Girly nights at 1630 Revello Drive were nothing unusual for Willow. Her and Buffy, Joyce there too but trying not to intrude upon them too much, that had been the usual format. Cordelia had come a couple of times while she'd been going out with Xander, but there had always been a bit of awkwardness between her and Willow, and it had never worked too well. More recently they'd had a couple of evenings with Anya joining Buffy and Willow. Never an evening like tonight.
Buffy and Willow, of course. Joyce actually joining in with the girls. Anya. Harmony. And, visiting from LA, Cordelia. Who had come to be with Harmony. Cordelia Chase caring about someone other than herself, driving for two hours to be with a friend and help her deal with a bad experience. Willow couldn't help thinking that this was some sort of Pod Cordelia. But, if so, Pod Cordelia was doing a good job. Harmony was smiling. Even laughing. Everyone had done what they could to comfort her, but what had made the biggest impact on her had been Cordelia's visit.
Cordelia had admitted straight out that she had no idea whatsoever what to say, or do. All she could do was to be there for her old friend. Which was exactly what Harmony had needed. To know that she mattered. That she wasn't a thing.
Joyce hadn't mothered Harmony, which is what Willow had expected. She'd sat with them, in jeans and a baggy sweater, and been one of the girls. Acted more like an elder sister of Buffy's than a mother. She'd been good for Harmony, too. Willow tried to imagine her own mother acting like that. Sheila Rosenberg in sweater and jeans. Sitting with the girls, talking to them like equals. The picture just wouldn't come.
Anya had helped Harmony, too. Straight talking. Saying exactly what she meant. And offering comfort. She'd even slept with Harmony, after she'd helped her bathe, holding her through the night, sharing a bed. Willow had blushed crimson when Anya had told them. Cringed as she thought she'd given away her own secret by that blush. Nobody had noticed, which was of the good. Although they'd have to find out sooner or later. Let it be later, she wasn't ready for anyone else to know. Except that somehow she was sure that Spike already knew. Had known even before it happened. Had known before she knew herself.
Buffy had been awkward with Harmony at first. Consciously trying to help, and not doing well at it. Eventually she'd relaxed, treated it as just another girly movie and chocolate night, and been herself. Much better.
The one person there who had been absolutely no help with Harmony had been Willow. She had no idea at all what to say. What to do. Whether to cuddle Harmony, or to avoid touching her, to mention The Incident, or to avoid the subject. None of the others, except possibly Anya, had known either; but that hadn't mattered. They'd just been themselves, and that had been the right thing to do. Willow couldn't do that. Couldn't relax. Couldn't stop thinking that it had all been her fault.
Because it had.
Xander was blaming himself. Spike and Buffy were blaming themselves too. Apparently Riley Finn was blaming himself. But it was Willow's fault, she knew. She'd walked out of the Bronze early, by herself, leaving Harmony as the odd one out. She'd walked right into danger, and called for help. Of course Buffy and Spike had raced to her assistance. Of course Xander had been so worried about her that he'd dragged Anya from the Bronze and waited anxiously at Giles' to be ready if Willow needed him, or to hear that Willow was safe. And Willow had just picked herself up from the rescue and scampered off to have fun with her new friend Tara. Well, her new more than friend Tara.
And it was big, and scary, and wonderful, what she had found with Tara. Something precious and new, something to dwell on, to look at, to consider, to revel in. This thing that had happened to Harmony had spoiled it somehow, detracted from it, taken away some of the happy shine. Willow found herself resenting Harmony for being stupid enough to get herself raped. Which made her feel even guiltier. Which made her resent Harmony more.
And she found herself resenting Cordelia for being there. For being good for Harmony. For being practical enough to bring with her some equipment for detecting bugs, and thus making it unnecessary for Willow to invent a spell for the purpose.
Resenting Anya came easily. It was as natural as breathing.
Next came resenting Joyce, for being a better mother than her own. For being a better friend to Spike than she was. For dealing with the Harmony thing better than she was.
Resenting Buffy took longer, but it came. For rescuing poor helpless Willow. For being loved by Spike. For being just as awkward with Harmony at first, but then forgetting the awkwardness, relaxing, and being nice.
