Chapter 13 - Last Stand
Summary: "War is coming. A slayer leads the way, a son of darkness heralds shadows, and a young girl claims her birthright as the light of all lights. These heroes, and others, in a last stand against the ancient evil; all corrupting and all consuming, poised to devour the world."
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
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Hellmouth Ascendant Trilogy: Revamped Edition
Book One:
Dusk
Chapter 13
Last Stand
Buffy walked through the graveyard. At this point it was as familiar and oddly comforting as a treasured playground from the days of childhood, or the half remembered images of a home, perhaps a few houses before the current one, even before LA.
“There’s a comforting thought,” she muttered to herself. “Yay - graveyards o’ nostalgia.”
“Pardon me, miss,” a familiar voice called out from the gloom, “but you got a light?”
Buffy laughed as the face of her lover was illuminated by the flick of a lighter, a new one, she noticed.
“Hello, babe, come to keep a girl company?” she asked coyly.
“Yeah, don’t know what kind of dangerous people might be out and about,” Spike replied, sauntering over to her with a grin.
“Mmm, I think I do. And guess what?”
“What’s that, baby?”
“They taste good…” Buffy whispered hungrily before she grabbed a fistful of Spike’s t-shirt and damn near tore it from his body as she pushed her mouth hard against his in a kiss that was both hot as blood and cold as the grave.
“Bloody Hell, they do at that, don’t they?” Spike commented when the long kiss finally ended, being very glad he didn’t have to worry about oxygen deprivation.
Buffy giggled. “Glad you approve,” she quipped.
“Too right I do, baby,” Spike replied hungrily as he pushed himself against her in a distinctly male way. “What do you say to seconds?”
“I’d say, yes, but not right now. I actually have work to do tonight,” Buffy said with a sigh.
Spike blew a wisp of blonde hair away from her face in an attempt to semi-groom his lover, but mostly just to draw attention to the errant strip of golden hair. Buffy rolled her eyes up at it, stuck her lower lip out and huffed, sending the lock of hair up into the air only for it to flutter back down again. She sighed and looked up at Spike, who was looking at her with infinite affection.
“Whatever you say then, baby,” Spike whispered to her, uncharacteristically gentle, almost tender. He stroked her face gently with cool fingers and she nuzzled his palm.
“Okay. Good,” she replied, placing a kiss on one of his fingers.
The pair then walked deeper into the silent graveyard, the stone angels of mausoleums and sepulchers their only company; the statues watched the pair with envious eyes of blank stone, coveting the warmth of the living girl and envying the luck of her dead lover.
“So, what was that you were saying about ‘nostalgia’?” Spike asked.
“Well…” Buffy began.
“… And over here is where I beat a vampire to death with a trash can lid, and over here was where I shot one in the head with a crossbow, that was a real mess, and- ”
Buffy continued to babble as Spike tried desperately to recall just how delicious that mouth of hers tasted when it was spewing tale after gruesome tale recalling her systematic annihilation of most of his undead brethren.
Suddenly, he stopped and frowned at a gravestone, pulling his attention from Buffy to focus upon it. The sudden shift in him did not go unnoticed.
“Hey, what’s up?” his chattering slayer/lover asked him.
“This was Dru’s stone,” Spike whispered quietly.
“Huh? Oh,” Buffy said sounding distinctly unthrilled as comprehension set in. “Drusilla. The ex. Got it.”
Spike didn’t say anything as, sweeping his leather duster out of the way, he knelt down to clear bits of grass and dirt away from the stone. With meticulous care, he cleaned the cold granite with even colder hands until the inscription could be read.
Buffy squinted. “ ‘Emily Audland: 1859 to 1880’,” she read aloud, then her brow furrowed, “and something in German about angels: ‘Und Auch-’ ”
“ ‘Und auch der engel singen’ - ‘And the Angels Sing’…” Spike finished in time with her words quietly. He looked up at Buffy standing over him. “You never told me you spoke German.”
“You never told me there was someone whose grave you visited, let alone it belonging to psycho-girl. What you saw in her-”
“This is her baby.”
Buffy’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click.
“Her… what?” Buffy tried to speak.
“When she hustled herself off to the convent way back when, “Spike began, “she was ‘in the family way’, I think the saying goes. She gave birth at the convent and the ol’ biddies there shipped the kid off back to her folks.” Spike sighed. “And when Angelus abducted Dru’s family to put the bite on them not ten days later, he left the little poppet, here,” he gestured at the gravestone, “safe in her crib at her soon-to-be-dead parents’ estate.” Spike scoffed. “He even kissed the babe on her little head before he left - a big bloody kiss from having just torn the throat out of her nanny.”
“Charming,” Buffy said a little uneasily, she was never comfortable discussing these aspects of Angel’s past, ex-status or no.
“Yeah, well, Angel’s always been a charmer. Bastard,” Spike growled.
“What is it between you two, Spike?” Buffy asked, bluntly. “It’s not just about me, or Dru, or male ego or whatever the vampire equivalent is, so what is it? Is it just stress ‘cause you’re like, his great grandchild, vampire style?”
Spike shook his head. “That’s not a box that will be opening tonight, love; and, for the record, he’s my grandsire,” he informed her testily.
“Yeah, yeah, I remember; your ‘yoda’, as I recall,” Buffy huffed. “So, why won’t you tell me what the deal is?”
Spike sighed unnecessarily and slumped, leaning forward in his crouch to rest his head on the gravestone. He slowly closed his eyes and began to whisper.
“It’s a lot of horror, love. A lot of things that he did, and that we did, for which there’s no forgiving or redeeming; the kind of thing you need an evil soul to be able to pull off, not just an absent one.”
Spike suddenly rocked back on his heels and, taking out a fresh cigarette, screwed it between his lips and lit it. He took a long, steadying drag before continuing.
“And it’s… just bloody twisted…”
Spike struggled for the words, but couldn’t get them out, instead taking another hard drag off the cigarette, blowing it out through clenched teeth, before sucking it back in through his mouth and snorting it out his nose. To Buffy, it made him look like an angry dragon: white peroxide-blonde horns, streaks of black and red for hide, and smoke curling from his nostrils, hinting at the fire that lay within and could only be seen in his eyes.
“The little thing got rescued by some late-night callers over at Dru’s and they raised it as their own. But then they lost their money, got really poor and really cold, and the wee girl here, now a pretty li’l thing got really sick, and then really dead,” the vampire bit out. “And I remember watching them, there in the streets… crawling and begging, like animals…”
Spike had two fistfuls of dirt in his hand and was currently squeezing them so tight, his pale knuckles nearly split with the force of his clenching fist.
“…And I remember that no one stopped - no one seemed to care, to even bloody notice these people just… dying. Just sort of… fading away, quietly.” He laughed bitterly and threw the dirt at the stone.
“And Angelus and Dru are both there, I don’t know where the blond bimbo wandered off to, and Dru doesn’t even recognize her, she’s so far gone, and I’m fresh out of my grave, and Angelus just throws his head back and laughs, and says, ‘Ah, there’s no place like London!’, and what a shame it is that she ‘couldn’t have followed her mother’s footsteps’ - as a spaced out, blood-sucking, sadistic BITCH!”
Spike snarled and his face changed into its demonic visage as he leapt to his feet and slammed a booted foot against the stone, over and over again, furious.
“You bloody bastard! You sick, twisted, son-of-a-bitch! I’ll kill you!” Spike screamed slamming his foot over and over into the stone until, finally, his strength gave out and he dropped to his knees, breathing hard and reflexively, his face changing back as the rage drained out of him.
“What happened?” Buffy asked quietly, having watched the entire affair with a sort of detached numbness.
Spike sighed and got to his feet, stopping to clean the scuffmarks off the gravestone and stick yet another cigarette between his lips.
“She died,” he answered simply, lighting the cigarette and taking a long drag from it. “They all just… faded away and died - like they’d never been there at all.”
“If she died in London… what’s the grave doing in America then?”
“I made it, during my first trip out to the States. I used to take a pretty good turn at stone carving before I found my ‘true calling’ -” Spike’s sarcasm was enough to choke someone, “ -as a poet. Time came to come to Sunnydale, I yanked it out of the ground where it was and brought it with.”
“Why?” Buffy asked simply.
“Because there’s a difference between being ‘without a soul’ and being just bloody ‘empty’,” Spike told her cryptically, gesturing at the stone again. “I got her this thinking it would, I dunno, jog her memory, bring her down to earth, help get some bit of human back in her.”
“Okaaaaayyyyy…” Buffy dragged the word out in great uncertainty, “but, you were vampires.”
“Yeah, and unlike your bloody ex, we were in love,” Spike snapped back.
Buffy looked hurt and the vampire sighed.
“Well, at least I was. And you can’t love someone, or be loved by someone, who hasn’t got a shred of humanity in them. I’ve said it before, Buffy - love isn’t brains, it’s blood.” He took another pull from the cigarette, blowing smoke into the air. “Blood screaming at you to work its will. But blood belongs to the living, in the end,” Spike admitted sadly. “We just borrow it for a bit. Just like we borrow life from it,” he turned to face the gravestone again, “just like we borrow love from it,” he finished in a whisper, his expression haunted.
