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Nan
RATING: R
Effulgent Spike (and Buffy, and Dawn, and everybody) belongs to Mutant Enemy and Joss Whedon, to whom be all praise. I promise to return him only slightly battered, in chains, looking sexy as hell. No profit is intended--only more SpikeJoy for everyone.
As much as Spike loved a fight, he hated being lumbered with these children and the responsibility of protecting them. It was too soon: he’d barely had a chance to begin with them. The ambush was an annoying distraction that kept him from finding the nest and dispatching the other fledges.
He couldn’t afford to be distracted. He focused on the fight.
As best he could tell, there were about two dozen Bringers against eleven potentials, him, and Dawn. So the first thing to be done was better the odds and trust the children, just for a few moments, to see to themselves and one another.
He went straight into the nearest pair of Bringers and carved them, left and right. Swinging the axe backhand into an attacker, solid contact, he whipped a leg forward and stopped the lunge of another cowled Bringer with a bootheel to the throat that would have taken a vamp’s head off but no such luck here, the Bringer just stumbled back into the Bit’s taser and went down. Spike dropped into a crouched whirl to choose who to go after next.
Bringers seemed to favor long-bladed daggers: fine against a bunch of human children but wrong weapon entirely against a vampire. They could hurt him, slow him maybe, but not do him any serious harm. All they really had against him was force of numbers: faced only by twos and threes, he was methodically hacking them to pieces. Unless they mobbed him fast, he’d have the most of them and the girls would take the rest.
Then Spike came up under a Bringer, and it vanished—simply melted away—at the instant of contact.
Bloody hell: he could no longer trust his eyes. Do the ones being touched, then. He concentrated on finishing the ones some girl was already engaging and those Bit’s taser had put on the ground. Bringers were down to about ten, and if there’d been time, Spike could have done them all. But he could hear a fresh force coming through the woods, off to his right someplace.
He directed, “Get the knives, children. If you see one, take it. Now! Mark is the ballfield. Go!”
That far, he’d taught them: they stooped, and rose, and ran in something like unison and he hoped they all were there, he saw nothing but Bringers’ dark robes on the ground, and then there was a girl there, pale limbs sprawled at the edge of the woods. Spike made a sour, incredulous face, thinking Yeah, pull the other one, and collected the Bit, slower than the rest, sticking right to him the same as he’d told her. No Bringer could run as fast as a scared fifteen, sixteen year old girl with Slayer in her blood, and the ballfield would be bright and full of people, confuse things, keep his own lot tight and together, yeah. And it was a new direction, unpredictable (he hoped): there’d have been no chance to set anything up there to bar their retreat (he hoped).
Just have to make do with what he found to hand.
“Bit. They’re throwin’ ghosts at me. Might be I’ll need you to call things, say if you see ‘em or not. Keep close. Don’t trust the taser past another shot or two, I dunno how much it’s good for. Get yourself a knife, a stake, something as fallback.”
Dawn squeezed his hand hard for confirmation, saving her breath for running, not looking back because that was his chore, rearguard. As the racing Potentials were silhouetted against the lighted playing field, Spike took quick count and they were all there, all there should be. An anxious knot in his chest let go at the realization. Somebody was hurt, the bloodsmell strong; but nobody hurt to the point she couldn’t run, nobody being carried or dragged, so that would have to be good enough.
The Potentials streamed onto the field near third base and veered toward the pitcher’s mound. Following, Spike jerked and lost Dawn’s hand, momentarily frozen. Entering the floodlit space from darkness threw him: everything in him was shouting daylight! daylight! in instinctive terror. Panic on a cellular level. He drove himself forward, continuing to find the floodlights an unexpectedly powerful distraction, making it hard for him to focus on anything beyond forcing himself deeper into the space his body was convinced meant annihilation.
He must not loose his demon in this place. All the demon would want to do was escape the lights. And where was the Bit?
The intrusion of the SIT pack had turned the game into a chaos of small, uniformed players screeching, wailing, and scattering away from the disruption. The bleachers were emptying. At the sidelines, disorganized crowds of alarmed parents were trying to collect their own, some coming onto the field. Reaching the little group of Potentials gathered at the pitcher’s mound, Spike looked around frantically for Dawn. Then he caught sight of her: jogging from the benches beyond the base path, carrying the weapon she’d turned aside to collect as he’d told her to.
A vast sense of yes fell on him like a bucket of water on flames. “Here,” he shouted, to call the Potentials’ attention to him, then swung his arm down, his whole body thrown into pointing, like an umpire calling strike three. As he had, they saw it at once.
When about eighteen pursuing Bringers erupted into the picnic area and then the outfield, twelve teenaged girls and a savagely grinning vampire awaited them with baseball bats.
The street beyond the ballfield was a cacophony of shouts, car alarms and approaching sirens. Whatever senses Bringers had to compensate for their sewn-shut eyes would be registering hundreds of randomly running forms.
Spike saw the Bringers halt, then retreat back among the trees. At once he named a new mark and sent his pack flying off to reach it.
Starting away, Dawn halted and turned at finding herself alone.
