Chosen

by Nancy Holder

  “Babe 2: Pig in the City was really underrated,” he said weakly.

  His victim was an adorable little piglet, heir to the mantel of school mascot, which, okay, she knew the job was dangerous when she, um, got picked from the litter for it. One of her predecessors had been a pig named Herbert, who, legend claimed, had been eaten up by Xander Harris.

  “You’re Conan. You’re the Destroyer,” Warren silkily reminded him. “Everyone knows you. You play by your own rules. It’s kill or be killed.”

  “That’ll do, pig!” Andrew cried desperately.

  He lunged at the little pink piggy; it squealed and ran. Andrew charged after it, missed again; charged, missed. He was sliding all over the basement floor.

  Finally the pig clicked on its little trotters down the hall.

  “Isn’t there some other way we can get blood?” he asked Warren.

  * * *

  And there was. Soon Andrew was number 87 at the butcher shop, and he had a list for the grouchy butcher man waiting to take his order. Andrew had on his coat, his boots, and his cool hair, and he felt very out of place among the mundanes in the shop.

  The butcher prepared to write his order, and Andrew moved to Step 2 of Plan B.

  He said anxiously, “I’d like twelve pork chops, two pounds of sausage, eightquartsofpigsblood, three steaks, a halibut . . . some toothpaste . . .”

  The butcher looked at Andrew as if he were an idiot. “This is a butcher shop, Neo,” he said, referring, no doubt, to Andrew’s outfit. Erg. How embarrassing. I thought it looked cool. “We don’t sell toothpaste.”

  “Oh, okay,” Andrew said, loaded to the gills with anxiety—no toothpaste, but does he have the halibut?—and while the butcher went into action to fulfill the order, Andrew kind of snuck to the back of the store to admire the steak sauce away from the eyes of common men.

  The bag was enormous; he picked it up and lumbered out of the store, colliding with someone as he crossed the threshold.

  Chops and sausages and several clear packages of blood went flying all over the place.

  But that wasn’t the bad part.

  The bad part was Willow Rosenberg had been on her way into the store. Willow, who had flayed Warren alive!

  She was staring at him, wide-eyed and obviously very, very clear on who he was.

  He ran down the street and into an alley.

  So did she.

  He begged her, “Don’t kill me! Don’t torture me and send me to an eternal pain dimension! Warren killed Tara. I didn’t do it. And he was aiming for Buffy anyway.”

  Willow glared at him. “Not making it better.”

  “And you got your revenge. You killed my best friend. We’re even.”

  She looked shocked. “Even? You think I get satisfaction from what I did?”

  “I’m protected by powerful forces,” he went on, trying a different tack. “Forces you can’t even begin to imagine, little girl. If you harm me, you shall know the wrath of he that is darkness and terror. Stand down, she-witch. Your defeat is at hand.”

  Realizing that she could use his weirdness against him, she decided to run with the scary Willow iteration. Getting herself in character, she pushed him soundly against a brick wall. “Shut your mouth. I am a she-witch, a very powerful she-witch, or witch, as is more accurate. I’m not to be trifled with. I am Willow.” And I sound like the Wizard of Oz. But he’s buying it. “I am death. If you dare defy me, I will call down my fury, exact fresh vengeance, and make your worst dreams come true.” She raised her brows. “Okay?”

  He believed her, and she forced him to go to Buffy’s house with her.

  She marched him into the house, where his old enemies—Xander, Anya, plus the cute sister, Dawn, all regarded him with . . . scorn.

  Anya stepped on his coat!

  Then they tied him up police-interrogation style and threatened to hurt him if he didn’t tell them why he was back in town.

  “I haven’t done anything wrong,” he pleaded.

  “Then you won’t mind if we ask you a few questions,” Xander said.

  “Yeah, okay,” Andrew murmured.

  “What were you doing buying blood at the butcher shop?” Xander demanded, as Anya listened, too.

