Spark and Burn Read online

  Spike closed his eyes; he couldn’t bear to look at the hateful ghost. She always appeared looking as she had in her final moments, wearing a nightdress and shawl, her long, golden hair hanging loose. He mustn’t be allowed to forget that he had staked the demon remains of his mother with her own broken cane. As though that were worse than the vile words that had driven him to rid his existence of her.

  “Just a poseur,” the demon mother went on, “strutting about, hoping no one would see the quivering prig buried under the arrogant bravado, needing his mum or his sire or his Slayer to make him feel a man.”

  Spike covered his ears with his hands. Her barbs cut as deeply now as they had that fateful night, and it mattered just as much. He had changed his invalid mother so she could survive, but she had reviled his gift.

  “Spend eternity listening to your witless twaddle?” The demon mother laughed. “Condemned to be undead forever with you would have been a horror, William. Annihilation was a mercy.”

  “Dawn!” Buffy called out.

  Spike pressed his hands tighter against his ears. The Slayer apparition didn’t come often, but he dreaded it more than the others, more than the Master or the ravenous unknown stirring underground. Every reminder of the Slayer magnified his despair by a hundredfold. Just as he had turned his mother into a demon that was nothing like the woman who raised him, Dru had changed him into a monster Buffy was unable to love.

  “You wouldn’t have cared except for clinging to that last lit’le bit of your humanity,” Dru said. “The Judge saw it, didn’t he? That vile pinch of a person that stole my darling Spike.”

  “It’s not that simple,” Spike protested. Drusilla’s bite had robbed him of his soul, freeing him of moral qualms and mortal constraints, but the sensitivities of the poet remained, irrevocably embedded in his psyche. To mask that inescapable flaw, he had been forced to become ruthlessly brutal.

  Sunnydale

  September 1997

  Spike glanced at the large vampire sprawled unconscious on the factory floor. The ugly brute had believed his own hype and attacked when Spike wasn’t looking. Spike had snapped his fist back, hitting the charging vampire in the jaw. Too easy to be sporting, Spike thought. However, the hostile underlings standing around the Anointed One had gotten the point. Spike had earned his rep as a Big Bad and enjoyed living up to it.

  “So—” Spike turned toward the small boy sitting on an overturned metal vat. “Who do you kill for fun around here?”

  “Who are you?” the boy wonder asked.

  “Spike.” He kicked Big Ugly’s hand out of the way as he advanced on the boy and his ragtag crew. “You’re that Anointed guy. I read about you.”

  In the twelfth century, Aurelius had predicted that an Anointed One would be the Master’s greatest weapon against the Slayer. Apparently, Spike thought with an internal sneer, things didn’t work out as planned. The Master was dead, and his orphans were still plotting to kill the Slayer.

  Another vampire with a goatee and a dust wish got in Spike’s face, trying to intimidate him. Spike saw the uncertainty behind his cheeky stare and smiled, moving past the vamp. The Master’s boy warrior is in charge, he thought.

  “You got slayer problems,” Spike said, addressing the boy. “That’s a bad piece of luck. You know what I find works real good with slayers? Killing them.”

  “Can you?” the boy asked.

  Of course, you moronic sod, Spike thought. That’s why I brought it up.

  “A lot faster than Nancy-boy there,” he said. “Yeah, I did a couple slayers in my time. I don’t like to brag.” He held a straight face for a second before he started laughing. “Who am I kidding? I love to brag. There was this one slayer during the Boxer Rebellion—”

  He stopped short and turned, alerted by the purring growl in Drusilla’s throat as she strolled into the room. She was a vision of elegance in a nineteenth-century gown and gold necklace, radiant in the gloom that permeated the cement cavern.

  “Drusilla.” Spike reverted to human form as he approached her. “You shouldn’t be walking around. You’re weak.”

  “Look at all the people.” She stared at the motley assortment of vampires with the fascination of a child at the zoo. “Are these nice people?”

  “We’re getting along,” Spike said.

  “This one has power.” Dru focused on the Anointed One. Her madness skewed her perceptions and the reality she occupied at any given moment, but it didn’t dull her ability to read those around her. “I could feel it from outside.”

