The buzzing drone quickly crescendoed to a whining, furious pitch. “Uh-oh. My bad,” she said, her eyes flying open wide. Then, forcing herself back to full alertness, she realized something. “Hey . . . you—you understood me.”
One of the vamps dove for her face. She swatted it away and sent it spinning through the air. “Back off. I was trying to give you a chance.” More of the fluttering menaces appeared unexpectedly in the air beside her. “You think you’re tough because you brought all your friends?” she asked. “Well, so did I.”
The flitter critters did not back off. Instead, they swarmed around her, diving toward her exposed skin. And there was a lot of it. Willow heard a yell from the trees and bushes and knew her friends were on their way to help her. She shook her arms, dislodging several of the fairies, then grabbed one that had tangled itself in her hair and dashed it to the ground. Suddenly, Tara was there fighting alongside her, pulling the fanged marauders from her friend’s hair and neck.
Some of the creatures were difficult to dislodge and left a bleeding needle-sharp trail of red on Willow’s skin. “You’re hurt,” Tara said. She pulled out a toothpick and tried to jab at one of the little monsters, but it dodged out of the way.
Willow smacked one that was clinging to her cheek. “Just a scratch.” It fell to the ground and lay there stunned. Tara stomped on it for good measure. “Tell me it’s dead,” Willow said. “Is it dead?”
Tara had no chance to answer as they were dive-bombed by a flock of the incoming teensies.
* * *
Spike raced beside the Slayer into the thick of battle.
“Dawn, stay with Spike,” Buffy snapped. Then her eyes flashed toward Spike. “Keep her safe. Not a scratch on her.”
The vampire quickly readjusted his priorities from impressing the Slayer to protecting Dawn, the most vulnerable of the Scooby gang. He couldn’t keep her entirely from the battle. “Who do you think I am, Mary bloody Poppins?” he objected, but only for show. He knew he would protect Dawn no matter what it cost him. So did Buffy. “Come on,” he said, grabbing Dawn’s arm and pulling her to the edge of the fray.
Dawn yanked her arm away from him. “I don’t need a baby-sitter.”
“Course not, Nibblet,” he agreed. “We’re partners. You get my back, I get yours.” He pulled a cigarette and lighter from his pocket, lit the cigarette, and handed the lighter to her. “Take this. Anyone comes near you, you fry ’em with that.” He adjusted the lighter’s flame control to high and held up a warning finger. “But I’ll be behind you, so mind the hair and the jacket.” He took a puff of the cigarette. Leaving it in his mouth, he got out two toothpicks, one for each hand. “Start at the outside. Pick off any stragglers, then we work our way toward center.”
Dawn giggled. Spike glanced down at the toothpicks he held at the ready and realized how ridiculous he must look. “Bloody flying vermin,” he said. “Can’t even fight ’em without looking like some sort of poofter.”
One of the glowing creatures flickered in front of him, and Spike lashed out with lightning fast reflexes and accuracy heightened by his anger. The light winked out and a puff of ash showered down on Spike and Dawn.
“Eew,” said Dawn. “Come on, let’s do it again.”
* * *
A cluster of fairy vamps headed straight for Xander and Anya to head them off before they reached Willow. Xander lashed out at them with his toothpick-armed hands. They nimbly flew out of reach, then circled back to attack from behind. Anya punched one of them before it could bite the back of Xander’s neck, where it was aiming for the hairline. “Go away!” Anya yelled. “If you hurt my boyfriend, I will hunt down every one of you flying shrimps.”
Xander tried again with the toothpicks, but with no better result than the first time. The winged creatures were simply too fast. “All right then,” he said, his face taking on a dangerous look. “Time to meet the Sunnydale welcoming committee.” He flat-handed two of them, then pulled out the bottle of holy water that Buffy had given him.
Anya clapped her hands together, narrowly missed one fairy, then another. With the third smack of her palms she caught a minivamp. Its wings stopped fluttering instantly and it tumbled to the ground to lie motionless. “Welcome to Sunnydale. Now please leave,” she said.
Xander unstoppered the sports bottle. A quartet of fanged creatures zoomed toward him and he squirted a stream of liquid into the air.
