I blame the tourists, silly clumsy suburbanites still clutching their ticket stubs and playbooks as they went white under our mouths. Dru plucked one of the gaudy printed things from the man�s stiff fingers and flipped through it. �Oooh, lovely,� she says, words twisted and lisping through her fangs. �Look, Spike, they made a play about all the lovely fighting.�
�That covers rather a lot of human history, pet,� I tell her, tossing the woman�s body next to a dumpster and sliding my arms around my princess�s waist, peering over her shoulder at the playbook.
�It was lovely...so much blood, so much screaming,� she says dreamily, slipping back into her human face and running her fingers over the black-and-white drawings on the glossy pages.
�You weren�t there, Dru,� I remind her gently, kissing her soft white neck. �You weren�t alive in any way during the French Revolution.�
�Daddy told me about it,� she says, scratching the eyes out of one drawing with her sharp nails. �Daddy and Grandmummy were there. They used to tell me all the tales...�
I wince, but kiss her again. She was off now, and it would be days before I heard about anything but Daddy and Grandmummy and the gay old times they had, before I was made, even before Dru was made, since time and place and chronology got all melted and mixed together in that lovely mad mind of hers.
�Can we go see it, Spike?� she asks wistfully, tossing the book in the air and watching it flutter to earth like a wounded bird. �Can we please?�
�Anything for you, Princess,� I tell her, kicking the man�s body over and searching his pockets till I found his wallet. Having to kill our way into a theater would make it rather difficult to see the whole show, after all. Of course, if she got tired of it in the middle- as my fickle darling had a tendency to do- there was no reason we couldn�t kill our way out again.
***
Orchestra seats; nothing but the best for Dru. But I see trouble coming as soon as we started walking to the theater, because she starts nattering on about how �perhaps we�ll see Daddy and Grandmummy on the stage.�
I think about trying to tell her that it�s only a play, but explaining concepts of fantasy and reality to Drusilla is like explaining weather patterns to a fish. It�s completely outside their frame of reference. A foreign language.
So I just nod and smile and steer her through the crowded streets, trying to choke back the anger that rises every time she mentions Angelus. God, it�s been years and more than years since she�s seen him, a fistful short of a whole century, and she still has her Daddy on the brain. Not that I don�t feel his shadow following me around in broody judgment as well, none of us in his bloodline can escape it. But Christ, I don�t talk about him for a week every time he crosses my mind. And I even had a refresher encounter with him at mid-century; of course, since for Drusilla yesterday and tomorrow and a hundred years ago are all mixed up, perhaps they went hunting together last week. Who knows. I love my dark bird, but I don�t understand her.
I shrug my leather duster up higher on my shoulders, comforted by the familiar weight. Picked it up in this very same dirty town, twenty years gone, off that Slayer�s corpse in the subway. I�d wanted it on sight, the spitting image of the SS officer�s coat Angelus had gone and ruined by making me swim from the submarine to New York Harbor thirty years before that. How did I keep ending up back in New York...
�Slayer�s coat,� Drusilla says thoughtfully, my motion catching her eye. She stares at it like she�s never seen it before, and I bite my tongue; her eyes are going wide and glassy the way they do when she has a vision coming on. I hope it won�t be a violent one; it would be dreadfully inconvenient to have her going into hysterics in the middle of the street.
�I�m going to get a Slayer,� she says, sounding awed and proud, eyes widening even further, so they take up half her pale face. �Me, Drusilla, all by myself.� She claps her hands in childish delight.
My first instinct is to laugh- Dru, best a Slayer in a fight? She can hardly fight at all, gets distracted too easily, my girl does. Oh, she�s deadly, never doubt that; but only when she�s in control. In a melee she�s hopeless. But it�s all right, because that�s what I�m here for. Her champion, her knight errant, I protect her...not that that�s not a bloody pain in the rear sometimes, and not that I never catch myself wishing that Angelus had left her at least a few of the wits she was born with, enough to block a stake heading for her heart by herself at least instead of standing there screaming like a baby...
She blinks, the vision fading, but her smile remains. �I saw it, Spike,� she says dreamily. �I�m going to get a Slayer for my very own.�
�I�ve no doubt of it, pet,� I tell her, gently slipping my arm through hers and moving her along down the sidewalk. And who knows if she isn�t right? The visions that come quietly have a strange knack for coming true. And maybe this one will have knocked Angelus and Darla right out of her stormy little head...
Just as I think the name, my nostrils flared in recognition. A scent...faint and faded under the human filth of the city, but there. One I know as my grandsire�s as well as I knew his name...Angelus...
My eyes sweep through the crowd, looking for him, torn between the desire to have a pack again and not be watching my own back and Drusilla�s alone, and the fear that if she sees him she�ll run to him without ever glancing back to see if I followed. I have to spot him before the smell drifts through the clouds in her mind...
But then a passing bicycle messenger clipps Drusilla with his handlebars and the narrowly-averted hysterics come anyway. By the time I get her calmed down and we resume our walk to the theater, whatever scent was there is long gone.
***
Nearly to intermission, and I�m suffering like I�ve been locked inside a church. God, this is terrible. The songs, the acting...the songs...fangs are too good for Andrew Lloyd Webber. If I ever catch him, it�s going to be Chinese water torture and the rack.
Drusilla�s getting more anxious by the moment, eyes raking through the chorus on stage, desperately looking for her Daddy. Just like whenever she gets on one of these old-days tears, all mention of Darla fades away in the intensity of her longing for Angelus. �He said he was there...he told me...where is he, Spike?� she mumbles, fingernails slicing the upholstery on the armrests. I�m scanning the chorus like a madman, trying to find some great square-jawed git I can pass off as my grandsire to keep her from having another fit. Perhaps I can convince her to leave at the intermission...we could slip our way into the showing of RENT down the way, I�ve heard that one has decent songs, at least. Not claw-your-ears-out-in-agony like this. But the subject matter of that one would never be ladylike enough for my Dru.
She�s whimpering now, confused and unsettled, and I�ve got an aching jaw from grating my teeth in frustration. Even if she doesn�t go into a fit over not seeing her Daddy, after this nothing will do but a trip to Paris, and then we�ll be off on one of her Grand Tours of all the cities of Europe. For me that means dodging crucifixes in Rome, sitting through bullfights in Madrid (she hates it when they kill the bull, but oh, the delight when the beast gores the matador...), and getting dragged as far east as Prague or Budapest before she gets bored with the whole thing or we encounter a mob that knows their vampiric folklore and get run out of town. Then and only then will I be able to get her to London or back across the pond, somewhere with a decent music scene and cheap whiskey.
Cosette�s gone into one of her solos, and Dru�s settled for a moment, gazing up wide-eyed at the stage. �Pretty lit�l girl,� she says in her guttural hunting voice, and I smother a sigh. Nothing will do for her now tonight but a little girl, and that�s going to be a pretty piece of work, finding one out and about at the hour shows end in New York. There�s nothing for it, though, I know that gleam in my princess�s eye. A child or nothing at all, and the visions always get worse when she hasn�t been feeding.
Somehow I�ll find one for her, and the bloodstained smile I�ll get over the corpse will make it all worthwhile. And then we�ll find a ship heading back to Paris so she can take her Grand Tour, and we�ll sample all the sights and smells and tastes of the Continent. But somehow I have a feeling it won�t be too long before we wind up back here, in the colonies as they used to say. I�m not a visionary like Dru, but I�ve got a decent gift for a hunch. And that�s the feeling I have right now, about this side of the world.
A feeling like it holds my destiny.
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