Gray
Gray
After having her world destroyed by the Winchesters, Eve wanted to rebuild her family. She claimed a soul with his own dark power and his own moral gray. He would be her champion. Hopefully. Xander just wanted to go home, preferably before the hunters Sam and Dean Winchester caught up with him.
Chapter ONE :: Chapter TWO :: Chapter THREE :: Chapters 4+5 :: Chapter SIX :: Chapter SEVEN :: Chapter EIGHT :: Chapter NINE :: Chapter TEN :: Chapter ELEVEN : Chapter TWELVE :: Chapter THIRTEEN :: Chapter FOURTEEN :: Chapter FIFTEEN
Chapter Sixteen
It's all fun and games until the police get involved.
Xander’s arm itched and he studied the streets around them. Spike reached over and casually caught Xander’s cuff and gave it a tug.
“Try to avoid ripping your skin off.”
“Way to give me a creepy mental image,” Xander complained, but he stopped scratching. If being around demons always felt like this, Xander was going to be in serious demon-avoidage. Wait. Spike never gave him the heebie jeebies, and he was a demon. “Are we trying to find this guy or run away from him?” Xander whispered.
“Never leave an enemy at your back, luv, especially if you don’t know how strong they might be. It’s best to face ‘em.”
“And if they’re stronger than you?”
Spike turned and gave a wicked grin. “Strength isn’t everything. You have to be quicker, smarter, and more determined to live.”
“Right, because that’s worked out great for me in the past,” Xander said sarcastically.
“Considering that you’re still alive, and bugger stronger than you aren’t, it has worked out. Now shut your gob and focus.”
“Focus, right,” Xander agreed. The streets were full of desperate people and the insubstantial ghosts they dragged with them. If Xander had ever needed proof that teenage boys were ruled by their dicks, he would have it now. At least half the laughing young men who passed them dragged along half-formed images of scantily dressed women.
Right in the middle of the street, Xander stopped. “Spike, do you smell chocolate?” Xander asked.
Spike frowned and sniffed the air. “No.”
Xander turned in a circle as he tried to figure out where it was coming from.
“Are you sure you’re not imagining things?” Spike asked, but Xander ignored him as he darted between the cars and crossed the road so he could go east.
“Oi! Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Spike called. Then he was there, in front of Xander. He had his hand around Xander’s wrist, and he was holding tightly enough that the bones ground together. Xander tilted his head.
“Bloody hell, not here, ya moron.” Spike gave him a hard jerk to get him into an alley, and Xander prepared himself for more of the manhandling and potential bondage, but then the smell of chocolate damn near overwhelmed him.
“It’s here,” Xander whispered, and suddenly Spike let go. Xander blinked as he watched a woman in a business suit pick her way down the alley, carefully detouring around bags of trash.
Spike moved forward, keeping himself between her and Xander. “Right then, you have a problem?” Spike demanded, and from the tone, he had his vampire face out.
The woman stopped. Her short brown hair was perfectly trimmed to fall just below her jawline and her suit didn’t have a wrinkle in it. She looked Spike up and down before giving him a bored look that worried Xander a little. “You’re an inferior excuse for a monster.”
“I’m a demon, luv.”
“Demon? You, tortured in hell? I don’t think so.” She had the nerve to actually laugh at Spike. “And what are you protecting? What new abomination has escaped Purgatory now?”
Usually by this point, Xander would have been backing away and trying his best to hide in Spike’s shadow; however, Xander could feel a cold fury pressing up through his chest until he couldn’t breathe.
“Bloody hell,” Spike breathed, and Xander looked over to find Spike staring at him, his human face showing. “Mate, don’t even think about it.”
It didn’t make sense of Spike to be talking to him. That thing in the alley was the one who needed to think twice. Xander scented the air.
“Bloody… Harris, let’s calm down, right then?” Spike had on his talk-down-the-crazy voice, like he used with Dru, but that fact seemed too unimportant to take note of. All he cared about was the monster in the alley. It was pathetic. Disgusting. And it carried so much life force that Xander’s stomach rumbled in hunger. It was like looking at one of those chocolate fountains at a wedding, and Xander just wanted to stick his head in and drink it all down.
“Enough,” Spike snapped, and he grabbed Xander’s wrist, and for a second, Xander was stunned out of his hunger, out of his disgust and his fury and everything else. For one second, he was Xander Harris, and then the monster leaped at them, her mouth opening and opening and opening until Xander recognized the creature from Purgatory. It was one of those black smoke things. She reached for Spike, and Xander snatched Spike out of her way, tossing him backward before throwing himself into the fight.
He caught her arm, and her body twisted before her shark teeth blindly reached for him, but he shoved a thumb into the underside of her chin. His thumb broke skin, sinking into her flesh, and she screamed, but Xander couldn’t reach that rich life force that flowed under her skin. He stretched, feeling for the key, searching for some weakness. He could sense all that power and his hunger was becoming a living beast that ripped at him.
Hands caught him and pulled him backward, and Xander lost his grip on the monster. He flew back and he and Spike landed in a tangle of sharp elbows and bruised knees. The woman stumbled and had to catch herself on a trash bin, clinging to it as blood ran down her neck. Her human face was back in place, but it didn’t matter, Xander had her scent.
She turned and ran down the alley, her high heels clicking against the concrete. Blind and deaf to everything else, Xander leaped after her.
Their chase led through alleys and up fire escapes, across the roofs of buildings and down drain pipes. She did everything to lose him, but Xander charged ahead, gaining on her inch by slow inch. He could feel his reserves start to ebb, but all he needed was to catch her, and she would be his meal, Xander could feel it.
