Chapter Fifty-Nine




“What am I supposed to do?” Willow dropped her face into her hands theatrically. “I have no idea what to say to her about it.”

“Why do you have to say anything?” Anya asked. She was the only one of them not sitting at the reading table; she was standing at the cash register, counting the day’s earnings. Willow heaved a sigh.

“Well, maybe it’d be easier to skirt around the issue if I didn’t keep walking in on them together. He’s practically living there now…strutting around like he owns the place. And let me tell you, he’s not shy with the PDAs.”

“So, what do you say?” Xander asked a trifle impatiently. He’d been having his own problems with Spike, who had apparently become the world’s only diurnal vampire. This made it virtually impossible to avoid him and, in the name of peace, Xander had struggled to be civil. Unfortunately, Spike wasn’t accustomed to receiving civility from Buffy’s friends, and he didn’t seem to realize he should respond to it in kind. Or, if he did, he clearly did not feel inclined to do so.

“Honestly, I have no idea what I say,” Willow told him. “If they notice me I open my mouth and words start coming out…and I have absolutely no idea of what they are. If they don’t notice me I just get the heck out before they do.”

“Move,” advised Anya. Willow shot her a nasty look, but she continued happily, “It makes sense, doesn’t it? You don’t like Spike, and Spike is always at Buffy’s house; you live at Buffy’s house. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have to see Spike. Seems like a pretty easy solution. Why make yourself miserable just because you don’t like the on-campus housing?”

“That is not why I moved into Buffy’s house!” Willow was offended. “Tara and I moved so we could take care of Dawn while Buffy was gone.”

“But she’s back now.”

“You know, this really isn’t any of your business,” Willow flared. Tara put a hand on her arm.

“Honey, maybe she’s got a point. Things have been so tense lately and…and us being there doesn’t really seem to be helping anymore.”

“Hey, what about the rent money we give her?” Willow shot back. Tara just looked at her impassively and she blushed. “Or, uh, the rent money we would give her if we started paying rent. Which we totally should…and are. Starting right now.”

“Honey, I’m not sure that will make much of a difference. She doesn’t really need the money and—”

Giles, who had been pouring over a book, ostensibly ignoring their conversation, suddenly looked up. He hadn’t spoken to Buffy since the night she’d thrown his offer—and his photographs—back into his face. He’d heard plenty about Spike from the others in the weeks since then, but nothing at all about Buffy’s financial situation. The latter of which, to be honest, had been his trump card in ridding himself of the former.

“Why does she not need money?” he asked now. “Has she found a job?”

“Not exactly…” Xander began. His girlfriend interrupted him.

“She’s got child support.”

“What?”

“For Dawn,” Tara jumped in quickly. “Apparently, they finally got in touch with their father and told him about the…the situation. He’s sending them the money he owes them…all those payments he missed.”

“And then some.”

Anya, still blissfully counting money, was unaware of Giles’ raised eyebrows, so Xander stepped in with an explanation.

“Old Hank must be having his midlife crisis,” he said casually. “Or…ending his midlife crisis. Anyway, he’s become the very picture of generosity lately. He might not send birthday cards or call on holidays, but he’s definitely been more considerate of the financial side of things.”

Giles wasn’t even feigning an interest in his book now. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “And what,” he began heavily, “would one consider ‘the picture of generosity’ in these degenerate times?”

Xander glanced at Willow, who in turn looked at Tara. Giles was frowning darkly now and the three of them were beginning to wish they had never raised the subject.

Anya finished her tally, slipped the money into a zippered bank bag, and shut the cash register drawer with a snap. She looked at the rest of them expectantly and, as it became clear that no one else was going to say anything, she finally answered Giles’ question.

“Last month, he sent them ten thousand dollars.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




When Willow had complained to her friends that Spike “practically lived” at the Summers’ home, she hadn’t been quite truthful. The fact was that he would have lived there if he could; he would never have left. But Buffy had not invited him to do so, and there were plenty of nights he left her to stay at his crypt. Not exactly by choice, but he was afraid that his presence might wear on her nerves once its novelty had worn off. And there was a more practical purpose behind it as well. His nightly work meant that when he stayed with her, he had to labor even harder to make believable excuses when he had to slip away. She never questioned his stories and never seemed skeptical of them, but he felt a twinge of anxiety each time he did it. Disappearing for two, three, or four hours when he was meant to be spending the night with her seemed to him not only odd but also unappreciative. The last thing he wanted was for her to think, once again, that he didn’t want to spend time with her.

