Chapter 2
“Buffy, are you sure it’s Spike?” Willow asked.
“It’s Spike! Do you think I wouldn’t know?”
“But...”
“For Pete’s sake, Will, you can’t have a man on top of you for three months and not know every detail of his face!”
Willow blushed.
“Sorry!” Buffy flushed herself. “But you know what I mean. Wouldn’t you know Tara that well? For instance, how her mouth moved or if her lashes were curved instead of straight or how she looked when she woke up.”
“Yeah, I would.”
“Not that I would know how Spike looks when he wakes up,” she muttered. “I never slept with him, always kicked him in the head and ran off after...uh, TMI.”
“Definitely TMI,” agreed Willow, even pinker.
Just that first morning after and she hadn’t really looked at him then, just jerked to her feet, horrified by having slept with him at all. Now she wished she had looked. She was hungry for everything she had so deliberately avoided seeing and now missed.
“Anyway. The Colosseo district’s mine for a while, okay? Tell the others to stay out of it. But don’t tell Xander or anyone else why. Not until we know what’s going on.”
“Okay. We don’t really know if it’s Spike. The whole thing could be a...” Willow broke off awkwardly.
“A hallucination? God! Maybe I am going round the bend, Will!”
From the uneasy way Willow was looking at her, Willow was wondering just that. Three days later, Buffy was starting to wonder as well. Patrolling the area had turned up nothing but two perfectly ordinary vamps whom Buffy had dusted without the least effort at all. Maybe she really had dreamed the whole thing.
“I need more sleep,” yawned Buffy. Between spending the whole night stalking the Colosseo district and the day training SITs, she was exhausted. “At least it’s the weekend. I’ll be able to grab a few zees before going out on patrol.”
She hadn’t gone to bed yet. She and Willow and Xander had decided to do the touristy thing and spend the morning at the Piazza Navona with its free show of mimes and artists and musicians and its three famous fountains. She had gone straight from patrol to meet them there, but they had all decided to come back to her apartment for lunch rather than shell out at the very pricey restaurants at the piazza.
“What’s the deal with patrol, Buff?” Xander asked. “Is there some new threat you haven’t been telling us about? You don’t usually spend the whole night...Merciful Zeus!”
Buffy and Willow looked where he was staring, then came to an abrupt stop themselves. A man had stepped out of Buffy’s small apartment building and was strolling away down the street.
“That...that’s Spike!” gasped Xander.
“It can’t be Spike!” Willow exclaimed. “If it was, he’d be burning up by now!”
All three of them involuntarily looked upwards. It was high noon and the sun was blazing directly down upon them. There was no protection from it anywhere on the street. Spike’s double was strolling along in full sunlight.
“A doppelgänger? He’s not a vamp, that’s for sure. Hey, Spike!” Xander bellowed, loud enough that the guy must have heard. But he didn’t look around or even break his stride, as if the name meant nothing to him and he thought someone else was being hailed.
“Come on!” snapped Buffy and they all three ran after him.
“It’s someone else,” Willow was saying as they ran. “He’s wearing the wrong clothes and where’s the duster? Besides, look at his hair!”
The hair was definitely a tumble of light honey-brown curls instead of slicked-back bleached-white and though he was wearing a black tee with a gold chain around his neck, it was paired with white slacks and sneakers—not even Docs—and the duster was nowhere in sight. But the face was Spike’s face.
“Could he be the guy you saw that night?” Willow asked Buffy under her breath.
“But that one was a vamp!”
“Maybe he wasn’t. Are you sure about that vamp vibe?”
“I’m not sure about anything anymore. He looks like Spike, but...”
Willow nodded, knowing what she meant. “Yeah.”
He looked like Spike, but he didn’t carry himself the same way. His walk was a calm stroll, not Spike’s cocky swagger; and his expression was quiet and reserved. He looked the studious type, an introvert rather than an extrovert.
He was heading towards a café just down the street, one which Buffy and the rest of them often frequented. They exchanged glances as he sat down at one of the outside tables, then ran to grab the one next to him before anyone else could do so.
“Giorgio, the usual,” called Xander.
The waiter coming towards them nodded, then stopped beside Spike’s double who ordered in fluent Italian.
“Did Spike speak...?” Willow murmured and Buffy shook her head.
“Not that I know of.”
The waiter went off and Xander suddenly leaned forward and tapped the double’s arm. He looked around in surprise, his brows rising.
“Hey, Spike!” said Xander in a hearty voice. “Good to see you!”
