Serious Moonlight

Sequel to The Heart's Filthy Lesson
Rating: Remember the last story?  Like that.
Summary: Nah.  But bad things happen to
chairs.
Authors' note: It's possible we've invented a 
new genre: SpikeTorture.  Didn't mean to do 
it; it just happened that way.

Serious Moonlight 1/26

"I don't have plans and schemes /And I don't 
have hopes and dreams /Baby, I just don't 
have anything, anything/Since I don't have 
you /I don't have you."

The jazz swirled through the bar like the 
haze of cigarette smoke.

It was Tuesday night at Lovecraft's and the 
usual congregation of male losers of the 
undead, dead, demon, and assorted 
supernatural worlds were lurking in the 
shadows, drinking, playing cards and 
generally being uninspiring. It looked like a 
cross between the Cantina scene in the 
original Star Wars and the movie poster for 
The Usual Suspects, even down to crap fashion 
sense.  Spike was perched on his favorite 
barstool, drinking Stoli and A positive, 
indulging in a bout of self-pity.  There had 
to be some way that he could get out of the 
funk that surrounded him like an eight-week 
wet afternoon.

"I don't have fond desires /And I don't have 
happy hours /Baby, I don't have anything, 
anything /Since I don't have you /I don't 
have you."

He wondered if Prozac worked on vampires.

"I don't have Happiness and I guess /I never 
will ever again /When you walked out on me 
/In walked old misery /And he's been here 
since then," the jukebox continued, despite 
the fact that the Chaos demon was growling at 
the aged Wurlitzer.

Small chance that the Chaos demon was going 
to be able to get the latest Britney Spears 
any time soon.  Spike had shoveled ten dollars 
in quarters into it and told it to keep playing 
his song.  Sometimes the only thing a 
vampire could do was drink a lot of booze, 
listen to depressing music and then stagger 
back to his hiding place at the crack of dawn.  
What no one appreciated was that vampires 
had hearts, too -- undead, unbeating hearts, 
right enough, but they could be macerated 
by a woman's meat-grinder treatment as 
easily as a human's.

"I don't have love to share /And I don't have 
one who cares /Baby I don't just have 
anything /Since I don't have you /I don't 
have you."

He was starting to think that women were just 
placed in the Universe to make men miserable.  
He lit another cigarette and chased the 
olives around in his drink.  Blood and 
alcohol swirled like a barber's pole.  Women 
existed only to shag and play games with 
men's hearts and minds, regardless of the 
life signs connected to those organs.  Dru 
had played him for a fool and dropped him 
like a crucifix, and the Slayer had done the 
same.  Maybe a spot of celibacy was in order.  

A spot of being dragged through boiling lead 
while wearing an aluminum thong might be 
slightly more enjoyable.  Was there something 
in the bar that he could shag, or kill, or 
shag than kill? 

He smelled perfume and looked up.

She was stacked, she was familiar, and she 
was a pain in the ass.

"Hullo Anya," Spike said as the former 
vengeance demon sidled up to the bar next to 
him.

"Bourbon, straight, no ice," she told the 
barman.

"Havin' a bad hair day?" he asked.

"Why would you think that?  Just because I'm 
going to a demon bar to kill as many brain 
cells as possible, why would you think that I 
was having a bad day?" She paused and caught 
a breath.  "What's wrong with my hair?"

"Noth--"

"I asked him if he liked the dress and he 
failed to look up from the television." Her 
voice had become even higher and more 
machinegun than usual.  "Survivor was 
obviously more important to him than I was.  
So I left.  I took his car and I left. And he 
still failed to look up from the television."

"You took his car?" Spike echoed, horror-
struck.

The barman slapped a glass in front of her, 
and the twenty-(centuries)-something pretty 
girl threw a shot back like John Wayne, wiped 
the back of her hand across her mouth and 
nodded for another.  

"I borrowed it.  I told him and he continued 
to stare at the bikini bimbos on television. 
I didn't steal it."

"A fine point there," he agreed and took a 
deep gulp of his Bloody Charlie.  "But you 
shouldn't be here, since you aren't actually 
a demon anymore."

"So?"

Girl-logic.  If he lived to be a thousand, he 
would never understand girl-logic.  The 
problem was that it wasn't logic as such, it 
was moving from point X to point A by way of 
the shoe store and a couple dozen make-up 
counters.  Anya wiggled on the barstool, 
fluffed her hair and gave Spike one of her 
more frighteningly intense looks, one that 
crawled around the back of his skull and 
looked for change under the cushions.

"I don't have love to share /And I don't have 
one who cares /Baby I don't just have 
anything /Since I don't have you," the singer 
ambled off into a sad coda.  A moment later, 
the music started again and the Chaos demon 
kicked the jukebox.

"Giles is gone," she said after the third 
shot.  "In England having sex with his 
girlfriend.  He said it was 'for a variety of 
business reasons' but I heard him on the 
phone with her and this is definitely sex 
tourism.  So I have to run the shop all 
alone, and all I do is smile at customers and 
take their money, and at night it's all scary 
and Xander won't come to pick me up because 
he says he's too tired from hauling bricks 
around all day -" she stopped to hiccup - 
"and all I want is someone to pay attention 
to *me*."

She was doing fine without him, but he nodded 
anyway.

"I mean it's all changed, its not the way 
that it used to be. He comes home and we eat 
dinner and then he gets in front of the 
television and turns into a couch radish." 

"Potato. Couch potato."    

"Well, some kind of starchy food.  And we 
don't talk and we never have sex anymore."

Anya's voice was loud enough to make the 
Calansis demons look up from their eternal 
poker game near the jukebox.  Spike gave them 
a good glower and turned his attention back 
to Anya.  The former demon was red around the 
face and nose and Spike wondered if she was 
going to explode or just break down and cry.  
Either one was an ugly proposition.

"Because he's too tired from hauling bricks 
all day- And I want to have sex, sex is good 
and I really like having sex with him and I 
always -"

"I get the picture," Spike cut her off.

"This long-term relationship stuff really 
sucks."

"And you're just figurin' this out now?"

Which was just enough to push Anya over the 
edge.  Her eyes filled up with tears and she 
began shredding the cocktail napkin between 
her shaking fingers. "But I just love him so 
much-"

"Right, that was your last call. C'mon, let's 
get you home." He took Anya's arm and began 
to propel her towards the door. 

"But I don't want to go.  I want to stay here 
with the demons.  I belong here, not with 
Xander," she whined, and balked.

"No, no more demons," he ordered.

"But-"

"Dude," a surprisingly un-supernatural voice 
demanded from right behind Spike, "she 
doesn't want to go."  

"Yes she does, she just hasn't realized it 
yet," Spike said and dragged Anya a foot or 
two closer to the door.

Chaos demons, fucking Chaos demons, the 
horniest thing in the Malleus Malleficarum, 
why was he pursued by Chaos demons?  And this 
one's horns were oozing with lust as he 
looked at the tidbit that was Anya.  It was 
tempting to leave Anya to the devices of the 
Chaos demon, and she'd probably had more than 
one when she was a demon herself, but they 
tended to leave marks on humans and this 
would doubtless end with him being banned 
from the Magic Shop, which would be a Bad 
Thing.

"I don't have love to share /And I don't have 
one who cares /Baby I don't just have 
anything /Since I don't have you /I don't 
have you."

"Dude," the Hawaiian-shirt-sporting demon 
repeated, "she doesn't want to go."

Since he really wasn't in the mood for a 
fight, Spike caught up a barstool and brought 
it down on the Chaos demon's head with the 
full force of his vampire strength.  The 
demon snarled and grabbed at him with hands 
the size of Christmas geese.  Spike ducked 
behind another vampire, who ended up on the 
wrong side of the Chaos demon.  The vampire 
fang-faced at the demon and snarled.  

Anya let out a very humanly girlish scream 
and skittered away, knocking over the 
Calansis poker table.  Four fucked-off 
Calansis demons advanced into the fight, 
where the Chaos demon and the extra vampire 
were alternately pounding on one another and 
trying to pound Spike.  For his part, Spike 
made a beeline over the assorted tables, 
leaping from one to the other, breaking 
glasses and spilling drinks as he went.  He 
dodged around the Calansis demons and headed 
for Anya near the jukebox.  This, he thought 
as he kicked the nearest Calansis in the 
head, was more trouble than it was worth.  
Anya gaped at him with her eyes round as 
manhole covers.  Spike grabbed her arm just 
as the Chaos demon went down in a puddle 
of slime underneath a dog pile of Calansis.

"Spike," the bartender shouted from where he 
was hiding beneath the bar, "Don't come back 
here!"

"Put the stool on my tab," Spike instructed 
and hauled Anya out the back door, just as 
chairs began to fly through the air and 
Lovecraft's degenerated into a supernatural 
bar brawl.  

"When you walked out on me /In walked old 
misery /And he's been here since then," the 
jukebox continued over the mayhem.

"I hope you don't think that this is going to 
mean I'll have sex with you-" Anya stated as 
he pulled her into the night.

Serious Moonlight 2/26

 
Buffy bounced into the lecture hall, swinging 
her bookbag with cheerful, decapitating 
force.  Willow was already waving from the 
fourth row, her bag blocking off a seat for 
Buffy.

"So what's today's topic?" she asked Willow, 
sprawling into the bag-held seat and busily 
rifling through her notebook to find an empty 
page.

"Guest lecturer.  Some mummies are here in 
Sunnydale on loan from a museum in Cairo, and 
the curator of the traveling exhibit is here 
to talk about them."

"Mummies again?"

"These are Egyptian mummies, the regular 
Boris Karloff kind, not the strange and 
little-known Inca kind ... Buffy? Buffy?"

"Who is that vision of male beauty?" Buffy 
breathed, just as he approached the podium 
and began to speak into the microphone.

"Tie, real adult, survey says - guest 
lecturer Dr. Peter Talbot."

"Temptation Island eat your heart out."

"Be less tempted and more attentive," Willow 
joked.

The professor blathered on about Egyptology, 
and hieroglyphics, and something called the 
Rosetta Stone - all things the regular 
professor had covered for this segment of the 
World History survey, but admittedly not 
nearly as attractively.  Buffy was glad she 
didn't need to take notes.  It left her more 
time to contemplate the natural wonder in 
front of her.  Was his hair really so black 
that it had blue highlights?  She was looking 
for a dark guy these days.  Not dark 
personality-wise, but dark hair, dark eyes, 
even a little brooding would not be out of 
place.  No bleach, no nail polish - she'd got 
those covered on her own.  One hundred 
percent normal, un-augmented, genuine, 
factory-warranty human guy was what she had 
in mind. 

"Incredibly, the bodies were *not* mummified, 
despite the luxurious setting of the tomb, 
which was reserved for mummies from the 
highest classes.  Time worked its ravages, of 
course."  He smiled out at the audience, blue 
eyes twinkling mischievously.  

"Are those dimples, even though they're 
long?" Buffy whispered to Willow.  "'Smile 
creases' sounds so ... non-yummy."

"Shhh."  Willow bent over her notes.

"Adding to the mystery, the bodies were 
locked together in an eternal embrace."

Buffy shifted in her seat, her mind doing a 
Beavis "he said 'embrace'" riff.  He was 
wearing a blue dress shirt with a stripy red 
tie, the top button of the shirt undone and 
the tie a bit loose.  The suit jacket was 
draped over a vacant chair in the front row, 
and the dark pants fit so well they had to 
have been tailored.

"The bodies have been identified as those of 
two women."

Willow looked up, her mouth dropping open.

"Sisters without the skin," Buffy suggested, 
and Willow frowned.

"Of course, the posture was not necessarily ... 
sexual," the lecturer said, his voice 
dropping on the last word as if he were 
saying it just for Buffy's benefit.  "They 
could have been fighting.  Even more 
bizarrely, carbon dating places the age of 
one body at over three thousand years, but 
the other tests as recent - from within the 
last century.  There are signs that the tomb 
was entered within that period, but no 
explanation for how the younger body could 
have wasted away to the same condition as the 
older body, or how they could have become 
entangled without completely destroying the 
older one."

The screen flashed on some hieroglyphics, 
reminding Buffy of some of her less 
successful attempts to use an iMac.  Within 
the squiggles and other indefinable symbols, 
she recognized a few from spell books.

"The paintings in the tomb are primarily 
related to the worship of Sekhmet, the 
goddess of bloody vengeance and battle.  This 
is highly unusual since traditionally most 
tomb art revolves around the rising of Osiris 
from the dead. Sekhmet is a fiery and 
destructive Egyptian goddess associated with 
war and divine vengeance. Her name means 'the 
Mighty One.' One of her primary temples was 
located in Luxor, a few miles from the Valley 
of the Kings." 
  
He smiled. "Which is where King 
Tutankhamun was buried, one pharaoh I'm sure 
everyone has heard of."

Buffy remembered Giles saying once that the 
legend of Osiris being brought back from the 
dead was a metaphor for vampire ontogeny.  At 
the time she hadn't understood what he had 
meant, since that was before she had done the 
cram course for the SAT's.  But Giles had 
never mentioned anything about Sekhmet, and 
it wasn't like him to leave something out if 
he thought it was important.  He was more 
inclined to add an awful lot of excess 
information.

The guest lecturer smiled out into the 
audience, his voice wrapping warmly into 
Buffy's head.

"According to a tale known as 'The 
Destruction of Mankind,' Sekhmet was the 'Eye 
of Re,' a vengeful aspect of the usually 
benevolent goddess Hathor. The sun god Re 
sent Sekhmet to slay mortals who were 
plotting against him. Sekhmet became so 
enthusiastic about her task that she nearly 
slew all of humanity. Re prevented this by 
tricking her into drinking vast quantities of 
beer, which had been colored to look like 
blood. The intoxicated goddess had to abandon 
the slaughter and humanity was saved."

Okay, so Sekhmet was a bloodthirsty bitch, 
and two chicks trying to kill each other had 
been left in a tomb covered with pro-Sekhmet 
graffiti. Willow was writing away at 60 mph, 
and Buffy frowned at her.  What was the 
point of taking notes if there wasn't going to 
be a test?

"As goddess of war, Sekhmet was often said to 
accompany Pharaoh into battle. She was also 
the 'Lady of Pestilence' who could send 
plague and disease. She was also revered as a 
healer of these ailments, a role that seems 
paradoxical in such a bloodthirsty deity.  Go 
figure." The professor looked at his watch 
and beamed his grin around the hall again. 
"They said I had a minimum of one hour, and 
since I remember what it was like to be you 
guys, I'm going to stop now."  There was a 
ragged smattering of applause from around the 
hall.

"Yeah, well thanks," he said and tapped his 
notes into a tidy pile of cards. "But you 
could do me a favor by coming to the exhibit 
- in Murphy Hall between now and the endd 
of the month - and filling out one of those 
comment cards saying how great it was."

The lights came up and the students filed out 
of the auditorium.  The guest lecturer strode 
off the stage without a backward look. 
Buffy was disappointed.  She had wanted to 
ask him if the mummies had been part of 
some sort of Sekhmet Sisters gang.

"That was interesting. Lesbian mummies, 
bloodthirsty goddesses, don't hear that in 
class all that often," Willow said and 
stopped.  "At the Magic Shop, yes, in class, 
no."

"Still," Buffy said, popping the top of her 
Diet Coke, "Creepy mummies aside, he is 
pretty cute, in an Indiana Jones kind of 
way."