Although he didn’t live there all—or even most—of the time, the majority of Spike’s belongings had been relocated to Buffy’s house. There was no grand offer or request, no moving boxes or furniture from one dwelling to the other. For one thing, Spike owned very little, and what he did own was of no value. His limited wardrobe migrated over as he wore it, along with a few books and the odd CD, but that was all. The crypt was still where he resided, but there was nothing in the crypt he wanted. If Buffy had asked him to, he would have abandoned it without a backward glance. But she never asked.

Nevertheless, his role in her life had undoubtedly become an important one and she was no longer shy in letting her friends know this. Oddly, even after almost five weeks, Spike still felt shy about his new status, though Buffy’s friends would never have believed it. There seemed to be some sort of truce declared there, and when they couldn’t avoid or ignore him (and they were incredibly resourceful in finding ways to do this), they treated him with reluctant courtesy. If Buffy happened to be nearby, he feigned the same; if she wasn’t, then he was openly hostile. He didn’t like her friends. He was jealous of the time she spent with them, and he felt certain they must have been using it to try to turn her against him. He was relieved that she seemed to see less of them than she ever had before.

Still, whether they knew it or not, he was shy. It was a strange adjustment, learning to be not just a lover but a love as well, and entrusted with all the secrets of her home life. For the first time, he was able to see Buffy truly off her pedestal. She quarreled with Dawn, ate undressed salads for dinner and then snuck down to the kitchen in the middle of the night for brownie ice cream. She used the bathroom, clipped her toenails, wore ratty t-shirts to bed, and woke up with snarls in her pretty hair—but none of it dulled her appeal. He was fascinated by that private, imperfect part of her; he felt privileged because she allowed him to see it.

Ostensibly, there were only three rules of the house: no smoking, no spilling blood on the carpet, and no purposefully antagonizing her friends. The last one Spike broke with unfailing—if unintentional—regularity; the first two he found moderate success in following. But there were dozens of other unspoken rules, dozens of minefields to navigate through, dozens of mistakes for him to make. He watched violent movies and then laughed during the most brutal scenes; he experimented with torturing the families of simulated people in Dawn’s favorite computer game and told the teenager graphic tales of his life as the Scourge of Europe. He never realized that there was anything inappropriate in his actions until he saw the look in Buffy’s eyes when he did them, and then he tried to adjust his behavior accordingly. But the two impulses that continually tripped him up—excessive drinking and invading Buffy’s privacy (which, unsurprisingly, often went hand-in-hand)—were much harder to master. He obsessed over her, craved her constant attention and, when even mildly intoxicated, would relentlessly dog her footsteps until she finally threw up her hands in exasperation and locked him out. Yet, Buffy was surprisingly forgiving of his mistakes, and she let him blunder through her life leaving a trail of unintentional damage in his wake. Because she had known, of course, that it would be like this. She had understood.

Because she loved him.

Spike tried to remind himself of this as he trekked through the cemetery, wearily dodging headstones and mounds of freshly raked leaves. Another night on the job. Although he’d only been at it for five weeks, it seemed as if he had been through the same routine a thousand times. Tonight had been especially difficult, and he felt exhausted, much older than a vampire should ever have to feel. He didn’t like following orders, didn’t like the rigid schedule his job required him to keep; he was tired of busting his arse half the night and then going home alone. He wanted—

Don’t be daft. What do you think she’s going to do? Invite you to play Ozzie and Harriet with her? She won’t even wear the ring for Christ’s sake.

The thought left him feeling disheartened, although it was one he had been dealing with for weeks now. During that time, the ring had sat in its box on the top of her nightstand and, unless she was going to an extreme amount of effort to return it to the exact same position each time, he could only gather that it hadn’t been touched since the day she brought it home. Spike knew he had no right to complain. If things were not exactly perfect, they were certainly closer to it than he had ever imagined they would be. Much closer than he actually deserved. It was just that the more he got, the more he wanted, and he wanted all of her.