“I’m afraid you’ve made some sort of mistake.” The voice was familiar and it was Spike’s. But it didn’t have that North London accent Spike liked to use. Instead the intonation and phrasing was similar to Giles’. Received Pronunciation, Giles had called it once, whatever that meant. Oxford English, someone else had named it. Which meant it was very likely the actual accent of the poet and gentleman Spike had been before he was turned.
“You’re British, aren’t you?” Xander plowed on.
“Quite.” There was a dry edge to the one syllable and a sardonic look in the blue eyes that scanned Xander disdainfully from head to foot. Again Buffy was reminded of Giles at his most high horse. “And you’re American, aren’t you?”
And therefore expected to be both crazy and boorish, said the voice without actually coming out and saying it; it was just in the intonation.
Willow blushed. “We’re sorry! We didn’t mean...It’s just that you look like someone we know.”
Her confusion made the blue gaze warm. He took in the fact that she was a very pretty redhead and promptly lost the wariness that came from being accosted by perfect strangers.
“Sorry I’m not him.” He smiled at Willow. “Spike, did you say? That’s a strange name.”
“He’s a strange guy,” muttered Xander.
“You look exactly like him,” explained Willow. “You must think we’re all nuts.”
“No, no,” he said politely, but the guarded glance said he did.
“We’re being rude,” said Willow hurriedly. “I’m Willow and that’s Xander...”
“Xander?” Another strange name, said the glance.
“It’s short for Alexander.”
“Ah!”
“And that’s Buffy.”
The glance suddenly developed definite interest as it settled on Buffy. “Buffy?”
“Short for Elizabeth,” said Buffy a little ruefully, all too used to people’s reactions to her name. “Elizabeth Summers.”
“Unusual. And charming.” His face had relaxed and was now looking as if he was more than willing to be friendly. Especially to Buffy. “I’m William. William Knight.”
“William,” said Xander in a choked voice.
“Most people call me Will.”
“That’s what they call me too,” said Willow to cover everyone’s stupefied reaction.
“Well, then we’d better leave it as Willow and William. Otherwise we won’t know which one of us should answer if someone says Will.”
Very much like Giles, thought Buffy, in the awkwardness and the faint formality. No smooth talker, this one, diffident and lacking Spike’s easy confidence.
“William the Bloody?” Xander said under his breath in her ear.
“Shut up. He’ll hear. He already thinks we’re crazy,” she muttered back, glad that Giorgio’s setting down their orders was distracting William’s attention.
“What the hell’s going on?”
“Good question.”
“Why don’t you join us?” Willow was saying to William.
“I’d be delighted,” said William, his gaze on Buffy, and transferred over to a chair next to her at their table. “So you’re tourists.”
Xander groaned. “Is it so obvious?”
“You’re drinking cappuccinos after eleven.” His was a plain espresso. “Romans usually drink that only for breakfast.” He smiled a little. “Actually that’s a bit of a joke, because I have seen them drinking it later than that. I think that ‘after eleven’ business is just people being snobbish. But it does tend to be the tourists.”
“You’re not a tourist?” asked Xander.
“I lecture at St. Mark’s. It’s a university about ten blocks that way. Associated with the American University in Rome. A great way to see Italy and Greece and get paid for it.”
“You’re a scholar,” said Willow. “Oxford trained?”
He nodded, a little uneasy under the intensity of their concentration on him.
“What do you teach?” asked Willow, feeling her way.
“Classical Studies and Classical Heritage. In this case, Classical Greek and Roman rhetoric. And Magna Graecia.” He noticed that Willow was nodding, but that Buffy and Xander were looking blank. “Uh, that last one’s about conflicting regimes in the ancient Mediterranean.”
“Are you a poet?” Buffy asked suddenly and the other two shot her quick glances, knowing what she was after.
William flushed a little. “How did you guess that? I dabble a bit. What about you lot?” he asked hurriedly, clearly trying to change the subject. “Are you tourists?”
“I guess you could say Xander and I are,” Willow said. “We won’t be in Rome too much longer. But Buffy’s going to be living here.”
“Oh?” He gave Buffy a pleased glance.
“Yeah, that’s why we noticed you,” explained Xander. “You came out of the apartment building she lives in.”
“Yes, I just rented a studio flat on the fourth floor.” William smiled at Buffy. “We’ll be neighbors.”
Buffy smiled back weakly. “I’m on the third.”
“So, student, worker, lady of leisure?”
Willow and Buffy exchanged glances. It was fine to be the ones asking the questions, but they weren’t sure how much to tell him of them.
“I guess you can say she teaches too,” said Willow vaguely.
“You’re rather young for that, aren’t you? You can’t be more than twenty-two. What’s your field?”
“Martial arts,” said Buffy hurriedly.