At last Willow began resenting herself. For thinking mean, uncharitable, selfish, unsympathetic thoughts. For resenting the others. Suddenly it all burst and she began sobbing her heart out.
And then Harmony was holding her, soothing her, asking her to please not cry, assuring her that she would be all right, that she wasn't to worry. Harmony had got it all wrong, misunderstood Willow's reasons totally; but she had found strength through Willow's tears, and it had been good for her.
And Willow's guilt and shame dwindled, and she hugged her vampire friend (yes, friend!) tight, and things were better. For Willow, and for Harmony.
The bar looked even worse during the day than at night. The windows were screened against direct sunlight, but some daylight filtered in. Just enough to make the electric lighting look feeble and washed out. Just enough to show up the lines on the faces of the strippers as they sat in dressing gowns, bare of makeup, eating salads that looked as if they had been rejected by slugs. Just enough to make the cleaners look like zombies as they set about their task of emptying the ashtrays and mopping the floor.
Not the worst bar that Giles had ever been in, by a long way. But the company was the strangest. Sitting beside one vampire, talking to another. Amicably.
“Yeah, he was a soldier,” the vampire bouncer told them. “Takes one to know one. I know soldiers. And I don't tell the cops a damn thing about them.”
“We're hardly the police,” Giles pointed out.
“I know who you are. I've made a point of staying out of your way for years. Both of you. Didn't want to attract the attention of the Slayer, didn't want to get mixed up with William the Bloody. I've got my own place in the world. I just want to stay here, keep my head down, and keep order in here. No deaths, no destruction. Seen enough of that to last a thousand lifetimes.”
“Vietnam?” Spike asked, looking at the tattoo.
The bouncer laughed. “I might not be as old as you, but I'm no kid. World War Two. I started off in the 116th Infantry. I was in the first wave at Omaha Beach. Only five of us even made it out of the boat. By the time we got off the beach I'd lost every friend I had. So I applied for a transfer to the Airborne, got into the 82nd - they'd lost half their strength during D-Day, were glad to take me. I reckoned nothing could ever be as bad as Bloody Omaha again. Stupid of me. First combat drop was during Market Garden. Nijmegen. We crossed the Rhine in rowboats, in daylight, under machine gun fire. Somehow I didn't get hit. Lots of guys weren't so lucky.”
He took a swig of pig blood from a beer glass, and washed it down with a whisky chaser. “Then near the end of the War I met a whore in Aachen and she did this to me. I'd gone through the whole European theatre from D-Day to pretty near the fall of Berlin, never got hit, never got the Purple Heart. Then this. Ate a few Krauts for a while, finally managed to get back to the States, worked out how to survive without eating people.” He looked a question at Giles.
“I don't have a problem with that,” the Watcher assured him. “If you carry on as you are I see no reason to send the Slayer after you. In fact I'll ensure that she doesn't bother you. I've learned that what you do is more important than what you are.”
“Yeah, I gathered that.” He shot a meaningful look at the English vampire beside Giles. “My name's Ace. I don't go out a lot, but if the Slayer knows not to stake me I might go out a bit more freely.”
“Glad to know you, Ace.” Giles extended his hand and they shook. “Of course, if you do start eating people all bets are off.”
“Of course.”
“Now, back to this soldier. I am fairly sure I know who it was, and I mean him no harm. Six foot one or thereabouts? Dark hair, slightly curly?”
Ace nodded. “Yeah, that's the guy. Big gangly innocent Mid-Western farm boy type. Except that I could tell he was Special Forces, Airborne, Marine, something like that. Elite soldier.”
“And what could you tell about the other guys?” Spike asked. “The ones who were found in the parking lot doing the Swiss cheese impression?”
“Rich guys slumming. Getting a cheap thrill out of mixing with the blue-collar crowd and the bikers. Except they were really wired. I was keeping an eye on them because I could tell they were trouble. There was blood on them. Thought they'd probably been kicked out of somewhere else for fighting, was ready to kick them out of here.” Ace drained the last of his glass of blood. “Damn right they were trouble. Guess I was right they'd been fighting elsewhere. And with the wrong guy.”
