Giles rose before Spike the next morning, and was sitting at the kitchen island eating Weetabix when the former vampire emerged from his bedroom and joined him. “Sleep well?” Giles asked, as Spike spooned honey over his Shredded Wheat. The dark circles under Spike’s eyes told the Watcher in advance what the answer would be.
“No,” Spike confessed. “I lay awake for a long time. Shaking. I was scared last night. Not in the fight, you know, too hyped up and angry and excited. I suppose that’s what an adrenalin rush feels like. But afterwards, I kept thinking about maybe getting killed. All those bullets flying around. It only needed one to hit me, or a knife, and I might have died. There’s so many ways I can die now.”
“But you did it anyway, knowing you could die,” Giles observed; there was respect, even admiration, in his voice.
Spike gave him a puzzled frown. “Well, yeah,” he replied. “I didn’t know what those sods wanted with the baby, but I knew it couldn’t be anything good, and they’d cut that Wesley bloke’s throat trying to get hold of the kid. Had to protect it, didn’t I? Also, I owe Harm.” He poured milk over his cereal. “But I was scared,” he finished softly.
“Did your whole life flash in front of your eyes?” Giles asked. “Drank some blood, drank some blood, almost got staked, drank some blood, drank some blood, almost got staked?”
For a second anger flashed in Spike’s eyes, then he remembered a similar quip he’d made to Giles once. “Cuppa tea, cuppa tea, almost got shagged; that’s what I said to you, or something like that, wasn’t it?” He laughed. “You’ve been waiting to say that for months, haven’t you? Not fair. Mine was off the cuff, yours was scripted.”
“True,” Giles admitted. “But at least I wrote my own script.”
Buffy tipped the bucket and a wave of hot soapy water ran across the stone floor of the crypt. Harmony followed it up with a yard brush, scrubbing at the remnants of the demon eggs as the hot water softened the hardened slime. “This is like totally cool of you guys, you know,” the young vampire said, as the Slayer joined her in the sweeping. “I mean, it’s only for a couple of weeks, I could have got by in the top section. But this is nicer. I really appreciate it, ‘specially as I used to be your like arch-nemesis.” She giggled. “Well, totally lame wannabe nemesis, I guess, huh?”
“Don’t mention lame wannabe nemeses,” Buffy replied. “You know who my current arch-enemy is? Jonathan Levinson and two pals. I mean, how lame is that?”
“Jonathan? But he was always kinda nice, in a geeky sort of way,” Harmony said, surprised. “I remember when he presented you with that Class Protector award. I mean, Jonathan always thought you were the best. Did he get vamped?”
“No,” Buffy said sadly. “Just turned evil all on his own. Well, with a little help from his friends. With friends like those, who needs enemies? Tucker Wells’ kid brother and a guy called Warren Mears. You might know him. He was at Sunnydale High for a while, then he transferred to the Tech College at Dutton.”
Harmony screwed up her forehead in thought, making the livid bruise on her face from Sahjahn’s blow stand out in sharp relief against her pale skin. “Oh yeah, I remember him,” she said. “He made a like robot camera thing and sent it into the girls’ changing room. Major Creepzoid factor. Principal Flutie kinda wigged, and a few of the Senior guys kicked his ass a time or two, guess that’s why he transferred. He was a slimeball. I don’t remember Tucker’s brother, but Tucker was a slimeball too. If Jonathan’s mixed up in bad stuff it will be their fault.” She gave a hopeful little smile. “I bet you can get him out of it. You’re good at that stuff. Remember when you turned us all into an army?”
“And got you killed.” Buffy stopped sweeping for a moment and leaned on the brush, looking across at the vampire girl. “I’m sorry, Harmony. I did my best, but it wasn’t good enough.”
“Hey, it’s okay,” Harmony smiled at her. “Being a vampire sorta sucks, yeah, but it beats Hell out of being eaten by a great big snake. I’m cool with it.” She brushed a mass of debris out of the chamber and into the tunnels, towards a fissure in the rock. “Hey, I remember Tucker’s brother now,” she called. “Didn’t he get these like flying monkeys to mess up the school play?”
Spike took three bags of blood from the refrigerator and laid them on the kitchen counter, and then began to gather ingredients from a cupboard.
“What on Earth are you doing?” Giles asked, perplexed.
