With the help of Donna and Ginger, Sam was able to move Spike from the place where he had fallen to the sofa in Toby’s office. Charlie was immediately notified, as was the President, and the air around the White House sank into a deeper well of supposition.

“We have to call Buffy,” Donna kept saying. “She needs to know about this.”

“I’ve been trying for the past twenty minutes,” Ginger said, handing the blonde a washcloth and a basin that someone from the Communications Department had smuggled from a random crook in the steam-pipe distribution venue. Sam had spent the better part of the past half hour trying to track down Willow in her classes. Her pager was off and he had left numerous messages on her cell phone. If Buffy couldn’t be reached, the logical conclusion was to find the Witch.

“What about Xander?” Donna demanded as Sam came back into the office. “He works for the guys that put this thing in his head.”

“He’s the boss of the guys that put the thing in his head.”

“Yes! Maybe he can help.”

“By, what? Handing out the antidote to a chip misfire? Something tells me the Initiative wasn’t especially worried about what happened to its assorted…clientele.”

Donna swore under her breath and rang out the washcloth before reapplying it to Spike’s head. She had busied herself with small, motherly attentions to the unconscious vampire in empty hopes that he would awake. They had absolutely no idea what had caused him to react the way he had, especially sans provocation. And they certainly didn’t know how badly the chip had injured him when the secret service repeatedly refused to let him exit the building.

“I can’t reach him.” A sigh coursed through Sam’s body. “I just got a hold of Will. She’ll be here in fifteen minutes…was just getting out of her anthropology class.”

“Carol says that he was screaming for Buffy,” Ginger replied, looking up. “I don’t…do you think he’s sick or something?”

Donna and Sam exchanged a wry glance. While they had not done much to hamper the education of the immediate staff of those on the inside of the secret world of vampires, they similarly had certainly done nothing to broadcast that things-that-go-bump-in-the-night were a matter of reality. Ginger, like Bonnie, knew that their bosses were involved with something they were not supposed to know about. They knew that Spike, Buffy, and Willow were a part of the ever-elusive events that had taken them all by storm the previous year. That Josh, Sam, Toby, and Donna had returned from Natchez as changed people. All aged with knowledge. All a part of something bigger than the world of the presidency, even if such was infeasible to those who worked for the most powerful man in the country.

CJ, Charlie, and the First Family were the only ones that had been told since the tone of the White House changed. For good reason, assuredly, but it made outbursts like Spike’s even more suspicious.

“If he was calling for Buffy, then something’s happened.” Donna’s face went grave. “Something’s wrong.”

“Something…”

“Sam.” The blonde leveled her eyes with his. “Think.”

It took all of a few seconds. His gaze went wide with recollection, and a rush of air near threw him to the ground. And that was it. Just like that, he knew. They both did.

“It’s happening.”

The words solidified it all. The next second, the air was pierced with the shrill of a security alarm. And the time for speculation was over.

It had already started.

*~*~*

There wasn’t an inch of her that didn’t ache. The air hung heavy with the stench of burnt skin, and she felt pools of her own blood forming on the floor around her. Her flesh was a map of char rivers. She felt every cell in her body was ready to combust. To throw in the rag. To concede defeat.

And there was a deafening pain in her head. A physical ache that had no blade to cast blame upon.

She felt it. She felt every part of it.

Buffy’s eyes opened to the wreckage of the place she had just begun to consider home. The cracks in her walls, the furniture she and Spike had selected one weekend when they were both struck with a whim of utter domesticity. It was all broken. The world around her had crashed in a matter of minutes.

And she couldn’t feel him.

Her body broke at that. She couldn’t feel her mate.

Spike!

There was nothing. Nothing at all. Her eyes welled with tears, and her body crippled with sobs before she could even manage to her feet. There was physical pain, then there was a manifestation of the one she loved that had been ripped away from her. All consuming. She felt as though every tug on the world had snapped, and there was no longer anything there to catch her fall.

Spike, please. Please answer me.

If he didn’t answer her, she feared a collapse of a different nature. Her lifeline was tied with his. And Glory was out there. Glory was on her way to kill her friends. Glory was on her way to destroy everything.

If Spike had already…

No. She couldn’t think like that.

She was one half. She couldn’t go on without the other. More than the ache that had consumed her, the grief that threatened to incapacitate her in the wait for the world’s end, it was mere physics. If he had died, she would not be able to fight. She would not be able to do anything.

