TITLE: Gamble When You Get A Face

AUTHOR: Dead Soul

RATING: NC-17

WARNINGS: graphic sex and violence, sadomasochism, bloodplay, implied character death, unrelenting cynicism and angst, and just a soupçon of blasphemy

PAIRINGS: Spike/Sunday (BtVS, Season Four, The Freshman), Spike/Drusilla, Spike/Sunday/Drusilla

SPOILERS: BtVS - none past Season Four

DISCLAIMERS: I own nothing and no one. The story title is a line from the song Blank Generation by Richard Hell and the Voidoids. Chapter titles are the titles of Elvis Costello songs.

DISTRIBUTION: help yourself, but please let me know – if I’m going to be a whore, I should at least remember where I’ve been and whom I’ve done

THANKS: to my terrific betas, SpikeMom, juliaabra and Lady Starlight who make me go back and describe things more, who slay the insidious typos, oh, and who make me use more commas (grumble, grumble). And to astraea for the gorgeousness that is her – eyeballs to entrails

FEEDBACK: might make me too happy to write, which may, perhaps, be a consummation greatly to be desired. Worth a try, anyway - deadsoul820@aol.com or my LiveJournal

SUMMARY: a twenty-year vampiric globetrotting ménage a trois with lots of really twisted sex and yummy gore. Oh, and angst, lotsa angst. Sequel to Sunday Girl

Someone take these dreams away
That point me to another day
A duel of personalities
That stretch all true reality
That keep calling me - they keep calling me
Keep on calling me - they keep calling me

-- Joy Division, Dead Souls

Prologue – I Want To Vanish

“Like Petroneus, perhaps, I take pleasure in committing suicide at leisure.”

-- Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings

Spike should have killed me then in that basement in the Bowery. Drusilla be damned. Which of course she will be, eventually, and when she is, I’ll have been there, wherever there is, if there is, long before. For that reason alone, I hope she stays undusted for a good long time. I never want to share anything with her ever again.

As I drive west towards California, I’m dictating the rest of my story into a micro-cassette recorder I’ve found in the pocket of his jacket. Seems that guy in the diner taped our entire conversation. Or rather, my monologue. What a Daniel wannabe. Too bad he didn’t look like Christian Slater. If he had, I might have some company for this road trip. Guess his coat, his car and his tape recorder will just have to stand proxy, be his insignificant memorial.

I’ve been listening to the tapes since I left Detroit. Examining the story from the beginning, I see the pattern so clearly. Prague was inevitable – so inevitable there’s been no point to most everything I’ve done since being turned. Spike really should have just killed me then. At least then it would have been done in affection and fun, not in the grim and vengeful hatred he feels for me now. But what did he expect the outcome to be? Between the two of them, they made me who I am. The kicked dog will eventually bite. Geez, how fucking trite. If I weren’t driving, I’d back the tape up and record over that last sentence.

I’m going now to the one place where I know he’ll eventually turn up. The Hellmouth. Where the Slayer is. If he’s not drawn there for me, he’ll turn up for her. Maybe she’ll do his job for him. Or maybe, just for kicks, I’ll do his job for him. Get one last dig in. Add fuel to the balefire.

So I may as well pick up where the previous tapes left off – nothing better to do as I flee the rising sun and head for Sunny. Dale, that is. Seems appropriate that the Mecca for our kind is to the west, rather than the east. Some silly part of me, some pathetic shade of the girl I was perhaps, hopes that he’ll hear these tapes and maybe understand why I did what I did. Or maybe I just want to leave something behind besides dust and death. And maybe I just like to hear myself talk. What? Me? Shut up.

Chapter One – Talking In The Dark

I stayed in the basement for several months, learning my new strengths, my new appetites. Feeding was easy among the junkies, drunkards, and punks (oh my!). A careful bite could be disguised as track marks in the ravaged crook of an emaciated elbow. Sprinkle some broken glass, make a few gashes for show, and the victim of even the most vicious bite would look like just the loser of a broken bottle fight. Mostly I was careful to choose meals who hadn’t shot up recently, but sometimes I’d get a loaded one and spend the next night or so floating in a warm sea of viscerally realistic memories and, for a little while, at least, I wouldn’t feel so alone.

***

Although my first hunt was rather a debacle.

I was so high on my new power, my new strength as I strode into the club. Leather corset from the night of my turning worn over a pair of Spike’s discarded jeans, the legs rolled up just over my ankles to show off my glossy new spit-shined black kicker boots, tight white t-shirt tied in a knot between my breasts, hair in a long tight braid, I glittered with Spike’s abandoned silver and leather jewelry. I thought I was hot shit; hear me roar.

He was tall, pale and pretty. Slender and gawkish, his black hair falling into his eyes, he had such a long, tender neck, and he was so obviously an incompetent poseur, but god he was cute. We played eye contact across the crowded club, although he looked surprised every time our eyes met as if he thought I must have been looking at someone behind him, not him.

Slam dancing must have been invented by vampires, for vampires. I could have had a quick nibble, a friendly bite from just about anyone on the packed dance floor, salty, pale flesh glistening with sweat, hearts pumping an adrenaline overload, even the ones who weren’t speeding their asses off, but my appetite had its heart set on him. I didn’t have to disguise my strength as I shoved my way through the packed, smelly, hot crowd of puerile disenchantment and sophomoric nihilism.

It was so easy. So very, very easy.

As a human, I’d have wasted hours tossing my hair, pretending to ignore him while at the same time stealing sidelong looks out of the corners of my eyes. The teenage mating ritual. The ‘no, no, yes’ that leads to so many misunderstandings and missed opportunities.

But, as a vampire, I saw what I wanted and I took it. If I’d known boys were this easy, I’d never have had a free Saturday night since hitting puberty. I walked up, grabbed his hot hand and took him home.

Once there, I was too hungry to wait. He was so warm and moist. He smelled like fresh-baked brownies and roasting turkey and grilling burgers, like all the food smells rolled up into one über-food smell. I had him down on his back across the fainting couch, straddling him, kissing his heated mouth, running my fingers over his neck, searching out the best place to bite to get as much of his blood into me as possible, as quickly as possible. He had a strong, fast, excited pulse, the veins very close to the thin, fresh, fragile skin.

I ran my tongue down his salty neck, grasping the collar of his shirt in my hands, easily tearing it all the way to the hem. His hands were busy too. He pulled my white t-shirt over my head, baring my breasts. As I leaned in to bite, I pushed them against the naked skin of his chest. But before I could slide my fangs into his pulsing throat, I felt a scorching, a searing against my breast, totally unlike the hot wax or even open flame Spike had tortured, tempted, teased, and taunted me with. There was nothing erotic about this feeling. It was entirely and completely a ‘get it the hell off me’ kind of pain that felt like it had burned a hole in me big enough for a fist to reach in and yank out my unbeating heart.

Hissing, fangs out and face bumped, I reared back and stared in disbelief at the tiny gold cross the boy was wearing on a long chain so that it had been hidden underneath his shirt. I was stunned. Why on earth would a cross do that to me? I was Jewish. Crosses weren’t a symbol of my former religion. A burning Star of David or Chai I could understand, but why would a cross affect me?

As I paused to consider this interesting metaphysical inconsistency, the boy was screaming and struggling to get away. Reflexively, I tightened my knees, crushing his ribs, holding him in place. Recovering from his panic enough to see where I was looking, and remembering some half-forgotten legend, he grabbed the cross and thrust it out towards me. In spite of myself, I recoiled, and not just from the memory of the pain. Something in me couldn’t bear to even be this close to it. Like how, even when you know it’s on a leash and you know you’re out of its range, if a dog lunges at you, you shy away. Ya know?

Yanking, he broke the chain and pushed the cross towards my face. I had to release him in order to get away from it. Looking at it physically hurt my eyes, kind of like a too-bright light that wasn’t light. The torment came from a different place. Maybe crosses do emit light of a sort – light that is outside the spectrum visible to human eyes and that vampire eyes can only detect as pain. Have to remember to ask someone about that someday, I thought. Meanwhile…

I reeled off of him and across the room, anything to put more distance between me and the source of the brain-splitting agony. He scrambled to his feet and towards the door but he made a mistake. His last mistake. Disoriented, holding his bruised and possibly broken ribs, instead of taking the door that led to the stairs out of the basement he stumbled down the familiar hall to, you guessed it, my old cell. All the better to corner him in, I thought, as the discomfort finally receded enough for me to act.

No lights down there, but I could see well enough. Well enough to observe him banging against the walls, feeling for a door, a way out. I let him go. Let him think that perhaps I was still huddled, cowering and blinded by the might of his tiny, little cross, instead of silently stalking him. This was beginning to be fun again.

He was feeling along the wall for an exit when I soundlessly entered the cell. Creeping up on him, I let him blunder into me. I heard the tinkle of metal hitting concrete when he dropped the cross, as he jumped back in surprise and fright. I could see the gleam of the faintest light on the whites of his wide-open eyes, glistening and shining like something dipped in syrup. No more messing around. I was hungry enough, and angry enough, to suck those sweet eyeballs right out of his head.

I was also still inexperienced enough to be surprised by my own speed as I rushed him, toppling him to the floor and striking at his neck with my sharp, famished fangs. I closed my teeth over his gorgeously protruding Adam’s apple and pulled. It popped into my mouth, a chewy, warm, wet mouthful of deliciousness. I sucked it dry and spit out the gristle then leaned down to bathe my face in the river of blood still pumping from his mutilated throat.

I fed like a wild beast. What was left after I’d sated myself was hardly recognizable as having been human. A rag, a bone, a hank of hair.

***

But unless the hunger was on me, I spent my time in Spike’s old room, turning over his detritus, his relics, burying my face in the smell of his unwashed clothes – the smell I was never able to catch until I lay dying, just before I was turned. I played the tapes he’d left behind and scratched his name on various parts of my anatomy with the safety pins I found, watching the bloody letters fade imperceptibly, the way, no matter how closely you watch it, you never quite see the hands of a clock move their way around the dial.

Evenings I was particularly missing him, I would smoke his brand of cigarettes and use the glowing ends to brand myself his. These marks would be a little more permanent, but they, too, would eventually fade.

I had discovered his room down an unexplored hall. I guess it was remote from the others so he could play his music and watch his ‘stories’ without disturbing Drusilla. A typical masculine mess – heaps of dirty jeans and t-shirts, the floor littered with cigarette butts and broken cassettes, shiny mylar threads criss-crossing the floor like fallen streamers in the aftermath of a wild party. Or the aftermath of someone packing in a hurry.

The unbroken tapes, I’d listen to over and over on his singularly clean and pristine stereo system, the bass and the volume turned all the way up so I could feel the vibrations of the huge speakers thumping through the cold concrete floor as I lay there, memorizing the short, frenetic songs full of fuzz guitar, feedback and screams of alienation, boredom and self-congratulatory silliness.