“Really?” William looked at once impressed and taken aback. He opened his mouth to say something else, then turned his head at the sound of Willow muttering something rapidly over a coin she had taken from the back pocket of her jeans. “What...?”
“I bought this at the Piazza Navona,” she said and handed it to him. “It’s supposed to be a copy of an Augustian denarius. If you’re into Classical Studies, you must know about things like that. How good a copy is it?”
“It’s...” He froze into stillness, his gaze fixed on the coin.
“Whoa!” Xander exclaimed. “What did you do to him, Will?”
“It’s a kind of hypnosis. Good thing I had that denarius in my pocket to act as a focus.”
“But why?”
“Because I need to do an analysis of him and I couldn’t figure out any other way to get him to sit still for it. You didn’t want him to know what we’re into, did you?”
“No way,” said Buffy. “And we do need to do that analysis. Who is he? What is he? He seems just an ordinary guy. Perfectly innocent. He’s no vamp.”
“Since he’s sitting in the sun, Buff,” said Xander dryly, “I guessed that a while back.”
“Well, he could have had something like the Gem of Amara.”
They all glanced at William’s hands, but they were bare of rings and the chain he was wearing around his neck was plain gold and didn’t look as if it were any kind of magical artefact.
Willow reached out and touched it anyway just to make sure, then shook her head.
“No magic about him.” She brushed William’s forearm, bare under the short sleeve of his tee. “He’s not a vamp. He’s warm. A vamp would be about thirty degrees cooler than us. His body temperature’s the normal 98.6.”
Buffy laid a hand lightly on his chest. “And he has a heartbeat. He’s human.”
Willow had her eyes closed in concentration, doing some quiet, hidden scan that was not visible to either Buffy or Xander or thankfully people at neighboring tables.
“He is human,” she confirmed after a while. “I can’t pick up any abnormalities.”
“Does he have a soul?” Xander asked sharply.
Willow whispered a few words under her breath. The coin in William’s hand suddenly flared a brilliant green, then went back to bronze.
“He does have a soul.”
“Well, at least they didn’t take that from him after everything he went through for it,” Buffy muttered.
“Buffy, it’s not Spike!” Xander snapped.
“No, he’s not. But he’s William, isn’t he?”
They all stared at each other.
“It could be a double,” Xander muttered. “Everyone’s supposed to have a double, don’t they? Somewhere in the world?”
“Calling himself William? Being a Classics scholar? Writing poetry?” Willow sighed. “That’s kinda pushing coincidence a little too far, Xand.”
“This is too weird.” Xander shook his head blankly.
“The differences are interesting,” said Willow. “Suggestive, even. Look, he doesn’t have that scar across his eyebrow.”
Xander twisted around Buffy to check William’s left eyebrow. “You’re right. I think I see what you’re getting at, Will. He isn’t even William the Bloody. It’s as if he’s the guy he must have been before he was turned.”
“They’ve given that back to him,” Buffy murmured. “They’ve taken away the turning and the guilt. Made all those deaths not happen, at least for him. Maybe it’s a reward for his sacrifice in the Hellmouth.”
Xander rubbed a hand across his face. “They who?”
“Maybe the Powers That Be, Xand,” said Willow. “Who understands the way they think? Hey, you know what? He’s Shanshued!”
“Yeesh! You may be right, Will!” Xander gave a sudden snort of laughter. “Angel’s gonna have a cow!”
Willow couldn’t help laughing too at the thought of how Angel would react to this turn of events. But Buffy was thinking of the Shanshu. To become human, that meant. This wasn’t Spike. This was Spike as he had been before he became a vampire. This was Spike human. He had been given a second chance.
She looked at him. The hair was different and the clothes. But everything else about him was dearly familiar. His features and the blue of his eyes and the very scent of him. There she had been thinking that if Angel had shanshued, they might have been happy. And here was Spike shanshued. Spike whom she loved. Maybe they had both been given a second chance.
But she had to go carefully. Couldn’t rush things. There would be no third chances. She had to do things right, couldn’t screw this up.
“You’d better bring him out of it, Willow,” she said. “People might start to notice if he’s frozen like that much longer.”
“Shall I make him forget about all this?”
“No. We’ll be running into each other if he’s living in the same building and that might make things complicated.”
“That’s true. Just a tiny jump in time for him then. What do you think, William?” she said, picking up the conversation where it had stopped. “How good a copy is it?”
William jumped and blinked. “What? Oh, sorry! I seem to have blanked there for a moment.” He rubbed a hand across his eyes. “It’s, um, it’s a surprisingly good copy for something you just picked up in the Piazza Navona. Most of what the street pedlars sell there is usually nothing more than tourist junk.”