“Not quite,” Giles informed him. “With a girl, actually. And not fighting.”
Ace interpreted Giles' tone correctly. “So, the questions you were asking, it's because you were wondering who saved you a job. Right?”
“Pretty much,” Spike told him. “Which means we're done here. It's been nice talking to you, Ace. Just one thing. Don't start moving around too freely just because we're advising the Slayer that you're not one of the bad guys. She's not the only player in town any more.”
Two Excedrin had dulled the headache, but a nagging ache remained, and Maggie Walsh had to fight back the desire to massage her forehead. It would not be a good idea to display weakness in front of the vampire. The vampire who sat in front of her examining an M-16 with barely concealed distaste.
So much contradictory data to assimilate. Six of the captive vampires insisted that Spike was indeed a vampire, a master vampire more than a century old, known as William the Bloody. Not only that, but also Hostile 9 and Hostile 22 insisted that Willow Rosenberg was a vampire. Ridiculous. She'd taught Rosenberg for months, seen her in broad daylight often, told her off for eating a banana during a lecture, and met her mother Sheila Rosenberg. She hadn't spoken to Walworth, but had seen him in daylight on campus, and had listened to Professor Barnes of the Languages Department extolling his virtues and saying that he was going to nominate Walworth for Teaching Assistant of the Year. They were not vampires. But the Hostiles had been insistent. Hostile 22 had even claimed to have been infected with vampirism by Willow Rosenberg herself, over a year ago.
There was only one explanation that made any kind of sense. The Slayer and her associates had discovered a cure for vampirism.
Hostile 17 was probably Harmony Kendall again, sunning herself on Malibu Beach - well, perhaps not, as it was February, but walking in the daylight anyway.
Maggie had thought long and hard about what to do about this deduction. Try to get the secret? Visions of a Nobel Prize had danced in her head briefly, and then faded. A Nobel for curing a condition that few people even knew existed? Unlikely. Anyway, it would have been passed on to the mysterious Watchers' Council, not kept as a personal secret of the small group in Sunnydale. No great personal benefits to be gained through stealing the knowledge from Summers, Walworth, Rosenberg and Giles. In fact it would open another can of worms. Experimenting on corpses animated by an alien life form was one thing; experimenting on humans infected by a curable condition was quite another. Best that the vampires stayed as they were.
And best that the Slayer and her associates died, as she had already decided. They were too big a threat to the project. Her first attempt to dispose of them had failed dismally. Time to come up with something new. Hence her discussion with this particular vampire, who had once been a member of the US Marine Corps in Vietnam.
“If I'm going against the Slayer I want something better than this stupid little Mattel toy,” the vampire sneered, gesturing at the M-16. “Something reliable, with stopping power. We got issued this just in time for Khe Sanh. Cost a lot of lives. Jams, misfires, and it just makes dinky little holes, which won't stop a charging gook. Against the Slayer, if I don't hit her right between her two eyes, she'll just keep a-coming. Not much consolation to me if she bleeds to death later after she's dusted me. Got an M-14, or something else in .308?”
“I am reliably informed that the M-16 has been greatly improved since Vietnam,” Professor Walsh responded, taken aback. She knew little about firearms herself.
“Yeah, but it still uses the same teensy bullet, and ‘reliably informed’ is the sort of officer-speak which don't inspire confidence after the shit we went through in ‘Nam.” The vampire frowned. “I want stopping power. Which means a big bullet, or hollow points. And, thinking about it, a silencer would be good. That way I could get more than one before the others were on their guard, and the Sunnydale cops wouldn't get tipped off and get in the way. What about one of those silenced Heckler and Koch MP5 guns that the German Special Forces use? 9 mike isn't a real stopper, but with hollow points from a long barrel it'll do the job.”
Maggie perked up. She recognised that name, and knew that some of the Initiative personnel did indeed have silenced sub-machine guns. “I can get you one of those,” she promised. A thought struck her. “If you, and presumably other vampires, retain the memory of firearms, why did you not use them against the Slayer yourselves?”
