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Unchecked by Xela
 
Chapter 4
 
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Buffy was flying, following the thin bond that connected her with Spike, hoping against hope that she’d find…something, anything, at the end of it. She kept tweaking the bond, the sound she associated with a Spike getting clearer as they grew closer. Buffy almost lost her way when the sound changed, jarring her. It was dulled, strained, not the clear notes that had guided her before.

It’s the badness, Anne whispered fearfully. A sense of urgency and fear came from her daughter.

What’s the badness? Buffy asked. The shudder of fear and revulsion that whispered through her connection with her daughter terrified Buffy. The badness was bad. Very bad. Buffy surged forward, panic and concern aiding her, driving her to find her mate.

The thread they were following turned searingly cold. Buffy glanced down and was shocked to see the vibrant swirls of color rapidly fading into a dully, lifeless grey. She could barely hear the song, straining to play. The ice seemed to grip Buffy’s heart, and she called out into the vastness around her.

Spike! The call flew away from her, but there was no response. Spike!

Daddy! Anne’s voice joined hers. Together, their call reached through the grayness and they felt an small answering spark. Together, they dove through the haze.

And there, faint and failing, was Spike. She could see him, surrounded by a sinister feeling great mist, tendrils wrapped around his body, his mouth opened in a silent scream. Buffy threw herself at him, severing the tendrils of icy gray that were wrapped around him. She took her love for him, her joy at seeing him again, her love for the children they had created together, and sent it our in a glorious burst of color, vibrant golds and reds chasing away the colorless mist.

***

The life-claiming force that had so convinced itself the struggling vampire was doomed was unprepared for the assault leveled upon it. It cringed, shrinking back against the blinding heat-gold that suddenly surrounded the prey. It watched, angry and hungry, as a smaller—but no less vibrant—being drew the prey away from the in-between and back to the word and to safety.

Gathering its anger, it attacked, charging at the gold light and latching onto it. Beings still attached to the world, still attached to their skins, were harder to draw in, harder to kill; they had a refuge, a place of safety. The prey had be promised to the mist, an easy target tired by a mortal fight and severed from its earthly connections. But the gold…the gold would feed its hunger, and it was far away from its base. The mist struck viciously, and the gold faltered. Ruthlessly the grayness pressed, searching for a weakness, whispering sinister thoughts, but each time the gold flared red and surged back. So the mist dug deeper, whispered sinister thoughts of death and loneliness. The gold lost ground and sparks of other colors, lonely and loss colors, touched the surface. She was tiring.

The mist searched for the thin thread that linked all beings with their physical manifestations, so thin and easy to snap. If it broke, the gold would be lost to the mist. One stabbing tendril brushed the cord, and the new prey recoiled sharply, panicked green-oranges suffusing its being. The mist surged towards the silver tendril, but the cord snapped back, drawing the new prey back to the safety of its body.

It retreated, floating benignly in the in-between, resting and gathering its energy for the next battle. The gold might be forever lost, but the prey was still out there…

***

Fred was worried. She hadn’t been able to find Spike. No one had seen him for hours, and none of her instruments were picking up any of his abnormal readings. Anywhere. Subsequent testing had proven Spike was incapable of moving far beyond the periphery of Wolfram and Hart, and prolonged exposure outside drained his energy considerably. So the question remained—where the hell was Spike?

“You look worried, Freddikins,” Loren’s friendly voice a welcoming distraction from her increasingly unhappy thoughts. “What’s got you down?”

“I can’t find Spike,” Fred replied, worrying her bottom lip as she continued analyzing the problem and coming up with no solution. Spike left trails, and all the ones she’d found were either old or just…stopped.

“Well tall blonde and ghostly can’t have gone far, n’est pas?” Lorne said with a cheery wink. He frowned a bit when this seemed to dampen Fred’s normally upbeat mood further. She looked up, surprised to find them standing outside of her lab.

“That’s just it. I can track Spike’s movements, and they just…stop. In the middle of a room. No new ones for at least the past five hours, and…I’m worried.” Lorne cocked his head to the side and looked at her. Worry seeped out of her pores, and her aura was slightly off. There was more to this than Spike just discovering some new ghost trick. He silently commanded her to continue.

“Spike…disappears sometimes,” Fred began hesitantly. Lorne’s brows crinkled, though he remained silent. A better reaction that the indifference she’d have suspected from any of the others…though she was pretty sure Angel would be far from indifferent. “He says…he says that when he disappears, something is-is draining him, and it’s getting harder to come back.”

A worried look darted across Lorne’s face. He settled himself against Fred’s desk, scrolling through all of the mystical mumbo-jumbo he’d ever come across in his life. He’d heard of ‘Soul Eaters,’ amorphous beasts that fed on the energy of the newly dead, devouring them before they could complete their final journey. But Fred had said that Spike was definitively not a ghost…though that didn’t mean there wasn’t something else lurking out there that fed on, say, spiritual energy. Which Spike had in spades.

“So, what have you figured out so far?” Lorne asked, trying to spark the Texan’s creativity. If something was going after their resident non-ghost, they were going to have to move on this whole recaporealizing thing. There were people who weren’t too excited about Fred’s newest pet project, Angel topping that list. There was something going on with the boss man these days that Lorne didn’t like. And Angel was avoiding him, particularly on a one-to-one basis.

“Well…I’ve never actually seen him disappear. But he’s reappeared in front of me. Spike doesn’t have control over his visibility; he’s not a ghost, he’s a part of this world but in some way I just can’t figure out not. If he’s here, you will see him. So there’s no doubt that his claims have merit; I just—“ A bright light appeared in the middle of the room, almost too bright to look at.

“Bloody hell.” Fred and Lorne gawped as Spike appeared in the room, sprawled unceremoniously on the floor. A light, mischievous giggle floated through the room as Spike began cursing a blue streak, struggling with uncooperative muscles to make it upright.

“Daddy said a Bad Word!” Lorne and Fred exchanged wide-eyed, astonished glances before taking a longer look at that ball of light. It was actually more like an ovular swath of incandescent light that shimmered through every color in the rainbow. But in the very center, their seemed to be the unformed shape of a child, her voice filled with love.

“Anne—“ Spike choked off; he had so much to say, too much. But that one word held such a wealth of emotion. He felt his daughter start pulling away from him, their bond weakening back to the muffled buzz that was both delightful and maddening. “No! Anne!” Tears pricked at Fred’s eyes at the anguish in Spike’s voice.

“Soon!” Anne’s voice floated back to them, tinny with distance. “I love you, Daddy.” Fred looked uncomfortably as Spike collapsed, drained in every way possible and yearning for his family. Lorne felt the vampire’s misery acutely, and walked over to comfort him. Unthinkingly, he laid his hand on Spike’s shoulder.

“I think Angel-kins may have told us a little white lie,” Lorne murmured solemnly.

Gold eyes clashed with red.

“You’re touching me.”
 
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