Chapter One
Neophyte
Six Months Later…
She was hunting. There was no other word for it. It had ceased to be patrolling a long time
ago. The darkness inside of her called
out for the night. The blood in her
veins rapidly coursed through her with the thrill of the chase. The feeling of absolute power and
fearlessness settled inside of her and she lived for that rush. Hunting her
enemies had become her only reprieve from the memories that haunted her.
She closed her eyes and breathed in the night air. This was the only time that she truly felt
useful anymore. School sucked and she
really wasn’t getting anything out of it.
She was at a point where she didn’t even care. There was no drive inside of her to do anything else. The yearning for normalcy just seemed to fly
out the window. Now she didn’t care if
she had a normal life or not. She had a
nice normal boyfriend, and honestly, she found him dull and boring.
He didn’t to it for her. She knew even though she hated to admit it,
that there was only one person that would ever be able to do it for her, but he
kicked her out of his life, threw her away like she was trash going out to the
curb.
She had tried for so long to figure
out why he did what he did. She had
spent weeks of sleepless nights trying to comprehend all the cruel things he
had said. In her head she knew that she
had forced him to act that way. If she
hadn’t begged and pleaded with him he wouldn’t have pushed her away so
cruelly. But she had only spoken what
was in her heart. She had only done
what her heart and soul were crying out for.
If the rational part of her brain were working properly she would have
recognized that he did only what he thought was best for her.
She kicked the wet grass with her
foot; she was tired of that excuse. He
always used that excuse; did he think she was some stupid kid with nothing
upstairs? Did he think that she didn’t
know what was best for her? Well he did
say that she was a selfish little girl, didn’t he? I guess that truly is how he feels. She was nothing but a young,
immature, selfish little girl how could she ever think that a vampire of his
years and experience could love her the way that she loved him.
She should have seen it coming because
now all she was left with was a heart that for all intents and purposes,
stopped beating. She was stuck with a
soul that was turning blacker than the blackest nights. He left her with nothing, nothing but
this…the hunt and the kill. He had taken away everything that was beautiful to
her, leading her into the darkness, and ironically, she felt more powerful now
than she ever had before. Now she
wondered why she ever shunned her darker side.
A crack of a branch in the distance
alerted her, her body tensed she acutely listened to the sounds of the night,
waiting for that moment of certainty when she would know which direction to
go. Crack, there it was again, her head
whipped to the left her eyes scanning the darkness. She saw a faint shadow swiftly moving across the cemetery.
Her heart started thumping in her
chest. Her pulse quickened as she
smiled into the night. She began to
sprint across the dew-covered grass.
Her hair whipped in her face as she made a sharp right. She saw her prey in the distance, twenty
maybe thirty feet in front of her. Her
smile increased, her pulse raced away, as her heart filled with the adrenaline
of the hunt. She jumped and leaped over
a tombstone, gracefully flying through the air she landed on her target pushing
him to the ground. She sat up
straddling him and rammed her stake through his heart.
She got up wiping away the dust that
covered her. She rolled her head to the
right and then the left, cracking it with the motion. She rolled her shoulders taking a quick look around and finally
felt at peace. She walked away, making
her way back to her room. Back to the
bed where her nice normal boyfriend slept, back to a world of light and dreams,
back to the lies that had become her world.
**
Spike watched the Slayer attack her
prey from the dark shadows of the cemetery, with lethal force and deadly
precision. He often followed her out on
her patrols partly because he loved to watch her work and because lately he was
worried about her.
Ever since she had come back from LA six months ago she had
changed. She was no longer the carefree
college student with the quick wit and humor. She no longer parried insults
back and forth with him. She hardly even spared him a glance anymore and talking
to her friends seemed to become something of the past. She tolerated him and the others, and that
was it.
She patrolled more often and with more violence. It seemed that every vampire that crossed
her path, she had a personal vendetta against.
Even the ones that she use too let go after giving her information got
dusted in a blink of an eye. This
Slayer didn’t care. She was a killing
machine with a systematic routine…hunt and kill.
Spike basically saw it as the
beginning of the end, the downfall of the greatest Slayer that ever lived.
He had seen and fought many Slayers
and had killed them with no problem. He
always knew that what made Buffy special and a warrior to be reckoned with was
her attachments to this world. It was
her emotions and love of life and the people in it that gave her that extra
fire she needed to win.
But this Slayer lost that somewhere
back in LA six months ago. It wasn’t
that hard to figure out that the gel-haired idiot had something to do with
it. He had heard the rumors about him
too. He had heard that he was more
demon than anything else. He had heard
the tale of how he grimly stormed into Wolfram and Hart and slaughtered every
one of them leaving behind only piles of dust and headless corpses in his
wake. He had heard how he killed
Drusilla and Darla without a second thought leaving them to burn to death in a
building as he stood by and watched with smile on his face.
It seemed to him that these two once
star-crossed lovers were unwittingly on the same path, put there by the idiotic
ramblings of a fool in a love.
As he watched the Slayer he had to
shake off the icy coldness that swept over him. He used to only get that
feeling from Angelus but now he was getting it from her and it was freaking him
out. Not to mention the fact that when she did look at him it was with loathing
and hatred as if she associated him with Angel. So besides the occasional
stalking detail that the Watcher put him on, he tried to stay out of her way.
Quite a turnaround when you consider
just a little while ago he was nipping at her heels like a lovesick puppy. But all that changed one night while
following her on patrol. He had noticed a dark figure steadily following her as
well. He knew it wasn’t a vamp because
he didn’t sense any. He continued to
watch the dark figure and as the Slayer finished off the last vamp the figure
emerged. It was Riley.
He walked up to her and started
yelling at her for fighting four vamps by her self. She looked at him with cold eyes, grabbed his head and brought it
down to her mouth. She kissed him
savagely making his lip bleed then coldly demanded that he either fuck her or
leave her alone.
Riley stupid as he may be did exactly
that. He shut up then proceeded to fuck
the Slayer into the nearest tree. Spike
the pervert not willing to miss this kind of free show had stayed low in the
bushes watching.
He was so turned on by the animalistic
violence of the Slayer that he reached into his pants and started to stroke
himself. It wasn’t until he took his eyes
off of the Slayers breasts that he looked up to see her staring directly into
his eyes. He stilled his motion not knowing what to expect. But she just coldly smiled at him and
continued to stare at him, while commanding Riley to fuck her harder.
It was in that precise moment that his
cock softened and he realized that the Slayer no longer held that lure of
goodness and purity. The things that
had attracted him to her in the first place were now replaced with nastiness
and cruelty. She was just down right
mean and as Spike watched her fuck Riley with not an ounce of emotion in her
eyes he knew that the Slayer he had known was gone and that a new Slayer was
left in her place.