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Kantayra
Disclaimer: I don't own Buffy, Spike, Dawn, or Anya. They're all Joss'. Everyone else, though - those're mine. ~_^ I'd also like to credit the movies 'The Shinning' and 'Clue', as well as two episodes of Star Trek TOS that helped inspire this plot. (Don't ask. ^_^)
Summary: Seven years ago, Spike fled Sunnydale and his abusive relationship with Buffy. Now, he and still-best-friend Dawn are working together in their own demon hunting agency. However, everything changes when they're called out to investigate a chain of supernatural murders at Cascade Mountain Lodge and discover that Buffy's on the case as well. Will they be able to solve the mystery before they become the next casualties? And what does the solution have to do with the events of seven years ago?
Author's Note: Hey, it's the beginning of a new Spuffy saga! Yes, this one will be rated NC17 eventually. (Aren't they all?) And, yes, I am doing the infamous 'Buffy and Spike in a haunted house' theme, but I'm hoping it will be quite different from all the others out there. However, I do want to warn people that some parts of this will be a bit darker than some of my other sagas. This story assumes that everything through the S6 episode 'Dead Things' occurred, and it deals heavily with the events of that episode - hence, the darkness. Just wait it out, don't trust anything you see, and trust me that things will turn out all right in the end. ~_^
The world seemed to move in slow motion as Buffy raised the gun. Screams of agony sounded all around her, the plaintive cries of wounded innocents, begging for her to save them. Jerky motions of shattered limbs tried to move away, crawling from the deadly danger.
Buffy moved in to the source of their flight, gun still poised and ready to fire. Everything else moved in jerky halts, but she ran as gracefully as a gazelle, almost as if she were floating through the air. She could tell she was getting closer now. Only lifeless corpses filled the barren field beyond this point, victims to the monster that had committed this carnage.
Buffy heard a cry of pain around the corner and froze for an instant, steeling herself up for the task ahead of her. Gun still poised and ready, she rounded the corner…
And found herself in the dirty alley behind the Sunnydale police station. Just like that horrible night seven years ago, Spike was covered in blood. But this time the blood wasn’t his.
Buffy gasped in horror as a monster’s face looked up at her, his features twisted into unnatural ridges and horns in her dream. For an instant, she could almost see his usual, handsome face flash her a wicked smirk, before he lowered six-inch serrated teeth to the throat of his latest victim.
The woman turned to look at Buffy with pleading eyes, and Buffy cried out when she recognized Dawn’s bloodstained face. Instinctively, her finger pulled the trigger and…
Spike roared in pain when the bullet pierced his chest, ripping straight through his heart. His eyes flashed to their normal blue for an instant, and he looked at Buffy in disbelief before he vanished in an explosion of dust.
And then, in his place, rose a monster of unimaginable hideousness. The distorted demonic visage Buffy had seen on dream-Spike’s face was magnified a thousand-fold. Razor-sharp fangs ripped through Dawn, just as Buffy pulled the trigger a second time.
A click. The gun was empty.
A silent scream contorted Buffy’s features, and then the monster was upon
her, fangs and claws cutting into her flesh…
Buffy awoke with a gasp of horror, panting heavily at the nightmare. She looked around wildly for a moment, not certain where she was, and her eyes naturally alighted on the vampire beside her. A frown creased her brow for a minute before the events of last night came back to her, and she lay back down with a groan.
She really hadn’t meant to fall asleep the night before. She was just supposed to stay by his side for a little while, make sure he was warm enough, and then go spend the night on her big comfy bed. Some part of her subconscious had obviously wanted to stay at her love’s side all night, though. Hence her eyelids had drooped as she rested beside him, and now here it was morning. Morning after a night filled with horrible dreams about the atrocities she and Spike could commit against each other. She shook down the memories with a shudder.
“You scared me for a minute there,” she informed a still-sleeping Spike, placing a gentle kiss on one prominent brow ridge.
He was still in game face from last night, fangs and demonic bone structure squished into the pillow beneath him as he slept. For a second, the slight of fully vamped Spike, looking oddly bucktoothed the way his features pressed into the pillowcase, seemed like the cutest, funniest thing she had ever seen.
