Waking
Waking
Disclaimer: to see how much I don't own, see chapter
Warnings: non-explicit sex, character death
Dawn came awake to the sounds of fucking. There was no mistaking the wet slap of skin on skin, the grunts and harsh breathing drifting toward her from the other side of the room. She was lying on a soft surface which turned out to be a mattress when she opened her eyes and her hands were pulled over her head and secured to a heavy iron headboard with a length of silvery chain that was starting to make her wrists itch. The back of her head throbbed in time with her heartbeat and she blinked dumbly at the ceiling for a few seconds until the soft sound of someone whimpering filtered through the rest. It was much closer than the occupied couple and Dawn turned her head.
Caleb was curled in on himself on the floor on the other side of the bed, wrapped in his own arms with his eyes clenched tightly shut, though a few tears escaped to roll down his cheeks. There was a length of silver chain wrapped around his neck. Dawn had to try a few times before she could get his name out, her mouth feeling dry as a desert and stuffed with cotton.
“Caleb?” she questioned softly and he blinked up at her. There was a particularly vicious snarl from across the room, a muffled cry, then the thick sounds of tearing flesh and cracking bone, sounds Dawn knew all too well, and Caleb buried his face against his upraised knees, a steady chant of “no, no, no,” falling from his lips. Dawn wanted to hide too, knew that it wasn’t sunshine and puppies waiting for her on the other side of the room, but she forced herself to look. The green tigress raised her great head, seeming almost as lethargic as Dawn herself, and scented the air. A picture formed in Dawn’s head of a creature that looked like a great shaggy wolf but not, a cackling call echoing in her memory, and she knew what he was.
The hyena wasn’t overly tall, about Oz’s height actually, blond and green-eyed with a face she would have found handsome under different circumstances but, as it was, Dawn’s eyes immediately darted behind the man to the limp form of Narcissus hanging, bloody and naked, chained to the wall, a gaping hole in his chest where his heart used to reside. The Oba’s eyes were open in shock but glazed in death and the blond man took a casual bite out of the dripping organ in his hand. Dawn gagged at the sight, drawing the man’s attention as he wiped the back of one hand over his bloody mouth.
“You’re awake,” he observed, dropping the heart and moving closer, Dawn’s chains clinking as she attempted to scoot further away but only succeeded in making her head swim. The blond hyena crouched down in front of her, blocking the sight of Narcissus’ broken body, and brushed a lock of hair off of her forehead, leaving a smear of blood behind. Dawn fought not to flinch.
“That’s good,” he continued conversationally. “Means you’re strong, but I’m not quite ready for you yet.”
“What do you want?” the words croaked out of her dry throat.
The hyena flashed her a charming smile or, it would have been, if not for all the blood, and pulled a small black case out from under the bedside table, setting it on the mattress beside her. Her eyes fixed on the syringe he pulled from the case, and the little glass vial containing some kind of clear liquid that he plunged the needle into.
“What I want,” he spoke sounding like he was talking to himself, “Is to have my wife back with our baby in her arms but, since I can’t have her, I’ll settle for someone who will keep my babies and not bleed them away every month like those other bitches!”
His voice had risen steadily at ‘bleed’ and he almost shouted the last word, spitting it out like it had left a sour taste in his mouth, his gore-streaked face morphing into something even more frightening than the happy psycho he’d been before as his beast bled through his eyes, turning them nearly solid black. Then, the happy man was back, grinning down at Dawn, his green eyes lingering on her belly as he swiped a cotton ball that smelled strongly of alcohol at the bend of her elbow.
“But you won’t be like them, will you?” he asked, returning his gaze to her face. “You’ll keep my babies.”
Dawn was shaking her head in denial when he plunged the needle into her arm, depressing the plunger and injecting whatever the hell that clear stuff was into her vein. She could feel the effect immediately, whatever it was had been designed with shifters in mind because she felt more disconnected from her tigress than ever before, her body going heavy as sleep beckoned with inviting, velvety darkness, and she felt her eyes beginning to close. The hyena’s large, warm hand cupped the side of her face, his thumb stroking her cheek bone gently as she fought to stay awake.
“But there’ll be time for that later,” he continued as sleep pulled her under. “Right now, I think Caleb and I need to get reacquainted.”
Caleb’s murmurs of ‘no’ had turned to sobs between one long blink and the next.
“Don’t,” Dawn managed but the word sounded faint and far away and before she could even turn her head the dark swallowed the world.
Spike could not believe what he was seeing. The two standing in the sitting room of the Circus of the Damned were two he’d thought to never see again, Faith Lehane, the last Slayer called before Willow’s spell, and Xander bloody Harris, of all people or, considering the scent of lycanthrope wafting off of the boy, not.