A slow rumble of thunder began then - the weather in Sunnydale had been odd lately and a thunderstorm in the middle of December was not out of the realm of possibility.
Buffy shivered slightly, at the roll of thunder and at Spike’s words; she’d forgotten that, every now and then, he could be profoundly insightful and say or do things that struck a chord so deep in her that she nearly shuddered. It was part of why she loved him, she imagined, they were two of a kind.
“Is that when ‘William’ died and ‘Spike’ was born?” she asked him.
Spike shrugged and actually laughed a little.
“No, but it was definitely a bloody nail in the bloody coffin of poor ol’ Willy.”
“Did Drusilla, you know, ever…?”
The blonde man shook his head.
“No, the gravestone never meant anything to her. She saw it once and mumbled something about ‘dancing butterflies’ before killing a couple of teenagers snogging against a tree over there.” He gestured with his cigarette. “Never bothered showing it to her again and she never asked. But I always stopped by here a lot whenever I could.” Spike smiled slightly and looked askance at Buffy. “Between bouts of getting my arse kicked or having a pipe organ dropped on my head by a certain blond Slayer,” he added.
Buffy looked embarrassed; sometimes it was difficult to remember how vicious their hatred of each other had actually been back in the day.
Spike continued to speak.
“Anyhow, like I said, I always came out here, to take care of the grave, take care of the girl that should’ve been alive and happy with a mum that remembered who she bloody was or who gave a damn. And to remind myself.”
“Remind you of what?”
Spike looked at her straight on then, unflinching.
“To remind myself what it’s like to be ‘empty’, to feel nothing at all, just like poor Dru and just like your Angel,” he bit out.
“ ‘And the Angels Sang’,” Buffy whispered to herself, suddenly understanding the awful bitter sentiment the passage was meant to convey.
“Oh, he will, someday, love, that I promise you - for this,” Spike gestured at the gravestone, “and for other things.”
Buffy looked up, shocked at the sheer malevolence, the raw cold hatred, in Spike’s voice.
“What… kinds of ‘things’?” she asked him tremulously.
“Worse things. Much. Worse. Things.” He enunciated each word into a separate sentence for emphasis.
“What… kind of worse things?”
Spike opened his mouth to answer when a bizarre call rang out through the graveyard. The thunder rumbled again, louder, as the voice rose up in some kind of rising, desperate howl that sounded almost like…
“…Singing?” Buffy said in disbelief, her dread vanishing as she slipped into ‘combat mode’ the instant the first sound reached her ears.
Spike composed himself and shook his head.
“Not singing, love, dirging, it’s a vampire trick - singing without breathing, let’s you do weird things with your voice.” He shrugged self-consciously. “I’ve been known to enjoy a tune once or twice,” he admitted by way of explanation.
Buffy smiled slightly, trying to banish the darkness that had settled upon her heart from the last few minutes.
“Well, then, let’s see who’s feeling musical,” she replied as she plunged into the darkness.
Spike began to follow, then stopped and looked back at the gravestone - a small humble thing, badly scuffed with boot marks, the fresh ones covering much much older ones. They mingled with dents that could only have been made by a furious vampire, regularly, over the last hundred years and change.
“I’m sorry, poppet,” he said quietly before heading after his lover.
Whether he was apologizing to the stone, or to the spirit of the young girl it represented that had ‘faded away’ before his newly-dead eyes, was not to be pondered by anything that remained in the silence following his departure… save for the shadows and the dust.
What awaited them, however, was something neither the living nor the dead were entirely prepared for.
There was Dracula, now dressed in a pair of leather pants, motorcycle boots and nothing else, lounging bare-chested upon a crypt, arms outstretched to either side of him, and howling exultantly in that bizarre musical tone.
“Okay. Now, are you certain you’ve never read Anne Rice? ‘Cause I’m having a serious Townsend moment here,” Buffy quipped.
Dracula arched his back to crane his neck, bringing the Slayer into view, albeit upside-down.
“Ah, Buffy, welcome,” he purred. “To answer your question - no, I am not a ‘Lestat rip-off’ as you have insinuated, nor am I ‘pimply’ or ‘overweight’,” he continued with an air of semi-wounded pride as he rolled over onto his flat stomach and got to his feet, shaking the dust off his bare shoulders.
My god, does he have that right - the man could make doing laundry look sexy, Buffy thought as her stomach did flip-flops. She forced herself to pay attention to what the vampire was saying as opposed to doing or wearing, or not wearing as the case may be.
“Granted, my brother Radu may have been known as ‘The Handsome Prince,’ the Turkish Sultan certainly seemed to think so…”
Dracula spat the words like bile as his face twisted into an expression of pure bitterness. Catching Buffy’s look, he quickly regained his composure.
“…but nor was I some kind of ‘leper king’ or ‘afflicted nobility’,” he assured her, using terms she’d never heard, but a tone she knew all too well - a guy trying to impress a lady.
He’s trying to impress me! Buffy thought with more than a hint of girlish glee.
Spike scoffed. “Yeah, so far, the only ‘affliction’ is your amazing ability to turn any conversation into an occasion for grand poof-ery,” Spike mocked. “The great Count Dracula-“
“ ‘Prince’,” Dracula corrected him. “It is now ‘Prince Dracula’; I’ve reclaimed my birthright as Prince of Romania.”
Spike just shook his head. “Yeah, whatever you say, Drac…”
Dracula frowned at this in irritation, which was probably Spike’s intent.
“…but what are you doing rolling half-starkers on a bloody grave-slab?”
“I am reveling,” Dracula replied. “Refueling the spirit for the dark times to come.”
“ ‘The dark times to come’?” Buffy said with a gulp.
The Romanian vampire favored her with an indulgent smile.
“Oh, I know that I have no need to lecture you about how dark times can become, and how quickly they can become so - after all, you are a Slayer in Sunnydale.”
“You are so not wrong,” Buffy affirmed.
Dracula chuckled low and deep. “I know, and it is good to not be wrong… most of the time at least,” he admitted, for a moment seeming to lose touch with the present and reality.
“Regardless, though, I come bearing a tribute,” he told her.
Buffy frowned and caught Spike’s eye, who simply shrugged in a ‘who-the-hell-knows?’ manner of fashion, indicating that he had no idea what the vampire prince would produce next.
Bringing his hands up and away from a patch of grass near the tomb he was resting upon, he came up holding a large black lump of rotting vegetation that reeked badly of decomposition.
Buffy frowned, trying not to gag at the familiar smell.
“Oh, good, I was hoping I’d be able to choke on this particular smell, again, real soon,” she grumbled. “What the hell is it anyhow?”
Then the object went thump-thump and Buffy jerked her head up to meet the Count’s eyes with a gasp, even as a loud ka-boom of thunder rumbled in the sky above.
“No way!” she said in amazement.
Dracula grinned, showing a bit of fang in the process.
“The heart of your enemy - the slain Golobulan - and my gift to you and your kin. The Summers women have undergone a terrible ordeal, I hope this, at least, will purchase you all some peace of mind,” he consoled.
“You have no idea,” was her only reply.
“To use the language of the times, do you want to bet?” Dracula retorted.
“Hang on a second, then,” Spike interjected as he examined the heart, gesturing at it with his lit cigarette. “This thing’s supposed to be a mass of rot, how’s it got a heart?”
Dracula’s grin turned predatory as he spoke. “My dear William…-“
“Don’t bloody call me that,” Spike interrupted with a growl.
Dracula kept right on talking over him.
“…have you not learned by now that it is not what is outside, but what lies within that truly has value?”
With that, Dracula gently squeezed the heart and a tiny spurt of black slime shot out of it, striking the lit tip of Spike’s cigarette. There was a whoosh as the cigarette burst into flames.
Spike’s hand nearly did so as well as the vampire dropped the burning object with a yelp and stomped on it with his thick boots. Dracula simply laughed, watching the English vampire’s antics as he furiously tried to stamp out the fire and wring the hand in pain at the same time.
“WANKER!” Spike roared and lunged for Dracula.
“Be still,” was all the other vampire said.
The effect was instantaneous. Spike jerked to such an abrupt halt that he toppled over and, had Buffy not been there to catch him, would have landed with his face at Dracula’s feet.
“Okay, boys, let’s play nice,” Buffy admonished them, gently helping Spike to his feet. “You all right, babe?” she asked him.
“Yeah, yeah, bloody perfect,” Spike growled.
“Not bad for ‘showy gypsy tricks,’ what say you, William?” Dracula asked, wryly.
“Don’t bloody call me-“
Dracula arched an eyebrow.
“Sod off, mate,” Spike muttered under his breath with a sigh.
Satisfied for the moment that Spike had learned his place, Dracula turned his attention to Buffy.
“Your family? They are well?” he asked.
“They are alive,” Buffy replied, astonished that there was actually concern in Dracula’s voice. “ ‘Well’ might be stretching it, but they are all in one piece. Or two separate but equal pieces, but, well-“
“Thank you, Buffy, I comprehend your meaning entirely,” Dracula assured her, holding up his hand to signal that she needed to stop speaking.