  He gave them his pre-thought-up story: “I-fell-in-love-with-a-beautiful-vampire-girl-down-in-Mehico-and-now-we’re-trying-to-make-a-go-of-it-on-the-straight-and-narrow-and-put-our-lives-back-together-here-in-Sunnydale.”

  Xander privately suspected he was getting his material from Tarantino’s From Dusk to Dawn.

  “You think this is a game, junior?!” Anya yelled at him, grabbing him, shaking him. “People are dying! Our friends are in danger!”

  Andrew whimpered in fear; Xander looked genuinely surprised at Anya’s behavior.

  “And you want to waste our time with deceptions? Not on my watch!”

  And she backhanded him a wicked one across the face. He screamed in pain.

  Xander stopped her, asked to speak to her privately. They went into the bathroom, giddy over their performance.

  “Did you see that?” Anya asked. “I actually made him cry!”

  “You were perfect,” Xander told her. “I was worried I overdid it with the whole easy way/hard way thing.”

  “No, that was great,” Anya congratulated him.

  She shook her hand like it was stinging. “I wasn’t sure if I should slap him, but then he made me want to slap him so I thought, ‘Slap him.’ ”

  “He’ll be singing in no time,” Xander said happily.

  “What do we do now?” she asked.

  “Now we let him stew in his own juices for a bit, then we give him the hard brace,” Xander told her.

  Anya nodded. “Right.”

  Buffy came out of her room. Anya didn’t miss a beat, nodded to her, all tough and NYPD Blue.

  “What’s the status with your guy?” she asked Buffy.

  “He hasn’t talking yet,” Buffy admitted

  Anya reported happily, “The weasel wants to sing. He just needs a tune.”

  “He’s primed,” Xander agreed. “I’ll be pumping him in no time.” Amending that, he tried again. “He’ll give us information soon.”

  Buffy nodded and returned to Spike.

  “It’s all flashes here and there,” the white-haired vampire admitted. “It’s like I’m watching someone else . . . do it, kill people. I’ve been losing time for a while now, waking up in strange places. Things have been wonky since . . .”

  He hesitated, and she filled in. “Since you got your soul.” He lowered his head in assent. “How did you do it?”

  He sighed at the memory. “I went to seek a legend out. Traveled to the other side of the world, made a deal with a demon.”

  “Just like that?” Buffy asked sharply.

  “There was a price,” he said, face stony. “There were trials, torture, pain, and suffering . . . of sorts.” He looked at her. “I have come to redefine the words ‘pain’ and ‘suffering’ since I fell in love with you.”

  * * *

  Xander got into character and went back into the room, where a very frightened Andrew flinched at the sight of him. He offered Andrew some water. After he drank, he muttered, “That chick’s psycho.”

  Xander let out his breath and looked sad. “You don’t know the half of it. She’s a vengeance demon, you know.” He sat down. “She’s bad news.”

  “This one time I saw her having sex with Spike,” he told Xander.

  Xander winced but said nothing. Then he continued. “She’s killed a lot of men. She tortures them. Anyone who incurs her wrath. There was this one guy . . . she took stopped his heart, then she replaced it with darkness . . .” Seeing that his own personal pain was not impressing Andrew, he added, “then she tore out his intestines and rubbed his face in it.”

  That worked.

  Then the door flew opened and Anya charged into the room, all hellfire and fury, and shouted, “You’re gonna tell us what we need to know, and you’r
e gonna tell us right now!”

  She went for Andrew’s throat, knocking his chair backward in her wrath. As Xander pretended to try to stop her, she slapped him, gave him a visual apology cue, and got back to her interrogation.

  “Get her off me!” Andrew shouted. “I’ll tell you what you need to know.”

  Hearing the ruckus, Buffy left the room to see what was going on . . .

  * * *

  . . . leaving Spike with his double, who leaned against the wall, smirking at him.

  He walked toward Spike, who was still tied in the chair, and said, “Well, we’ve got ourselves a problem.”

  * * *

  Anya and Xander looked to be beating the truth out of Andrew, which was fine with Buffy; She started to go back into her own when she overheard Spike from behind the closed door. It sounded as if he was talking to someone.

