Prologue

Spike refused to smile. Despite the sunny attitudes of his father and brother, he was utterly unexcited about leaving his home in London and moving across the pond. There was no chance he'd be able to keep up his punk look in a place with a name like Sunnydale. His mind flashed to Cecily and he sighed. He hadn't been able to win the brown-haired beauty over, and that angered him. He figured if he'd had a couple more months of careful planning, he could've swept her off her feet and straight into his bed, but the fates had intervened, and how he was stuck on a jet over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. And he was afraid of heights. He slouched sullenly in the airplane's seat, running his black-tipped fingers through his stark white hair, then stared out the small window and sulked.

***

Cornelius William and Liam Angelus Giles couldn't have been more different if they'd been born into different families. In fact, most people had no idea that the two were fraternal twins. The older of the two by five minutes, Angel (as Liam was affectionately dubbed) had been outgoing and extremely active since toddlerhood. William, by contrast, was shy and somewhat frail. Angel had inherited their mother's dark looks right down to his dark, piercing eyes, whereas his little brother had the look of his father, with dark blonde locks and pale blue eyes that were perpetually hidden by the thick lenses of his glasses.

As they had aged, the differences between them had grown sharper. Their mother, Jenny, had passed away after a long battle with cancer, and they had both taken her death extremely hard. Fifteen-year-old William had locked himself in his room, neither sleeping nor eating for three days before his father, Rupert, had dragged the struggling teenager into the kitchen and force-fed him a meal. Angel, on the other hand, had punched his bedroom wall until the plaster came loose in chunks, moistened by his blood. Rupert had sighed and taped a poster over the hole, then curled up in his bed and soaked Jenny's pillow with bitter tears.

A week after Jenny's funeral, William left home, returning hours later with his curls trimmed and bleached, and wearing an all-black ensemble that included steel-toed boots and a long, leather duster that his insubstantial frame swam in. He began to work out that evening, and once he had developed enough muscle-mass, he'd begun to get in fights with the less savory youths of the area. He developed the moniker 'Spike', and refused to respond to anything else. One night he returned home with a large, bleeding gash through his left eyebrow, and when Rupert asked how it had happened, he'd merely shrugged and covered it with a gauze pad, taping it in place and trudging up the stairs to his bedroom.

Somehow, through all his antics, Spike had managed to keep his grades up in school, but at the end of his eleventh grade year, he was suddenly expelled. The reason: fighting. Rupert had seen no other choice but to move his sons to America to finish their schooling. A fresh start, he'd reasoned, would be good for all of them. He'd already been accepted as librarian at a high school, so he and his sons had packed their clothing and personal belongings in boxes addressed to their new home, and locked up their house for the last time, before climbing into the taxi that would bring them to Heathrow Airport.

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R to NC-17