Childe of my Heart ~ Chapter Twenty-eight
by Shanyah
 

He pulled her up by her tunic front and she came willingly, fear palpable and submission irrefutable. Had she struggled, back-chatted, looked him the eye or done anything other what she did, Winifred Burkle would have become Winifred Aurelius.

But she showed him she was already his and the beast tap-dancing in the centre of him wanted a brawl, not the nut numbing exercise of rubber stamping.

“It was my idea, Spike,” Dawn cried behind him, “please don’t hurt her.”

She was his too. Harris, however was bent on not being his. He snapped his head round to the sound of shuffling, watched Xander slowly sit up from sprawling.

Taking him would be more than rubber-stamping. It would be the brawl Spike wanted – the only submission worth using his fangs for. Drag him into the room and fuck him to within an inch of his life. Plough into him and turn him. Drink him down. Pierce his vein and taste the reckless life spray into his mouth. Possess Xander because the devil knew he’d earned him in more than word only.

But Xander, like Fred and Dawn, took up the penitent’s bearing: non-confrontational gaze not meeting his, lips fastened, heart in the proper state of hysterics. No brawl to be had here.

Spike stroked Fred’s hair and snaked his hand down to her wrist, “You too Fred? You want proof before you’ll accept my word.” He jerked on her wrist, twirling her round and behind him, “I’ll give you proof. Get up Dawn.”

He pulled Fred out into the hallway, Dawn running behind them, Xander’s footsteps trailing. Spike marched to the Fifth Ranking Baths, venting his disappointments on Fred.

“Thought you had your head screwed on right. You were the one didn’t need telling, appreciated how things work in demon dimensions. Can’t trust you, who can I bloody trust? You’re not behind me then who’s got my back cause it sure as frigging hell’s not my back Xander is watching.”

One and a half miles accomplished in under ten minutes, Spike trod over The Bath attendants, entered the reception hall and took the right-hand exit, stopping in the centre of a courtyard garden with mosaic tiles for flagstones. Behind him was a marble arch, the feet of its pillars surrounded by potted plants and its entryway boasting ornately engraved oak doors, huge double doors.

Fred, Dawn and Xander gasped for breath beside him. In front of him were the closed doors to ground floor rooms and a staircase leading up to more rooms on the first floor. Fiddlers played a tune on the first floor balcony and dancing to the frenetic music were lithe figures paired up with clumsy figures. Under the tallow and smoke of burning torches rode the tang of wet copper pennies.

“Games rooms,” Spike nodded ahead at the ground floor rooms, “but you knew that Nibblet, didn’t you? Could smell the blood.”

“We stayed away from this courtyard,” Dawn panted.

The lithe figures spun faster, milky cheeks untouched by exertion, red hair flowing, green eyes twinkling and lips singing a melody of spiteful laughter as their dance partners lurched to keep up, arms and faces lathered in sweat.

“Did you get introduced to the dance leaders?” Asked Spike.

“They came to poolside twice and asked us to dance, but we ignored them,” Fred said.

“They’re a type of Baobhan Sith – Scottish Fairies. They don’t ask the third time. They force you to boogie till you drop dead, literally and not gorgeously either.” Spike smirked at Fred and Dawn, “they’re friendly like that,” he said, opening the door to a ground floor room.

Death rattles from the Earned pinioned under the writhing bodies of a pack of Earners; chains and gore – the standard fare of demon games’ rooms. Spike searched among the Earners until he saw one holding a handkerchief to his nose.

“Him in the corner, the Tomb Robber, what game you reckon he’s playing?” He asked Dawn.

“Can we go please?”

“He’s playing tag. Prowls the baths, sees someone he likes and while they’re swimming, he swipes something of theirs from the change rooms, sends the Hounds to go fetch. When the Hounds are done, he takes the dead tagee home and waits for it ripen. It’s why Tomb Robbers are the first suspect – because they tag with other people’s Earned.” He glanced at Fred and Dawn, “Either of you lose a sock, knickers maybe?”

Fred paled.

“You’ve been tagged,” he said.

“W-what should I do?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m only your Amo.”

He turned his back on Fred’s distress, went back to the reception hall, straight ahead through the changing room and into another open air garden, this one with a large oval swimming pool in its centre. He stood by a potted orange tree and surveyed the Fifth Rankers on the porch and on the terrace restaurant above it. Smirking at the bathers in the pool, he jammed his thumb onto a thorn protruding from the tree’s branch.