"You're totally talking to the wrong person 
about that.  But I can see a certain scruffy 
charm."

"Scruffy charm has its charms.  And anyway, 
if Tara weren't in the picture, are you 
telling me that you wouldn't even *consider* 
a guy who possessed such wasabi hotness?  Not 
even if he smiled at you like he was smiling 
in the lecture hall?"

"I think this is the point where I invoke 
don't ask, don't tell.  Speaking of guys in 
the general segue kind of way and not meaning 
to pry closer than is really necessarily, 
have you talked to---" Willow mimed fangs.

"No." Buffy said, a little nastier than she 
had planned. "Not going to.  Over and done 
with."

"Heard that before," Willow said to herself, 
and Buffy decided that she could pretend that 
she herself hadn't quite heard.

"I'm totally and completely serious.  Living 
guy-free right now is pretty good, quiet, and 
I kind of like that." They rounded a corner 
of the classroom building and walked straight 
into what was either the football team or a 
group of trolls with unusually good personal 
hygiene. "Not that I would want to take it up 
as a permanent kind of thing."

Surrounded by the valley walls of man-flesh, 
Buffy felt a little wavery around the edges; 
the humid California afternoon was thick with 
yummy boy-smell.  Eye-level with buff chests, 
shoulders, rippling 6-pack abs, every little 
bit of muscle primed and ready for athletic 
prowess on the artificial turf and towel 
snapping in the locker room afterwards.  
Buffy wasn't sure if she was having an 
anxiety attack or some kind of lust seizure, 
but her heart was pounding faster in her 
chest than a Eurodance track, and she turned 
a reddened face to Willow.  

"So when's Giles getting back from England?" 
she asked in a helium-esque voice, trotting 
through the hallway at breakneck speed to get 
away from the fug of man-ness.

"Next Wednesday." Willow broke into a half-
canter trying to keep up, her backpack 
bumping against her shoulders.  "I don't 
think that he's going to be happy with the 
bill from the electronic alarm company.  You 
know they charge three hundred dollars each 
time the alarm gets tripped by accident?"

"I always thought Anya was a little quicker 
on the uptake than that."

"But seven times in three days?   And why are 
we running?"

Buffy pushed open the heavy steel and glass 
door as though it was made of paper and took 
a deep breath of fresh air. "Not running.  
Just crowded, too many guy-people breathing 
the air."

"Ri-ight.  You know, Anya only seems to set 
off the alarm while she's closing up for the 
night.  You might want to cruise by when 
you're on patrol, just to let her know you're 
keeping an eye on her."

"Will, there are about seven zillion 
protection spells on that building. She 
doesn't need me."

Willow stopped dead in her tracks and 
shuffled the gravel between her feet for a 
moment. "You don't have to avoid the store 
for the rest of your life.  I think two 
months might be long enough, don't you?"

"I haven't been avoiding the store, I've been 
busy, I have really hard classes this 
semester and when I'm not patrolling I'm 
reading or doing homework.  I have Ancient 
Civ and English Lit and even you would get 
bleeding eyeballs from the reading that you 
have to do with them!"

"And this would have nothing to do with the 
fact that certain people of the undead 
persuasion have been known to frequent 
aforementioned place."

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Hello?  I said nothing and I mean nothing." 
Buffy frowned and qualified herself.   "I 
mean something which is I mean that I'm not 
avoiding the Magic Shop because certain 
people of the undead persuasion have been 
known to frequent aforementioned place."

Willow blinked.

"Cross my heart," Buffy lied.


Serious Moonlight 3/26

 
Getting Anya home turned out to be a far more 
complex event than Spike had imagined.  There 
was Xander's car to deal with, for one thing, 
and the fact that Anya absolutely refused to 
stop crying just cast a pall over an 
otherwise annoying series of events.  

The moon was fat and full, which explained a 
lot of things, including the dog/man shaped 
thing that Spike almost hit a few blocks from 
Lovecraft's.  Damn werewolves completely 
forgot the rules of the road when they 
changed.  The most staid businessman turned 
into a yipping idiot, leaping in front of 
cars.  Made you wonder how the police 
explained all the naked hit and runs in and 
around SunnyD. Then again, the SunnyHell 
police were hired by weight rather than IQ.

Finally, with the car parked in the 
appropriate place at Xander's apartment 
building, Spike escorted Anya up into the 
hallway. His motivation was strictly 
mercenary; he had the idea that at some point 
this would earn him a few brownie points in 
the eyes of that ridiculous blonde creature.  
Anya tottered along in her fashionably stupid 
shoes and Spike let her, not offering support 
since he didn't need the brownie points that 
badly.

Anya was blubbering too hard to get the key 
in the door, which seemed somehow symbolic to 
Spike.  Finally he claimed her keyring and 
did it himself, turning the knob and giving 
the door a kick to open it up since he 
couldn't enter.

Xander had responded to the commotion by 
leaving the couch; Spike could see, over his 
shoulder, the bowl of Doritos he'd abandoned 
on the coffee table.  "Where have you been?" 
he demanded as Anya brushed past Spike and 
stumbled into the apartment.  Then Xander 
deigned to notice Spike, and Anya's 
questionable emotional state.  "What have you 
done to her?"

"I don't want to talk to you," Anya wailed, 
and ran into the depths of the apartment, 
presumably to the bathroom (holy ground for 
females).

"If you've hurt her -"

"Oh, dispense with the soap opera, you can't 
act that well," Spike growled from the 
doorway, the threshold between him and Xander 
like an invisible force field in a Classic 
Star Trek episode.  "Your girl wanted a bit 
o' sexual satisfaction and had to accept 
alcohol as a substitute.  Speakin' for 
m'self, I can see why she's upset, though not 
why she's so particular about getting her 
man-love from *you*."

Anya was back now, shorter without the 
dangerous shoes.  Her eyeshadow was smeared 
from where she'd washed her face, like a 
clumsy child playing with mother's makeup.

"I don't need your advice," she snapped.

"Oh, sure, complain to me for hours on end 
and then take *his* side."  Spike didn't know 
why he was surprised.  Anya was just as much 
a human girl as if she'd skipped a thousand 
years of inflicting misery on men.  Or maybe 
that aided her presentation.

"This is none of your business, Spike."  
Xander had stepped forward and was poking his 
finger into Spike's silk shirt.

"Come out into the hall and say that, floppy 
boy," Spike said and gave Xander malevolent 
smile #4.

Xander stepped back into the apartment a 
couple of feet, well out of arm's reach.  
Anya velcroed herself to his side and settled 
for glaring at Spike as though he'd started 
the whole thing to begin with.

"Just leave us alone," Xander warned.

This was really beginning to get tiresome, 
this doing someone a good turn and having it 
blow up in your face like a kitten in a 
microwave.

"Yeah, I'm sorry I didn't let your girl wrap 
your car around a tree.  Look, she's back 
unharmed, just somewhat th' worse for 
alcohol.  So be a good pair of dimwits and 
have a nice shag, right?"

Xander and Anya blinked at him like owls 
caught in broad daylight before he spun away, 
wishing he could have reached inside the 
apartment to slam the door.

As he stomped down the steps of Xander's 
apartment building, Spike found himself 
wondering why males and females ever really 
bothered with one another. Masturbation was 
never this complicated.

Serious Moonlight 4/26
 
"Wow, talk about sun damage.  Didn't they 
have moisturizers back then?" Buffy breathed 
and stared up at the intertwined figures in 
the glass case.

The bodies looked as though they had been 
formed out of chopsticks covered with several 
large corn flakes, and then deep-fried. She 
wondered if Full Ho Luk was still open and if 
she could talk Willow into some fried won ton 
before heading home.

"Crispity-crunchity," Willow agreed.  "And 
it's kind of rare because the Egyptians 
actually had to do a lot of stuff to their 
mummies to make them mummies.  I mean it just 
doesn't happen every day."  

"What kind of stuff?"

"Icky kind of invasive stuff," Willow hedged, 
circling around the glass, looking up at the 
mummies.  "These are natural - people 
raisins."

Buffy looked again at the entwined figures.  
Something about them was twinging her Slayer 
sense, setting her brain vibrating like a 
plucked guitar string.  The faces, if you 
could call them faces, were nearly touching; 
lips peeled back from snarling teeth and 
eroded gums. 

"During the Old Kingdom, from 2750 to 2250 
BC, only royalty was mummified, but during 
the New Kingdom, 1539-1070 BC, it spread to 
the other classes."  A voice floated out of 
the darkness behind one of the paper-mache 
mummy cases which served as set dressing in 
the University museum.

Willow jumped away from the case when she 
heard the voice, and Buffy automatically 
jammed her hand in her bookbag and grabbed a 
stake.  Anything talking to you after sundown 
wasn't necessarily a friend in Sunnydale.  

The voice belonged to the jalapeno-flavored 
guest lecturer, who was hanging out in the 
gloom of the museum.  He must have been 
keeping an eye on his priceless display, 
making sure that the jocks and other things 
that went bump in the night didn't bother his 
crispy ladies.  Buffy let go of the stake, 
since staking a guest lecturer was probably 
going to reflect badly on her GPA.  He was 
even cuter up close, in the dim light of the 
museum.

"To make a true Egyptian mummy, all the 
internal organs were removed, except for the 
heart.  The liver, the intestines, and the 
kidneys were all preserved in canopic jars 
because they were necessary for the body to 
regain life in the afterworld.  The only 
organ discarded was the brain, because they 
had no idea what it was for.  The body was 
packed and covered with natron, which is a 
natural salt, and left to dry for forty or 
fifty days.  Then the body was packed with 
sawdust and spices before it was finally 
wrapped in linen covered with spells and full 
of amulets wrapped between the layers.  Of 
course nothing like that happened here, hence 
the mystery." His voice was as silky as sand.

"Extreme mystery," Buffy agreed.

"Were you two at the lecture?" he asked, 
coming a little closer into the light 
spilling over from the beams shining down 
into the mummy case.

"We were. I'm Willow Rosenberg and this is 
Buffy Summers."

"Hiya," Buffy muttered.  Dr. Talbot was still 
wearing his suit.  She was used to sussing 
out physical characteristics on minimal 
clues, and he looked skinny but strong.  
Think Billy Baldwin, not Charles Atlas.  She 
swallowed and looked at the mummies again.

"Are you two interested in Egyptology?" he 
asked, looking pretty much at Buffy only.

"Dead things." Buffy blurted.  "I'm really 
interested in dead things."

Willow flashed her friend a panicky look. 
"Mortuary science.  Buffy's studying Mortuary 
Science."

That earned her an "ew, yuk" look.

"I'm afraid I'm closing up for the night, but 
you're welcome to return tomorrow.  I'll be 
giving - personal - tours throughout the 
week."

"Oh," Buffy breathed, wondering when she'd 
fallen into the plot of a cheesy porn film 
and hoping that Willow's involvement was not 
further required.  "I'd love to take your 
tour."  She wondered if she were really 
blushing over every square inch of visible 
skin, or only felt as if she were.

"Tomorrow then." He indicated the path to the 
door, and Willow grabbed Buffy's arm to tug 
her away from the mummies.

"I'm revising my opinion," Willow said, and 
this time Buffy had to force her strangely 
sticky feet to keep up with the other girl.  
"I'm pretty much thinking that the creepiness 
outweighs the hitting-on-the-girl-young-
enough-to-be-his-daughter-type charm."

"Please," she scoffed.  "I'm *way* over the 
age of consent, and he'd have to have been a 
father at, like, twelve, in a weird Mary Kay 
Letorneau scenario.  But, I don't know, 
there's something about those mummies ... I 
definitely think we should research and 
return.  Potential acolytes of creepy death 
goddesses near the Hellmouth.  I would feel 
very un-Slayerly if we didn't keep an eye on 
this place."

Without discussing it, they were headed off-
campus and toward the Magic Shop.  "I'm sure 
Tara would be happy to help research," Willow 
said brightly.  "She's handy with those 
crutches, you know! ... Not at all in a sexual 
way."

"*So* did not want to go there," Buffy said, 
but without heat.

"Tara was asking about Spike the other day, 
why he wasn't hanging around the gang like 
before ...?"

"You didn't *tell* her, did you?"

"No," Willow was hurt, and the pout showed in 
her voice, "and I don't like that, but I 
respect your feelings.  It's just that 
unresolved boy-girl issues have a way of 
showing up and demanding resolution at highly 
inconvenient times, and maybe you ought to 
schedule some dealing-with-it time so that it 
doesn't interfere with the next crisis."

"You know what, I'm going to let you and Tara 
do the book-learning thing," Buffy said 
abruptly.  "Too much studying in one day, 
there's nasty rash potential.  I'm just going to
pick up some Chinese and head home.  If 
you're so convinced that Doctor Tasty is up 
to no good, why don't you look up Sex-met 
or whatever her name is."

She left Willow standing on the sidewalk, 
looking woefully in Buffy's direction.  Damn 
Spike anyway.

Which was what she was thinking half an hour 
later, when she had to duck into the alley 
beside Xander's apartment to avoid Spike as 
he half-carried, half-dragged a wobbly Anya 
up the steps.

How dare he swagger like that, with his coat 
flapping around his legs like a gunslinger, 
his over-bleached hair standing out like 
white shoes after Labor Day, and a cigarette 
hanging out of his mouth?  Didn't he know 
that the eighties were OVER? Didn't he know 
that the Sid Vicious thing was passé?  All 
she could do was chew on her thumbnail and 
hope that he left before he realized that she 
was there.  Hiding from a vampire was an iffy 
thing at best, but with any luck he wouldn't 
be able to smell her (or the Chinese food 
cooling under her arm) through the cigarette 
smoke.  And what was he doing dropping Anya 
off at Xander's anyway?  Was Anya now hanging 
out with Spike because he was the only one 
willing to come around the Magic Shop after 
closing time?  Come to think of it, where had 
Xander been lately?  Didn't Anya or Xander 
like her anymore?  More importantly, did 
they now like Spike better? 

When he disappeared into the building, she 
considered her options.  The Magic Shop was 
out: Willow was undergoing major sulkage by 
now.  Xander and Anya were Spike-infested.  
Dawn was at home - she shuddered with horror 
at the thought - and the only viable option 
was to return to the museum and poke around.  
She rummaged around in the take-out bag and 
pulled out a fortune cookie.  

"People say you have sharp sense and superb 
intellect."

Yeah, that cookie had been meant for someone 
else.

Buffy cracked the next cookie while chewing 
on the remains of the first one. She was 
holding out for something good about finding 
romance, riches and fame, great shoes at a 
low-low price, or a promise of travel to 
exotic destinations.

What is the distance between the eyes and the 
soul?

Apparently this entire package of fortune 
cookies was meant for someone else and 
possibly she'd even been given the wrong 
dinner.  If it was sweet and sour pork she 
was going to be really pissed.

"Kung Pao chicken." the familiar slimy voice 
commented. "If you really want to hide, 
carryin' Kung Pao chicken isn't the best 
thing to do." 

"It's not Kung Pao chicken.  It's Szechuan 
Eggplant and Tofu," she corrected him, 
wanting to kick herself for being so wrapped 
up in reading fortunes that she hadn't heard 
one annoying, psychotic, and evil vampire 
lumber up next to her.
 
 "It's true, Chinese do all taste the same 
and half an hour after eatin' one you're 
hungry again."

