Chapter 21 – Mopey and Broody



The Watcher’s Journal of Sir Arthur Gosnard-Tisklin.

London, Kensal Green Cemetery, February 19, 1901, continued. While the Slayer shook the ashen remains of Miss R. from her clothes and hat, I kept watch for other denizens of the night. The silhouette of a well-formed male figure appeared on the roof of the Cruikshank’s family crypt. His shadowed figure and his opera cape billowing in an unnecessarily French manner, contrasted starkly against the angry red glower of the setting moon as it plunged toward the horizon. I couldn’t decipher his features, but he seemed in some way familiar to me. Lady Vicky stared at him for a long time and made no move to approach him. The devil actually tipped his top hat to her before leaping from the crypt and vanishing.


***

Parker ran at an incredible speed across the dark campus quadrangle, in spite of the gunshot wound in his thigh. “Wow, this is cool. I’m like an incredible athlete.” He leaped over a bush and closed the gap between himself and Katie Loomis. He jumped forward, as adrenalin pulsed through him, urging him to kill – kill – kill.

Katie stepped aside and Parker went flying headlong into a thorn hedge.

“Parker? Is that you? I tried to call. Did you get my message?”

Parker staggered out of the hedge and swatted loose the thorns. He turned to Katie in full vamp face. “Yeah. I goth your metthage.” Damn. It was hard to talk with fangs hanging out of your jaws. Didn’t matter. You didn’t need to talk in order to kill. He wiped away a string of drool.

Katie froze with fear. “Parker? Your face. What’s wrong?”

He lunged at her, but she jumped aside at the last moment.

“Is this some kind of game? Cause I don’t think it’s very funny.”

“No game. I’m going thew kill you and drink your blood.” Parker grabbed her shoulders and lowered his head. He snarled, too, for the terrifying effect.

Katie shoved her hand into his nose and followed up with an elbow into his gut. “Get your hands off me, you creep.”

Parker straightened and caught her arm as she backed away. “Hold still tho I can kill you.”

She slammed her high-heeled shoe onto his instep and yelled out “Defense Class Rocks,” as she brought her knee up hard on his crotch.

Howling in pain, Parker fell onto the ground as Katie ran away.

Once they got through rolling on the ground laughing, Sunday and Rosamund came up and kicked him a couple of times in the kidneys.

“You’re the most pathetic fledge in history,” Rosamund said.

***

Buffy dragged into her dorm room late the next afternoon. She had just left Spike. He’d overcome her protests and promises not to go home with him last night without even resorting to the claim. It was getting harder and harder to leave him. She wanted to stay with him all the time, to touch him and talk to him and to everything to him. Once the claim expired, she wouldn’t get to do any of those things ever again.

She greeted Willow, threw her bag on her bed and checked her phone messages.

“Hi, honey, oops, this message is for Buffy. It’s Mom. Hi, Willow, too. Buffy, there’s a big sale at the lingerie store at the mall tonight. Meet me there. I’ll have my credit card handy.”

Buffy slumped on her bed. She couldn’t bring herself to be interested in a shopping spree tonight.

Willow looked up from her class notes, which she was color coding in blue, pink and green. “Buff, where’ve you been? You haven’t been watching Spike all this time?”

Watching didn’t come into her activities with Spike very often except for watching the wicked things he was doing to her. “Yeah.”

“So, tonight’s the night?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s good. Another few hours and the claim thingie will be over and you can forget all about Spike.”

Is that what she wanted? To forget about Spike? “Over.”

“You do want to forget, don’t you?”

“Forget?”

“Have you been drinking Cave Beer again? You’re all Monosyllable-Speech Girl.”

“No. No Cave Beer. I’m totally Homo Sapiens Girl. It’s Spike.”

“What about him?”

Buffy sank down onto her pillows and curled up. “Never mind.”

“Buffy!”

“I think I might … I have feelings … I kinda … I could ….”

Willow picked up a dark blue Flair that she used for important notes, and selected a clean page in her notebook. The material she’d learned in Professor Walsh’s class was coming in handy already. She began writing. “The subject is approaching the ability to articulate her problem, in sentence fragments of two or three words. Another twenty or thirty sessions and the subject could graduate to speaking in sentences and might, given time, be able to communicate her feelings regarding her Vampire Mate without lapsing into a state of catatonia.”

“I love him!” Buffy blurted out. She put her fingers over her mouth, astonished at her own outburst.

Willow continued writing. “Subject exhibits psychotic episodes with intense delusional overlay and inappropriate emotional content. You can’t love him, Buffy. Well, you can, but if you love him, he can’t love you back. He’s a vampire. Giles has only told us that particular piece of Important Vampire Lore about a gazillion times. Vampires have no feelings. Good feelings, anyway.”