He needed to answer her.

Spike!

*~*~*

Josh had all but bounded down the corridor toward the Communications Offices. In a blink, the concerns for tomorrow were nonexistent. The empty rage he was battling in place of a president’s concealing an illness fell completely. Somewhere, he had heard the first notes of a brass quintet, and he knew things were about to get bad.

“Donna!”

Something was happening and he didn’t know what. Only the time gap between this moment and hundreds of miles plus a year away suddenly seemed complete. He saw her. She was rushing out of Sam’s office when he saw her, and logic fell to instinct. His hand wrapped around her wrist, and he ran back for his office before she could sputter out a sentence.

He didn’t even register that she was talking to him. He shoved her across the threshold of his workspace and slammed the door shut.

“Josh, it’s Glory.”

“Glory?”

“She tripped security, or something. We didn’t even have time to crash.” Donna’s eyes were wide and erratic. “Sam…and Spike and Ginger—”

“Oh God, Sam.”

He’d completely forgotten about Sam. It had happened, and he had run for Donna.

“It happened to Buffy first, I’m positive.” She had started crying without realizing it, shaking her head in a mess of incoherent statements and blurred lines of reason. “Spike was on his way home and he just spazzed and started screaming for her.”

“Yeah, I know.” Josh shook his head. “Glory can’t get in here, Donna. We’re in the most secure building on the planet. I don’t care if she comes with the Spanish Inquisition, she can’t get into the White House.”

“So running, grabbing me, and taking off like the world is ending was just to confuse her?”

“I’m telling you, the secret service would, in no way, ever let a threat of this magnitude near the President. They’d take him to the bunker. They’d—”

“Josh, she’s a god.”

“Yeah.”

And though neither of them wanted to say it, there was only one name they could conjure in relation to the banishment of gods.

The ground was beginning to quake. And the rules no longer applied.

Spike was unconscious. No one knew where Buffy was, or what had happened to her. And Willow was still on her way.

Josh grabbed Donna’s wrist again and jerked her to the floor behind his desk.

He’d lost count of the times he’d nearly died this last year. And if this happened to be the day fate drew his number, there was no way he was going without having Donna near. Not to share his death, rather to have her there in some means of solace.

He just knew it was happening now. All else was left to guesswork.

*~*~*

Spike’s eyes flew open.

“Buffy!”

She was screaming his name, her grief and her pain washing over him in an onslaught of anguish.

“He’s awake!”

The bird he knew to be Ginger was at his side, her eyes shining with tears that smelled fearful. He was in Toby’s office and the door was shut. The Communications Director and his Deputy were with him, and the air around him tasted rich. That familiar, potent scent that came before an especially anticipated kill. He knew it too well to doubt it. He was in the White House and Buffy was not. Buffy was in Georgetown, hurt. Screaming, sobbing, pleading for him to answer her.

Buffy.

He heard her choked relief as though she was standing beside him. As though she had run her hands through his hair and collapsed against him in respite.

Oh God. Oh my God. Spike… I thought—

Shhh. It felt strange to see her tears without seeing her. To feel her pain without having the luxury of comforting her in his arms. It was a sensation he distinctly never again wanted to experience. If he lived a thousand lifetimes, he would never again place himself a hair away from her. Baby, it’s okay now. It’s okay. What happened?

There was a long pause. He felt burn marks lace his skin. Felt the crippling sensation of fire combusting his insides. She was hurt. She was hurt, and he couldn’t reach her. All else fell second to that.

He needed to see her.

Glory. She’s coming. Spike, she—

I’ll be there in a second. A bleedin’ flash. Jus’ stay there, sweetheart. Stay with me.

No! Despite the stench of fear surrounding her, there was something else in her mind’s tone. A shade of something he knew so well, it nearly inspired tears to his eyes, aside the ones that had already burrowed rivers down his cheeks. This was his girl. The Slayer. The Slayer that lived inside the god, not quite ready to say goodnight.

No. She’s on her way there. She’s going to kill everyone. You have to…Spike, you have to…

What? Leave you hurt? You’re off your nutter.

I’m coming.

Buffy!

The President…Josh, Donna…all of them. You need to…I’m on my way. There was another rush of relief. I just…don’t scare me like that.

Buffy, please.

She wasn’t ready for this. She had only just accepted that she needed to touch this part of who she was. The god within her skin. She wasn’t ready. She was going to get herself killed.