“No!” Anya said.
Xander’s hand jerked and the stream went wide. “No? No what? Are you all right?” He looked at Anya, who stood mesmerized staring at a fairy vamp who shed a bright golden glow just inches from Anya’s forehead.
“It’s you. I remember,” she said. Xander put a hand on Anya’s arm as she spoke. “Mabyana. The queen of the fairy troop.”
She seemed unable to move, and Xander felt a jab of alarm. “Ahn, snap out of it. Don’t stare at them.”
The fairy’s wings made a sound like a diamondback rattling. Xander pulled Anya back and aimed a squirt of holy water at the flying creature. With a flutter of its wings, it moved out of reach and seemed to buzz some sort of alarm. A dozen fairy vamps appeared as if from nowhere. Anya, no longer in a daze, swept her arms wide and brought them together again with a mighty smack of her hands. One fairy fluttered away with a broken wing. Xander opened fire with the holy water.
Most of the fairies flew clear of the water hazard, but the stream caught one of them full in the chest. For a moment it hung there with a sickening sizzle, and then burst into a ball of ash. “Kind of… gives a whole new meaning to the term fairy dust,” Xander observed. He held the bottle high in front of them. “All right, who’s next? Ring-around-the-rosy time.”
One of the fairies Anya had stunned earlier shook itself and stood up on the ground. She stomped on it and it collapsed again. Suddenly, ten fairies had hold of Anya. One of them grabbed her ponytail. Five others attached themselves to various parts of her jacket and four grasped her pants legs. With a mighty heave, they lurched upward and Anya felt her feet leave the ground. “Xander!” she yelled, kicking her legs and jerking her arms, trying to pull free.
The fairies did not let go, but they could not seem to pull her more than a few inches off the ground. Another handful of fairy vamps approached from all directions.
“Hands off my girlfriend, microfreaks.” Xander, knowing they could not hold his weight as well, threw himself at Anya in a flying tackle.
They fell to the ground, bursting the bottle of holy water beneath them as they fell. Tiny glowing vamps scattered in all directions.
A hissing, sizzling sound from beneath Anya told them that the spilled holy water had dispatched at least two more of the winged monsters.
Xander sucked in deep breaths of air. “Holy holy water, Batman. That was a close one.”
* * *
Flipping end over end, Buffy made every part of her body a weapon. Her feet kicked small glowing balls high into the air. “Have patience with me.” Buffy’s voice dripped mock sincerity. “I’m new to little guys.” Her hands alternately slapped, flicked, smashed, or punched. “So I’m just winging it.”
Giles stood nearby with a cross in one hand and a toothpick stake in the other. “Excellent agility training, I must say. You’re really becoming quite accurate.”
Buffy tucked and rolled beneath a trio of incoming fairies, then kicked up out of the roll, sending her enemies flying. Another one came at her and she whacked it hard with an elbow. It froze stunned in the air, and she smacked it to the ground with the flat of her palm. “If I’m so good,” she panted, “how come there aren’t any fewer of them than when we started?”
Giles blinked in surprise, then glanced around them. “Few—? I daresay there are more now than when we began.”
Buffy drove back two more enemies with a pair of well-aimed punches. “I hope you don’t mean they’re multiplying,” she said.
“Indeed not,” Giles said, bringing his foot down on one of the fairies that
had landed on the ground in front of him. “Merely that there may be more than we had originally anticipated.” Holding the cross at head level, he knelt and examined the fairy he had stepped on. When it didn’t move, he jabbed it with the toothpick for good measure and it poofed into a pile of dust.
Several fairies dove in toward Buffy in a V formation. She let loose with a flurry of kicks and punches. One of the fairies got past her guard and landed on Buffy’s face. She hit the undeadette hard enough to stun it, and whacked her cheek in the process. Pain detonated in her jaw like a dental landmine going off. The vamp fell to the ground, but another dive-bombed the Slayer at eye level. Instinctively Buffy jerked away, still reeling from the pain, and lost her balance. A tree root caught her foot. She went down. Fresh agony drilled from her tooth straight up through her brain.