“Giles might be wrong.” Giles was definitely wrong, at least about Spike.

“And, also Spike - heavy on the Ruthless Killer.”

“No getting around Ruthless Killer. Although, he’s behaved himself pretty well for the last few days. He hasn’t had a single drink from a live human since he’d claimed me. At least, that I know about. That counts for something doesn’t it?”

“As your friend, and speaking sternly, I just want to say: Buffy – good, Spike – bad, Spuffy not mixy.”

Spuffy? “Thanks for explaining in Cave Slayer, Will. I know we have problems. He’s dead. I’m not. He’s a vicious killer and I’m a … Maybe we can make it work?”

“No, no, no. Spike is worse than Parker. He’s worse than Riley, who by the way asked me to ask you if there was any chance that you’d go out with him tomorrow night. There’s nothing to work out, Spike-wise, I mean.” Willow spent the next minute snapping the caps back on her pens and arranging them alphabetically by color, except her Black Warrior pencil, which as a weapon for killing vampires, earned the Black Warrior its own position in her pencil tray. Arranging her pencil tray was relaxing, like meditation. “Did Spike say he loved you?”

“He hasn’t said. He said he still loved Dru, but I think he was trying to make me jealous.” What if he didn’t love her? What if that whole business with the flying goldfish was just an illusion?

Willow levitated the Black Warrior pencil, sharpened it with her Wicked Witch of the West pencil sharpener and returned it to the tray.

“He wouldn’t have claimed me if he hadn’t felt something for me,” Buffy said. She picked at her blouse and smoothed out a wrinkle.

“Giles didn’t say anything about that.”

“Anya did.”

“Oh, Anya.” Willow took very little interest in what Anya had to say on any subject. The former vengeance demon had only one skill that Willow counted as useful and that was aggravating Xander. Willow hadn’t quite forgiven Xander for insisting on being her Bestest Friend and nothing more during high school. Anya’s constant stream of Xander Embarrassment served a higher, punishing purpose in Willow’s opinion. Petty, but true.

“Anya knows stuff about demons sometimes,” Buffy said. “Maybe she’s right and Spike likes me a little. Maybe more than a little.”

“Even if it’s true, you can’t let yourself become the Bride of Spike. He’s Evil.”

“Yeah.”

Willow floated the pencil again and tapped it on the desk without touching it while she thought. Plainly, her friend Buffy was jonesing on this dumb vampire, Spike. Maybe there was something to Anya’s mating theory. If it was true, that Spike and Buffy had some mystical love connection, nothing would stop them from being together. In that case, something would have to be done about Spike. “What if he wasn’t? Evil, I mean.”

“Spike, not Evil? It’s kinda hard to separate the William from the Wicked.” What would he be like? She might not even like Spike if he wasn’t a little wicked.

“Well, we probably couldn’t completely eradicate the evil part without dusting him, but what if we could prevent him from being all snarly and bitey?”

Buffy kind of liked the snarly and bitey, but she couldn’t always be around to make sure he behaved. What if he snapped one day and ate somebody while she was at the mall or taking an exam? She’d never forgive herself. “I don’t know. Would he be all Mopey and Broody like Angel? I don’t think I want Spike to be all broody.”

“No. You wouldn’t want that. The whole brooding thing wears on you after a while.”

“I don’t know what we’re talking about. There’s no way to make Spike behave – with or without brooding. I guess I don’t have any choice. I’ll have to break the claim tomorrow night.” Making a decision, even an unpleasant one should make you feel better. Why didn’t deciding to break up with Spike make her feel better?

“Are you going to kill Spike? Giles wants you to, doesn’t he?”

“I don’t care what Giles wants, or the Council either. They can fire me. I told Spike he’d have to leave town.”

“Think he’ll leave?”

“No.” He likes having Slayer sex and a sip of Slayer O positive way too much to get back in that crazy car of his and blow town. That car with the big, comfy back seat that they’d tested out on the way home from the dog races.

“So, even if you let the claim expire, you’re still going to have to deal with Spike. Since you don’t want to kill him, and he won’t leave, we’re going to have to do something drastic.”

“Yeah, but what? I can’t be having sex with him all the time to make sure he behaves. I have to do other stuff once in a while.” Buffy swallowed. “And, I didn’t just say that.”

Willow scribbled some more in her notebook. “Can you keep a secret?”

Buffy snorted. “You’re a fine one to be asking other people if they can keep secrets after you snitched to Giles about Spike and me.”

