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The Contest
Lindsey McDonald was bored. It wasn’t bad enough he had to be a fucking ghost; oh no, he also had to be stuck haunting the same colossal prick who’d had him shot like a rabid dog. He’d almost rather have stayed in hell—even though this last hell had been a particularly nasty one involving pitchforks and opera. His entire existence was someone’s colossal joke and Lindsey was always the fucking punchline.
“I’m bloody bored,” Spike whined. As usual, he was hovering with his boots four inches off the carpet, like nobody was going to notice his obvious attempt to look taller. “It’s not fair. I did the ghost gig already.”
“Thanks to me. And thanks to me you got unghosted that time.”
Spike didn’t look thankful. “Cheers,” he sneered. “But you didn’t do it for my sake, and if it wasn’t for your lot I wouldn’t be here now.”
“Hey, I was on your side at the end, remember? Not that the jerkface over there cared.”
The jerkface in question twitched slightly and mumbled something incomprehensible in his sleep.
Spike pouted. “It’s not bloody fair. I went out in a blaze of glory—twice, mind you!—and saved the world several times over, and do I get my eternal reward? I don’t even get a sodding thank you card. Just a free trip back to LA to haunt the king of poofs.”
“I’m not exactly having the time of my afterlife either, asshole. Having to watch that moron clomp around like some kinda undead Sam Spade, seeing him drool over every blonde in SoCal and then not even get laid, like he’s some kinda frigging monk.” Lindsey’s voice was beginning to rise.
Spike’s did too. “You think I enjoy being stuck with you two wankers? Can’t fight and I can’t even touch my own dick!”
“Neither can I!”
Angel sat up suddenly in bed and glared at them. “Will you both shut up? I’m trying to sleep.”
Spike dropped his fangs and went all bumpy—which was kind of interesting to see, considering he was a ghost—and launched himself at Angel. Or, more accurately, launched himself right through Angel, ending up on the other side of the bed with a roar, while Angel sat among his fancy sheets and smirked. “In case you didn’t figure it out the last thirty times you tried that, Willy me boy, you can’t touch me.”
Lindsey had seen a lot of demons with murder in their eyes, and none of them looked half as pissed off as Spike did right then. “You buggering, bogtrotting, poxy….” He went on like that for a while, spouting some insults that were new even to Lindsey. But Angel only turned up his smirk a few notches, grabbed a pair of earplugs off his nightstand, and stuck them in his ears. Then he lay back down and closed his eyes.
Spike kicked a wall but his boot went right through.
Lindsey hadn’t figured out the whole ghost physics thing. Like, how come he and Spike could walk through walls and couldn’t touch anything, but didn’t sink through the floors and the ground and right to the goddamn center of the earth? Or alternately, float off into orbit?
Spike swore a few more times and then threw himself down onto Angel’s armchair. Which also shouldn’t have been possible, but whatever.
“Dude, you’re gonna give yourself a spectral stroke or something. Why do you let him get to you?”
“Because I haven’t anything else to do, do I? Except look at your ugly face.”
Lindsey grinned. “My face is not ugly.”
“Is too,” Spike muttered. “And your hair’s stupid.”
“Look who’s talking!”
Spike glared and Lindsey glared back, but after a while they both grew tired of it and they glared at Angel’s sleeping self instead. “Not bloody fair. I saved the world. Now I can’t even irritate that pillock properly.”
That’s when the idea struck Lindsey as solidly as an anvil landing on a cartoon character’s head. “Holy shit. C’mere, Spike.”
Spike looked as if he might argue, but then shrugged and followed Lindsey out into the hallway. That was about as far as either of them could go. If they tried to put any more distance between themselves and Angel, they just went poof and got zapped back practically into the big guy’s lap. Their situation really, really sucked.
“What?” Spike demanded, leaning up against the wall—and somehow not falling through. The wall needed new paper. Hell, most of the hotel was a wreck and should probably be condemned, and Angel hadn’t bothered to do more than make sure the lobby and one suite were in decent shape. Lindsey remembered when the firm was trying to get its hands on the Hyperion, but that had never worked out. Stupid fucking Gavin Park.