"I did not need to know this," she snapped 
and crinkled the bag shut. "What are you 
doing here?  Lurking around Xander's place?"

"I was about to ask you the same thing," he 
said and smirked a Spiky smirk at her.

"I'm not lurking, I was going to see if they 
wanted to eat Chinese food."

"They're busy makin' the beast w'two backs. 
What's next on the agenda, Blondie?"

Bad mental image, Xander and Anya, not gross 
but Buffy wasn't sure that she wanted to be 
thinking about anybody having sex while she 
was standing within ten feet of the Vampire 
From Hell. Yes, the Vampire from Hell, not 
because he was evil, which he was, not 
because he'd threatened her a zillion times, 
and he had, but because she'd made the major 
mistake of having sex with him.  And the sex 
had been pretty much amazing and thinking 
about it had taken up entirely too much of 
her time lately.  So she stood there and 
tried to keep her thinking hard, clear and 
focused, which wasn't really easy since his 
midnight eyes were taste-testing her even as 
they spoke.

"Patrol.  I'm doing the college campus 
tonight.  You might want to find someplace 
else to be, since I wouldn't want to stake 
you by accident."

"No, you'd do it on purpose," he smirked at 
her again and dangled something shiny and 
silver in front of her nose.  "Fancy a lift?  
I don't think Xander's goin' to be usin' the 
car in the next five minutes."

Reflexively, Buffy looked up at Xander's 
apartment in time to see the lights go out.

"The Uni's a long ways away, long walk for 
those stubby little legs a'yours." He jingled 
the keys again. 

"My legs are not stubby," she said and looked 
at the car, thought about the distance, "but 
it's a ride, that's all."

"I wasn't imaginin' it was anythin' but."

Naturally, Spike had tuned the radio to the 
greatest hits of the '80's station and Buffy 
had to endure an assortment of Duran Duran, 
Culture Club, and the B-52's while they made 
their way to the university campus in 
Xander's Cherry Apple Primer Corvair. Since 
she didn't have anything better to do, Buffy 
opened the rest of the fortune cookies and 
couldn't read the fortunes in the dark of the 
car so the fortunes weren't binding.

"If you should fall, into my arms, tremble 
like a flower," a man sang from the radio.

"So how are you doin', Slayer?" he asked, 
lighting a cigarette.

"I was fine before the secondhand smoke 
thing started," she grumped around a mouthful 
of cookie.

"And how have you been over the past two 
months?" he asked.

"Fine, just fine, great even.  None of your 
business as well."

"Glad to hear it," he snarled and turned the 
car into the entrance of the university with 
a jerk that sent Buffy into the passenger 
door even with her seatbelt on.

"Oh I'm sorry, was I supposed to follow you 
around or something?  You thought I was going 
to get all mushy over you, Spike?  Get. A. 
Clue.  A soul is not an automatic upgrade 
into boyfriend-class." She caught an angry 
breath and tried to bring her voice down to a 
pitch that would be heard by something other 
than dogs.  "You're a liar, you're a cheat, 
and a sneak.  The list of people you've 
killed looks like the LA white pages.  You'd 
sell your grandmother up the river if the 
price was good enough and you're about as 
dependable as -- as - an undependable thing.  
Besides, I really don't like you."

"Right, your stop." He slammed on the brakes 
with personal-injury inducing fervor.

"Fine!" she shouted and started to fumble 
with the catch of the seatbelt, which was 
sticking like a bad curse.

"Bloody Hell," Spike muttered and reached 
over to grab at the catch.

"Don't!" she hissed and grabbed his hands, " 
I can do it myself."

"I expect you can."  The acid in his voice 
should have burned through the seatbelt 
strap.

She hit him, somewhere between a punch and a 
slap, since she really didn't have enough 
room to build up velocity.  A normal guy 
would have been reeling, but Spike's head 
barely turned and all she could do was steam 
in frustration for a split second before he 
leaned over and kissed her.  Anger's gas 
flame flared up again. How dare he? How dare 
he think that she-And her little coherent 
train of thought derailed and crashed into 
the toy scenery under the Christmas tree of 
her senses.  It was wrong, entirely wrong, 
crazy wrong and just plain old good.  He 
kissed her long and hard, enough to make her 
almost forget that she was mad at him, that 
she had sworn to herself after the last time 
that the last time would be the last time.  
Head pressed back into the seat, she felt 
herself getting all tingly, warm, and stupid, 
tilting her head up and kissing him back even 
though she knew better.  Kind of like looking 
over the edge of a building and wondering 
what it would be like to jump.

She'd jumped before and gotten away almost 
unscathed.

Somehow, he'd managed to get his hands out of 
her grip and was holding her face, drawing 
his thumbs over her cheekbones in a way that 
was making it hard to breathe.  Equally 
inexplicable was the fact that she had her 
hands on the cool hardness of his chest, 
feeling the muscles move and feeling the non-
existent beat of a vampire heart. It hadn't 
taken much for him to slither over the 
emergency brake until he was straddling her 
on the passenger seat, his thighs capturing 
her hips on either side.  His mouth slid, 
cool and thrilling. down past her jawbone to 
here he could kiss her throat, right over her 
carotid artery.  Buffy found herself gasping 
and wasn't sure if she was moving her hands 
against his chest to get a better spot to 
push him away with or because he felt so 
good.  The cool palms of his hands dipped 
inside her shirt and bra to make contact with 
her breasts and she felt herself arching up 
against him from the car seat.

"Hey!" someone said and there was a tap 
somewhere, a tap that sounded sharp and 
official.

Bright light burned her eyes.

"What the F-" Spike began.

"You two, out of the car."

Serious Moonlight 5/26

Campus Security, Buffy realized, was shining 
a flashlight into the car and the man in the 
ugly polyester uniform jerked the passenger 
door open.  Spike looked at Buffy for a brief 
second and the expression was a simple 
question: 'You want me to kill this asshole?' 
As tempted as she was, Buffy pushed at Spike, 
realizing that she had just been saved from 
making yet another Major Mistake.

Spike slid out of the car and Buffy followed 
suit, the seatbelt causing no problem this 
time. The Security officer seemed bent and 
determined to blind both of them with his 
flashlight which he held in the goofy way 
that all police did.

"This ain't a hotel," the man warned.

"No sir," Buffy said in her meekest tone.

For his part, Spike leaned against the side 
of the car and looked like every parent's 
nightmare, which was doing nothing to endear 
him to the rent-a-cop.  The cop looked from 
Buffy to Spike and made a quick judgment.

"I'm gonna need to see some ID," he warned. 
"This is private property.  If you ain't 
students, you're trespassing."

Buffy hauled her University ID out of her 
wallet and showed the officer, who gave it a 
cursory look before handing it back to her.

"What about you?" he asked Spike.

To Buffy's surprise, Spike passed the man a 
laminated card, which the Security Office 
looked over as though he was examining it for 
DNA.  Finally, he looked up at Spike with 
infinite skepticism.

"Little old for a student?" he asked.

"Grad student,"  Spike said and folded his 
arms over his chest and gave the man a 'fuck 
you' look.

"What department?"

"Parapsychology."

Flicking the card back to Spike, the guard 
adjusted his flashlight belt and looked 
officious. "Get a room, this ain't a hotel," 
he repeated, apparently only possessed of one 
lame line, and waddled off into the night.

"Doughnut-biter," Spike scoffed and dug his 
cigarettes out of an interior pocket of his 
duster.

"Well thanks much," Buffy snapped and pulled 
her shirt straight.

"My pleasure," he smirked and lit a 
cigarette.  "And what demands your attention 
here, at SunnyHell U?"

Pulling tight on her attention's leash, Buffy 
brought it to heel.

"Lesbian mummy vampires."

"This I have to see."

The lock on the back door to the museum 
yielded to Buffy's gentle persuasion, her 
debating skills exercised in the form of a 
quick kick.  She didn't see red lights 
blinking or hear any alarm, so she'd just 
have to hope that the U was as budget-
deprived as the administration always whined.  
Spike flitted alongside her, doing the 
silent-vampire routine.

The hallways were dim and silent, boxes and 
crates stacked against the walls with labels 
from Faraway. Operating on a Slayer-enhanced 
sense of spatial relations, she headed 
towards the Egyptology exhibit.  As she drew 
closer, she began to feel the floor 
vibrating, a sub-earthquake-level shaking 
that left her queasy.  Damn mummies anyway; 
why would a sane person even bring them near 
the Hellmouth?

Now she could hear chanting, gobbledegook in 
some Mummylicious dialect.  If the cute guy 
is involved in this, she thought darkly, 
we're going to have words.

Annoyingly, Spike grabbed her arm; she 
frowned at him and jerked away.  He made a 
two-fingered gesture that Buffy had never 
understood, but always assumed was obscene, 
and then pointed.  Over near the grouping of 
fake mummy cases the U had dragged in for set 
dressing, candles flickered.  In the faint 
light, she could make out a figure moving 
around the sarcophagus where the lady mummies 
lay.  She peered around the edge of the fake 
mummy case.

"I have come to be a protector unto thee. My 
strength shall be near thee; my strength 
shall be near thee, forever. Ra hath heard 
thy cry, and the gods have made thy word to 
be truth. Thou art raised up. Thy word is 
truth in respect of what hath been done unto 
thee. I hath overthrown thy foes, and thou 
art Sekhmet, Lady Destruction."

The candlelight did amazing things for the 
highlights in Dr. Talbot's hair.  Buffy was 
almost distracted from the gallon jug of dark 
fluid he was about to pour into the 
sarcophagus.

She cleared her throat, and he spun around.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," she 
warned.  He snarled, a perfect curl of upper 
lip that made his blue eyes flash like pilot 
lights, and edged around the sarcophagus, 
putting it between them.  Then he tilted the 
jug and the first red drops arced through the 
air.

"The blood of Isis, the spells of Isis, the 
magical powers of Isis, shall make this great 
one strong, and shall be an amulet of 
protection against She that would do to her 
the things which she abominates," he 
continued to chant.

"Freeze!  Campus Security!"

Which didn't quite have the threat of 
"Freeze, Police!"

Dr. Talbot swore and ducked and rolled under 
a display case, leaving a splatter of black 
blood under the case from his tipped jug.  
She could hear him scuttling away as she 
raised her hands, having no desire to see how 
well Slayers healed from being beaten by 
flashlights and doughnuts. 

"You!  Over there!  Drop it!"

Buffy dropped her stake and squinted; the 
sudden red alarm lights weren't helpful, 
making everyone look like a Paratin demon 
only without the warts.  There might be three 
or four rent-a-cops.  Maybe.  Dr. Talbot had 
probably made it to Tijuana by now, and Spike 
was nowhere in sight.  No doubt he had 
slithered off to his crypt like the snake 
that he was, ditching her when the going got 
rough.

"Okay Missy, what's going on here? This some 
dumb sorority prank?"  Rent-A-Cop  #1 asked.

"Dumb prank?  Prankish. Dumb.  Very, very 
dumb," she chattered, as blonde as possible.

As quickly as they had gone on, the red 
lights and the sirens went out, leaving 
blackness and silence for about two seconds, 
and then a droning male voice began, backed 
by squealing, distorted guitars, blaring over 
the speakers loud enough to make Buffy's ears 
buzz with pain.

"She had an 'orror of rooms, she was tired 
you can't hide beat/When I looked in her eyes 
they were blue but nobody home," the voice 
droned, "She could've been a killer if she 
didn't walk the way she do, and she do/She 
opened strange doors that we'd never close 
again!"

Buffy heard cops howling in pain at the 
discordant assault and she jammed her 
fingers in her ears to block some of the 
sound.  Her Slayer-sense alerted her to 
Spike's presence before he grabbed her arm.  
She knew it was him by his ashtray and 
leather smell and fought her natural instinct 
to pull away.  Instead, she followed him 
through the darkness of the museums.  
Vampires could see better in the dark than 
humans, and she had a good idea that Spike 
wasn't about to turn her over to the fake 
cops, but she didn't like feeling helpless in 
the dark while His Spikiness was in control.

"She asked me to stay and I stole her 
room/She asked for my love and I gave her a 
dangerous mind."

The screaming guitar music continued.

"Now she's stupid in the street and she can't 
socialize/Well I love the little girl and 
I'll love her 'till the day she dies."

Finally, Spike pulled a fire door open with 
vampiric strength and they were outside, and 
they were in the back parking lot, complete 
with both of Campus Security's golf carts and 
Xander's Corvair.  The very first security 
guy from earlier - witness to Buffy's near-
humiliation - was waiting outside the door 
they'd initially entered, talking on his 
walkie-talkie and looking nervous.  Going 
back for the car was not a good idea.

"Spike, what did you-"

"Plugged the old Discman into the PA system.  
Discman and CD I fully expect you to replace.  
That's a classic album."

"There has been music recorded since 1989."

"Usin' the widest definition of the word 
music."

"Quick recap, guest lecturer is chanting and 
pouring blood into a sarcophagus with unusual 
mummies inside.  This can't be good," Buffy 
hissed as they picked their way through the 
shrubbery and away from the museum.

"Where'd he get the big bottle of blood?  I 
get those stupid little bags and he gets a 
whackin' great jar of it."

"Hello?  Creepy Egypt guy more important than 
your grocery issues."

"No he's not," Spike muttered as they crept 
along.  "Where we goin' now?"

"Willow and Tara.  They're looking up Sekhmet 
for me."

"That should be a laugh riot."


Serious Moonlight 6/26

Buffy banged on the dorm room door.  A moment 
later, Willow opened up and goggled at Buffy 
with Spike lurking behind. Spike was tempted 
to vamp-face at her but realized that the 
subsequent ruckus would slow matters down 
somewhat.  Instead he composed his face into 
something like a bland expression.

"Did you find that Sex-met stuff I asked you 
about?" Buffy asked as she barged past her 
friend into the room proper.

Spike loitered in the doorway while Willow 
stared back at him like a squirrel not sure 
if there really was a glass pane between her 
and the cat.

"May I come in?" Spike asked with a double-
shot of sarcasm.

"Buff?"

"Yah, spell him out later.  This is 
important," she instructed as she crossed to 
where Tara was propped up on the bed with a 
flurry of books and paper around her.

"All right, come in," Willow instructed 
Spike.

Spike stepped over the threshold as though it 
were made if unstable gelginite and went 
straight to the window where he could lurk, 
lean and look over Buffy's shoulder.  Tara's 
eyes followed him across the room.  While 
Tara could be downright friendly when he was 
alone with her, the moment Willow entered the 
scene, Tara treated Spike like he was an asp 
in a basket of dates.

"Further research has disclosed that Sekhmet 
was thought to be embodied in an avatar," 
Tara explained from the bed.

"What's an avatar?" Buffy asked.

"A being who embodies a god," Tara said, 
in her not-quite-duh! voice.

"Remember about the blood-drinking?" Willow 
asked, shifting her weight to stand between 
Tara and Spike.  "The creation of Sekhmet's 
avatar involved a lot of blood-drinking."

Spike backed away, moving towards the room's 
single desk, putting as much room between the 
two witches and himself as possible.  He 
didn't much relish the thought of them 
sprinkling fairy dust on him and turning him 
into a frog or something.  Buffy looked up at 
him for a moment with a big question mark 
hanging over her head before turning her 
attention back to the matter at hand.

