Chapter 15
 
Spike silently led the way up the steps to the dilapidated building and stood with his hand on the door, eyebrow raised.
 
Buffy slipped the first stake from her sleeve and gave the nod.
 
Spike pushed the door open. “After you, milady,” he said softly.
 
It took a few seconds for Buffy’s eyes to adjust to the dim lighting provided by a couple of low wattage light bulbs. Then details began to emerge out of the shadows. It was a large space, furnished with half a dozen couches and mattresses scattered around the otherwise bare room, all but one of which were occupied. Her attention was drawn to one side by a moan, which she recognised as a moan of pleasure rather than pain. Or, she quickly realised with distaste, possibly a combination of both.
 
Buffy made a gesture for Spike to go left, and she headed towards the tatty red velour chaise longue to her right. She thrust her stake into the back of the female vampire whose fangs were buried in a youth’s arm.
 
“Wha’?” gasped the dazed young man, blinking up at her. He wasn’t much more than a boy really. His eyes widened as he belatedly became aware of what had happened.
 
Buffy pressed her fingers to his lips to stop him from raising the alarm, and whispered forcefully, “Get out of here. Now.”
 
After watching him stumble towards the exit, she looked over to see that Spike had mirrored her action with the male vampire feeding on the girl on the filthy striped ticking mattress on the left, then she crept on to the next couch.
 
Between them, they’d sent four ‘customers’ scuttling to safety before the inevitable happened.
 
“Hey! What’d you do that for?” shouted a well-endowed red-head, whose vampire parasite had just been transformed into a shower of greasy grey dust settling on her bare breasts. Buffy winced at the sight of blood trickling from the latest in a long series of bites around her nipples. The girl batted Buffy’s hand away from her mouth, but it was too late anyway. “Whip! Help! She just killed Jake!”
 
“Hush now, you daft cow,” Spike said, stepping up behind Buffy to grab the girl’s hand and haul her to her feet. He leered at her exposed breasts. “Look as if they used to be nice tits. Shame nobody will ever want to look at them twice now they’re all scarred up. Now, get out of here and go find yourself a new hobby. One that won’t end up with you dead.” He shoved her towards the door and she fled, pulling her shirt closed.
 
Buffy raised an eyebrow at the sight of the burly vampire clattering down the bare wooden stairs. He looked as though he’d escaped from a Village People tribute band. Bare chest, leather vest and steel studs. All that was missing was the big moustache and the cute little cap.
 
“What the…?” He pulled up short at the foot of the stairs. “Slayer! You’re not welcome here!”
 
Buffy snorted. She wasn’t looking for a welcome. She flexed her shoulders and shifted her grip on her stake in preparation for the expected fight.
 
Instead of attacking her, Leather Guy turned to Spike and said, “You’re that Spike. I remember you. You used to be badass. Now you’re hanging around with her?” He gestured wildly at Buffy. “And what were you thinking, bringing her here?”
 
Spike laughed, “Got that wrong, mate. I didn’t bring her;she brought me.”
 
Buffy was offended at the sneer in the vamp’s voice when he referred to her as ‘her’, and at being ignored while he spoke to Spike, so she gave up waiting for an attack and leapt forward.
 
A second later she sat slumped against the wall, fingering her jaw to check that it was still intact as she waited for her head to stop spinning. The stupid vamp had casually backhanded her away like an irritating fly. Okay. Now she was pissed. Mostly at herself, because she’d been overconfident and hadn’t seen it coming.
 
At least her training had held and she hadn’t lost her grip on her stake. She surged back to her feet, stake raised... and stopped dead.
 
Spike was gripping Leather Guy by the throat, holding him up one-handed so that the larger vampire’s feet dangled a couple of inches off the floor. Spike was batting away the fists pounding at his head and shoulders and ignoring the kicks aimed at his shins.
 
He twisted to one side, neatly deflecting the knee aimed at his groin so that it slid up his hip instead, and simply continued to squeeze.
 
Buffy relaxed. “Stop playing, Spike. Finish him off, we aren’t done yet.”
 
Spike glanced over his shoulder and quickly looked her up and down. “You okay, love?”
 
“I’m fine. Come on, we need to check upstairs.”
 