Somehow, it didn’t come as a surprise when, upon reaching his crypt, he found her just a few yards away from the door. He had been thinking of her with such intensity, she might have been a mirage fashioned out of his own desire. Except, of course, a mirage wouldn’t have been fighting a vampire.

Spike leaned on the nearest monument and lit a cigarette, watching the battle with interest. If Buffy had seemed to be in the least bit of danger, he would have entered the fray in a heartbeat. But she wasn’t, and he didn’t like to interfere and risk disrupting the violent beauty of the scene before him. As far as he knew, Buffy hadn’t played slayer since the day Willow brought her home, but the time off certainly hadn’t hurt her game. There was nothing particularly memorable about the vampire she fought—just another awkward, nameless fledgling. Normally, Buffy would have dispatched such a creature easily, and she seemed well on her way to doing so with this one. After playing cat-and-mouse with him for a bit, the way any good killer should, she put him on the ground with a single, neat kick to the gut. Watching them, Spike wondered if the vampire knew how lucky it was to meet its end at her pretty hands.

Except that it didn’t.

As closely as he had been watching her, it was still difficult for Spike to pinpoint the moment where it all went wrong. Her stake was driving for the vampire’s chest, but Spike thought she must have hesitated because it never connected. They began to struggle in a way that the Slayer just didn’t, not with anybody, and Spike pushed himself off the headstone.

He had only walked three steps when the vampire suddenly regained its feet. Buffy stood also, but her hand dangled uselessly at her side and, along with it, her stake. She seemed dazed, indecisive, and her adversary immediately took advantage of her torpor, using the few extra seconds it allotted him to execute an impressive uppercut that sent her reeling. Her back slammed into a stone monument and the small moan of pain that followed cut into Spike’s heart. Weariness forgotten, he leapt across the grass to where the other vampire was dropping to his knees beside Buffy. The fledgling managed to pin her arms to the ground and dip his head down toward her throat, but he got no further than that, because with his own feral face terrible in the moonlight, Spike snarled and kicked the creature in his back. The fledgling looked surprised—then fearful—and started to speak. Spike kicked him again, this time in the face, and felt a savage satisfaction in the crunch of broken bone as the nose gave way. His victim howled, spat out blood and teeth onto the grass, and then tried to crawl away.

It was really rather pathetic.

Spike didn’t have a stake, so he grabbed the one Buffy had dropped. Even as he killed the little bastard, he could hear her behind him, slowly climbing to her feet. She smelled of blood and adrenaline, and Spike didn’t even wait for the dust to settle before he turned to her.

“You all right, pet?” Even as he asked, his hands were roaming over her body, checking for damage.

“I’m okay,” Buffy assured him. Her voice was shaking with an odd mixture of amusement and regret. “Nothing broken,” she added. “Just my eye…”

There was a wound above it, a two-inch-long horizontal gash trickling blood. Already, the area immediately surrounding it was becoming bruised and puffy. Not a serious injury by any means, but Spike’s jaw clenched.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded. When he ran the pad of his thumb across the cut to assess its depth, his touch was much gentler than his tone.

“What do you mean?” she asked. But her gaze slid away from his and Spike knew she was avoiding the question.

“What do you mean ‘what do you mean?’ You stood there like a moron and let that little shit beat you down. You almost got yourself killed!”

Buffy jerked her chin out of his hand, her bottom lip protruding in a pout that usually sent him to his knees. Now, he felt like hitting her. He grabbed her elbow when she tried to turn away from him.

“Well?” he pressed.

“I was thinking.”

Spike stared at her, baffled.

“Thinking about what?”

“You said that if I had been there that night…the night you rose…you would have done everything differently. You wouldn’t have hurt anyone.”

“So what?”

“So…what if that vampire was the same way? It was a new one…just crawling out of its grave. Maybe…” Her voice trailed away.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake—” Spike began. Buffy interrupted him.

“What? You’re telling me it’s impossible? That you’re the only vampire capable of denying his baser urges? Or—” her voice suddenly became cutting “—were you lying when you said you could do that?”

