Red Right Hand

by
Witling

Part Five

"What I'm saying is, there's absolutely no way they could have done it." He gauged, jumped, and got a nice breeze in the face for a couple of seconds. Whump. "It's impossible."

"Right, that's what they said about cold fusion."

"Cold fusion was impossible. Is. Still."

"That's what they want you to think, isn't it?"

Xander paused, put a hand out in midair, and closed his eyes. "Hang on. I'm overloading on what-the-fuck."

"I'm just saying, if Watts had lost an arm in a car wreck, the band could have gone on."

"And I'm still back at, 'Why the hell are we having this conversation?'"

"If some wanker from Sheffield with hair down his back and the rhythm of Thatcher could do it, so could Watts."

"Look, first of all, Leppard sucked after Hysteria. Actually, Leppard sucked before Hysteria too. So it doesn't matter. And since when do you know from cold fusion?"

"I'm dead, I'm not illiterate."

"Oh right, I've been meaning to ask where our book of the month gets sent--"

Spike looked sharply over Xander's shoulder, and Xander shut up. In the time it took him to turn around, he heard it too--a couple of bodies coming up the fire escape, quiet and fast. He stepped around behind Spike, faded back a couple of feet, and waited.

Two vamps hopped up onto the roof, a man and a woman, black and white. Matched set. Moving fast but not in a hurry, passing a cigarette back and forth. Looking sort of vinyl and Goth-y, which, after a few weeks of hauling the DeSoto from mechanic to mechanic in the cowtowns of Flyoverland, was pretty welcome. Lipstick, even. Crazy.

They made it a few feet across the roof before the man glanced up and saw Spike and Xander standing there. He shorted out right away, his eyes flipping over to yellow, the ridges starting to bubble up. Xander felt his own head lower and his shoulders rise, and Spike twitched a hand behind his back.

"Pleasant evening." One of the enduring surprises of the last couple of months had been that Spike could be polite. And sometimes was, when he thought he could get something out of it.

The man kept tweaking, easing into a low growl, and the skin at the back of Xander's neck started to tickle. The woman looked startled, but she got over it fast. Nodded and patted the guy's shoulder.

"Sure." She was looking them over, figuring them out. "You're going to Kyd's."

"Thought we might." Spike took out his cigarettes, shot one out of the pack, and lit up. "Used to be a pretty decent place, some nights."

The woman smiled. "It still is. We're off for some carry-out, but we might come back later." The smile widened; she had a stone of some kind in her canine. "Maybe we'll see you there."

"Maybe." Spike nodded, still being polite, and the woman tugged at her boyfriend's arm. He just stood there, bristling all over, making a sound like the DeSoto on a bad day.

"Come on, Willard." She turned another smile on them. "Don't mind him, he's all fucked up." She tugged again, and Willard didn't move. She smacked him in the back of the head, hard enough to make him stumble, and for a second he turned the growl on her. She raised an eyebrow. The growl choked off. "Yeah, no, I thought not."

Xander shifted slightly, and caught the hinky little tensing-up movement to Spike's shoulders. Along with the look the woman flicked back at him, just half a second long, plenty of time for a full assessment. Whoops.

"Won't keep you, then," Spike said smoothly, as if nothing had happened. She gave him another little smile, because apparently she had a whole trunk full of them, she was the smile lady, she had the local smile franchise. Willard didn't look too happy about that. Maybe he wasn't a customer.

"Maybe we'll bring you back something," she said. Purred. She was purring now. Xander shifted again, and Willard glanced back at him this time. For the briefest microsecond, Xander felt a kind of crazed, tenuous bond hang between them. The kind of bond you feel with a slavering demon whose girlfriend is hitting on your...dammit, he still didn't have that part figured out--your sire, okay, fine--right in front of you. Then Willard got jiggy with some fang, and the bond folded up into a dusty little whiff and died a good and proper death.

