A/N: I'm sorry! *irresistible puppy face* My betas have been super busy lately so the updates have been a bit slow. As an apology, here's the update and another one is coming during the weekend! Yay!? There's not many chapters left and I'm really glad I always have about four of them written in reserve since the uni work has been riding me hard! Oooh dirty. Anwyay, hope you like. ;)

Chapter 42


As soon as the sun had set, Spike was on his way to Tara’s. His jaw was set in determination as he lengthened his strides, and in a few minutes he was standing in front of the familiar door, the metal unyielding as he pounded on it with his clenched fist.


He heard her unlatch the door and then she swung it open and stepped back to let him in.


“Hello, Spike.”


“Hey, pet. Glad to see me, are you?” He tried to leer but he had a feeling it came off more as a grimace.


“A-are you okay?”


He chuckled bitterly. “Bloody brilliant.” He walked past her and rubbed his face. The pressure in his chest expanded further, all the emotions bottled inside threatening to burst out. He so badly needed to tell someone. “I hurt her, Tara. I swore to myself I’d never… but it came over me and I didn’t realize and then she… she just…”


“I-is she… I mean-”


“No!” He spun on his heel to stare at her. “I didn’t… she’s alive. But I could have! It would be so fucking easy and I don’t understand how she can still trust me after I… bit her.”


“You b-bit her?”


He turned away again, ashamed. “Didn’t mean to, but it took over me… the way she felt under me, around me…”


He didn’t have to see her to know she blushed, could hear it in the quickened beat of her heart. So innocent, this one was. Hadn’t he been too, once upon a time? It felt like a lifetime ago. A different existence altogether.


“Are you here to… i-it’s okay if you just need to talk to someone-”


“I want you to do the ritual.” He walked towards the book shelf and traced the dusty spines with the tip of his forefinger.


“M-maybe you should… think about it. When your head is clear. This is… I looked into it and it’s too volatile.”


Drusilla’s voice echoed in his head like an ominous threat, “It would burn you, my Spike. Until there’s nothing left.”


He squared his shoulders and glanced at Tara over his shoulder. “I’m willing to take the risk. I’d do anything necessary to… just do it, would you? Please.”


He saw her approach from the corner of his eye before she took a thick tome off the shelf.


“I c-can try. But I’ve never done something like this before so I don’t know if it’ll work.”


He faced her then, the book clutched to her chest as she looked up at him with doubt clouding her eyes.


“It’ll work. You just gather your magical doodads and chant the dead language and presto… one souled vampire coming up. Simple, yeah?”


“Magic like this. It has consequences.”


“I’ll take that risk,” he said in a hoarse voice.


She stared at him then, pinning him with her perceptive eyes, seeking. Whatever she was searching for she must have found, because she nodded and set about gathering the ingredients.


*******


“This bloody stinks,” Spike complained and waved a hand around his face to chase away the smoke rising from the heap of burning herbs on the floor.


“I thought you didn’t need to breathe?”


“Don’t. But I do need air to speak.”


“Don’t speak then,” Tara said with a hint of a teasing smile.


“Cheeky bint,” he muttered good-naturedly though he felt nervous enough to throw up.


Spike watched her trembling fingers as she scanned the crucial page of a book and slowly exhaled and inhaled several times. Sprinkling glittering sand on top of the herbs, she started to read the lines then folded her fingers around a small orb. Chants rolled off her tongue in soft tones then and he could feel the air around them thicken with tension. It beat against his skin in time with her voice, insisting, striving to penetrate his skin to reveal him stripped to the marrow.


The witch’s words blurred together, fading through the roaring in his ears and his eyelids fluttered shut. That was when the energy exploded from within his core, arrows of liquid fire flaring out through his veins. It burned. The heat spread through his every molecule, gathering in intensity until he was gasping, his fingers failing to clutch at the hard wooden floor beneath him. Black dots overwhelmed his vision before he passed out, his scream still resounding in his head.


*******


Did he drink too much? Where was he, and why did the ground keep shaking? He just wanted to go back to sleep.


“Spike, wake up.”


He slapped at the hand shaking his shoulder and rolled over onto his back. Everything hurt. His intestines felt as though they were put through a wringer and light stabbed his sensitive vision when he opened his eyes.


Tara was crouching next to him with a worried expression on her face. She looked just as bad as he felt. It all came to him then. The spell. The feeling of force gathering within him until he couldn’t take it anymore. Funny, somehow he’d thought the energy would slam into him from the outside.


“Did it work? The spell… did it work?”


“I-I don’t know. I felt it happening, b-but it went… it wasn’t supposed to happen like this.”


He propped himself up and sharply inhaled at the pain. “What do you mean?”


“Spike, you… there was something inside you already. It’s like the soul you’d had when you were human didn’t fully leave. It was yanked in between two places and couldn’t fully settle anywhere. I don’t know what could have made it-”


“I do,” he said. It all came down to the beginning, didn’t it? It was the only explanation. The ritual. The unfinished ritual where the big ugly thing of a hell servant had a hard-on for his soul. Before Darla and Dru came along and damned him in a different way. Yeah, Darla had told him all about it.