Giles fought his way over to Buffy and helped her up just as half a dozen fairies converged on their location. Shaking off the pain, Buffy stunned two, and the rest flew away to a distance to regroup. “Hate to be picky, but you’re out of here.” Overtaken with a need to be thorough, Buffy dusted the duo of stunned vamps with a toothpick stake from her pocket.
Spike and Dawn battled a cluster of minis with flame and stakes. One of them landed on Spike’s leather duster, and he slapped a hand over it, trapping the creature. He squeezed and felt the thing wriggle and bite. Thinking quickly, Spike pinned the fairy in place with his thumb, then opened his hand and jabbed a toothpick through the microvamp’s stomach and his own hand, effectively immobilizing his opponent and drawing blood from his palm. The tiny vamp began to lick at Spike’s wound. In disgust, Spike flicked it in the head a few times to knock it unconscious.
“Some help over here,” Xander called.
“Oh, dear,” Giles said, hearing Xander’s yell. More fairyvamps zoomed toward them. “Perhaps we should rethink our strategies.”
Buffy ran to help and arrived just as Xander and Anya dove away from some attacking fairies and tumbled to the ground. She pulled her friends back to their feet.
Several groups of microvamps veered away from their intended targets.
“But look,” Willow said. “We’ve got them on the run.”
“Do we leave it as a rout?” Xander asked. “Or do we pursue and exterminate?”
At least three dozen of the glowing tinks were fleeing toward the bushes. “No time like the present,” Buffy said.
Giles closed ranks with Spike and Dawn while Buffy, Xander, Anya, Tara, and Willow followed the fairies into a thicket of bushes. Dawn made a move to go after them, but Giles put a hand on her arm.
“We’ll fight another day, Little Bit,” Spike said, holding up his fisted right hand. “We’ve got what we need here.”
Excitement showed in Dawn’s eyes. “Buffy’s going to be so surprised.” The bushes shuddered and sounds of a scuffle drifted back to them. “Uh, oh,” Dawn said when moments later the five Scooby defenders ran back out of the bushes pursued by at least a hundred twinkling lights.
Giles drew in a sharp breath. “Perhaps we should—”
“Run,” Spike said.
The Slayerettes reunited as they ran en masse through Weatherly Park. “Willow, how’s that teleportation spell you were practicing?” Buffy said.
“Yeah,” Xander said. “Now’s the time, if any, Will.”
Tara panted. “It’s all right. I’ll help.”
Without pausing, Willow lifted a hand overhead and gasped out the words of an incantation as she ran.
Tara kept one hand on Willow’s shoulder and spoke the spell along with her, adding strength to her friend’s power. An invisible ripple seemed to bounce from Willow’s upstretched hand, and the creatures retreated ten feet as if from an electrical shock. Then, with an ominous angry buzz, all of the lights swirled up from the field of battle and winked out.
The gang kept running headlong out of the park.
“Wait.” Willow stumbled to a halt, pressing her hands to her head. “And… ow.”
“What’s wrong?” Tara asked, looking worried. Willow groaned.
“What’d you put in that spell, Will, essence of hangover?” Xander asked, putting a steadying hand on her shoulder.
The rest of the gang stopped as well and turned back to help. Tara threw an arm around Willow’s waist. “It was a pretty strong spell. I think she just overdid it.”
“Get her to the car,” Giles said.
“Which is where, exactly?” Xander glanced up and down the street.
Giles tilted his head to the left. “About a block that way.”
“Then we’d better move before those microcreeps come back with reinforcements,” Xander said. “I mean, game over, man. They kicked our butts.”
“You okay?” Buffy asked, looking at Willow.
Willow nodded. “I just need to rest. No big.” Her knees collapsed under her and Tara lost her balance. Buffy grabbed Willow’s arm, pulled her up, and put the arm over her shoulder so that Tara supported Willow from one side and Buffy from the other.
“No big, huh?” she said wryly. “I’d have to disagree with you there. That was our problem tonight. I don’t think any of us were thinking small enough.”
Giles had left the top to his convertible down, and when they got there, the friends quickly loaded the drooping Willow into it. Giles sped off with most of the girls in the car, leaving Xander, Spike, and Anya—who insisted on staying with the Xander—to walk warily back to the Summers house.