“What the bloody hell is wrong with you?” Spike growled at her between clenched teeth.
“Shut up and go back to nursing your hand,” Buffy growled back at him.
Neither one of them had bothered taking the other aside and Dracula watched the entire exchange with bemusement.
“Ah, yes. Spring: ‘when a young man’s fancy turns to love’,” the elder vampire quoted.
“It’s winter, and you can go straight to Hell,” Spike growled.
Suddenly, there was a burst of dust and stone fragments, and the entire slab that made up the cover of the tomb upon which Dracula had been resting on barely moments earlier, shot off like a rocket, landing with a thud off in the distance.
“I believe we have someone who will accommodate that wish, William,” Dracula replied warily.
This time, Spike didn’t even notice the unwelcome name as he frowned, trying to peer though all the dust. Buffy, meanwhile, was keeping one eye on the dust cloud and the other peeled for any friends it might have.
“What the hell is it?” Spike muttered.
A vine encrusted skeletal hand reached up and gripped the granite rim of the tomb.
“I don’t need to know, do you, honey?” Buffy asked Spike, her eyes wide at the sight that was hauling itself up out of its stony confines.
“ Yeah, no, I’m fine with not knowing,” Spike agreed in a hurried tone of voice. “ In fact, I’m all for leaving now, getting a giant onion and a pitcher of beer and maybe just not ever knowing what is about to come out of there.”
“Come now, William, you know what they say about the curious cat and how satisfaction will always bring it back,” Dracula chided them both gently.
“Screw the cat, what’s going to bring us back?” Spike retorted.
“I dunno, we’ll think of something,” Buffy replied distractedly as she settled into a fighting stance, “but meanwhile, we have company.”
A rotting corpse, once human, climbed up and out of the gray tomb. Where it’s body was not rotted through by the decay of time, now-familiar black vines wrapped their way inside and around its body, forming a creature that was one part plant, one part zombie, and entirely horrific.
“Oh, fan-freaking-tastic!” Buffy groaned. “Golobulan 2.0!”
“These are not Golobulai,” Dracula was quick to assure her. “They are weaker things, puppets, nothing more.”
“Good, because the only way we made it out of the last one is with my brother’s help and, without him, I’d say we’d be screwed.”
“Alec Giles?” Dracula shook his head. “No, you may trust me in this, Buffy, there is far more danger for you in the keeping of his company than with its absence, this I promise you.”
Buffy frowned, turning to face Dracula. “Okay, what are you- ”
“He’s brought his mates!” Spike cried out.
Buffy whirled around, cursing herself for taking her attention from the fight, and gaped as she saw multiple creatures, just like the one before her, closing in on them at a speed that belayed their shambling gait.
“Do you have any suggestions?” Dracula asked the Slayer quietly.
“Me? You’re the one that held off 90,000 Turks with only 30,000 men,” Buffy whispered back fiercely.
Dracula whirled on her in shock, his blue eyes wide. “How do you know this?” he demanded.
“Umm, you’re the most popular vampire since Brad Pitt?” Buffy countered. “It’s not like I can’t look you up online.”
“Oh,” Dracula said, his pride again sounding slightly wounded. “So, because of movies and magic computers then?”
“Will you just shut up and start killing things already?!?” Spike screamed.
“As you wish.”
With a blinding flash, a bolt of lightning came down from the sky and struck a patch of earth in front of several of the vine zombies. Electricity raced up into their bodies and they jerked and writhed for a split second, then exploded as the methane that fueled their botanical portions ignited.
“Holy-!” Spike cried out as he and Buffy turned to look at Dracula, shocked.
Dracula smiled magnanimously.
“I was afraid my storm would not make it here in time. As I said, though, it is good to be wrong sometimes,” he informed them with a smile.
More zombies approached, and, as rain began to come down in sudden, heavy sheets, Dracula’s eyes shone iridescent blue in the rain.
“And this is how you deal with Turks,” Dracula snarled, his smile turning feral as he bit his thumb and flung blood upon the ground, shouting something in Romanian.
Buffy frowned.
“What the hell does ‘the rage of the forests mean’?” Buffy shouted, spitting out a mouthful of rainwater.
The rain was coming down in a powerful torrential downpour; a true ‘dark and stormy night’ had been summoned by the vampire prince’s power.
“Watch and see!” Dracula cried out in exultation.
“Make it fast or it’s ‘bugger all’!” Spike yelled.
The zombie horde had almost reached them; Buffy had lost count of their numbers.
Just then the ground trembled where Dracula’s blood had been spilled and giant wooden stakes erupted from the earth, impaling zombie after zombie.
Buffy and Spike stared at the carnage, dumbstruck, as Dracula laughed in delight.
“Behold! I give you the legendary Vlad Tepes: the Impaler Prince!” he yelled mirthfully while the zombies writhed and wailed as they were, one by one, impaled by Dracula’s weapons.
But then the mirth turned to rage in the blink of an eye.
“No!” he roared and swore in Romanian. “You wretched land, how dare you!”
Buffy had to squint to see through the rain in an attempt to discern what had so enraged the vampire, but she saw it at last. The wood that the giant stakes were made of was rotted, pitted and black and slimy; Buffy could see insects burrowing through it, transforming them into mounds of wooden mush. Before her eyes, the zombies pulled themselves free of the rotting stakes, making the wood crumble into more mush, and advanced towards the three.
“You look pissed,” Buffy commented.
“Those stakes were weapons from the war. With them I impaled my enemies and set them along our borders to warn those who would enslave us. The land granted me the power to summon them and now this wretched place has corrupted them,” Dracula growled.
“A vampire using stakes and fighting alongside a Slayer - that’s got to be a new one.”
“Not as new as you may think. Now hearken, they are upon us.”
“About damn time!” Spike cried out. “Bring it on!” With that he charged into the melee.
“Spike!” Buffy called out after him.
Spike didn’t hear a word, he had entered a berserker state of mind, typical for when he was in combat, and was enjoying every second of it. The blond vampire threw punches and felled creatures, kneecaps and ribs shattered under his boots; skulls, too, if they were knocked to the ground. Necks were broken, and heads were torn free of their bodies entirely. He was having a wonderful time.
He also was in trouble. He’d charged without support into the thick of things and the zombies had closed ranks behind him, cutting him off from the others and surrounding him.
“Outnumbered, outgunned, and staring death in the face,” Spike commented off-handedly before a grin spread itself across his face.
He reached down and grasped his crotch with one hand, giving the monster the ‘V’ sign with his other hand - the English equivalent of a very common, and very obscene, American hand gesture.
“All right, my beauties! Balls of British steel here for the taking!” he cried out, still holding his crotch. “Come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough!”
The zombies were not impressed with his bravado and they came to him readily enough.
“These odds suck,” Spike growled. “There definitely needs to be more of them. … Oh, well.”
With that, he went to town on them.
But there were just too many of them… Those that he knocked down got back up, and even those whose skulls he crushed were giving him trouble - vines would explode from their bodies and entwine themselves around his feet, tripping him up or trying to burrow under his skin.
Then he found the groundskeeper’s shovel. With a cry, Spike snatched it up and promptly decapitated three zombies in a row, far enough away that their vines couldn’t entangle him.
“A grave shovel!” the peroxide vampire shouted in joy. “Haven’t seen one of these since I got turned!” He turned to the zombies. “All right, you bastards, shovel party for all! Here’s your… INVITE!”
Spike drove the sharp edge so deep into a zombie’s skull that the bone split in two; the thing gurgled a little and tried to pull the blade out, its hand trembling as what was left of its nervous system had several inches of rusted metal embedded in it.
Suddenly, Spike grinned wolfishly, twisted the shovel’s handle hard, and the head exploded.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” he howled with glee and began the slaughter, singing the whole time.
“ ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few’- ”
Zombie heads were separated from zombie shoulders on the shovel’s now-gory edge as Spine swung it.
“ -‘But then again, too few to mention’- ”
Ribs shattered and one zombie actually had the shovel pushed through his body and out the other end. Spike used him to club the others.
“ -‘I did, what I had to do,’- ”
He added a little emphasis on the last word as he twisted the shovel again, destroying the monster impaled on it.
“ -‘But dig- ’... heh, get it? Dig?” he asked a zombie whose arm he’d just cut off with the weapon. The creature just gurgled, causing Spike to sigh, exasperated, and then continue to sing.
“ -‘Dig, what I had to do, I saw it through, with no devotion’- ”
The vampire thrust the butt end of this weapon through a shambling corpse’s head, then proceeded to drive a fist through its body and hurl it away from him like a missile into a group of other creatures.
“ -‘Of that, take care and just, be careful, along the highway’- ”
Spike dug out his flask and lighter as he sang. Taking a long swig of booze, somehow still managing to sing with a full mouth, he spat it all over the ridiculously bloodied blade of the shovel with a grin.
