Samson and the Broken Dolls - chapter one

Brought down the house while they were still in it. Let slip the dogs of war on the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart and inflicted Agincourt on the armies of Hell. Blazed brighter than Leonidas and the Spartans - made an alley into Thermopolyae but ended the story still standing. Charged into the valley of death and taken the guns. Held off the slavering hoards and torn them to messes. Gone for the poetry game instead of bowls but still defeated Hell's Armada. Taken on the ultimate backs to the wall fists and fangs fight and come out swinging - torn the enemy apart and avenged their lost ones in enough blood to swim in.

He really thinks they've won.

The Wolf, the Ram and the Hart might wield all the armies of Mordor, but they've the tactical skills of General Custer. The giant crushes half the orcs in its rush to get to them, tied up as they are in a narrow alley that allows only a few of the enemy to attack at once. The giant crushes even more of its own side when Illyria rips its kneecaps off and it crashes backwards onto its allies. It makes perfect cover and an obstacle for the enemy even before Illyria guts it with its own bones.

And the wind might not blow away the enemy, but the rain quenches the dragon-fire - enough anyway for him to leap onto it when it swoops down on them and with trophy-sword slay the dragon. Angel's protest of, "That was my dragon!" makes victory all the sweeter.

He laughs as he tears an orc limb from limb and shouts, "Didn't you see Return of the King, mate? The blond guy always gets the beastie!"

He's slaughtered his way across continents, but never has the blood soaked into his skin, into his hands, into his very bones the way it does now. Not with the very battle itself, the thirst for payback, for justice, for vengeance for the dead, filling mind, body and soul.

Time slows to a crawl as Gunn falls to his own wounds, taking enough demons with him to drop surrounded by a circle of the slain.

Spike feels every ounce of loss when Gunn finally stops moving. He can't stop fighting, he can't stop killing, feeling every blow to his body and exulting in the ones he returns ten-fold, but his scream of, "Charlie!" becomes the music to his whirlwind of destruction.

Even Illyria stops killing for a moment to say, "Impressive." Her tears flow, as they have since her arrival, through her ever-renewing mask of blood, washing her clean even as she renders the forces of her ancient enemies into their component parts.

Angel's methodical, economical. He slices, dices - his jaw clenches harder when he catches sight of Gunn's body, but it just makes him fight the harder. There's a peace to him, even amid the destruction that takes Spike back a century.

But Spike pulls back from the temptations of memory and concentrates on the current carnage, on keeping himself in one piece and killing. Angel might have the look of a man happy to martyr himself for the cause, but Spike's been there, done that and all present circumstances to the contrary isn't wildly keen to do it again right now. He's going to get out of the impossible battle in one piece. Hell, he's made a practice of it, and practice makes perfect. Just like he's a perfect killing machine, poetry in motion, poetry that won't get out of his head even when he wants it to, and it all adds up to a stanza of slaughter.

And it's an epic worthy of Homer when the berserker poet, the broken god and the battered champion stand bloodied but victorious on the bodies of their enemies. Standing by sheer bloody-mindedness, but standing none the less. Demons dead and dying everywhere, but none more on the horizon, and after the howls of hell, the groans of the dying demons are blessed silence.

A silence they barely have time to savour, before one last figure stalks her way through the corpses; a gorgeous brunette who steps over the dragon in her high-heels.

"Lilah."

"Angel."

Lilah's killer-heels are unstained from stepping over both the dragon and the orcs it crunched in its fall. It's her eyes that seem to bruise seeing who's not there, fallen or standing.

"I'm sorry, Lilah, he didn't make it." Shame, grief, pride, pragmatism war in Angel's eyes, even as the rest of him is stillness.

"Wesley is dead." Lilah hears Illyria, but she's only got eyes for Angel.

And they're daggers drawn, even if her voice is deadly quiet. "I always knew that you'd kill him. What we're going to do to you, Angel, I'm going to enjoy it."

"You will not have the opportunity. I will squash you into the dirt you belong in, like I trampled the other worms. Though I expected more, even from the Wolf, the Ram and the Hart."

"And you must be Illyria." Lilah refines obvious grief into purest vitriol. "Nice job with the extreme makeover on Fred, by the way. Still no figure, but, hey, I guess even gods can't work miracles."

"You know Extreme Makeover?" Spike knows it's not the most crucial question of the night, but he can't help it. Besides, the longer he gets to talk, the longer vampire healing has to fix him up for another go. The way he feels now he's stopped fighting, the way Angel looks, even the way Illyria resembles nothing more than a doll that's gone ten rounds with a two-year old, they all need all the recuperation time they can get.

"Spike, right? Prime candidate for a Queer Eye makeover, notoriously impatient and perceptive, unsuitable candidate for the whole corrupting onto our side for The Apocalypse idea owing to - and can I shudder here - choosing to get your own soul back." Lilah does the full shoulder movements to go with 'shudder'.