Turning his attention back to Leather Guy, Spike snarled, “Nobody gets away with hurting my slayer.” He grimaced with the effort of closing his fist around the vampire’s neck. A second later he was brushing dust from his sleeve.
 
At the top of the stairs, Buffy hesitated, chewing her bottom lip. It occurred to her: what if Riley was here, in one of these rooms with one of his vampire hoes latched on to his arm? What if he’d come straight here from their break-up scene at the Magic Box to get his bite on? It was bad enough finding out that he’d been doing it. Sheso didn’t want to come face to face with it.
 
She gave herself a little shake. She couldn’t let the possibility distract her from her purpose. Besides, if the idiot was here, her duty decreed that she should save him along with all the other idiots.
 
She cautiously moved forward along the passage, stepping over and around piles of foetid trash that nobody had cared enough about to clear away.
 
The first door she came to was open. Moonlight streamed in through the grimy window revealing an unoccupied room furnished with only a broken down dresser with a cracked mirror and a stained mattress piled with pillows.
 
She moved across to the closed door opposite and twisted the doorknob. Taking a deep breath, she pushed the door open. Her attempt at stealth was thwarted by the screeching of the hinges, which immediately drew the attention of the three occupants of the room.
 
Suddenly Spike was shoved into her back. She took a couple of steps forward to recover her balance, then the small room seemed as though it was full of people and she was fighting for her life.
 
Kick, jab, parry, punch, ouch, duck, kick, twist, stake—and damn, she’d left the stake in her attacker’s chest for a second too long and it had dusted along with him. Before she could slip the next stake from its hiding place, she received a hard blow to her right shoulder which numbed her arm for a few seconds, so suddenly she was very much on the defensive.
 
Buffy ducked and dodged and kicked out, at last managing to shake feeling back into her arm so that she could grab the stake from her waistband at the small of her back and take the initiative once more.
 
Punch, head-butt, knee to the groin, parry, roundhouse kick, lunge and stake. Whew, managed to retain the stake that time.
 
Deep breath and focus on the next opponent.
 
Buffy was sizing up the situation when she was distracted by the unmistakable ‘poof’ of a vampire being dusted immediately behind her. “Spike?” A sudden panic caused her stomach to churn and her heart to thud in her chest. She turned to check that Spike was still there, still fighting at her back the way she had become accustomed to during that long hot summer that now seemed so long ago.
 
He was glorious, with a grin of sheer glee lighting up his face and his duster flaring dramatically around him as he engaged the vampires crowding the doorway, preventing any more of them from coming into the room. He met her gaze for a split second and winked at her before returning to his task.
 
Her moment of inattention had not gone unnoticed by the two remaining guys in the room, however. She was suddenly jerked backwards into a hard body by a painful yank on her ponytail. Before she could recover, a hairy muscular arm clamped across her chest. She froze in shock when her head was roughly yanked to one side and a vampire’s cool, foul-smelling breath wafted over her shoulder.
 
“Slayer,” he gloated, his voice as rough as his breath. “I’ve wanted to do this for years.”
 
Buffy was galvanised into action by the distinctive sound of facial bones and cartilage shifting.
 
She raised a foot and thrust it back down, raking the edge of her boot down his shin and stamping on his instep. At the same time, she rammed her left elbow back into his solar plexus and dropping her stake, she reached back between his legs with her right hand. She caught hold of a handful of soft flesh and squeezed. Hard. Something popped.
 
A high pitched scream filled the room and she was abruptly freed. She spun on her heel and found Leather Guy Two hunched in front of her, clutching his privates and hopping to keep his balance on his uninjured foot. He could have been the twin brother of the vamp they’d encountered downstairs, except that if anything, he was even bigger.
 
To one side, a skinny guy hefted a jagged length of two by two and swung it at her head. She parried it with her arm then grabbed it, pulled it out of his grasp and tossed it away. With an uppercut to the jaw, she sent Skinny Guy flying across the room to land in an ungainly tangle of limbs on the mattress, allowing her to focus on Leather Guy Two.
 
His hunched posture meant that she couldn’t get at his chest and he was too big for her to reach over to stake him through his back, so she planted her hands on his shoulders and vaulted over him. Before he had a chance to react, she turned and pulled a stake from her jacket pocket. She rammed it into his back and the constant screaming was abruptly cut off.
 
