Love In Vein: Book Three - Chapter 12

It was cold.

Freezing.

Her hands automatically began rubbing her arms, trying to warm herself in the darkness. Wind rushed past her and she couldn’t tell if she was standing still or falling.

A tiny dot of light.

It was approaching rapidly.

Either that or she was approaching it rapidly.

It was growing larger by the second and it wasn’t long before all the darkness was left behind her and she was surrounded by a blinding white light. She squinted as her eyes tried to adjust to the brightness, and after a while she could make out the shape of the room she was in.

It was a rectangle and she could see white passages coming off the three sides of it visible to her where she stood with her back to the fourth side. The entrances to these passages were lined with two white columns, leaving barely enough space in between them for someone to walk through.

She gasped and leapt to the side as something tumbled in behind her. Pressing herself against one of the side walls, she expected to see the angel had followed her but instead she found her eyes falling to rest on someone else.

Spike.

She watched him as he stood up, mumbling bitterly to himself and brushing down his jacket. Her first instinct was to run to him, but she realised that something was different.

This wasn’t the Spike from the basement, well, at least not the Council’s basement. This was the Spike that had been pulled into the portal shortly after the First.

Her Spike before he’d gone insane.

The angel was showing her what had made him crazy, and that would give her the clue as to how to bring him back. How?

She watched Spike as he regarded the mirror he’d just tumbled out of with an arched brow, prodding it to see if it worked both ways.

“It won’t take you back. It brought you here for a reason.” An echoing voice filled the room and Buffy turned at the same time Spike did.

Stood at the opposite end of the room from Spike were two figures, a white robed male and a white robed female. They were as bright as the room around them and Buffy couldn’t help thinking that if they were hurting her eyes, they must have been murder on Spike’s. She turned to look at him. He was standing still, his all black clothing a stark contrast to his surroundings.

Just as she wondered what was going on, everything shifted slightly, the lights becoming dimmer and the mirror behind Spike shimmering like a moonlit lake.

“Get me the bloody hell out of here…I have to get back to her,” Spike growled at the two people and Buffy smiled at his reference to her. “She needs me there…I can feel her.”

She swallowed down her tears as she watched his face and could read in it how distressed he was over being so far away from her. She could still remember how she’d felt—lost and lonely even when surrounded by her friends. It had taken her almost a week to come to terms with the fact that he was gone and there was no way of knowing whether he’d be back. After that she’d lost all desire to live, had began not eating properly and had patrolled the whole night through, not caring if she was injured. She had dropped out of college too, unable to face being there and unable to concentrate on her work.

Her thoughts had been continually with him.

“She does need you…of that we are sure.” The white robed female spread her arm out theatrically and intimated the mirror behind Spike.

He turned and Buffy saw his eyes widen dramatically. She immediately looked at the mirror and couldn’t stop hers from doing the same when she saw what he was looking at.

She was in the mirror, surrounded by fire, by flames, just like her visions had shown her. She was burning, dying. She could see the houses tumbling down around her and could feel the hot heat as it burnt everything to cinders including herself. She couldn’t believe that they were showing him the vision she’d had, that they knew. It was there, image for image in front of her—a perfect copy of everything she saw each night.

Don’t fade away. That’s what Spike had said to her and it had sent shivers up her spine because she faded away on a nightly basis. Spike had seen her visions just like Giles said he had, and he’d seen them before her. Was it before her, or was this timeline different to hers? Could it be that travelling to this dimension had taken Spike so long that two months had passed in her world? Was that possible?

“No!” Spike shouted at the mirror, rousing her from her thoughts, and then turned to face the two. “No…that isn’t happening!”

“You’re right…it isn’t, yet. But it will come to pass, unless…”

Spike turned to look in the mirror again, watching Sunnydale as it burned and she went with it. She felt sick to her stomach as she watched the unshed tears shining in his eyes and she could almost feel what he was feeling—all the hurt, the pain and the fear.

“Unless what?” he asked cautiously and she could see that he wasn’t wholly convinced by what he was seeing.

“There is only one way to stop this from happening, William, only one way to save her from hell on earth.”

“What?” He ground the word out, obviously losing what little patience he had, as though the sands of time were visibly slipping through his fingers and he needed to do something fast before she was gone.

“You must face trials,” the white man said.

“Great trials,” the white woman corrected and blinked languidly as Spike looked at her.

“What kind of trials?” He looked curious but not ready to bite yet, not ready to agree to something that he knew nothing about.

“The trials of a champion,” they said in unison.

Spike looked sceptical. “Champion?”

“A champion,” they confirmed and then smiled at him. “Her champion.”

Spike looked over his shoulder at the mirror again, watching her burn along with Sunnydale. She could see he was thinking, trying to figure out exactly what kind of trials it would take to save her from the future he was witnessing.

“Why?” he asked and Buffy smiled. It was so like Spike to want to know every last detail before committing himself to something.

“Because you cannot save her as you are, but you can as you will be,” the man replied with a serene smile and Buffy frowned at the same time Spike did.

She didn’t get what the man was talking about and it appeared that her mate didn’t either. The two were talking in riddles, confusing the hell out of both of them and it seemed to Buffy that that was exactly the way they wanted it.