  “Yeah, he’s the big noise in these parts,” Spike explained. “Anointed and all that.”

  “Do you like daisies?” Dru asked, but the boy didn’t respond. “I plant them, but they always die. Everything I put in the ground withers and dies.” She hesitated, as though aware of something that eluded everyone else. “Spike? I’m cold.”

  Spike whipped off his black duster and placed it around her shoulders. “I’ve got you.”

  Dru smiled. “I’m a princess.”

  “That’s what you are.” Spike shivered as Dru cut his face with her fingernail, drawing blood. He paused, kissed her, and then turned to meet the Anointed One’s curious gaze. “Me and Dru, we’re moving in.”

  The announcement was met with stunned silence.

  “Now.” Spike moved away from Dru. “Any of you want to test who’s got the biggest wrinklies around here, step on up.”

  No one moved.

  “I’ll do your slayer for you,” Spike told the boy, “but you keep your flunkies from trying anything behind my back. Deal?”

  The boy nodded.

  “I can’t see her, the Slayer.” Dru’s voice trembled. “I can’t see. It’s dark where she is.”

  Spike hurried back to Dru to ease her anxiety. Drusilla had been born with precognitive sight. Although he couldn’t always interpret correctly her rambling explanations of her visions, the ability to foresee events of import rarely failed her. A vision that left her in the dark was the only thing that truly frightened her.

  “Kill her,” Dru insisted. “Kill her, Spike. Kill her for me.”

  “It’s done, baby,” Spike said, laying a hand on her chest to calm her.

  Dru began to relax. “Kill her for princess.”

  “I’ll chop her into messes,” Spike promised.

  “You are my sweet, my lit’le Spike,” Dru said, appeased.

  Spike held Dru’s gaze a moment, making sure the upset had passed, then taunted the midget warrior with an impertinent grin. “So—how about this Slayer? Is she tough?”

  “She’s alive,” the vamp with the goatee spat back.

  “For now,” Spike said, drawing Dru close. As they started toward the exit, he felt the goateed vamp tense to strike. Spike cast a casual glance back. “Don’t try it. Drusilla hasn’t had a mate to dismember for a while.”

  The vampire swore, but he didn’t follow as Spike led Drusilla into a dark corridor lined with pipes.

  “It’s so damp, Spike,” Drusilla complained as she sidestepped a puddle. “I’ll catch my death.”

  “No, you’ll get better soon,” Spike said. Sunnydale had been built over a Hellmouth, a source of immense power he knew he could use to renew Dru’s strength and vigor. “After I kill the Slayer.”

  “Yes, you must kill her, Spike.”

  “That’s the plan,” Spike quipped. He didn’t want Dru fretting. Worry wore her down and sent her into more frequent flights of panicked raving. He wanted to avoid any unnecessary distractions while he learned the Sunnydale Slayer’s habits and quirks. Every slayer had them. It was just a matter of finding them out.

  “Rip out her heart and bury her deep. Or pulverize her bones and let the wind carry the dust far, far away.” Dru began to glance frantically about.

  “What is it?” Spike asked, not knowing whether the threat she perceived was real or imagined.

  “I can’t see her, Spike. My head swims with dark clouds when I try. I’m blind—like th
e poor lit’le mice in the story with no tails.”

  “You’re not blind, Dru.” Spike stopped. “I’ll show you. Close your eyes.”

  “Why?” Dru frowned, and then smiled, her distress forgotten. “Is it a surprise?”

  “You’ll never guess,” Spike said.

  Their moving routine hadn’t varied much the past several years. When they arrived in a new city, he found a suitable lair, stole whatever he needed to please Dru’s Victorian tastes, then “surprised” her. The only modern convenience he required was a TV. He had already installed one in the corner of the warehouse he had staked out and furnished earlier. He planned to watch an old film or rerun while Dru fussed about unpacking her dolls and trinkets.

  “C’mon, Dru,” Spike cajoled. “You don’t want to spoil it now, do you?”

  “I love surprises,” Dru said, closing her eyes. They popped open again, widening with terror. “This Slayer doesn’t play nice, Spike. She dances with death, twirling her stakes, making dust.”

