The thin film of sweat that rose from her skin had Buffy glistening under the spotlights. She couldn’t see clearly past the crowd, five or six deep at the rail, wrestling each other for the opportunity to lay their money down, but she could feel every vamp in the club. They each had their own note in the overwhelming composition of energy she gave off and took back, her slick body undulating with it.

Black cotton scrap of a thong. Knee-high combat boots. She kept it simple for the most part. Her Slayer strength afforded her the ability to pull the kind of pole tricks that didn’t need much in the way of extravagant costumes to back them up.

Her green eyes flashed up coyly when she felt him, lashes unfurling. He wasn’t any more than a thin shadow beyond the gulf of pheromones clinging to the sides of the stage. But he felt big, driven. Dangerous.

Shoving one hand roughly into her underwear, she shivered the tip of her middle finger past her clit. Her customers wanted to imagine she really played with herself up there. The inside track was that it wasn’t a stretch. The other girls looked at her sideways every time she brought herself off on stage. She just pursed her lips and shrugged. Then brought home twice the cash.

Now it was him doing it to her. Easing her back down the pole, knees wide open, she tipped her head back, let her mouth slack slightly. Keeping a steady caress up between her legs, she felt for him, picked him out, closed her eyes and reached.

Damn, she thought, rocking her hips up and back, the cool metal hinting against the split in the peach of her ass. He’s thirsty for me.

Staring past the layers of faces, she drew her hands up her ribcage, spread them over her sweat-slicked breasts. Rick suggested implants, but she knew she didn’t need ‘em. They’d probably wreck her balance permanently, get her dead. She got the job done, both jobs, every night, with a B cup. And almost never put on a bra.

Buffy dropped languidly to her knees, pulled her tongue across her upper lip: salty. She worked her torso back, rolling her shoulders to the beat of the song, massaging her nipples, until her shoulder blades brushed the stage and her legs were a tight fold at each knee. She clawed at her belly with black-lacquered nails, strained towards her cunt, teasing herself, teasing them.

He was closer now than a minute ago. She still couldn’t pick him out with her eyes, but her mind fixed on the series of low, shuddering breaths he was taking, but did not need. Up her spine crept the Slayer alarm, communicating in no uncertain terms that she could be compromised any minute, that this one could really fuck her up.

They didn’t hear the little moan that forced past her tender lower lip. Of course they wouldn’t, over the music, over each other.

Seamlessly, slowly, she rolled onto her belly, swinging her booted feet playfully into the air, taking care not to accidentally slam a kick into anyone’s head. She was on the rail now, giving them the close up look they’d paid for. Pulling her knees under her in a clean little tuck, she propped herself on them and her elbows, arching her back so the customers would have a nice view of her ass. She kept it moving for them, spread her legs further and further apart, rolled her neck so her hair was tossed up like a bridal bouquet.

Eventually she was low enough to the stage floor to hump it, pull her hips down desperately on an invisible cock, let them recoil with a twist, plunge them low again. Her breasts brushed the reflective black of the stage floor. She bit into her lip without meaning to.

And suddenly there was something in her, sizzling through her, like acid or lava. Her veins felt as lit as the neon sign out front. It had the intensity of orgasm, the pleasure of it, but was draped in the fabric of raw fear. Her belly clenched, mind spun.

It was like a gear had gotten caught when instinct forced the shift from fuck to slay. For a second, she was somewhere else: the edge of death. She felt its hot breath tumble across her back, felt it put one claw into her side.

And then she was back, and the song was ending, and she was sitting up to collect her tips.

And she was staring into the coldest blue eyes she’d seen.

One quick, ragged inhale was the only loss of composure she let slip, but he caught it. Of course he caught it. He smirked, held a crisp twenty dollar bill out to her.

“Save your money,” she breathed at him, pushing up onto her knees, close enough to feel cooled by his body.

Kneeling on the stage, she was a head taller than he was, so he had to look up to ask, “Yeah, pet? What for?”

“Private dance,” she directed. Then, “It’s what you came here for, right?”

“Something like that.” He looked her over, unabashedly. She stood for it. It was, after all, what she did, and he was hardly the first to examine the merchandise before purchase. When he reached a slim, pale hand up to push her hair back from her neck, she gripped his forearm, twisting it until she was no longer in his reach, until she caught his jaw twitching with the pain he didn’t want her to know she’d inflicted.

“I touch you. Not the other way around.” She kept her fingers pressed into the soft black leather sleeve of his coat, felt the bruise pool beneath it.

“That so? And if I don’t cooperate?”

She dropped his arm, but not his stare. Moving forward on her knees, she crept until she was almost against him, so that the backs of her hands brushed his long cheek bones as she played her fingers over her breasts. His face tried desperately to hold its resolve, but his eyelids fluttered, got heavier.

She felt him, a churning so intense behind the alabaster visage that she wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold his wad. The one in his pants. The one in his fangs.

She lowered herself over him, letting her hair, wild with sweat, crowd around his own bleached, brittle curls, a halo closing him in, so he’d be overwhelmed with her scent. The tactic was a favorite of hers. More than eye candy, vampires lost it for olfactory stimulation. She knew he’d smell her arousal, her urge to hunt. That she’d just ended her period that morning, had killed earlier in the day, had given three lap dances since she’d gotten to work. It had to be one layer after the next now, the pungency of her sweat drawing it all right out to her edges, no clothes to filter any of it.

He swallowed hard. The sound put a sly little grin on her.

“If you don’t cooperate,” she released each thick, lush word on its own against his ear, curling the tip of her tongue behind it, “I can’t dance for you.”

She felt him crumble. Not his resolve to kill her, not that, but the idea that he’d be doing it on his own terms.

“Good boy.” She jumped down from the stage.

One of the bouncers was nearby, brought Buffy a little black slip of a dress to put on. “This guy’s VIP.” She motioned to the vamp. “Show him to the Red Room, will you? And bring him a glass of blood.” To Spike, she crooned that she’d meet him there in a minute. He gave a pensive nod.

In the dressing room, she didn’t shower, wash her face, or even her hands; stayed in the same damp underwear. The way to vampire’s heart was wooden and pointy, but the way to his groin was through his nose. The hotter he was for her, the more of an edge she had.

The better the kill would be.

Instead, she leaned back into the overstuffed loveseat, yanked the small triangle of fabric aside, and worked the blunt end of a well-sanded stake into her pussy. Buffy fucked herself on it frantically, pitching gasps like pleas through the little room, sweeping a tight pattern of strokes onto her clit via the little silver ball at the end of her hood jewelry.

He’d smell that too now, the saturated efflux of her orgasm.

Rising, she crammed the wet stake into her boot.