"Can you say 'vampire'?" Buffy asked 
rhetorically.  "But he was pouring the blood 
into the coffin.  So are these mummies some 
sort of freeze-dried avatars?"

"There's no mention in the texts of that," 
Tara said.  "But observed behavior would 
suggest some type of resurrection scenario."

"She wasn't moving yet, last I saw before the 
cops so rudely interrupted," Buffy offered.

Tara looked down at the book she'd propped on 
her lap.  With her legs splayed to 
accommodate both plaster casts, she looked 
like a human gingerbread woman.  

"According to these records, the ritual to 
resurrect Sekhmet's avatar requires several 
nights to take full effect.  First the blood 
of a man, then the blood of a woman.  There 
are some references to repeating the process, 
but I couldn't make sense of them."

Spike cleared his throat like a were-tiger 
having a hairball, making Willow's face go as 
red as her hair.  This earned him a Slayer-
glare.

"I didn't say anythin'," he protested and 
turned his attention down to the schoolbooks 
and papers scattered over the desktop while 
Buffy and the witches went back to their 
yipping.

His eyes scanned down the page of a notebook, 
between loopy notes about the end of the 
Elizabethan Era and the changes that 
Shakespeare had caused in writing in general, 
someone had jotted down a few lines from one 
of Donne's Holy Sonnets.  The words in a 
childish scrawl jumped out at him.

"Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved 
fain, /But am betroth'd unto your enemy: 
/Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again, 
/Take me to you, imprison me, for I /Except 
you enthrall me, never shall be free, /Nor 
ever chaste, except you ravish me."

"Spike?" Buffy's voice snapped him out of his 
cold horror.  "Why do you think The Formerly 
Cute Dr. Talbot would want to raise Sekhmet?" 
she repeated.

"Oh well," he slid onto the desktop and 
looked across the room at the women, "I'm 
thinkin' the usual reasons any mortal goes 
muckin' about with ancient vampires.  Money, 
power, sex, eternal life, dead borin', 
really."

A thought surfaced.

"Formerly cute?" he asked.

The women, inevitably, ignored him.

"He wants to have sex with an ancient dried-
up vampire chickie?" Willow wondered aloud, 
and then caught herself, and blushed. "It's 
the dried-up thingy. Like ouch.  But if 
that's what you're into, fine with me!"

The accidental double-entendres of Willow's 
speech struck Buffy first and she glanced 
over at her friend as if Willow had been 
sucking blotter acid.  Tara merely sighed and 
closed her book. Clueless, Willow looked from 
one to the other and frowned.  Spike thought 
this was all very cute, but a waste of time.

"Hang about, what if it's th'other way 
around?  What if Sekhmet is usin' the good 
doctor to resurrect her, not intendin' to 
keep whatever part of the bargain she'd made 
with him to begin with?"

"Wouldn't be the first time a vampire broke a 
promise," Buffy remarked in a tone as dry as 
Sekhmet.

"I guess going to the school authorities is 
out of the question?  I mean the mummies 
don't belong to him, they belong to the 
museum in Cairo," Tara offered in her mild 
way.

"Are you volunteering to explain?  That won't 
go over really well," Buffy pointed out.

"The place was crawlin' with Sunnydale's 
Finest last we saw, I doubt if he'll get much 
raisin' of the dead done the rest of the 
night.  It's safe as houses."



It was late afternoon by the time Buffy made 
it to the crypt.  She pulled open the trap 
door and barreled into Spike's inner sanctum.  
Naturally, he was sleeping through the 
daylight, a bleach-blonde lump under his 
retro tacky red and black velvet bedspread.

"Get up!" she demanded and kicked the bed 
frame.

It took three repetitions before Spike 
emerged from the covers and gave her a bleary 
glower.

"For Hell's sake, it's the middle of the 
bleeding afternoon," he groaned and pulled 
the covers over his head.

"Talbot stole the mummies.  The mummies are 
missing from the museum," she explained in a 
not-patient voice.  "The mummies are gone."

Only by concentrating on the mummies was 
she able to look at the bed without thinking 
about what had happened on it - much.

"Spike!" she kicked the bed again, not 
wanting to touch any more of it than was 
necessary. "He's taken the mummies and can 
complete his ritual tonight."

"Right, wake me when it starts."

"And they took Xander in for questioning 
because his car was found on campus.  It 
didn't matter that he'd already reported it 
missing."

"Xander's in the slammer?" the muffled voice 
from under the covers sounded amused.  "He'll 
make somebody a nice bitch."

"He was questioned and sent home.  Willow 
says that Sekhmet can only be banished if her 
physical avatar is destroyed.  Stake through 
the heart, decapitation, and then burning.  
And if you don't get up in the next thirty 
seconds, I'm going to practice on you," she 
warned.

"Why don't you come here and practice 
something else on me?" The beckoning hand 
left something to be desired in the erotic 
category.  

"Twenty seconds," Buffy said.

"It'll take longer than that, I promise."

"Fifteen-"

"All-bloody-right." Spike finally surfaced 
and the covers sliding down his body made him 
look thinner and whiter than usual.  He had 
raging bed-head, and grumpy morning-face.  
"Look, why don't you go get some coffee, 
drink it, and let me bite you, all right?"

"Willow was able to track down the house that 
Talbot rented for the month in the college 
computer system.  He's probably taken them 
there."

"If this bloke's the mummy freak, I bet you 
a fiver that he's got his house all tricked 
out like a tomb or a temple," Spike remarked 
and got out of bed.

Naturally, he was naked.  Buffy should have 
seen that one coming a mile away. She also 
should have realized that he had a truly 
amazing ass.

"Oh God," she muttered and looked down at the 
scuffmaks on the toes of her boots.  There 
was no doubt in her mind that her face was 
matching the red squares on the bedspread.

"I'm thinkin' that this little jaunt to 
SunnyD is the first time he's been able to be 
alone with his dried-up babes.  A proper 
little honeymoon, don't you think?"  She 
could hear him moving around, doing things.

She just knew that he was making his naked 
and proud way around the crypt, like that fat 
gay guy in the first Survivor, trying to 
freak her out, trying to get the upper hand, 
and trying to get her to look at him.   She 
wasn't going to. He could walk around with - 
it- flapping in the breeze the whole night 
for all she cared.

"Those fat blokes you laughingly refer to as 
Campus Security are probably nothin' compared 
to what they got at his regular museum. It 
must have been a walk in the bloody park for 
him.  Are you listenin' to me?"

"I'm not talking to you until you put on some 
pants. I will not speak to you while you are 
pant-less."  She caved like a tunnel dug in 
sand.

"Bit late for the maidenly modesty, Slayer." 
period he sounded amused and then rustled 
around for a moment.  "Fine. You can talk to 
me now."

Since he was actually buttoning up his fly, 
it didn't count as actually lying, even 
though  it did give her a very clear view of 
the fact that he had, like, zero body fat and 
his abs tended to twitch alluringly when he 
moved. But he was leering at her while he did 
so. All Buffy could really do was wait while 
he pulled aside the black drape that hid a 
pipe hung with a limited variety of clothes.  
Yes there was the half-dozen pair of black 
pants, red shirts, black t-shirts, and a few 
other things besides.  Spike stared at the 
clothes for a moment before turning to her.

"Do you ever have those days where you just 
don't know what to wear?" he asked in an 
exaggeratedly feminine voice.

"Here's an idea," she said with brittle 
brightness. period "Black pants, black T-
shirt and a red silk shirt. It's a novel and 
unusual look, one you don't see *every day*."

Just to spite her, she was sure, he varied 
his normal routine by wearing a gray T-shirt.  
A moment later, he combed some gel through 
his hair and shrugged into his duster.

"Right, let's go."

As far as surveillance was concerned, theirs 
was both lame and amateurish.  Xander's car 
was about as inconspicuous as a hippo in a 
pink tutu, and having a vampire in the back 
seat under a gray Army blanket was just plain 
weird.  Stuffed next to the scratchy wool of 
Spike's blanket, Buffy fought the urge to 
start poking him through the fabric until he 
begged for mercy.  She found herself 
wondering if he was ticklish and quickly beat 
back the thought.  Xander and Anya were in 
the front seat, clearly more enthralled with 
each other than anything that was happening 
in the nondescript white ranch house across 
the street. It was like a bad double date at 
the drive-in.  Not that Buffy had ever been 
to a drive-in, but she had watched Happy Days 
reruns.  Worst of all, the car smelled foul.  
Campus Security must have eaten the 
confiscated Szechuan eggplant and then farted 
in the car.

"How long is this going to last?" Xander 
asked, glancing at his watch in what he must 
have thought was an inconspicuous way.

"Yes, not long I hope, we have some 
reconciliation sex planned. Which, I might 
add, we interrupted for you," Anya added.

"Thanks for interrupting.  Since Sekhmet is a 
vampire entity, I don't think he'll do 
anything until after dark.  That's about a half an
hour from now."

"Wonderful.  I get to do the Claude Rains 
imitation 'til then?" Spike asked.

"Try Helen Keller. She was mute," Buffy 
suggested.   

"Hey, Evil Dead, I bet you can't stay quiet 
until sundown," Xander challenged.

"How much you want to put on that, Floppy-
Boy?"

"Sawbuck," Xander brandished the twenty. "Put 
your money where your fangs are, Dead Guy."

Buffy held the money and sipped at her 
coffee.  Across the street, nothing continued 
to happen.

"Anya, if you could be anywhere else right 
now, somewhere else entirely, where would you 
want to be?" Xander asked.  In Tirely? Buffy 
wondered, until she figured it out 

"Monaco," Anya said, "I'd want to be Grace 
Kelly in Monaco with Cary Grant.  Did you 
ever see that movie, Buffy?"

"To Catch a Thief?  That's one of my mother's 
favorite old and moldy movies."

 "Xander? What about you?" Anya asked.

"A tropical beach, you in one hand and a cold 
Corona in the other."

"That's so sweet!" Anya simpered and leaned 
over to kiss Xander.

Unexpectedly, Buffy felt a pain in the center 
of her chest, envying them their couple-ness.  
Next to her the blanket heaved in 
frustration.  

"What about you, Buff?" Xander asked.

Without warning, the black and red bed rose 
and waved hello to her consciousness.  She 
chewed on her lower lip, intensely aware that 
Spike was next to her, and that he was 
sitting in a state of deathlike rigor, 
waiting to hear what she said.

"Oh, anywhere but here, really."  her laugh 
sounded fake even to herself. "Maybe in a big 
hot tub with Brad Pitt or something." 

"What's your man look like?" Xander asked, 
suddenly sitting at attention in the driver's 
seat.

Buffy's lie evaporated in an instant.

"Dark hair, kind of yummy."

"Yummy? What kind of description is that, 
then?" Spike demanded, just as Anya's voice 
rang out. 

"Sundown!  And a yummy dark haired guy just 
pulled the blinds in the front room," Anya 
reported.

"Bloody Hell," Spike muttered, obviously 
realizing that everyone was going to say he 
lost the bet by jumping the gun.

Buffy shoved the twenties at Xander.  "You 
guys wait here.  If we run into something we 
can't handle, we'll let you know," she 
instructed, getting out of the back seat.

"How will you let us know?" Anya asked.

Sticking his head in the passenger's side 
window, Spike gave them one of his more smug 
looks. "When the house shoots flame, blows 
up, or vanishes into a parallel universe, 
that may be a bit of a hint."

"Gee thanks, never would have occurred to 
me," Xander sniped back.

"Today would be nice," Buffy called from the 
sidewalk, and Spike loped up alongside her.

"So what's the plan?" he asked, eager as a 
snake that had seen the dinner-mouse through 
the side of its aquarium.

"Stake it, decapitate it, and set it on 
fire."

"I love a woman who knows her own mind."


Serious Moonlight 7/26

What Dr.-Bloody-Talbot obviously did not 
understand about Southern California 
decorating was that you could pull the 
blinds, but that didn't stop your neighbors 
from seeing in.  Especially when they walked 
up to the windows and peered through the 
cracks.

Sure enough, the man's living room looked 
more like Ancient Egypt than the sets for The 
Ten Commandments.  The mummyquins had pride 
of place, on a bed of blindingly-white sand 
that looked as if it was contained in a 
child's sandbox.  Papyrus scrolls were 
scattered across every available surface, 
rolled, unrolled, and in-between: absent-
minded professor as evil genius.

Buffy scurried over to the entrance.  She 
grabbed the knob and shoved her shoulder 
against the door with controlled violence.  
There was a low groan as the hinges popped 
loose and she carefully moved the door out of 
the way.  "It's quieter than kicking," she 
explained as he looked at her in amazement.  
"Come on in," she suggested, and he did.

There was only a bit of hallway between them 
and the good doctor's living/resurrecting 
room, and they were quickly watching him 
chant and sprinkle something that smelled 
like oregano, but not in a good way, on the 
mummies.

"My heart, my mother; my heart, my mother! My 
heart whereby I came into being! May no one 
stand up to oppose me at my judgment, may 
there be no opposition to me in the presence 
of the Tchatchau; may there be no parting of 
thee from me in the presence of she who keeps 
the Balance of Justice!"

Talbot took another enormous jug of blood - 
Spike was desperate to know where he shopped 
- from a side table and uncapped it.

Buffy unshipped the stake from the small of 
her back and arrowed it towards him.  It hit 
the jug, puncturing it and sending it 
spinning away from the Egyptologist.  More 
blood slopped onto the mummies, but the 
majority was lost with the jug.

"Bitch!" he yelped. 

"What is it with you guys anyway? Show a 
little athleticism or a will of your own, and 
you go running like lemmings!" she accused.

"'Scuse me?!" Spike asked, punching through a 
glass case to pick up a zillion year old 
dagger.  "Absent me from that lot a'wankers."

Suddenly Spike experienced a sudden change in 
verticality.  He'd been picked up and thrown 
across the room, bouncing off the wall and 
onto a stone bench.  Looking back, he could 
see four mummies advancing on Buffy - real, 
Scooby-Doo mummies, frayed bandages and red 
glowing eyes and all, not just desiccated 
corpses.  Dr. Talbot had his hands raised, 
controlling them somehow.

Spike crossed the room in four bounds, 
grabbing the nearest mummy.  With one arm 
around its neck, he hooked his fingers into 
the eyeholes, feeling his fingers buzz with 
the reanimation magic coursing through the 
thing, and reached until he found the dried 
skull.  He pulled until the skull separated 
from the rest of the skeleton.  The mummy's 
body twitched within the bandages, then 
collapsed.

Talbot had retrieved the remains of the jug, 
and Spike's keenly honed ear for blood could 
hear it gurgle onto the entwined bodies.

Buffy was still showing off her Giles-Kwon-Do 
moves, as if she could kick the mummies into 
submission.  "Got to take their heads," he 
suggested, just as one of her kicks sent a 
mummy against a mirror so hard that skeleton 
fragments poked out of the wrappings.  Well, 
that would do it too.

The ground beneath them began to shake, as it 
had in the museum.  Spike didn't think it was 
an earthquake.  Talbot's chanting was 
beginning to annoy him.

"Hail, thou One, who shines from the moon. 
Grant that Sekhmet may come forth among thy 
multitudes at the portal. Let the Tuat be 
opened to her. Behold, Sekhmet shall come 
forth by night to perform everything which 
she wishes upon the earth among those who are 
living."