She smiled and brushed back one platinum curl from his ridged brow. “Don’t ever tell anyone I said this,” she continued to talk to him while checking the bandages on his back, “but I kinda like your vamp face. It’s actually sort of handsome…in a strange, demonic way.” She laughed. “You can tell I’ve met way too many vamps, when I can actually start to spot the cuter game faces…” She peeled back the edge of the bandage and made a face. “Ugh. Okay, time for more blood…”
She rose from the makeshift bed Dawn had created on the floor of her room. In a desperate effort to keep every single mattress in the entire inn from getting soaked through with blood, they’d moved a bunch of sheets, blankets, and pillows to the floor until Spike’s wound closed up. It was looking like a smart move since a dark brown stain seemed to have permeated one of the sheets last night.
Buffy scrunched up her nose and pulled the offending sheet from Spike’s weakened grasp. She quickly grabbed one of the extra blankets Dawn had provided and tucked it in around him, making sure he stayed nice and warm during his recovery.
Satisfied that he’d be fine for five minutes without her, Buffy hurried over to the site of last night’s disaster and pulled the last two human blood packets from Dawn’s refrigerator. The suite was empty, of course, after the damage it had taken. A sleepy memory of her quick dinner with Dawn the night before provided that she and Siggy had taken up empty singles down the hall for the night.
Buffy returned to her room and made preparations for feeding Spike, shuffling pillows and propping him up without jarring the wound in his back. It really was turning out to be one of the more cumbersome places for him to have gotten shot.
She had just gotten the first bag into him when there was a soft knock on the door and Rick’s head poked inside. “I am temporary room service,” he provided, the joke sounding flat even to his ears.
Buffy cracked a half-hearted smile at the effort. “How is everyone?” she inquired softly, resting Spike’s head against the crook of her neck as she opened the second bag.
Rick sighed at set the breakfast tray down on a nearby table. “Veronica is still in shock, I think. She has not said a word. Siggy ended up staying with her last night.”
Buffy nodded slowly. “You and Dawn?”
“Tired,” Rick replied. “Last night was…horrible.”
“What’s going to happen with Xel and Lena?”
“Dawn is making preparations to have them taken care of. They…” He trailed off, still too shaken up to discuss the matter.
Spike finished the second bag with a little slurp, and Buffy was grateful for the distraction of lowering him back down to the floor. She actually wasn’t too much of the nursing type, but it gave her something to concentrate on so she didn’t have to think about everything else.
“Dawn wishes to know if you would like a break from watching after Spike,” Rick provided, turning the conversation away from the awful situation as well.
“It’s okay,” Buffy assured him. “I’ve got him.”
Rick refrained from making any comment at that. “How is he doing?” he inquired.
Buffy grimaced. “That was the last of the human stuff. Unless we’re going to go rob a blood-bank, we’re reduced to pig and cow now.”
Rick frowned at that. “The wound?”
“Only beginning to show signs of healing.” Buffy checked under the bandage to see healthy tissue slowly inching inwards along the edges of the wound. The blood was working, true, but now that he was reduced to second-rate stuff? She bit her lip in worry.
“I shall tell Dawn,” Rick assured her. “If the wound does not heal up quickly, sometimes it never will.”
Memories of handless vamps and ugly, debilitating scars flashed through Buffy’s mind, sending coursing fear through her veins. “He’ll get better,” she insisted vehemently, wishing this were one of those situations where her pigheaded stubbornness could solve everything.
Rick nodded and set down her breakfast tray on a nearby table. “Dawn will take care of it. You are sure you do not need any additional assistance?”
“No. But thanks.” A little voice in the back of her mind was screaming that Spike was hers to take care of. After all, hadn’t he been injured saving her life?
Rick seemed to understand and got up to leave. “I will see you later, then.” He smiled as he left.
Buffy sighed when he was gone and got Spike settled back down into the blankets before she turned to her own breakfast. Omelets seemed to be becoming a theme, and she wolfed down the food with frightening speed. Hell, stuff like this always made her famished.
It wasn’t until she had polished off the last of the toast that she first noticed she had an audience.
“Buffy?” Spike’s cracked voice murmured.
“You’re awake,” she said with a small smile, crawling back under the covers beside him and laying her head down on the pillow so that he could look her in the eye.
He coughed and winced at the pain. “Wish I wasn’t…” His voice seemed to be fading out again.
She gave him a sympathetic smile. “Is there anything you need?”
“Be nice if the hole in my back went away…” he murmured with a hint of his usual humor.
Buffy laughed at that. There was something about seeing him back to his old snarky self that just made the world feel right to her again. Girl, you’ve got it bad… “I’m working on it,” she assured him.
He shivered unnecessarily. “Cold, too.”
