Vices of My Blood
Chapter 17
Chapter 17
Angelus deposited Drusilla in their room and saw to a few disputes among the minions. The arguments in and of themselves seemed petty compared to Angelus’ bigger picture. So he rectified the situation by dusting all the quarreling parties.
He knew Drusilla wouldn’t stay in their room long. She liked seeing the night sky too much to stay anywhere he left her. Knowing he’d find her in the atrium, he headed that way. Though not before grabbing a frightened minion by the back of the neck and hauling the underling in front of him. “Go get that damnable grandchilde of mine and his mate and tell them to present themselves in the gardens, now!”
The gopher’s nod looked like his head was on a metal spring. Angelus threw the minion away from him and headed toward the gardens following his childe’s scent. His beautiful Drusilla had taken on the scent of the night-blooming jasmine that grew in the backyard.
Angelus stopped just short of entering the space and leaned against the wall merely watching his childe. She was perched on the side of a large planter with her fingers sifting through the soil. He knew she sensed him, but didn’t turn her head. Just then Buffy wheeled Spike into the gardens.
“Maybe I’ll sleep underground. Dig myself a little burrow,” Drusilla mused.
“What about your dress, sweet? It'll get all dirty,” Spike reasoned with his sire.
Drusilla smiled coyly. “Then I shall sleep naked. Like the animals do.”
Angelus smiled at that thought: his child lying naked on the soil of the earth. The image his mind conjured up was rather enticing. “You know, I suddenly like this plan.”
Drusilla lay down on the ground in front of the planter and rolled over; arching her back in an ecstasy only she seemed to feel. She smiled adoringly up at her sire, her dark blue eyes full of lust that matched Angelus’ own.
Spike rolled his eyes at Angelus’ comment. “Fortunately, nobody cares what you like, mate.”
Angelus raised an eyebrow at his grandchilde. “Oh, yeah? Let's ask Dru,” he suggested. He crouched down, eying Drusilla in a predatory manner. Drusilla laughed at her sire and sat up on her knees.
Dru’s lost it if you ask me, Buffy thought. Spike turned his head up to her and gave her a knowing look. As her mate, the blond vampire had heard her thought.
“The sunshine is alert now. It has awakened in the guise of a new being,” Drusilla whispered.
“What are you talking about, princess?” Angelus cooed to her as he moved closer to his childe.
Drusilla got to her feet, Angelus following her. “I’m a mummy, my Angel, I told you I would be,” the dark vampiress giggled.
Spike reached for Buffy’s hand which had tensed on his shoulder. His sire knew about Buffy’s slayer demon surfacing. He could feel through the claim how uneasy Drusilla made Buffy. He had tried to reassure his mate as much as he could that his Black Goddess wouldn’t harm her now that she was family.
Buffy stood on edge when Drusilla had referred to her. How did the vampiress know she was changing into the primal essence of her ability? She barely understood what was happening to herself and yet this woman had insight into her very being. It scared her a little how accurate Spike’s insane sire was.
Angelus wrapped his arms around Drusilla’s waist and ground his crotch against her ass. “Actually, Spike, Dru isn’t the reason I called you out here. I wanted to tell your mate some news,” the dark vampire said as he trailed his fingertips over Drusilla’s cheek.
“What do you have to tell me, Angelus?” Buffy asked. She had foregone ever using ‘Angel’ to address her former boyfriend after her demon started to become more prominent.
“Well, Buff, I left a present for your watcher . . . in his bed. A certain gypsy computer teacher who tried to re-ensoul me,” Angelus told the blond girl as he played with a lock of Drusilla’s hair. “Believe me; she won’t be re-ensouling me any time soon.”
“You killed Jenny Calendar?” Buffy whispered too stunned to move.
“Are you insane?! If you wanted to kill the Slayer why not just do it? Why the hell are you going around leaving gag gifts in her friends’ beds?” Spike growled at his grandsire.
“But, Spike, the bad teacher was going to restore Angel's soul,” Drusilla cooed to her childe.
“What if she did? If you ask me, I find myself preferring the old Buffy-whipped Angelus these days. This new, improved one is not playing with a full sack!” Spike said angrily. His outburst earned him an irate look from Angelus. “I love a good slaughter as much as the next bloke, Angelus, but your little pranks will only draw unneeded attention from that watcher of hers,” Spike said. He hated playing both sides of the fence. He felt very deeply for his mate, but he also felt a sire/childe bond with Drusilla and couldn’t abandon her, or either woman, to the likes of this version of Angelus.
