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Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part III

At the techno club where Gutrick was expected to appear, Allie wanted to wait outside, and Will had to argue his reasons. Disagreement between them was common, but Allie was seldom so passionate in pursuing a point, and Will found himself attempting to convince her when he could have simply compelled obedience. “Crowds are cover,” he explained to her for the third time. “We can use them for camouflage while we watch for him.”

“Cover works both ways,” Allie objected. “Crowds mean it’s as hard for us to spot him as it is for him to see us. Outside, we can watch from a hidey-hole, and take him down away from witnesses.”

“He’s the last one,” Will said. “Witnesses don’t matter. And there are three entrances, we’d have to separate to monitor the lines of approach.” He frowned at her. “Normally you’d insist on being in the thick of the people and the music. Are you just being contrary, pushing the opposite of whatever I want?”

“I …” Allie bit her lip. “I don’t know. It’s just, we’ve been taking it all one step at a time, right? I mean, you always knew what the last act would be but meanwhile we’ve done whatever we had to do to get there. Well, this is it, curtain time. We could wrap it all up tonight … or it could all fall apart, right here, right now, just when we’ve almost got it won.” She laughed briefly, but it wasn’t the usual derisive bark. “I don’t know if I’m choking at the goal line, or if I’ve actually got a vibe, but the thought of going in there is really making me twitch.”

Enough. “This is the finish,” Will said. “I’m not going to back away because you’ve got performance anxiety. I’ve heard you out, but the decision is mine. Let’s go.”

The interior was loud, dimly lit but punctuated by strobes, and with perhaps a quarter of the population density that might have been seen on a weekend night. The music was recorded rather than live, but horrendously amplified to compensate, the lyrics so distorted by the volume that it couldn’t be immediately determined if they were being belted out in German or English. Will led the way to an upper level from which they could survey the majority of the floor area below, while anyone looking their way would have to squint to see up past the glare of a bank of colored lights. He gave Allie an expressive You see? tilt of head and eyebrow, and they settled in to watch.

Even with the noise and movement below them, it wouldn’t be difficult to pick out Gutrick when he arrived. He wasn’t visibly old enough to seem out of place among the other patrons, but his facial structure was gaunt and distinctive, and he affected a style of dress that might have been trendy in the mid-1980s but looked stodgy in comparison to current styles. Until recently he had made it work for him, surrounding himself with younger, flashier minions, among whom his relatively conservative apparel gave him the appearance of an authority figure.

This approach had been severely compromised by the events of the last several months. An open assault would have been far too chancy, so Will and Allie had carried out an attrition campaign. One killed in Cheriton, as an opening sally and to assess their new teamwork; three in Marseilles a few weeks later, though only two of those had been among Will’s original targets; more as they could manage them, one or two at a time, trying never to let the quarry gain a clear understanding of what was thinning their ranks.

At one point Gutrick’s flock had numbered close to a dozen. Though he had acquired a few replacements in the interim, for the past month he had been reduced to no more than three or four hangers-on, and Gutrick was now the only remaining survivor of the original seven.

The count had been down to three of the seven when the Council muddied the waters by suddenly launching a hunt of its own: not for Gutrick’s band, but for the implacable duo stalking it. One of the targets had gained weeks of added existence when his scheduled termination had been pre-empted by an ambush at the Belgian border; all of Allie’s indoctrination, and all Will’s shouted injunctions, had been barely sufficient to prevent her killing any of the field team that sprang the trap, and even so there were probably some who would never again be fit. It had been an unwelcome if not unanticipated complication; worse than the brief reprieve gained by Gutrick’s followers, however, was that those being hunted now knew the threat against them, as demon networks across Europe were hit by requests for information about the outlaw Watcher and his vampire pet.

It had been inevitable; family connections could shield him only so far. It had cost him momentum, though, just at the point when he might have been able to wrap up the whole affair in short order. Moreover, his relations with Allie, contentious already, had taken a decidedly darker turn. In fact, it was when they had at last gone to ground, following the ambush, that Allie had hurled him into bed for the first time, a development unforeseen by either of them, and from which he had needed most of the next day to recover …

“Target lock,” Allie announced, and pointed.