“Well, Harm hates animal blood, you know,” Spike explained. “Don’t want her raiding the hospital again, so I thought I’d try something a bit different. Apple sauce for the pig blood, horseradish for the beef, mint sauce for the lamb. If I can cook up something she likes, it’ll make it easier for the daft bint to cope with being one of the good guys.”
“I see. I wondered why you’d brought the blood back here last night. I thought perhaps you expected to turn back into a vampire now that Sahjahn is dead.”
“I did have that possibility in mind,” Spike confessed. “You think that’s what this transformation was for, then? The Powers fulfilling the prophecy without involving Angel’s kid?” He looked at Giles, and his eyebrows shot up in astonishment.
“No, I don’t think that,” Giles told him, looking down at himself worriedly. “Is there something wrong with me?”
“Only the socks. What on Earth possessed you to wear them?” Spike stared at the luminous green socks that showed above Giles’ tennis shoes.
Giles laughed. “Oh, those. A birthday present from my nephew. I thought that, if we are going to spend the morning gathering the last of your possessions from the crypt and cleaning up the wreckage of those demon egg things, I’d wear clothes that I didn’t mind getting filthy or ruined.”
“Good thinking, Batman. I’ll raid the washing basket for the gear that I was wearing when Anya took me shopping and stick that on.” Spike abandoned his experiments in blood cuisine for the moment and headed off to change.
Giles watched him go, a worried frown on his face. A disturbing possibility had been preying on his mind since he had overheard Spike and Buffy’s conversation in the car the previous night. Yes, the changes in Spike could have been arranged to enable him to fulfil the prophecy and slay Sahjahn. A soul, reawakening his conscience, causing him to begin the chain of events which sent Harmony to Wesley’s aid in the nick of time and led to Harmony’s appeal for his help. A house with a phone, so that he could invite Giles to stay, and therefore the Watcher would be there to research Sahjahn and discover his vulnerabilities. A fast car, so that Spike could reach Harmony in time. Humanity, so that he fulfilled the conditions of the one who would kill the Granok demon. But it was a long and tenuous chain, and there were so many things involved that were completely unnecessary. Giving up smoking? A job offer from the University? His hair reverting to its natural colour? Drastically restricting his swearing? His music tastes changing to fit in with what Buffy found tolerable? Why would the Powers That Be care about any of those things? They mattered to only one person other than Spike. The girl who, it seemed, wanted to be more than friends with the former vampire. Buffy. What had she done?
Linwood raised no objection to being disturbed at home on a Sunday. If Lilah didn’t have a very important reason for her visit she was dead. Both of them understood that without need for comment. “I have a game of golf with a client soon. Don’t take too long,” he ordered, and sat down to listen to her report.
Lilah smiled slightly. Her boss hadn’t needed to explain his plans for the day; his ridiculous trousers and plaid socks were explanation enough. She forced the smile from her face and recounted the events of the previous night.
Linwood shifted uncomfortably in his seat, remembering Angel’s threat that ‘whatever happens to him, happens to you’. “So you failed. What were our losses?”
“Three dead, five seriously injured. Three others won’t be fit for duty for a week or two. A few thousand dollars worth of weaponry and equipment. Holtz is in Angel’s custody, so any chance of making use of him is gone. Our dubious ally Sahjahn is no more. Of course, as it turns out he was lying to us the whole time, that particular loss is perhaps a net gain.” Lilah gave a tight little smile, making it clear that she was finding a crumb of consolation in a bad situation rather than belittling her failure.
“So the Nyazian Scrolls were tampered with?”
“For centuries,” Lilah confirmed. “We can’t trust anything in them at all. Sahjahn was only interested in avoiding his own prophesised fate, and altered them to that purpose. The baby may be harmless, a future champion of good, a bringer of apocalypse – absolutely anything.”
“There seems little point in our concentrating our efforts in that direction, then,” Linwood sighed. He turned to the matter he had been avoiding. “What will Angel’s response be? Is he going to follow through his threat against me?”
Lilah concentrated hard on keeping a straight face. “He says arranging for you to be kidnapped, driven away by a mad vampire at ninety miles an hour in a Ford Explorer notorious for overturning at speed, while said vampire sings ‘Crash and Burn’ into a cell phone and shoots off a revolver, and then having your diaper changed on a battlefield with a crazy Slayer yelling her head off beside you, would all be too much hassle. He’ll let it pass this once. Our dead and wounded will count as sufficient. For now. If we move against the child again, then you’d better start looking in incontinence products catalogues for adult diapers. Oh, and then he’ll kill you.”