“ -‘And more, much more than this, I did MY WAY!’ ”
And with another swig of a scotch that was so high in proof that it would kill a mortal, he took his lighter and spat a gout of flame onto the zombies, catching the edge of his shovel.
Now armed with a flaming shovel, he stabbed zombie after zombie, each one exploding as their methane guts ignited, adding more flames and fuel to the fires, causing more zombies to explode, and so and so forth, until Spike’s portion of the graveyard resembled a scorched war zone. The rain was the only thing that kept him from incinerating the entire place, something that he looked very disappointed about.
Finally, there were no more zombies to kill. Spike tossed the flaming weapon aside with a sigh and grinned as he looked around at the carnage he had brought about.
“Thank you, thank you very much,” he called out to his audience of zombies, all decapitated, dismembered, on fire, or all of the above. “You’ve been a wonderful crowd. Now, for my next number…”
He reached down and, with a grunt, tore a huge headstone out of the earth and, after hefting it, started swinging it around, testing it like a baseball bat.
“…‘Anarchy in the UK’,” he concluded in an ominous tone, another homicidal grin forming before charging to help the others.
Dracula, meanwhile, was not doing as well as Spike. He’d been clawed by several of the creatures and was nursing an ugly wound just above his eye. Still, he fought on with his bare hands in the storm.
“Enough! You sicken me, monsters, if the rain will not wash away the stain of your existence; perhaps steel will.”
With that he took a clawed finger and carved a symbol into his own chest, crying out words in Romanian. Buffy frowned as she heard them.
“ ‘Purification of blood and iron’ ?” she said to herself uncomprehendingly as she ducked another blow from a zombie.
Dracula suddenly plunged his hand into his own torso with a snarl of pain. Buffy flinched as the vampire rooted around in his own chest for a moment. With a roar of fury and triumph, Dracula pulled a large sword out of his body and swung it around to slaughter two monsters at once.
“You foolish creatures with your ancient taint, you cannot protect yourselves against my power,” he told the zombies. “I condemn you now to Hell.” With that, the Prince began to carve a path through the monsters.
One of the lurching creatures managed to penetrate the Count’s defenses; it snarled, inches from the vampire’s face, its mouth open wide and vines writhing out from its parted lips.
Dracula smiled smugly and pointed a finger at the creature’s eyes.
“You do not see me,” Dracula intoned, channeling the power of his magic.
It was not enough. The creature’s mouth opened wider and the vines within shot out, wrapped around the Count’s finger, and tore it clean off his hand to pull it back into the zombie’s mouth; like a frog catching a fly.
Dracula roared in pain and quickly fell back away from the pressing onslaught of the monsters.
“My charms do not affect these monstrosities!” Dracula cried out.
“Why don’t you sing some more, they might find that ‘charm’-ing,” Spike quipped bitterly as the group continued to be forced back against the press of zombies.
“No brain to trick! They’re walking vegetables!” Buffy called out from amidst a furious melee with a horde of zombies.
Suddenly she went down with a cry.
“Spike!” she called out, just before vanishing from sight.
“Love!” Spike yelled, sounding panicked, and, giving a bestial roar, began swinging the gravestone he carried, like a man possessed.
His vampire features manifested as he roared and killed, again and again, lost in a blind fury. In the back of his mind, the blond vampire was distantly aware of Dracula screaming from somewhere behind him, but the frenzy, fueled by equal parts fury and fear, had him in its grips strongly, and he did not think of Dracula or anything else save his lover and the… objects… impeding his progress to her. Smashing aside another creature with the large granite slab, he saw a flash of blond among all the dead-black and rot-green colors of the zombies and dove for it.
Buffy was lying prone on the ground, a combination of vines and hands working on sucking her down into the earth. As Spike tore his eyes from the creature, he realized that he couldn’t see the Slayer’s left arm. With a growl, he bludgeoned away another monster and saw why - there was a zombie chewing on it, on her wrist, tearing away strips of flesh and muscle, like a man stripping the meat from a roast, with gory bits of skin dangling out of the creature’s mouth, like bloody little ribbons of sinew.
“BASTARD!!!!”
Spike bellowed and brought the gravestone around, hitting the creature in the side of the head so hard that the skull flattened for a moment before it burst like a melon and shot off its neck like a baseball as the raging man followed through with a devastating strike.
“You. Don’t. Get. HER!” Spike roared, smashing at the hands and vines grasping at Buffy; using the gravestone, his fists, his feet - even his teeth - to shred, mutilate and gnaw his way through dead skin and rotting vine alike.
“Spike?” Buffy called out weakly.
Tearing free the last of the grasping vines, Spike jerked his head up to look at her.
“Hey, baby. How you feeling, then?” he asked, attempting to sound casual, but he saw the wound on her wrists spurting blood in time with Buffy’s heartbeat - arterial spray, he knew at once - and his own heart grew cold at the sight, far colder than death had ever made it.
The Slayer smiled, drowsily.
“You look grumpy,” she stated in a sleepy whisper, reaching out to trace the outline of his prominent facial ridges brought about by the change.
At her touch, Spike’s face immediately reverted to a smooth human face. It was the face of a young man, who was deeply in love and about to die with her, but who refused to let her be scared or let himself to go down easily.
“Just got a bit worked up, baby,” Spike said in a halting voice.
He reached up to cradle his lover’s head in his hands, squeezing her body tightly, and looked around. More zombies were advancing - all rotting vines and hungry yellow teeth - and they had managed to surround them completely. Dracula was nowhere to be seen.
“Wanker,” Spike muttered under his breath, for the other vampire’s cowardice and for leaving Buffy and he to die.
It was her death, though, that truly troubled Spike. He’d been dead a long time and, even so, this is how he wanted to die - bloody and screaming and surrounded by the broken bodies of his enemies. However, he never thought he’d have all that but be forced to watch the one person in life he truly loved die.
“Mmm, I’m sleepy Spike,” Buffy mumbled into his chest, a drowsy voice that only comes from a great deal of lost blood. “Is it time for bed, baby?”
Spike felt a powerful, painful shudder, the most painful thing he had ever experienced, rip through his body as the reality of the situation came crashing down upon them.
They were both going to die. Now.
“Yeah, baby,” he whispered hoarsely, “yeah, it’s time to sleep, love,” he said, choking on the last word.
Spike could feel Buffy’s body going cold, could feel her heartbeat slowing down; the wound in her wrist had ceased spurting and was now a slowly seeping thing, a fountain from which the last of his lover’s life would leak from.
“Mmmkay, good,” Buffy whispered quietly, nuzzling deeper into her lover’s chest. “I’m cold.”
Spike’s self-control slipped a little then and he emitted a small painful sob. The zombies were very very close now. He could smell the stench of mildew and putrefied tissue.
“I don’t bloody think so!” the English vampire snarled, game face back in place, and got up to fight, to at least go down fighting before these monsters took them down and stripped the meat from their bones.
“No…” Buffy protested as she felt her lover pull away. “Stay with me, stay with me until I go to sleep….” she pleaded in a tone that Spike could imagine her using as a little girl to get anything she wanted from mommy or daddy.
Spike broke. He sank back down as his visage regained its humanity and sobbed - painful, hurting sobs that offered no relief, only regret - right there in the cold dirt of a fresh grave, surrounded by the dead, walking and buried, beside his dying paramour.
“Awww, what’s a matter… honey?” Buffy’s voice was trailing off.
Spike grabbed her hand and squeezed so tight it would have hurt had her hands not been numb from blood loss. She was so cold.
“Nothing, baby, nothing at all,” he rasped out, taking one last look around.
The zombies had apparently waited a moment to gather their fellows, so that they could all share in the bountiful feast that they were about to enjoy. They weren’t, however, stupid enough to break the circle they’d created, and Spike knew Buffy was too far gone for escape at this point.
“Nothing’s wrong at all, baby,” Spike repeated as he continued to cradle Buffy’s body, pressing her blond head into his chest.
That was one thing he’d always loved about her - her hair. It reminded him of the sun, something he found himself missing. He looked up at the sky for a moment. It was black with no moon, no stars, and no care for what was about to happen - a silent and apathetic witness - and Spike found himself hating the night and how casually it was going to watch them all die.
The zombies began to advance once more, hissing and snarling.
“Yeah, yeah, piss off,” Spike muttered.
A thought came to him and the hand that was cradling Buffy’s head became tense, muscles began to prepare to do something he would never ever have done in a million years, but that was preferable to what was to come, preferable to seeing his ‘sun’ change from golden to blood red.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered into Buffy’s ear, kissing it.
Buffy smiled. “Mmm, is it time to sleep? I’m sleepy.”
“I know, baby,” he assured her, his hand hard and ready against the back of her head.
“Close your eyes, Buffy.”
“Hey… you called me ‘Buffy’,” the Slayer whispered, her voice trailing off as the wound in her wrist stopped leaking.
Spike kissed her head, fiercely and hard as a goodbye kiss needed to be, and whispered.
“Close your eyes.”
Spike closed his eyes and tensed.
“Close your eyes, baby.”
The zombies fell upon them....
