"Bollocks," said Spike.  "We're here because yet another sodding supernatural pest decided to make a bid for evil world domination.  Not because of anything you did, love."  His arms tightened around her. 

        "No, Spike, I—"

        "You've always got to make it all about you, don't you, Slayer?" he interrupted, the note of exasperation in his voice increasing.  After a moment, he added, "It's not, you know.  For one thing, you weren't the only one who made a decision about coming back into this world."

        "What do you mean?" asked Buffy.

        After Buffy left, William had become even more of a loner, spending a great deal of time outside, riding and walking.  For a time, the angels watched him closely, but they soon lost interest, and he was once again free to wander anywhere in the gardens.  Once he realized he was no longer under observation, he often sat and even slept under the tree where he had made love to Buffy.  He found that when he slept indoors, the nightmares were worse.

        William knew that nightmares were not supposed to visit the residents of the mansion, but they haunted him nonetheless.  He suffered endless images of Buffy, her eyes empty, her face blank and joyless.  Sometimes she would be simply sad and lonely, sometimes she would look at him with an odd yearning, and once she was fighting.  He woke with his stomach lurching as he realized the creature she was fighting bore his own face. 

        After a particularly restless night, he lacked the energy to exercise and took up his old seat in the main hall, watching the other residents.  He noted that the Mad Girl—it was still hard to think of her as Drusilla—was there, wending her annoying way among the men and women browsing at the buffet table.  William ignored her and began to wonder idly where all these people had come from.  Their clothing should have been a clue, but almost all the newcomers dressed so outlandishly he had trouble imagining what country could have harbored them in life.

        A perfect case in point came into the foyer as he was musing on this topic.  She was a slender young girl, almost a child.  Her hair was a startling shade of pink and adorned with multicolored feathers, giving her a vaguely tropical air.  He assumed that whatever her environment had been, the climate must have been warm.  This thought was reinforced by her shirt, which appeared to be made from a handkerchief, and by her extremely short skirt.  The heels of her shoes, on the other hand, were both hideously clunky and vertiginously high.  He hoped that the hot place she came from also had well-graded pathways; she would certainly trip on any uneven surface.

        William looked at the newcomer’s face and realized that she was staring at him in surprise.  He shuddered slightly; none of the new arrivals had recognized him in a long time, and he had hoped never to see one of those horrified looks again. 

But this girl wasn’t afraid; she approached him said calmly, "Gee, your hair is different."

William’s hand went involuntarily to his dark blond locks.  He stood up with automatic courtesy before answering.  "I beg your pardon, miss?  My hair?"

"It was really cool," said the girl.

"And I thought it would have been warm where you were from," William replied to this apparent non sequitur.

"Huh?" said the girl.

"Bad boy!" said a new voice.

William turned to see that the Mad Girl had crept up on them.  She was frowning at him and shaking her finger.  "You didn’t save her."

"Don’t yell at him.  He tried," said the new girl. 

William gaped in astonishment at the first person he had ever met who seemed to know what the Mad Girl was talking about.

"From the Grrrr—?"  said the Mad Girl, curling her hands into claws and growling like a child pretending to be a lion.

"Uh huh.  He and that woman tried," repeated the newcomer.  "They were fighting the first one, and I ran.  But there was another monster a couple of blocks away."

"What woman?" said William hoarsely.

"Some blonde woman," said the newcomer.  Her eyes strayed around the room.  "Besides, none of that is important anymore," she added vaguely. 

William’s hand shot out and grasped the girl’s wrist.   She tried to pull away, but he held on with a strength that he had never before used on another human being. 

"Let me go!"  She struggled, and the celestial bureaucrats at the reception desk looked in their direction.

The Mad Girl nodded at William solemnly.  "A bit of the demon in you, a bit of the saint in him," she said.  "All confusion and chaos.  Or it would be if someone didn’t need the man in the monster.  And the monster in the girl."   She bounced up and down on her heels and giggled.  "A very special someone."

William ignored her, staring at the newcomer.  "Young lady, I will release you when you have described this woman to me," he said.  "I want every detail that you remember."

Suddenly, Spike released Buffy and stood up.  "What the—"  He went over to one wall and listened.  "Do you hear that?"  She heard him fumbling in his pocket.  Then she had the impression that he'd frozen in place.

        "Something is hissing," said Buffy. 

        "Bloody hell," whispered Spike.  "And I almost used my lighter just now."

        "Xander and Andrew," said Buffy.  Her voice was level and angry.  "They've been trying to impress the Potentials with tales of fast times at Sunnydale High. One night, I saw all the girls, including Rona, listening like it was ghost story time at Girl Scout camp.  Xander was talking about the time that crazy invisible girl trapped him, Willow and Giles in the basement and turned on the gas. And that's what I smell now.  Gas."

