***************************************

He wondered, not too unhappily, when he'd become a grown-up.

Buffy, of course, led the charge but what caught Spike's eye was the way Dawn stuck stubborn to her sister's heels. Wasn't sure how he felt about the small one being up front -- but then he remembered that she wasn't so small, anymore, and that she had no use for him, anymore. He and Wood maintained a terse distance, flanking Nikki and occasionally trading hostile glances.

Giles trailed after Nikki, telling her in a low, intent tone of what he'd learned about her unexpected resurrection, his suspicions, the consequences. For someone who'd bitched long and loud to discover how she'd been brought back, Nikki appeared oddly disinterested. Spike was curious, though, and listened in. So, he noticed, did Wood.

"There is, of course, little evidence to support this theory -- documentation on the First and its followers is notoriously sparse and unreliable. However, it's my belief that your...presence is the result of a botched attempt on the part of the First to assume your incorporeal form. It has done so before, with success -- appearing to individuals as a friend, a loved one, a wronged party. The single unifying factor has been that the apparition…for lack of a better term...is deceased."

"A ghost,” Nikki interjected distractedly. “With an agenda."

"Well, yes. A bit of an oversimplification, but substantially accurate. It has managed to appear as a Slayer -- Buffy, in this case." Giles' gaze flickered to Spike, who returned it evenly. Giles went on. "Buffy technically qualified -- she was once dead. Er -- twice, actually. But she's alive now, and was when the First took her form. Nothing to bring back. You, on the other hand..." He paused, obviously choosing his words carefully.

"Suppose the First decides to appear as you -- to your son, most likely, although it may have also planned to visit Spike as well. It needs to look like you, speak like you, even possess a few of your more poignant memories to complete the picture. So it reaches into the ether, and pulls back enough superficial aspects to pass. It hasn't encountered any resistance in impersonating an ordinary human being; our lifeforce is strong but, once extinguished, is virtually impossible to rekindle. Properly, at any rate."

Spike uncomfortably recalled Dawn, weeping over her mother's grave, and how in his own way he tried to fix things for her and big sis. Ease their suffering. Recalled the stumbling, hollow-eyed zombie he'd followed that night to the Summers home until it thankfully vanished and he was left with his own idiocy.

Nikki was humming to herself; some old blues tune that Spike couldn't place. Giles rushed to recapture her attention. "Now, the First tries to gather up pieces of you, a Slayer. Just the smallest shards, the thinnest shell of you that it can temporarily inhabit. Except -- it fails. Most spectacularly, in fact. What if," and Spike could detect the excitement in the Watcher's voice, the thrill of discovery, "what if the First summoned all of you, rather than just the bits it wanted?"

Nikki slowed her pace marginally, casting a blank look at Giles.

"Imagine," he said, "that before me sits a bowl of water. I extend my hand, to merely wet my fingers as I have done a thousand times in the past. But what I don't know is that the water, this water, carries an electrical charge. I reach out -- I make contact -- I get a shock -- I strike out -- the bowl tips." Giles smiled briefly. "Water, water everywhere."

"And not a drop to drink," Spike muttered from behind them. Giles shot him a glare but Nikki's lips quirked knowingly.

Ahead of them Buffy called a halt. They were in a clearing, exposed, and Spike moved forward, no longer content as rearguard. She stood at the entrance of large, rather decrepit wooden structure. It occurred to Spike how abandoned buildings popped up in Sunnydale with convenient regularity. The Hellmouth, perpetuating itself, keeping in step with some cosmic unnatural progression of things. Or maybe Rupert's lecture was making Spike philosophical.

"Looks deserted," Kennedy piped up. Spike heard the challenge in her words, wanted to smack her.

Buffy's lips compressed, the only sign that she had registered Kennedy's disdain. She caught Spike’s attention, nodded to him and then Willow, Xander and Giles in turn. They regrouped, and Buffy pushed open the dilapidated front door.

The place appeared utterly uninhabited. Dust motes drifted in the flashlight beams, danced along rotting wooden casks. No worries, Buffy would say. She moved slowly through the room, increasingly closer to the uneven stairway that led to a cellar of some sort.

“Slayer! Behind you!” She whirled, just in time to get backhanded from a stolid-faced Harbinger. She recovered immediately but suddenly they were pouring out of the walls, rushing from shadows, the gleam of the daggers they held heralding their arrival.

One of the SiTs shrieked and then it was pure chaos, a fucking madhouse and Spike very fervently wished he was on the other side of the riot like he used to be. Was a sucker’s bet, this whole fighting-for-good bit. He could see that now.

There were so many of them, and Spike didn’t know where to go first. There’d been a time when he’d only worried about Buffy or Dawn in a fight; now he felt the weight of the others slowing his every step. To his right, a Potential let out a screech and Spike was there, slipping between her (Lisa? Lauren?) and the Bringer. He heard her scuttle away, half-expected her to bolt for the door but instead she found one of her sisters – and where had that come from, Spike wondered distantly – and joined her in guarding Willow, who was frantically fashioning a protection spell.

He noted in satisfaction that Nikki was cutting a swath through the Bringers. She moved as if possessed, her grin widening each time another fell. It was a marvelous thing to watch.

Two jumped him from behind and he went down, taking them with him. They grunted and scuffled on the floor, locked in some surreal scrum until Xander hacked and slashed his way through the brown robes to Spike.

“Buffy’s downstairs,” Xander gasped out. “Gotta keep ‘em away from her.”

Which wasn’t so much of a problem, really, because the battle had spilled outside. More crying, shouting and above it all Willow’s hoarse incantations that didn’t seem to be doing a hell of a lot of good. Spike darted uneasily between the entrance to the winery and the courtyard, aware that he saw fewer Potentials now than when they’d first walked in.