Yes, it was Gutrick, coming into view a dozen feet from the primary entrance, and Will was gladdened to see that the former bon vivant had only two underlings in attendance. He must have been plagued by desertions, for the most recent strike — ten days ago — had still left him with four. As Will watched, the three of them proceeded to the back of the establishment, and were lost from sight. “One of the private rooms,” Will said. “Our information was accurate.”

“Spin up the Mystery Machine, Shaggy,” Allie said, moving away from the railing. “It’s time for us to bag that villain.”

Will stared at her. “What?”

Allie shook her head in mock reproof. “That’s the problem with you Masterpiece Theater types, you don’t appreciate real culture.”

He thrust back the temptation to let himself be sucked into debate; that way lay madness. “Gutrick is the only one who matters,” he told her as they started down the stairway from the loft. “Kill any that get between us and him, but don’t let them distract you. This is what it’s all been for.”

Allie shot him a peevish look. “Hey, do I tell you how to starch your boxers? I don’t need any armchair quarterbacking, I’ll whack the sucker just to get you to shut up about it. You concentrate on not being minion-chow, and leave the rest to me.”

This last came as they reached the lower level; they were about to start for the room that held Gutrick when a face leapt out at him from the main doors, and in that instant Will spun to put his back to the entrance, shoving Allie ahead of him. “Oh, bollocks,” he said.

“What?” She went where he was pushing her, but he could feel her fighting the impulse to look back. “What is it?”

“Watchers,” he told her. “Covering the front. Christ, why did they have to find us now? Even ten more minutes —!”

Allie stopped at a door set under the stairs and tried the knob. Locked. She set her mouth in a line and gave the knob a hard yank. Something snapped, and a moment later they were inside, pulling the door mostly closed but leaving a slit through which they could see. This was a janitor’s closet, stocked with brooms and mop buckets and paper towels and cleaning supplies — including some that should never be stored together, you’d think the bloody Germans, at least, could keep such things straight! — and Allie said, “Me think this smell fishy, Kemosabe. Your snitch musta decided he could sell you out just as easy as he could Gutrick. I ask you, what’s the world coming to when you can’t even trust a demon stoolie?”

“It couldn’t have come at a worse time, either.” Will clenched his fists. “If Gutrick learns we were here, that we came this close … He’ll change continents, hug the earth as close as he can, it could take us years to track him again.”

“So let’s don’t give him the chance.” Allie held his gaze, fierce-eyed but calm. “This is your holy mission, boss-man, so it’s your call … but I’m tellin’ ya, we can still make this happen if we just put the pedal to the metal and blow straight through.”

It was horribly tempting, but, “No,” Will said. “They’re too close, they might break in on us just as we reach Gutrick, and he escape while we’re dealing with two sets of foes at once. We can’t take that risk.”

“Then think of something,” she insisted. “I’m the muscle here, you’re the brains, so do your freakin’ job, already!”

Will peered through the slit in the door, mind working furiously. This sudden turn had thrown him off focus, and it didn’t help that the chemical smell in the enclosed space was threatening to make him ill. “I don’t believe they truly know what you look like,” he said at last. “They’ll be watching for me, or for the two of us together.”

“We split up,” Allie said, understanding.

“Right. I’ll move over to the bar, draw their attention, and you go after Gutrick. As long as you don’t attract notice, you should be able to pass them unchallenged.”

“Got it,” Allie said. “If he gets away, I’ll meet you back at our room, we’ll figure out what to do next. If I kill him …” The huge, careless grin spread across her face. “I’ll still meet you there, and bang your brains out by way of celebration. So, any parting instructions before I run to make the crazy?”

“Yes,” he told her. “Go do your bloody job.”

“That’s my bastard,” she said. She kissed him hard, and slid out the door.