She frowned when she felt that the water bottles she’d set around him the night before had all gone cold. “Hang on a sec. I’ll just go—”
“No.” It was a little whimper against the side of her throat as he inched his body closer to hers. “Don’t go,” he pleaded softly. “Fixed up the crypt and there’s ice-cream in the fridge.”
Buffy sighed and lay back down, holding him closer to her. “Spike, you’re delirious,” she pointed out. “You haven’t had the crypt for seven years.”
“All right, ‘ve got your kittens…”
Buffy rolled her eyes and pulled him closer to her when he shivered again. It was a difficult task given that she had to favor his back and, as a result, she could only warm one side of him at a time. Unless… “Here’s hoping you’ve been laying off the junk food lately,” she teased lightly before lying down on her back and slowly pulling him over to her, until his body covered hers. She let out a little gasp at the feel of his weight on top of her and suddenly became painfully aware of all the fantasies she’d had over the years of getting this close to him again. “And I promise not to ravish you,” she added with a coy smile. “Unless you ask me to.”
He let out a low mumble but stopped shivering. “Warm. Don’t leave.”
She felt a little pain in her heart at the memories he was reliving in his semi-coherent state. “I’m not going to leave you, William,” she assured him softly. “I promise.”
“My Slayer…” A sigh and then a wince of pain.
Another of those odd moments of clarity overtook her then, as she watched Spike lying atop her in agony. She still had so many questions, so many doubts, but just like when she had tended to his wound after he’d first been shot, her instinctive reaction was to do everything she could to help him. His wellbeing meant the world to her.
“Spike?” she ventured hesitantly, shifting beneath him so that she could bring her arm up to her shoulder. “Are you still with me?”
A mumble.
She pushed her hair back from the left side of her neck, exposing the soft flesh there. “You need blood,” she decided.
“No fucking kiddin’.” He managed to flash annoyed yellowed eyes at her for an instant before the effort caused him to close them again.
“Well, I’m thinking Slayer blood’s gonna be the best…” she suggested, guiding his head over to her exposed throat. The Slayer in her was shouting out in alarm at the proximity to the vampire; the woman in her was more sure of this than she ever had been of anything in her life. “You need to drink,” she informed him matter-of-factly.
His eyes drifted open again at that, seeming to fully realize for the first time what was being offered to him. For a few seconds, he managed to raise himself up on shaky arms so that he could look down at her with conflicted yellow eyes. “B-Buffy?” His voice wavered, hopeful and insecure all at once, half-convinced that he was still delirious.
“Do it,” she insisted confidently. “I want to feel you…inside me…” She looked away at this admission, feeling raw and exposed to this beautiful demon’s gaze.
Spike gulped and nodded. “Wanted you for so long,” he whispered reassuringly as he collapsed atop her once more, his fangs now mere inches for her ear.
“Please…” she whispered back unhesitantly.
“Thank you…” And, with those final words, he bit deep into her throat…
* * *
“A host?” Dawn repeated with a weary sigh.
Siggy nodded. “Here. At the lodge. The host appears to be a sort of…emotional safety net for the Haunting. It breaks the host’s mind and then feeds from it when other sources of food are scarce.”
Dawn nodded.
“And it is someone here?” Rick spoke up.
“Someone who has been here all along,” Siggy corrected.
Dawn’s eyes narrowed at that. “There’s only one person…” she began.
Siggy nodded. “And she is quite old. The Haunting drains life force from its host. This means she will die soon, which means the Haunting must find itself a new host.”
“One of us?” Rick suggested nervously.
Dawn swore. “We’ve got to get rid of this thing and fast,” she decided.
“Xel is dead,” Siggy pointed out. “And Veronica is still in shock; she will not be able to assist in the spell.”
“And Spike’s out of it, too,” Dawn grimaced. “Rick?” she suggested hopefully.
“Kayeri have many skills,” he said apologetically, “but magic is not one of them.”
“We may require outside assistance,” Siggy suggested.
“Yeah, but who’s powerful enough to…” Dawn trailed off. “That old witch in Black Hills Falls?”
Rick frowned. “She is terrified of this place,” he pointed out.
“But she’s already tried the spell in translation once,” Dawn countered. “She’d need virtually no prep work.”
“But she would never agree to come here…”
Siggy raised a hand. “Let me at her. I shall have her convinced of anything you want within half an hour.”
Dawn smiled at how Siggy’s confident and efficient manner seemed to be returning. She had been noticeably shaken after Tucker’s attack, but nothing ever hit Siggy for long. “You can drive in this blizzard?” she inquired pointedly.