  Spike realized there was no point moving onward until Drusilla’s rant had run its course. She was terrified of the Slayer she couldn’t see, like a child fearful of make-believe monsters under the bed. That’s how it was with most vampires regarding the Slayer: cold sweats and frightened whispers.

  “I feel it in my bones, rattling and shaking with fever and chills.” Dru stared at the floor, her fists clenched. “She’ll be the end of you, Spike. Nasty Slayer.” She stamped her foot as though squashing a spider.

  “I’ll be careful, pet.” Spike drew her close and held her, hoping the bad spell would pass soon. Her concern was touching, but unwarranted. Spike had heard it all before.

  Yorkshire

  1880

  A mineshaft is a sod awful place to be stuck, Spike thought, rubbing his chin. Lanterns left hanging on support timbers and overhead rafters were cocooned in cobwebs, and the air was chill and stale. A table and chair, shovels, pickaxes, and crates of molding dynamite were coated with black dust and grime. They had been hiding in the deep burrow for hours waiting for nightfall, when Angelus attacked him. At first he thought his grandsire had been provoked by the humorous rhymes he had composed to entertain Darla and Dru. That, he could have understood.

  “You know what I prefer to being hunted?” Spike asked, standing his ground. “Getting caught.”

  “That’s brilliant strategy, really,” Angelus retorted, toying with Spike’s lapels. “Pure cunning.”

  “Sod off.” Spike, exhilarated by the new strength flowing through his veins, faced Angelus with pugnacious defiance. He had lived the demeaning existence of a gentleman without means, dependent on his mother and tolerated as an amusing sideshow by his peers. Now all that was over and done, relegated to a footnote of the past. Everything about being a vampire—the stalking, the chase, the scent of fear, the taste of blood, the kill—made him feel alive for the first time. He would never resort to cowardly caution.

  Darla, looking prim and proper in a stylish hat atop perfect blond ringlets, was quite put out because Spike’s murderous deeds had forced them to flee London.

  Accustomed to luxury and leisure, Angelus objected to passing a day in a mining pit and preferred finesse to a good brawl. He, too, resented the peril the new bloke’s reckless actions had brought upon them.

  On the other hand, Spike’s exploits thrilled Drusilla. She watched him and Angelus spar with a young damsel’s delight, relishing his every audacious word and move. How could he appear to be less than the vicious beast she thought him to be?

  “When was the last time you unleashed it?” Spike taunted Angelus. “All-out fighting in the mob, back against the wall, nothing but fists and fangs. Don’t you ever get tired of fights you know you’re going to win?”

  “No,” Angelus answered, his gaze and attitude deadly serious. “A real kill, a good kill—it takes pure artistry. Without that, we’re just animals.”

  “Poofter,” Spike scoffed.

  Angelus shoved him, but Spike shoved back, driving the more powerful vampire across the wide space where the mine’s underground tunnels intersected. Incensed, Angelus grabbed an axe and snapped its head off. Before Spike regained his balance, Angelus was gripping his coat and pushing him backward. Taller and heavier, with an edge of experience, Angelus threw Spike down on an ore cart and raised the broken axe handle to strike.

  For a moment Spike thought he had pushed the older vampire too far, but the Scourge of Europe stayed his hand. It wasn’t an act of compassion or sympathy for a rambunctious young mate. Angelus would gladly have ended Spike’s short, glorious sojourn as a vampire except that Dru adored him. Since Spike had become Drusilla’s doting companion, she had stopped pestering Angelus and Darla for attention.

  “Now you’re getting it.” Spike grinned, tempting fate with another taunt. Angelus could kill him, and that kept him alert and honing his skills. The threat of obliteration energized both of them and, once the novelty wore off, would prevent endless days from becoming endlessly boring.

  “You can’t keep this up forever.” Angelus pulled back. “If I can’t teach you, maybe someday an angry crowd will.” He answered Spike’s smirk with a short, derisive laugh. “That—or the Slayer.”

  Spike’s smug smile faded as he sat up. “What’s a slayer?”

  Ignoring him, Angelus motioned the women to follow as he ducked into another tunnel. “There’s a draft from an auxiliary shaft somewhere ahead. The locals might be guarding it, but there’s a woods nearby. I doubt they’ll try to follow in the dark.”