“This where you swam carefully, here in this water?” He asked, watching blood well up on his thumb-pad.

“Only when there wasn’t anyone else swimming.”

“Bit, there’s always something else swimming,” Spike went to poolside and dipped his hand into the water to his wrist. “Doesn’t take much to wake it, a scratch from sparring will do the job.” He glanced at Fred, “that bleach scent? Not chlorine, luv. Monster’s piss.”

A rumbling started in the water. The bathers struck out for the side of the pool as a column of water jack-knifed from the surface and gained on a swimmer.

“Great camouflage, like a jellyfish. You don’t see it till it stings you,” Spike said as the water coloured snake closed it’s jaws on the slow swimmer. It bit him in half and agitated the water, feeding with the enthusiasm of a blood crazed shark.

Dawn, Fred and Xander gaped.

“You missed a bit,” Spike called as a bloody chunk floated by.

The snake raised its head at his voice, and zig-zagged for poolside with several bits hanging from its jaws. It got closer, Spike stayed put, closer still and Dawn swung round for the courtyard’s archway yelling, “point made, Spike, let’s go!”

Off he went, leading the disobedient ones into a freezing hall, the place bathers came to between stints in the sauna or steam rooms, or before a swim in the pool’s balmy waters. Those people were scrambling out of the cold plunge pools in the high-ceilinged hall as the snake came in from the pool garden, its meal visible through the transparent body, spaghetti of part chewed limbs in a belly that had room for more.

Spike stood in the snake’s path, thinking on tying it into a reef knot.

“Spike!” Dawn hopped on the spot.

“Ahead, Bit, warm room. Go…go!”

Fred, Xander and Dawn ahead of him and the snake behind him, Spike bolted across the hall, into the warm room and through to the steam room with the scalding plunge pool at its centre. He leaped over the pool, warmed by billows of steam, tickled by the hubbub his larking about caused among the Fifth Rankers on the steam room benches. Just when he thought it would slide into the boiling pool, the snake hit the brakes and took the long way round to him, great slithering body making it look like a short way.

“Bugger,” he sprinted for the doorway.

Out into the cold hall again, through the archway at the bottom of the corridor and into another courtyard, smaller than the first. Up the flight of stairs to the first floor and coming face to face with a marble bust of Tresten in an alcove at the top of the staircase. He glared at the statue, seizing it when wet slithering sounded behind him. The snake took the steps at an ungainly gait, torch-light shooting rainbow coloured glints off its rippling scales, flat head clearing the top step as Spike swung the marble bust down. He smashed it atop the snake’s head, lifted and hammered, pulped long after the hissing had ended. 

“And that, my friends, is how it’s done,” he threw the marble bust along the balcony.

Grimacing at the slime on his hands, he went into one of the rooms off the balcony, not a games rooms this, a quiet room fragrant with massage oils and plush with rugs, open sky-lights, sink in one corner. He scrubbed his hands at the sink and explored the rest of the balcony. Quiet rooms on the right wing, quiet rooms plus a utility room and a reading room on the left wing. Envious of their restful lounging on the divans, Spike disturbed the readers in the small-size library by noisily rifling through the books in the recessed bookshelves.

“May I be of assistance, Amo?” A hulk unfolded from an armchair.

“No,” he went back along the corridor in search of Fred, Dawn and Xander, tripped over the statue and went down swearing. “Fine sodding place to leave a statue! Where is everyone?”

“Down here,” Dawn shouted back.

‘Down here’ was the garden below. A clipped lawn separated a grove of palm trees from a collection of marble picnic tables set around a pool. With a few inches of dirty water in the bottom of it, the pool was the same oval shape as the snake’s home, but much smaller – a backyard pool. Chess boards were carved into the table tops of the picnic benches, and it was behind one of these tables that Dawn, Fred and Xander stood, twiddling with chess marble pieces and looking at Spike as if expecting more explosions of anger.

But his anger had dried up, replaced by relief that Fred and Dawn hadn’t come to any harm. He focussed on the far side of the garden, could just make out red brick and grey marble beyond the palm trees.

“What’s through there?”

“Our steam room, sauna and bathroom,” Dawn said.

“Yours?”

“Well not ours, but the ones in the main building are crowded so we use the steam room here, it’s a lot quieter,” Fred said. “Mostly, you get readers and chess players in the pool house – I mean here – and they don’t hardly notice you.”