Dawn sat on the sarcophagus and stared at the wall, her brows lowered in a sullen glower. Sitting with her back to a vampire was contrary to everything her sister had ever told her, but it would be rude to stare at Harmony while she changed her clothes, and Buffy was just downstairs. She didn’t feel particularly threatened by Harmony, not in a physical sense anyway; she hadn’t been very scared of the blonde even when Harmony’s gang had kidnapped her. The threat from Harmony came in her status as Spike’s ex-girlfriend.
“Did Spikey ever tell you the end of that story about the girl in the coal bunker?” Harmony asked.
“What?” Dawn exclaimed. “You were here?”
“Well, yeah, lived here too then, remember?” Harmony walked around the crypt and stood in front of Dawn, tugging the sleeves of her sweater down. “I was here quite a few times when you were visiting Spike. Sometimes I was asleep downstairs, and I heard you when I started coming up the ladder. A few times I was up here and hid under where you’re sitting when I heard you coming. Which was boring, and uncomfortable, and it drove me mad when you sat there and drummed your heels on the side.”
Dawn gulped. It had just occurred to her how dangerous her visits to the crypt had been. “Were you ever here without Spike when I came over?”
“Sure. Two or three times at least. I just hid till you went away.” Harmony held up the dress she had taken off and examined it. “A total write-off, I think. Even if we could get the blood and stuff out, it’s got all these bullet holes. Bummer. It’s a Versace. I wanted to make an impression on Angel and his crew.”
“I think you managed to do that,” Dawn said dryly. “Harmony, how come you didn’t eat me?”
“Hey, I’m not a total idiot. I only managed to survive here ‘cause your big sis was never pissed enough at me to really hunt me. Eating her sister, probably not a good idea. Plus, Spikey told me that if I laid a fang on you he’d nail me to a tree and leave me for the sunrise. Anyway, I kinda like you. You were really brave when I kidnapped you that time.”
“Thanks. You weren’t a bad kidnapper, pretty nice really. About the nicest villain I’ve ever been kidnapped by, I guess. Except maybe for this music demon who was going to make me his queen, he was sweet really, but pretty gross looking.”
“Hey, I know a music demon. The Host. He’s a friend of Angel, patched up my wounds last night. Cute green guy, really nice, but I think he’s kinda gay.”
“Not the same demon. This one was red, and no way was he gay. It turned out Xander was the one who summoned him, so by the rules he should have been the one to be the demon’s queen, but the demon said he’d pass.”
Harmony laughed. “I’d have paid money to see that. Queen Xander.” She went into a fit of giggles, and Dawn joined her.
Buffy stuck her head up through the trapdoor. “All finished down there. It sounds like you two are making friends.”
“Yeah,” Dawn replied, sounding somewhat surprised. “I think we are.”
Giles and Spike walked through the cemetery towards the crypt, and met Willow and Tara coming in the other direction. Tara was carrying a laundry bag full of bedding, and Willow had her laptop.
“You’re late,” Tara scolded them gently. “Us girls have done all the cleaning. There’s nothing left to do except pick up the record player and so on. Just like men to dodge the hard work.” Her impish smile showed that she was only teasing.
Spike stared down at his old, pre-human, shoes, and missed the smile. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I slept late.”
“So I put on these socks for nothing,” Giles remarked. The girls looked down at his feet and their eyes widened.
“Special cleaning socks?” Willow asked. “The dirt sees them and flees? Or are they just radioactive?”
“No, I just don’t care if they get covered in demon slime,” Giles replied. “It could only be an improvement. Any luck with that camera feed, Willow?”
The witch shook her head. “Nope. It was completely dead, no signal. I think they must have seen Riley and shut it off. Disconnected it at their end. There’s nothing there I can trace. I gave up, and disconnected it at the camera end so they can’t start it up again. So they won’t know anything about Harmony being there.”
“So Warren might come to retrieve the eggs and walk in on her. Hmm,” Giles mused. The idea of just letting it happen was horribly tempting.
“Can’t see it,” Spike said. “He’s too scared of me to walk in unless he knows I’m not there. He would have sent someone else to pick up the eggs, maybe a demon, or made sure I was away. That’s assuming he was going to pick them up at all. He might have given up on selling them and just left them to hatch out in the hope that they’d eat me. Whichever, if he got scared enough to switch off the camera, he’s not going to be back.”