  “Follow us where?” Darla asked.

  “The coast,” Angelus replied quickly, having already settled on a plan. “I’ve a sudden craving for French cuisine.”

  Dru gasped with pleasure. “I’ve always wanted to take a holiday in Paris.”

  Spike dusted himself off and pushed back his tangled hair, but he didn’t argue about the decision. He still had much to learn about the demon world, and given the revelation about a mysterious slayer, his companions still had much to teach despite their dreadfully wary ways.

  “Pack of rabbits running scared,” Spike muttered.

  Darla’s eyes flashed with disdain. “If not for your last kill, William, we’d be sitting cozy in chambers now.”

  “It’s Spike now,” he reminded her sharply. “William the Bloody is bloody over.”

  “And his last encore was a work of art,” Dru said, gracing Spike with an admiring glance. “A masterpiece. I never would have thought of it.”

  “Neither did I,” Spike confessed. “Death by railroad spike through the head was his idea, actually. As was the poetry recitation to set the mood.”

  “It was inspired!” Dru touched one hand to her breast and began to recite. “ ‘The bloody awful stench doth linger, painting pictures in my mind. Honey and angel hearts impaled on Cupid’s crooked shaft.’ ”

  Spike had relished tormenting and killing the pompous literary critic who had humiliated him in front of Cecily, but he couldn’t bear to hear Dru mangle the verse he had struggled so to write.

  “What’s a slayer?” Spike asked again, diverting the conversation.

  “A girl who kills vampires.” Angelus paused when the tunnel dead-ended by a narrow vertical shaft.

  “A girl?” Spike wasn’t sure if Angelus was serious or having a joke at his expense. Trying to hide his intense interest, he leaned into the dark shaft and looked up. Stars littered the patch of night sky visible above, and he could detect no flicker of firelight or waft of human scent. “An immortal girl?”

  “No, slayers all die,” Angelus said as he stepped into the shaft. “Mostly while they’re still young and tender.” Then he was gone, blending into the dark as he climbed swiftly upward.

  Spike waited until they were clear of the mine and deep into the woods before he peppered them with more questions. “Where does one find these killer lasses?”

  “She’s everywhere,” Dru whispered. “One at a time but always one. Kill or b
e killed and then there’s another, and she kills too. That’s what they do, slayers. Kill.”

  “Vampires,” Spike stated for clarification.

  “They destroy whatever evil thing happens along,” Angelus said. Although brambles and bugs bedeviled their passage through the forest, his mood had lightened now that they were on the move. “Unless something gets them first.”

  “Which, sad to say, makes no difference to us.” Darla cursed a low-hanging branch that snagged her hat, and cursed again as she yanked it free. “There’s always a new one being trained to fill the vacant niche.”

  “Trained by whom?” Spike asked.

  “Watchers,” Darla explained, “from families with a long tradition of watching over the Potentials, most of whom will never become the Slayer. I’ve heard that those who mentor the Chosen Few keep a record of their murderous lives. There must be a library full of their histories somewhere.”

  “Slayer tales with happy endings,” Dru said. “Nary a one dies of old age.”

  “Short lives, short books,” Angelus added.

  It was those short lives that Spike found most intriguing. Slayers were enhanced to be a match for the vampires they hunted and fought. Yet they died. Frequently, apparently.

  “How many of these slayers have you killed, Angelus?” Spike asked.

  “Can’t say that I’ve ever met a slayer face-to-face,” Angelus said. “I prefer not to.”

  “Scared, are you?” Spike couldn’t resist the jab, but Angelus didn’t take offense.

  “I’m not foolish.” Angelus stopped, his voice smoldering with caution. “Luck, as much as power or talent, accounts for most slayer deaths, Spike. A slayer’s training and ability may differ, but they’re all strong, quick, and driven by one purpose—to kill vampires.”

  Spike was not put off. “One Slayer, many vampires. The odds are not in her favor.”

  “They’re not.” Darla hoisted her red velvet skirts to step over a fallen log. “I doubt a slayer gets much rest. The dangers and demands of defending good against all the forces of evil must be constantly wearing her down.”

  “Then why the hesitation to take her on?” Spike was genuinely perplexed.