Spike detached a mummy's arm from the rest of 
the body and used it to beat the thing's 
skull into powder.  Buffy was ignoring the 
final mummy, heading for Talbot again, so 
Spike took it and impaled it on a 
conveniently placed mini-obelisk.  It waved 
its arms and legs feebly, like some obscene 
spider, but he ignored it in favor of the 
gathering magical storm in the room.

As he watched, a mini-tornado began to form, 
whirling above their heads, blue-black with 
pink and yellow sparks flashing through it 
like demented Tinkerbells.  A funnel formed, 
tail homing in on the dried-out girl mummies 
on the sand.  With a sound like the slap of a 
tidal wave on shore, it sucked the top body 
into its cloudy embrace.  The remaining mummy 
shuddered, and he could see it twitch.  Jolts 
of electricity bounced around the room, 
frying lamps and making papyrus scrolls dance 
with blue fire.

Dr. Talbot whooped (somehow evil self-
celebration could always be heard, no matter 
how loud the other noises) and threw himself 
into the funnel, which was still hovering in 
the center of the room.  Spike could see the 
funnel begin to shake and throw off streamers 
of smoke, beginning to dissipate.  Looked 
like victory for the good doctor.

But Buffy never let anyone else have the last 
word.  She ran after them, leaving a hole in 
the disintegrating smoke like a reverse 
contrail.  

"Bugger!"  Spike followed, and managed to get 
a hand on her shoulder as her body was sucked 
further into the blackness.  He wasn't going 
to let her out of his sight until they'd had 
a bit of a discussion, or sex anyway.


Serious Moonlight 8/26

She was falling through a shower of sparks 
and waves of light, fuzzy electric feelings 
crawling over her skin, the sound of a 
million electric guitars playing Led Zeppelin 
in a tin can, cold air rushing by her, 
sucking the breath out of her lungs and 
everything smelled like burnt popcorn.  
Buffy screamed and didn't hear a thing.

And she landed with a thump on her side and 
rolled, trying to get her feet underneath her 
to face any real threat, but she was dizzy-
woozy and her arms and legs seemed to be out 
of her coverage area.  Rubbery, she managed 
to raise herself up onto her hands and knees, 
and shook her head to try to shake the sparks 
out of it.  Her backpack was still on her 
shoulders, which meant she was still armed.

"Fuck," a small and shaky version of Spike's 
voice interrupted her spark-thickened 
thoughts.

"What the hell was that?" she asked and 
looked around in total darkness, but was it 
dark or was she blind?

"Dunno, some teleportation spell thing.  
Brutal, though.  Feel like I've been through 
a mangle."  She heard him moving around 
somewhere to her left.  "Wonder where we are.  
If I've gone through this just to end up in 
Encino, I am goin' to be really fucked off."

Something big and pale was beginning to come 
into focus.  Really big and really pale, 
bright even.  Buffy squinted and blinked, and 
even if it didn't help, it made her feel 
better.

"Oh my God," Buffy breathed as the world swam 
into focus.

Sand, miles and miles of sand, stretching 
from horizon to horizon.  More sand than 
there should be in the entire world, making 
hills and valleys out of dunes, all silver 
and black and white under the light of a moon 
that seemed close enough to touch.  Buffy 
stood up and the cool wind moved through her 
hair.

"What?" Spike demanded and leapt to his feet.

"Spike, it smells funny."

He looked around, a silver and black thing 
himself.  Spinning in a slow circle, he 
looked around the entire horizon, and finally 
tipped his head back to look at the big, 
black night sky overhead.

"What you smell is actual clean air.  No 
smog.  An' th' stars are all wrong, I mean 
that bit there, should be there, and that bit 
there, well I dunno what that is."  He 
pointed up into the night sky.

"So now you're an astronomer?" she asked in 
sharp tones, hitching her fists onto her hips 
and cocking her head to the side to indicate 
sarcasm.

"I'm thinkin' by the mis-alignment above, 
that we're somewhere in Africa.  The 
continent.  Ever heard of it?  Your guy and 
his Mummy, sand, catch my mental?"

"Is it contagious?"

Spike whirled, kicking up a wave of sand with 
his boots. "Egypt."

"No. Super-octane no.  Not Egypt.  Vegas 
maybe, not Egypt."

"No, of course not. Ignore everything I say." 
He squared his shoulders and began marching 
down the sand dune, leaving her alone.

"Spike? Spike! Where are you going?!" she 
shouted after him.

He continued to stomp along and in a matter 
of moments disappeared from view between the 
dunes.  Since there was no way that he was 
responding to her shouts, Buffy cursed and 
began hurrying after him.

"Where are you going?" she panted after 
catching up with him.

"Get some cover.  Sun comes up and you go all 
red and peely.  I experience spontaneous 
Spike combustion."

"You're serious about this Egypt thing."

"Very."

"So I guess we walk, but where do we go?"

He shrugged, looked up at the moon as though 
he didn't quite trust it.

"North Star over there.  So that's East.  We 
go East."

"Why?

"If we go on long enough, we'll hit the Nile 
or the Red Sea," he said and began to walk.  
"I think."

"I have a bad feeling about this," Buffy 
sighed and shouldered her backpack.

****

Night's candles were burnt out, and jocund 
day was standing tiptoe on the misty dune-
tops. The prickle of fear began dancing along 
Spike's spine as he looked around the sand 
bowl, which afforded no cover.

Abruptly, he stopped, knelt, and began to 
scoop sand from one sandy place on the ground 
to another.

"What are you doing?"  She was bouncing from 
foot to foot with impatience, sand scurrying 
around her feet.

"I don't see any shelter 'round here, do you?  
Best I can do is dig a hole in the ground and 
try to cover up."

Buffy glanced toward the east, and he was 
gratified to see concern flit across her 
face, even though it disappeared into her 
blank Maybelline expression.  Without saying 
more, she knelt and began to scoop.  

Ten minutes later, there was a band of yellow 
in the sky, sun reflecting off clouds, and 
they were only about four inches down.  He 
tried to increase the pace, but his hands 
wouldn't cooperate.  For some reason he was 
tiring rapidly, his arms beginning to spasm 
with the repetitive motion.  He twitched and 
Buffy's hands brushed across his, gritty with 
sand.

"I always knew you'd be the death of me," he 
muttered.

"So now this is *my* fault?"  To her credit, 
Buffy didn't slow her pace at all.

"We'd best stop and try to cover me up," he 
said.

He huddled in the shallow sandy depression, 
curling himself into his coat, as she piled 
sand on him.  The sand was still cold from 
the night, and he found himself shivering, 
wishing he'd had one last meal before he 
went.

She was dumping sand on him, the slow 
increasing weight his only hope of survival, 
and he remembered being trapped in a cellar 
while fifty angry Alsatian villagers advanced 
on him and Dru.  Tasty, they'd been, but 
before matters had turned in his favor there 
had been a long period in which the dank and 
dirty cellar walls had seemed to close on him 
like the maw of some dark beast.  Now, the 
pressure of the sand was like being 
swallowed, individual grains worming 
underneath his coat and biting like fleas.  

Spike thought he could feel the hot breath of 
the dawning sun, searching him out to light 
him like a match.  How many thousands of 
matches had he lit over the years?  Watching 
the flare, always risking self-immolation, 
but drawn to the ritual of smoking and the 
little death of the match as if it would ward 
off his own.

Finally she stopped.  He could hear her 
panting.  "Sun's up," she said, her voice 
roughened through sand.  "I can feel it on my 
skin."

All he could feel was the great hand of the 
desert, curled around him.

He tried to breathe, waiting for the end, and 
found himself choking on stale air.  
Reflexively, he tried again, a great gulp 
that filled his mouth with sand but no 
oxygen.  Helplessly, knowing he was killing 
himself, he began to thrash, trying to burst 
a hole in his sand blanket so he could 
breathe.  Above him, he heard Buffy exclaim, 
but he couldn't waste time trying to 
communicate.  With one last desperate punch, 
he broke through, and wriggled as best he 
could to get air underneath his coat, drawing 
his hand back before it could feel the sun's 
wrath.

"Spike!"  She had the sound of one who'd 
repeated herself too often for comfort.  
"What is it?"

"Couldn't..." gasp, cough, "breathe."

Pause.  "Vampires don't breathe."

"Don't *have* ... to breathe," he corrected.  
"Do it ... out of habit."

"You nearly killed yourself for a bad 
*habit*?"

"You knew I smoked," he volleyed, but the 
mental flywheels were spinning too fast to 
see.  A habit, yes, maybe aided and abetted 
by the claustrophobia.  But he shouldn't be 
choking like this, feeling the welcome burn 
of air in his undead lungs.

What in Zandru's hell had that transport 
spell done?

Spike gathered himself and called the 
bloodlust to spark the Change.  He felt his 
face contort into the familiar sneer, but no 
burn of magically transformed muscle and 
skin, and when he ran his tongue across his 
teeth he encountered nothing but dull edges.

"Buffy?"  He was amazed by the steadiness of 
his own voice.

"Still here."

"Pull me out.."

"What?"

Summoning his unnaturally-reduced-to-natural 
strength, Spike pushed more sand out of the 
way and emerged, a baby snake from an egg.  
He blinked into the dawn.  The sun, brighter 
than any artificial light he'd seen in over a 
century, brought tears to his eyes.  God, had 
the sun always been that big? The heat and 
light licked his face, his hands, and his 
hair like an aggressive but friendly lion.  
Was it any wonder that older minds had 
worshipped the sun as a god?

"Oh my god," Buffy said, shocked out of 
California-ese and into making each word a 
separate explosion of disbelief.

Eyes wide open, Spike tipped his head back 
into the burning light of the morning, 
feeling the burn move through his eyes and 
into his brain.  His arms were out to his 
sides, feeling the light and the heat, while 
the warming desert wind flapped his coat 
around him.  Years fell away, he smelled 
fresh air, felt his heart beat in his chest, 
felt the living blood run through his veins, 
felt his stomach gurgle and his arms ache 
from digging in the sand.  He wanted to 
laugh, wanted to sing, wanted to explode.

"O SUN of real peace!/ O hastening light!/ O 
free and ecstatic!/ O what I here, preparing, 
warble for!/ O the sun of the world will 
ascend, dazzling, and take his height-and you 
too, O my Ideal, will surely ascend!/ O so 
amazing and broad-up there resplendent, 
darting and burning!/ . . . O purged and 
luminous!/ you threaten me more than I can 
stand."

The morning light absorbed into his cells, 
zipped electric through his nerves, set his 
brain bubbling.  The sun was burning his 
eyes, that's why his face was wet with tears.  
He mopped his face with the back of his hand 
and turned to face the silent and transfixed 
Buffy behind him.  All he could manage was a 
weak smile.

She just stared at him, which under different 
circumstances might have been flattering.  He 
shrugged, scrabbled around in his mind for 
some cool, found a melting ice cube somewhere 
between ego and sarcasm, and gave up as the 
reality of the situation hit him like a 
cricket bat on the back of the head.

"I'm human.  I'm alive."

The look that she gave him was perfectly 
blank, the painted eyes of a Barbie doll 
staring back at him in the Slayer's pointed 
little face.

"Hello?  C'mon Blondie, experiencin' mental 
vapor lock more'n usual?" 

"Oh that's wrong.  That's just totally and 
completely wrong.  You can't be alive!" her 
voice started spiraling upwards with rage, 
"You're Spike, you're --" she began to 
splutter as her hands worked the air as 
though she were squeezing his throat.  
"You're rotten, nasty, self-centered, you're 
got awful hair, and you're bad." 

"I recall you sayin' somethin' different last 
we-"

He never got to finish the sentence.  Yes, he 
saw the telltale movement in her right 
shoulder, knew the punch was coming, and 
threw up a hand to grab her incoming fist-
which promptly smashed into his nose and sent 
him rolling like Wesley from the Princess 
Bride down the dune they stood atop.  When 
he reached the bottom of the incline, blind 
with pain and sand, he grabbed at his face and 
found that it was bleeding.  Not the showy 
gusher from vampire veins, but a slow, 
painful, and human leak.  He flopped back 
into the sand and howled with pain.  God, 
he was dying, his entire skull was crushed, 
his face was smashed into a pulp, and he was 
blind and disfigured forever.  

"Fuggin' 'itch!" he raged.

"Spike, don't be a wuss." 

She was kneeling in the sand next to him, her 
face folded into a frown while she dabbed at 
his blood with a grubby cocktail napkin from 
the Bronze.  Her fingers were warm, but not 
the burning heat that he remembered.  Of 
course, their body temperatures were about 
the same now.  Unexpectedly, he felt very 
warm and it had nothing to do with the sun or 
the desert.  Snatching the napkin out of her 
hands, he rubbed at his face.  The smell of 
his own blood was faint and made his stomach 
churn unpleasantly.

"I'm sorry," she said ungraciously, "I 
forgot.  Slayer strength."

"Yeah, you Slayer, me mortal.  Do that again 
an' you're likely to drive a bone fragment 
straight into the brain."

"Brain? What brain?"

"That would kill me.  You'd best think of 
another method of foreplay."

She put her hands on her hips and regarded 
him as coolly as a vulture watching a rabbit 
dying of thirst.

"Oh this sucks," he grumbled and spit out a 
combination of sand and blood.

Shaking the sand out of his clothes and hair, 
he stood up, closed his eyes against the new 
sun-brightness of the sand and thought for a 
moment.  When he opened them, he saw the 
uncertainty in her eyes.  "Here you go," he 
said, slipping off his leather duster and 
shoving it at her.

"What's this for?"  She didn't take it.  Sand 
was still running out of the sleeves as if 
from a broken hourglass.

"'Less you brought your industrial-strength 
sunblock, I suggest you cover up," he said, 
looking at her bare arms, practically bare 
chest, and bare midriff with a gaze that was 
nearly not lecherous.

Snorting, she took the jacket and shrugged 
into it.  The cuffs draped to her fingertips 
and the hem nearly hit her ankles, but she 
wore it as if it were the latest in Paris 
fashions.

They walked for hours.  Spike could feel the 
sunburn begin to rise out of his shocked, 
unprotected flesh, a slower burn than he'd 
expected but likely to hurt like Hell's own 
hounds in any event.  

"Did you miss it?" Buffy asked from behind 
him, her voice strangely gentle.

"What?"

"The sun."

He tilted his head, considering.  "No," he 
finally admitted.  Coco Chanel's elevation of 
the suntan to fashion happened long after 
he'd become a vampire.  And three days in the 
English sunshine did not a tan make.  
Besides, as an aspiring poet, he preferred to 
do his moping indoors.  "It never bothered 
me, livin' at night, and then not long after 
I was turned the movin' pictures came along, 
so if I did get lonely for it ... There are 
vamps that treat movies set in daytime the 
way human men treat a girlie film, but that 
was never my bag."


Serious Moonlight 9/26


"Stop," Buffy instructed.

No difficulty there.  Spike wasn't used to 
being human, he wasn't used to walking hours 
in the hot sun, and he certainly wasn't used 
to keeping up with a Slayer using human 
stamina.  He used his hands to brace against 
his thighs and leaned over as discreetly as 
possible, which wasn't very.  He tried not to 
suck in deep breaths that would only 
dehydrate him more.

"I hear something," she said.  "There are 
people working, over there," she indicated a 
hill of sand that looked to him much like any 
other hill of sand.

She turned and began walking.

"Wait!"