“You’re right,” Giles agreed, glad that the moral dilemma had ceased to be an issue. “Well, we’d better go and pick up your things. See you later, Willow, Tara.”
“Can I carry that for you, pet?” Spike offered, gesturing at the laundry bag.
“We are going in opposite directions,” Tara pointed out. “Thanks for the offer, though. See you later.”
“I won!” Harmony squealed. “I won!” The crypt door opened, and Giles and Spike entered. “Hey, Spikey,” Harmony greeted him. “I beat Dawn at ‘Twenty Questions’. I guessed hers and she didn’t guess mine. I won.”
“Don’t tell me, yours was a breadbox,” Spike guessed, raising an eyebrow. Harmony nodded, and Dawn winced.
Giles was surprised to see that the Slayer had left her sister alone with a vampire. Not that he himself thought for a moment that Harmony was a threat to Dawn, not after what she’d gone through to protect Connor, but Buffy was usually almost paranoid about her sister’s safety. “Hello, Dawn, Harmony. Where’s Buffy?”
“Downstairs,” Dawn told him. “Picking up the last few bits of Spike’s stuff.”
Harmony lowered her head and looked up at Giles shyly. “Hello, Mr Giles,” she greeted him. “Thanks for coming over.” Spike stared at her, and then looked at Giles, a half smile coming to his face.
“Sorry we were too late to help,” Giles apologised. “I’d like to talk to Buffy. I’ll go down and join her, I think. I’ll see you in a little while.” He descended into the basement and closed the hatch behind him.
“You fancy him!” Dawn exclaimed once the hatch was closed. “Harmony, you fancy Giles.”
“The Nibblet’s right,” Spike added, as Harmony shook her head in denial. “I can see it written all over you.”
“Okay, you’ve got me,” Harmony admitted. She would have been blushing if that had been possible for a vampire. “It’s that accent. I can’t resist an English accent. I fancy Wesley too, but he isn’t saying much right now. I had a bit of a crush on Giles at school, ‘cept that he was the Librarian, majorly uncool, so I didn’t tell anyone. But last night, when he had that shotgun stuck under that evil lawyer woman’s chin, he was just so cool.” She sighed dreamily. “You were cool too, Spikey,” she added, “but I am so over you. Well, pretty much over you. Mr Giles hasn’t got a girlfriend, has he? Do you think he’d mind if I call him Rupert?”
“Buffy?” Giles called, entering the chamber that had been Spike’s bedroom. The bedside lamp was on, illuminating the room, and half a dozen candles added more light. Buffy was sitting on the bed. She had been filling a cardboard box with books, but had paused to look through one of them, and she hastily closed it and thrust it into the box as Giles entered.
“Hi Giles,” she greeted him, smiling. She saw his serious expression, and her smile faltered. “Don’t tell me, you’re going to scold me for leaving Dawn alone with a vampire. Well, Harmony might be dumb, but not that dumb. If she did anything to Dawn she’d have to come out past me, or run out the front door into the sun and fry, and she’s not that crazy. Anyway, after what she did last night, I think she’s earned a bit of trust.”
“Oh, I agree wholeheartedly,” Giles assured her. “She does indeed deserve some trust. It appears that what she most wants is friendship, primarily from Cordelia, but also from her other associates from Sunnydale. If giving her that will help her stay on the path of good, then we should do our bit. What you have done this morning, cleaning out this place so that she can stay here in comfort while waiting for Cordelia to return from holiday and Angel to make a decision about her, is a valuable contribution to that end. You have done well.”
“Yeah, I’m trying this radical new technique,” Buffy said with a tinge of bitter self mockery in her voice. “If someone does good things I’ll be nice and supportive, not just dismiss it ‘cause of their not having a soul and criticise them all the time. Hey, why don’t I try that with Spike?” She laughed mirthlessly. “Oops, too late.”
“I too have made mistakes in my dealings with William. Rejected him when support would have been far more appropriate and productive. I regret that now. Partly it was because of his rejection of my earliest attempts at support, but I see now that it was simply too early. I should have kept trying. Actually I made substantial progress with him last summer, but it went wrong again because of my concern over what I saw as his obsession with you.”
Another mirthless laugh from Buffy. “Well, looks like you don’t need to worry about that any more. What’s wrong with me, that only a vampire can love me?”
“I overheard some of your conversation with him in the car last night,” Giles revealed. “I must admit that it worried me. It sounded as if you had been engaged in a relationship whilst he was still a vampire, and you had perhaps not treated him as well as you might have done.”