Skinny Guy was only just beginning to clamber unsteadily to his feet, so she took a few seconds to roll her neck to ease the strain from Leather Guy Two’s violent treatment and check that her hair was still attached, despite the burning in her scalp at the base of her pony tail.
 
Relieved to discover that she wouldn’t need to borrow one of her mother’s wigs, Buffy glanced over her shoulder to check that the latest sound of a disintegrating vampire had left Spike intact. Seeing that he was okay and had run out of opponents, she strode across the room to deal with Skinny Guy.
 
She hesitated for a few seconds, slightly puzzled by the fact that rather than attacking her again, he just stood there with his arms wrapped around himself, tears flowing freely down his cheeks.
 
Shrugging off her uncertainty, she raised her stake and thrust forward.
 
The stake was a fraction of an inch from his chest when a hand clamped around her wrist and held her arm motionless.
 
“You don’t want to do that, slayer.”
 
Buffy glanced over her shoulder to see Spike at her side. “Spike? What…?”
 
“He’s human, love.”
 
“Huh?” Buffy examined Skinny Guy more closely and belatedly noted the pulse pounding in his throat, the sweat beading his brow and the blotchy flush of his face. None of which would have been present in a vampire. “Oh god!” She stumbled back in dismay, her stake falling forgotten to the floor. “I’m so sorry! But why did you attack me?”
 
When Skinny Guy just stood there shaking his head in abject misery, Spike said, “I think the vamp you just dusted was his uh… special friend, slayer.”
 
“Oh!” Buffy thought for a moment. It occurred to her that the bite might not be the only attraction for the human visitors to this establishment. “Oh!”
 
Spike gripped Skinny Guy by the shoulders and propelled him out of the room. “Time to go home. Nothing for you here any more.”
 
The reality of what had nearly happened suddenly struck Buffy. She broke into a sweat, bile rose in her throat and she clamped a hand over her mouth. She had nearly killed a man. How could she have been so careless?
 
“You all right, love?”
 
Buffy looked up at Spike in horror. “I can’t believe I nearly…”
 
“But you didn’t. He’s just a bit bruised. He’ll be fine, slayer.”
 
“But if you hadn’t been here, I could have…”
 
“But I was and you didn’t. And even if you had, it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. Everyone makes mistakes, love. Even you.”
 
“You don’t get it. I can’t afford to make mistakes. When I make a mistake, people die.”
 
Spike cocked his head to one side and tenderly stroked her cheek. “And that’s one of the reasons I love you so much, Buffy. You hold yourself to standards no human can possibly maintain.” He took a step back, looked down at the floor, hunched his shoulders and thrust his fists deep into his duster pockets. “I know I don’t understand what you’re going through, that I can’t ever hope to meet those standards, but…”
 
“Oh, Spike. I don’t expect you to. It means everything that you’re even willing to try.”
 
Spike raised an eyebrow and smirked at her.
 
Buffy rolled her eyes and tried not to smile at his teasing expression. “And yes, I do realise I’ve just admitted to a double standard. I have to hold myself to a higher ideal. Kinda comes with the whole slayer package.”
 
“Look, love. I’m not the best person to talk to about this. I might not get why you’re so upset, but I can see you are. All I can suggest is; go talk to your watcher about it.”
 
“Giles? I can’t do that!”
 
“Why not? Isn’t that what your watcher is for? To advise and assist you?”
 
“Yeah, but…” Buffy shook her head. How could she tell Giles she’d almost accidentally killed a man? He would be so disappointed in her.
 
“Afraid to admit that the mighty slayer might be fallible?” Spike leant forward and whispered into her ear, “Believe it or not, love, I don’t think it’ll come as that much of a surprise.”
 
Buffy swatted him on the arm then wrapped her arms around him, luxuriating in the comfort of his embrace.
 
“You always seem to know what to say to make me feel better.”
 
“So you’ll go and talk to him?”
 
“I’ll take the suggestion under advisement.”
 
“Does that mean yes?”
 
“Don’t push me, Buster.”
 
Spike simply chuckled at her pouty tone and hugged her tighter.