He didn’t know how long the skirmish lasted; for long dreamlike moments he heard only the tearing of flesh and the sick thud of bodies and bruises. Buffy was nowhere to be found and that didn’t sit well with him; with every other punch he looked over his shoulder to see if she’d emerged. She didn’t, even as the Harbingers fell around him and Willow’s magic gradually waned.

He was sticky with blood: his own, the Harbingers and others’. It was the others he didn’t want to think about; he’d rarely stayed long enough after a brawl to pick through the casualties. It promised to be a gruesome task – the soul made everything grim and hurtful.

A few hardy Bringers were making their way back to the winery. Spike and Xander attacked in unspoken agreement. More crunching of bones – Spike hoped they weren’t the carpenter’s and then berated himself for the thought.

Two down, one to go when Spike heard a terrified scream from behind the building. One of the girls. Spike faltered; Xander was still pinned under the remaining Harbinger. Fuck, what to do?

“Go,” Xander ground out. The Harbinger’s inched up to his windpipe. Spike was lost.

“The girls, Spike. Go now.” And there was something reassuring in Xander’s expression, something that understood the infant soul’s confusion. Trust me, Xander told him silently. I’ve been doing this a lot longer than you. Doing the right thing, Spike realized.

He aimed a final crushing kick to the Harbinger’s ribs; it recoiled and Xander rolled away. Spike took off.

He skidded round the corner of the building, and stopped short.

Nikki stood, surrounded by the bodies of half a dozen Bringers. She was laughing. Laughing, and holding a sword to the throat of Chao-An.

The little girl was sprawled, arms and legs akimbo, on the ground. She’d obviously been fending off the robed wankers on her own before Nikki appeared. Spike had no doubt that it was Nikki who had killed them, one by one. And now she loomed over Chao-An, intoxicated by death, desperate for another fix.

Spike hadn’t been the only one to hear Chao-An’s cry – across from him, Wood was frozen in horror, riveted to the sight of his enraptured, demented mother.

Nikki drew back the sword, arm raised in a wide, graceful arc.

Wood tackled her first, knocking her away from Chao-An and Spike went to the girl automatically. After a perfunctory examination for injuries he was beside Wood and Nikki, who grappled for the sword in her hands.

Chao-An was wailing and Spike picked out a few choice American obscenities between the Mandarin. Beneath Wood, Nikki was thrashing and hissing. Her hands were wrapped around the blade now, unmindful of the blood pouring from her clenched fingers.

With Spike and Wood both tugging at the sword, they managed to wrench it from Nikki’s grasp. She leapt up, furious.

“What’s wrong with you?” Wood exploded. That seemed to faze her slightly. Not much, in Spike’s estimation – she remained defensive and suddenly alien to them.

“Keep your mouth shut,” Spike snarled, and wasn’t sure whether he was speaking to Nikki or her son. He turned to Wood. “Nothing’s wrong with her. She just got a bit mixed up, yeah? Heat of the battle and all that.”

“You saw her, she was about to –"

Spike knelt next to Chao-An, bent close and whispered soothing things in her ear that wouldn’t be heard by anyone else. Calming, the girl finally extended her arms and Spike tugged her upright. She sniffled into his coat and Spike looked over her head at Wood. “Chao-An knows it was an accident. Don’t you, sweet?” She nodded uncertainly and broke away from him to leave.

She stopped when she saw Buffy, though.

For all that he didn’t need to breathe Spike felt suffocated, then. A Slayer on each side and in just about any other circumstance he’d have reveled in it, but now he had the sense of being tragic and trapped like the hero of some penny dreadful.

So this was the soul, then, making itself heard. And he had to credit the sheer fucking irony of it, the doomed humor that certainly amused Someone but not Spike.

He’d never known about the choices, the decisions; he’d imagined (on those very rare occasions) that The Right Thing was something concrete and immovable, unappealing but easily identifiable -- a kind of karmic Riley Finn. And it was unfair, he thought, to get this far and then be confronted with the new lesson of degrees of goodness, of having to sacrifice one for the sake of another. He thought, too, of Buffy during the Glory Days, the fate of Dawn and the fate of the world vying for position in her heart and mind.

He wondered if she was thinking of that as well because there was some sad understanding in her expression even as she took in the fiasco before her. She’d seen what happened, or enough; she advanced on Nikki with the measured and measuring gait of an adversary. She was holding some weapon he’d never seen before; it shone wickedly and she carried it with ease.

“She isn’t a threat to you,” Spike put in desperately. “Been a cock-up, Slayer, no question, but –"

Buffy's gaze fell to Chao-An, and the thin trickle of blood that decorated her bare neck. Then she looked back to Nikki. “Take her away from here,” Buffy ordered quietly. “Until we figure out what the hell is going on.”

Spike waited for Wood to gather Nikki up, but the other man didn’t move – just stared at Nikki with dread and disgust and it dawned on Spike that Wood didn’t want to touch her.

Nikki realized it too; her eyes were no longer haunted but cold and opaque. “Not even a kiss for mother?” she asked, as Spike went to her side. Wood shuddered visibly.

“Best be off, pet,” Spike said, and when she looked at him he knew she wasn’t through yet.

Still, she didn’t protest; let him steer her from the clearing and away until they’d disappeared from view entirely.

“There’s still killing to be done,” she told him earnestly as the grass gave way to crumbling sidewalk and they were underneath the glare of Sunnydale streetlamps again.

"I know," Spike answered. "But not tonight."

Part 13: This Little Light of Mine

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