“Please,” Anya said with an easy smile, as though vampires confessed to torturing each other every day. Maybe they did. Jonathan knew that plenty of vamps were regular customers at Best Pressed Juicery. Andrew was always coming home with stories of customers who paid in ancient coins or who were so recently turned that they still had the fang marks on their necks.

Under the stage lights, Drusilla shrieked and clawed at her face until red rivulets wept down her forehead and cheeks.

“Stop her!” Drusilla screamed, staring up, unseeing, at the ceiling, even as Spike made it onstage and scooped her up. She pitched in his arms, wailing, “Stop the slayer!”

His brow creased in a pained furrow, Angelus released the beer tap, leaving Anya’s fresh pint half-filled. There was no sign of his mocking smile now. His eyes were hard and appraising as his gaze traveled evenly over Jonathan and Andrew.

“You better come with me.”

The band’s name—Drusilla and the Dollies—made a lot more sense after Angelus ushered Jonathan, Andrew, and Anya backstage into the singer’s dressing room. The walls were thick with dolls. Porcelain dolls so old that their skin was cracked and flaking. Barbies plucked bald. Baby dolls missing eyes. So many of them it was hard to see the shelves they were seated on.

Jonathan’s shoulders crept toward his ears. He had the overwhelming urge to pull his turtleneck over his face and run screaming in the other direction. Especially when he spotted Drusilla babbling on a red velvet fainting couch, her face continuing to flicker between human and vampire.

Spike knelt on the floor beside her, holding out a glass of blood. A pink Krazy Straw bobbed up and down in the gore.

“Relax,” he murmured, stroking the singer’s bumpy forehead as she cried out again. He nudged the Krazy Straw against the corner of her mouth. “Drink your juice, pet. It’ll pass.”

Jonathan had never seen a vampire show overt tenderness before. He looked down at his shoes, embarrassed to witness such a private moment.

Angelus obviously felt no such embarrassment. He strode into the dressing room, his shadow falling over Spike’s face.

“We don’t want the vision to pass, Spike,” the larger vampire rumbled. “It could be important.”

Spike’s eyes blazed at his employer, the gentle lover transformed into a menacing beast of prey in a blink. “Look at her, you massive-foreheaded git. She’s in anguish. And not the kind she enjoys.” He peered around Angelus at the group assembled in the door. “So, thank you for the snacks. You can leave the boys and take the girl back to the bar. Can’t you smell a vengeance demon when you meet one?”

“If I put it in my batter, it will make my batter bitter!” Drusilla howled in a Cockney accent even thicker than her boyfriend’s. She slapped the Krazy Straw away from her face. “The bitter blood spills secrets, the slayer laps them up. Bitter batter secret keeper.”