Part Four


The next afternoon, Buffy called Rick’s and said she had a disgusting flu. Possible she’d be out a few nights, she said.

Swaddled in an oversized flannel PJ shirt, one that had belonged to her father and which she hardly ever took out, she painted her toenails, pressed those little foam toe separator things onto her feet, and walked around her apartment like a penguin.

She ordered up Chinese.

She liquefied a small chip of opium and smoked it out of a favorite little glass bowl.

She watched The Cutting Edge on video.

Standing in front of the vanity mirror in the bathroom, she tugged the ring from her lower lip. It was flecked with blood, though the tiny set of fang slashes were healed up but for the deepest one, a slim red diagonal across her upper lip.

She’d never kissed one before, not even in smoothy face. She tried not to read into it too much, that she’d kissed him, or that he was the only vamp ever to walk out of the Red Room.

Or that he’d nearly made her cry at the end.

‘Cause fuck him. He wasn’t different. He’d admitted, bold-faced, that he killed girls like her every day. Spade was a spade. Tonight she’d hunt him down and give him the staking he deserved.

An hour before sunset, she scrubbed herself mercilessly in the shower. His ability to scent her was an advantage she didn’t have. She was stronger, but he’d be better equipped to find her, sneak up if he wanted.

She slid into her luckiest, most broken-in black leather pants, black lyrca tank under a long sleeved, black nylon shirt.

She wanted to wear her combat boots, because they were the stompiest and kick-assiest, but they’d still retain scents from the night before, from the dance she’d given him. Leather had the porous thing going on.

Her belly twitched at the memory. She rolled her eyes at herself.

She dug her motorcycle boots out of the closest. Heavier in the sole anyway, better traction. She zipped up their sides and fastened their buckles.

She kept the ring out of her lip. Maybe she’d leave it out for good. It really was a liability in a fight. Fortunate Spike hadn’t hooked a fang into it when they’d been…

He could have ripped it clean out. Then he really would have had something to drink.

Fingerless black leather gloves. Eye make up. Red hair hung down like a mane.

In the full-length mirror she looked like a shadow. A new-old feeling of anticipation shot through her.

Buffy tucked a pair of nunchucks into the back of her waistband. She’d gotten them through an old customer, bartered three of the raunchiest lap dances she’d ever given for them. The handles were wooden. She’d had them sharpened. It’d been awhile since she’d left the house with them.

It’d been awhile for a lot of things.

By the time the kamikaze sun put the big money view through Buffy’s floor to ceiling windows, she was gone.



*


She’d know better than to keep her scent full on, but he’d tracked her once already without relying on his nose, and from a lot further away. It’d be nothing to scare her up again. Christ, he’d tasted her. He’d be pulled to her now. His unconscious mind salivated.

His want for her had deepened, filled out in him, surpassed any wanting of the two Slayers he’d killed before, obsession multiplied many times by itself. She’d humiliated him, and he seethed. She’d aroused him, and he shivered. She’d been his to kill, to guzzle, and he’d turned her loose.

If he died by her hands now, it would be his recklessness to blame. He insisted to himself that it had been for the sake of honor that he’d let her go, for the sake of the confrontation he’d been imagining for years, the thought of which had dizzied his head and stiffened his cock so many times. If he had a chance to get at it, there was no price too high, up to and including his own existence.

That was why he’d released her. It had nothing to do with the meek strand of red hair that’d caught in the corner of her pretty, bloody mouth when he’d had her against the wall. Nothing to do with the hard on he’d worn until he’d gotten back to the crypt he’d moved into, or the wank he’d put to it once he got there, or the way he was erect again almost immediately after he came. Was the circumstance, and the bitty taste of her blood, that was all. Nothing to do with the girl herself.

As sunset closed in, the edge he’d been on all day threatened more and more to tip him straight over it. He was wound up, racehorse tucked into the starting gate, everything around him buzzing, buzzing and about to snap. He started off in a run and kept to it for nearly an hour, waiting to feel her presence tug him in any particular direction.

By the time midnight had come and gone he’d covered a lot of ground, but none of it hers. He drank a bum in an alley, took the half-emptied pint of Wild Turkey from his stiff hand and put it after the blood.

Spike prowled through the first hours of the morning, alleys and boulevards and playgrounds and woods. The absence of her energy in the space around him draped a thin silence on everything. Like a jack-in-the-box, he’d let the tension build, and now to find out he wouldn’t get to spring up and out and onto her, not tonight, at least, stitched a sting of desperation just under his skin. A feeling like starvation coated him fully, though he’d only just fed. Till he’d eaten her, he wagered the hunger would persist, sod anything else he put into his belly.

Oh, he was raw for it, and he kicked and shuffled along, hung with disappointment, as the sun threatened to breech the horizon. She could have left town, he supposed, decided to avoid him altogether.

Bollocks, had he scared her off?

She didn’t seem like a scared girl. She seemed like a hell-bent one, fixated as he was on the rivalry blooming between them. If she’d been managing her slays by luring dopey fool vampires into her lap dance room by their pricks, or by approaching them out back when she was through at the club for a little dusting on the sly, she’d probably not been employing much more skill as of late than looking delicious and shaking her box. Spike knew a thing or two about Slayers, about what drove them, what moved them, their compulsions and urges. Their needs, and what got them met.

And a Slayer off the hunt wasn’t much different than he was. They drained night after night, clocked kill after kill, remained unsatisfied the whole time. Girl had to know, just like he knew, that there was a better use for her, glory and triumph the size of legend to seize, blood and purpose and ritual and lineage to observe.

Here he was, thinking he’d come for his destiny. Turned out he’d come as well to deliver hers.