Chapter 14 - Danger
Disclaimer: All publicly recognizable characters, settings, etc. are the property of their respective owners. The original characters and plot are the property of the author. The author is in no way associated with the owners, creators, or producers of any media franchise. No copyright infringement is intended.
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Hellmouth Ascendant Trilogy: Revamped Edition
Book One:
Dusk
Chapter 13
Last Stand
Buffy walked through the graveyard. At this point it was as familiar and oddly comforting as a treasured playground from the days of childhood, or the half remembered images of a home, perhaps a few houses before the current one, even before LA.
“There’s a comforting thought,” she muttered to herself. “Yay - graveyards o’ nostalgia.”
“Pardon me, miss,” a familiar voice called out from the gloom, “but you got a light?”
Buffy laughed as the face of her lover was illuminated by the flick of a lighter, a new one, she noticed.
“Hello, babe, come to keep a girl company?” she asked coyly.
“Yeah, don’t know what kind of dangerous people might be out and about,” Spike replied, sauntering over to her with a grin.
“Mmm, I think I do. And guess what?”
“What’s that, baby?”
“They taste good…” Buffy whispered hungrily before she grabbed a fistful of Spike’s t-shirt and damn near tore it from his body as she pushed her mouth hard against his in a kiss that was both hot as blood and cold as the grave.
“Bloody Hell, they do at that, don’t they?” Spike commented when the long kiss finally ended, being very glad he didn’t have to worry about oxygen deprivation.
Buffy giggled. “Glad you approve,” she quipped.
“Too right I do, baby,” Spike replied hungrily as he pushed himself against her in a distinctly male way. “What do you say to seconds?”
“I’d say, yes, but not right now. I actually have work to do tonight,” Buffy said with a sigh.
Spike blew a wisp of blonde hair away from her face in an attempt to semi-groom his lover, but mostly just to draw attention to the errant strip of golden hair. Buffy rolled her eyes up at it, stuck her lower lip out and huffed, sending the lock of hair up into the air only for it to flutter back down again. She sighed and looked up at Spike, who was looking at her with infinite affection.
“Whatever you say then, baby,” Spike whispered to her, uncharacteristically gentle, almost tender. He stroked her face gently with cool fingers and she nuzzled his palm.
“Okay. Good,” she replied, placing a kiss on one of his fingers.
The pair then walked deeper into the silent graveyard, the stone angels of mausoleums and sepulchers their only company; the statues watched the pair with envious eyes of blank stone, coveting the warmth of the living girl and envying the luck of her dead lover.
“So, what was that you were saying about ‘nostalgia’?” Spike asked.
“Well…” Buffy began.
“… And over here is where I beat a vampire to death with a trash can lid, and over here was where I shot one in the head with a crossbow, that was a real mess, and- ”
Buffy continued to babble as Spike tried desperately to recall just how delicious that mouth of hers tasted when it was spewing tale after gruesome tale recalling her systematic annihilation of most of his undead brethren.
Suddenly, he stopped and frowned at a gravestone, pulling his attention from Buffy to focus upon it. The sudden shift in him did not go unnoticed.
“Hey, what’s up?” his chattering slayer/lover asked him.
“This was Dru’s stone,” Spike whispered quietly.
“Huh? Oh,” Buffy said sounding distinctly unthrilled as comprehension set in. “Drusilla. The ex. Got it.”
Spike didn’t say anything as, sweeping his leather duster out of the way, he knelt down to clear bits of grass and dirt away from the stone. With meticulous care, he cleaned the cold granite with even colder hands until the inscription could be read.
Buffy squinted. “ ‘Emily Audland: 1859 to 1880’,” she read aloud, then her brow furrowed, “and something in German about angels: ‘Und Auch-’ ”
“ ‘Und auch der engel singen’ - ‘And the Angels Sing’…” Spike finished in time with her words quietly. He looked up at Buffy standing over him. “You never told me you spoke German.”
“You never told me there was someone whose grave you visited, let alone it belonging to psycho-girl. What you saw in her-”
“This is her baby.”
Buffy’s mouth snapped shut with an audible click.
“Her… what?” Buffy tried to speak.
“When she hustled herself off to the convent way back when, “Spike began, “she was ‘in the family way’, I think the saying goes. She gave birth at the convent and the ol’ biddies there shipped the kid off back to her folks.” Spike sighed. “And when Angelus abducted Dru’s family to put the bite on them not ten days later, he left the little poppet, here,” he gestured at the gravestone, “safe in her crib at her soon-to-be-dead parents’ estate.” Spike scoffed. “He even kissed the babe on her little head before he left - a big bloody kiss from having just torn the throat out of her nanny.”
“Charming,” Buffy said a little uneasily, she was never comfortable discussing these aspects of Angel’s past, ex-status or no.
“Yeah, well, Angel’s always been a charmer. Bastard,” Spike growled.
“What is it between you two, Spike?” Buffy asked, bluntly. “It’s not just about me, or Dru, or male ego or whatever the vampire equivalent is, so what is it? Is it just stress ‘cause you’re like, his great grandchild, vampire style?”
Spike shook his head. “That’s not a box that will be opening tonight, love; and, for the record, he’s my grandsire,” he informed her testily.
“Yeah, yeah, I remember; your ‘yoda’, as I recall,” Buffy huffed. “So, why won’t you tell me what the deal is?”
Spike sighed unnecessarily and slumped, leaning forward in his crouch to rest his head on the gravestone. He slowly closed his eyes and began to whisper.
“It’s a lot of horror, love. A lot of things that he did, and that we did, for which there’s no forgiving or redeeming; the kind of thing you need an evil soul to be able to pull off, not just an absent one.”
Spike suddenly rocked back on his heels and, taking out a fresh cigarette, screwed it between his lips and lit it. He took a long, steadying drag before continuing.
“And it’s… just bloody twisted…”
Spike struggled for the words, but couldn’t get them out, instead taking another hard drag off the cigarette, blowing it out through clenched teeth, before sucking it back in through his mouth and snorting it out his nose. To Buffy, it made him look like an angry dragon: white peroxide-blonde horns, streaks of black and red for hide, and smoke curling from his nostrils, hinting at the fire that lay within and could only be seen in his eyes.
“The little thing got rescued by some late-night callers over at Dru’s and they raised it as their own. But then they lost their money, got really poor and really cold, and the wee girl here, now a pretty li’l thing got really sick, and then really dead,” the vampire bit out. “And I remember watching them, there in the streets… crawling and begging, like animals…”
Spike had two fistfuls of dirt in his hand and was currently squeezing them so tight, his pale knuckles nearly split with the force of his clenching fist.
“…And I remember that no one stopped - no one seemed to care, to even bloody notice these people just… dying. Just sort of… fading away, quietly.” He laughed bitterly and threw the dirt at the stone.
“And Angelus and Dru are both there, I don’t know where the blond bimbo wandered off to, and Dru doesn’t even recognize her, she’s so far gone, and I’m fresh out of my grave, and Angelus just throws his head back and laughs, and says, ‘Ah, there’s no place like London!’, and what a shame it is that she ‘couldn’t have followed her mother’s footsteps’ - as a spaced out, blood-sucking, sadistic BITCH!”
Spike snarled and his face changed into its demonic visage as he leapt to his feet and slammed a booted foot against the stone, over and over again, furious.
“You bloody bastard! You sick, twisted, son-of-a-bitch! I’ll kill you!” Spike screamed slamming his foot over and over into the stone until, finally, his strength gave out and he dropped to his knees, breathing hard and reflexively, his face changing back as the rage drained out of him.
“What happened?” Buffy asked quietly, having watched the entire affair with a sort of detached numbness.
Spike sighed and got to his feet, stopping to clean the scuffmarks off the gravestone and stick yet another cigarette between his lips.
“She died,” he answered simply, lighting the cigarette and taking a long drag from it. “They all just… faded away and died - like they’d never been there at all.”
“If she died in London… what’s the grave doing in America then?”
“I made it, during my first trip out to the States. I used to take a pretty good turn at stone carving before I found my ‘true calling’ -” Spike’s sarcasm was enough to choke someone, “ -as a poet. Time came to come to Sunnydale, I yanked it out of the ground where it was and brought it with.”
“Why?” Buffy asked simply.
“Because there’s a difference between being ‘without a soul’ and being just bloody ‘empty’,” Spike told her cryptically, gesturing at the stone again. “I got her this thinking it would, I dunno, jog her memory, bring her down to earth, help get some bit of human back in her.”
“Okaaaaayyyyy…” Buffy dragged the word out in great uncertainty, “but, you were vampires.”
“Yeah, and unlike your bloody ex, we were in love,” Spike snapped back.
Buffy looked hurt and the vampire sighed.
“Well, at least I was. And you can’t love someone, or be loved by someone, who hasn’t got a shred of humanity in them. I’ve said it before, Buffy - love isn’t brains, it’s blood.” He took another pull from the cigarette, blowing smoke into the air. “Blood screaming at you to work its will. But blood belongs to the living, in the end,” Spike admitted sadly. “We just borrow it for a bit. Just like we borrow life from it,” he turned to face the gravestone again, “just like we borrow love from it,” he finished in a whisper, his expression haunted.