"What?  Spike, we have to get out of this 
sun."

"Don't I know it.  But listen, you an' I 
ended up in the same place.  Stands 
to reason that Talbot and his beauty queen 
also came down somewhere about us.  We 
ought not go in with banners blazin', is all 
I mean." 

She thought about it, which caused a charming 
little frown line to appear on her forehead 
but had no other apparent results.  "If 
anything gets in our way, I'll slay it.  Will 
that make you feel safer?"

"Oh I wish," he said and followed.

Creeping like cartoon villains, they 
approached the source of the noises.  Metal 
chewing against sand, shouts -- orders -- 
called down.  It could have been English, or 
!Kung, according to Spike's newly dulled 
hearing.  They scuttled past half-dug-out 
houses, ancient steles scratched with shovel 
marks.  "This is kind o' destructive," he 
whispered.  "Might not be legit.  A real, 
official dig would have to do all sorts of 
preservation stuff, along w' the bribes."

"Who's there!"  The shout turned them round.  
As if transported into place, a circle of 
goons surrounded them, looking like 
gladiators on the sand.  Half looked Arab, 
dressed traditionally.  The other half were 
sunburnt like Spike was about to be, dressed 
in the kind of Great White Hunter clothes 
that should have gone out with Rudyard 
Kipling.  The non-Arabs were carrying big, 
nasty-looking revolvers.

"Who are you?" one of them asked, pasty-
looking underneath his peeling skin.

"Tourists?" Buffy offered.

The goons looked at one another.  "You're ... 
American?" their interlocutor asked in plummy 
English tones.  He said it like "syphilitic," 
only with slightly more disdain.

"It's worse than that, mate," Spike told him.  
"She's a natural blonde."  Buffy's hand moved 
as if to whack him, and then stopped.

Another volley of uncertain looks.  "We'd 
best take them to Isobel," the talker said 
unhappily.

"What are you waiting for?" Spike asked with 
outrage.  "Kill 'em!"

Buffy's head whipped back and forth, 
assessing the situation.  "I don't kill 
humans.  Not without a better reason anyway."

The goons began to advance.  "How's this for 
a reason: They aren't dressed normal-like.  
Those trousers went out with the Charleston, 
and those guns are antiques.  There's 
somethin' very wrong here."

Hard hands closed around his upper arms, 
marching him towards an unknown fate.  Beside 
him, Buffy submitted; she'd obey anyone but 
him, apparently.  "Antiques are sold in 
quaint little shops," she informed him, 
struggling free from their captors' hands but 
otherwise following their lead.  "A gun in 
someone's hand is, definitionally, a non-
antique."

****

Deeper into the dig, they were surrounded by 
tents and camels and people, mostly people 
swaddled head to toe in unflattering brownish 
fabric running on unfathomable errands, often 
shouldering loads that Buffy would have 
thought more suited for strapping on top of 
an SUV.  The only car they passed, though, 
was a brown hulk that looked like a refugee 
from an Indiana Jones movie, all metal and 
sharp angles, the kind of car you needed to 
wear a cap to drive.  Only someone had 
obviously carried out a powerful restoration 
spell, because it looked shiny and new enough 
to carry around a starlet.  But there were no 
pyramids.  Buffy was disappointed.

Mr. I'm-afraid-of-Americans stopped in front 
of one of the larger tents, relieved Buffy of 
her handy backpack, and disappeared into a 
flap of brown fabric.

"Buffy," Spike said, despite the jostling of 
the nervous large men surrounding them, "I 
think those are telegraph lines goin' into 
that tent over there."

"Hunh?"  She'd heard of the telegraph -- it 
was sort of like a fax machine, only with 
worse typing.  And maybe it involved Morse 
code; she was none too clear on technical 
stuff.

"Excuse me, sir," he addressed one of their 
captors, a brown-haired man with smile lines 
who was not smiling, "could you tell me the 
date?"

"It's October sixth," the man said.

"Of what year?"

Buffy gave Spike the same look as the man -- 
obviously she'd punched him too hard earlier, 
and the blooming black eyes weren't the worst 
of the damage.

"1925," he said as a tall blonde woman -- 
Isobel, Buffy guessed -- emerged from the 
tent.

"Young lady, I hope you have a perfectly good 
explanation for wandering around our campsite 
after an anomalous temporal vortex carrying a 
variety of unorthodox items," Isobel said, 
looking over her half glasses at Buffy.

"There are non-anomalous temporal vortices?" 
Spike asked and was ignored.

"Specifically, a large crucifix, several 
wooden stakes, brass knuckles, several 
knives, a small bottle of holy water.  Am I 
to assume from this collection of items that 
you are hunting vampires?"

"Y'know what they say about assumin'," Spike 
muttered under his breath.

"It's a long story," Buffy said, feeling that 
hope was gone beyond gone-ness.  1925?

 "Miss, your enthusiasm is commendable, but 
business such as this must really be left to 
those with a certain, shall we say, 
expertise," Isobel fussed with the large tie 
hanging around the neck of her broad-collared 
blouse.

"Been there, done that, got the spellbook.  
Ever heard of a Slayer?  Chosen One, born 
into every generation?"

"And you think you are the Chosen One."  The 
woman's voice was indulgent.

"Buffy don't do much thinkin'," Spike 
interjected.  "She's a lot better at the 
*bein'* a Slayer part."

"I'm afraid, my dear, that it is quite 
impossible that you should be the Slayer.  
Jane?"

From out of the darkness emerged a young 
woman, nearly as slight as Buffy.  She moved 
liquidly, like something that had only 
detached from the air for a moment.  She too, 
was dressed in a long skirt, heels and a 
floppy-necked blouse.  Not what Buffy would 
have considered sensible Slaywear. Buffy's 
eyes locked with Jane's.  Jane was confused, 
but the idea of a second Chosen One was much 
easier for Buffy.  Jane had a frightened 
wildness in her dark eyes that reminded Buffy 
far too much of Faith.

"Okay, this may be hard for all of you to 
understand, but the thing about the 'into 
every generation' business -"

Jane, for one, had heard enough - she lunged 
for Buffy, despite the tall woman's cry and 
the feeble attempts of the goons around them 
to stop her.  Buffy ducked and grabbed Jane's 
outstretched arm, flipping her neatly onto 
the ground.  Jane bounced up like a jill-in-
the-box and took a more careful stance.  
Skirt or no skirt, the other Slayer was 
strong as Buffy and almost as limber.  At 
least she was compensating for her stupid 
clothes.

"I'm actually from a different generation -" 
Buffy stopped to kick at Jane's stomach; Jane 
grabbed her foot, but she twisted in the air 
and used Jane's grip as leverage to vault 
over Jane and land on the sand behind her.

"There was this spell, which obviously moved 
us through time -" Jane landed a fierce kick 
on her left shoulder, and Buffy just knew 
she'd bruise unattractively, so she responded 
with an uppercut that staggered Jane back a 
few steps.  "And how much of this is required 
before you guys admit that either I'm not a 
wannabe -"  

Jane was keening now, a warcry that sent 
shivers down Buffy's spine and threatened to 
drown out her dialogue, and she leapt at 
Buffy with enough force to knock them both to 
the ground.  Buffy was occupied trying to 
wriggle to the top, and she had to use a 
particularly subtle move Giles had spent 
nearly a week drilling her on before she was 
able to pin Jane's hands as she straddled the 
other Slayer like a rocking horse.  "-Or your 
Slayer's training is dangerously deficient."

She stared up at the woman who was obviously 
the leader of this bunch.  "I assume you're 
Jane's Watcher.  I'd call her off if I were 
you."

"Good job, that, " Spike said, not without 
admiration.

The tall blonde looked from Spike to Buffy 
and then back again, before settling on 
Buffy.

"Jane-" she said.

The brunette shrugged out of Buffy's loosened 
grip and stalked over to stand behind her 
Watcher and glare at Buffy.  Isobel ignored 
her, smoothing a hand over her own blonde 
hair before continuing.

"So you're a Slayer.  That's good.  We've 
been sent by the Council to destroy a 
particularly nasty vampire."

"Us too.  We followed a bad guy who took this 
strange mummy, possibly the avatar of Sex-
met, back in time," Buffy said, leaving out 
the part where the Council knew nothing about 
it.  "This is Sp -- William," she said.

To her disgust, Spike turned on the charm 
with an audible click.

"Shankly.  William Shankly," he said and 
shook Isobel's hand, his face moving into a 
friendly smile that Buffy had never seen 
before.  "Ever so pleased to meet you."

"Isobel Throckmorton.  The Lancaster 
Shanklys?"

"Essex, actually." 

"He's ... my Watcher," Buffy stammered, not 
knowing what else to say.  

"Really?"  But Isobel wasn't going to let a little 
thing like a bleached blonde Watcher get 
between her and her mission at hand.

"The crux of the matter is this.  Someone has 
released a very old and very dangerous 
vampire."

Buffy's head hurt.  "Why would someone from 
our time bring a mummy back here?  I mean, 
why go back in time when in 2001 we have 
indoor plumbing and TV and stuff?  He could 
have resurrected Sekhmet and stayed around to 
slaughter *now*, I mean *then*."

"Indoor plumbing is not unknown to this day 
and age," Isobel said stiffly.  "But as for 
your broader point, our researches have 
disclosed that a major thaumatological 
turning point is upon us.  Within the next 
ten days, the stars will align in a 
configuration that will not be seen again for 
a thousand years.  According to ancient 
prophecy, at that point Sekhmet will have the 
power to rule the world.  And the people she 
bleeds to death will outnumber the grains of 
sand in the desert.  But if she sleeps 
entombed, her chance will be lost."

"So," Buffy agreed, "What's the plan?"

"We had wondered how Sekhmet escaped from her 
tomb, as it is heavily guarded.  We are going 
to lure this incarnation of Sekhmet to a 
different tomb and seal her inside."

"Why don't you just stake her?" Buffy asked.  
Did these people not have any idea what they 
were doing?

"My dear, Sekhmet is an avatar of a goddess.  
It's far more complicated than that."

"Well, I was told that all you need to do is 
stake and bake."

"You forgot the head bit," Spike corrected.  
"Stake, cut off her head, then burn her.  
Stake, cut, and bake."

"We are binding her in the tomb."  Isobel 
assumed the expression of a substitute 
teacher in charge of a study hall.  "We would 
appreciate your help in this matter.  Then we 
will attempt to return you from whence you 
came."

Whence?  Buffy wondered.  Had she really said 
whence?  Was whence really a word?

Serious Moonlight 10/26

They stared at each other until the real 
Watcher shook her head briskly.  "Jane, take 
them to your tent, you can bunk with me." 

"This way," Jane sulked.  The black-haired 
Slayer led them to a tent about ten feet 
square and fitted out like a proper bedroom 
with a wardrobe, dressing table/desk, bed, 
bedside table and a few kerosene lamps. The 
floor was covered in an elaborate rug that 
would become a priceless antique in eighty 
years.  Buffy stared openmouthed at the 
paucity of the accommodations.  Spike 
found himself smiling internally at Buffy's 
discomfiture.  Primitive conditions in 
Southern California meant no cable.

Jane did have a jug of water and a mismatched 
set of cups.  Spike poured himself some, 
thirsty after all that walking, and took his 
first sip of water in over a hundred years.  
He recoiled from the old-paper taste and the 
unsettled grit.  The memory had been much 
better.  

"D'you think you'll go mano a mano with Jane 
again anytime soon? That was a fabulous 
fight.  Only thing missin' was baby oil and 
music," he asked and arranged a leer on his 
face.

"Shut up."

"And you promotin' me to be your Watcher.  Am 
I goin' to get to watch everythin'?"

"Don't make me hurt you."

"Don't tease."

"Give me some of that.  I need to re-hydrate.  
It's good for the skin."  Spike complied and 
then snickered at Buffy's expression as she 
choked down the water, which had been boiled 
but not de-sedimented. 

"Your Doctor Yummy and his Mummy have really 
gone and gotten us in a right mess."

"I don't see where we can do anything but 
help these people out.  They're our only way 
home."

Spike, with his flexible sense of loyalty, 
found himself missing his cool, dark, and 
comforting crypt.  "I trust that Isobel about 
as far as I could comfortably spit out a 
rat."

"Bad picture.  But we're choiceless here," 
she said in a voice as barren as the desert 
outside.  "Willow and Xander are gone - my 
mother and Giles, they're not even alive yet.  
Their parents probably haven't gotten to 
first base.  We're alone."

Something twisted in his gut and he wanted 
very much to have a cigarette, but leaving 
her alone right now wasn't the best thing to 
do.  Instead, he went and sat next to her 
where she was sitting on the bed, trying very 
hard not to touch her, even though every cell 
in his body was telling him that now would be 
a good time.

"Where are the pyramids?" she asked with a 
frown.  With her dirty face she looked like 
an unhappy child.

"Not here. Down the Nile a piece, I expect."

"Great.  I go to Egypt and I don't even get 
to see the pyramids.  That sucks."

"Just drink your water."

To his surprise, she did.

****

Dressed in borrowed clothes gathered from the 
Watchers and Jane respectively, Spike and 
Buffy made their way through the camp to 
dinner.  Spike felt downright naked without 
his duster but he didn't need to stand out
amongst the Watchers and he'd managed to 
fight his way into the trousers, shirt, and 
jacket that had been gathered up for him.  He 
couldn't remember how to tie a tie so he left 
it off.  The clothes felt strange, rough against 
his living skin, and he'd forgotten the way 
that braces rubbed on his shoulders.  Had he 
really spent years and years bundled up in 
cotton and linen like this?  The boots 
pinched his toes and he worried about 
blisters.  On the other hand, Buffy managed 
to look cool and collected in her mango-
colored silk dress.  He noticed that she'd 
neglected to put on stockings and he didn't 
know if it was by choice or out of ignorance.  
He wasn't about to say anything because he 
had the suspicion that any comment he made 
was going to be answered with a smack or two.

Jane stalked over to them.  Her dress was 
cobalt blue, which set off her dark hair and 
the three ropes of real pearls around her 
neck.  She stopped about six inches from 
Spike's face, so that he was staring into her 
eyes.

Deliberately, she leaned forward and sniffed 
Spike's collar.  He tried to stand as if 
women checked him out like fruit in the 
grocery store on a regular basis.  "There's 
something about you," she accused.  Her human 
breath brushed his cheek and knocked his 
already-racing heart up another twenty beats 
per minute.

Beside him, in her bright, filmy dress, Buffy 
tightened her hand on his arm and it hurt 
like hell.  "Yes," she said, stepping forward 
so that Jane had to retreat or bump chests, 
"he's *my* Watcher."

"Share and share alike," Spike said, trying 
hard not to sound eager.

Buffy looked at him as though he smelled like 
dead fish.  For a moment he thought she was 
going to hit him again, but instead she 
stalked past him to the dinner table, leaving 
him alone with Jane.  Jane's pale eyes burned 
into his face and recognition sent lightning-
shocks down his spine.  It wasn't so much 
that she looked like Dru, she looked at him 
the way Dru had.  A cold feeling, possibly 
not human, began in the pit of his hungry 
stomach. He found himself wishing that Buffy 
hadn't walked away from him.

Jane raised an elegant eyebrow under the dark 
canopy of her fringe and considered him 
again.  The Council members, archaeologists, 
and assorted flunkies passed by on their way 
to the dinner table.  