  And . . . singing?

  She opened the door and entered the room, warily looking around.

  She eyed Spike, who seemed to have calmed down quite a bit.

  “Who were you talking to?” she asked him.

  “Nobody. I was just keeping myself company,” he said steadily.

  He was so different from the unhappy mess she’d left less than a minute before . . . composed, at ease.

  “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  “Fine,” he rejoined, as if the answer should be obvious. “Feeling a bit peckish, I suppose.” He looked over at the bags of pig blood on the night table by the bed. “Do you mind?”

  Buffy kept her eye on him, her spider-sense tingling. The abrupt change in his mood was startling. Something was up with him.

  She turned her head for just a second when she went to get the pig’s blood . . . and that was when he vamped out again.

  He roared with vampiric fury, breaking the chair arms in his struggle to free himself. He stood; Buffy dashed at him, ready to fight, but he pushed her down and turned on his heel, racing in the other direction.

  Where, in Dawn’s room, Andrew was against the wall, spilling his guts.

  “We needed more blood to activate the seal of Danthaza—”

  A hand broke through the wall behind Andrew, just like in Night of the Living Dead. Another hand grabbed his chest. Screaming, Andrew was yanked through the wall, breaking the plaster, and into the next room.

  He was in Spike’s clutches; the raging vampire pushed his head to one side, and chomped into him.

  Buffy threw Spike off Andrew and threw him against the wall. Spike gazed up at her, mouth dripped, his face a contortion of confusion and misery . . .

  . . . as he gazed at his double, standing behind the Slayer, looking very disappointed in him.

  Buffy kicked Spike in the face, knocking him unconscious.

  * * *

  While he was out, Buffy and Xander dragged him into the basement and chained him to the wall. Then Buffy met with the others in the living room, trying to understand why he had changed so much.

  “Spike and I were having a conversation, and he was fine. I mean, you know, fine as Spike can be. And then I went to check on you guys, and when I got back it was like he was a completely different person.”

  “Different like ‘William the Bloody’ type different?”

  “He was talking to someone,” Buffy remembered. “And then he started singing. He mentioned something about a song in the cellar. And he changed there, too. I mean, instantly became another person.”

  Xander got it.

  “Trigger,” he announced. “It’s a brainwashing term. It’s how the military makes sleeper agents. They brainwash operatives and condition them with a specific trigger, like a song, that makes ’em drastically change at a moment’s notice.”

  “Is this left over from your days in the army?” Willow asked him.

  Xander favored her with one of his patented self-deprecating looks. “No, this is left over from every Army movie I’ve ever seen. But it makes sense. We’ve had ghosts or something haunting us, right? Well, what if Spike’s ghosts have figured out a way to control him?”

  “Spike said he’s been seeing things since I found him in the basement,” Buffy put in.

  “So he gets his soul back, he starts seeing spooky things, and he goes extra-extra crazy.”

  It was making sense to the Slayer. “This trigger. How do we make it stop?”

  Xander was not as much help there. “Well, usually the operative completes his task and either blows his head off or steals a submarine.”

  “All right,” Buffy said to the group. “If Spike’s a bomb, then I need to know how to diffuse him.” To Dawn and Willow, she added, “I want to know what did this to him. Spirits, ghosts, demons—check the lot of them. Look for anything that could haunt or possibly control like this. I need to know exactly what we’re dealing with.”

  * * *

  Principal Wood was finished with his day job. He had threatened two boys with a visit from the police if they didn’t repair their vandalism; he had attended innumerable meetings; he had filed out piles of paperwork.

  It was time to go . . . to the basement.

  There was a dead boy sprawled over an elaborate disc.

  Robin Wood stared at him impassively.

  Then he got a shovel, loaded the body in his car, and drove it to a quarry.

  Within a few minutes, he had put the boy’s body into a hole and began to shovel gravel over it.

  It was a shallow grave for a useless victim, dug by a man who seemed not at all surprised to be doing so.

  * * *

  Powerless. In pain.