Spike hated the blinding unnatural glare. Wanted to be gone. Yet it galled him to desert the field with any Bringers still unfought and alive. He wanted to do them all. And the chance of locating the nest and slaughtering any of his fledglings stupid enough to still be there was becoming more remote with each passing second. In an hour, it would become no chance at all.
But his pack had performed brilliantly, had fought their first engagement and all survived. They’d now be into the backlash, scared and tired. Some were hurt. They needed to be taken home, into rest and care. If they were his, as he’d claimed, he was also theirs: they had a claim on him now, no matter what he wanted.
Maybe there’d never been a chance. His fledges weren’t stupid. The Bringers’ ambush made it plain that his fledges had taken alarm from his initial kills. Instead of running, they’d made an alliance of common interest with the First. From the woman fledge’s reaction, Spike had known he’d lost the advantage of surprise and instead was facing whatever nasty surprise they’d slapped together to greet him with.
He couldn’t go both ways, do both things.
He made himself move and caught Dawn’s hand. They escaped the lights just as the first police cars screeched up.
Spike loped down Ravello Drive alone, on the off chance another ambush might have been set along this last, predictable stretch. But the street was all quiet, as far as he could see or sense. He stopped and lifted an arm to Dawn, standing at an intersection three blocks back, to send her to relay the come-along to the pack waiting where he’d put them while he checked that the coast was clear.
The SUV was still gone so Buffy and her lot weren’t back from vetting the airport. Spike lit a cigarette and paced the back lawn, violently unsettled, wanting a drink. Wanting to barge into the bloody basement and get himself chained up, collapse into the sleep he’d first had too much of and now wanted desperately. Sleeping in the daytime was more a habit than a need, the body didn’t need it to regenerate, but his mind was spinning with impressions and ideas and he wanted them all to shut up, drink himself back to quiet, but couldn’t do that till Buffy returned and he’d given her something like a report, which was gonna be a treat and a half, this fiasco.
The SITs started arriving, the first of them putting on a final burst of speed to show off to him, and then they were all over him again, and the bloodsmell bothered him something ferocious. He could feel the chip sizzling in the back of his head, just waiting to fire off searing lightnings if he so much as touched a one of ‘em, the way he was feeling, and that kind of unconsciousness he really didn’t want to deal with right now. Another minute and he was gonna grab and try to eat somebody, and the chip would fry him blind and senseless, and the children didn’t understand.
He seized on Dawn the second he saw her and was able to make something like sense, enough that Dawn took charge of herding them all into the house and the hell away from him! for all that they didn’t want to go, wanted to hop like bunnies and yank him into some sort of fucking victory dance, and in another two seconds it was gonna go all pear-shaped and they still didn’t understand—
Dawn hauled the last one off him and he managed to stand there, hold his demon from exploding, start pacing again. After awhile an ambulance came and then left, no siren, so maybe it wasn’t too bad. He was starting to stiffen up and he knew he’d taken some damage but nothing worth tending, nothing that wouldn’t right itself in a few hours.
Dawn came back onto the porch but had the sense to stay there, and he was so grateful to her and loved her so hard it was all he could do to keep away from her. But because she stayed clear, so did he, and he was glad when she put out the light.
Finally he’d settled down enough that he could swing by the porch and ask, “Who’s gone to hospital?”
“Rona.”
“How bad?”
“Not too bad. She made it home. But she was still bleeding…. I guess you know.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” He threw himself into another circuit. The tiredness was catching up to him, it was better, he was slowing down. He circled back to the porch and settled there, fishing for another cigarette. “I’m real proud of ‘em all. They done fine. I just can’t—”
“You have a fan club,” Dawn said.
“Bloody hell.”
She laughed at him, and it was suddenly better, nearly all right. He tipped his head back and shut his eyes, ready to sleep then right where he was, and the sun be damned.
“An’ you done the best of all, Bit. Couldn’t have managed without you.”
Quick as a shot, Dawn said, “Does that mean you’ll take me to the mall, a movie and Buster Crabbe’s?”
“Goddam, Bit. Whatever you say. Whatever you want.” Spike looked around at her: all long legs and huge eyes and sweet girlsmell. The blood, that was there, but no longer so important. He could set that awareness aside. Food wasn’t what she was to him. “Ran you off your feet tonight. Get yourself inside, get to sleep.”
She shrugged and flipped her hair. “In a while.”
Then he understood: she was staying with him till Buffy got back. That was all right.
Diffidently, Dawn offered, “I’ll try to tell them, if you want. How you are. So the next time, they’ll know.”
“Yeah. That would be good. I wouldn’t know how to say. I’d just scare them.”
“Maybe not. You don’t scare me.”
“No: not never you, no, ‘course not…. You know when to stay clear of me, Bit. An’ I can’t tell you…how that helps.”
She unfolded and stepped all long-leggedy down the stairs, waited a second to see if he minded, then thumped down next to him and leaned against his shoulder. And that was good, even better: he drew quiet from her and he could feel her smiling.
“You did the best of all,” Dawn said in a dreamy, far-off nighttime voice. “I never saw you fight before. Never really. With Glory, too busy being scared and all ME, the glowy Key center of the known universe and all…. You’re beautiful and awesome. And you brought everybody home.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess.” He supposed he could live with awesome.
The SUV pulled into the driveway.
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