“As I will be? Right. And what’s that then? I do these little tasks for you, and I get what in return?” Spike took a step toward them, his swagger confident as he regarded them with a cold cynical glare.

“You get what you need to save her.”

“And that’s what exactly?”

“Your soul.”

Buffy gasped as the room span in front of her and she landed with a thud on dusty ground. She coughed as the air cleared and frowned as she saw that she was no longer standing in the white room. She was knelt in what looked like caves. There was rusty brown sand underneath her and the walls were covered in drawings.

Standing up, she ran her fingers over them and frowned. They looked like the pictures of prehistoric drawings she’d been shown in history class when she was little—stick men were chasing stick animals, their spears held high above their heads.

Spike had been told he needed his soul, had he come here to get it? She couldn’t get her head around the fact that he had been shown her visions in order to save her. Who were the people he’d spoken to? She presumed that he’d received more information than she’d seen, that there had been more discussion about the soul and the trials that she hadn’t been privy to.

White people in a white room. It sounded familiar somehow and she got the feeling that she should know it. Staring unseeingly at the drawings on the wall, she almost slapped her palm to her forehead when she remembered where she’d heard about the people before.

Angel.

He’d told her about what he called the Powers That Be, the ones that had told him that he had to go on, that he was needed on earth for some great purpose.

They really had a thing about vampires with souls if that was the case. Not only had they fished Angel out of hell, but they had set Spike on the path of getting a soul himself.

A distant roar roused her from her thoughts and she immediately recognised it as Spike.

She bolted down a network of dark tunnels, ignoring the flaming torches that told her that wherever she was there was more than just Spike present. It looked as though someone lived in the caves. Someone that Spike had been sent to see by the Powers That Be?

Her breath hitched in her throat as she ran straight out into a chamber, the darkness of it almost blinding her after the brightly lit room and the flaming torches that had lit the passageway. Her eyes quickly adjusted to the blackness as though they knew she needed them fast and she scoured the room for a sign of Spike.

He was knelt in the middle of the room, his chest bare but covered in burns and wounds. She frowned with concern as she saw how badly he was struggling against pain and fatigue.

Something moved in the shadows.

“Spike!” She called out without thinking, forgetting that she wasn’t really present.

For a moment, it seemed as though he’d heard her. He raised his head, his chest heaving as he panted and his face showing signs of how tired he was.

His head turned slowly to regard the demon that was approaching him—a tall robed figured with glowing eyes. Spike clearly recognised it as he just stared up at it, his breathing still coming heavily and his body sagging slightly as he seemingly waited for something.

“That it then…that all you can throw at me?” Spike stared hard at it as it looked down at him.

“There is one more thing.”

Spike sagged a little further. “What’s that then?”

The demon seemed to be thinking for a moment as it looked around at the room. Buffy noticed for the first time that it was littered with bodies, all lying broken in the dirt, and there were what looked like a lot of dead bugs by her feet.

“Eww.” She wrinkled her nose in disgust as she kicked one of the little bug carcasses.

“Why?” The demon said after some time and Spike’s gaze moved to rest on his hands.

On his ring finger.

She brushed her finger over the ring that she was wearing, knowing that he was looking at the finger she’d placed it on.

“Because I love her. Because I can’t fail her. Because I want to be her champion, want to be the best man I can be for her and that means getting a soul. She deserves this…”

Spike didn’t even have a chance to look up before the demon had pressed its hand against Spike’s chest and a bright light emanated from it.

“Very well, we shall return your soul.”

She flinched as Spike screamed out in agony and then watched as he curled up in pain when the demon released him. She was running before she knew what she was doing. Instinct drove her feet toward Spike. She wanted to comfort him, wanted to show him how much she loved him and how proud she was of him.

As she reached him, the room span again and she almost ran straight into the angel.

“Wait…” She said as her head continued to spin. She held it and breathed deeply, trying to steady herself. “What happened next? That can’t be all you have to show me?”

The angel looked at her with a mixture of disdain and curiosity. “What did you expect? I have done my duty, you have seen what ails your vampire.”

“That’s why he sent you down here isn’t it? Spike has a soul now. He has back what differentiates us and sets us apart from demons. He registers on God’s little list.”

The angel merely looked at her and she got the feeling that the reason he didn’t like Spike wasn’t because of the fact he was a demon, it was because he had a soul and therefore meant something to God. Something more than angels did? Did a soul make you more important than them in God’s eyes?

“He has a soul.” Buffy wrapped her mouth around the words as she tried to come to terms with what Spike had done. “He got his soul for me…the demon reinstated it…I saw him do it…oh God, that’s why he’s crazy isn’t it?”

“A century of bloody murder to deal with, it all stays on the soul and the guilt of it is returned with it.” The angel said serenely with a little smile that Buffy wanted to wipe of its face. It was as close to a smirk as she’d seen so far and she got the feeling that the angel liked that Spike was suffering for his sins.

“I have to go…I have to tell him that it’s okay, that whatever he did it’s okay…we can deal with it together.” She went to run but then stopped, looking over her shoulder at the angel. “Thank you…”

She watched as the angel bowed stiffly and then spread its wings, beating the air heavily as it disappeared into the night.

A smile dancing on her lips, Buffy bolted out of the cemetery and back toward the Council Headquarters.

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