Lindsey gave Spike a slow smile. “I got an idea.”
“Bully for you.”
“Something to entertain us.”
That caught Spike’s attention. He raised one eyebrow. “Oh?”
“You’n Angel, you never got along much better than me and him.”
“That wanker doesn’t get along with anyone,” Spike said sourly. “Too busy admiring his own magnificence. But how is that entertaining?”
“It’s not. It’s just, I thought maybe you and me could have us a little bet. Right now, we’re nothing more to him than minor annoyances. I figured maybe we could see which of us can be the first to make Angel lose his cool.”
Spike seemed to consider this for a moment and then a slow smile spread over his face. “What do I get when I win?”
“Aside from the satisfaction of getting under Angel’s skin? I dunno. Not much we can do for each other since we can’t touch anything.”
“When I win you have to keep your mouth zipped tight for two—no, three days. Not a peep out of you. That’ll be prize enough.”
Lindsey grinned. “Fine. But I’m gonna win and then you have to sing Loretta Lynn’s greatest hits… buck naked.”
“Bit of a kink there, cowboy?” Spike said with a snort.
“I got all kinds of kinks and not a lot of ways to indulge. So we got a deal?”
“Done.”
After that, they did rock-paper-scissors to see who got the first turn. Spike tried to cheat but Lindsey won anyway, mostly because he knew a vampire would always go for the pointy option.
#
A little bit of negotiation worked out the details. The contest was to begin as soon as Angel hauled his lazy ass out of bed. Lindsey got first whack at him but if Angel failed to blow his stack then Spike got a turn and so on. It was fair enough, and it meant Lindsey had a few hours to plan his strategy. As it turned out, ghosts didn’t really sleep. Didn’t dream either, which sucked, because maybe Lindsey would at least have had an hour or two each day when he could escape his existence a little. What ghosts could do was sort of fade out into a kind of stupor where everything went gray and hazy, like floating in the middle of a really thick fog. You could hear things and see things, but only vaguely, and your thoughts went slow and sluggish. Lindsey didn’t like that state: he hated feeling out of control. But Spike drifted into it quite a lot, and when he did, Lindsey could barely see him. Spike became just a bit of a waver, like a heat mirage over an August highway.
Spike was miraging away right now, which was fine with Lindsey. Gave him the chance to think. He stared at Angel’s lumpy slumbering form and made a mental list. He wished he could make a real list with pen and paper, but apparently ghosts weren’t allowed to take notes.
It was early morning and if Lindsey concentrated he could hear the hum of the morning commute, Los Angelenos stopping and going while eating, listening to the radio, and texting. Some of them had got lucky the night before, and maybe some of them were driving with the taste of their lover still on their lips, the feel of their lover still impressed on their skin. He wished he’d kept track of that kind of thing better when he was alive. Wished he’d taken the time to enjoy the way a hot morning shower felt, or the way a cold beer slid down so nice on a summer afternoon, or the way the breeze would make the little hairs on your arms prickle, or the ocean smell of fish and salt. He knew now: that was the kind of shit that was important, that and having someone to share your bed and stand at your side. Not who ran what fucking law firm or whether you’d exacted revenge on everyone who looked at you cross-eyed. Hell, if he still had a soul he’d sell it just for one more bouncy, noisy ride in his old truck, with the engine compartment baking his feet and the gears clunking into place and the steering wheel as big as the whole wide world.
Such musings were not going to win the contest for him.
And he wanted to win. He wanted to see Angel throw a tantrum and he wanted Spike singing “Coal Miner’s Daughter” in his birthday suit. Well, hell. He’d be pleased to see Spike stripped bare even without the tunes, because seeing was all he could do nowadays and cold comfort was better than none.