I will not hit her. It’s wrong and it would give me one hell of a headache. I won’t do it.

And he didn’t. He turned her loose and drove his fist into a tree instead, feeling some small comfort in the burn of the bark against his knuckles.

“I…was…not…lying.”

Buffy pried his hand away from the tree and looked at the grazed flesh, her expression unreadable. “Well, then,” she pressed. “If you could do it, who’s to say that other vampire couldn’t have?”

“Don’t be daft. He might’ve been able to do it, but that doesn’t mean he would have.”

“But you don’t know that. I mean, he was just crawling out of his coffin. Does it really seem right to drive a stake into him when he hasn’t even done anything wrong?”

“Oh, so you want we should wait until they do a little killing first, huh? Brilliant plan there, Slayer. It’s a great way to reduce the surplus population.”

“Would you have wanted to be staked as you crawled out of the dirt?” Buffy demanded, stung.

“Well, no. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have deserved it. For God’s sake, Buffy…”

“I mean if I had been there,” she insisted. “If you had me to go back to…if you had me to make you behave…would you still have deserved it?”

“How many of them do you think are out there?” he asked. “How many like me with people like you waiting for them? Out of, say, ten thousand, how many do you think coming up out of the ground would have any interest in being good? Maybe one percent of that? And you’re wanting to leave the other ninety-nine percent out there killing until you finally catch them at it—if you do—and put them to a just death? Does that really sound realistic to you?”

She shook her head, said slowly, “No, it doesn’t sound realistic…but it also doesn’t seem fair to kill creatures that are capable of being good before they ever do anything bad.”

“Yeah, well. Life isn’t fair.” He was philosophical. Life wasn’t fair and you did what you had to do in order to maintain your own; it was the same conviction that kept him going out, night after night, and returning to her feeling no guilt whatsoever.

Buffy threw herself down on the damp grass at the base of the tree, leaning back against the trunk and drawing her knees up to her chest. She looked like a sulky child.

“You know, things were a lot easier when all I had to do was hate you.”

Spike chuckled and dropped down beside her.

“Sorry to complicate things for you.” He looked at her closely, trying to gauge her expression. “You’re doing the right thing, Buffy. You know that, right? You’re not going to let yourself get hurt over something like this…”

“I won’t get hurt,” she promised. “Tonight was just…a mistake, I guess. It’s the first time since I got back that I actually tried to slay anything. I saw that fledgling and after the things you told me about your own turning, I couldn’t help but think…”

Spike sighed. He should have known that would come back to bite him in the arse.

“I shouldn’t have told you all that, then.”

“Of course you should have,” Buffy insisted. “I want to know all those things…I have a right to know them. The stuff you’ve done…”

Spike didn’t want to think about the things he had done. He also didn’t want to continue down a line of discussion that might lead her to think about them—or question them. He dropped his head back and pretended he hadn’t heard her.

“Look there,” he said instead. “I put a dent in the tree.”

Buffy’s eyes followed Spike’s to the small, splintered hollow in the tree’s trunk. She smiled a little and nudged his shoulder with her own.

“You’ve really got to learn to control your temper.” Her sanctimonious tone made him grin. The self-righteous little bint; he couldn’t have loved her more.

“Well, you’ve got to learn to quit pissing me off. Better be glad that this time the tree got the worst of it.”

She laughed. “Poor tree. It isn’t even very big. I wonder what kind it is.”

Spike studied it thoughtfully.

“Flowering almond, it looks like,” he said after a moment’s deliberation. Buffy stared at him and he added defensively, “Well, it’s not flowering now, obviously.”

“Since when did you become an expert in horticulture?”

“I’m not. We had them at Wiltshire…gardener planted a bunch of them near the summerhouse. They all died, naturally.”

“Why naturally?” she asked, puzzled. Spike just shrugged.

“No reason. Listen, can we move along? I haven’t eaten yet and you’re bleeding, which is just a damned tease.”

To his relief, Buffy followed his lead and climbed to her feet. Spike didn’t have any blood at her house—he’d drunk the last of his supply that morning—but when she asked him to come home with her, he didn’t hesitate. Hunger and fatigue be damned; there were some needs more immediate than that.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




“Have you noticed anything weird about Spike lately?”