He waited a few seconds, and then emerged as well, taking a deliberate path toward the bar. Allie, he saw, was moving nonchalantly through the club’s other patrons, no hasty motions to draw the eye, and as he watched from the edge of his vision, she reached the short hallway that led to the private rooms in back. Right, then. His task, now, was to occupy their pursuers until she could complete hers.

The man he had seen at the door crossed the main interior to intercept him: Roger Wyndham-Pryce, he must have come out of retirement just for these festivities. The other two stayed at the door, Will only recognized one but the second matched him in body language and general manner of dress; they followed his progress with their eyes, but held their stations. Good, with the spotlight on him, Allie could act unhindered.

He and Wyndham-Pryce met at a table just short of the bar, and the senior man began to speak in precise, formal tones, voice raised to make itself heard over the music: “William Randall Giles, you are hereby bound into custody by order of the Council of Watchers, on charges of —”

“Put a sock in it, Windy.” Will settled into a chair and relaxed into the easy, slangy speech of his Manchester days. “I can’t believe they sent you after me; scraping the bottom of the barrel, they are, I should be insulted.”

Wyndham-Pryce’s expression didn’t change; it was as if he had expected the response, and been confirmed in his pessimistic opinion. “Neither commonness nor flippancy serves to alter the seriousness of your offenses,” he said. Glancing back toward the men at the front, he nodded; one of them spoke briefly into a hand-held radio, and then Wyndham-Pryce turned back to Will and went on. “You deserved, and received, sympathy for the tragedy that befell you, but there can be no excuse for your systematic violation of the oaths you swore.”

“Means to an end, Windy.” Will’s eyes were on the men at the doors, and he began to feel a trace of unease. They should have been scouring the place for sight of Allie, but they seemed content to maintain their position. “I played by your rules, and believed in ’em, but when it came to the chop …”

He stopped, gaping, and surged to his feet. Someone was approaching the men at the main entrance, and it was Gutrick. Will made as if to go for him, but Wyndham-Pryce’s hand on his elbow checked him for a moment, and in plain fact it was too late already. The two men moved aside; Gutrick paused at the doors, looking around until he saw Will; a thin, triumphant smile creased the harsh-planed features, and then he stepped through the doorway and vanished.

Will was paralyzed for interminable seconds as fury warred with bewilderment. Then he turned back to Wyndham-Pryce, wrath gaining the advantage as comprehension dawned. “You let him go. No — no, you arranged it with him.” Staring at that forbidding, imperturbable face, it was all Will could do to keep his hands from the man’s throat. “My father disowned me for colluding with a vampire; what do you think he’ll say to the Council, when he learns you did the same thing?”

“Learn of it?” Wyndham-Pryce’s reply was measured, assured. “It was Rupert who suggested it.” A spark of satisfaction glimmered in the older man’s eyes as Will felt his face sag, and he went on remorselessly. “If you’ll consider the matter, you’ll see we had common cause with Gutrick. He feared the vampire with a soul, and we feared the vampire schooled by an apostate Watcher. It was in all our interests to see you stopped. Once that had been established, it was a simple matter to reach an agreement.”

The revelations were coming too quickly for Will to keep pace with them, and he struggled to recover his balance. “If you know she has a soul,” he said with fanatical calm, “then you know she’s no threat to you.”

“Do we?” Wyndham-Pryce said. “Your own recent activities have amply demonstrated that ensoulment is no guarantor of benign behavior …”

His voice rose on the last words as he attempted to hold the younger man’s attention, but Will turned away from him, gaze sweeping the crowd of revelers, the sense of something dreadfully wrong expanding to crisis proportions. There had to be more than he was seeing, they would know it would take more than three men to deal with Allie —

Then his eyes centered on a single figure, strolling languidly through the throng around her, and Will felt himself go cold. She moved with a tiger’s liquid, deadly grace, and a strobe-shuttered glimpse of her face confirmed what he knew already. The second Slayer, the dark one, the renegade: offered amnesty, it would seem, in return for this urgent service …