I also found a Polaroid camera and several packs of film, which came in handy as I was learning to do my make-up by feel. The early ones, the ones that looked particularly clownish, I saved to show Spike one day. I thought it might give him a giggle. But one night in a fit of self-loathing and despair I tore them to tiny shreds and set fire to them. Why should I be saving things to show him if I was never going to see him again?

What finally broke me out of this funk, was a taste of others of his, my, our kind.

***

The simplest way I’d found to catch a meal was simply to walk out by myself late at night. There was always some mugger/rapist/thug type hanging around who thought he’d found himself an easy mark. The fun of pointing out his mistake could momentarily alleviate the gloom – especially if I let him, or them, if I was lucky, beat up on me a little first. But one night the muggers weren’t human.

Since I’d become one myself, I hadn’t been around other vampires, so I didn’t recognize them as such right away. And since I was so young and looked so small and helpless, they didn’t peg me as one of their kind immediately, either.

I was doing my scared-scurry impression of a girl out too late in a bad part of town when I heard them stalking me. I walked a little faster, throwing pantomime glances of fear over my shoulder, but really thinking that if they didn’t hurry the hell up, I’d get to ‘safety’ and lose my shot at them. Finally they surrounded me and pulled me into a handy alley, all grabby hands and grubby clothes. Grubby hands too, to judge by the taste of the one held over my mouth as I pretended to struggle.

I was hungry and not really in the mood to play with them, so I made my move to break free and attack, but, to my surprise and extreme irritation, I couldn’t break the hold of the attacker clutching me from behind, pinning my arms to my sides. Angry and a little genuinely scared, I vamped out. As soon as I had done so, so did the ring of four or five others. They looked like such typical minions that I was ashamed they’d gotten the drop on me, but I was still pinned, held off my feet, against the chest of one big motherfucker whose grasp I couldn’t wriggle out of or break.

I still wasn’t seriously frightened. I guess I figured that as soon as they’d realized their mistake, that I wasn’t a late night snack, they’d release me and we’d go our separate ways. No harm, no foul. Neither Spike nor Drusilla had thought to mention how territorial your run of the mill vamp gang is, and now, it seemed, I was trespassing.

Shit, I’m about out of gas.

***

Funny how the taste of motor oil cuts through the flavor of the blood, completely ruining it. Note to self: no more mechanics for breakfast. Although the smell of gasoline does continue to appeal to me, sharper and even more intoxicating than I remember it being when I was human. Mmm, brain-buzz.

Where was I? Oh yeah. That lame-ass vamp gang. Who really gives a shit about them? I’m here, aren’t I, so I must have gotten away. I’m bored with that subject, although the incident did give me my first understanding of how truly flammable we are. A lesson I’ve since put to good use.

What I want to talk about is Rome and what happened there.

If I were going to wax literary, I’d justify the topic jump by saying that linear narration, while logical and expected for this kind of story, reminds me too much of this motherfucking highway. Could you guess that I’m in Kansas now? Mile after mile, event after event, all of it going nowhere. If I jump ahead, maybe it’ll help me imagine the Rockies, which must be up ahead there somewhere. Wax off.

And a question. Do all these pop culture references make this a work of postmodernism? Or is it just the gasoline fumes causing an overweening sense of self-referential self-importance and mock-hubris? And is the metanarration really called for?

***

So anyway, once I got my ass in gear I took to hanging around JFK, trolling for a girl traveling by herself who looked like me and had a passport and a plane ticket to anywhere in Europe on a flight that both left New York and arrived at its destination after dark. A fairly specific list of requirements, but it only took about a week for all the elements to fall into place, and I found myself in a seat in coach on a flight to London’s Heathrow airport. Train to Dover, ferry to Calais, more trains to Paris, and then to Rome. First class sleeper car tickets, paid for with the travelers’ checks and American Express card I’d swiped along with the passport and plane ticket in New York.

Once in Rome, I had no idea how I was going to find Spike or even if he was still there. Best I could figure was to hang around the rough areas of town and cause some trouble, maybe get him to come to me.

So I was in this alley sucking on the neck of some young guy who’d had the nerve to pinch my ass when I smelled something familiar. Something I hadn’t smelled since the last night I was alive. Something I’d only caught the faintest cold memories of from unwashed jeans and t-shirts two thousand miles behind me. Nonchalantly, I took a last sip and snapped his neck, letting him slide to the rough paving stones. I shook off my vamp face and turned.

Wiping the blood from my mouth, I said, “I don’t know what Dru was talking about. I love eating Italian.”

Chapter Two – Little Goody Two Shoes

Spike was leaning against the far wall, trying to look stern and failing utterly. Finally his face cracked into a huge grin, and he pulled his hands out of his pockets, opening his arms wide. I flew into them, jumping up and wrapping my arms around his neck, my legs around his waist.

“Thought I’d gotten rid of you, you silly cow,” he said, pulling me tighter against him.

“You never did ask me what my name was,” I replied, grinning back at him.

“What?” He pulled his head back to look into my face, thrown by my response.

“Eingeshpahrt McStubborn. And my middle name’s Chutzpah. One of those mixed marriages, you know. Nothing good ever comes of them.”

He burst out laughing and started spinning us in a circle. I tightened my legs around him and leaned back, releasing his neck, supported only by his arms around my waist. I flung my arms out and laughed out loud with happiness and love. For this one brief minute, the world was the beautiful, whirling place I remembered dimly from childhood and the security of my father’s arms.

Finally getting dizzy, I pulled myself up effortlessly (who knew sit-ups could be this easy) as his mad spinning slowed and stopped. Arms back around his neck, I kissed him, smiling against his mouth.

We’re the same temperature now, I mused. His lips no longer felt cool to me. And mine would no longer feel warm to him. I wondered if he would miss that or if he liked it. I kind of missed the contrast but only for a second, as his mouth moved on mine, opening my lips for his searching tongue, his hand tangled in my hair, pressing my face closer to his. I could wait no longer. I reached between our bodies and unfastened his jeans, glad that I was wearing a short skirt. I grasped his hard length and used the end of his cock to push aside the wisp of silk covering my pussy. Groaning into his mouth, I lowered myself onto him; feeling him stretch me, fill me just right. I stayed still for a long moment, my inner muscles clutching and releasing, his cock jerking inside me each time I tightened.

When he couldn’t stand it anymore, he backed me up against the alley wall and began slamming into me, the rough brick shredding my shirt, scraping my back, as I fucked him back as hard as I could. With me pressed between the wall and his thrusting body, he could free a hand to rip open my shirt and attach his mouth to one of my nipples, sucking and biting it roughly. That familiar, but oh so missed and longed for tugging, the electric charge it sent through me drove me over the edge and I came hard, biting into my lower lip to muffle my screams. Groaning against my breast, triggered by my cunt’s rippling spasms, he came a few seconds later, shoving into me hard as I milked the last drops of his come from him.

I tugged his head up from my breast so I could kiss him; offer him the blood that had filled my mouth when I had bitten my lip. Still kissing, he slipped out of me, and I slid down his body to finally stand on my own two feet.

“Want to go back to my hotel and catch up?” I asked after I’d twitched my underwear back into place and he’d refastened his jeans.

“Might as well,” he said with a shrug. “Not like I got anywhere better to go.”

I gave him a quizzical glance, puzzled by the abrupt shift in mood, but he didn’t act like he wanted to explain. “I don’t think there is anywhere better than my hotel – you’ve never seen any place so ritzy.”

I knelt down next to the guy I’d eaten, lying in a heap right where I’d left him. I felt in his pockets and pulled out his wallet. I helped myself to the few lire in it and tossed it aside after making sure that he had had no credit cards. I checked a different pocket and found a set of keys. I dangled them towards Spike. “Do you want to drive or shall I?”

He held out an open hand and I tossed the keys to him. Out on the street, I kept watch while he went to the various cars to see which the keys fit. No luck until he tried a Vespa motor scooter. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” he said.

“Oh come on, it’ll be fun. Wind in our hair, bugs in our teeth.”

He just threw me a look over his shoulder as he swung a leg over the bike and started it up. “Coming?”

I hopped on behind him and grabbed him around the waist as he took off in defiantly the wrong direction on the one-way street.

“Where’s this sodding hotel, then?” he shouted at me over his shoulder.

I leaned up to speak into his ear, “Parioli, up by the Villa Borghese. You know how to get there?”

He just nodded and turned left at the next intersection we came to. I settled in for the ride, hugging him tight around his slender middle and burying my nose in the delicious leather and tobacco smell of his duster. Something was obviously bothering him, but I didn’t think it had anything to do with me. And I didn’t care how bad a mood he was in, I was just happy to finally be with him again. I closed my eyes and continued to take deep, unnecessary breaths as if trying to prove to myself that he was really here and that I was back where I belonged.

When we’d climbed the hill to Parioli he slowed to a stop. I shook myself out of my comfortable dreaminess. “Where to now?” he asked.

I looked around. “Take a right at the next intersection then turn left on the Via G. de Notaris. It’s the Lord Byron. I half expected that you and Dru’d already be there, what with her thing for poets.”

He twitched irritably when I said that but started the Vespa up again and followed my directions. When we pulled up to the entrance, the sleepy night parking valet woke up enough to catch the keys that Spike threw at him as he followed me into the hotel. Stopping at the front desk for the room key, I told the night concierge to make sure that we weren’t disturbed. He nodded enthusiastically, murmuring liquid Italian assurances as he reached out for the wad of lire I slid across the counter to him. Lire I’d just liberated that night. Spike and I crossed the dimly lit, flower-filled lobby to the elevator and rode it up to the sixth floor.

I opened the door to room 603 and beckoned extravagantly for Spike to enter. He came in and flopped down in one of the deeply upholstered terracotta red armchairs. He immediately reached into his coat for his cigarettes and silver Zippo lighter. He gave the room a jaundiced once-over and said, “You seem to be adaptin’ all right.”

Sitting in the chair across from him, I lit up my own cigarette and said, “Got lucky with a credit card that hasn’t been cancelled yet. Guess they haven’t found the body yet behind all the lost luggage. Mommy and Daddy must just think their little girl is a bad correspondent.”

He only grunted in reply and got up to pace the room restlessly.

“Okay, mister. What bug’s crawled up your ass?”

He gestured testily with his cigarette, “Darla’s just gettin’ on my tits, is all. You got anything to drink in this frilly boudoir?”

“Not unless you count the bellboys. I could call down for something. What do you want?”

‘Whiskey – get a bottle.”

I called down to the desk and asked them to send up a bottle of their most expensive scotch and a couple of glasses. Looking at the scowl on Spike’s face, I changed the order to two bottles. As we waited for the liquor, Spike went out to the balcony and amused himself by picking the blooms off the potted begonias and tossing them over the railing. I stepped into the walk-in closet and shed my shredded shirt and the rest of my clothes, putting on the dove gray silk robe that had come with the room. The room service waiter brought the scotch and, after I’d signed the bill and he’d gone, I slipped the Non Si Disturbi sign over the outside doorknob.