Buffy looked up from the cereal she was pouring into her bowl, clearly surprised by her sister’s question.

“Weird?” she echoed blankly. “What do you mean?”

Dawn hesitated. She had been helping Spike keep his secret from Buffy for over a month now, and that morning marked the third time he had bolstered their finances under Hank’s name. Privately, he told Dawn that things were working out just as he had planned for them to. The bills were being paid, there was food in the fridge, and Buffy had a new pair of Prada boots; he was perfectly satisfied.

But Dawn was worried about him; the stress of maintaining two separate lives was clearly taking its toll. He frequently forgot to eat and, as a result, lost so much weight that his normally snug jeans hung off the narrow shelf of his hipbones. He began to look like an alley cat, all lean muscle and taut nerves. He looked hungry; he looked as if he wanted something very badly and could not get it. And Buffy didn’t even seem to notice.

Now, thinking of it, Dawn mumbled into her Rice Krispies: “Well, he’s getting really skinny.”

Okay, so it was not the most subtle opening in the world, but she didn’t believe in beating around the bush. She watched Buffy bite her lip, toy with the spoon that rested inside her own untouched bowl of cereal.

“I know,” she said finally. “The nights he’s over here, he forgets to bring blood. I’ve put some in the fridge—I’ve even heated it up for him—but he always gets distracted and forgets to eat it.”

“So, make him eat it,” Dawn insisted, feeling a flush of annoyance. Buffy dropped her spoon.

“Hey, it isn’t like I haven’t reminded him to,” she said defensively. “But this is Spike we’re talking about. When have you ever heard of anyone ‘making’ him do something? He’s too stubborn.”

“I bet you could make him if you man up about it. It’s your fault he forgets; he’s totally obsessed with you.”

A small smile appeared at the corners of her sister’s mouth.

“I know he is.”

The answer might have appeared uncaring, but Dawn knew better. Buffy wasn’t intentionally distracting him from doing the things he needed to do; she forgot as well. Dawn thought there must be something very appealing about having that kind of power over someone, the ability to consume him so completely. If she were the object of such devotion, she would be smiling, too.

She resumed eating, commenting between mouthfuls: “And you should lay off him about the stories he tells me; I’m not five and I can handle it. He said he already told you everything, anyway. About before, I mean. Back when he was…different.”

“Of course he didn’t tell me everything,” Buffy answered, suddenly looking amused. “Do you really think that he would?”

The reply startled Dawn. Spike had told her plenty about his life as a killer; he didn’t seem particularly shy about it. She couldn’t imagine what he might hide from Buffy.

Except for that one thing.

“What…what do you think he’s keeping from you?” she asked nervously. Spike was killing himself building Buffy’s house of cards; he was doing it because he loved her. But Dawn knew that if Buffy found out he lied, she would see it as a betrayal. Her stomach clenched as she waited for her sister to answer.

“Oh, I’d say just about everything after 1977.” Buffy didn’t seem concerned.

“Does that bother you?”

Buffy smiled, her expression suddenly faraway. “Of course not,” she said softly. “I trust him.”

~*~ ~*~ ~*~




Dawn didn’t intentionally set out to uncover the mystery of Spike’s career, although it would come as no surprise to him when she did. He had never confided any details of his clandestine activities to her, of course, but just knowing that there were such activities was enough for her to figure things out on her own. She was, as Spike so often said, smart as hell.

After her breakfast conversation with Buffy, Dawn wanted to talk to him about the money. Not that she was eager to meddle in his private affairs, but she needed to be certain he was okay, that he hadn’t gotten in over his head trying to protect them. She wanted reassurance that he was doing the right thing—and that she was doing the right thing by keeping it a secret. So, when he left the house that night, she snuck out after him.

He was already out of sight by the time she made it to the street, but she headed in the direction of the cemetery anyway. It was much better to do this away from home, she thought. They could talk without having to worry about Buffy overhearing—and without the presence of Buffy nearby to distract Spike from the conversation at hand.

She arrived at the crypt just as he was leaving it, and she might have yelled to attract his attention—he was only a few hundred yards ahead—but something stopped her. Spike was holding a dented metal fuel container, gently swinging it in one hand as he made his way across the cemetery and into the woods that lay beyond it.