Buffy squirmed uneasily. She wasn’t comfortable with discussing sex with her Watcher. “You could say that,” she admitted. “We had a thing. And, yeah, I didn’t treat him right. He didn’t treat me right either, but I guess I was worse. And he would have been better if I’d let him, wanted it to be a real thing of us actually being a couple, but I wouldn’t have that, because, hello, evil vampire, the gang would have had fits. So I made him keep it a secret, no real dates, which turned out to be pretty much a waste of time because Tara was okay with it, Willow would have been okay, Anya wouldn’t have cared, and Dawn would have blown up balloons and let off fireworks.”
“Then Spike conveniently turned human, you came out of the closet, as it were, only to find that William had been put off by the way you treated Spike,” Giles finished for her. He took off his glasses and began to clean the lenses, and Buffy’s heart sank. “Buffy – how did you do it?”
“What do you mean?” she asked, pretending ignorance, but a tremor in her voice betrayed her.
“I’ve been considering the changes in Spike, or William, wondering who benefited by them. I might have thought it a plot by the Powers to frustrate Sahjahn’s scheme to avoid his prophesised fate, except that so many of them have no relevance. Why would the Powers care about Spike’s smoking, or about his musical tastes? I must assume it was some sort of wish. The list of suspects narrows down to two, Buffy. It had to be either Dawn, plotting to bring you and Spike together, or you. Dawn thought his being a vampire was ‘cool’; I can’t see her restoring his humanity. It was you, wasn’t it?”
Buffy stared at the floor. “Yes,” she confessed in a small voice. “I made a wish, and I made a list of all the ways I wanted him changed, and I was careful about every detail, and I thought everything would be perfect. I just took it for granted that he’d still love me. He always did before. But he doesn’t, he just wants to be friends, and it’s not perfect at all.”
“… but I had to quit a couple of weeks ago, because sunrise was getting to be too close to the end of my shift,” Harmony was telling Dawn as Buffy and Giles emerged into the top level of the crypt.
“You had a job?” Buffy asked, raising her eyebrows.
“Well, yeah,” Harmony replied. “How else was I going to keep up the payments on my car? I was the night clerk at a gas station. Before that I worked for this telephone chat line thing, which was totally eww, gross, but I at least I could do it from home. I might go back to that if Angel doesn’t take me on. I was thinking about this law firm in LA I’d heard about who have vampire-friendly working conditions, but I think I probably blew that one last night. Or nights at a bank call center, if I can find one where they’d do the interview and the training at night. I went for one with SunTrust last year, but I couldn’t make the interview.”
“You bought a car?” Buffy queried, astonished. “And you’re keeping up payments on the finance?”
“Hello, if I don’t they’ll repossess it,” Harmony pointed out. “And if I stole a car, what happens if I get pulled over? Suppose the cops stuck me in a cell with a window? Sure I bought it. 1998 Honda Civic. I left it in LA near Wesley’s place. I’ll drive his car back there tonight and pick up mine. All my other clothes and stuff are in it, I moved out of my crypt in Thousand Oaks when I got the call from Spike, ‘cause I was hoping I’d get a chance to prove myself to Angel and get to join them again, maybe move in with Cordy again. Only now seems like he owns this hotel, lots of rooms, living there would be totally cool. With Cordy, but not like we’d be on top of each other the whole time. I hope he says yes. You think he will? I mean, I did a good thing last night, didn’t I?” She looked to both Buffy and Giles for approval.
“Sure,” Buffy agreed, still rather stunned at the way Harmony appeared to have been living as human an existence as possible since she had left Sunnydale. The vampire girl almost seemed to have been making a better job of it than the Slayer had been. “A really good thing.”
“I concur,” Giles added, and then saw from Harmony’s baffled expression that she hadn’t understood him. “I agree with Buffy,” he rephrased his comment.
Harmony beamed at him. She was about to say something when she was distracted by a knock on the crypt door. It opened a second later and Spike came in. “Hello, Slayer,” he greeted Buffy. “Sorry I wasn’t here in time to help with the cleaning.”
“No problem,” Buffy assured him. Spike was wearing his old clothes, black jeans and a T-shirt with a red shirt over it, and looked like his vampire self again apart from the hair. He was looking dangerous and sexy; not necessarily more attractive than in his new human wardrobe, but definitely no less so.
