal fat.

Giles and Spike exchanged looks.

“Want to bet the witch set fire to their dorm room and that’s what left of it?” Spike whispered. Giles rolled his eyes and shuddered.

“I heard that!” Willow shouted from the kitchen. “And it wasn’t the dorm room, it was just in the bathroom. Nothing burned, it just got...smokey.”

“Knew it!” Spike crowed. “Knew you’d been messing with magic again and created another mess.”

Eyes narrowed into a lethal glare, Willow stuck her head out of the kitchen.

“I could use some more ashes,” she said pointedly, waving the stake at him. “And I wasn’t doing magic! I was trying to boil lard. Over a fire. Like they used to.”

“Pretty sure that was something people did outside, Red. Not in a communal bathroom in a building.”

“It was perfectly safe,” Willow sniffed. “Tile isn’t flammable. Unlike vampires...”

Trying not to laugh, Buffy gently took the stake from Willow’s hand and carried it to Giles.

“Here. You take this. I have plans for Spike later; and they don’t include vacuuming him up off your floor.”

Giles took the stake, then whirled as he realized what Willow had said.

“You are not going to boil lard in my kitchen!” he said, groaning as his nose told him they’d already begun.

“Don’t worry, Giles. It’s going to smell better soon.” Willow held up another ziplock bag. “I brought all sorts of good smelling things to mix into it so that our soap smells pretty.”

Giles stood in the entrance to the kitchen and watched with some trepidation as Willow and Buffy mixed the ashes into the melted fat, creating a slimy mixture into which they added various fruity-smelling oils. Spike had retreated to a window and opened it so that he could breath in the less pungent outside air. Eventually, Buffy joined him, having been driven out of the kitchen by both the smell and her short attention span.

“Wanna go kill something?”

“Thought you’d never ask, pet,” he said, straightening up and shrugging into the coat he’d taken off earlier. He followed Buffy to the door, smirking at Giles who was now going to be left to supervise Willow’s soap-making. “So,” he said as they pulled the door shut behind him,” Who or what are we gonna kill?”

“Vamps, probably. Is that going to be a problem for you?”

He thought about the two vampire’s he’d killed in the cemetery, and the two he’d left to the tender mercies of the soldiers. “Nope. No problem here, Slayer. Not so long as they aren’t friends of mine, anyway.”

“Vampires have friends?”

Her stopped and gave her a long, hard look. “You know, maybe you should think about reading that book on vampires and demons—if that idiot woman lives long enough to write it. You might learn something.”

“I know all I need to know, Spike,” she said, glaring back at him. “A stake to the heart, off with their heads, daylight is good, and holy water makes a nice accessory to my cross.”

“That’s my bloodthirsty girl,” he said with less approval in his voice than she might have expected. “Tell me, Slayer, what would you do if you came across a vamped kid?”

“Been there, done that,” she said shortly, striding off again.

“Oh. How’d you handle it, then?”

“First I waited for her to change, then I staked her.”

Something in her face made him soften his voice for his next question.

“And then what, pet?”

“And then I cried,” she said tersely.

“And that’s my girl too,” he murmured, putting his arm around her just long enough for it to count as a hug.

“Not your girl,” she muttered, leaning into him never the less.

They were saved from any further uncomfortable conversations by their arrival at Longbranch cemetery, where they were just in time to see Professor Inkfel happily following a young female vampire deeper into the maze of old crypts and tombstones. She was chattering away as she went, showing no sign of being fearful or anxious—or having any clue that she wasn’t likely to be leaving in the same condition in which she was arriving.

They looked at each other.

“We could just pretend we didn’t see the stupid bint...”

Buffy fought back a smile that she knew he’d see anyway and shook her head.

“Let’s go, Big Bad. Time to slay.”