Dawn knew instinctively that he was on his way to whatever nocturnal pursuits paid him so well and, without fully intending to do it, she began to follow him.

It was a long walk and a difficult one. Although the parcel of land to the north of the cemetery encompassed only about thirty acres, it was densely wooded and somewhat steep. By the time Spike finally reached his destination—a cave set into the side of the craggy hill—Dawn was panting. She followed him to the mouth of the cave and then paused, doubling over as she tried to catch her breath. Which did her little good. When she finally did look up, she felt all the air rush out of her lungs in shock.

“Oh, my God.”

Spike, standing just inside the entrance and bathed in the glow of a kerosene lantern, startled at that sound of her voice. He dropped the canister of gasoline and then quickly ducked to pick it up again before the contents spilled.

“Goddamn it,” he swore. “Try and warn a bloke before you sneak up, Dawn. You almost made me waste it, and that’d come straight out of my paycheck.”

Dawn was amazed at how casual he was being. Then again, this was Spike and he was getting good at hiding his emotions. She took a step closer to him.

“Spike…what is this place?”

He gave her a half-smile and then returned to the task of refueling the generator beside them.

“Welcome to my office, Bit.”

“This is what you’ve been doing the whole time?” she asked in disbelief, staring at the uniform rows of neatly labeled trays that surrounded them. Each tray held a dozen identical mottled gray objects. They resembled rocks, but on closer inspection, Dawn realized that they were actually eggs. Very large eggs.

“Spike…what are you doing?”

“Paying your mortgage.”

Spike screwed the top on the gas tank and cranked the generator. A moment later, the dull roar of dozens of air conditioners filled the cave, and for the first time Dawn noticed how cold the air was, almost enough to make her shiver. Spike moved further into the darkness, instinctively swerving around the flats of eggs and stacks of shipping crates. Unsure of what else to do, Dawn followed at his heels.

“Yeah, I get that,” she began. “But what exactly…?”

He pulled up so abruptly Dawn almost ran into him, and when she saw the white blur of his hand lifting in the darkness, she almost wondered if he was going to touch her cheek. Then, a tiny flame lit, throwing an eerie orange cast on his face, and she realized he was lighting a cigarette.

“Well, they’re eggs obviously,” he said. He took a drag off his cigarette and then motioned to the flats on either side of them. “Fellow sells them, but he doesn’t like to be in on the day-to-day…he has me watch it for him.”

“Watch it?”

“The place here. It’s got to stay cool or else they start to hatch. It’d be a bit harder to ship them out if they were eviscerating their handlers, right?”

Dawn winced.

“So…what exactly are they?”

The red tip of his cigarette swung away from her and she heard him fumbling with something in the dark. “Some kind of demon,” he told her. “Don’t know just what, and I don’t like to ask. It’s something I’ve never seen before, anyway. But—” he snapped on a flashlight and trained it on the far wall “—that’s what they grow into.”

Her eyes followed the beam of light. A few hundred feet from them, bolted to the floor, was a heavy iron cage—a box, really, with only a few slats in the walls for air—and something was moving inside it. Something very, very large. Its hide was a dark color—black, gray, or green; it was hard to tell—and looked rocky. Claws scrabbled on the slick surface of the iron and then the side of its head was pressed against the wall of its prison. Dawn could see one of its eyes between the slats; it was muddy yellow and had a vertical pupil like a snake. Now that she knew it was here, she could hear the wet rasp of its breathing and smell the sharp odors of the urine and dung that littered the bottom of the cage.

“Why…?”

Spike swung the flashlight around so that it pointed at the ground between them and she could see his face. “It’s a breeder. I helped unload her, the bitch, that first night. She liked to have killed me for my trouble.”

Dawn squinted into the darkness, but she couldn’t see more than one cage. “Where is the male?” she asked.

“Isn’t one. They eat the males afterward, so it wouldn’t do any good to have one. Anyway, this is the age of medicine, Bit. They do it artificially; buy the jizz from a third-party supplier.”

“She doesn’t try to hurt them?”