Spike gave a half-polite little shrug that clearly said, Up to you, and the woman lowered her eyelids and turned away.

"I'm Fawn," she said over her shoulder, starting for the far side of the roof. "You can tell them I sent you."

"Will do," Spike said. Willard made a sound that might have been the twinkle in the eye of the father of a growl, and Spike's head turned toward him. "Off you slope, now." He didn't bother to watch Willard's brain and ego tussle that one out; there were cigarettes to be lit. Brain won. By a hair.

When they were both gone, off down the opposite fire escape, Spike started walking again. The crunch of roof grit under his boots seemed very loud now. And frankly, if Fawn and Willard were representative of the clientele at this Kyd's place, Xander was pretty sure he'd rather stay home and watch Hammer films on late-night.

"So, okay." He started after Spike, wishing for the gajillionth time since he'd joined the choir invisible that he'd got a duster in the deal. It was just so damn cool. "They seemed like nice folks."

"Next time you start dancing around behind me like that, I'm going to toss you off the building."

"I shifted, Spike. I settled. It was, like, a millimeter."

"Good thing it didn't make her notice you."

"I was standing right there, it wasn't like she didn't see me anyway."

"Of course she bloody saw you, it's a matter of principle--"

"Oh yeah, I forgot there's principles to it now."

"Bloody right there are. None of which you seem to give a rat's arse about--"

"Which principle are you following when you call Angel a poof, exactly?"

"The point is, you can either be a useless wanker on a short leash like that Willard twat, or you can learn the job and do it right and--"

"'Maybe we'll see you there,'" Xander said, pitching his voice just south of Baffin Island. "'You can tell them I sent you.'"

"Shut up."

"'I'm Faaaaawn.'"

"You sound like a...what are those things?"

"A woman?"

"Blue, big eyes, got little chef hats on?"

"Last surviving members of the Donner Party?"

"Saturday morning telly."

"Smurfs."

"Right, yeah. You sound like a bloody Smurf, Harris."

"So what principle kicks in when she shoves her tongue down your throat? Do Willard and I go sit in the kitchen and talk Amway?"

"You're getting boring," Spike said, swinging off the ledge onto the fire escape. "If I'd known you were going to be this much of a pain I'd never have--"

"Turned me," Xander finished for him, following him down the shaking steps. "If I'd known you were going to be this much of an asshole, I'd have died."

Spike sort of laughed at that, and Xander smiled to himself. It was fun being a superhero, or a superantihero, or whatever he was now. It was fun leaping high buildings and swooping down on the unsuspecting, especially if he didn't think too hard about what happened after the swoop. But it was weird--he'd got used to all that pretty quickly, and now he found that pretty much all his attention went to what he was starting to think of as My Science Project: Spike. He spent way too much time thinking about Spike, about what Spike liked and didn't like, about what Spike might want in a few minutes or a few hours, about what Spike was saying and how he was saying it. Not paying attention, per se, because to be honest most of what Spike said still passed Xander by like a warm calypso breeze, but more just...dwelling. Increasingly neurotically, he was aware. On Spike.

He was starting to get this whole sire thing, the way it could mess with your brain. And he had a feeling Spike was starting to get the other side of it, too--the holy christ, I sired this idiot side. He got this look on his face sometimes, when he thought Xander wasn't watching. Sort of bemused and fond and at the same time kind of horrified. Like he couldn't quite believe what he'd done, or whatever Xander was doing at the moment.

"All I'm saying is," Xander said, hitting the pavement with another satisfying whump, "that I think she likes you. If you know what I mean."

Spike gave him the you idiot look. "'course she likes me."

"Right, of course. Because you're Alistair Crowley's gift to women, I forgot. And the coda to my statement was: if she does anything more than flash that carnie rock at you, I'm going to puke actuary hemo all over her shoes."

Spike frowned. "That guy was an actuary?"

"Said so in his wallet."

"Damn. Keep meaning to ask one of those about life expectancy tables."

