The Sick Rose
by Pandarus


12. Prague Golem

Spike rang Isaac Goldstein's doorbell again and was gratified by how quickly Mrs Post opened the door. He held the book just out of her reach and watched her mouth tighten.

"You wouldn't be thinking about double-crossing me, now, would you?"

"Certainly not, Master William," she said pettishly. "I'm a woman of my word."

"Tell that to Petr Soucek, love. Now, the thing is I'm a suspicious type and I felt the need for some security - I'm sure you can understand. So right now your little friend Martina is still very much alive and well aware of who it was that invited a vampire into the Watchers' Prague HQ. She won't be telling anyone for a little while, of course; I've stowed her away in a nice safe place. But if you're thinking of screwing with me, Gwenny, then she'll be free to tell her Watcher chums all about what a bad girl you've been."

He was bluffing, as it happened; all these years of poker playing had made him a pretty skilful liar. Martina was thoroughly dead. He had made her drink before her heart stopped, though; the notion of a vamped Watcher rather tickled him.

Gwendolyn Post looked bored.

"I assure you, this is entirely unnecessary. You have fulfilled your part of the bargain, now I shall fulfil mine. Give me the book."

Spike considered his options and found them remarkably thin.

"What's the magic word?" he asked. She stared at him through narrowed eyes.

"Please."

"There you go!"

The door slammed a moment later and Spike was left alone and bookless on the threshold, wondering whether the bitch would keep her word and where to start looking for these bloody witches if she didn't. The news that they couldn't kill female demons had taken a great weight off his mind, but he wasn't about to get complacent anytime soon.

* * *


As luck would have it, a youngish tart happened along the street whilst Spike was waiting impatiently for Gwendolyn Post. At least, he thought she was a tart; dressed like a tart, smelled like a tart - spunk and sweat, fear and anger and cheap perfume. Not that such semantics mattered - meat was meat, regardless of its name or occupation. He savoured the hasty clip-clop of her heels long before she strutted into view. Such sweet vulnerability in the sound. He delighted in the vagaries of fashion; could not imagine Drusilla ever donning such unseemly footwear, but he relished the seductive rhythm of these stiletto-shod footsteps; the sharp, percussive beat of precariously arched feet aching to be chased. Promising to be caught.

He watched her sail around the corner, wearing her body like an advert and a shield. Hard little face masked in faded makeup; mascara-smudges under her eyes and lipstick almost worn away - only a crimson ring still staining the edges of her lips, quickly fading into the honest dusky pink of her naked mouth. He took in these details as she walked through pools of lamplight and hurried through the shadows in between them.

Smiled. Just what he wanted.

She didn't notice him uncoil leather wings in the darkness and had barely time for a sharp inhalation of night air when he seized her and covered her wet mouth with one hand, wrapped an arm around her wildly struggling torso and dragged her into the shadows.

Hot skin quivering against his snarl and then the blissful tearing as his teeth ripped a beautiful new hole in her throat. Her scream was imprisoned by his palm and it bubbled bloodily into his mouth. He drained her veins with gulp after ravenous gulp - no need to pause for breath, after all. Imagined it was Gwendolyn Post whose heart was thrashing helplessly towards silence in his grasp and smiled against her neck. Bitch.

When she was spent and he was rosy and brimming with second-hand life, he dropped her broken body between two parked cars. Retrieving her orphaned handbag he rummaged through it, plucking out a wallet and a pack of Lucky Strikes with a triumphant grin. Leafed quickly through the wallet and extracted the crumpled bills with practised ease, ignoring the receipts and scribbled phone numbers and the creased photo of a blue-eyed toddler. Dropped the ransacked wallet and bag onto her limp body and strolled back to Goldstein's house, lighting up a fag.

If she were double crossing him, Gwendolyn Post could hope for no such merciful death.