“What the buggering fuck ‘re you doing here, Harris?”
Xander regarded him with not one, but two eyes; one the chocolate brown the kid had been born with but the other a pale green in place of the one the First’s crazy preacher had dug out.
“Could ask you the same thing, bleach boy,” Xander growled back, crossing his arms over his chest and glaring with his mismatched eyes.
“Holy,” Connor breathed somewhere to his right and Spike followed the young man’s line of sight to where Ghost was moving to embrace the newest arrival, the two girls clinging to each other like they just seen one of them come back from the dead. And they probably had; Spike had managed to get a bit of Ghost’s story out of her on their way to New York where they’d run into Connor, so the vampire knew about the witch’s cousin and how the two had been closer than sisters, a part of being the Blessed Ones he’d figured, by the way Ghost had talked about it, and he was happy for her. He’d be even happier, though, once Dawn and Caleb were both back, safe and sound in the underground stronghold of the Master of the City.
“How’d you lot get here?” he asked. It was Faith that answered.
“Same way you did, apparently,” she said and tipped her head to indicate the two embracing young women who seemed oblivious to their surroundings. “Ellie there said that she could feel her cousin, Lynn, cookin’ up something big, first time she’d felt her in almost three years, and said that we needed to be ready. Next thing we know, there’s this green portal opening up in the middle of the road. We figured that where ever it led had to be better than where we were so we took it. Popped up in the same damn spot just in a different world,” she snorted, “Almost got flattened by a bus but, here we are. Ain’t ya happy ta see us?”
“Asher,” Jean-Claude spoke softly, voice as flat as he could make it as he surveyed the new people in his home. “Qui sont ces personnes?” who are these people
“Pardonnez-moi,” forgive me Asher said. “I hadn’t expected them so soon, I would have explained.”
“Asher?” Anita questioned, frowning at the golden-haired vampire before her eyes moved back to the two dark-haired young people.
“They are mine,” Asher continued. “Faith Lehane, my human servant and Alexander Harris, my animal to call.”
“You’re… what?” Anita began, so totally not expecting that to be his answer. “How?”
“When Spike’s Quadrate formed,” Asher explained, “And I was caught up in their memories, these two called out to me in a way I’ve never experienced. The first mark was formed that night and the second given the night I took Ghost from her work, drunk on the power of a new ability. Dante was most reluctant to part with the power he thought having my servants in his city gave him.”
“That’s why you were talking with Dante?” Anita demanded. “To get them here? Not to go there yourself?”
Asher nodded once, a brief incline of his head which was suddenly snapped back, the tall vampire finding himself on the floor with an aching jaw and a fuming Jean-Claude standing over him. Anita didn’t think she’d ever seen the dark-haired vampire so angry as he knelt to wrap long pale fingers around Asher’s throat, whispering angry words in French as he pressed Asher into the floor.
“You let me believe,” Jean-Claude hissed. “For months you let me believe that I had lost you, that you would go to that Italian bastard who had lusted for you from the moment he first laid eyes on you. Do you know the torment you’ve put me through, imagining his hands upon you?”
“No less than my torment,” Asher replied. “Watching you with Anita, sharing a bed with you both but still not being a part of it all, having you so close for so long but never feeling the touch of your hand, the kiss of your mouth? You would cater to her whims for centuries if you were allowed and I was tired of waiting!”
For a moment it looked like Jean-Claude was going to hit Asher again, punish him for the agony he’d put the other vampire through for so long but, in the end, Jean-Claude decided on a much more pleasant option. Moving his hands to cup Asher’s face he pulled the blond vampire into a punishing kiss instead, cutting their lips on their fangs as he plundered Asher’s mouth with his tongue, tasting the faint tang of cigarette smoke from the habit Asher tried to hide and another darker, heady flavor that was all Asher. The blond clung to him, fingers digging into Jean-Claude’s shirt as he swallowed the soft sounds Asher breathed into his mouth. Jean-Claude pressed Asher to the floor, one knee slipping between the blond’s thighs to press against his groin, pressure just this side of pain making Asher arch his head back and grind up into the hard-muscled thigh pinning him to the ground until a throat cleared somewhere above them.
Reluctantly pulling apart the two vampires focused on the dark-haired werehyena standing nearby, a light blush on his cheeks but his mismatched eyes firm.
“Not that I’m not happy for you guys,” Xander said. “But it’s almost sunrise and none of this is helping us find Dawn.”
Jean-Claude nodded, rising to his feet in one graceful movement before offering a hand down to Asher and pulling the blond to his feet.