She staggered to a stop behind a restaurant and turned to face him, her mouth opening again, the tongue probing out into the night.
Xander slowed and then stopped a few feet from her. He couldn’t afford stupidity around her kind. He could feel the strength, older than even Eve, perhaps. But corrupt. Wrong. Disgusting. They were not part of the balance. Xander spoke the first words to come to mind. “You’re weak,” he accused the creature.
That shocked her enough that her human face returned. She snarled at him. “Humans are weak. You’re weak. This world was ours, and it will be again.”
“No. It won’t. Humans create, and yeah they destroy, too. But they can make art and buildings that reach to the sky and music, and all you do is consume,” Xander said. That’s what was wrong with them. They were creatures with only one ability. They had no balance. “You’re weak. You know only the strength of hunger, and that makes you disgusting.”
She looked down on him. “You talking monkey.”
Xander roared, and her teeth came out, and they threw themselves toward each other. Some little part of Xander whispered that Spike was going to kill him for going head to head with a creature he couldn’t even identify, but he didn’t care. He wanted her. He wanted all that power flowing under her skin.
She threw him toward the restaurant, but Xander grabbed her shoulder so that she followed, and they slammed into the brick together. Unfortunately, the brick yielded. With a shower of mortar dust and red brick pieces, they landed in the kitchen. Humans scrambled away, yelling and cursing, but Xander kept his hold on the monster in front of him.
She tried to back away, and he could smell the fear now. She had expected to eat him, but he was going to turn the tables. They slammed into one wall and then another, neither able to overpower the other. When her mouth came open again, Xander grabbed that long snake tongue of hers in one hand and punched the bottom of her jaw with his other. Her mouth slammed shut, biting off her own tongue. She screamed in pain, and suddenly all her power lay right on the surface of her skin.
He reached out, and the power flowed into him, filling him, pouring over him and drowning him in the scent of warm chocolate and the feeling of contentment. The monster writhed and twisted, the human form lost as limbs folded in on themselves and then the whole twisted, mangled body and sharp-toothed mouth went out like a popped balloon with a little puff and a few lingering wisps of black smoke.
It was as clean as dusting a vampire… cleaner because she didn’t even leave behind vampire dust. Sated and full, Xander lay back in the twisted wreckage of a pot shelf and let the power sink into him and flow under his skin. This is what it felt like to be full, to feel right in his own skin. He let his eyes fall closed as he wallowed in the simple joy of being filled up to the brim with goodness. Well, not goodness exactly, but it sure felt good.
“Freeze! Police! Put your hands up and do not make any sudden moves.”
Xander’s eyes popped open, and he looked to see uniformed officers pointing guns at him. Oh shit. Xander blinked, lost for a second as he tried to decide what to do, but a lifetime of watching television had taught him that there really was only one answer.
He put his hands up. “I’m unarmed,” he said in his own defense. Xander looked around at the huge hole in the wall and the wrecked kitchen. A stove had been shoved out of place and a refrigerator lay on its side. Aw shit. This was Buffy burning down the gym full of vampires bad, and Xander couldn’t even claim to be underage.
Xander kept his mouth shut through the reading of the rights and as the police frisked him and cuffed him, after a whole lot of discussion of the leather restraints and why exactly Xander didn’t have the keys. Honestly, he kept expecting Spike to show up and do something that would magically make the whole mess go away, but the police put him in the back of one of the cars, and there was not a Spike in sight.
Amazingly enough, he kept his mouth shut as they reached the station and had another round of conversations about why Xander didn’t have a key to the ankle and wrist restraints.
“Give the kid a break, Tanner, he doesn’t have the keys.”
“We’re going to have a hell of a time cutting them off,” the man behind the desk complained bitterly. He gave Xander a dirty look, like it was his fault. Xander was the guy with his hands flat on the desk waiting to get strip searched or something, so he wasn’t sure why he was getting blamed.
“Then get bolt cutters and stop complaining,” the other officer suggested. He stood with his foot on the inside of Xander’s instep and one hand on Xander’s wrist, making sure he didn’t move. Which funny enough, Xander wasn’t planning on moving. He had kind of blacked out a bit during the fight, and the last thing he needed was to have another mental brownout and wake up to finding a bunch of cops dead. Cops were good guys. Usually. This Tanner was a bit of an ass as he huffed and stormed away.
“You need to call your friend?” The officer holding him asked.
“Need? Yes. Want? No,” Xander confessed.
The officer looked at him with this intense look, and he did have a pretty good stare on him. “He’s going to be pissed, huh?”
“Oh, pissed doesn’t cover it.”
“Will he be angry enough to pose a danger?”
“What?” Xander instinctively tried to turn, but the officer’s grip on his wrist stopped him, and Xander forced his body to relax. “Spike is going to be pissed the way parentals are pissed with lots of ‘I told you’ and ‘If God gave you a brain, why can’t you use it?’ but with more British.” Xander watched Tanner come back out of an office with large bolt cutters. “He’s not dangerous to me, just my butt if he finds out I got arrested.”
The guy behind him chuckled. “Maybe you need your butt bruised for tearing a place up that bad. But honestly, this will go a lot better if you give the names of the other people involved.”
“That’d be awesome if I knew any of them,” Xander said. Everyone seemed to assume that a whole gang had attacked the kitchen, and Xander wasn’t disagreeing. That made more sense than two monsters fighting.
“We’ll get you booked in and then you can all your Spike and explain,” the officer offered, and Xander could tell that he even meant it kindly. However, watching Tanner take bolt cutters to the leather and steel cuffs, Xander cringed. Maybe he’d postpone on the calling of Spike because a bruised butt was going to be the least of his problems.