Faint stench of sulphur and pine curling from the house. Spike stared hungrily at the windows, cursing the small print that came with the gift of vampirism. Bloody invitations. Stupid rule. A flicker of blue-white light, almost opaque in its intensity, licking quickly at the glass and then darkness shrouded the house once more. He cocked his head to one side, listening hard, then bounded up the steps to the threshold. Waited.

When the door opened, Spike's jaw dropped. The figure before him stood at least eight foot tall. Built, he reflected, like the proverbial brick shithouse. He stared at the hulking great human-shaped thing - a blank-eyed Apollo with feet of clay.

"Let me guess - your name would be Mud?" Spike's gaze travelled down to the flat, sexless branching of torso into thighs. "Or possibly Ken... I take it this isn't Mr Goldstein?" he asked as nonchalantly as he could.

Gwendolyn Post's voice was thick with triumph, her face flushed with the sated expression of a woman who had just been well and truly laid. Or something very like it.

"This is our way into the lion's den, Master William," she said. Her crisp hair was dishevelled and still crackling with blue sparks.

"Our?" She smiled at him, and Spike felt his cock stirring automatically at the look and the smell of her.

"Our. I'm coming along for the ride; and if you want your Drusilla to be safe, you'll have to restrain your appetites for the duration. Besides, the golem won't tolerate any attack upon my person."

He tried to remember when he had last heard such concentrated smugness in a voice. Darla, of course.

"Fair enough, pet," he said, pretty-faced, his blunt teeth gritted in a glittering smile. "Whatever you say. You're the boss."

"You would do well to remember that," she said, stepping out into the night a pace behind her golem. Spike was acutely aware of her movements, but his eyes were fixed on the golem as it moved into the circle of lamplight.

"I thought the secret of making them had been lost," he said.

It moved like water, somehow - not lumbering, as he had half-expected, nor yet with any human or demon grace; but bonelessly, like lava or liquid mud. As if its form were a matter of whim; as if all the molecules in its body were rolling forward together almost by coincidence, like the shape of a shoal of thousands of tiny fish. As if gravity held no sway over it at all. Strange, even by Spike's standards.

"It was lost," said Mrs Post. "But I found it again. With a little help from Mr Goldstein."

Spike could almost have pitied the poor bastard.

Gwendolyn Post stalked across the pavement with every appearance of fearlessness. Spike did not reach out and snap her brittle neck. He did not seize a double handful of clean brown hair and yank her head right back, slice through the white skin over her jugular and watch her blood arc through the night air. He did not punch her in the solar plexus or plough the fragile bones of her nose back into her skull. Instead he followed the girl and her golem, like a good dog, and bided his time.

Drusilla was his only priority, the dark sun around which his world revolved, the sweet erratic beat by which he measured time. His heart. His soul. The cream in his coffee, the salt in his wound. His love for her was boundless and binding and tender as a bruise. Gwendolyn Post pissed him right off and he would happily unravel her intestines to make his girl a skipping rope - but there was a time and a place for such things. For Dru's sake he could put his pride to one side and lope after the lapsed Watcher. Drusilla's safety was paramount.

Mrs Post walked very quietly for a human, her neat feet shod in predictably sensible shoes. The golem, far from shaking the ground with its reverberating tread, flowed forwards as silently as smoke. Spike wasn't entirely sure it was actually touching the road at all.

"Where are we going, then, Gwenny?" She didn't so much as glance at him.

"We are going," she enunciated with irritating precision, "to rescue your lover."

"Yeah, I got that part, love," he replied after a moment, congratulating himself on his restraint at not having lunged straight at her in vamp face. "But how do you know where to find the buggers who are hexing her?"

"It is my business to know such things," she said. Spike very nearly retorted that it was her business to stake vampires, not save their pretty little arses - but he bit his tongue just in time. Screw the small talk anyway. Paused long enough to light another of his newly-acquired fags; drew in a long breath of smoke and felt the pleasant little kick possess his body. Not alcohol or blood, but still a nice low-level buzz that took the edge off his frustration. He watched the cocky sway of her receding backside with a tight little smile, and strode after her once again.