He woke up the next night with a splitting headache, the sort he usually got after dreaming about tasty human happy meals, but he couldn’t remember the dream.
“No rest for the dead,” he muttered, as he pulled on his jeans one leg at a time. He sniffed his shirt - musty, but not yet offensive - and slipped it on. Add one duster and presto, a vamp-about-town.
He was a picture of bloodless cool, leaping up the ladder and out the door of his crypt, striding faster than a human being really could across the dewy grass, going unnoted down the dark streets of Sunnydale, stopping at Buffy’s. He loitered a bit in silence, for old times’ sake, then knocked.
Dawn let him in. Time was, they wouldn’t have wanted the vamp in the house - that was some time ago. He was pretty high up in the white-hat hierarchy now - he hadn’t broken Dawn’s arm, like Willow, or summoned a demon into town to kill the populace softly with his song, like Xander, or left Buffy to fend for herself, like Giles, or fallen in love with the wrong loser in amnesia, like Anya, or left his girl to do the Twelve Steps on her own, like Tara, or committed a thousand little teen sins that seemed so significant to the living, like Dawn. No, Spike was way up there with the Slayer herself - but the Slayer had slept with a vampire, a soulless vampire, leaving Spike the good guy of the year.
Except you couldn’t win that award unless you had a soul, too.
“Nice necklace,” he told Dawn. “New?”
“One of my friends gave it to me.”
“Right.” Being a vampire was as good as being a soddin’ polygraph. The li’l bit’s capillaries dilated tellingly, but he wasn’t the costume-jewelry police. He was just the pet vampire.
“Buffy will be right down,” she assured him. “Buffy!” she shouted, to guarantee it.
The Slayer came down the stairs, reluctantly, Spike thought.
“How about a patrol?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Warren’s up to no good.”
“What else is new?” she asked, but she followed him out the door, telling Dawn not to wait up.
Spike told her his story as they headed for the industrial park.
“It could be a trap,” she said once he was through.
“Why trap you? They’re not vampires.”
“They could be planning to go over.”
“They’re not the type.”
“There’s a type?”
He turned towards her as they walked along. “Yeah. You’re not the type either.”
“I doubt they’d have let me into Slayer school if I were.”