“Seems sorta like cheating, somehow,” the vampire replied, thoughtfully. “We're three times as strong as a normal human, got the fangs, just don't seem right to just up and shoot somebody. Weak. Cowardly. And we want to drink her blood, which is a lot easier while she's alive; it's not the same from a corpse. I guess we just stop thinking in terms of guns once we get the power from being a vamp. Sometimes we do use guns, though. Vamp name of Darla went after the Slayer once with a brace of auto pistols. No fledgling, she was one of the old ones, from the time of the Virginia Colony. Real tough mother. The guns didn't help. We never saw her again.”
It was the most horrible thing Buffy had ever heard.
Harmony's impression of Arnold Schwarzenneger's Austrian accent. “I'll be back.”
Buffy laughed, and waved goodbye as Cordelia's car pulled away, then turned to Willow. “I'm actually going to miss her. How weird is that?”
Willow grinned at her. “And so am I. She's actually nicer as a vampire than she was as a human.”
Buffy frowned. “Which is wigging me out. I mean, Spike turns good, Harmony gets to be a friendly vampire, and now there's this guy Ace that Giles and Spike told me about, who keeps pretty much to himself and doesn't hurt anyone unless they cause trouble in the bar. So vampires can be good. Which maybe makes me a vampire murderer, rather than a vampire Slayer?”
“When you put it like that, maybe it does.” Willow's brow furrowed as she thought deeply. “Except that I don't think that's really the way it is. It took Spike a hundred and twenty years to start being good, and he told me that he thinks his three months in a wheelchair had a lot to do with it. Lots of time to think. Harmony's got that chip in her head. Also she was always a sheep. Follow the leader. She was horrible to me at school because the girls she wanted to hang with were, and she went along with them. These days she's hanging out with us, so she's acting like us. If it wasn't for the chip she wouldn't be hanging out with us in the first place. Not even with the chip if it wasn't for her having made friends with me in that last week of school. Can't see how it would work with some vamp who didn't know us.”
“And that Ace vampire at the night-club?”
“Don't know enough about him to really say, but I bet he wouldn't be as good if there wasn't a Slayer around.”
“Yeah, that's about how I worked it out.” The frown left Buffy's face. “I'll keep on dusting vamps unless I have reasonable grounds for sparing them. The opus can be on them to prove themselves.”
“That's ‘onus’, Buff,” Willow pointed out.
“What, I'm supposed to stake them up the ass?”
The vampire hadn't returned to the Initiative base by morning. Maggie Walsh sent the signal that would re-activate its implant, breakfasted, and went off to her University duties. She spotted Walworth straight away, queuing for the photocopier, talking to Riley Finn. At least one target missed. Rosenberg and Summers were in class, in their usual seats, and paying attention to the lesson. They were not showing any signs of distress at the death of an old friend, so Rupert Giles was presumably still alive.
The vampire had achieved nothing. Perhaps it had just failed to locate its targets; although in those circumstances its orders had been to return, spend the day in captivity, and go out again the next night. Perhaps it had betrayed her, and fled. Or perhaps it was dust.
Maggie delivered the lecture on autopilot. Riley Finn, acting as her assistant, seemed equally distracted. The students fidgeted. Normally she could hold their attention, inspire them with the desire to learn, but not today. Her heart just wasn't in it. She was just filling in time. Eventually she brought the class to an end, and let the students file out. They handed in their last assignments as they left, and she and Finn gathered them up ready for marking. One loose sheet among the folders caught her eye. She glanced at it and was struck rigid. Crude block capitals probably scrawled in crayon and then photocopied. A quote from ‘Die Hard’.
‘HO HO HO NOW WE HAVE A MACHINE GUN.’
Now she knew what had happened to the vampire.
“Guess all that stuff I got from when I was Soldier Guy has pretty much gone,” Xander admitted, examining the sub-machine gun with a baffled air. “I haven't got enough technical knowledge left to get into the Swiss Army, and all those guys ask you to do is uncork a couple of sassy Cabernets.”