“Okay, and for the thirteenth time, I’m sorry. Can you keep a secret from Spike?”

“Not for long. The claim lets him read my brain on an annoyingly frequent basis.”

“I guess it’ll have to be me.”

“What will, Will?”

“I’ll have to be the Keeper of the Secret.”


***

“Lady, you want me to wait?” asked Serafimo Guttierez. He was moonlighting this evening as a taxi driver. The nice English lady didn’t have any business running around Sunnydale alone at night, so he offered to wait for her. Also, he didn’t mind getting paid to sit in his cab and watch the meter rack up the fare.

Lydia Chalmers got out of the taxi in front of what appeared to be a deserted mansion. The street was empty, there were few street lights and the bushes and plants around the house were overgrown and looked, to use a word not much in favor with the Council elite, spooky. “Yes, please wait. I won’t be long.”

She walked up to the front door and trembled. Now that she was here, she was terrified of going inside. What had she been thinking? It was bad enough to sneak behind Quentin Travers’ back and fly to Sunnydale to meet the Slayer, but to expose herself to one of the most dangerous vampires in history was madness. Still, she’d come all this way and she was properly armed and it would be a shame to miss this opportunity. She screwed up her courage and tapped lightly.

Spike jerked the door open. “What the bloody hell do you … Oh. Who might you be, luv?”

Lydia touched the tiny gold cross that hung from her neck. It was him, in the flesh, so to speak. She could feel her heart racing at the thought of facing the infamous William the Bloody, but she remained outwardly cool. “I’m Lydia Chalmers, from the Watcher’s Council. I’d like to speak to you.”

“Didn’t bring any nasty stakes or crossbows, did you?”

Lydia stepped across the threshold, her eyes darting around for sign of any other vampires, or of the Slayer. “I am armed, but I didn’t come to exterminate you.”

“Good to hear. Have a seat, Watcher. I’m Spike.”

“Yes, I know. I … wrote my thesis on you.”

Spike rubbed his chest. “Well, well. Isn't that neat.” He sat down next to her on the sofa and looked down the front of her white silk blouse. “Watcher’s Council has certainly improved their hiring policies.”

Lydia fastened the top button of her blouse and hoped her face wasn’t as flaming red as it felt. “I’ve come about the Slayer. I understand you placed a mating claim on her.”

“Yeah, I pretty much had to take her up. See, the poor little twig can't keep a man. Gets her all down. Thought she needed some stability in her life. That and a regular shagging.”

Her face must be positively neon red. “I was surprised when I heard about the claim. I'd think you'd want to kill her. You've killed Slayers before.” Not to mention hundreds of other people. She tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.

Spike was staring at her in an intense manner that was making her very nervous. She jumped when he leaned closer and sniffed her neck.

“You have done your homework.” Bird smelled nice, but not as good as his mate. He sighed and sat back. “So, why are you here?”

“I’ve come to warn you. You and Ms. Summers are in danger. The Council is going to try to kill you and possibly the Slayer as well.”

“Is that right? I’m not much worried about those wankers. They’ve come after me before.”

“Yes, of course, but with the claim, they can get to you through the Slayer.”

Spike stroked his fingers along her warm neck and lingered over her pulse point. He savored the pat pat pat of her heartbeat. He was a bit peckish, but there was that nasty cross hanging around her neck, not to mention his mate might not be best pleased if he took a taste of this toothsome Watcher Girl. Balls. “That’s right nice of you. Tell me, pet, now we're such good friends, why are you really here?”

“You’ll think me silly. I came to help you and the Slayer, if I can.”

“Help us with what?”

“The claim. I know you love her and she must return your feelings for the claim to be activated.”

Spike rubbed the back of his neck. “Yeah, well, I’m not so sure about that last. I feel pretty warm and friendly towards the Slayer, but I don’t think she feels the same about me.”

Lydia frowned. “Oh, but she must. I’ll prove it to you.” She dug in her purse and pulled out an envelope and handed it to him. “I brought this for you. Please.”

Spike opened the envelope and pulled out a couple of old letters. He read the letters, replaced them in the envelope and handed it back. “What of it?”

“Don’t you see? You’re not the first vampire to place a mating claim …”

Spike pushed off the couch and went over to the fireplace and shoved in another log. “You’re wasting your time. The claim expires tomorrow night. She doesn’t want to complete the claim and there’s an end to it. Cheers for stopping by.”

Lydia tucked away the envelope and snapped her purse shut. “I’m sorry. I must go.”

Spike stirred the fire with the poker and didn’t turn as Lydia slipped out the door.