Xander paused, considered the conversational detour and the lightless thicket into which it led, then shook his head and kept on the high road. "I don't want to be a bitch, here, but I've got a bad feeling about this Kyd's place."

"You'll love it." Spike swung around on his heel and started down the alley. Toward a dead end, as far as Xander could see. "When's the last time you saw a lamia sing lounge?"

"I-- Huh."

"See what I mean?" Spike flashed him a grin over one shoulder, stopped, scanned the ground with a slight frown, then raised one boot and started banging with his heel. "Bloody back door--"

"Spike, that's a delivery door." Spike ignored him and kept kicking, and after a few seconds there was a grating sound and he stepped back. The trapdoor swung open and clattered against the ground, and a long, sharp wooden pole came up out of the gloom and hovered around his chest. He ignored it. Xander, on the other hand, found himself all of a sudden standing right there, his neck itching and his hands hot, reaching out to intervene. Down below, someone growled. Sounded big.

"Fawn sent us," Spike said cheerfully, and there was a brief pause while Xander kept a nervous hand on the giant shishkebab stake. Below them, grumpy whuffling.

"Awright," someone grunted, and the stake jerked back fast enough to leave splinters in Xander's palm. He winced, and Spike slung an arm around his neck, which almost tipped him right down the stairs.

"You're going to love this," Spike said happily. He planted a kiss on Xander's cheek, and Xander was pummeled by a simultaneous ripcurl of irritation and lust, and then he was being yanked stumbling down the steep steps into darkness and the smell of fish.

Part Six

If there was a secret to controlling his new, supersonic vampiric senses, Xander hadn't learned it yet. Times like this, he really wished he had.

"It smells like cod," he said at the bottom of the stairs, hiding his nose in the crook of his elbow. "Rock, ling, Atlantic. I'm not sure."

"Shut up," Spike said.

"Possibly perch. Outside chance of bream."

"Shut up."

"This is a great place, Spike. It's not often I get the chance to really inhale the nightlife, you know?"

"Shut--"

The door clanged shut above them, and Xander jumped. There were people around them, he realized. No, wait--he revised that thought. Not people. People had a certain set number of limbs, and a generally reliable arrangement of them. People didn't bubble.

"Spike..."

"Shut up."

They were standing in darkness on a wet stone floor, and there was a sound of water running somewhere nearby. Around them, in a room that felt pretty big, was a kind of convergence of shadowy nastiness. Lots of bulky black bodies, all of them apparently waiting for something.

"Spike..."

"Back up. Now."

Back up where? Xander thought. He was standing at the foot of the staircase; there was nowhere to go. Then he realized that Spike meant Go back up the stairs, you fucking idiot, and lifted his foot to do as he was told, like a good little fledgling. Something heavy and damp came down on his shoulder and started soaking through his shirt.

"Spike, I think--" Then there was something over his face, cold and wet and spongy, and his brain went simultaneously Ew and Fuck, and with the remaining three grey cells left to him, he game faced. It was like biting Jell-O. Fish Jell-O. His mouth filled up with it and he gagged, and whatever it was lifted him up in a cold, clammy embrace like it was time to begin the beguine. He heard scuffling, a single furious "Fucking hell--" that cut off suddenly. That made him lash out harder, as hard as he could with arms and legs that were strangely heavy, cold and dumb and unresponsive. He gnawed at the Jell-O, tried to yell, tried to kick or grab, and got nowhere. There was bubbling in his ears. He was being smothered by a serenity fountain. That was seriously fucking lame.

This sucks, he tried to say, and, if you do anything to Spike I'll go Exxon Valdez all over your watery ass--

He had a second to be struck by the weirdness of the fact that he was worried about Spike's health rather than his own, and then the coldness in his limbs crept right into his brain and he stopped thinking altogether. Which was a relief.

Xander woke up in four inches of cold standing water, on a stone floor, in darkness. For a few seconds he lay still, marvelling at the sensation of water running up his nose without drowning him, and then he started to feel the rest of his body. He felt like shit.