A slow rumble of thunder began then - the weather in Sunnydale had been odd lately and a thunderstorm in the middle of December was not out of the realm of possibility.
Buffy shivered slightly, at the roll of thunder and at Spike’s words; she’d forgotten that, every now and then, he could be profoundly insightful and say or do things that struck a chord so deep in her that she nearly shuddered. It was part of why she loved him, she imagined, they were two of a kind.
“Is that when ‘William’ died and ‘Spike’ was born?” she asked him.
Spike shrugged and actually laughed a little.
“No, but it was definitely a bloody nail in the bloody coffin of poor ol’ Willy.”
“Did Drusilla, you know, ever…?”
The blonde man shook his head.
“No, the gravestone never meant anything to her. She saw it once and mumbled something about ‘dancing butterflies’ before killing a couple of teenagers snogging against a tree over there.” He gestured with his cigarette. “Never bothered showing it to her again and she never asked. But I always stopped by here a lot whenever I could.” Spike smiled slightly and looked askance at Buffy. “Between bouts of getting my arse kicked or having a pipe organ dropped on my head by a certain blond Slayer,” he added.
Buffy looked embarrassed; sometimes it was difficult to remember how vicious their hatred of each other had actually been back in the day.
Spike continued to speak.
“Anyhow, like I said, I always came out here, to take care of the grave, take care of the girl that should’ve been alive and happy with a mum that remembered who she bloody was or who gave a damn. And to remind myself.”
“Remind you of what?”
Spike looked at her straight on then, unflinching.
“To remind myself what it’s like to be ‘empty’, to feel nothing at all, just like poor Dru and just like your Angel,” he bit out.
“ ‘And the Angels Sang’,” Buffy whispered to herself, suddenly understanding the awful bitter sentiment the passage was meant to convey.
“Oh, he will, someday, love, that I promise you - for this,” Spike gestured at the gravestone, “and for other things.”
Buffy looked up, shocked at the sheer malevolence, the raw cold hatred, in Spike’s voice.
“What… kinds of ‘things’?” she asked him tremulously.
“Worse things. Much. Worse. Things.” He enunciated each word into a separate sentence for emphasis.
“What… kind of worse things?”
Spike opened his mouth to answer when a bizarre call rang out through the graveyard. The thunder rumbled again, louder, as the voice rose up in some kind of rising, desperate howl that sounded almost like…
“…Singing?” Buffy said in disbelief, her dread vanishing as she slipped into ‘combat mode’ the instant the first sound reached her ears.
Spike composed himself and shook his head.
“Not singing, love, dirging, it’s a vampire trick - singing without breathing, let’s you do weird things with your voice.” He shrugged self-consciously. “I’ve been known to enjoy a tune once or twice,” he admitted by way of explanation.
Buffy smiled slightly, trying to banish the darkness that had settled upon her heart from the last few minutes.
“Well, then, let’s see who’s feeling musical,” she replied as she plunged into the darkness.
Spike began to follow, then stopped and looked back at the gravestone - a small humble thing, badly scuffed with boot marks, the fresh ones covering much much older ones. They mingled with dents that could only have been made by a furious vampire, regularly, over the last hundred years and change.
“I’m sorry, poppet,” he said quietly before heading after his lover.
Whether he was apologizing to the stone, or to the spirit of the young girl it represented that had ‘faded away’ before his newly-dead eyes, was not to be pondered by anything that remained in the silence following his departure… save for the shadows and the dust.
What awaited them, however, was something neither the living nor the dead were entirely prepared for.
There was Dracula, now dressed in a pair of leather pants, motorcycle boots and nothing else, lounging bare-chested upon a crypt, arms outstretched to either side of him, and howling exultantly in that bizarre musical tone.
“Okay. Now, are you certain you’ve never read Anne Rice? ‘Cause I’m having a serious Townsend moment here,” Buffy quipped.
Dracula arched his back to crane his neck, bringing the Slayer into view, albeit upside-down.
“Ah, Buffy, welcome,” he purred. “To answer your question - no, I am not a ‘Lestat rip-off’ as you have insinuated, nor am I ‘pimply’ or ‘overweight’,” he continued with an air of semi-wounded pride as he rolled over onto his flat stomach and got to his feet, shaking the dust off his bare shoulders.
My god, does he have that right - the man could make doing laundry look sexy, Buffy thought as her stomach did flip-flops. She forced herself to pay attention to what the vampire was saying as opposed to doing or wearing, or not wearing as the case may be.
“Granted, my brother Radu may have been known as ‘The Handsome Prince,’ the Turkish Sultan certainly seemed to think so…”
Dracula spat the words like bile as his face twisted into an expression of pure bitterness. Catching Buffy’s look, he quickly regained his composure.
“…but nor was I some kind of ‘leper king’ or ‘afflicted nobility’,” he assured her, using terms she’d never heard, but a tone she knew all too well - a guy trying to impress a lady.
He’s trying to impress me! Buffy thought with more than a hint of girlish glee.
Spike scoffed. “Yeah, so far, the only ‘affliction’ is your amazing ability to turn any conversation into an occasion for grand poof-ery,” Spike mocked. “The great Count Dracula-“
“ ‘Prince’,” Dracula corrected him. “It is now ‘Prince Dracula’; I’ve reclaimed my birthright as Prince of Romania.”
Spike just shook his head. “Yeah, whatever you say, Drac…”
Dracula frowned at this in irritation, which was probably Spike’s intent.
“…but what are you doing rolling half-starkers on a bloody grave-slab?”
“I am reveling,” Dracula replied. “Refueling the spirit for the dark times to come.”
“ ‘The dark times to come’?” Buffy said with a gulp.
The Romanian vampire favored her with an indulgent smile.
“Oh, I know that I have no need to lecture you about how dark times can become, and how quickly they can become so - after all, you are a Slayer in Sunnydale.”
“You are so not wrong,” Buffy affirmed.
Dracula chuckled low and deep. “I know, and it is good to not be wrong… most of the time at least,” he admitted, for a moment seeming to lose touch with the present and reality.
“Regardless, though, I come bearing a tribute,” he told her.
Buffy frowned and caught Spike’s eye, who simply shrugged in a ‘who-the-hell-knows?’ manner of fashion, indicating that he had no idea what the vampire prince would produce next.
Bringing his hands up and away from a patch of grass near the tomb he was resting upon, he came up holding a large black lump of rotting vegetation that reeked badly of decomposition.
Buffy frowned, trying not to gag at the familiar smell.
“Oh, good, I was hoping I’d be able to choke on this particular smell, again, real soon,” she grumbled. “What the hell is it anyhow?”
Then the object went thump-thump and Buffy jerked her head up to meet the Count’s eyes with a gasp, even as a loud ka-boom of thunder rumbled in the sky above.
“No way!” she said in amazement.
Dracula grinned, showing a bit of fang in the process.
“The heart of your enemy - the slain Golobulan - and my gift to you and your kin. The Summers women have undergone a terrible ordeal, I hope this, at least, will purchase you all some peace of mind,” he consoled.
“You have no idea,” was her only reply.
“To use the language of the times, do you want to bet?” Dracula retorted.
“Hang on a second, then,” Spike interjected as he examined the heart, gesturing at it with his lit cigarette. “This thing’s supposed to be a mass of rot, how’s it got a heart?”
Dracula’s grin turned predatory as he spoke. “My dear William…-“
“Don’t bloody call me that,” Spike interrupted with a growl.
Dracula kept right on talking over him.
“…have you not learned by now that it is not what is outside, but what lies within that truly has value?”
With that, Dracula gently squeezed the heart and a tiny spurt of black slime shot out of it, striking the lit tip of Spike’s cigarette. There was a whoosh as the cigarette burst into flames.
Spike’s hand nearly did so as well as the vampire dropped the burning object with a yelp and stomped on it with his thick boots. Dracula simply laughed, watching the English vampire’s antics as he furiously tried to stamp out the fire and wring the hand in pain at the same time.
“WANKER!” Spike roared and lunged for Dracula.
“Be still,” was all the other vampire said.
The effect was instantaneous. Spike jerked to such an abrupt halt that he toppled over and, had Buffy not been there to catch him, would have landed with his face at Dracula’s feet.
“Okay, boys, let’s play nice,” Buffy admonished them, gently helping Spike to his feet. “You all right, babe?” she asked him.
“Yeah, yeah, bloody perfect,” Spike growled.
“Not bad for ‘showy gypsy tricks,’ what say you, William?” Dracula asked, wryly.
“Don’t bloody call me-“
Dracula arched an eyebrow.
“Sod off, mate,” Spike muttered under his breath with a sigh.
Satisfied for the moment that Spike had learned his place, Dracula turned his attention to Buffy.
“Your family? They are well?” he asked.
“They are alive,” Buffy replied, astonished that there was actually concern in Dracula’s voice. “ ‘Well’ might be stretching it, but they are all in one piece. Or two separate but equal pieces, but, well-“
“Thank you, Buffy, I comprehend your meaning entirely,” Dracula assured her, holding up his hand to signal that she needed to stop speaking.