Will had a good mind, capable of deep, incisive thought, but it was best suited for analytical consideration rather than for lightning decision. In the moment of seeing that sullied-angel face, however, he understood a number of very important things instantly and totally. Wyndham-Pryce’s hand on his shoulder pulled him back around, and Will allowed the turn to begin the swing that buried the ice-axe in the senior Watcher’s arm, the point biting into bone. Wyndham-Pryce screamed, and Will spun and sprinted through the stunned onlookers, weapon abandoned and victim already forgotten.

He didn’t look back to see if the operatives from the doors had moved in pursuit of him; if not, they were of no consequence, and if so, he needed speed more than verification. He dashed toward the janitor’s closet where he and Allie had temporarily hidden, his brain assessing a collection of related facts with icy, preternatural clarity.

Allie had gone down the hallway leading to the private rooms.

The Slayer was moving toward that same hallway.

Gutrick had come to the doors from an unexpected direction; he must have circled through connecting rooms in the back, moving behind cover so as to remain undetected.

Gutrick had been alone. He would have left his attendants behind, then, to occupy and delay Allie while the Slayer came upon her unawares from behind.

Allie couldn’t beat a Slayer.

In the closet it took him only seconds to find what he had seen; he sacrificed additional precious seconds twisting off the caps and casting them away, then he was running for the hallway, a bottle in either hand. Bleach and ammonia, they should never be kept in the same storage space because inevitably some bloody fool would mix them, and that produced toxic chloramine gas. A Slayer was a dismayingly formidable killing organism, but all that power was housed in a human frame and the frame had to breathe, whereas Allie didn’t. He’d pour the two bottles together at the door and then fling the concoction inside, maybe that would give her the edge she needed, if he wasn’t too late already, and he was in the hallway now and with all the desperate, frantic fear that possessed him he screamed, “Alexandra —!!!”

Someone appeared in front of him, an unremarkable man in an ordinary black suit and tie. The stranger held up his hand, and in a mild voice he said to Will, “No, don’t interfere, sir. This is what you asked for. This is how it has to be done.”

*                *               *

There was no threat in the man’s manner, and he certainly didn’t appear to offer any physical challenge, but Will found that he had stopped. “Please,” he said. “I have to get to her.”

“I understand your feelings, sir, and they do you credit. But this is a process, begun at your request, and must continue to its own ends.”

Why was he standing here? Why hadn’t the Watcher agents caught up to him? What had happened to the blaring synthesized music? “She’ll die,” Will protested.

“Yes, sir. That is the process.”

“I don’t understand … and, and, and I don’t care. You have to let me help her!”

“Oh, I truly don’t.” The man tilted his head to study Will with some interest. “However, I would suggest, sir, that you ask yourself why the matter so concerns you. Your companion was simply a tool by which you could achieve certain goals, is this not so? Well, then, sir, that function has been fulfilled. If you will simply await the natural resolution of events which — if you will pardon me, sir — you yourself set in motion, then all you sought will be yours. You need only allow it to occur.”

There was no effort, no force being exerted against him, but Will felt that he was engaged in a titanic struggle. Sweat ran down his face as he fought something he couldn’t even feel. “I can’t,” he gasped. “I can’t. Let me go to her, please.”

The man regarded him with doubt and disapproval. “The creature is so important to you?”

“She’s everything to me.” His own words astonished him; he was almost weeping now. “Oh, God!”

The man drew himself up, seeming to grow taller and more imposing, and a lambent glow appeared behind his eyes. “Very well,” he said, and his voice, too, had deepened. “You are released.”

Power tore through Will with hurricane force, he jerked and cried out as everything in him was scoured as if with supersonic sleet, his nerves scraped raw and his very identity peeled away, he couldn’t see, he couldn’t think, he … he … he …

He straightened to glare at the man before him, his face taut with menace. “What the bloody hell is this?” he spat. “What are you tryin’ to pull on me, you dozy little ponce?”