“I got it from a jewelry store.”
“That explains it.” He looked up as Xander rose and went off to pay for their lunch. “Oh, are you leaving?”
“I work nights,” Buffy explained. “And I haven’t been to bed yet. I need to get some sleep.”
“I-I hope we’ll meet again sometime soon.”
“I’d like that.” She smiled at him. “My apartment’s 3D.”
His eyes lit up. “Mine’s 4A.”
“See you around,” she said lightly, certain of that. If he didn’t move on it, she would.
“That vamp you saw at the Colosseum,” Willow said when they reached Buffy’s building. “What if it wasn’t a vamp? What if it was him?”
“Maybe I was mistaken about the vamp vibe.” Even about the gameface. Maybe she had seen what she wanted to see. “Darn, I should have asked where he was that night. I will the next time I run into him. It must have been William, but I thought he was Spike, so I was expecting him be a vamp.”
“Vamp?” asked Xander who had been lagging behind. “What vamp?”
“Buffy saw a vamp she thought was Spike at the Colosseum a few days ago,” Willow explained. “But now we think it must have been William.”
“Had to be. Weird enough for him to come back like that. Can’t be two.” Xander shuddered. “God, what a thought! That really makes my brain spin out.”
Buffy laughed. She would have laughed at the lamest of jokes right now. She was feeling so hopeful after the misery of the last few months.
She slept really well for the first time in ages and almost didn’t go on patrol that night. But if she didn’t, no one else would do the Colosseo district tonight since it was marked as hers on the whiteboard at the College.
It was midnight before she finally got there and started to make her forays up and down the cross streets all around the Colosseum. For an hour nothing turned up and she was almost going to call it a night when she picked up the faint trace of vamp presence. She whirled and started to run it down.
The vamp seemed to be aware of her as well, because it ran too, whipping through the streets and staying just barely on the edge of her senses. But she was locked on it now and it couldn’t escape.
Then she was chasing it down the west side of the square around the Colosseum. It was darting in and out of the trees, but she finally got a clear view of it. Black leather duster, black jeans, Docs, white hair.
“Spike?” Buffy exclaimed in shock.
He stopped short and spun to face her.
“Why do you call me that?”
He was in full gameface, fangs flashing in the streetlights. And that was definitely a vamp vibe. Even though she wasn’t close enough yet to make out the vibe precisely, there was no mistaking that he was a vamp.
“You called me that before,” he said. “It felt right.”
“William?”
“No,” he said, aggrieved. “That’s not right. You don’t really know my name, do you? I just thought you did.”
“Spike,” she breathed.
He let out a sharp breath. “Yeah. That feels right. Yeah. Spike.”
She was almost close enough to read his signature. But he kept backing away, half wary, half teasing.
“No. Stop,” she said urgently.
“Not gonna let you dust me, Slayer.” He grinned at her. It was Spike’s grin, vivid with laughter and mockery. It was Spike’s stance, hands on hips, head tilted. “Fun’s in making you run around, innit? Fun’s in the chase. No fun in being dusted. You’d win then. Not gonna let you win.”
“This isn’t a game!”
“Sure it is. All you pretty little Slayers just panting for the kill. But doesn’t it get boring? Innit more fun when there’s risk involved? When the tables might be turned? Shall we dance, pet?”
Oh, God, it was Spike!
“What are you?” she whispered. William was human. Willow had confirmed that. This being in front of her was a vamp. “I’m going crazy. Who are you?”
“If you don’t know, who does? I sure don’t.” He laughed at her. “I’m me, pet. Who else would I be?”
“More games.”
“Why not?”
“Stand still!” He kept backing away every time she tried to reach him and she needed to be just that little bit closer for her senses to be sure of who he was.
“Not that dumb, Slayer.”
“Truce! For tonight.” She slid her stake into its sheath at the small of her back, held up her empty hands. “See? I won’t dust you.”
“Your word?”
“Yes. On my honor.”
He shrugged. “Whatever that’s worth. Okay. But why?”
“Because I need to know what I’m dealing with.”
“Suppose that makes sense. Only, you already know what you’re dealing with, cutie. A vamp. A demon. What else is there to know?”
“A lot.” She was almost in range now, coming carefully forward step by step, wary of setting him off again.
He moved, but not backwards. He flashed forward to stand right in front of her, only a couple of inches away.
“Be very disappointed in you if you dust me now, Slayer,” he said, laughing.
Reckless as always. And the vibe was his. Spike’s. That unmistakable vampire signature of his that she knew so well.