“Don't worry, roller boy. I've got everything under control,” Angelus assured him.
An arrow swooshed through the air intent on hitting Angelus’ heart but ran through Drusilla’s shoulder instead. The vampiress cried out in dismay and her eyes flashed from dark blue to yellow and back. Angelus tried to push his childe out of the way, toward Spike and Buffy, but she was near whimpering in pain and rambling to herself about fallen birds.
“Drusilla! Move the hell out of the way!” Angelus barked at his childe.
Drusilla ran toward the entrance of the house, the arrow still imbedded in her shoulder. Buffy turned to help the vampiress remove the arrow while Angelus cut across the garden and received a blow to the shoulder with another arrow. He grabbed it to pull it out while he scanned his surroundings to see who his attacker was. Giles walked toward him with a baseball bat.
Angelus had just pulled the arrow out of his shoulder and thrown it aside when Giles swung the bat and hit him in the face once and then again on the return swing. The dark vampire staggered from the onslaught and bent down to catch his bearings.
“Jeez, whatever happened to wooden stakes these days?” Angelus asked no one in particular.
Giles was still beating on Angelus’ back with the bat when Buffy turned from helping Drusilla for moment to take in the fight. For a split second she wanted to jump into the fray to help Angel, but then as soon as the thought appeared, reality set in that it was Angelus. Spike’s voice crept into her mind, ‘Uh uh, pet. Stay out of the fight, Angelus can hold his own. Buffy looked up at him, seeing his concern for her before she turned back to Drusilla to try and stem the bleeding. She didn’t know why she was compelled to help the crazy vampire, other than the dark beauty was Spike’s sire.
Angelus twisted his body away from the swinging bat and stood back up, but Giles switched positions on him and swung the bat into his face twice again, which knocked him off balance once more. The watcher continued to beat on him, causing the dark vampire to collapse all the way to the floor. Angelus tried to rise to his knees again, but Giles swung into his jaw with an uppercut. The mortal wielded the baseball bat over his head, but as he brought it down the vampire caught it, and the adversaries started to struggle over it. The vampire quickly gained the upper hand, and grabbed Giles by the throat, lifting him off of his feet. In his incapacitated state, Giles let go of the bat, dropping with a thunk to the floor.
“All right, Giles, you've had your fun,” Angelus growled. “But you know what it's time for now?”
Buffy couldn’t stand back and watch the fight any longer. She needed to get her watcher out of there. She could handle her former boyfriend’s demon by herself, but if this fight kept up, she was afraid Angelus would rip Giles apart. She pulled away from Spike’s side and, just as he was about to deliver a blow to Giles’ face, Buffy kicked the dark vampire in the back, causing Angelus to let Giles go and the watcher to fall to the floor.
“My fun,” Buffy said in a feral growl as she pulled Angelus back and slammed him into the spiral staircase.
Drusilla cried piteously in the background at the turn of events. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Her pixies never warned her about her ‘daughter’ going up against her daddy. This was all so wrong. She had felt for sure that the Sunshine was on their side.
Buffy kicked Angelus in the face, and then shoved him onto the floor. He tried to get up but Buffy kicked the dark vampire in the face again and then threw herself at him. They involuntarily bucked their hips against each other before he grabbed her waist, flipped her over and tried to get away from her by running up the stairs.
Buffy rolled to her feet fast with Giles’ discarded baseball bat in hand and pushed it between the posts in the stair railing, tripping Angelus up. The vampire fell and she grabbed for his legs. Angelus kicked himself free of Buffy and knocked her back onto the floor. He scrambled up the stairs. Buffy got to her feet quickly. She saw his progression on the stairs. Seeing a heavy chandelier chain, she grabbed it, twisted it in the air a few times and threw it at her former boyfriend. When the chain wrapped around his body, she yanked him down the staircase.
When Angelus broke free of the chain, he swung at Buffy, only to hit air as she had ducked. She kicked him in the back of the knee, causing him to drop onto the bottom steps of the staircase. When he rolled over, she kicked him in the chest, causing him to heave an unneeded breath.
Angelus grabbed Buffy’s foot, caressing her instep for a second before throwing her away from him. He stumbled to his feet, but she slugged him hard in the jaw, knocking him back down again.
“Oh, Buff, if I knew you liked it so rough, we would have sparred sooner than this,” Angelus taunted her with a chuckle.
“You have no clue how rough I like it, Angelus,” Buffy said as she continued to slug him in the face and chest. Buffy jumped up and kicked his chest hard. Then she pounced on him and delivered a series of punches that kept the back of his head banging against the stairs. Angelus started to laugh as Buffy grabbed him by the coat and rammed his head into the stairs more forcefully.