He can't help smiling. And feeling worried on more than one count, so he counters it with snark. "You've read the press-clippings. I'm flattered, love. But, no makeovers! I'm not that knackered I can't go for the second-half of the big match." He is, but he will. He always does what it takes.

She smirks. "Extreme Makeover, American Idol, The Swan, the whole Reality Television thing - it's all us."

And it clearly pays off. The bird looks good: legs that go on forever, eminently rip-able silk stockings shown off to advantage in a short skirt and shoes Buffy would kill for, and a figure-hugging jacket just begging to be unbuttoned. Even her Rita Hayworth hair and make-up seem curiously immune to the driving rain.

Unlike Illyria, who's all blue-brown hair plastered to her head from the downpour, even as it washes her armour clean of the blood trapped in its ridges, and who demands of Angel, "You waste breath on this rotting corpse, raised up body and soul as a slave to my enemies?"

Angel's quiet, "Unfortunately," is lost to the rain.

"There's no rot, they don't wait that long. The Senior Partners just slap the dead middle management back together and put us back to work. And hey, why not, it saves bringing in temps." Lilah's all Queen Bitch of the Universe, but she doesn't stop her hands playing with her pearls - exposing the decapitation scar.

Angel's wince is almost invisible to those that haven't spent decades with him. Illyria's ice-smile and head-cocked study of Lilah as an insect under glass is strangely reminiscent of a Fred Spike's never seen, but who seems to belong in that body the way she never has before.

Lilah's eyes signals at Gunn's broken body, looks for the man who isn't there and returns to hold a gaze with Spike. Under the acid-tones, she seems almost desperate for him to understand what she can't tell him. "And anyway, I prefer to think of it less as slavery, more as on-going career progression."

And he is getting it, the un-living hell awaiting his department-head mates. He really, really doesn't want to think it possible, think Peaches would sign them over that way to serve his cause. But Spike knows better and worse, and never denies it no matter how much he might want to. "Promotion?"

"You got it!" The momentary softening in her expression in what has to be relief, the flash of vulnerability under the shine and snark could so easily be missed by anyone less practised in reading the unreadable. "No, come to think of it, I do."

But he's a master at seeing truth when it's right in front of him in someone he doesn't love. "What? When you're dead?" It helps that most importantly she seems to want him to see it, to get it, to know what will happen to his friends. Most strangely of all, for a minion of the Senior Partners, he can see she wants him to do something to prevent it.

And he will - or die trying.

And she sees that and gifts him with the strangest flash of relief he's ever seen, before unleashing her claws on Angel. "Well, me anyway. Holland, after that bright idea to give the branch to Team Angel - ho boy, wouldn't wanna be in his shoes. Or, hey, yours!"

Angel's burned out, as hollowed out inside as Spike was a year ago in the mouth of Hell. He's soaked to the skin, and the drowned-rat look isn't as spectacular as the light-show of glory, but Angel's not going to fall into ashes doing anything less than spitting defiance at Lilah and the Senior Partners. "Lilah, if you're all the Senior Partners have left to throw against me, I'm terrified."

"Oh, believe me, you should be." And in this, she's one hundred percent serious.

And Illyria remains one hundred percent literal. "I do not see why I should fear when all my enemies can offer is one last bug for me to crush."

"Yeah, where's the rest of the hounds of hell, pet? Got to say, love, just ain't feeling the terror right now." Spike's too tired even with the break from the fighting to feel the fear, but he'll never admit that to the enemy.

Lilah shimmies. "No, you and Action-Figure Ex-Fred, you'll be feeling it in, ooh, about eight hours."

"I was right. Eliminate Vail, and the sorcerers you need to really summon the monsters go to the mattresses." Angel's has a tone so redolent of the days when they tore Europe apart. It sounds no different now.

Lilah smirks, "You've been watching The Godfather too much, Angel."

"But he's right, isn't he? That's why your lot stopped coming, after all the sound and fury." Which has died down to a keen from the dying, amid the steady pounding of the rain washing the blood from Spike's duster, hair and hands. " Knew a witch once. Learnt a few things. Your lot were summoning from a long way away, and distance from the target adds to the drain and reduces what each of them can do. Your boys ran out of juice, pet, didn't they? And even if you fly 'em in, they can't go bringing in the troops for a while yet. The buggers need to recharge first."

Lilah's nod is almost imperceptible, but it's there, as is a strange pride that her messages have got through. "I said the giant was all image, no substance, but, hey, you try telling the Paris Branch what to summon."

"So we've got a window to regroup our forces?" The touch of hope looks almost strange on Angel's resigned face.

"Well, they have. You, Boss, have a performance appraisal to attend." She looks upwards to a swirl of lightning forming overhead, "And, Ace, I really don't wanna be in your shoes, but mine - it's gonna be a blast."

Angel recognises the portal of the Senior Partners and barely has time to shout, "Inside the Hotel," before it pulls Angel and Lilah upwards and they disappear into its maw.