"You're surrounded by death," she said as 
casually as any vampire.

"Well, you know, spendin' all that time with 
Slayers and whatnot," he hedged.  "A bit's 
bound to rub off eventually."

Hell, he sounded like a complete pratt, and 
not unlike Giles, which amounted to the same 
thing.  Jane did the burning eyes thing at 
him for another few moments and then took 
herself off to the dinner table.  Nearly 
sweating with relief, Spike waited a few 
moments and then followed.

The table was set with fine linen and gold-
banded china, which was slightly surreal with 
the desert sand surrounding them and the 
stars burning down like a thousand faraway 
chandeliers.  "Looking at you now, dressed 
properly," Isobel managed to make it sound 
like an insult, "you seem familiar to me.  
Are you certain we haven't met before?"

"You may have met one of my grandparents, I 
suppose."

"Hmm.  Perhaps when your injuries heal I'll 
see a closer resemblance.  How were you 
hurt?"  Her tone implied that Buffy had 
neglected to protect her Watcher, and 
simultaneously that her Watcher had wrongly 
attempted to ignore his job description and 
intervene.   

He tried very hard to avoid looking at Buffy.  
"I'm not entirely sure.  Perhaps it was a 
side effect of the transport spell.  
California to Egypt across eighty years is a 
hard journey, and I don't have the Slayer's 
immunities."  He heard Buffy shift in her 
seat, relaxing.

"So, how did you come to be in California?"

"Turned left at Cleveland," Spike joked, 
looked around and realized that no one at the 
table had seen A Hard Day's Night but him and 
the joke was lost.

He cleared his throat.  "Actually, there's a 
Hellmouth there.  Been there since the 
Spanish settled in the late 1700's.  It's a 
veritable phantasmacopia of demons, vampires, 
ghosts, hauntings, and poltergeists, as well 
as a few things less easily categorized."

Dinner, refreshingly stuffy, began.  He 
hadn't dressed for dinner since Dru's fetish 
for evening dress had dissipated.  And Dru 
hadn't been picky about demitasse spoons and 
fish forks, though she did scold Miss Edith 
for spilling her tea. Of course herself had 
given Spike the task of dressing the dinner 
for dinner.  Getting a woman into an evening 
gown was infinitely more difficult than 
getting her out of one, especially when she 
realized that she wasn't going to live 
through to dessert.

Buffy viewed the silver set before her with 
stunned horror.  It might have been the first 
time he'd ever seen her afraid.

Broth was served in delicate two-handled 
bowls.  Spike picked his up and brought it to 
his lips.  Buffy looked at him 
disbelievingly, then hastily imitated him.  
This had possibilities.

The possibilities escaped him as soon as he 
tasted the broth.  It was fatty, salty, 
exploding on his tongue like concentrated 
sunlight.  He gulped it down, ignoring 
Buffy's increasingly frantic faces, and 
signaled for more.

His dinner companions disappeared into a haze 
of crackling fat and tinned vegetables, all 
hitting his taste buds like cluster bombs.  
He slowed only when his stomach threatened 
not just rebellion, but all-out, George-Bush-
in-Japanese-Prime-Minister's-lap style 
guerrilla warfare.  He relaxed into his camp 
chair and tried diligently not to belch.

"So," Jane said, accepting another gin and 
tonic.  "How long have you been a Slayer?"  
Her stare was as dark as her hair.

Buffy stopped chasing a chunk of maybe-meat 
around her plate.  "Coming up on six years 
now.  And you?"  Her tone was dulcet, 
evidence that she was engaged in a serious 
dominance struggle.

Jane looked down.

"The prior Slayer was lost eight months ago," 
Isobel said.  "Jane was identified at age 
three and has been in training ever since."

"Wow," Buffy said.  "I'm sorry," and she 
sounded genuinely so.

The servants were spiriting plates away, 
rather more from Spike's end of the table 
than elsewhere, and Spike settled back to 
adjust his belt.  Who would ever imagined 
that English food would be that good? The 
secret was that you had to be dead for a 
century to appreciate it.  If he continued to 
eat like this, he was going to need to steal 
some bigger jeans when he got back.

Jane's curiosity had yet to be satisfied.  
"And you've been Buffy's Watcher all that 
time?"  Her eyes were like searchlights under 
the pale moon of her forehead.

Buffy and Spike exchanged glances.  "The 
Council and I ... have had our differences in 
the past," he said, trying to channel Giles.  
"But I've been with Buffy for some years 
now."

There were cream cakes for dessert, and 
trifle, which Buffy turned up her nose at, so 
Spike ate her portion.

After the dessert had been cleared, and after 
Spike had gotten the strength to stand, he 
headed towards their borrowed tent, leaving 
the deserted table behind.  The alcohol was 
beginning to overwhelm the caloric onslaught, 
and he was glad that the tent was only a 
hundred yards away.

Jane appeared on the path before him.  "You 
shouldn't be out alone, after dark," she 
crooned, her voice raising goosebumps on 
flesh that hadn't moved in decades.  
"Something might happen to you."

"I think it already has," he admitted.  

Her skin was the exact color of the risen 
moon, her hair like the night between the 
stars.  Why were all Slayers beautiful?  Was 
it some kind of adaptation to keep vampires 
off balance?  Anyone could be fooled into 
thinking that a delicate beauty like Jane was 
harmless.  Her perfume was lilies of the 
valley and it wrapped around him like smoke.

She was circling him now, her dress rustling 
over the sand like a cobra.  "What's eating 
you, Sweet William?"

His back was totally exposed.  She could 
stake him before his next heartbeat.

"Jane!"  Isobel's voice from across the 
compound made his head ring.  "Come to bed!"

Jane sniffed, a well-bred English sound, and 
disappeared in a hiss of cotton and lace.

She didn't say 'eating', he realized as he 
hurried toward the relative safety of the 
tent.

She said 'eaten'.


Serious Moonlight 11/26


Buffy thought she was drunk.  It was 
possible, given the fact that the only 
beverages on the table at dinner had been 
alcoholic in one form or another.  She had 
never seen adults put away so much booze in 
her life.  They had been drinking like frat 
boys, only with food, so their speech had 
slurred somewhat, but no one had started 
cracking dirty jokes or brought a goat to the 
table.  Even Jane, who couldn't have been 
more than eighteen, was putting it away with 
the rest of them.

Sitting at the tiny dressing table in her 
tent, Buffy ran a brush through her hair and 
considered her face.  With the heavy eyeliner 
washed off and the lipstick now on a napkin 
left at the dinner table, she looked more 
like herself than she had earlier that 
evening when the dark-eyed stranger had 
stared back at her from the same mirror. 

Hard to believe that the morning before she 
had been trying to get Spike out of bed in 
his crypt, and he'd been wandering around all 
naked and arrogant.  That thought percolated 
through her brain for a moment before she 
continued thinking.  Was Human!Spike a good 
thing or a bad thing?  The jury was still 
ordering chicken salad sandwiches on that 
one. Human!Spike was Subdued!Spike, which had 
a couple of advantages.  He was more polite, 
not quite as foul-mouthed, and seemed to be 
refraining from his customary Spiky 
snarkiness.  On the other hand, he hadn't 
tried to paw her for many, many hours and 
this made her wonder if he was sad.  He 
looked like he was suffering pain somewhere, 
like his shoes were too tight.  Grinchy-face, 
with blackened-blue circles from the nose-
punch clashing with his cornflower-blue eyes.

Speak of the vampire, or ex-vampire - the 
flap of her tent pulled back and Spike 
wobbled in.

"What are you doing here?"

He smiled at her, and she noticed that from 
somewhere he'd acquired glasses, a tiny gold-
rimmed pair that, with the suit, made him 
look as cute as a teddy bear holding a bunch 
of heart-shaped helium balloons.  "Sent me 
here, they did.  Figured you and I would want 
to stick together, the way a Watcher and a 
Slayer should."  He moved towards her, then 
tripped on a stool and she only saved him 
from smashing into the floor by moving 
Slayer-fast to grab him.

"Something else I forgot.  Tolerance to 
alcohol.  Not only have I gone blind as a 
proverbial bat, I can't drink anymore."  He 
blinked up at her and his human eyelashes 
were still really long.

"Why was there so much alcohol?"  She was 
aware that her tone was vaguely whiny, but it 
was only Spike after all.

"Drinkin' the water's a good way to get 
yourself killed out here if you didn't grow 
up with girardia and all those other nice 
invisible little bugs.  No such thing as 
chlorination out here.  Alcohol tends to ward 
off the worst of the bacteria."

She was still holding him, and her stomach 
was wobbly, so she eased him onto the bench 
and sat with him.  He was warm, warmer than 
he'd ever been, and she was suddenly cold.

"I had forgotten how the world gets when 
you're drunk," he said, leaning companionably 
against her shoulder.  "All sparkly, like bad 
TV reception, only feelin' it instead of 
seein'."

Spike was probably as surprised as Buffy was 
when she turned her head and kissed him.  The 
gin on his lips tasted different,  bitter, 
dark purple, and she felt his tongue invade 
her drink-numbed mouth with a vague 
satisfaction.  Clumsy, lumbering, he shifted 
on the bench until he was straddling it, his 
hands on her shoulders to keep from falling 
away, and his fingers traced her collarbones 
and fumbled open the buttons on the thick 
cotton shirt.  

Spike's human kisses were different, rougher.  
It might be the alcohol or it might be the 
realization that there was almost nothing he 
could do to hurt her now.  He tugged at her 
lower lip with his fangless, even teeth and 
she sighed as his hands found her breasts.  
Where his fingers crossed her skin she felt 
electric sparks, travelling through her body 
slowly, like rubbing up against a thick fur 
coat.  His teeth scraped at her jawline and 
she threw her head back, watching the shadows 
dance on the top of the tent.  His shirt 
refused her attempts at removing it, and 
finally she growled and pushed him away.

"Take off your clothes and get in the bed," 
she ordered, pushing away from the bench, and 
he grinned up at her until she felt herself 
blush.

Spike managed to undress himself and lay back 
on the bed, his white body nearly glowing in 
the lamplight amidst the dark exotic 
blankets.  She'd never really let herself 
look at him before; the sex had been hurried 
and shameful, and while it was still shameful 
she had the feeling that this was going to be 
slow.  Anyway, she was seventy-five years 
away from anyone who knew what a big ball of 
wrong sex with Spike was.  His body seemed 
milk-white even without the vampirism, thin 
but muscled like a statue in a museum, smooth 
and lithe, thinner than Riley and Angel, with 
dark nipples standing out from his chest.  
There were a variety of whiter than white 
scars crossing his skin at different points, 
and she wondered how many of those she had 
inflicted.  Buffy could see his ribs through 
the blood-pink flesh.  He was unembarrassed 
by her frank scrutiny.  His cock jaunted up 
to meet her, purpling with his very own 
blood, and she felt a guilty thrill -- she 
was the big strong one in the situation; she 
could make him do anything she wanted, and 
he'd want it too.

The dress and step-ins came off fairly 
easily.  The cool night air against her skin 
-- or maybe it was Spike's waiting gaze  -- 
made her shiver.  He hadn't taken off his 
glasses, which seemed more decadent than the 
rest of it. 

When she straddled him, he groaned in pained 
pleasure. His skin was smooth against hers, 
proving all the stories about sun damage.  
She dragged her fingers down his ribs and he 
shuddered underneath her.  She felt buzzing 
arousal between her legs, pressed against his 
chest, and he bent his head to nip at her 
stomach right above her bikini line.  "I'm 
not sure I got enough to eat, Slayer, how 
about some dessert?" he growled, and she 
silenced him in exactly the manner he'd 
requested, covering his face with her body, 
capturing his cheeks between her thighs.  
Behind the gold frames, his darkened eyes 
burned her skin.  Here, too, he was rougher, 
using the flat edges of his teeth on the 
delicate skin, tugging at her, sucking in the 
only way he could now.  She could feel the 
blood rushing beneath the surface of her 
skin, right up against him but no further, 
and his hands were cupping her bottom now, 
his fingers sliding in where his mouth 
couldn't reach, warm fingers, warm tongue 
lashing at her.  The red-brown-gold bed shook 
underneath her; she was pumping up and down 
on him like he was a hobby horse.  The 
lamplight thrashed against the ceiling in 
rhythm with her movements, hot and liquid 
golden like he was making her feel.

The orgasm swept her up, more powerful than 
any transportation spell, mixing with the 
alcohol in her blood and the remnants of 
dehydration to make her collapse on top of 
Spike, panting, while he held her waist as if 
she were going to float away.

After a bit, his grip relaxed, and then he 
began to push against her.  "Slayer!" he 
said, muffled and wheezing, "... can't 
breathe!"

Laughing, her head still buzzing with 
starlight, Buffy moved down his body like he 
was one of her workout toys, stopping only 
when she encountered his still-bobbing cock.  
It throbbed against her wet thigh, warm and 
dry and seeming so lonely, she had to give it 
a home.

Spike sighed as she slid down on him, and the 
sound was so human-normal that it made 
something in her chest do a back-flip, with a 
twist.  His glasses had gone askew while he 
had other things to worry about, and she 
reached down to adjust them so that he could 
see her face.  He blinked up at her as she 
moved, slow and careful.  He was human now 
after all, and delicate, and deserved to have 
the work done by someone who had the stamina 
for it.

"I didn't remember," he sighed, his face 
smooth with wonder and pleasure.  She dragged 
her palm down his cheek and was shocked to 
find a hint of stubble.  

"What didn't you remember?" she asked, 
displeased that he was still capable of 
thought.

"It's not the same thing at all," he mumbled.  
"The only way..." he trailed off, his head 
twisting against the thick pillows as he 
groaned.  His hips pumped, overtaking her 
rhythm, and she felt him surge within her, 
then subside.  Human Spike apparently lacked 
the extensive control of his vampire self, 
but since he'd already ensured her 
satisfaction, she'd allow him some time to 
get up to speed, or to slow down, or 
whatever.

She slid off of him and threw her arm over 
his nearly hairless chest, shaking with his 
attempts to get his breathing under control.  
His hair was mussed and his glasses still 
weren't right, and this close to him she 
could smell his sweat.  Deodorant was a thing 
of the past, or of the future really, and she 
was glad that Spike turned out to have a good 
solid boy-smell, nothing sour or overly 
pungent.

Words said during sex couldn't be trusted, 
this she knew.  But Spike's had seemed 
uncharacteristically meaningful.  Maybe Riley 
had been right, in a twisted not-right way: 
sex for vampires wasn't at the pinnacle of 
experience; it wasn't the only way they could 
get inside someone else.  Here, human, Spike 
was limited to human senses.    

Much later, after they'd both dozed and the 
lamp had burned down to the wick, they 
talked.

"Where'd you get the glasses?" Buffy asked, 
running a finger down the side of his face.

"They have an extra supply.  Watcherdom bein' 
an invitation to myopia an' all, and then 
considerin' the constant hazards of fightin' 
evil, it's only sensible to have some 
backups.  I'd forgotten how nasty it is to 
have the world all fuzzy, like your 
thinkin'."

Spitefully, she dug her fingers into the thin 
skin covering his ribs and he twitched away.

"We'll have none of that, young lady," he 
warned, but the threat was lost due to the 
fact that the glasses had slid down his nose 
and his post-tryst hair looked as though 
someone had run an eggbeater through it.