“You’re so feisty when you’re angry, you know that, sweetheart?” Angelus grinned lasciviously.
Buffy’s eyes faded into the turquoise color of her demon and growled at Angelus. Angelus’ own demon came to the forefront and he bucked his hips up against the apex of her thighs, throwing her off him. She managed to control her balance and land on her feet near Giles. Angelus took off out of the house, but she stopped him short with a whack of a two-by-two against the back of his head, laying him out.
Buffy turned to help Giles to his feet and supported his weight as she helped him to the garden entrance. When they had made it to the outskirts of the gardens, she turned her feral eyes on her watcher. The man pushed her away from him.
“What do you think you’re doing coming here, Giles?” Buffy asked at the same time Giles asked, “Why did you intervene?! This wasn't your fight!”
Buffy punched her watcher in the jaw as an answer, and he spun around and fell to his knees. “Are you trying to get yourself killed in there? If I hadn’t have intervened, Angelus would have eventually eviscerated you,” she growled.
Before Giles could say anymore, Buffy continued, “I don’t know what’s happened to me internally, Giles, but I have to stay here to find out who I am now and stop Angelus in whatever he has a mind to try. I need you on the outside, researching this, not dead and made a meal of by my family!” Buffy had said ‘family’ without realizing she had.
Giles trudged back to his apartment from the Crawford Street mansion. He tore the crime scene tape away from his door and stared at the wood paneling for several seconds. He was drained from the fight and exhausted from the long night. He turned the knob and shuffled tiredly into his home. All he wanted to do was sleep.
Buffy turned around and headed back toward a mansion of disordered chaos. She helped Drusilla to her feet and walked her to the bedroom the vampiress shared with her sire. Spike wheeled his chair behind her. Inside the dark room, dimly lit by candles, she sat the woman on the huge bed that matched hers and Spike’s.
“Can you help her, pet?” Spike quietly beseeched his mate.
“I’ll try, Spike,” Buffy said.
She carefully cradled a shuddering Drusilla against her shoulder. Buffy gave an apologetic look to Spike as she gently wrapped her fingers around the arrow and gave a quick jerk, pulling it out smoothly and quickly. Drusilla cried out at the pain.
Spike wheeled away and came back a short time later with towels to sop up the blood flowing fresh again from his sire’s wound. Buffy took great care in treating the woman. She ignored Angelus’ presence as she ministered to the wound as delicately as she could. It wasn’t that she didn’t expect him to get up from that blow from the two-by-two. She just didn’t care to look up at him.
Angelus moved into the room and walked silently to the other side of the bed. He lay sprawled out beside Drusilla, the earlier fight with Buffy forgotten in the wake of his childe’s pain. He growled and purred to her softly while Buffy worked over her and Spike watching the whole scene.
A few days later, Giles was in the cemetery at dusk, looking down at Jenny’s grave. He kneeled down and put a bouquet of wildflowers on her grave. Buffy walked up and stood behind him. She had snuck out through the gardens when Angelus was busy seeing to Drusilla’s care.
Buffy knew Giles sensed her presence even though he didn’t move to look at her. He merely stared sightlessly at Jenny’s name on the headstone for a moment before standing back up. Buffy stood silent beside him.
“In my years as . . . Watcher . . . I've buried . . . too many people. But Jenny was the first I've loved,” Giles said in a distant voice.
Buffy looked up at him, heartbroken for her Watcher’s loss, but even more for what she had to tell him. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry I couldn't kill him for you . . .” she looked at the gravestone, “for her . . . when I had the chance. I wasn’t ready to, and I don’t know if I can now.”
In Jenny’s classroom, the students waited at their desks for the teacher to arrive. Willow walked slowly into the room and stood awkwardly at the front.
“Hi. Principal Snyder asked me to fill in for Ms. Calendar . . . u-until the new computer science teacher arrives. So I'm just gonna stick to the lesson plan she left,” she said sadly.
Willow walked around the desk and looked over the stacks of books and papers. She wanted to burst into tears so badly. She wanted to cry for the loss of her teacher and her friend. She raged inwardly, wanting to pummel Angelus for taking both out of her life.
Willow put down her own books, in the process nudging a few other books aside. As a result the yellow disk that Jenny had set next to the stack was pushed off the edge and fell between the desk and the small filing cabinet beside it. The disk hit the floor and leaned against the side of the cabinet unnoticed.