"I feel like shit," he said, levering himself up onto hands and knees, and then unsteadily to his feet. "Holy shit, do I feel like shit."

There was some kind of weird slime all over him, his face and hair and clothes. He was soaked to the bone and his shoes were squishing. More important, and what would form the main body of his written complaint to the Third International Comintern of Spike, was the bone-deep ache all through his body. His skull hurt. His toes hurt. His spine felt like it had been twisted and yanked until it snapped with a festive scattering of nerve endings, like a Christmas cracker. He stood swaying for a minute, his hands holding his brain inside his head.

"Ow."

"It gets better," someone said, and he spun around, lost his balance, and caught his weight with his fingertips on the floor. There was another vamp lying in the water by the wall, propped up like Miss Edith against a bound and wriggling chambermaid. He had dark brown hair, a ponytail, black jeans and a black T-shirt. The vampire uniform. Focus, Xander thought.

"What gets better?"

"The ow." The vampire shrugged, raised one arm slowly, and waggled it in midair. "See? And I've only been lying here...what, a couple of hours?"

"What the hell is going on?"

"Odobenans," the vamp said morosely. Xander just stood there. The vamp looked up at him and raised an incredulous eyebrow. "Walrussians?" Xander kept looking. Both eyebrows went up. "Walrus demons?"

"Oh. Right." Xander rubbed the back of his neck and tried to think. The vampire made a pfffft sound.

"What are you, like, three minutes old?"

"Hey, I'm the one standing up here, pal."

"Yeah, kudos to you. Enjoy that. We're both going to die in here."

Xander lookd away, still rubbing his neck. They were in a windowless stone room, some kind of storage room maybe, empty except for some wooden pallets and a bunch of soaked, flattened cardboard boxes. The water on the floor was running in through a grate at one side of the room, and out through another grate at the other. There was a powerful smell of fish in the air.

"Okay." He stood there a minute longer, trying to make his brain stop pulsing like that. "Okay, so. Walrussians. They're bad, right?"

"Son, you are really going to die."

"Shut up. Why do the Walrussians want to kill us?"

The vamp chuckled, and Xander slewed around again to glare at him. "They don't want to kill us, kid. They don't give a damn about us, we're just, like--" He made a little poof gesture with one hand, then frowned. "Ow. But yeah, Walrussians aren't down with all this bipedal crap."

"Yeah, okay. So...?"

"Why the hell does anyone do anything? They're getting paid."

"Paid?"

"Yeah, you know, someone gives you something and you do what they tell you--"

"I have enough motor function to make it over there and kick you in the face."

The vamp held up two hand, whooooooah. "Chill out, little man. You're dead anyway, remember? No big."

"Who's paying the Walrussians to kill us?"

"Fawn."

Xander's brain went blank for a minute, and he thought, Who's Fawn? Then he remembered. "Why is Fawn paying the Walrussians to kill us?"

The vamp rolled his eyes. "You are so going to--"

"Thank you, Madame Blavatsky."

"Fawn's been jockeying for this domain for months, sport. She gets the Walrussians onside, they pick off everyone who comes into Kyd's this weekend, which is, like, every major vamp in the zip code, and boom." He tried to snap and frowned. "Ow. Anyway, suddenly Chicago's, like, Fawnago."

Xander stood squinting at him, rubbing the back of his neck.

"Okay, that was a little much."

"So, Fawn's axing Chicago vamps."

"Yes."

"With the help of these...walrus demons."

"Right."

"And we just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time."

The vamp smiled ruefully and shrugged. "Sorry, little man. Hey, you got any smokes?"

"Where's Spike?"

There was a pause, and then the vamp said carefully, "I don't know who you mean." He had brown eyes, and the whites were very white.