Siggy looked out the windows. “Those flurries?” she teased lightly.
Dawn grinned at that as well. “Better take my car. No one will even notice if you crash it.” She tossed the keys Siggy’s way.
“I will bring assistance as quickly as possible,” Siggy assured them before she set off on her task.
“Which leaves us to sit here and twiddle our thumbs,” Dawn sighed. “Unless…”
“I believe it is time we had a talk with Ms. Danvers,” Rick agreed…
* * *
Buffy hissed at the first initial flash of pain as razor-sharp fangs cut through the tenderest spot on her throat like a knife through hot butter. She had felt this pain before, of course, on the three other occasions when vampires had left their mark upon her.
The Master had been cold and brutal, inflicting the maximum amount of pain in the shortest amount of time before he cast her aside to die. Angel had been rough at first, the violent demon in him driven frenzied and to the surface by her taunts. But, then, after he’d come back to himself, oh, he’d felt so good she was still ashamed for thinking it. Almost as if she’d been cheating on Angel with Angelus. Dracula’s bit had been a lazy, trance-like seduction that wove through her mind to the point where she didn’t really feel much of anything.
But Spike…
After the first initial penetration, he’d stilled himself with agonizing effort. The first drops of her blood were a sweet elixir, food of the gods to top any other he had ever tasted. The urge to pull on her veins was incredible, but he held off, the sound of her hiss of pain doing strange, alien things to his heart that he had thought no longer possible.
Buffy took a deep breath and sighed in relief. All the vampires that had bit her had been different, but never could she have imagined that one could be so…gentle… She felt a fire burn deep inside her, the feel of her jeans on her inner thighs beginning to chafe. Oh god, this was so…
Amazing…
A purr from the vampire atop her, almost as if he could hear her thoughts, and his lips began to move slowly against her skin.
Buffy wanted to cry out in ecstasy, to tell him how absolutely wonderful this actually was, but her voice couldn’t quite work due to the treatment her throat was getting. Desperate thoughts tumbled through her mind, sounding in a rapid cacophony through her heated blood.
Never imagined…god, is it this good for vampires, too?…so incredible…Spike inside me…god, I’ve waited so long…so long…so deep and strong…oh god, Spike…
Yes, luv…
Her eyes widened for one instant at the rich sound of his voice in her mind before the lids fluttered shut again. Was she imagining, or had she actually heard…? But he was so close, his fangs in her throat and his hair clenched in her fingers, urging him onwards. His hips were grinding down into hers now, and she could feel that he was just as aroused as she was. His hardness rubbed erotically against the wetness between her thighs, somehow finding her clit through two layers of jeans and causing the seam to grind into it, bringing her ever closer to the brink of ecstasy. Dimly, the somewhat giddy thought flitted through her mind:
Hey, that blood’s for healing the wound. There’s plenty of time for Horny!Spike later…
A chuckle against her skin.
Still nothing but silent gasps were emitting from their mouth. There was no way he could have heard her, but…
And, then, she began to sense something, as though it were far off in the distance at first: Pain…fading pain…muscles and bones mending…flesh sewing back together…taste of Heaven…oh, sweet love…never dared dream…hope all gone and now…cor, even better than I had imagined…Buffy…Buffy…
Spike?
Yes, luv…it’s me…I’m right here…
How can I hear you, how can…?
His fangs plunged deeper inside her at that, and she gasped aloud as new twinges of pleasure shot through her body. He was moving fluidly on top of her now, showing no further signs of his injury. She had no way of seeing his wound, of course, but she had just felt the injury close itself, through the connection between them and…
So deep…so strong…so good… She tried intentionally sending thoughts his way for the first time.
So sweet, he countered. God, Buffy I never knew…I can feel your love…god, I can finally feel it…
I can finally feel it, too…oh wow…how?
Only done this once before…but Dru so dark…but, god, you’re so light, so beautiful, so…
Effulgent? She plucked the word from his mind, perplexed. And then the entire incident from his miserable human existence came flooding into her, and she clutched him more desperately to her, crying the tears that had tried up in his own eyes over a century ago.
D-Don’t laugh… Even his mental voice sounded scared.
Never laugh at you…love you too much…I… But a dizzy feeling was overcoming her now, making it impossible for her to think clearly. Was she dying? Had it felt like this before? God, she couldn’t remember and…
Love you, too…tried to stop, but I couldn’t…tried to fight it, erase it…but…always loved you…
And then Spike’s voice faded away as well, and her body cried out in release before the world faded to black…
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