Spike, his right hand still clenched into a fist, carefully, guarded his winged prisoner.
Chapter Seventeen
Dawn leaned down to the sofa and handed two aspirin and a glass of water to Tara, who was sitting with Willow’s head in her lap. “Thank you,” Tara said. She helped Willow sit up just enough to take the tablets with a sip of water and eased her back down again.
Willow put a hand to her forehead. “Good thing I didn’t waste that mini-teleportation spell on a bunch of dumb ants.”
Tara stroked her friend’s hair, wisely saying nothing.
“But we’re glad you used it when you did,” Dawn said.
Spike wandered into the room, his right hand loosely cupped, and sat in the stuffed chair at the end of the sofa. “Seems to have taken a lot out of you, Red. Afraid if you’d tried that in the middle of the fight you might’ve ended up as midnight munchies for our fine feathered fiends.”
“There weren’t any feathers,” Dawn said. “I thought the wings were more—”
Spike gave her a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding look.
She stopped and held up an index finger. “Okay. Literary license. I get that.”
“Where is everyone else?” Tara asked.
Anya entered from the dining room. “Mr. Giles is in the kitchen, and Xander took a breadboard, some large deli toothpicks, glue, and a diminutive drill into the basement. He said something about building a better mousetrap.” She lowered her voice confidentially and sat cross-legged on the floor. “I don’t know why we’re interested in mice, but he’s very sexy when he’s working on a project.”
Spike snorted.
“Buffy is upstairs in the bathroom,” Dawn said. “She’s been in there ever since we got home, running water in the sink and making weird gargly sounds.” Her brows drew together. “Is it just me, or does something seem seriously wrong with my sister? Did you see when Buffy hurt herself during the fight and hit the ground? I couldn’t believe it. I mean, Giles had to go help her up. I really think she’s off her game.”
“Maybe she’s just worried about the fairies,” Tara said.
“It’s not that,” Spike offered. “Goldie’s got a gimp tooth.”
“Bad,” Willow muttered, trying to sit up. “That’s bad. Isn’t that bad? She needs to do something about it.”
Tara put a soothing hand on her head. “Shhhh.”
“Doesn’t know what to do. Bad tooth, no insurance.” Spike shook his head. “Just trying to tough it out.”
“Then obviously
she should pay the dentist,” Anya said as if the answer were obvious. “Dentists accept cash payments, don’t they?”
Dawn looked down at the floor. “We, uh, don’t really have much in the way of money. Mom didn’t have a dental plan. She had life insurance, but the company said it could be two more months before they send the check. I don’t understand it all.”
“But,” Tara stammered, “Buffy can’t just let her tooth rot. Can she?”
“Do you think it might just get better on its own?” Dawn asked.
“Not likely,” Spike said. “I think Big Sis has already tried everything she knows how, and it’s gone from bad to worse.”
Dawn looked over at Willow and Tara. “Do you know a spell maybe? Anything that could help?”
Willow sat up. “I think I know something.”
“Honey, no,” Tara said, trying to get her friend to lie back down again.
Willow gave her a wan smile. “Don’t worry, there’s no magick involved. Strictly unmagickal. Help for the hurtiness in Buffy’s tooth.”
“She’s bloody stubborn,” Spike said.
Dawn looked at him, her eyes widening in alarm. “Blood? Spike, I forgot. Your hand.”
Spike gave her a sheepish look. “I was kind of waiting to show the Slayer.”
“Show me what?” Buffy asked, coming down the stairs.
Spike held his right hand at chest level in front of himself and opened it slowly with his palm face up. Buffy’s eyes went wide. “Oh . . . my . . . God! Spike, are you crazy?”
Spike looked nonplussed. “I knocked him out. He kept biting, so I had to, didn’t I?”
Xander came up from the basement. “Buffy, do you have any bigger drill bits?” He stopped and stared at the vamp’s hand. “You’ve had that stuck to you ever since we left the park?” Xander shook his head. “Of all the times I wished I could see Spike get spiked, this is not how I imagined it.”
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