I poured a couple of fingers of scotch into each of the crystal tumblers they’d sent up with the bottles and took them out to Spike on the balcony. He was totally in his own head as he stared out into the darkness. I touched his arm with the hand that was holding the glass and he, reluctantly it seemed to me, came back. I handed his scotch to him. He downed it all at once and tossed the glass out into the night. I heard the faint tinkle of breaking glass somewhere six stories down. Wordlessly I handed him the drink I’d poured for myself and he knocked this one back as well but didn’t throw the glass. Instead he thrust it back at me, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and said, “More.” I left the glass on the railing and returned with the bottle. I hoped that maybe if he got drunk enough he’d start to talk, tell me what was bothering him.

In the meantime, I was content just to look at him, silver and blue and black in the moonlight. His Adam’s apple moved as he swallowed, and it made my mouth water. The blue hollows under his cheekbones were dark and inviting; his tongue snaking out to catch the last drop in the glass made my thighs quiver. The early spring night was chilly but that wasn’t the reason my nipples were hard.

Angry Spike, horny Spike, worried Spike I knew how to deal with. Morose Spike was new to me. I didn’t know what to do, what to say. Should I talk, try to distract him? Should I pry and pester him to tell me what was wrong? Or should I just let him drink and leave him alone? The latter, I decided. I left him by himself on the balcony, just saying, “When you come in, make sure you close the drapes tight behind you.” He only nodded curtly and raised the scotch bottle to drink from it directly.

I got into bed with a copy of Italian Vogue and flipped through the pages, not really looking at them, until eventually I was sleepy enough to turn out the light. Spike was still on the balcony being uncharacteristically quiet. I could feel that dawn was coming soon and wondered if I should check on him. What if he’d passed out? Having him fry on my balcony made for a piss-poor reunion. I slipped out of bed and opened the French doors. He was sitting on the balcony floor, slumped against the stone railing, the empty bottle hanging from his loose fingers. I nudged him with my foot and he stirred, muttering unintelligibly.

“Come in, Spike,” I said. “The sun’ll be coming up soon.” His only response was to drop the bottle, his chin sinking against his chest. I stooped and grabbed his arm, slinging it over my shoulder. I don’t know if I’d have been able to lug his dead weight around before I became a vampire, I doubt it, but it was pretty easy for me now. I dropped him on the edge of the bed and wrestled his coat off him before kneeling to remove his boots. I swung his legs up onto the bed, and he flopped down on his back. I took the rest of his clothes off, wishing that there were more of a point to it than making him more comfortable to sleep. It certainly wasn’t unpleasant to see his hard, naked, white body again, but it was frustrating not to be able to do anything with it. Maybe later, I thought. When he’d had a chance to sleep some of it off.

I hunted through the pockets of his duster and retrieved his cigarettes and lighter. I put them on the nightstand, figuring he’d want them handy when he eventually woke up. I slipped out of my robe, got back into bed next to him and pulled the covers over us, resting my cheek on his shoulder, breathing in his scent. It smelled like home.

***

When I woke up the heavy, slate gray drapes were edged with the red of late afternoon sunlight in keeping with the gray and terracotta color scheme of the room, but no potentially painful rays were sneaking in to burn the unwary undead. I stretched and rolled over, taking a deep breath out of habit, and noticed his smell. He was really here. I hadn’t dreamed it. Smiling, I opened my eyes. He was awake and watching me solemnly.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, frowning a little. “You weren’t supposed to come.”

“I imagine I came lots of times I wasn’t supposed to. Can’t seem to help myself.” Admittedly, it was an appallingly lame joke, but he didn’t crack even the smallest of smiles.

Awkward silence. I decided to try a partial truth. Another one. “I kinda had to get out of New York. Pissed some people off. Couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.” It was true that I’d probably upset a couple of vampires, but I seriously doubted that all of New York City was now unsafe. Just didn’t want him to think I was following him, or anything. So I exaggerated a little.

“Not that I have any trouble believing that you could manage to piss off just about anyone, but what, specifically, did you do?” Mock serious, but teasing.

“Um, set a bunch of vamps on fire? But they started it! Like I was about to just let them get away with it.” He rolled his eyes and turned over onto his back, sighing the sigh of the long-suffering and the hung over.

“Start from the beginning. What were they trying to get away with?”

“Wouldn’t have been a problem if there hadn’t been five of them. I was out for a bite, pretending, you know, to be all helpless and vulnerable, when they jumped me.” He snorted, I guess at the idea of me being helpless and vulnerable. I poked him in the side. “If I’m not helpless and vulnerable anymore whose fault do you think that is? Besides, it works – well, most of the time.”

“I’m sure you were the perfect delicate flower. Go on.”

“Well, I figured it was just a little gang of your run of the mill thugs until I couldn’t break free. I vamped out, they vamped out, and they didn’t seem to understand that they should just let me go my way and they should go theirs. They seemed to think that I was, like, trespassing on their turf or something. Like I was such a threat to them. What was I going to do - eat all the humans in the area all by myself?”

“Most nests don’t take kindly to poaching.”

“And you couldn’t have told me that before sticking me in a coffin and shoveling dirt over me?”

“Knew you’d be okay, didn’t want to spoil your fun.”

“Right, it was so fun being sized up for the big gang bang.”

“They didn’t, did they?” He rolled back over to face me, looking mildly alarmed.

I turned my face away from him and shuddered, remembering the way they’d discussed it among themselves while I was still trapped in the steel jaw grasp of the biggest of them. If they had decided to do it then and there, there probably wouldn’t have been much I could have done about it. Spike touched my chin, pulling my face back towards him. “Did they?” he asked again, more urgently.

Suddenly I was pissed off. “And what if they had? You did it to me first – raped me in an alley.” That sounded all fine and indignant, but I couldn’t lie to him. “Well, it would have been rape if I hadn’t liked it. You’d have gone right ahead even if I’d screamed and struggled.”

“That’s different. You were human then, not a vampire I’d made. Besides, there was only one of me.”

“And I’d have been just as dead.”

“A little late in the day to be regretting things now, don’t you think? D’you really wish none of it had happened? You had your chances to leave. Even left and came back, I seem to recall.”

I looked up at the ceiling. This had turned into a far more serious conversation than I’d wanted to have with him first thing in the evening. I’d just wanted to justify my turning up in Rome and, maybe even impress him with the way I’d gotten myself out of a particularly ugly jam.

I tried to put into words the conflicting thoughts and feelings I’d been having since being turned. “I still get all mixed up about what I feel and what I think I ought to feel. I mean, I don’t feel bad about what happened with you and Dru or about being a vampire, although I am still pissed off as hell about you leaving me, but sometimes I forget that I’m not human anymore. It’s like the demon is sometimes just that little bit slower on the uptake than the rest of my brain.” I chewed on a ragged cuticle for a minute, thinking.

“Or it’s like a bad habit or something, you know? The silly first impulse I sometimes have is to do the ‘human’ thing. Like being good is a habit I need to break. And you know the habit that’s the fucking hardest to break? Being polite. God, I can be guzzling blood like there aren’t five billion other warm bodies out there full of it, and if I burp, I cover my mouth.”

Spike chuckled at that but didn’t speak, so I continued, “I mean, besides the occasional throat-ripping-out and the cool new powers, I guess I just don’t feel that different. I’m fully aware that it’s just habit keeping me from really acting out on all this evil I’m supposed to be feeling. God, none of this is making sense. Maybe what it is is that my morals were never screwed on too tight in the first place and that’s why I’m not all one with some evil plan to destroy the world or something. Like if the pendulum wasn’t swinging too high in the direction of good in the first place, the corresponding swing to evil just isn’t going to be that high either. ‘Course, if I’m hungry, all bets are off.”

“S’what I always liked best about you,” he purred, his voice a low rumble of amusement and arousal. “You were an amoral little baggage from the very start. Didn’t feature making you a vampire would change you that much. Just make you less breakable.” He slid his hand under the sheet and over my bare stomach, barely touching it with whisper-light fingertips.

“Know what your problem is? You think too much. Little human habits buggin’ you so much right now? They’ll fade soon enough, you won’t even remember you ever had ‘em,” he soothed, his mouth against my shoulder before nibbling the point of it. “And I’m thinkin’ I just need to show you how to really let loose with the evil. Reckon you haven’t had fun enough with it yet. Haven’t really let go and enjoyed it. More to it ‘n just getting somethin’ to eat.” His tongue trailed up my shoulder to my neck, tickling the place where they met.

“So don’…don’t you want to hear what happened with those vampires?” I asked, swallowing, distracted by his tickling fingers and swirling tongue, but still wanting to impress him with my bravery and ingenuity before the subject was completely dropped.

“Later,” he breathed, as he leaned over me to touch my mouth with the lightest of kisses, feathering lower then upper lip with tiny touches, sighs of air, a snaking tease of tongue then another puff of breath to make the moisture cool, to make me shiver. His hand on my belly moved up to brush my nipple just as lightly, just as teasingly. My eyelids were fluttering, my needless breath quickening, my heightened senses pricking. I darted my tongue out and fleetingly caught the tip of his. He stilled, our tongues just touching. We stared at each other for a few long seconds before his eyes closed, long black lashes hiding the vivid blue, and he pushed my tongue back into my mouth with his, deepening the kiss into something tender yet desperate. His hand tightened around my breast, fingers digging into the soft flesh. I knew, vampire healing or not, I would have the best kind of bruises there later.

I reached up to stroke his rumpled hair, but he caught my hand and lowered it back to the bed. “Don’t do anything,” he whispered against my mouth. “Just lie still.” He held my wrists loosely over my head with one hand – not squeezing, not forceful, as he kissed down my neck, licking the line of my collarbone to the edge of the sheet, taking it between his teeth and drawing it down to my waist before making a gentle, yet thorough exploration of my breasts with his mouth.

Since he had never managed, quite, to break me with rough fucking when I was alive, unless you count the night I was turned, I think he was trying to see if he could break the vampire me with tenderness. Or maybe taking that step up the food chain had made me worthy of a kind of respect and consideration not generally afforded to humans. Or he just wanted a change of mood. A change from Drusilla and her need for pain. Maybe I was some sort of surrogate for the tender feelings and caresses he could never give to her.

But, as he teased my hard nipple with licks and nibbles and more cool puffs of air, I lost the ability to think, to try to reason out why he was doing what he was doing. I could only feel it and melt as he finally closed his lips around my nipple, sucking it gently, nursing it sweetly, as his free hand traced circles and curves and lines, hieroglyphs of sensation on the skin of my belly and lower to the newly re-grown hair between my legs, stroking it, twining his fingers in the short curls. He nudged my thighs just a little apart so he could run a finger tantalizingly along the closed slit.

My knees fell out to the sides, opening me to his insinuating finger as it slid deeper into my wetness. He released my hands with a warning pat, silently telling me that I should keep them there, and rose over me, stripping the terracotta-colored sheet completely off our bodies and straddling me, switching his hungry suckling to the other, so far neglected, nipple.