"Spike. My--" Xander hesitated, wiped his mouth, then went for it. "My sire. This was all his fucking idea, and if he's out walking around somewhere while I'm stuck in here breathing sturgeon and talking to you--" He turned away to study the door, and to hide the fact that he was considering a totally different scenario. Spike could be dead. They could have killed him. Fawn or one of her bubbly walrus pals could have staked him, or they could be torturing him right now, Spike could be injured, in trouble, dead--

"Spike's your sire," the other vamp said vaguely, somewhere behind him. It was kind of a thoughtful tone, but Xander was examining the door, trying to find the screws in the hinges under all the muck, and he wasn't really listening. "Spike, huh? Been a long time since I heard that name..."

There were screws, Phillips head, which meant a wooden frame, which meant he could maybe break it, right? He could break wooden things, he'd done it before. He'd broken a lot of stuff by accident, he had to be able to break this on purpose. He just needed his fingers to work properly, and his arms, and his brain--

There was a strange moment of silence behind him, just long enough for him to get a spidey sense tingle and think, What the hell--? He started to turn and something slammed into him, cracking his head against the door. There was an arm around his neck, yanking his head back, a hand knotted in his hair. Seriously bad blood breath in his face.

"Just so you know," the vamp said conversationally, "it's nothing personal. Spike owes me a fledgling from way back. I like you, so I'll make it quick."

Xander snapped his head back, connected with chin, saw stars. The vamp yelled, and just for a second the grip around Xander's neck loosened. He took the opportunity to sink his teeth into the vamp's forearm, game facing in the process. The blood he got was cold and antique, and he thought, Oh shit-- before being flung sideways into space. There was always a wall at times like that, ready and waiting. He hit it, slid down, and made kindling out of a pile of pallets. Get up, his brain said, but his body just lay there, stunned and cringing, while reports flooded in from all points that he was broken and probably past warranty.

"Little fucker," the vamp said, in a tone that came close to admiration. 'You bit me."

Get up, Xander's brain said again, like a coach standing anxiously over a passed-out cross country junior. Come on tiger, up an' at 'em, lookin' good, you can do it--

"Okay, so." The vamp was walking over, taking his time by the sound of it. "I was going to be a gentleman about this, you know? I mean, you're clearly a new recruit, and it's not your fault you're Spike's little pegboy--"

Hey! Xander's brain said.

"--but now you've gone and taken a chunk out of me, which is seriously uncool, so now I'm going to have to teach you a lesson. Before I kill you."

He kicked aside some of the broken pallets, and Xander's brain had a thought.

"Don't feel too bad about it, little man. I won't hurt you as much as Fawn would, if she got the chance." More wood scattered with a splash, and Xander's hand closed around a broken shard. He lay still, trying to ignore the red-hot pain growing down his right side.

"And for what it's worth, you did pretty good. If you weren't Spike's, I might consider taking you on, you know? I can always use a boy who knows how to take a beating." The pallet in front of Xander's face shifted, then disappeared, and suddenly the vamp was right over him. They looked at each other for a second, and then the vamp leaned over and grabbed Xander's shoulders. "You all busted up, little man?"

Xander swung the stake. The vamp caught it. They looked at each other again.

"What's your name, kid?" the vamp asked gently.

"Xander," Xander said.

"You didn't actually think that was going to work, did you, Xander?"

"I thought I'd give it a try."

The vamp worked the stake out of his hand, tossed it across the room, and patted him on the head. "Good job. Okay, let's start with me breaking the fingers on this hand."

Xander tried to yank his hand away and got nowhere. His brain was still slow, still trying to catch up. He hadn't quite processed the fact that the staking thing hadn't worked yet. It always worked in the movies. The hero was down and out, no way to go but loose, and in the face of impending doom, a last-minute plan was conceived. And it worked. It always worked. He couldn't quite figure out what was going on.

The vamp broke his little finger, and everything jumped into sharp focus. He yelled.