“You get rough types and normal types in the Baths. It’s like the rough types use the big house and the normal types use the pool house,” Dawn eagerly explained. “And no one asks you to dance here…sometimes a masseur asks if you want a massage – not a demon masseur – and they’re cool about it when you turn them down.”

“You’re definite these masseurs aren’t demons because?”

“They don’t look demon,” Dawn said. He shook off his game face and hers blushed red. “Oh,” she said.

I’ve raised a bunch of idiots, Spike thought, eyes beseeching the paling skies. He reckoned it was about two hours before dawn and he pricked his ears up for the blare of grief, contracted his abdominal muscles in preparation for his demon’s swelling as it rejoiced in the lamentations. His pricked up ears and prepared abs were for nothing.

“There’s a bloke that bawls. Two hours before sunrise to the second, he starts bawling. Walks inside the walls, same as that demon on The Slayer’s twenty first birthday bash,” Spike reached into his duster and pulled out a packet of smokes. “I’d be dropping off to sleep or patrolling the unit and this bloke starts mourning from here,” he patted belly, “right where the demon sits. Mille ans Ma Seulement, one thousand years of looking into the dark void. Je craigne que quand ces montagnes passent…”

He took a deep drag of his cigarette, slowly exhaled. “I fear that when these mountains pass away I, weary with life, must search on for My Only without hope of death’s mercy.”

Elbows resting on the balcony wall, Spike followed his hunch. “You hear the bawling too, Bit. You come here ’cause the Wall Demon doesn’t walk in the Bath’s walls.”

Shivering, Dawn scratched her nape. “I never come to The Baths before dawn, so I don’t know if the Wall Demon walks here. But yeah, I hear him in the unit walls. It’s like tuning into the funeral station every morning.” Dawn startled as three Bath attendants hurried in through the courtyard gates, watched them run up the staircase and disappear into the reading room.

Xander curved an arm around her shoulders, bringing her closer to his side. “Go on,” he said. 

“Jude’s said, a while back, he was talking about the Fifth Ranking Baths. He said it was a spa ‘equipped to gentle Earner’s troubles away.’ I thought if I tried the spa…I tried it and it worked, it chilled me out. I kept coming here because I didn’t know where else to go.”

‘You should’ve come to me’, Spike was about to say when the hulk strutted out of the reading room, the three Bath attendants at his side. He slowed at the head of the staircase, tutted down at the dead snake and proceeded along the balcony.

“Is Asp’s demise your work, Master Spike? If so, I must protest, for Asp was Custodian of the bathing pool. He ensured the water’s hygiene by sterilising it with his bodily discharges,” said the hulk.

“Lochness tried to swallow me.”

“Why does this astonish you?” The hulk frowned down at Spike. “You provoked him with your blood, disputed his authority over the water and it is customary for Asp to swallow he who disputes him.” The hulk retrieved Tresten’s bust from the floor, tutted at its slimy face and passed it to one of the attendants. “One expects better behaviour from an Earner.”

“Who the hell d’you think you are, sneering down at me?“

“I am Superintendent to The Fifth Ranking Bath, Owned of Lord Tresten and charged to provide amenities to suit the palates of every hue and race of Fifth Ranker and his Earned,” conceit in every word. “I am also charged by Lord Tresten to deal with, as I see fit, Earners who break Bath law. It is against Bath law to kill Asp.”

Oh here we go again, recompense and atonement and you know what? Screw it. He’d done enough to appease Lord Tresten; had learnt the rules by rote, taught himself the main demon languages in the Trail, hadn’t put a foot wrong since making Fifth Ranking. He could hang Tresten’s flag in his window and the wanker wouldn’t be satisfied. Would still send Advisors into his courtyard and place underlings in authority over him.

Xander was right.

He either assert himself or get used to feeling the force of Tresten’s tread on his back, and he’d die first. He would face the hangman before accepting the position of Tresten’s shag pile.

“Tell the chief Tomb Robber from me that the game of tag His started with Mine is over. Scour this courtyard, make the pool fit for use, get new divans, rugs and towels for the quiet rooms. Swill out the steam room, sauna and bathroom. The readers have ten minutes to clear out for good, this is my play pen now.”

Superintendent crossed his arms. “By whose authority-”

“It’s the least you can do seeing as how you authorised my Earned to use the Baths without my say-so. Shootable offence, that.” Spike hurdled over the balcony wall, hit the ground swaggering, “and I want a lock for these gates,” he said, slapping oak as he walked through the double gates. “Shift you three. Got rules to bend.”

CHILDE OF MY HEART ~ CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

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