I gasped reflexively, as he slid one finger inside me, sliding his thumb up my slick folds to softly brush my clit. When he released my nipple to kiss his way down my stomach, I sighed in momentary disappointment, but as a second finger joined the first and his tongue replaced his thumb with wet velvet, rose petal licks, I had to clench my hands into fists to keep from reaching down to press his face deeper into me.

He turned his fingers inside me so he could rub the spot on the upper wall that corresponded with the hypersensitive piece of flesh he was now sucking into his mouth, lashing it with a firmer tongue, tormenting it with tiny nips. My hips were arching up off the bed, my nails digging into my palms, my head rolling on the pillow as the deep waves of my orgasm began to surge through me. He sucked me harder, scraping his teeth lightly up and down my clit, bringing me to greater and greater heights; moans, groans, sighs and squeals escaping unbidden from my throat. Eventually he eased off a little, bringing me down slowly. I was gasping from some atavistic, limbic instinct and felt as if I should be gleaming with sweat, but, of course, I wasn’t.

He slithered back up my body, sliding every possible inch of his smooth skin against me until his face was even with mine. Holding my face between his hands and staring into my eyes as if to gauge my reaction, he slid his cock along my wet slit, further awakening nerve endings that were still gasping and zinging. Carefully he pulled back far enough to position the head of his cock at my opening and after a long pause, as if waiting for me to give him permission, he slowly pushed into me, inch by hesitant inch, until he was completely buried inside me. He didn’t start pumping right away, but rather, stayed perfectly still, giving me time to get used to the feel of him. He gently brushed the hair out of my eyes.

I didn’t need it, that moment of stillness, but it was nice, exquisite even, to have the time to truly appreciate the size of him and how he seemed to fill me so completely. I could still feel the aftershocks of my previous orgasm making me spasm irregularly around him and each time it happened I could feel his cock jump just a little bit. Purposefully, I tightened my muscles around him and was rewarded with a stronger jerk. Slowly, slowly he started to slide out of my clenching cunt and just as slowly pushed back in.

On and on it went, this slow, gentle fucking, his eyes on mine, neither of us so much as blinking. I’d never felt so fragile, so cherished, so, I mistakenly dared to think, loved.

I could have stayed that way forever, but passion, hormones, blood, demons, will have their way and the force and speed of his thrusts increased. Unable to stay still another instant longer, I finally moved my hands to pull Spike’s mouth down to mine, as I wrapped my legs around the backs of his thighs, pulling him harder into me, slamming my hips up to meet his as a different kind of orgasm, fiery, violent and explosive erupted through me, my fierce spasms triggering his own as he bit the side of my neck with blunt teeth. I wanted him to really bite me, but it was over before I could express the need, both of us shuddering. He gently kissed and licked the livid marks his human teeth had left on my neck.

Still inside me, he rolled to the side, pulling me with him. I draped a leg over his hip to help keep us joined and raised my head so he could put his arm underneath it. I had closed my eyes and snuggled even closer to him when I noticed that he was murmuring over and over, “It’s all right. You’re all right. I’ll take care of you. Nothing like that will ever happen to you again.”

“Nothing like what?” I asked sleepily. “That could happen to me any old time and I wouldn’t complain.”

“You liked it? With them?” He jerked his head up to stare at me disbelievingly and somewhat accusingly.

“Of course I liked…. What do you mean, them?” I was beginning to suspect that we were talking about two different things. Duh.

“What they did to you?” His voice sharpened, got that crisp, diamond-hard edge that meant he was angry past the point of shouting. He pulled away from me like he couldn’t get far enough, fast enough, his cock slipping out of me, leaving a trail of our combined juices down the length of my thigh. “Bloody hell! You let a bunch of dirty minions have you, do things to you then come here and expect me to take their leavings?”

“What? No! They never, I never…. You never let me finish. I got away from them before they could do anything. I promise!” I bolted upright, stretching an arm out towards him as he shot out the far side of the bed.

He was reaching for his jeans but he paused and turned around with a look on his face as if to say, ‘This had better be good.’ He waited, yanking up his jeans, a muscle in his cheek twitching as he clenched his jaw over more angry words.

I pulled the sheet from my lap up to my chin, looking at him beseechingly, then looking down as I began to speak. “I-I really did think that they were going to do it…me…in that alley. I was angry and that’s what I showed them, but really I was so scared. I was thinking of you – I didn’t want them touching what you had touched. As long as you were the last person to touch me I could still feel like we were somehow, I don’t know, connected or something.” I stole a swift glance at him. He was frowning but no longer looked quite so angry and hadn’t reached for his shirt or boots.

“I kept struggling to get free. My god, that asshole was strong. They started arguing with each other about what to do with me. They had this leader that they were afraid to go against and he had first dibs on any female – human or vamp – that they captured. In the end, I guess they were more afraid of him than…well, you know.”

He nodded once, slowly, as if that made sense to him, as if that was the usual order of things. “Go on,” he said, jaw relaxing infinitesimally, hooking his thumbs in the waistband of his jeans, shifting his weight to one hip.

“They took me to this abandoned building not too far from where you and Dru lived. I stayed there after you left, you know. Wanted you to be able to find me if you decided to come back. The grand pooh-bah wasn’t there so we all sat around waiting for him to show. Really, he couldn’t have been that great of a leader; they started drinking right away and had done a piss-poor job of tying me up. Dru’d never have put up with that.” I saw again the tension in his body language that I’d already noticed whenever Drusilla was mentioned. I hastened past the reference. “So anyway, while I waited for them to fall asleep I worked on the ropes. And may I say, I’m really impressed with the way being a vampire makes your nails stronger and sharper.”

He lowered his head and gave me an impatient look from under his eyebrows and I said, “Okay, not digressing here. I had the ropes nearly scratched through by the time they’d all passed out and when they did, I broke the last strand and grabbed the gas can they had to run their generator. I splashed it around, dropped a match and hauled ass out of there all the way to JFK. I lurked around there until I found what I needed to come here. And so here I am,” I finished in a rush, breathlessly. We don’t need to breathe for the oxygen, but air moving across the vocal chords is necessary to speak which explains why we so often find ourselves unable to break the breathing habit. Except when we’re asleep, it takes conscious effort not to breathe.

He looked somewhat mollified, no longer like he was in a disgusted rush to leave, but I had a thought. An indignant thought. “But what if it had happened and I had enjoyed it?

And yet another point of offense, “And what was that that you did to me just now? Some kind of pity fuck? Is rape still a fate worse than death to you? Maybe I would have liked it.”

The emotional tilt-a-whirl I’d been riding swung to anger, spun into rage. “Maybe since you threw me away like a toy you were bored with, you don’t get to make any judgments about what I do or don’t do with my own body! In case you hadn’t noticed, Queen Victoria’s been dead for a good goddamned long time.” I let go of the sheet. It dropped unheeded to my lap then slipped down my thighs as I got up on my knees. I was just getting warmed up, building up a righteous head of wrathful steam.

Too many contradictory accusations, too swift a u-turn from placating to berating – he looked flummoxed, as though a normally placid house pet had just turned on him, all claws and teeth.

But I had a valid point, I thought, so I kept pressing, moving towards him on hands and knees across the width of the large bed. I hissed, “I don’t ask you who you’ve slept with; you don’t get to ask me who I’ve slept with. Maybe I lied. Maybe I fucked every bum and drunk on the Bowery. Maybe after you left I just didn’t care.”

Rising again, I ran my hand up my body to my breasts, cupping them, squeezing them, lowering my voice to a sultry tease, “Maybe I rode with a motorcycle gang, a-a vampire motorcycle gang and they all passed me around, and I was their bitch, and I loved every greasy, beer-bellied one of them and the nasty things they did to me – I couldn’t get enough, and they’d loan me out to other gangs, and they’d, they’d…”

As I exhausted my somewhat limited repertoire of vile things I could imagine off the cuff - evil I may have been, experienced I wasn’t - the rage subsided as quickly as it had come on, leaving me deflated, my voice sputtering quiet as I sat back on my heels, and, besides, I finally noticed that he was silently laughing. Laughing so hard tears were streaming down his cheeks. He toppled over onto the bed and began to shake with deep belly laughs, still largely silent, but shaking the bed.

“Don’t you dare laugh at me,” I said pettishly. “I’m evil. I’m bad. I’m a whore and I’m not ashamed of it. So there!” Granted, the ‘so there’ sounded pretty childish, but honestly, how adult was it of him to be laughing like a peroxided hyena. A peroxided hyena with dark roots. There was really nothing more to be done but have a good old-fashioned sulk.

I sat back against the padded headboard, settled the sheet under my arms and studied my nails, waiting for him to get it out of his system and take me seriously again. Eventually his laughter subsided enough for him to talk and he said, between hiccups, “Bugger me, you don’t know how much I needed that.”

“Yup, that’s me, ready and able, if not always so willing, to be the butt of someone else’s joke. Because, heaven knows, nothing I say could ever be taken seriously.” I was still nursing a serious mad-on, but I might, just might, have been willing to be cozened out of it.

He propped his head up on his hand and looked at me, eyes still smiling, the lines of his face still in the pattern of merriment. “Oh Sunday, Sunday, you really don’t know anything about vampires, do you?”

I figured the glare I leveled at him saved me from having to reiterate my Johnny one-note whine of abandonment.

He sat up and scooted next to me, reaching for his cigarettes and lighter from where I’d left them on the nightstand before leaning back. He fired one up and passed it to me before lighting one for himself. Mentally, I settled in for a cozy story while still only giving him my coldest profile. Truth be told, watching him laugh had made me feel kind of funny and warm inside, but it wouldn’t do to let him know that. Not yet.

***

“One does try to keep up with the times, love,” he said, exhaling a dense cloud of smoke. “Eaten a feminist or three these last couple of decades – tasted just like any other woman, like women’ve always tasted. Like people have always tasted. Y chromosome ain’t got any kind of flavor I been able to identify. ‘Sides, comin’ up with Darla, learned early that petticoats can be just as powerful as trousers. Until the silly bugger went and got hisself cursed, Darla’d only to raise an eyebrow to stop him in his tracks. Point is, it ain’t about gender; it’s about sires and, for want of a less poncey word, childer.

“Like everything else, it’s all about power,” he continued. “And control. Never had much reason to think about it before, the way things were was just how they were, but what I think it all comes down to is making sure that there are never too many vampires for the food supply. Sires keep control over their get for decades. Long enough to pound some sense into them and, believe it or not,” he looked over at me with a quirked eyebrow, “in my case it took a right load of pounding.” Given the eyebrow cue, I snorted the quick laugh he was angling for.

“And controlling sex is an important part of it,” he said, getting back on topic, “otherwise you’d have every demon-come-lately running around turning every pretty boy or girl he fancied, and, before too long, even the most gormless of humans would get an inkling and the Slayer’d be the least of our worries.” He frowned down at the smoldering butt of his cigarette for a moment before crushing it out in the ashtray on the nightstand.