And he would die right along with her. If anything happened to Buffy…

I love you.

Love you, too, sweetling. Stay the bloody hell away.

You’re there. Like hell am I staying away.

Then it was gone. His connection. He felt her, but she was no longer open to him. She had cut him out.

She was coming here. His girl was coming to him. To do all she could. It was who she was. Who she always would be. The Slayer locked inside, worrying about everyone but herself. Breaking his heart with worry, then infuriating him with her stubbornness.

If she died, it would be because he was already gone.

As long as he stood, Glory wasn’t going to touch her.

“She’s here.”

Spike glanced up. Sam was staring at the door in horror.

“She’s…”

“She’s gonna kill the lot of us,” the vampire said, rising to his feet. “An’ she’s startin’ with the top.”

“The President.”

Like hell. Even Spike was skeptical of that. There was no way the secret service would let the President stay in the Oval with a threat of this magnitude on the premises. With a god tearing through the most recognizable building in the country. It simply wouldn’t happen.

That didn’t mean he was going to take a chance. The President was the closest thing he’d had to a father in a hundred and fifty years.

If he couldn’t stop Buffy from coming, the least he could do was make sure there was nothing but the clean up when she arrived.

*~*~*

The door to the Deputy Chief of Staff’s office flew open. Donna screamed and burrowed herself further into her boss’s arms as Josh dared to peek over the length of the desk.

A sigh of relief rumbled through his body. Thank God. Willow.

“Josh?”

“Here.”

The redhead nodded and raised a hand. “Is Donna with you?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” The room rumbled with something unseen, but he wasn’t about to contest it. Willow was here.

Willow who banished gods.

“Stay put,” she said lowly.

“Glory—”

“I know. Stay put.” The Witch shrugged off her jacket and tossed it against the entryway. The sheath of fabric exploded into a cloud of yarn and cotton. “There’s a ward around your door.”

There was every possibility that Willow could be the scariest person he’d ever met, but he wasn’t about to tell her that.

“Sam—”

“I’m warding his office next.”

“And the President—”

She nodded gravely. “I know.”

Josh did not doubt her. The President would be the first person Glory would attack. If she could take out the President, the rest of them would be lost to chaos, and she could pick them off in a matter of seconds.

There was a ward around his door. Donna was in his arms.

But Willow banished gods. And she was here now.

*~*~*

Glory had not come by herself. She wasn’t as dense as to project an attack on the most secure office in the country with nothing but her strength to fight off the President’s personal guards. And it was unlike anything Spike had ever seen. Not in a hundred years. Not in a thousand conjectures of his very active imagination had he foreseen anything like this, and he imagined he never would again.

“Oh my God.”

Willow was beside him, and her eyes were black with power.

The blonde god flashed a smile over her shoulder. The floor was littered with the bodies of secret service agents, and the President was lost between bereavement and fear. His eyes met Spike’s and explained in plain, silent words that he expected the vampire to turn around and leave before he similarly got hurt.

“Ah, it’s the lover,” Glory chided. “You know, honey, your girl might talk a good game, but it’s all a matter of experience. And let me tell you, she wasn’t ready for a very real taste of her own power.”

Spike’s eyes darkened as his body flooded with rage.

And Willow was beside him.

“You’re thinking about calling for help, aren’t you?” The god turned and kicked the leg of the nearest agent. “You think you guys can take me. A scorned vampire avenging his shmoopy, and a witch who struck gold twice.”

“Never doubt that a small group of people can change the world,” the President muttered, almost to himself.

Spike looked up again, and made a quick decision.

“Go,” Willow said, her voice compressed with magic. She’d read him without having to read a thing.

And he did. Just as the god turned her attention back to the President, Spike leapt forward, and his fangs burst through his gums. He was over her head in a flash, and landed in front of her before she could flinch.

Then he was between them. Between Glory and Bartlet.

If the god wanted the President, she would have to come through the vampire.

He was going to die here. He would die here defending the President, but he would give his life to protect his mate. He would forfeit everything trying to save the woman he loved by killing the woman that had hurt her. Killing the one that had cut their eternity short.

Buffy.

He was still swimming in the pain of his mate. Fury had overwhelmed him.

Spike saw the whites of her eyes. The shock. The glee. The sadistic joy. It was all there, and it was the last thing that registered as he lunged.

TBC