“What the bloody hell is wrong with you?” Spike growled at her between clenched teeth.
“Shut up and go back to nursing your hand,” Buffy growled back at him.
Neither one of them had bothered taking the other aside and Dracula watched the entire exchange with bemusement.
“Ah, yes. Spring: ‘when a young man’s fancy turns to love’,” the elder vampire quoted.
“It’s winter, and you can go straight to Hell,” Spike growled.
Suddenly, there was a burst of dust and stone fragments, and the entire slab that made up the cover of the tomb upon which Dracula had been resting on barely moments earlier, shot off like a rocket, landing with a thud off in the distance.
“I believe we have someone who will accommodate that wish, William,” Dracula replied warily.
This time, Spike didn’t even notice the unwelcome name as he frowned, trying to peer though all the dust. Buffy, meanwhile, was keeping one eye on the dust cloud and the other peeled for any friends it might have.
“What the hell is it?” Spike muttered.
A vine encrusted skeletal hand reached up and gripped the granite rim of the tomb.
“I don’t need to know, do you, honey?” Buffy asked Spike, her eyes wide at the sight that was hauling itself up out of its stony confines.
“ Yeah, no, I’m fine with not knowing,” Spike agreed in a hurried tone of voice. “ In fact, I’m all for leaving now, getting a giant onion and a pitcher of beer and maybe just not ever knowing what is about to come out of there.”
“Come now, William, you know what they say about the curious cat and how satisfaction will always bring it back,” Dracula chided them both gently.
“Screw the cat, what’s going to bring us back?” Spike retorted.
“I dunno, we’ll think of something,” Buffy replied distractedly as she settled into a fighting stance, “but meanwhile, we have company.”
A rotting corpse, once human, climbed up and out of the gray tomb. Where it’s body was not rotted through by the decay of time, now-familiar black vines wrapped their way inside and around its body, forming a creature that was one part plant, one part zombie, and entirely horrific.
“Oh, fan-freaking-tastic!” Buffy groaned. “Golobulan 2.0!”
“These are not Golobulai,” Dracula was quick to assure her. “They are weaker things, puppets, nothing more.”
“Good, because the only way we made it out of the last one is with my brother’s help and, without him, I’d say we’d be screwed.”
“Alec Giles?” Dracula shook his head. “No, you may trust me in this, Buffy, there is far more danger for you in the keeping of his company than with its absence, this I promise you.”
Buffy frowned, turning to face Dracula. “Okay, what are you- ”
“He’s brought his mates!” Spike cried out.
Buffy whirled around, cursing herself for taking her attention from the fight, and gaped as she saw multiple creatures, just like the one before her, closing in on them at a speed that belayed their shambling gait.
“Do you have any suggestions?” Dracula asked the Slayer quietly.
“Me? You’re the one that held off 90,000 Turks with only 30,000 men,” Buffy whispered back fiercely.
Dracula whirled on her in shock, his blue eyes wide. “How do you know this?” he demanded.
“Umm, you’re the most popular vampire since Brad Pitt?” Buffy countered. “It’s not like I can’t look you up online.”
“Oh,” Dracula said, his pride again sounding slightly wounded. “So, because of movies and magic computers then?”
“Will you just shut up and start killing things already?!?” Spike screamed.
“As you wish.”
With a blinding flash, a bolt of lightning came down from the sky and struck a patch of earth in front of several of the vine zombies. Electricity raced up into their bodies and they jerked and writhed for a split second, then exploded as the methane that fueled their botanical portions ignited.
“Holy-!” Spike cried out as he and Buffy turned to look at Dracula, shocked.
Dracula smiled magnanimously.
“I was afraid my storm would not make it here in time. As I said, though, it is good to be wrong sometimes,” he informed them with a smile.
More zombies approached, and, as rain began to come down in sudden, heavy sheets, Dracula’s eyes shone iridescent blue in the rain.
“And this is how you deal with Turks,” Dracula snarled, his smile turning feral as he bit his thumb and flung blood upon the ground, shouting something in Romanian.
Buffy frowned.
“What the hell does ‘the rage of the forests mean’?” Buffy shouted, spitting out a mouthful of rainwater.
The rain was coming down in a powerful torrential downpour; a true ‘dark and stormy night’ had been summoned by the vampire prince’s power.
“Watch and see!” Dracula cried out in exultation.
“Make it fast or it’s ‘bugger all’!” Spike yelled.
The zombie horde had almost reached them; Buffy had lost count of their numbers.
Just then the ground trembled where Dracula’s blood had been spilled and giant wooden stakes erupted from the earth, impaling zombie after zombie.
Buffy and Spike stared at the carnage, dumbstruck, as Dracula laughed in delight.
“Behold! I give you the legendary Vlad Tepes: the Impaler Prince!” he yelled mirthfully while the zombies writhed and wailed as they were, one by one, impaled by Dracula’s weapons.
But then the mirth turned to rage in the blink of an eye.
“No!” he roared and swore in Romanian. “You wretched land, how dare you!”
Buffy had to squint to see through the rain in an attempt to discern what had so enraged the vampire, but she saw it at last. The wood that the giant stakes were made of was rotted, pitted and black and slimy; Buffy could see insects burrowing through it, transforming them into mounds of wooden mush. Before her eyes, the zombies pulled themselves free of the rotting stakes, making the wood crumble into more mush, and advanced towards the three.
“You look pissed,” Buffy commented.
“Those stakes were weapons from the war. With them I impaled my enemies and set them along our borders to warn those who would enslave us. The land granted me the power to summon them and now this wretched place has corrupted them,” Dracula growled.
“A vampire using stakes and fighting alongside a Slayer - that’s got to be a new one.”
“Not as new as you may think. Now hearken, they are upon us.”
“About damn time!” Spike cried out. “Bring it on!” With that he charged into the melee.
“Spike!” Buffy called out after him.
Spike didn’t hear a word, he had entered a berserker state of mind, typical for when he was in combat, and was enjoying every second of it. The blond vampire threw punches and felled creatures, kneecaps and ribs shattered under his boots; skulls, too, if they were knocked to the ground. Necks were broken, and heads were torn free of their bodies entirely. He was having a wonderful time.
He also was in trouble. He’d charged without support into the thick of things and the zombies had closed ranks behind him, cutting him off from the others and surrounding him.
“Outnumbered, outgunned, and staring death in the face,” Spike commented off-handedly before a grin spread itself across his face.
He reached down and grasped his crotch with one hand, giving the monster the ‘V’ sign with his other hand - the English equivalent of a very common, and very obscene, American hand gesture.
“All right, my beauties! Balls of British steel here for the taking!” he cried out, still holding his crotch. “Come and have a go, if you think you’re hard enough!”
The zombies were not impressed with his bravado and they came to him readily enough.
“These odds suck,” Spike growled. “There definitely needs to be more of them. … Oh, well.”
With that, he went to town on them.
But there were just too many of them… Those that he knocked down got back up, and even those whose skulls he crushed were giving him trouble - vines would explode from their bodies and entwine themselves around his feet, tripping him up or trying to burrow under his skin.
Then he found the groundskeeper’s shovel. With a cry, Spike snatched it up and promptly decapitated three zombies in a row, far enough away that their vines couldn’t entangle him.
“A grave shovel!” the peroxide vampire shouted in joy. “Haven’t seen one of these since I got turned!” He turned to the zombies. “All right, you bastards, shovel party for all! Here’s your… INVITE!”
Spike drove the sharp edge so deep into a zombie’s skull that the bone split in two; the thing gurgled a little and tried to pull the blade out, its hand trembling as what was left of its nervous system had several inches of rusted metal embedded in it.
Suddenly, Spike grinned wolfishly, twisted the shovel’s handle hard, and the head exploded.
“HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” he howled with glee and began the slaughter, singing the whole time.
“ ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few’- ”
Zombie heads were separated from zombie shoulders on the shovel’s now-gory edge as Spine swung it.
“ -‘But then again, too few to mention’- ”
Ribs shattered and one zombie actually had the shovel pushed through his body and out the other end. Spike used him to club the others.
“ -‘I did, what I had to do,’- ”
He added a little emphasis on the last word as he twisted the shovel again, destroying the monster impaled on it.
“ -‘But dig- ’... heh, get it? Dig?” he asked a zombie whose arm he’d just cut off with the weapon. The creature just gurgled, causing Spike to sigh, exasperated, and then continue to sing.
“ -‘Dig, what I had to do, I saw it through, with no devotion’- ”
The vampire thrust the butt end of this weapon through a shambling corpse’s head, then proceeded to drive a fist through its body and hurl it away from him like a missile into a group of other creatures.
“ -‘Of that, take care and just, be careful, along the highway’- ”
Spike dug out his flask and lighter as he sang. Taking a long swig of booze, somehow still managing to sing with a full mouth, he spat it all over the ridiculously bloodied blade of the shovel with a grin.