After he told Tara this, he said, “So, it did work.”


“I think so. I could feel it working and then it took over me and it was like watching from the sidelines. With what you told me, it makes more sense. The spell must have… fully fixed it in place. Brought it out,” she said and regarded him as though it would be somehow visible on the outside. Perhaps it was. “Can’t you tell?”


But he wasn’t listening to her. His gaze was fixed over her right shoulder at the place next to the shelf with a wooden statue of what looked like a Hindu god. The place where something flickered to life.


A ghost. And it was calling his name.


*******


They were all around him. Like a death shroud, wrapping him in their murderous arms as they whispered his name over and over. Spike buried his head in his hands and breathed loudly in hope of drowning out their voices. The weight of his crimes tore at his insides.


He’d been barely aware of Tara driving him home hours ago. He must have given her the instructions how to get there. He couldn’t remember. How much time had passed since then? At least now his head was starting to clear and he managed to crawl into the bathroom just in time to dry heave over the toilet. He heard his phone ringing insistently and didn’t have to see it to know who was calling him.


It ached, how much he wanted to pick it up and hear her tell him everything would be okay. But…


The ghosts? He could learn to live with them. What they meant. What he couldn’t live was the clarity of knowing how much he didn’t deserve her. Not merely thinking it but truly realizing it for the first time. She was so far beyond his reach. And still he was selfish enough to crave her proximity. The soul hadn’t changed anything at all. It was supposed to fix him and he’d only managed to mess things up even more. But maybe it would stop him from approaching her, from hurting her again. It had to.


The phone kept ringing.


*******

One week later


Buffy was beside herself with worry. After Spike had fled her house six days ago, she tried calling him at first, even left a couple of voicemails. Okay, so it might have been a lot more than just a couple and it was approaching a stalking territory now. Still, no response. She decided to give him some space to get over being ridiculous and try talk to her instead of hiding. This was the sixth day and now she was becoming kind of scared. She picked up the phone and tried calling him again.


This was getting to be too much. It wasn’t like him to just pull a disappearing act without at least letting her know he was fine and pissed he’d bitten her. Didn’t he know she’d worry? That she couldn’t bear even the thought of losing him again?


Enough was enough. God help him if she found him sitting at his apartment in the middle of a drinking binge, he’d be sorry.

*******

Hell, he truly was pathetic. Hiding out at his flat like a coward, staring at the phone clenched in his fist. So far it had rung three times in the last ten minutes. After he’d pulled himself together couple of days ago, he found a great number of messages from Buffy. Deleting them took every ounce of will he possessed. Now he stared at her ID flashing across the screen. He couldn’t let her see him like this. Not before he picked up the pieces.


His stomach was growling but he couldn’t take even the thought of blood without feeling disgust. He had enough of it staining his hands. The ghosts came and went. He mostly ignored them now. There was no use wallowing in guilt over lives he could never give back. Didn’t mean he wouldn’t live with regretting it for as long as he existed.


Spike drew his knees towards his chest and closed his eyes.


KNOCK! KNOCK!


His head jerked up and his heart would be hammering if it could. If he kept still, they’d leave. Never suspect a thing, they would. Nobody here. Nobody worth seeing.


The knocking turned into pounding and a familiar voice yelled through the door, “Spike, open the door! I know you’re there and if you don’t want to see me…fine, but… the least you can do is let me know you’re alive,” Buffy said and fell silent. “Or undead… Spike, if you don’t open this door, I’ll kick it in!”


The phone slipped from his grasp and the stiff muscles in his legs protested when he staggered to his feet.


“I’m serious!”


He could hear her mutter as he warily approached the door and reached for the doorknob with a shaking hand. She was so close. So stubborn. He knew she’d do good on her promise and find her way in with or without his approval, so he slowly opened the door and spun around, turning his back on it.


Buffy pushed the door open and immediately let out a relieved sigh when she spotted him standing in front of her. He was fine and now she could feel anger churning in the pit of stomach for making her scared. But she wouldn’t give into it. Not before she found out what was up with him.


She closed the door behind her. “I called you.”


He nodded but didn’t say anything and he all she could see was his back, his shoulders hunched.


“Spike? Would you please… can you look at me when I talk to you?” What the hell was wrong with him?


He shook his head and sharply inhaled.


Okay, this was getting silly, so she took a couple of steps towards him. His whole body tensed and she could tell he was fighting the instinct to flee.


“What’s this all about? Is it because of the whole bitey thing? Because I told you… I’m not angry. Okay? I’m really not. I know what you are and something like this was bound to happen. I don’t want you to beat yourself over it because I know you have the tendency to do that.”


She waited for some kind of response.


“Spike?”


She put a hand over his shoulder, feeling the muscle tense then relax beneath her touch. What he did then froze her to the bones. He let out a choked sob.


Without hesitation, she spun him around. He dropped his head, bottom lip quivering as he tried to back away from her.


She wouldn’t let him.


TBC


A/N: It'll get better soon, promise. :) Also, did you expect the twist with the Hermes' unfinished ritual and Spike's soul not being completely gone?? Just curious what you think of it.