“I’ve taken one load of stuff back to the car, we should be able to do the rest in one trip,” Spike told Giles, and then turned to Harmony. “Have you tried the blood yet, Harm?”
“Yeah,” Harmony smiled, picking up a thermos flask from beside her on the sarcophagus and handing it to him. “I finished the flask. It was fantastic. You gotta teach me how to make it. Doing without the human won’t be any hardship at all if you can make pig blood taste that good. I’ve been trying adding Tabasco sauce, makes it tolerable, but yours was just ace. What’s it got in it?”
“Apple juice,” Spike told her. “I thought that it might do what apple sauce does for roast pork, and it seems that I was right. Have you tried the lamb with mint sauce yet, or the beef with horseradish?”
“Not yet, I’ve had enough for now. I’ll try them later. How come you never had ideas like that when you were a vampire yourself?”
‘Because I hadn’t wished for him to be a good cook,’ Buffy thought to herself, but said nothing.
“I don’t know,” Spike replied, frowning. “Perhaps because I couldn’t really taste human food properly unless it was highly spiced, so I didn’t think of any other approach to improving the taste of animal blood other than adding hot spices. Now I’m human I can appreciate subtle tastes, but I can remember how things tasted when I was a vampire, and I thought it might work. Glad you like it.”
‘It was supposed to be me that got the benefit of his cooking skills, not a vampire,’ Buffy thought resentfully. She studied Spike’s expression, looking for any hint that he still had feelings for Harmony, but she saw nothing but friendship. Harmony seemed happy to accept that, and didn’t seem to expect anything more, although Buffy still had a feeling that one word from Spike and the blonde vampire would welcome him back with open legs. “We’d better be off home,” she told Dawn. “I’ve got lunch to cook. How up to date are you with your homework?”
“All done,” her sister assured her, “but I’d like Spike – sorry, William – to check through it for me. Would you?”
“So you’re over hating me?” Spike smiled at her, tilting his head to one side.
“Yeah, I guess,” Dawn said, a touch of sadness in her voice. “Not your fault if things aren’t working out the way I’d like. We can still be friends, okay?”
“Of course, Nibblet,” he grinned at her. “You’re still my honorary kid sister. And feel free to keep calling me Spike. I don’t mind it from you, as long as you don’t mind be calling you ‘Nibblet’ and ‘the Bit’.”
“I don’t mind, Spike. Come over this afternoon?” Dawn invited, shooting a quick calculating glance at her sister.
Buffy wondered if Dawn was going to try to get her and Spike back together; Buffy would normally hate such interference, but on this occasion she thought she’d play along with it. “Yes, come over,” she seconded the invite.
“I don’t think so,” Spike declined, a cold note entering his voice briefly, then it warmed again as he directed his speech back to Dawn. “I’m going to the computer store this afternoon, if I’m right about it being open Sundays; fancy coming with me? They always say you should consult a teenager on anything to do with computers. Bring your homework along, we’ll call in at my place afterwards and I’ll go through it with you, and then I’ll run you home in time for tea.”
“Yeah, sure, that’d be cool,” Dawn grinned, eyes lighting up. “Although, computers, shouldn’t you be asking Willow?”
“Nah,” Spike scoffed. “She’s got this obsession with Apple Macs. I might not know enough about computers to dispute with her about which is better out of Macs and PCs, but I know one thing; there’s twenty times as many games available for PCs.”
Dawn’s eyes lit up. “Are you going to get ‘The Sims’?”
“Probably. And the ‘Baldur’s Gate’ series. And a football game, I suppose I’ll have to get that by mail order from the UK. Soccer, that is,” he clarified for Harmony, who was looking slightly puzzled by his last comment.
The puzzled look vanished. “Get ‘Aliens versus Predator 2’,” she suggested. “The guy I was going out with while I was working at the gas station had it, I had a go a few times, it was totally great. When you’re the Predator you can like rip people’s heads off. He liked it so much sometimes he’d keep playing it even when I wanted to boink him.”
Buffy bit back the barbed retort that almost escaped her lips. “You had a human boyfriend?” she asked instead.
