Suddenly, he knew. The blackness was all too familiar now, and he fought to get up. He managed to scramble to his feet, draw his sliced hands into aching fists and get up the energy to glare into the darkness as best he could.
SLAP!
His feet were knocked out from under him and he fell backwards, beating his head off of the shadows. He felt his brain rock in its casing and his teeth crammed shut onto his tongue for a second. He coughed, laying there on his back and looking around for the person that did it. “Am I... dead?” he asked, gulping back spit.
“No,” came the humming, springtime voice. A face became visible in the darkness, pale and chalky at first. Dark circles around the eyes and jet black hair matted in front of her face gave her the brief approximation of an albino skeleton. Or of a ghost. It floated, as if bodiless, up into a height that meant it was standing and then slowly started coming toward him. As it got closer, its features became more and more defined, until Eve Spider stepped out in front of him. There was an odd glow around her. An ambience that was welcomed, the first light he’d seen since coming to this dreadful place. “But I am. You killed me, remember?” she teased, her fingers dancing around the stab wound in her silken robes sexually. She rubbed her gut, tracing the lines of it with her index finger, then bringing it up to her mouth. “It’s okay. It doesn’t hurt anymore... only sometimes. When I sleep.” She smiled at him, and it was surprisingly warm. Her slanted eastern eyes held a tint of mischievousness and glee to them, but there was kindness there too. You had to look deep, but it was definitely there. “Get up,” she laughed, and it was no longer that of an evil mastermind. It was that of a friend laughing at someone who’d just tripped over their own feet, and he felt the strange urge to laugh with her.
He repressed it.
“What am I doing here?” Xander asked, sitting up and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I have to get back to Coral Beach. Mike needs my help, he can’t fight those assholes alone,” he pleaded with her, as if she were somehow holding him here.
“I know, sweetie,” she chided gently, reaching out and stroking the side of his face. “That’s what I said too, when I first got here. But for me, it was a one-way ticket.” She smirked. “There wasn’t even an in-flight movie.” She dug her nails into the side of his face, raking them across his cheeks.
Xander coiled back, rushing to his feet. He brought a hand up to his ripped flesh, but found there was none. No marks, not even a scar. Just a chubby little cheek with not enough facial hair on it. “What the hell are you talking about? Where am I?” he demanded, pointing a finger at her. “Tell me, now!”
“Yeah, that’ll work,” came a second voice, the one who’d told him to stop whining a moment ago. Only this time Xander recognized it. All of the colour drained from his face and the blood coming out of him ran cold as ice. His lower lip quivered. He did not want to turn around to face the man behind him. “‘Tell me... now!’” The voice chuckled again. “You sound real intimidating. I almost soiled myself, really. You didn’t sound at all like some scared little teenager wishing he could go home, watch Adam Sandler movies and try to look down his girlfriend’s bra.” Again, laughter.
The lights came on, finally, and he was there again. “Home sweet home,” he mumbled under his breath, trying to mask his fear at the solid metal room they were in the centre of, with a drain for blood directly beneath his feet in the middle of the semi-circle. His remark did not sound fearless, as his voice quivered past the point of comprehension.
They were back at Engen.
He heard the second speaker’s lips open again, the tongue snapping against those sharp, jagged teeth as he prepared to speak. “This is absolutely pathetic,” Genblade spat, and Xander felt tiny driblets of saliva splatter against the back of his neck. “You might as well let me kill you now, and do yourself a favor.”
“Oh, but you mustn’t do that, dear Adam,” Spider said, humming that song again and speaking to the tune. “Ruin all the fun, it would. All the daisies would die and the sun would go all pink.” She spread her legs slightly, looking past Xander to Genblade, a hint of seduction in her face. “Take away from all the other good things that are pink, I say.”
Xander’s brow furrowed as Genblade bumped past him, nearly knocking him over as he made his way over to his wife. His hand slid up her leg and he kissed her passionately, their tongues darting in and out of the space between their mouths. It made Xander wish that the lights were out again. They wished it, too.
Spider’s silks were draped over her body just the way they’d been the day they met. The day she died. She wore them loose and they blew hauntingly in the breeze, just enough so that he couldn’t get a glimpse of anything. He found himself staring at her, until he saw a scar on her right thigh. A surgical scar. The spot where Alpha had put Sara’s ovaries into her.
They stopped kissing, and Genblade glowered at him. “Is this your dream, or mine?” he hissed wickedly.
“Beats me,” Xander replied honestly, shrugging one shoulder.
Genblade whipped out the Spider-Sword as though it were an extension of his own body,