“So in a way,” he went on, climbing out of bed to get the remaining bottle of scotch from the coffee table between the two armchairs, “Dru paid you a compliment by leaving you to raise yourself, trusting that you’d have the sense to avoid the traps most of those other silly wazzucks go stampedin’ into.”

I watched him with cool disbelief. Did he really believe that garbage? The reason Dru’d made him leave me behind was because she had felt threatened. I guess she hadn’t figured I’d have the gumption to follow, but then, I’d always been on my best, meekest behavior around her.

But even as young as I was, I was wise enough not to tell him what was what. He’d never believe it of her, and the last thing I wanted to do was to start demanding, like the typical ‘other woman,’ that he leave his princess for me. There’d be no contest. Yet.

Well, anyway, that’s what I thought at the time. I know better now. There never was any contest. She won in the end, but I’m vain enough to think that I gave her a run for her mad money. Actually enough to make you feel sorry for the poor guy. He was the only one of us without an agenda.

But back to that night. Spike took a healthy swig straight from the bottle and flopped back onto the bed, handing the bottle to me. Getting drunk sounded like a fine idea, so I tipped it back, trying to ignore the harsh, tonsil-scouring taste of it, focusing on the warm glow it started in my belly. My empty belly. Damn, I was hungry. I hadn’t had more than a few swallows of last night’s dinner before Spike had shown up. I wondered when he’d last eaten.

I belted back another couple of gulps of the scotch, returned the bottle to Spike and got out of bed. The sun had gone down, so I went over to the French doors and drew back the drapes, opening the doors wide to let some fresh air in, to let out some of the smoke, scotch, and sex fug. Naked, I walked out onto the balcony and leaned my braced arms on the railing, drawing in deep breaths filled with all the aromas, floral and faunal, of the spring evening.

Spike came out to stand behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and drawing me back against him. “You’re being awfully quiet,” he said. “Whatcha thinkin’?”

“Too many things, nothing at all. I don’t know. I’m just hungry, a little restless.”

“There’s a whole city out there waiting for us,” he murmured low in my ear, his voice smooth and dark as espresso. “Waiting for us to show it what evil is, what evil does.”

“Let’s go then,” I said. “Show me some of that evil. Teach me.”

Chapter Three – Crimes Of Paris

We didn’t actually get out of the hotel until several hours later. Got be squeaky clean to do the big honkin’ evil, and the huge sunken gray marble tub was just perfect for soapy, splashy games between two creatures who don’t need to breathe.

What? You need me to spell it out? Well, if you insist. I’m stuck here in this crappy motel anyway, waiting for the sun to go down so I can continue my little road trip. I don’t know if remembering our nights at the Lord Byron will make this one any easier to bear or if it will just make it seem all the more tawdry. The latter I suspect, but oh well.

***

The bottle of scotch accompanied us to bathroom, naturally. And that bathroom put the luxe in deluxe. It continued the terracotta and gray color scheme with a creamy white tile floor. The toilet and bidet were hidden by a half-wall of gray marble that matched the tub, the counters, and the twin sinks. One wall was mirrored floor to ceiling, which made for a fascinating display of waterworks with no visible impetus. Especially fun to watch while drunk, although I was pretty distracted most of the time.

I guess here’s where I rhapsodize some more about the beauty of Spike. Really, this just can’t be done enough. The bright lights in the bathroom, incandescent, thankfully, rather than fluorescent, shone his smooth white skin, sparkled his blue eyes, picked out the definition of each and every muscle, each and every sharp plane and angle. No marble was whiter, no sapphire bluer, no grin wickeder. And the pink of his evil, talented tongue. The expressive black swoop of his eyebrows, revealing every thought, every mood. If I had ever played poker with him, his eyebrows would have given away his every attempt to bluff. Okay, that’s enough, Gershwin.

Sometimes we’re just so normal. Vampires, I mean. I mean, who doesn’t love a good, hot bubble bath? And so what if evil smells like lavender? Evil smells as evil does. Um, or something like that. Okay, I have no idea what that means, either. I guess I’m stalling. It was such a good time, such a special time that I’m kind of afraid that by sharing it, by speaking it aloud, I’ll lessen the power of the memory. But if I don’t share it, the memory will die with me since I doubt that Spike looks back on those days with much fondness. I’ll quit teasing now and get to the good stuff.

***

It all began when I showed him a little something I’d picked up in Paris. Well, stole, if you must know, from a little antique store in the Place des Voges near the Gare de Lyon when I had a few hours to kill before catching the train to Rome.

I wasn’t sure what it was at first. Certainly no one I’d ever known had used one. About as long as my hand and only about three-quarters of an inch wide, it was made of ebony worn to the smoothest, silkiest patina by years of use and chased with silver art nouveau swirls and curlicues. I took it to the bored clerk. “Qu'est-ce que c'est?” I asked.

She glanced up. “C'est un rasoir,” she said, and looked back down at the fashion magazine she was reading.

“Ça marche comment?”

Sighing gallicly, she took it from me, pulled the blade out, and handed the straight razor back to me. It was rusted in spots, as if stained with old blood, but still had a keen edge. It made me think of Spike. Black and silver. Beautiful and dangerous. I wanted it. I looked around. The shop was deserted. I reached across the counter, grabbed a handful of carefully messy gamine hairdo and baptized my new baby.

Once I was settled in Rome, I cleaned it carefully then took it down to the concierge who said he could send it out to be sharpened and restored.

***

And so, back to the bathroom. I was still naked and he still had on his jeans. We were passing the scotch back and forth while we waited for the enormous tub to fill. “And, see,” I said to Spike over the noise of the water, after showing the razor to him, “They even gave me this.” I took it down from the hook on the back of the door. “What’s it called? A strop? To keep it sharp.” He took the supple piece of leather from me and ran it through his hands, testing its flexibility and heft.

“Nice. Come in handy, this will.” He snapped the three-foot long leather strop across my ass as I leaned over to check the water temperature. I shrieked and danced around a bit, rubbing the red mark I was sure it had left. “Hey! That’s for little Spike! Not for me!” From his anticipatory expression, I figured I’d better clarify which ‘little Spike’ I meant. “For the razor, I mean. That’s what I call the razor.”

“Well you know, us vampires, gotta travel light. Everything’s got to serve more’n one purpose. All it takes is a little imagination.”

As sternly as I could, I said, “Don’t you quirk that eyebrow at me, you pervert. I know exactly what you’re imagining.”

He moved closer to me; I backed away. “So if I’m imaginin’ you, in chains, spread out and helpless, does that make me the only pervert in this room?” he drawled.

And of course it didn’t. “Maybe, maybe not. The committee needs more data before it can make that determination.”

Closer still. “And is it perverse that I’m imagining myself arranging you just so - face down on the bed, wrists and ankles shackled to the four corners, a pillow pushed under your belly so that your lovely, smooth white bum is raised in the most inviting fashion, your hair in wild disarray, your wanton mouth gagged, your fiery eyes blindfolded - ”

He had me backed into the corner, running the leather strap down my arms, across my chest, around my neck, his voice getting lower, huskier, “Am I perverse to want to turn that luscious white arse of yours pink, then fuchsia, then raw blood red? To want to hear your muffled screams, smell your rising desire?”

I was pointlessly panting, my eyelids heavy and half-closed, all the borrowed blood in my body had rushed to my hard nipples and swelling cunt. I leaned into him, rubbing my face against his chest, nuzzling his neck. Still holding the strop, he reached around me to brush my ass with the end of it, using it with both hands to pull my body into his, to press his hard, denim-covered cock against my twitching belly. Neither of us noticed the tub overflowing until the bubbly deluge reached our bare feet.

I sprang away from him with a shrill cry and ran to the tub to turn off the water. Spike grabbed up all the towels and threw them on the floor to mop up the flood. I opened the drain and, while Spike was still dealing with the floor, I went to the phone and called housekeeping, “Molti altri tovaglioli, per favore, e rapidamente!”

Within five minutes there was a soft knock at the door, and Mia, the shy, dark little maid who usually cleaned the room, entered with towels, soft, fluffy charcoal gray towels, piled high in both arms. Spike was still decent, I mean, he had still had his jeans on, and I’d thrown on a robe. She took the fresh towels to the bathroom and came out with one of the laundry bags provided for the guests, filled with the sopping mess. Spike charmed the poor girl mercilessly, and she was blushing and stuttering as she left. “She’s such a sweet thing,” I said, once the door was safely closed. “When we decide it’s time to stop eating Italian, we must have her for dessert.” I looked over at Spike with my best sunny smile and said, “Ready for bubble bath, take two?”

This time I sternly insisted that he stay out of the bathroom while I refilled the tub. He amused himself by trying out the strop on the various fixtures to see what different noises he could make with it, testing his aim on the few remaining begonia blossoms on the balcony. Men. They never do grow up. He was such a little boy with a new toy.

When the bathwater was finally just right, I pulled the robe off again, stood in the bathroom doorway, cocked a hip, and called to him, “Come ‘n get it while it’s still hot.”

Grinning like the little boy he’d just been emulating, he came in from the balcony, tossing the strop on the bed and stripping off his jeans, almost tripping in his haste. He scooped me up in his arms. I was bracing to be thrown into the water (and having to call down for even more towels), but he lowered me gently into the bathtub before climbing in himself. I’d poured some lavender oil into the water, as well as the bubble bath, so the hot water felt silky as we twined around each other, playing like otters, all slippery limbs and rolling bodies.

Spike grabbed my legs and slid me under the water before ducking his own head under and burying it between my legs. He held me firmly, not letting me get my head back to the surface, and I had a moment of panic, but, as soon as I remembered not to breathe, I could relax and enjoy. I clutched my own slick breasts, as he dragged his tongue up and down from my clit all the way to my asshole, pausing there to tongue it, pulling my cheeks apart so that he could thrust his tongue into it.

I clenched at the unexpected and unaccustomed invasion. It felt really weird, but kind of good. I relaxed to give him easier access and within minutes was pushing up with my hips, my legs high, kicking up above the water’s surface. If someone had come into the bathroom, the scene would have been extremely humorous, if puzzling. Just a pair of legs flailing in the air.

He licked back up to give my clit a quick nibble before slithering between my legs and sliding his smooth cock into me. We still, neither of us, had come up for air. He set an unhurried pace, kissing me likewise, deep and slow. Not breaking contact or stride, we rolled in the water so that I was on top. This was the first time I’d been on top so a little experimentation was in order. I kept my head under the water, so we could continue to kiss. Spike lay still, as I worked myself up and down on him, trying different angles, movements, working out which would best hit the spot(s).

I found the angle and quickened my pace, grinding myself against him until I came. He rolled us back over and drove into me until he, too, was satisfied. We lay under the water, not gasping, for a few minutes longer.