"Shh." The vamp tightened his grip on Xander's wrist. "If you keep screaming I'm going to have to cut your windpipe, okay?" He looked pensive. "Well, I'm going to do that anyway, so--"

Xander had a sudden, completely misplaced vision of Willow. Not the good, sweet, red-haired Willow of old, the one he kept in a little silver locket inside a dusty drawer in his brain. The one he was quickly forgetting. No, the Willow he saw was in black leather and Jezebel lipstick, and she looked pissed. She was gazing down at him from somewhere slightly above, and her expression said, I am the Madonna of self-respecting vampires everywhere. You...you are a disappointment.

Something kicked over inside him, and he thought, I am not going to die at the hands of a John Frieda clone. He had one free hand, the right one--it was bloody and it didn't work very well, but he could lift it enough to grab the vamp's ponytail and yank.

"What the--?" The vamp looked puzzled, then horrified when he saw the clump dangling from Xander's hand. Scalp, too. Just a little. Gross. "My hair--"

"How long do you think that'll take to grow back?" Xander asked, and tossed it away into the darkness.

The vamp clapped a hand to his head, as if the pain were just now transmitting, and Xander kicked him in the balls. There was no more satisfying feeling in the world, he reflected, scrambling backward over the pallets, than racking your mortal enemy. The vamp was doubled over, one hand on the back of his head, the other rammed between his knees. It was a beautiful sight.

"To the pain!" he yelled, and just caught a glimpse of the vamp giving him an irritated glare before the world fell out from under him. His right shoulder hit something hard, and then his head, and then he was shooting down something like a laundry chute or one of those old pneumatic delivery tubes, top speed and head first. This is not going to end well, he thought, just as it ended. He shot out into space, hung there for a second or two, then hit water and left a wake. It was freezing and dark, and there was no bottom. He flailed and tried to keep his mouth shut. If there were Walrussians in this, whatever it was, he was screwed. He was probably screwed anyway; he couldn't move properly, his whole right side was on fire, he couldn't see a thing. He was underfreakingwater. Somewhere, Willow was rolling her eyes and crossing his name off a list.

Then the tip of his shoe hit something hard and he jerked that way blindly. If he got out of this alive--no, wait, if he got out of this no deader than he went into it--he was going to sit right down and write up a fledgling-sire contract, and it was going to be full of riders like: No full-body immersion. No vendettas. No Walrussians. He'd have to ask around, see what else he should write in. He hadn't even heard of Walrussians yesterday.

He'd washed up against a wall, a stone wall with chinks he could cling to, so okay, he clung. He was still underwater. He should do something about that. Soon. As soon as he got a little energy, a little get-up-and-go. Maybe a Red Bull. Right now all he wanted to do was cling and do a damage assessment. Right side: serious bitching, centering around the ribs. Fingers: one very broken, very much extremely broken. Head: very confused, sleepy, painful. All systems: sort of deciding whether or not to be go. Maybe if he clung long enough, a Walrussian would swim by and eat him.

He hung a while longer in the silent black water, waiting to see if he was going to die. It was novel, hanging out underwater without needing to breathe. Then it started getting paralyzingly cold, and he remembered Spike. Who might still be alive, and in need of a bitch-slapping. That was enough reason to start hauling his worked-over butt somewhere new. Somewhere less watery.

He climbed the wall until he reached air, and found a cold metal grating a few feet directly overhead. He must be in a flooded room, he reflected, using the heel of his left hand to hammer the grate off its seat. Why it was flooded, he didn't want to know. What else might be in there with him, he didn't want to know. He just wanted to get out of the water, and to get the water out of him. His brain felt like it was floating.

The grate yielded, and he swung himself up into some kind of ventilation shaft. It smelled like dust bunnies and machine oil, but there wasn't any air movement. No light, either. For a minute or so he just drained. Then he heard a suggestion of something moving down in the water below, and that sparked a little hurry in him.

"We're gonna need a bigger boat," he muttered, and started to crawl wearily forward into darkness.