“Of course,” he said, carefully keeping his eyes away from Anita and what might be written on her face. “Finding our etoile verte is of the utmost importance but, as you have said, the sun is far to close to rising for we vampire to be of any assistance. William,” he addressed Spike.
“Yeah?”
“Any resources you may need to aid in finding Miss Dawn are yours, you need only ask for them.”
Spike nodded, “I appreciate that.”
“If there are any who listen to the prayers of vampires,” Jean-Claude continued. “Then mine is that she and young Caleb are returned to us before the sun sets.”
“That’s it!” Ghost’s excited voice suddenly cut through the room as she jumped to her feet, pulling her cousin along for the ride. “Ellie, you’re a genius!”
“We miss something?” Spike asked as the witch began running toward her and Dawn’s room, her cousin right behind her. Ghost turned back to him with a wide grin on her face.
“I know how to find Dawn!”
“I thought your cat freaked out every time you tried to do magic,” Connor said as he and the rest of the small group watched her rush about the room she shared with Dawn, collecting spell ingredients and piling them on the floor in the center of the circle she’d inscribed into the floor at some point.
“She does,” Ghost replied, digging through a medium sized wooden box full of candles before pulling out three of various sizes and colors. “I was telling Ellie everything that’s happened, including that, and she pointed out something I really should have seen before.”
“And what’s that?” Spike asked, his skin beginning to crawl at the power starting to gather in the small room.
“That I’m in charge, not the cat and not the magic either. They’re both mine and they need to accept it.”
“And that means… what?” the new man, Xander, asked. He’d watched Willow perform her spells a lot after she’d become Buffy’s magical support but he didn’t recognize what Ellie’s cousin was setting up.
“Meaning, I’m going to make her my familiar.”
“You’re gonna be your own familiar?” Connor asked. Ghost nodded and he frowned. “Can you even do that?”
The witch shrugged. “Guess we’ll find out.”
She set the candles; orange to attract the influences she needed and promote energy, brown for the invocation of an animal, and white to represent the moon, in triangle points around the circle, grabbed the iron ‘cauldron’ that had survived the fire, and set herself in the middle of her circle. Striking a match she lit the white candle, at the same time reaching down deep inside of herself, reaching for the tiger that had taken up residence inside of her skin.
“Guardians, look upon this union with favor as I take this beast to care for as my servant and my helper.”
Striking another match, she lit the orange candle.
“Goddess, look upon this union with love as I take this creature to follow as my protector and my guide.”
A third match was lit and held to the brown candle.
“Spirits, look upon this union with blessing as I take this tigress to me as my familiar and my friend.”
The last match was dropped into the cauldron with the others as Ghost started the chant from the beginning, calling on the Guardians of the Earth, the Goddess, and the Spirits of Nature for aid. A blend of earthy-scented herbs were crumbled into the pot and caught with a sudden puff of sweet-smelling smoke. The witch’s voice went deeper on the third recitation as she breathed in the smoke and willed the magic and the beast to join.
Ellie couldn’t hold in the soft gasp that left her lips when her cousin opened her eyes. Lynn had told her that she’d been turned into a lycanthrope but being told that and actually seeing her cousin’s light blue eyes bleed to a soft electric green were two different things.
Ghost could feel the tigress’ unease with the situation and tried to send her calming thoughts as the magic drew closer in that Between Place inside her head, imagined what it would feel like to run her hand through the silky pale fur, and was rewarded with the great cat leaning into the touch as the magic, this time in the shape of a vine, twined around her other hand. The magic caressed her skin, wrapping around her wrist and traveling up her arm like a snake, the cool, waxy leaves tickling slightly as the vine used the witch’s body as a bridge to the tiger. The golden cat sniffed delicately at the vine as it brushed her face, which was so much better than the outright hostility Ghost had encountered every other time she’d tried to do magic and, for a brief moment, it was like all three parts of her; the tiger, the witch, and the woman, were one being. Her eyes had that odd warmth again when she looked around the room and she could hear Ellie gasp softly, but she finally felt the way Dawn had described merging with her own beast/Key/whatever had felt; not three separate parts but one whole.
A brief flexing of power extinguished the candles and the warmth faded from her eyes as she stood, releasing the forces she’d called with thanks and broke the circle. Spike wordlessly offered her the comfort of his embrace when she went to him and buried her face in his shoulder, the cat luxuriating in his scent and the touch of his skin.
“You alright, luv?” he asked softly.
She nodded, reaching for Connor, feeling some kind of circuit complete when he joined their small huddle, and let out a breath.
“I can find Dawn now.”