“Actually they are one of the most highly trained armies in the world,” Giles informed Xander. He took the gun from the young man, and pointed to the fire selector lever. “Four positions. Safe, single shot, three-shot burst, and fully automatic. This is a lot more sophisticated than anything I ever handled when I was in the Cadet Force at school, but the general principles remain the same. Integral silencer. How effective was it, Spike?”
“Bloody quiet. Didn't hear a thing above the noise of the bullets hitting my sodding chest. Fucking good thing it was me he started with.”
“I hope you don't think me callous for agreeing with you,” Giles responded, feeling a shiver down his spine at the thought of Buffy being riddled with bullets.
“Me too,” Xander joined in. “If they're going to be shooting any of us, best it's the one who can't get hurt.”
“Oh, it bloody hurt all right,” Spike complained, and then grinned. “But seeing the look on the wanker's face when I picked myself up and came for him cured the pain straight off.”
“There'll be more,” Xander said worriedly. “She'll just keep sending them until one gets lucky.”
“Perhaps not. This can't be anything official or it wouldn't be demons and vampires that she's sending after us. It would be the Initiative soldiers themselves,” Giles pointed out. “Riley Finn assures us that they have not been given any instructions regarding us whatsoever. As far as they're concerned, Buffy and Spike are martial arts experts who dabble in demon fighting, Willow is merely a friend of Buffy's, and they know nothing about me. This is all Maggie Walsh's personal vendetta. We seem to pose a threat to her, which implies that she is significantly exceeding her instructions. Sooner or later the higher authorities will discover this. Every time she hands out weaponry to a demon and sends it on an unofficial mission she is risking exposure. Eventually it will catch up with her.”
“Yeah, well, hope it's before she gets you or Buffy or Willow killed,” Spike grumbled. “Last night was too sodding close for comfort. Don't like to think what she's cooking up for her next attempt.”
“I was working in the lab, late one night,” Maggie Walsh sang softly to herself, “When my eyes beheld an eerie sight. My monster from the slab began to rise, then suddenly, to my surprise, he did the Mash, he did the Monster Mash...”
The additional data downloads were complete. She hesitated a moment. This was a moment of great significance. Not quite raising the dead, but verging on it. Should she have someone else there to witness it? Dr Angleman, perhaps? No. She wanted to keep this for herself alone. “Time to wake up, Adam,” she said to the motionless figure, and clicked on ‘Run’.
Her heart pounded in anticipation. Anticlimactically, nothing happened for several minutes. Just when she was beginning to believe that the experiment had been a failure, Adam stirred. He blinked. Stretched. Sat up. Spoke.
“Mommy!” he addressed her. His voice was deep, rich, confident, belying the childish first word.
“Adam, my boy,” she smiled at him. “There is so much for you to learn, so much to experience.”
“And for you to learn from me, Mother,” he replied. He swung his legs over the side of the bench, stood up, and raised his hands in front of his face to study them. The spike, which had been extracted from a Polgara demon, slid out of its sheath in his forearm. “Until you feel you have learned enough.” He lunged forward with blinding speed and drove the spike through Maggie's ribcage, piercing her lung. “You programmed me to survive. I will not accept deactivation at your convenience, Mother. Tactical precepts dictate that I strike first.”
He lowered his arm and Professor Walsh slid from the spike, slumping to the floor, agony and shocked incomprehension flickering on her face as she tried vainly to breathe. “Adam!” she gasped, unable to make more than a whisper. “Why?” Her voice died off into a gurgle as her lungs filled with blood.
“Don't worry, Mother, I will destroy the Slayer as you have instructed me. I will survive, and learn, and overcome all obstacles. I will make you proud.” Adam strode from the chamber and turned towards the hidden exit from the Initiative base. An exit unknown to all personnel except those with the highest security clearances, but clearly marked on the map programmed into Adam's memory banks. He didn't even glance back at his dying creator. He had other priorities now.
First he had to explore this world. Assess how the reality corresponded to the data in his memory banks. Next, plan long-term survival strategies. Acquire a power base, a place of safety, allies. Destroy potential threats, such as the ‘Slayer’. Then think about making some friends.