“You are being given what you came seeking,” the man said. He still spoke cordially, but his tone no longer held even the semblance of apology. “This is merely the way in which it is being done.”

“That’s bloody bollocks!” Spike favored the other with a razor-honed sneer. “You been muckin’ about in my brain, dizzyin’ me up for jollies. D’you really think I’d let you lot take ’er from me …?”

He faltered in sudden confusion. “Take her? Take who?” the other man said into the new silence. “Yes, you begin to understand. You came here to win a soul. You agreed to submit to trials. These trials, however, always involve the testing of something that you yourself lack.” He shook his head slowly. “You could not succeed; by the terms of trial, you were unfit before you began. Yet there was an … asymmetry, in condemning you for the absence of that which you had come to acquire.”

“That’s all piss to me,” Spike blustered. “Why can’t you mystical hoo-hoos ever spell it out to where a bloke can understand you?”

“Your will has been tested,” the black-suited man said. “Your resourcefulness. Your determination. But how could we test those attributes which exist only in the company of a soul, when your very reason for coming here was that you lacked a soul? The trial required it … and so, one was borrowed.”

“Fancy that.” Spike patted himself for a cigarette, but of course those had gone when he stripped for the first combat. “So the whole soddin’ business was an illusion, was it? Pity; she had some gumption, for an imaginary bird —” He bit off the words as, within his readjusting brain, a number of cues came together. “Oh, bloody hell,” he whispered.

“It was the arena for the last trial,” the man said patiently. “And it provided also the framework for the granting of your prize. The body was vulnerable, magick-stricken in a way that offered an uncommon opportunity. That put the soul within a space that we could control … and so the soul is to be harvested and reshaped, and will become yours.”

Spike shook his head, trying to rattle his jumbled thoughts into some kind of order. “I … Will thought she was sharin’ his soul. But all the time …”

“It was you who required an external provider, yes. Within the arena, you and she — She? He? Material entities can be tiresomely insistent on distinctions easily mutable — took on aspects of one another’s natures. Neutered vampire, ineffectual human, none of it signifies. He/she was accessible on a psychic plane, and was already linked to you, and so we made use of that. Given the attributes afforded by a soul, you chose to place another’s welfare before your own wishes. Sickening, but those are the terms of trial. You have won, Dark Warrior, and you shall have your prize.”

Spike frowned. “So what’ll happen to ’im?”

“He will die,” was the indifferent answer. “He came within our reach because he flung his own body into the path of harsh magicks. He acted selflessly, to save the world, and the world will reward him with oblivion. Such is ever the fate of heroes. What is it to you?”

Nothing, if he wanted to be honest with himself, and yet Spike hesitated. Allie — Alexandra Harris — had shown a rare fire; he’d never seen the like in the whelp himself, but it hadn’t come out o’ nowhere, now, had it? A huge bleeding sideshow, but within that sideshow she’d loved him and been ready to die for him, he knew that to his core. So Will had been a sniveling tosser, and Allie more the loser for being devoted to such a sad-sack; still, it didn’t seem right to punish someone for the same thing that had won him his reward …

The black-suited man swelled and darkened, the light behind his eyes flaring green, and the illusory hallway faded into dimness. The looming figure stretched out a hand toward Spike, and in a voice like rock-plates grating together, it intoned, “Your prize awaits. Prepare to receive it.”

Spike struck the hand aside, and roared, “Hoy! Do I look full daft to you? I meet all your trials, and you try to fob me off with a hand-me-down from that pathetic wanker? Well, you can go bugger yourself sideways, you slag-faced pillock! I want my own soul back!”

The glow of the eyes had grown until little else could be seen, and the voice below them rumbled, “This is your decision?”

Spike scoffed. “Too bloody right it is.”

“There will be a price,” the other warned.

“Always is,” Spike said derisively. “Buck to it, will ya? Got people to see.”
 

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