“ -‘And more, much more than this, I did MY WAY!’ ”
And with another swig of a scotch that was so high in proof that it would kill a mortal, he took his lighter and spat a gout of flame onto the zombies, catching the edge of his shovel.
Now armed with a flaming shovel, he stabbed zombie after zombie, each one exploding as their methane guts ignited, adding more flames and fuel to the fires, causing more zombies to explode, and so and so forth, until Spike’s portion of the graveyard resembled a scorched war zone. The rain was the only thing that kept him from incinerating the entire place, something that he looked very disappointed about.
Finally, there were no more zombies to kill. Spike tossed the flaming weapon aside with a sigh and grinned as he looked around at the carnage he had brought about.
“Thank you, thank you very much,” he called out to his audience of zombies, all decapitated, dismembered, on fire, or all of the above. “You’ve been a wonderful crowd. Now, for my next number…”
He reached down and, with a grunt, tore a huge headstone out of the earth and, after hefting it, started swinging it around, testing it like a baseball bat.
“…‘Anarchy in the UK’,” he concluded in an ominous tone, another homicidal grin forming before charging to help the others.
Dracula, meanwhile, was not doing as well as Spike. He’d been clawed by several of the creatures and was nursing an ugly wound just above his eye. Still, he fought on with his bare hands in the storm.
“Enough! You sicken me, monsters, if the rain will not wash away the stain of your existence; perhaps steel will.”
With that he took a clawed finger and carved a symbol into his own chest, crying out words in Romanian. Buffy frowned as she heard them.
“ ‘Purification of blood and iron’ ?” she said to herself uncomprehendingly as she ducked another blow from a zombie.
Dracula suddenly plunged his hand into his own torso with a snarl of pain. Buffy flinched as the vampire rooted around in his own chest for a moment. With a roar of fury and triumph, Dracula pulled a large sword out of his body and swung it around to slaughter two monsters at once.
“You foolish creatures with your ancient taint, you cannot protect yourselves against my power,” he told the zombies. “I condemn you now to Hell.” With that, the Prince began to carve a path through the monsters.
One of the lurching creatures managed to penetrate the Count’s defenses; it snarled, inches from the vampire’s face, its mouth open wide and vines writhing out from its parted lips.
Dracula smiled smugly and pointed a finger at the creature’s eyes.
“You do not see me,” Dracula intoned, channeling the power of his magic.
It was not enough. The creature’s mouth opened wider and the vines within shot out, wrapped around the Count’s finger, and tore it clean off his hand to pull it back into the zombie’s mouth; like a frog catching a fly.
Dracula roared in pain and quickly fell back away from the pressing onslaught of the monsters.
“My charms do not affect these monstrosities!” Dracula cried out.
“Why don’t you sing some more, they might find that ‘charm’-ing,” Spike quipped bitterly as the group continued to be forced back against the press of zombies.
“No brain to trick! They’re walking vegetables!” Buffy called out from amidst a furious melee with a horde of zombies.
Suddenly she went down with a cry.
“Spike!” she called out, just before vanishing from sight.
“Love!” Spike yelled, sounding panicked, and, giving a bestial roar, began swinging the gravestone he carried, like a man possessed.
His vampire features manifested as he roared and killed, again and again, lost in a blind fury. In the back of his mind, the blond vampire was distantly aware of Dracula screaming from somewhere behind him, but the frenzy, fueled by equal parts fury and fear, had him in its grips strongly, and he did not think of Dracula or anything else save his lover and the… objects… impeding his progress to her. Smashing aside another creature with the large granite slab, he saw a flash of blond among all the dead-black and rot-green colors of the zombies and dove for it.
Buffy was lying prone on the ground, a combination of vines and hands working on sucking her down into the earth. As Spike tore his eyes from the creature, he realized that he couldn’t see the Slayer’s left arm. With a growl, he bludgeoned away another monster and saw why - there was a zombie chewing on it, on her wrist, tearing away strips of flesh and muscle, like a man stripping the meat from a roast, with gory bits of skin dangling out of the creature’s mouth, like bloody little ribbons of sinew.
“BASTARD!!!!”
Spike bellowed and brought the gravestone around, hitting the creature in the side of the head so hard that the skull flattened for a moment before it burst like a melon and shot off its neck like a baseball as the raging man followed through with a devastating strike.
“You. Don’t. Get. HER!” Spike roared, smashing at the hands and vines grasping at Buffy; using the gravestone, his fists, his feet - even his teeth - to shred, mutilate and gnaw his way through dead skin and rotting vine alike.
“Spike?” Buffy called out weakly.
Tearing free the last of the grasping vines, Spike jerked his head up to look at her.
“Hey, baby. How you feeling, then?” he asked, attempting to sound casual, but he saw the wound on her wrists spurting blood in time with Buffy’s heartbeat - arterial spray, he knew at once - and his own heart grew cold at the sight, far colder than death had ever made it.
The Slayer smiled, drowsily.
“You look grumpy,” she stated in a sleepy whisper, reaching out to trace the outline of his prominent facial ridges brought about by the change.
At her touch, Spike’s face immediately reverted to a smooth human face. It was the face of a young man, who was deeply in love and about to die with her, but who refused to let her be scared or let himself to go down easily.
“Just got a bit worked up, baby,” Spike said in a halting voice.
He reached up to cradle his lover’s head in his hands, squeezing her body tightly, and looked around. More zombies were advancing - all rotting vines and hungry yellow teeth - and they had managed to surround them completely. Dracula was nowhere to be seen.
“Wanker,” Spike muttered under his breath, for the other vampire’s cowardice and for leaving Buffy and he to die.
It was her death, though, that truly troubled Spike. He’d been dead a long time and, even so, this is how he wanted to die - bloody and screaming and surrounded by the broken bodies of his enemies. However, he never thought he’d have all that but be forced to watch the one person in life he truly loved die.
“Mmm, I’m sleepy Spike,” Buffy mumbled into his chest, a drowsy voice that only comes from a great deal of lost blood. “Is it time for bed, baby?”
Spike felt a powerful, painful shudder, the most painful thing he had ever experienced, rip through his body as the reality of the situation came crashing down upon them.
They were both going to die. Now.
“Yeah, baby,” he whispered hoarsely, “yeah, it’s time to sleep, love,” he said, choking on the last word.
Spike could feel Buffy’s body going cold, could feel her heartbeat slowing down; the wound in her wrist had ceased spurting and was now a slowly seeping thing, a fountain from which the last of his lover’s life would leak from.
“Mmmkay, good,” Buffy whispered quietly, nuzzling deeper into her lover’s chest. “I’m cold.”
Spike’s self-control slipped a little then and he emitted a small painful sob. The zombies were very very close now. He could smell the stench of mildew and putrefied tissue.
“I don’t bloody think so!” the English vampire snarled, game face back in place, and got up to fight, to at least go down fighting before these monsters took them down and stripped the meat from their bones.
“No…” Buffy protested as she felt her lover pull away. “Stay with me, stay with me until I go to sleep….” she pleaded in a tone that Spike could imagine her using as a little girl to get anything she wanted from mommy or daddy.
Spike broke. He sank back down as his visage regained its humanity and sobbed - painful, hurting sobs that offered no relief, only regret - right there in the cold dirt of a fresh grave, surrounded by the dead, walking and buried, beside his dying paramour.
“Awww, what’s a matter… honey?” Buffy’s voice was trailing off.
Spike grabbed her hand and squeezed so tight it would have hurt had her hands not been numb from blood loss. She was so cold.
“Nothing, baby, nothing at all,” he rasped out, taking one last look around.
The zombies had apparently waited a moment to gather their fellows, so that they could all share in the bountiful feast that they were about to enjoy. They weren’t, however, stupid enough to break the circle they’d created, and Spike knew Buffy was too far gone for escape at this point.
“Nothing’s wrong at all, baby,” Spike repeated as he continued to cradle Buffy’s body, pressing her blond head into his chest.
That was one thing he’d always loved about her - her hair. It reminded him of the sun, something he found himself missing. He looked up at the sky for a moment. It was black with no moon, no stars, and no care for what was about to happen - a silent and apathetic witness - and Spike found himself hating the night and how casually it was going to watch them all die.
The zombies began to advance once more, hissing and snarling.
“Yeah, yeah, piss off,” Spike muttered.
A thought came to him and the hand that was cradling Buffy’s head became tense, muscles began to prepare to do something he would never ever have done in a million years, but that was preferable to what was to come, preferable to seeing his ‘sun’ change from golden to blood red.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he whispered into Buffy’s ear, kissing it.
Buffy smiled. “Mmm, is it time to sleep? I’m sleepy.”
“I know, baby,” he assured her, his hand hard and ready against the back of her head.
“Close your eyes, Buffy.”
“Hey… you called me ‘Buffy’,” the Slayer whispered, her voice trailing off as the wound in her wrist stopped leaking.
Spike kissed her head, fiercely and hard as a goodbye kiss needed to be, and whispered.
“Close your eyes.”
Spike closed his eyes and tensed.
“Close your eyes, baby.”
The zombies fell upon them....
Chapter 14 - Danger