        "Well, this looks oddly familiar," said Xander.  He stared at the buzzing, constantly moving, impenetrable barrier that stood between the Scoobies and the high school.

        "Swarms of insects?" said Anya critically.  "I remember a few plagues of locusts, of course, but I thought this kind of thing had gone out of fashion centuries ago, even in vengeance circles."

        "Well, it was the height of fashion for one very, very upset ghost from the 1950s," said Willow.  "A few years ago, he took over the whole high school and a few of the student bodies.  Not to mention Buffy and Angel."

        "And he kept us from following him with an impassible swarm of insects," said Giles.

        "I told Rona that story," said Xander, shamefacedly.  "Looks like her memories are being tapped by the First."

        "When the sun comes up, the Power will pour into the blood of the Slayer," said Buffy.  "And the First wants to be that vessel, so it's not feeling good about sharing the title.  I thought it would be dueling Slayers at dawn, but I guess it's too much of a coward for that."  Her voice dripped with cold anger.  "If this thing thinks I'm going to get out of Dodge without a fuss, it missed my first two exits."  Her final words were punctuated with a rattling cough.

        Spike was at the door again, feeling along the walls.  "We have to get out of here, or find the leak and stop it, to—"

        "No!"  Buffy was pulling on his arm, dragging him back to the center of the room.  "Listen to me, Spike!  There's no time for that.  I'm going to be dead in just a few minutes.  We can't waste them.  I'm so sorry, Spike." She coughed again.  "But I have to use you one last time."

        "I don't get it," said Dawn. "When did Rona learn to make plagues of insects?"

        "She didn't," said Anya.  "The First had plenty of time to learn magical theory, but there were limitations to what it could put in practice without a body.  It had to use the Bringers, and they aren't all that good at mystical stuff.  They may be able to handle the odd chant or charm, but assassination by knife-point seems to be their major skill-set."

        "This is a good spell," said Willow.  "In a bad way.  I mean, it's really, really strong."  She slapped her bicep and stepped back.  "And those things really sting."

        "Can you break it?" asked Giles urgently.  "Willow, I know you've been trying to restrict your use of magic, but—"

        "Yeah," said Willow.  "I was afraid the First was trying to take me over.  But I'm hoping now that it's having too much fun with its pretty new body to bother.  I have to risk it, anyway.  This may take a while, though."

        "Buffy may not have a while," said Dawn.  She reached out to hold Xander's hand as Willow's eyes went black and the witch focused on the buzzing swarm.

William ran out of the great hall, the strange new girl’s words echoing in his mind.  He raced down his favorite path, but for once the trip was difficult, stones seeming to appear just to trip him, and the heat of the summer sun beating down harshly.  By the time he reached the path to his special garden, his chest was heaving with exertion, and he could hear the cries of the angels who staffed the reception desk.   He felt as if he had been running for weeks.

        As he approached the tree where he and Buffy had dallied, William scanned the sky uneasily.  But no one appeared above him, and the voices behind had faded into the distance again.  Apparently none of the angels had found the time, or the forms, to requisition wings yet.  A scandalous lack of foresight, he thought with a gasp of humor.  And how typical of their bureaucratic minds to have ignored all previous evidence that he might attempt to break the rules of this place.

The angels may have pushed him from their minds, but he had never forgotten the tall one’s agitation that day when they had come for Buffy.   William began searching frantically among the roots of the old tree. 

        He found the apple.  It was little more than a core, browned and rotten, and it was easily the most unwholesome thing he had ever seen in this place.  Hoping that he had guessed correctly, William bit into it as hard as he could—

        —and Spike's mouth opened in a scream of pure agony.  His body was throbbing with pain from a thousand wounds and sores.  Every muscle shrieked in exhaustion, as if he had fought a dozen battles.  He was naked from the waist up, and he felt chilled to the very core. 

        A red-eyed demon stood over him, lowering a hand to his chest and saying, "Very well.  We will return your soul."

He had tried to explain it to Buffy, before she grew cold in his arms.  But it was difficult to describe how things worked in that other, too-perfect place.   He was sure that the tale he had told had been too garbled for her to understand.  It had all been filtered through the mind of the bad poet he had once been, complete with clumsy, borrowed metaphor and imagery that failed to express the desperate desire that had enabled him to break the rules of Paradise. 

He hoped she understood that the return of his soul had not been entirely the work of the demon Spike had sought out.  William had chosen to return his soul to his demon-inhabited body, just as, in some way, Buffy had found a route back from heaven into this world.  They had tried to rescue each other’s souls.  He found a bitter irony in that now.  "Our road was paved with good intentions, love," he murmured, gently kissing her still lips.

        There was a crash as the barrier was removed from outside the heavy metal door.  Then a grinding sound as it slowly began to open.  Spike stood up, holding Buffy’s body in his arms.  It was a few minutes before dawn.

Chapter Fifteen