The oil and soap in the water were beginning to sting my eyes, so I wriggled out from under him and sat up. I rubbed my eyes until the tears had washed the irritants out. Spike still hadn’t emerged, so I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and ducked back under to blow a stream of bubbles into his ear. That got him up. He roared out of the water, shaking his head and wiping his eyes. “I was asleep, you daft bird.”

“Yeah, and about to grow barnacles. I’m hungry.”

“First, there’s a little something I’ve been meaning to take care of.” He got out of the tub, water and bubbles streaming down his beautiful white skin, smooth, tight muscles gleaming and flexing. He crossed the room to the counter (I have mentioned that this was a huge bathroom, haven’t I?) and collected the small can of shaving cream that was part of the gratis toiletries kit and little Spike.

***

“Hold still,” he snarled at me.

“I can’t help it,” I giggled. “It’s cold and it tickles. Hey, why does it feel cold?”

“’Cause you’re warm from the bath, you little barmpot.” He touched it to me again, and I couldn’t help squirming.

“If you don’t hold still, you’re going to end up like one of Jack the Ripper’s earlier victims – you know, slit open but not actually missing any bits.” He leered up at me, mouth half open, and tongue curled up to touch his upper teeth.

Which, of course, only made me laugh harder. “Suit yourself,” he said, half laughing himself and closing the razor with a click. “You want to be an aviation blonde, makes me no never mind.”

“Aviation blonde?”

“Y’know, blonde hair, black box.”

“Well, then, what are you?”

“Too manly to worry about color coordination.”

Okay, I’m sure the liquor had something to do with it, but the thought of Mr. Black-on-Black-on-Black not being concerned with color coordination set me off into the kind of laughter that formerly could have caused an embarrassing loss of bladder control. And so, you see, the benefits of being a vampire just kept piling up.

Eventually I got myself back under control. Settling myself more securely on the edge of the tub, I spread my legs wide. “Okay,” I said. “I’m ready.”

Tongue caught between his teeth, Spike carefully drew the wicked edge of the straight razor between my legs, working from the outside, in, rinsing it off under the trickling tap after each stroke. His careful manipulation of my flesh, drawing each bit taut, as he ran the sharp blade over it, the danger of being cut, the look of concentration on his face was so arousing it was hard to hold still. I leaned to the side to brace myself against the wall and closed my eyes, willing myself not to move.

Finally he finished, rinsing me off with handfuls of warm water, but he didn’t put the razor away. He knelt up from his sitting position in the tub and grasped one of my breasts, holding it tight around the base so the skin was drawn tight. With the blade, he cut an inch long slit in the flesh and continued to squeeze, licking up the blood as it welled from the wound. He drew a pattern of shallow rays all around my nipple then repeated it on the other breast. Dragging the dull edge of the razor down my stomach, he repeated the pattern once more on the smooth, bare flesh of my mound, arrows pointing to the top of my slit. Holding me open with the fingers of one hand, he made the smallest of nicks on my distended clit then closed his mouth over it, sucking deeply.

I came almost immediately. The sharp pain coupled with his prolonged handling of my most intimate parts, as well as the sight of the blood against my pale skin, had aroused me to the extent that all it took was one long pull of his mouth on my clit. I cried out, shaking, and fell from the marble tub’s rim, landing on top of him in a loose, wobbly, liquefied heap.

Sliding out from underneath me, Spike draped my boneless body over the edge of the tub, nudged my knees apart and entered me from behind, fucking me fast and hard, driving my breasts into the cold stone, holding onto my shoulders to keep from pushing me out of the tub entirely. In the mirror directly across from the tub, I watched in fascination as the water churned and splashed for no reason whatsoever.

Chapter Four – Little Savage

By the time we got out of the bathtub and into our clothes, the night was quite advanced and the streets were mostly deserted. Spike wasn’t having any of the scooter we’d appropriated the night before. I beckoned the parking valet over to where Spike was lurking in the shadows, drawing him away from the entrance of the hotel and the bored gaze of the night concierge. Spike snapped the boy’s neck before he could say anything more than, “Che cosa-” and helped himself to the huge ring of carefully labeled keys hanging from a chain on his belt. He dragged the body into the dense bushes surrounding the hotel.

We sneaked into the garage under the hotel. Passing by our lowly scooter, Spike chose a gleaming black Jaguar XJ sedan. Picking through the key ring, he found the right key and opened the passenger door for me, gesturing me in with an old-fashioned flourish and a bow. “Your carriage awaits, Madam.”

“Thank you, sir, you are most kind,” I said, doing a dreadful impression of his own dreadful impression of a highfaluting aristocratic accent. I think I probably sounded like Scarlett O’Hara with a head cold. I slid into the buttery leather seat, and he closed the door behind me with that solid, almost muffled, thunk that only the doors of the very best cars have. He went around to the driver’s side and got in. The engine purred nearly silently when he started it, and we stole out of the garage like the shadow of a storm cloud gliding across the moon. He didn’t turn on the headlights until we’d gotten several blocks from the hotel. Spike obviously had some experience in grand theft auto.

“Where are we going?” I asked idly, although I didn’t much care. I was enjoying the warm spring breeze coming through the open window and the Verdi that had been in the car’s tape player.

“Surprise,” he said, looking over at me with a wicked grin. He paused then asked, “How good are you with your game face?”

“Game face?”

“Y’know, vampire face. How well can you control it? Can you turn it on and off at will, or is it just something that happens when you’re about to fight or feed?”

“Oh, is that what you call it? Makes sense. Pretty good, I think. Sneaks up on me sometimes if I get mad, but mostly I only wear it when I feed, and I can shake it off right afterwards.”

“Lemme see.”

I looked down at my lap, then out the window, thinking furiously. I really didn’t want to do it in front of him. I was afraid he’d think it was ugly. I knew I’d have to show him eventually; how else was I going to eat? But here? Now? It was too soon. I didn’t even know, myself, what it looked like. When I’d been taking pictures of myself with the Polaroid, I’d been scrupulously careful not to catch it. I hadn’t wanted to know then, but now I was wishing I’d had at least an idea.

“Come on, let me see. Or were you just talking big?”

“Just take my word for it, okay? I can turn it on whenever I need to.”

Spike pulled the car over with a screech, bumping the tire up over the curb. He grabbed my arm and jerked me around to face him. He drew back his arm and backhanded me across the face, then hit me again from the other direction. “Do it,” he snarled, eyes gleaming yellow in the dark, the ridges of his brow standing out starkly in the glow of the streetlamp.

I stared at him, my eyes big and round, shocked by this unprovoked attack. I reached up to touch my stinging face, but he grabbed my wrist and twisted it. I pulled away with all my strength but couldn’t break his grasp. A frenzy, born of fear and stubbornness and confusion, came over me. I fought him tooth and nail, flailing and kicking, barely noticing the change when it happened. He didn’t try to hurt me back; he only held my arms, throwing a hard-muscled leg across mine to still my kicks, until he had me pinned back against the leather seat. I turned my face from him; trying to hide it until I was able to turn it off, put it away.

It was no good. With one strong hand, he grabbed my jaw, forcing my head towards him. But when he saw my tears, tears of anger, frustration and humiliation, his grip became gentler, and he moved his thumb to brush them away.

“You think I won’t like your face? Is that what this is about?” he asked, voice soft and solicitous. “Here, let me look.” He let go of my jaw completely and, instead, used his hand to trace my, as I imagined them, grotesquely deformed features. I was searching his face, trying to assess his reaction, looking for any sign of distaste, any hint of rejection.

“You got lucky,” he said. “As vampire faces go, yours is quite nice.”

I blinked and said, in a small voice, “I-It is?”

“Yeah, always a gamble, though. What it’s going to look like. Sometimes the prettiest girls, the handsomest blokes’ll end up with a phiz like a bag of spanners. Brows hangin’ over so far, you don’t know how they can see, mouth like a bucktoothed jackrabbit with a gob full of rusty knives. You’ve got about the prettiest set of teeth I’ve ever seen on a vamp, white and sharp as needles.”

I had to smile, but it was a very self-conscious smile. “So I won’t give you nightmares, then?”

“Your face won’t, anyway. Your behavior, however, well, we’ll see. Now, let me see you take it off.”

I hadn’t been bragging, I normally did have quite good control. I’d spent hours practicing in the basement, training myself to let it show only when I was feeding or when it was necessary to put a scare into someone. Smooth as butter, I shifted, immediately feeling much better and more attractive.

“Not bad, now switch back.”

Scowling at him, I did as he asked, putting it on and taking it off several times. Finally he conceded that I hadn’t been lying, that I did, indeed have decent control. “Guess you’ll do,” he said with a sly grin.

“I know that expression,” I accused. “What’ve you got up that black leather sleeve of yours?”

His grin just widened as he pulled off the curb, and back into the deserted street.

***

About half an hour later, he stopped the car in, what seemed like, the middle of nowhere, although I could still see the glow of the city’s lights behind us. Quiet country night noises were all I could hear after he’d turned the engine off, the rustling of small nocturnal animals, the wind in the trees. He’d pulled up next to a concrete slab with a manhole cover in the center of it – the only sign of civilization in this little clearing. He stuck a finger in the cover’s hole and wrenched it up, letting it fall to the side with a clang that echoed loudly. Reflexively, I caught my breath and looked around to see if anyone had heard it. Of course no one had – there was no one within miles of this place. “Get a wiggle on,” Spike said, as he disappeared into the pit of utter darkness. His voice floated back up, hollow and eerie, “We haven’t got all night.”

“Better be someone down here to eat,” I muttered to myself, descending the creaky, rusty old iron ladder, feeling carefully for each rung as I went down and down. I have no idea how long the climb down was. By the time I got to the bottom, the manhole was just a gray circle the size of nickel.

“You ready?” Spike asked right in my ear and I jumped.

“You prick, you scared me!”

“Here, hold onto my coat, we’ll be without a light for the next couple hundred yards.” The ceiling of the tunnel was so low that Spike had to stoop a bit. Since I’d worn flat-soled boots, I could stand up straight, but just barely. After just a few steps, the dim moonlight filtering down from the shaft had faded away. I put on my face again, and that helped my vision for a few steps more, but even the best, most uncanny, eyes need some light. Soon I was just following Spike blindly, trusting that he knew where we were going.

The blackness seemed interminable, but it was probably only a couple of minutes until I saw a reddish glow ahead of us. As the light grew, so did the sound of voices. Voices chanting like priests. As we neared, I could tell that the chanting was Latin, but I’d never studied enough of the language to be able to tell what they were saying.

I looked around. The walls of the tunnel were covered, floor to ceiling, with slots, each about six feet long and two feet high. In some of the slots, I could see the faint pale gleam of bone, in a few, an entire, still-articulated skeleton. I shivered. I’d read about these places. We were in the catacombs. The faint stench of ancient death and decay hung in the still air.