“Well, yeah,” Harmony told her. She bit her lip for a moment, looking embarrassed, and then made a confession. “See, I don’t like vampires. The minion ones are ugly and smelly, and the proper ones keep trying to push me around and tell me what to do, and they never want to talk about clothes and shoes and TV shows and things. I mean, even Spikey was only nice to me about half the time, and all the other vampires aren’t ever nice to me. My own gang turned on me, and Doug just wanted to use me, and I just wish I’d seen that earlier and I’m totally glad Angel cut his head off. I mean, all I’ve really got in common with other vampires is the diet thing and the problem with sunlight. And, really, how important is that compared with ‘Sex in the City’ and ‘Friends’ and ‘ER’ and ‘The Simpsons’ and ‘Ally McBeal’?”
“It is amazing how much of her humanity Harmony retains,” Giles commented to Spike as they rode up in the elevator to his apartment, their arms full of boxes of books and records. “I must find out more about the circumstances of her turning. She was killed in the big Graduation Day battle, and I was surprised to find that she had become a vampire. I would not have thought there would have been an opportunity to get her to drink the sire’s blood at all. Perhaps some peculiarity about the occurrence might explain the way she differs from most vampires. She seems very cooperative at the moment; she may well be willing to be interviewed on the matter. Or, if she is unwilling to discuss it with me, perhaps you might interview her on my behalf.”
Spike didn’t seem to be paying attention. The elevator door opened and he stepped out into the corridor without replying to Giles.
“William, were you listening to me?” the Watcher asked, following Spike out of the elevator.
“Huh? Did you say something, Rupert?”
“Nothing significant. You seem deep in thought. Anything important?”
“Maybe,” Spike revealed, balancing his load of boxes with one arm while fishing his door key out of his pocket with the other. “I think I’ve worked out what’s behind me turning human. No big prophecy thing after all. I think I dragged you all the way across the Atlantic for nothing, although it turned out useful anyway.” He unlocked his apartment door, pushed it open with his knee, and walked in. “I think it must have been Dawn.”
“Dawn?” Giles repeated, following him into the apartment. “What makes you think that?”
“Did you hear about that wish she made that got us all stuck in Buffy’s birthday party?” Spike asked, as he set down his load of boxes on a table. “I think she made another wish. She wanted me and Buffy to get together. She said in the Bronze last night that she was hoping we could be like a real family, the three of us. I think she might have wished for me to change so that Buffy wouldn’t have any excuse for rejecting me any more. I can’t think of any other reason for some of the changes. I mean, why would the Powers That Be care whether I smoke or not? It wasn’t like it was going to kill me.” He sighed. “Maybe I should hate her for it, but I know she meant well, she did it out of love.”
“Is it really all that bad?” Giles asked. “You seem to have adapted fairly well by now. You don’t seem unhappy with your lot.”
“In some ways it’s a big improvement,” Spike admitted. “There’s only the one big drawback, and you’ve got to accept that it’s a massive one. A few days ago I could look forward to hundreds, maybe thousands, of years of life, or unlife, as long as I avoided sunshine and a few other things. All that time I wouldn’t have aged at all. Now I’ve got, what, sixty years or so ahead of me, and the last twenty-odd probably won’t be a barrel of laughs. Think of it in proportionate terms. Would you take a deal like that? Imagine waking up to find that you’ve got a million dollars and a makeover, and you don’t need glasses any more, but that you’ve also got untreatable cancer and you’ve only got a couple of years to live. Would you be over the moon? Can’t see it. And that’s more or less what it’s like for me.”
Giles nodded slowly in reluctant agreement. Spike was no doubt exaggerating to emphasise his case, but he still had a valid point. He had been immortal, and now was not. It was hardly surprising that his reaction had not been one of unmixed joy.
“I can’t really blame the Bit,” Spike went on. “She’s just a kid, can’t be expected to have thought of all the implications, and she wasn’t to know how things really were between me and Buffy. Still, I would have thought she’d have learned her lesson after the party. I’m disappointed in her. I’d have died for her, sure, but I’d rather it had been my choice.”
Giles hesitated. He didn’t want to betray Buffy’s confidence; on the other hand he was unwilling to have Dawn blamed for something she had not done. “It wasn’t Dawn,” he said reluctantly.
“Wasn’t Dawn?” Spike repeated. “How do you know? You’ve sussed out what happened, then?” His eyes widened. “It was Buffy. It was her, wasn’t it?”
“It was,” Giles told him. “I guessed as much, confronted her, and she admitted it.”
Spike sank down onto the sofa and put his head in his hands. “God,” he moaned. “Hadn’t she done enough to me already? Messed up my head, broke my heart, punched my teeth down my throat. And now she’s condemned me to death. She’s killed me. The bitch has finally killed me.”