“The slayer attacked us first!” Jonathan continued, stomping his foot for emphasis. The sound was mostly lost in the noise of the club. “She’s the reason Warren’s dead. She drew first blood! And I have been a coward for too long. Letting other people lead. Letting other people make my decisions. But the slayer has terrorized us for long enough! We owe it to ourselves and our community to see this through to the end. This is our town, not hers. It’s up to us to send her packing! Right? Who’s with me!”

He punched the sky with his eyes closed. It took him a couple of seconds to notice the lack of response.

“Sure, whatever,” Angelus said. “Suit yourselves, blood bags. It’s your funeral.”

“The important thing is that we get the gem,” Anya said, punctuating each word with a slash of her ax. “No one gets a free drink until the Marnoxon gem is secured. The apocalypse isn’t thwarted if a piece of Creation ends up in the hands of a baby eater. Or a chaos demon. God only knows what kind of disgusting mucus-covered world they’d wish for.”

Pushing his way through the throng, Spike marched toward Angelus, his face stormy.

“Jesus, who invited the Gorch idiots?” he asked.

“We don’t need their skills, just their capacity for evil,” Angelus said.

“This whole thing feels like a reunion no one asked for,” Spike spat. He rolled back his shoulders and straightened the lines of his coat, as though expecting someone to take a picture of him. “It’d better bloody work. We’ll never be able to get the ooze residue off the dance floor. Did you see the size of that Glairy bloke?”

“How can you tell it’s a male?” Andrew asked, craning his neck for a view of the blob swelling near the stage.

“Female Glairys secrete corrosive ooze,” Spike said, scratching the scalded skin on his hands. “If it weren’t male, there’d be a hole in the floor from here to hell.”

“Like a Xenomorph,” Andrew said. “Cool.”

“Cool, but not necessarily evil,” Angelus said, scanning the room. “We’ve got plenty of amateur demons waiting on free drinks, but I’m not seeing enough true malevolence to make this plan work.”

“The genital renders aren’t bad enough for you?” Anya asked, gesturing to the line of miniature demons leaning against the far wall, digging trenches in the floor as they sharpened their scythe-shaped claws against the concrete.

“Amateurs,” Angelus said with a sniff. “We need some fresh-outta-hell bastards. Give me a Bezoar or one of the Deathwok Clan. Someone not afraid to really get their hands dirty.”