“And certainly not enough to go around,” Spike said. “It would take both of them to slake my thirst.”

“There were plenty of humans waiting to be bitten at home,” Drusilla said, waving a dismissive hand, her interest now solely with Willow. “Now, where have you been waggling your tail, Little Robin Redbreast? I would remember if you had flown into our nest before.”

“Oh, I was sired last year,” Willow said, bashfully lowering her lashes. “Just before the sunshade went up.”

“No!” Drusilla clutched the other girl’s leather-clad forearm. She lifted Willow’s hand to her face and sniffed her wrist. “I never would have guessed you were such a baby. You’re already so strong, so powerful.”

Spike looked scalded by Dru’s dismissal and fell into sulky step with Angelus.

“You know, there’s this new thing called polyamory,” Angelus said to him. “Where you don’t have to get jealous every time your girlfriend falls in love with someone else.”

“Sod off,” Spike grumbled.

“Of course,” Angelus continued, throwing a wink back at Anya, as though annoying Spike were a private joke between the two of them. Her heart cramped in her chest. Before she could decide whether or not to wink back—were winks reciprocal?—Angelus was talking to Spike again. “There is this old thing called breaking up with your girlfriend who keeps falling in love with everyone but you.”

“She’s not falling in love,” Spike grunted as Drusilla tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and fell into Willow’s arms. “It’s been ages since she made a friend. All those stage-door Johnnies don’t count. Disgusting chaos demons and weak humans courting death.”

The group started to trudge uphill, leaving the lights of downtown behind. Was part of the vampire physiology an immunity to aching feet? It certainly wasn’t a skill vengeance demons had. Normally, Anya would use her powers to teleport where she needed to go. Before today, she’d never realized how dependent she was on the Marnoxon gem’s magic. She was beginning to realize why humans were forever sitting in traffic. If she had to be powerless for longer than a day, she would definitely have to learn how to operate a car. At least then she could travel and sit at the same time. What could be more human than that?

“Excuse me, Willow the security officer?” she asked, shouting over Spike’s and Angelus’s irritated mutters. “Where exactly are we going?”

“To see the Black Flame flag,” Willow said without glancing back. “At the Church of the Eternal Night.”

On either side of Anya, Andrew and Jonathan took on the greenish pallor of mortal illness. Anya hoped that they’d keep their bile in their stomachs and off her shoes. She told them as much as she plucked the box of candy from their hands and took an almond cluster for herself. Hopefully protein would help fuel her fragile human feet.

For most of Sunnydale’s history, the Church of the Eternal Night’s headquarters had been the site of a Catholic church. Sprouting castlelike out of a neighborhood of banks and hair salons, it had the same red tile roof and white stucco façade as all the other important buildings in town. Two bell towers chimed on the hour. The marquee listed times for meetings and services. From far away, it would be easy to mistake it for a human house of worship.