She tried very hard and managed not to 
snicker.

"I think I know why I'm human."  She stared 
at him, and he sighed.   "Unlike you, *I* had 
a physical presence in 1925.  I was undead 
then -- now -- just like I'm undead in 2001." 

Details, details, she thought and began 
examining his skin a little more closely.  
There was a scar on his shoulder and she bent 
her head to taste it.

He fussily pushed the glasses back up his 
nose before continuing, "I'm in Paris about 
now, I think, but point is that if I'd gone 
through as a vamp there would be two of me in 
the same time."

The scars definitely hadn't been there when 
he was a vampire.  Maybe the rush of real 
blood under his skin had brought them out. 
She followed the shoulder-scar down to where 
it dead-ended on his left nipple, and he 
caught his breath when she raked her teeth 
over it.

"If the two of us met, it might be enough to 
destroy the universe, or at least be some 
sort of magical Chernobyl," he continued, but 
sounded somewhat less self-assured.  It might 
have been the fact that she held the 
twitching weight of his cock in her hand.

"Chernobyl," she agreed and tasted the other 
nipple.  No, the scar didn't make a 
difference in taste, only texture.

"But if the laws of magic don't want that to 
happen, puttin' me through as a human while 
filtering out the demon soul means that even 
if we meet, there'd be no duplication and 
therefore no explosion."

"'Cause the real Spike doesn't have a human 
soul at all," Buffy said slowly, as the 
explanation penetrated and she bent down to 
run her tongue around the edge of his navel.

Hard to believe that he had been born - that 
a woman had given birth to him.  It was 
easier to imagine that Spike had been hatched 
like an infant snake from an egg in some 
foul-smelling nest somewhere.

"Blondie, I *am* the real Spike, fangs or 
no," he said and his voice caught even as he 
reached for her breast.  "But that other 
fellow tearin' up the catacombs is the real 
deal too, and at least this way there's no 
risk we'll make like matter and antimatter 
even if we do meet."

"How do you know so much about time travel, 
anyway?"

"I've been watchin' late-late night TV since 
it started.  Star Trek, the Outer Limits, 
Doctor Who, the Twilight Zone. Couple a'years 
of that and you're an expert."

She narrowed her eyes, "But if we were to 
leave here and go to Paris, and run into you, 
would you kill you?"

"Would I kill me?" he asked and he was full-
blown hard again in her hand.

"Yes.  Would you kill you or would you?" she 
asked and twitched her hips so she could 
guide him into her.

"Yes," he gasped without hesitation.  "There 
would be screamin' an' carryin' on and then 
I'd probably rip myself into bite-sized 
bits."

"Cross Paris off the list of fun places to 
go," she said and pulled him deep inside her.

"But it was fun," he said in a thin voice,  
punctuating his words with thrusts of his 
slim hips.  "Montmartre, Follies Bergere, 
Gertrude Stein's parties, summers at the Cap 
d'Antibes, Scotty and Zelda getting drunk and 
fighting, artist's models, American Jazz, and 
French wine." 

Somewhere after Gertrude Stein, Scotty and 
Zelda, and a brain-wrecking orgasm, Buffy put 
her head down to his shoulder and heard only 
the rumbling of his breathing in his chest, 
which gradually faded into a distant tide as 
she fell asleep.

Serious Moonlight 12/26


The following morning, Buffy was bright-eyed 
and bushy-tailed and Spike found himself 
plotting her death as he was exposed to evil 
morning perkiness.  His hair still retained 
vestiges of gel -- that stuff really did 
stand up to most anything, even sudden
humanity -- so he washed his face in the 
small basin on the dresser and ran wet 
fingers through his hair to keep it in line.  
He hoped they didn't stay here long; his 
roots would begin to show. He was glad that 
he'd taken off his black nail polish the day 
before on a whim.  It would have been hard to 
explain to Jane and her uptight Watcher.

After the culinary glories of breakfast, 
which was a slightly less formal affair than 
dinner, Buffy went off somewhere with Jane to 
do Slayer things and Spike found himself 
alone at the table with Isobel.  He sipped at 
his coffee and found it disappointing until 
he remembered that coffee always smelled 
better than it tasted and a half-dozen 
spoonfuls of sugar made it bearable.

"This must be very difficult for you," Isobel 
said, squinting out across the blowing desert 
sand between the camp and the workmen working 
at the tomb.

"You have no idea," Spike said, in a voice 
that registered a 7 on the pH scale.

Naturally, Isobel had no idea what he was 
talking about and explaining it was out of 
the question so he drank a little more coffee 
and squinted into the sun as well.  The white 
robes of the Arabs blew in the hot wind and 
somewhere voices were chanting the morning 
Salat: Allâhu Akbar. Allâhu Akbar.  Ash-hadu 
an-lâ ilâha illal-Lâh.  Ash-hadu anna 
Muhammadar-Rasûlul-Lâh.  Hayya `alas-Salâ.  
Hayya `alal-Falâh.  In 2001, on this very 
same spot, they would still be chanting the 
same words.  Barring apocalypse, people like 
them would be chanting when Buffy's bones had 
crumbled like vampire dust.  Spike felt old, 
and small.

"I understand that things may be quite 
different in eighty years, but you seem very 
young to be a Watcher," Isobel tested him, 
like a kung-fu master assessing the defenses 
of her opponent.

"I'm older than I look," he said and showed 
her his unfamiliar teeth in something almost 
like a smile. "Look, love, why don't we just 
cut the bull and go at it straight-like.  You 
don't like me and you don't trust me. Right 
back at you babe.  But we got a deal goin' on 
here.  Buffy and I help you get Sekhmet 
locked up in her condo for one and you get us 
back to where we belong and out of your 
hair."

"What I don't like, Mister Shankly, is your 
attitude."

"Wouldn't be the first time I heard that.  
Now is there somethin' I can do or do you 
want to sit 'round and take shots at me all 
day?"

Still as and stiff as an Egyptian statue, she 
stared at him for a long moment, and the wind 
moved the pale blonde hairs that had escaped 
from her smooth uptwist.

"If you go down to the tomb, I'm sure Albert 
will find something for you to do."

"Right."

Albert turned out to be a young man with an 
intelligent face and a floppy haircut.  He 
was directing the local workmen in fluent 
Arabic, where they were reinforcing the walls 
of the tomb with steel girders.  The workmen 
were wearing "bloody foreigner" faces and 
working slower than teamsters.

"The real problem is that the locals don't 
understand what will happen if we don't get 
Sekhmet under lock and key," Albert 
complained when Spike commented on the 
workers' lack of enthusiasm for the project.

"I don't suppose offerin' them more money 
would help?"

"Please, we've already got Howard Carter 
working on the other side of the Valley, and 
he's paying more than we are.  All the 
enthusiastic workers are over there.  I'm 
afraid that the budget doesn't stretch much 
further."

"You have a budget?  Savin' the world's got a 
budget?"

"You know what the bloody Council's like."

Spike nodded as though he did and tried on 
one of Giles' long-suffering looks.

"You want to be a mate and help me setting 
out some wards around the perimeter?"

"Right."

Setting wards turned out to be digging holes 
in the unbelievably rocky soil and burying 
metal boxes the size of a shoebox every ten 
feet.  By midday, Spike's hands were covered 
with blisters, his back was screaming in 
pain, and his sunburn had sunburn. How any 
human could work in the heat was nothing 
short of amazing, since Spike had sweated 
through his shirt in the first ten minutes.  
It was only frequent breaks for the vile tea-
water that kept him from doing the 
dehydration nose-dive.  While they worked, 
Albert let loose with a long string of 
complaints about Isobel, most of which seemed 
to center around the fact that she was a 
woman, and that Albert should have been put 
in charge of the expedition. None of this 
surprised Spike very much, since the woman in 
charge issue was still going on in Sunnydale 
almost eighty years in the future. 

Despite the complaining, Albert was a gabby 
goldmine of information.  He outlined all the 
precautions that the Watchers were taking to 
make sure that Sekhmet didn't get out of her 
prison.  There were anti-vampire devices, 
such as the wards, that Spike had never heard 
of or encountered in his long and illustrious 
career as one of the evil dead.

"The trick is, you have to match the 
pervading culture and religion of the 
vampire," Albert grunted as he shifted a 
fairly large rock. "Christian symbols work on 
vampires from a Christian culture. You wave a 
cross at a Chinese vampire and he's just 
going to look at you like you've lost your 
tiny mind.  You need a yin/yang or a Buddha."  
Spike actually knew this was untrue, at least 
where the vamp in question was aware of the 
religious tradition at issue.  He'd seen 
vamps with the sidecurls that marked them as 
formerly Orthodox Jews cringe from crosses, 
not because of Christian superiority but 
because they'd recognized the symbols that 
continued to persecute them in undeath.  But 
there was no sense relieving Albert of his 
potentially useful misconception. 

Spike dragged one of the surprisingly heavy 
wards over to the hole and dropped it in.  
Despite what Albert had said about magical 
elements, Spike was convinced that the boxes 
were made of solid lead.  There were 
hieroglyphics incised on the surface, 
spelling spells of binding or some other 
Watcher-like thing.

"Knew one guy who went after a vamp in Nepal.  
The vamp ripped the crucifix out of his hand 
and snapped it in half before he put the big 
bite on him.  Now what we've got here is 
completely accurate to 1353 BC Armana-centric 
Egyptian religion.  You see, the pharaoh 
Amenophis makes this dramatic turn into a 
sun-based religion.  The disc of Aten.  Aten 
was a minor god until Amenophis picks him up 
and he changed his name to Ankhenaten.  It 
means Beloved of Aten.  Re was the sun god 
before that.  Suddenly, Ankhenaten moves the 
capital to Armana and makes everyone worship 
Aten.  Makes you wonder, since Aten was 
depicted as a solar disc with sunrays coming 
down off it. "

"Vampires and the sun."

"Exactly.  We think that's when Sekhmet made 
her appearance and the whole country turns to 
sun worship to combat her.  That would have 
been the time that the priests of Aten would 
have locked her up in her first tomb, but 
there aren't any documents to support this."

Albert straightened up, took off his fedora 
and ran a hand through his sweat-soaked hair.

"D'you think this is gonna work?" Spike 
nodded at the tomb, the wards, and the desert 
in general.

"I hope to God it does." Albert's face 
settled into an expression of dread.  
"Otherwise we're fucked."

If the situation hadn't been so serious Spike 
might have laughed.  The sands blew around 
their ankles for a long moment before Albert 
jammed his hat back on his head.

"See the tomb?" he asked.

"Sure." 

The tomb was three small rooms carved into 
the solid rock of the hillside.  Workmen were 
smoothing three of the walls of the main room 
while the fourth wall was being painted with 
an elaborate mural that looked like something 
Spike vaguely remembered seeing at the 
British Museum a few decades earlier.  He 
should have gone with Dru the night that she 
broke into the Metropolitan Museum of Art to 
see the King Tut exhibit back in '79. What 
had he done instead?  He suspected that it 
involved going to CBGB, drinking a beer, 
seeing a band, and then drinking a patron.  
But there had been a lot of nights like that.

"We're putting this gate with ankhs on it 
across the doorway.  The ankh is the Egyptian 
symbol for life, almost analogous to the 
Christian cross."

Spike stared at the gate, wrought in 
something the color of gold, saw the touching 
arms of the loop-topped crosses and 
remembered a crucifix pressed into his 
outstretched hand, one of Angelus' little 
jokes.  It had taken almost five years for 
the burn to heal properly.  Without thinking, 
he stepped back from the gate, and bumped 
into something soft and feminine.

Unfortunately, it was Isobel.

"Albert, I need you to place an international 
phone call back to headquarters.  I need to 
have a file couriered over.  Can you drive to 
the American Express office this afternoon?"  
She was staring straight at Spike.  He put a 
hand up to check whether there was something 
nasty on his face, and winced when his 
fingers encountered the bruises remaining 
from Buffy's domestic violence episode.

"I need to get the rest of the wards set and 
I -"

"Albert." Isobel tightened the leash with her 
voice and a cold look.

"Right after lunch."  Albert looked at Isobel 
with a mixture of rebellion and irritation 
that Spike thoroughly understood.

Turning again to Spike, Isobel composed her 
face in a smooth façade of calm friendliness.

"I hope this is educational for you, Mister 
Shankly."

"Extremely."

With her dress shimmering in the torchlight 
of the tomb, Isobel made her way out.  Both 
men watched her go.

"Bitch," Albert breathed.

Spike made a non-committal sound.

"She hasn't got the slightest fucking idea 
what we're dealing with, thinks it's some 
kind of Council Holiday or some fucking 
foolishness," Albert said.

Spike grinned at him.

"Best let her make a hash of it herself."

"She never should have been put in charge.  
And that bloody Jane. You ask me, the girl's 
a walking cock-up."

"Fancy a smoke?" Spike asked.

"Ta ever so."

****

When Buffy returned to the tent, Spike 
attacked her, but not in the usual way.

"There is a common courtesy of puttin' things 
back when you're done wiv 'em," he snarled 
and kicked a pile of clothes off the chair.

"Excuse me?" she asked in a stake-pointed 
voice.  "I'm sorry, is part of being human 
turning into my mother?"

"Wardrobe, that's where the hangin' things 
live."  He pointed at the furniture as he 
spoke, as though Buffy had grown up in the 
jungle instead of Southern California.  
"Chest of drawers, which is where the frilly 
girlish bits live, not all over the floor."

Crossing her arms over her chest, she glared 
at him.  "So what's got your frilly bits in a 
twist?"

He stopped flinging clothes around long 
enough to give her a snarl almost as ugly as 
a fang-face.

"That bloody Isobel. Set me out diggin' holes 
with Albert all mornin'."

"Albert?  Who's Albert?"

"The point is--" he would have had far more 
authority if he hadn't been holding an 
underslip, "-- she knows that something isn't 
quite pukka about you an' me.  Havin' Jane 
sniffin' around me isn't helpin' matters 
either. I'm thinkin' that her Slayer sense is 
pickin' something up."

"Jane's not making my top ten list of 
favorite people, either.  She's totally 
weird.  I thought maybe we could trade Slayer 
tips or something but all she wanted to do 
was play cards," Buffy flopped down on the 
bed and took off her shoes.  "And this skirt 
and heels routine is totally lame."

"Dunno, got its advantages," he said and his 
hand was on her leg, sliding quickly up the 
length of her skin.  "Easy access, for one."

Breath caught in her throat, Buffy let him 
push her back into the bed, and welcomed the 
hot hardness of his kisses.  God, he had the 
kissing thing down cold.  Guess it took a 
hundred years or so for complete proficiency.  
She gave herself up into it, since it was 
only kissing, after all, and his heart was 
beating in his chest.  She could feel it 
banging against her hand like something 
trying to get out of a cage.  His hand was 
working its way around her underwear, headed 
for home plate, and part of her brain was 
doing the "it's wrong" tap-dance while the 
other was all ready for a slow grind.

"It's the middle of the afternoon," she 
hissed when he finally broke for breath.

"So it's a rare opportunity. You wouldn't 
deny me a rare opportunity, would you?" he 
murmured into her throat.

She wanted to die, wanted to swoon (whatever 
that was, exactly), and couldn't quite work 
up the energy to fight him off.  She knew she 
could. With his human body, she could put a 
massive hurt on him.  The knowledge made h