“Sure she does, but she can’t. See the cage? It’s tall enough so she can stand but not long enough for her to turn around. She’s hemmed in. Makes it easier when she drops the eggs, too. There’s a slot that opens up in the back and you can just reach in. It’s a neat trick, really.”

So he said, but the idea of being trapped in a dark box for months on end, unable to even turn around, made Dawn feel ill.

“That seems cruel,” she said lamely.

“Course it’s cruel,” Spike answered, leaning against the cave wall. “But it’s the way it’s done.”

He said it dispassionately; neither proud nor ashamed of the part he played in the creature’s misery. To him, it was just a part of life, a means of making money. Dawn shivered and turned away from the cage.

“So, what happens to the eggs?”

Spike blew a smoke-ring into the stale air.

“I told you; they get sold.”

“Yeah, but for what? I mean, do people use them in spells or…”

“Spells…weapons…I don’t know. They’re sure as hell not buying them to keep as pets.”

“Weapons?”

“Well, yeah. Think about it. Turn one of those—” he waved a hand toward the cage “—loose on a town and it’d clean the area as quick as a missal. Better, too, because they wouldn’t fuck up the area around them. Just shoot them once they’re finished and you’ve—” He stopped when he saw her face. “What?”

“You mean these things are being used to kill people?”

Spike pushed off the wall, suddenly looking impatient.

“Well, hell,” he snapped, dropping his half-smoked cigarette on the ground and grinding it out with his boot heel. “I don’t know what they’re being used for—I don’t ask and I don’t give a shit. I get my money and after that it’s none of my fucking business.”

Dawn was starting to feel a little hysterical. This wasn’t what she thought he would be doing for money. She had no idea what he would be doing—she never thought about it before—but this—

“You have to care!” she insisted. “If Buffy—”

He crossed the passage so quickly, she didn’t even hear him coming, but the next thing Dawn knew he had her pinned against the wall. Not painfully and she knew that Spike couldn’t—and wouldn’t—hurt her, but her heart still leapt into her throat.

His face was right in hers, his sweet-smelling breath as cool and wet as fog as it passed over her cheek. Dawn thought she could hear the bones in his jaw pop as he clenched it.

“Listen here,” he said thickly. “You tell Buffy about this and you’ll end up out of a fucking home. Do you want that? You want her to be working three jobs to pay for low-income housing? You want to become a fifteen-year-old high school dropout working the tables at Denny’s? Because I’ll tell you, Bit…this might be the Devil’s workshop, but it’s all that’s keeping your head above water right now.”

Dawn knew he was right, but she also knew that there was more to it than that. There was an edge to his voice, serrated like the blade of a saw. Because in his eagerness to help, he’d let himself get in over his head, too, and if Buffy found out about this, there was no telling what she’d do. She might hate him; she’d definitely leave him. She had her sense of duty, of course, and that wouldn’t include condoning the possible deaths of dozens—maybe even hundreds—of people.

She suddenly began to understand what Giles meant when he said Spike was a loaded gun.

Nevertheless, he was still her friend, and she understood why he was doing this. Whatever evil might be in the deed, there was none in the intent. She took a deep breath.

“I’m not going to tell anyone,” she whispered, and he released her. “I wouldn’t do that. It’s just that…if Buffy finds out some other way…”

“She won’t. I’m being careful.” He began to move back down the tunnel, and Dawn quickly followed.

“Got to keep it dark back there,” he explained as they reached the mouth of the cave and the glow of the lanterns. “If we don’t, that bitch starts acting up something terrible.”

Dawn was looking at the eggs again. There seemed to be so many of them, enough to take out a small country. She felt another shudder of fear.

“How often do you ship them?”

“Haven’t yet. Got to find buyers first, people with money, and then they’ll be packed in ice and sent…somewhere.” He was indifferent. “Take another few weeks, I guess. Come on—” he motioned to the entrance “—let’s get out of here. I’m done for the night.”

Dawn followed him, but the sick knot remained in her stomach. She couldn’t for the life of her understand why Spike, who was petrified of jeopardizing his relationship with Buffy, seemed oblivious to the fact he was doing something that was sure to make her despise him.

~*~ ~*~ ~*~