  Spike lay inert on the basement floor, his hands and feet chained to the wall. The shadows shifted as Buffy walked across the floor with a bowl of water and a towel in her hands, giving Spike the illusion of movement.

  She knelt and tenderly dabbed the blood off his face, and he opened his eyes. Weakly, fearfully, he asked, “Did I hurt anybody?”

  “You took a good bite out of Andrew,” she told him. “Tucker’s brother. He’ll be okay.”

  “I don’t remember,” Spike said. He sounded weary and defeated.

  “It’s okay.” She knew she sounded the same, as she rose and walked to the sink.

  “Buffy, I don’t know why.”

  “We think we do. Something’s playing you. Some ghost or demon has figured out how to control you. Got the gang researching it now. Xander has this theory that you’re being triggered.”

  Spike pulled himself to a sitting position and said, “Kill me.”

  She faced him. “You don’t understand. When I left the room earlier, I heard you talking to someone.”

  He ignored her. “Do you have any idea what I’m capable of?”

  “I was in the cellar with you,” she reminded him. “I saw what you did.”

  “I’m not talking about the cellar,” Spike insisted. “The people in the cellar got off easy. I’m talking about me. Buffy, you have never met the real me.”

  She crossed her arms and raised her chin. “Believe me, I’m well aware of what you’re capable of.”

  “No. You got off easy, too.” He rose, and his face hardened with purpose, with self-loathing. “Do you know how much blood you can drink from a girl before she’ll die? I do.” He swallowed, determined to go on. “You see, the trick is to drink enough so that they’ll still cry when you . . .” He began to lose his composure, but he held on. “ ’Cause it’s not worth it if they don’t cry.”

  Buffy refused to rise to his bait, refused to react. But inside, she was thinking of another vampire who had hoped to make her hate him by revealing his atrocities—Angel, who had boasted about eating his entire family “with a song in my heart.” Angel, whose life had centered around penance, and need . . . and the realization that he could never, ever pay enough for the awful things he’d done.

  “It’s not your fault. You’re not the one doing this,” she said, but her voice was strained.

  “I already did it,” he reminded her. “It’s already done.”
He paced, an animal in misery, then stepped toward her. “You want to know what I’ve done to girls Dawn’s age?” He saw her glance tick away, saw that he’d gotten to her.

  “This is me, Buffy. You’ve got to kill me before I get out.”

  She knit her forehead at that, frightened. “We can keep you locked up. We’ll figure out—”

  “Have you ever really asked yourself why you can’t do it?” he asked.

  She raised her chin. “You fought by my side. You’ve saved lives. You’ve helped—”

  He rolled his eyes and cut her off. “Don’t rationalize this into some noble act “

  He paced back and forth, light to shadow, and then the darkness swallowed him as he said, “You like people like me who hurt you.”

  “No.” Her eyes were wide to prove the truth of her assertion.

  “You need the pain we cause you. You need the hate. You need it to do your job. To be the Slayer.”

  “No,” she said firmly, her voice rising. “You think you have insight now because your soul’s drenched in blood? You don’t know me. You don’t even know you. Was that you who killed those people in the cellar? Was that you who waited for those girls?”

  “There’s no one else . . .” Spike began.

  “That’s not true,” she said firmly. She took a moment, and then she said, “Listen to me. You’re not alive because of pain. Or hate. You’re alive because I saw you change. I saw your penance.”

  He lunged violently at her, but the chains held him back. “Window dressing,” he scoffed.

  “It would be easier, wouldn’t it? If it were an act? But it’s not.” She came up to him, her face filled with emotion.

  “You faced the monster inside of you and you fought back. You risked everything to be a better man.”

  “Buffy,” he moaned.

  She got close, in her heart, in her spirit, as she said, “And you can be. You are. You may not see it, but I do. I believe in you, Spike.”

  His face radiated hope and amazement.

  Then at that moment, the lights flickered and went out. The glass in the basement door exploded inward, and a black-hooded figure burst into the room.

  He was carrying a staff and he smacked her across the face with it, sending her flying across the room.