We drew near enough to the red light coming from an arched doorway to see the black-robed figures circling around a leaping bonfire while they chanted, but we didn’t go through. Spike drew me off to the left through a smaller archway and into a small, cell-like room lit only by a candle. A single, robed figure was in there, sitting on a small stool, the robe’s hood drawn over his head. He looked up as we entered, and I stopped dead in my tracks, frozen, completely unable to move. But when he stood, I found I could move after all. I could move backwards, and with as much haste as possible. Before I could get more than a couple of steps away, Spike caught my arm and stopped me, pulling me back into the room. “Be good now. Freddy’s an old friend.” He let go of me and approached the enormous monster. “Freddy, me old son! How’s it hangin’?”

The monster roared something that might, conceivably, have been ‘Spike,’ and engulfed him in a huge bear hug with much manly back-pounding, which Spike heartily reciprocated. The beast emitted a growling, rumbling mumbling and Spike, to my amazement, rumbled right back to him.

Spike extricated himself from the embrace and reached a hand back to me. I let him pull me forward as he said, “Freddy, (rumble, growl) Sunday, (snarl, rumble, growl, snort).”

The creature, Freddy, held out a huge, clawed hand to me and, with much trepidation, I put mine in his, expected it to be mauled, the bones crushed to powder, but he was surprisingly gentle. I nodded and said, with as much confidence as I could muster, “Nice to meet you.”

While Spike and Freddy continued their animalistic impersonation of a conversation, I had a chance to examine Freddy a little more calmly, with a little less blind panic. He was huge – he had to be between seven and eight feet tall. He had curled ram’s horns on either side of his head and a long chin that came to a squared off point several inches below where a normal chin would stop. Kind of like the beards of Egyptian pharaohs, only not quite that long. He skin was darkish and reddish, it was hard to tell by the light of the one candle, and he had exaggeratedly prominent cheekbones and sharp fangs, although not quite in the same configuration as Spike’s and mine. The robe poked up over his shoulders like there was something bony or spiny protruding there, and similar, but smaller protrusions marched down his spine.

Finally, Spike turned back to me and said, “Freddy here has a show tonight, and he’s invited us to participate.”

“What do you mean?”

“Silly gits in the other room think they’re summoning a demon, and Freddy’s here to oblige them.”

“Freddy’s a demon? Vampires aren’t the only demons?”

“You’ve got eyes – what else could he be? There’re more kinds of demons than there are breeds of dogs. Freddy’s a Fyarl demon. In general, they’re not too bright, but he’s kind of their token genius. Got himself quite an act. Kinda the livin’ embodiment of ‘be careful what you wish for.’ Well, if you’re wishin’ for demons, anyway.”

Since we’d been in the room with Freddy, I’d been listening with half an ear to the chanting, which had been steadily growing louder, faster, and more frenzied. They seemed to be at a fever pitch now, wails and screams punctuating the speed-Latin. Freddy bent to raise a trap door in the floor and growled something before climbing down the hole. Spike translated, “Showtime.”

Spike took down a couple of spare robes from hooks set the wall. “Take off your clothes and put this on,” he said, handing one to me. “It’ll save them from getting ruined.” After changing into the robes, we crept back into the tunnel and watched through the wide archway. The demon summoners, maybe fifteen of them, some still in their robes, some naked, were circling round the huge bonfire. They all seemed to be in their late teens to early twenties – just the age to start fooling around with Satanism and the occult in an effort to shock their parents and impress their friends. If anyone was asking for it, it was these idiots.

The room was a chapel, complete with altar and mosaics of saints and other religious figures. It looked ancient – a strange mixture of Byzantine and Roman styles. But past the bonfire, one’s eye was drawn most immediately to the huge inverted crucifix behind the altar.

“So what’s the scoop on churches?” I whispered to Spike. “Can we go in them?”

“Sure, but this one’s deconsecrated, anyway. Shh, watch now.”

The wailing and thrashing increased to the point of hysteria as the flames of the bonfire suddenly started burning a smoky, sickly green. As the chanters fell about, choking and gasping, Freddy stepped out of the flames, raising his arms and roaring. Those still standing fell to their knees then their faces as he towered over them.

“That’s our cue,” Spike said, and we entered the deconsecrated chapel. Iron gates were opened flat against the walls on either side of the doorway. Spike gestured to me; I went to one side, and he went to the other. We closed the gates and, using a heavy chain and padlock that had been looped through the bars on his side, locked them shut.

“Put your game face on and drop your robe,” he said so quietly that I could barely hear him, but he could have yelled it at the top of his lungs for all the attention they’d have paid to us.

Naked and together, we picked our way through the prostrate cultists to stand on either side of Freddy. He took our hands in his and raised them, roaring something incomprehensible, which Spike translated into English for me, and Italian for those on the floor, “These are my lieutenants, my surrogates. Obey them as you would obey me! Feed them as you would feed me!” The roar dropped to a seductive rumbling purr, “Pleasure them as you would pleasure me.”

Freddy dropped our hands and flung off his robe. To this day, I’ve never seen a cock as huge or as terrifying as his. Evil I may have been, stupid I wasn’t. I vowed silently that he wasn’t getting anywhere near me with that thing, and Spike had damn well better back me up on that.

And so I witnessed, and participated in, my first orgy. Since I was still awfully hungry and still pretty well sated sexually by our bathroom fun, blood was the first thing on my mind. I grabbed up the first person I could get my hands on, not caring about gender or attractiveness, and fed.

When I was finished and had let the lifeless body slide from my grasp, I looked around me. Freddy had somehow managed to get himself into a girl while several others held her in place so that his huge prick bloodily sawing in and out of her wouldn’t drag her back and forth across the floor. Spike was feeding on one man while another knelt at his feet, sucking his cock. I was momentarily taken aback, but as I watched, I realized that the sight was arousing me. And annoying me. Someone began pawing at my knees, trying to get my attention. Irritably, I reached down and snapped its neck. I never even bothered to look at whom I’d just killed.

Spike tossed his dinner’s body away. He put his hands in the other man’s hair, shoving himself harder and faster into the man’s mouth until he came, twisting the man’s head so sharply that I could hear the bones of his neck snap over all the moaning and screaming and general carrying on. The last few spurts of Spike’s semen fell on a dead face.

Peevishly, I wondered if that guy had given Spike better head than I had. I was still smarting from his words after my very first, and so far, only complete blowjob, “Points for effort, love, but the technique still needs some work.” So, sauce, I thought, you’ve met the gander, now meet the bitch.

Seizing a guy at random, I dragged him up the short flight of stairs to the altar in front of the upside-down jesus on a stick. I hopped up on it and sat with my legs spread wide. Grabbing his head, I thrust it between my legs. I beckoned for more worshippers, and more came. Soon I had four people doing their fervent best to give me pleasure, to worship me with their hands and tongues. I was stretched out on the altar; hot, sucking mouths attached to my nipples, my cunt, even my toes. Understandably, quite soon I didn’t care what Spike was doing or with whom.

I’ve been to more than few of these things over the years, and it’s been my experience that, after a while, orgy = one big blur. I don’t remember how many I killed, how many Spike killed, how many Freddy killed. Ditto on whom and how many got fucked. But I do remember how it ended.

He was at that moment, that perfect moment right before you come when that’s all you can think of, all you can feel, and the Second Coming couldn’t distract you from your goal. He writhed underneath me, as I rode him, gasping for breath, as I clutched him with the boa constrictor muscles of my inhumanly strong cunt. Just as he was about to have the best orgasm of his short and pathetic life, I clamped down hard, gave one vicious, little sideways wriggle of my hips and ripped his cock clean off. He had a moment to come to the stunned realization of what had happened and to feel the pain. I let him scream a couple of times before ripping his throat out and gulping down huge draughts of his hot, spicy blood, blood positively saturated with testosterone, endorphins, and adrenaline – the ingredients of lust, fear and pain.

As I raised myself off his dead body, I glanced over at Spike who had been watching the whole thing with gleeful licentiousness, and stroking himself to rifle-barrel hardness. I prowled over to where he sat on the steps leading up the to the altar, straddled him, and, reaching down between my legs with both hands, I opened myself wide and pulled out the dripping remains of the dead guy’s little minchia. Leaving one hand busily rubbing my clit; with the other I brought the pathetic little scrap of flesh to my mouth, sucking the blood that was still dribbling from the torn end of it, moving it in and out of my mouth in a triumphantly sadistic backwards fellatio. Oh yeah, I thought, that’s the sauce for this bitch.

Tossing it aside, I lowered myself onto Spike’s much more satisfactory erection. When he was inside me as far as he could go, I tightened around him, cooing archly into his ear, “And don’t think for a moment that I’ve forgiven you for slapping me in the car.” I gave him a first, er, hand demonstration of the little move I’d just recently found to be so effective, and, while his cock was in no immediate danger, he did catch his breath in instinctive alarm before giving me an ‘Okay, you got me’ grin.

But he got me back by rolling us over, pressing my back against the sharp edges of the steps, and fucking me fast and hard, burying his fangs into the place where my shoulder met my neck. I shuddered in passion before answering in kind, sinking my teeth into his hard, white flesh and sucking in his rich, heady blood. This was totally different than feeding from humans. It wasn’t food; it was the purest essence of sex, of belonging, of communion. I drank of his blood in remembrance of who I had been and in celebration of who I had become, whom he’d remade me to be. I truly felt it now. I was a Vampire.

Chapter Five – I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down

Trapped in the chapel by the rising sun, Spike and I curled up together on top of the altar, covered by one of the abandoned robes. Warm and satiated but not quite ready to sleep, we watched Freddy directing a clean-up crew of other Fyarls who were removing the corpses, taking them out through the trapdoor located directly behind the burnt out bonfire. From which Freddy had made his grand entrance. Idly curious, I asked Spike, “What’ll they do with them?”

“Eat ‘em,” he said, toying with a strand of my hair, twining it around his fingers.

“That’s nice. It’d be a shame to waste all that meat.” My mother had had a thrifty streak that I guess I’d inherited.

“I didn’t know the catacombs extended this far outside the city,” I remarked after a couple of minutes.

“Isn’t really part of the catacombs, proper. There’re underground cemeteries all around this city. Lot of them haven’t been rediscovered yet. Like this one. Not by the archeology chappies, anyway. Magic spells keep ‘em hidden from humans, and they’re damn handy places to doss down in a pinch.”

“Oh,” I said, yawning hugely. Yeah, I know. Vampires don’t need oxygen, so why did I yawn? I don’t know. I just know that when I’m sleepy, I still yawn. So much about us doesn’t make sense. Hell, our existence doesn’t make any sense. And speaking of not making sense -

“Magic? Magic’s real?”

“Well, yeah, why wouldn’t it be? Though it’s a tricky bitch to manage. Never been much in that line myself, but Dru finds it fascinatin’.”

Speaking of tricky bitches, I thought, but didn’t say aloud. I did finally give in to my curiosity. “Where is Dru?”

His hand tightened on the lock of hair he was still playing with, pulling it. “With Darla somewhere. I took it as long as I could: Darla sneering at me, being all po-faced and butter wouldn’t melt, but I just had to get out. Tried to get Dru to come with, but she wouldn’t. Seems she’s found religion – again. Darla’s got her all brainwashed with some scheme to find some mystical whosits that’ll free the Master.”

