Willow gave him a slow blink, Drusilla’s hand still cupped to her mouth. “All gone,” she said. The pink tip of her tongue flicked across Drusilla’s palm. “Unless you want to see if there’s any slayer blood left inside.”

“I don’t mean the blood, I mean—ARGH!” He yowled as Angelus gripped his shoulder and shoved him hard into the nearest palm tree, cramming his arm back into its socket. The arm made a crunch almost exactly like a rat being run through the Best Pressed juicer.

Angelus let go and shook his head. “What’d I tell you, man? Respect yourself.”

“How can I when we’ve been trounced by a little girl?” Spike growled. He adjusted his leather coat so that it once again sat square on his shoulders.

“At least you all made it out alive,” Andrew said. “Or, you know, still undead. That’s worth celebrating, isn’t it?”

“We got our asses handed to us by the slayer, so no, I don’t want to sit around and sing ‘Kumbaya,’” Spike said. He scuffed his heel in the grass, which refused to budge no matter how hard he kicked it. “What I want is a bloody rematch. I want to tear her head from her adorable little body.”

Angelus gave a contemplative nod, pacing between palm trees. “She is cute for a slayer. The last one I faced was back when we were in Rome. She was all teeth and gums.”

Drusilla closed her eyes, lost in a reverie. “Oh yes,” she moaned. “Long Gums. She was yummy. AB negative in the wild. You don’t find that every day.”

“This one talks a lot of nonsense,” Angelus said. He stroked the end of his ponytail without seeming to realize it. “But she’s cute.”

“Ugh, she’s a child, you creep,” Willow spat at Angelus, her hands combing through Drusilla’s fight-mussed ringlets. “What are you? Two hundred years old? Three?”

“Two fifty,” Angelus sniffed. “Ish.”

Spike let out a laugh, punching the taller vampire in the arm. “Try two seventy-two, you old git. I was at your last birthday party. And the hundred and fifty before that. Blimey, I need new friends.”

“Wait, how old is the slayer?” Anya asked, looking to Andrew and Jonathan for help. “Like eight years old? Ten? I’m not great at human ages. You all decay so quickly.”

“She’s a teenager,” Andrew said, glancing up from the backpack open in front of him. “She looks like one of the popular girls from our high school. You know, when we went to high school. Before it blew up.”

Willow’s lip curled in apparent distaste. “Exactly. There’s no way she’s a legal adult. She smelled like naturally occurring collagen.”