She put out a hand and laid it delicately on his chest. He looked down at it, amused. Solid muscle and bone under her palm. No hallucination, no phantom. Cool flesh under the soft cotton of his tee. Thirty degrees below the human 98.6. And no heartbeat. Definitely vamp, not human. But the scent of his body was oh so familiar.
“Drop the gameface. Please.”
He looked at her for a moment. She expected another ‘why?’ and didn’t know how she would answer it. But then he just shrugged. The gameface melted away.
And there was Spike’s human face. From the vivid blue of his eyes to the reckless grin to the scarred eyebrow. Feature by feature, the same. Even the hair was white at close range. It must have been a trick of the light that had made her think before that it was honey-brown like William’s.
“What game are you playing, Slayer?” he asked.
She raised her hand and brushed his left eyebrow. The scar was rough and real under her fingertips.
“I think someone’s playing games with both of us.”
“Oh, I don’t think so.” He smiled and fangs glinted at the corners of his mouth though his eyes were still blue. “I think this is just some variation you’ve thought up for the dance. It’s amusing, but it’s still the same game. The Great Game between Slayers and vamps.”
“Spike...”
“That’s me. Yeah. And you’re The Slayer, aren’t you? I can feel the difference. Those others, they’re nothing. Newbies. Knew they were a waste of time, waste of a kill. Pushed them. Knew they’d call in the big gun.” He smiled slowly and triumphantly. “You. You’re the one. The real challenge. The one the Master promised. You’re the one I’ve been looking for.”
“To kill for Rome’s Master.”
He nodded. “That was the price he put on the pax that lets me stay in the city.”
“So you’re one of his minions,” she said scornfully.
His brows flicked together, offended. “I’m no one’s minion! Free agent here. A pax doesn’t bind me to him, only gives me permission to stay in his territory. Your death is the price he put on it. He didn’t know I’d have done it anyway. You’re the kill I want, Slayer.”
It was the demon speaking to her, deadly and lethal. His hand flashed up and gripped her throat. His eyes had gone gold.
“Truce?” he purred. “There’s no truce possible between vamp and Slayer. How could you think that?”
She struck his hand away. It flashed back, fingers rigid and stiffened, a blade pointed straight at her throat. Meaning to crush her larynx if the thrust connected. She blocked it swiftly.
“Yes!” he said exultantly. “Let’s dance, Slayer!”
He’d gone into full gameface. His next blow sent her tumbling backwards ten feet across the grass and the cobblestones to thud painfully against the trunk of an olive tree. She recovered herself and got him with a spinkick as he came after her, knocking him back. Then they were at it, fast and furious, no holds barred.
He had never fought full out all the times they had battled before. He had always held back. She hadn’t realized it then, but she did now that there was no holding back. This time he meant to kill.
But she couldn’t bring herself to kill him, couldn’t even bring herself to snatch her stake out from its sheath in the small of her back. He was Spike. It was the demon, but he was still Spike. She couldn’t do it. All she could do was hold him off and that put her at a heavy disadvantage. Spike was as good a fighter as she, better really, with all those decades of making it an art form. Only her Slayer abilities had kept her ahead of him and only because she had meant to kill. This time she couldn’t.
They battled back and forth under the trees it felt like forever, neither able to get the upper hand, she trying for a standoff, he trying for a kill.
“Sod it, you’re not fighting, Slayer!” he snarled. He knew. He could feel the half-heartedness of her moves. “Fight!”
Whistles were blowing in the distance and there was the sound of thudding footsteps. Buffy caught a glimpse of two men in dark blue uniforms with a red stripe down the legs running towards them. Carabinieri. Some passerby must have seen them fighting even under the concealment of the trees and had called the cops. Spike spun, snarling.
“No!” she gasped, throwing herself between him and them.
“Is that what’s needed to make you fight, Slayer? For me to attack humans?”
“I won’t let you hurt them!”
“Why should I? Humans are too easy. They’re only cattle to be eaten,” he said contemptuously. “They’re not even prey. You’re prey, Slayer. And the dance is between you and me. But it looks like this one’s gonna have to be postponed. See you later, cutie.”
He flashed away and was lost in the shadows. Having no desire to spend hours explaining herself in an Italian police station, she ran as well, Slayer speed rapidly outdistancing two very bewildered cops.
She was bewildered too. There were two of them. Two Spikes. Xander would freak. Somehow they had split. William had shanshued and was human. This other seemed to be purely demon. The William part had been separated out and left this other behind. And yet this other was Spike too.
‘How’ was irrelevant. The PTB could presumably do anything they wanted. ‘Why’ was the question.
More importantly, what was she going to do about it?
TBC
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