“Who’s the Master?”

“Darla’s sire, older’n dirt, face like an albino bat. Got himself stuck trying to open the Hellmouth. Very into the old myths and rituals. The whole Order of Aurelius thing.”

“So let me get this straight.” I counted it up on my fingers. “The Master would be my great-great-great grandsire? Or have I missed a ‘great’? Is ‘grandsire’ a word? Aurelius as in Marcus?”

“Yes, no, no, and dunno. Never paid that much attention. Ritual and mumbo-jumbo bore me. Much rather be out killin’ something. Or shagging.”

I chuckled. Yeah, in general, I’d rather be shagging, too. But not right now. Too comfy and sleepy.

“What would you be doing if I hadn’t come to Rome?”

“Prob’ly drinkin’ a lot more and having a lot less fun. You’re quite the tonic, you know.”

“If I’m the tonic, you must be the gin,” I said. It says something about my fuzzy state of mind that I thought I was being terribly witty.

He snorted. “Well, that was about the worst joke I’ve heard in nearly one hundred years of unlife. Go to sleep now, before you embarrass yourself even further.”

“’Kay,” I said, wiggling even closer up against him, pulling his arm around me. His deep, rumbling chuckle was the last thing I heard.

***

Now, I don’t believe I’ve a prophetic bone in my body, but images from the dreams I had that day still haunt me with their twisted accuracy. And I am, in a fashion, related to Dru.

I saw Drusilla and another woman, blonde with delicate features, performing their own Latin ritual, dripping smoking blood from a chalice onto an ancient map of the world the size of a large oriental carpet, the blood burning holes in it wherever it fell. As they moved the chalice over the part of the map where North America would have been shown, had it been discovered at the time the map was made, I felt a burning pain in my chest, not unlike the pain I’d felt when my first victim’s cross had touched me. The farther west the blood fell, the more it hurt.

I tried to cry out, to beg them to stop, but I was voiceless. When they got to the western edge of the map, I saw the hand that I had stretched out towards them imploringly turn gray and start to crumble to ash. Screaming in my head, I reached out to catch the falling ash with my other hand, which had a strange gold ring on it with a green stone. I caught the falling ash and was able, with the help of the ring, I somehow knew, to mold the ash back into my own recognizable hand.

Suddenly disinterested in the arcane goings-on, I wandered out of the dark into a brightly lit, generic college campus, locatable geographically only by the palm trees and warmth. I squinted in the bright light – the first full sunlight I’d seen since the previous summer.

I found a secluded bench in full sunshine and was basking in the warmth, enjoying the orange glow of the sun through my closed eyelids when I felt a cool draft up the back of my neck. I shifted uneasily on the hard concrete, raised a hand to block the draft, and stuck my finger in Spike’s eye. He yelled and pushed me off the stone altar onto the floor, where I landed in a graceless heap, blinking up at him and wrinkling my nose at the now rancid smell of all the blood we’d spilled.

One hand clapped over his eye, Spike was laughing at me and my obvious confusion. “Time to get crackin’. Gonna be a long trek back into the city.”

I groaned as I got slowly to my feet. “I was dreaming,” I mumbled sleepily, rubbing my tongue against the roof of my mouth, trying to dislodge some of the pastiness. “It was warm and sunny.”

“Dark and moony, now.” I could hear the leer in his voice.

I exaggeratedly dusted some of the dirt and ash I’d collected off my ass and said, “Better?”

“Positively glowin’, love, but we can’t stay here all night. Plenty of time for compliments once we get back.”

I was feeling disgustingly gaumy, what with the assorted dried fluids and other grit, so I didn’t complain. As fun, in an evil, blasphemous and depraved way, as the previous evening had been, a bed was certainly more comfortable than an altar.

Spike broke the chain that held the gate back to the tunnel closed, and we got dressed in the small cell outside of the chapel where we’d left our clothes. He grabbed a candle to light our way out. The Jaguar was still right where we’d left it, but before I could open the door to get in, Spike scooped a rock up from the ground and threw it through the windshield. The crash shattered the peacefulness of the clear night.

I goggled at him as I watched him poking around for another rock to throw. What on earth had he done that for? Not finding another rock handy, Spike leapt up onto the hood of the car and finished what his rock had started by kicking the rest of the windshield in, jumping up and down, denting the shiny, black metal, laughing, appropriately, like a lunatic under the full moon that looked close enough to lick. Hell, it looked like fun, and, I reasoned, the car was stolen anyway – not like we could keep using it, so I climbed up on the trunk and swung my own booted foot at the rear window.

Wow! What a rush. The noise of the glass was music, underlain by the percussion of Spike’s stomping feet as he bounded from the hood to the roof of the car. Turning gleaming beauty into so much dented and shattered metal and glass. It was a whoopin’, hollerin’ hootenanny of noise and glee and pure high spirits. Spike lost his footing and tumbled off the roof of the car into me, knocking us both to the ground where we lay laughing for a few minutes before getting up to complete the destruction.

I was inside the car, slashing the leather upholstery with a pocketknife I’d found in the glove box when Spike pulled me out. “Get ready to run,” he said, holding onto my arm, and pulled his lighter and cigarettes out of his duster pocket. He wrenched off the gas cap and tossed the lighted cigarette into the tank, in the same moment, taking off running and dragging me along with him. We’d not gotten more than a few yards away before the gasoline in the tank exploded, the violently displaced air throwing us up into the air, sending us flying.

I landed hard, several feet away from Spike and fully expected broken bones, at the very least. I lay still, waiting for the pain, waiting for the damage to become apparent, but I hadn’t even had the breath knocked out of me. Duh, I thought. If you don’t breathe, there’s no breath to be knocked out. Spike picked himself up, brushing leaves and so forth out of his hair then reached a hand down to me. I let him pull me to my feet with a jerk that brought me crashing against his chest. He clutched me to him and whooped once more at the moon, eyes shining gold, before we set off on foot for the city, the beautiful wreckage of fine engineering burningly merrily behind us.

***

Either the body of the parking valet hadn’t been found yet, or the police had come and gone because all was as usual when we returned to the hotel. Other than there being no parking valet, of course. But then, we didn’t have a car anymore, so we didn’t need one.

“Dibs on the bathroom,” I said, as we staggered into the lobby, still giddy from running most of the way into town. It had been the first time I’d really had a chance to test out my new strength and stamina for things other than fucking and fighting. Running for the sheer joy of it, feeling no pain, no labored breathing, no annoying side stitches. I had felt strangely wild and free, thinking nothing, but being totally aware of my environment in a way I’d never felt before.

“S’all right. I’m gonna run out for some more fags, anyway.” He’d pulled out his pack and was feeling it carefully, making sure not to crush the stray last cigarette that might be hiding. Feeling none, he wadded up the pack and tossed it at the bored and sleepy concierge who had straightened up at our entrance but was obviously having a hard time keeping his eyes open. The ball of crumpled paper and cellophane bounced off his forehead before he had a chance to evade or try to catch it. Spike strode magnificently back out the door of the hotel, leather coat swinging with an appropriately Italianate brio.

Soaking in the tub, I had a chance to mull over the events of the previous night. So that was evil. Felt an awful lot like plain old fun. Spike would doubtless accuse me of thinking too much again, but I tried to compare how I felt about the events of the previous evening now and how I would have felt about them when I’d been human.

Well, that’s what I set out to do, but quickly found that there was no basis for comparison. The catalyst, the matrix of it had been the blood, which, of course, would have held no more than an ick factor for the human me. And, of course, a fear of the consequences. That’s what seemed to be the major change in my attitude. I had no fear of consequences anymore. I had a supreme confidence in my ability, my demon’s ability, to do whatever I wanted and get away with it. And a total lack of empathy or sympathy for the humans we’d killed and would continue to kill. Those, I’d found, when it had been me in danger of dying and being nothing more than relieved when they’d killed someone else, were no more than surface emotions I’d paid lip service to until it was me or them. And could a sentence be any more convoluted? No more convoluted than my thoughts at the time, so I’ll let it stand.

The water had cooled, and I was tired of thinking. I gave myself a mental shake and sat up to let the water out. Once it had completely drained, I ran some more hot water into the tub, sloshing it around to rinse out the ring of blood, semen, and just plain grime that had come off of me. Once the tub was clean, I filled it again and got in for a final rinse, thinking that sometimes a shower is much more convenient than a bathtub. The tedious details lend verisimilitude to the story, n’est-ce pas?

The sheets had been changed while we’d been gone, and I slid blissfully between them, the Egyptian cotton, worn smooth and soft by thousands of washings, cool against my bath-warm skin. Pleasantly exhausted, I only idly wondered why Spike wasn’t back yet. I had left a light on for him on the other side of the room and was feeling sleep’s pull when I heard a scratching at the door. I could smell that it was Spike, so I lay back, wondering what in the world he was doing. A few minutes later, the door swung open, and I could see Spike kneeling in the hall, looking fairly pleased with himself for having successfully picked the lock.

“And that was in aid of…?” I asked, as he stood then stooped to pick up a large paper bag that he’d set on the floor.

“Just keeping my hand in. Didn’t have the key and didn’t want to pull you out of the bath.”

“You’re just all full of useful tricks, aren’t you?”

“Well, even though it isn’t as much fun as kicking the door in, sometimes you gotta be a little stealthy.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“Knocked over a chemist’s. Got a few things I needed.” He set the bag on the bed before stripping off his clothes. “Need to get these things washed,” he remarked as he started emptying the pockets of first his coat then his faded jeans which did, in fact, look kind of grubby.

I was poking through the paper bag. He’d gotten a couple of cartons of cigarettes as well as three boxes of hair dye, black nail polish, a fifth of scotch, and several lengths of clothesline. I raised an eyebrow at that, looking at him, ready to make some sort of suggestive remark when I noticed that he was just standing still, holding his jeans in one hand while frowning down at something he’d apparently pulled out of the pocket.

It was a length of red ribbon. Without another word, he dropped his jeans and went into the bathroom. I distinctly heard him lock the door. Damn Dru and her reminders, I thought. I got out of bed, pulled my robe out of the closet, put it on, and collected his discarded clothes into one of the hotel’s laundry bags, hanging it outside the door to be washed by the hotel staff. I can’t say that I wasn’t as motivated by making him stay with me as I was by doing as he’d indirectly asked and getting his clothes clean. Although I’d no doubt that, had he been determined to leave, he’d have had no compunction about taking off wearing nothing but duster and boots.

My tranquil and contented mood spoiled, I unscrewed the top of the scotch and took a long pull straight from the bottle, trying to decide whether to try to distract Spike out of his Drusilla-inspired moodiness or to confront him about it, about her, about me and where this was going. I was young. I hadn’t yet learned about sleeping dogs and the advisedness of letting them tell themselves lies.

TBC

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