As if on cue, Spike came back to clarity and without even glancing at Lindsey, wandered to the window to peer between the blinds. He did that often too, although there wasn’t much to look at. Just the empty lot across the street and the gray and white and brown buildings beyond it. A few months earlier, Spike had spent several days on a campaign to convince Angel to change to a different room, one with a view of the garden instead. Lindsey didn’t understand why it would make any damn difference to Spike and Angel had ignored the pleas until Spike finally gave up.
“What’re you looking at?” Lindsey asked, just because the silence seemed a little oppressive.
“Nothing.”
“Maybe when it’s dark we can get him to go to the beach.”
Spike shook his head. “Won’t smell anything if we do go, will I? Won’t feel the wind.”
“We can see stuff.”
“Just loads of sand and water.” Spike’s voice sounded far away, as if he weren’t standing just across the room. If Lindsey could have touched him, he would have gone over there and socked him in the face because a brawl would have felt pretty good. Would’ve woken Angel up too, and pissed him off, and then maybe Lindsey would have won the bet. Instead, Lindsey sighed and let himself fade into the fog.
He phased back to full awareness hours later, when Angel began to stir. Spike was standing at the window—possibly having moved in the interim, but more likely not—and he didn’t turn around as Angel kicked off the covers and stood and stretched. Angel slept in silk pajama bottoms, much to the scorn of both ghosts, but even Lindsey had to admit the fabric looked good as Angel reached his arms up high and the pants slumped low on his hips.
“Mornin’ sunshine,” Lindsey said with a leer.
Angel ignored him—and Spike as well—and padded into the bathroom. Usually Lindsey left the big vampire alone as he did whatever the hell vamps did when they woke up, but today Lindsey stepped right through the closed door and perched on the edge of the bathtub. Angel had pulled on a plain white undershirt and was standing in front of the sink, staring into the mirror where he had no reflection, putting some kind of goo into his hair. “What do you want?” he growled.
“Nothin’, sweetcheeks. Just thought I’d watch you make yourself pretty.”
Angel frowned but didn’t otherwise respond.
Lindsey stood and sidled up right behind him, so close he would almost have touched him if that had been possible. Once, not long after he’d showed up at the Hyperion, he’d actually attempted to pass right through Angel’s body. That had been an extremely unpleasant experience for the ghost, although the vampire hardly noticed, and Lindsey had taken care not to repeat it. “Bet that stuff smells good,” Lindsey purred, his nose near Angel’s hairline. “Fruity, right?”
“Sure,” Angel replied, and set the bottle on a shelf alongside several others. He opened the bathroom door and stepped back into the main room, passing within a couple of feet of Spike’s back before entering his walk-in closet. He shut that door too, which of course was no impediment to Lindsey. He got inside just as Angel stepped out of his pajamas.
“Nice view,” said Lindsey as he ogled Angel’s bare ass.
Angel was unperturbed. “Best in the house.” He pulled a pair of navy blue boxers out of a dresser drawer—the shorts were silk too, naturally—and pulled them on. “Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“Sure. I figured I’d play a round of golf, eat a steak dinner, get myself laid. Except I’m a fucking ghost and can’t do any of that.”
“Boo hoo.” Angel’s shirt was silk, a very dark red, and his pants were tropical-weight wool, carefully creased. Even his socks looked expensive. Lindsey was willing to bet that Angel had spent more on those shoes he was lacing up than Lindsey had on his first car.
“So what are your big plans for today, Angel baby?”
“Taxes.”
That wasn’t the response Lindsey had expected. “Huh?”
“Property taxes and a bunch of other stupid paperwork that has to be done. Thrilling enough for you?”
At first, Lindsey was a little annoyed. Most of his plans had centered on the assumption that Angel would be out gumshoeing. But on second thought, taxes and all that crap were pretty damn irritating, and without being able to pummel innocent demons—okay, not-so-innocent demons—Angel was bound to be in an especially pissy mood. Perfect.
When Angel left his suite and clomped down the dusty hallway, Spike finally tore himself away from the window with a sigh. Both ghosts had tried not following Angel when he moved, but that only resulted in them getting pulled along so hard that they fell on their faces. Not very dignified. So they trailed him like a strange parade, down the wide stairway and across the marble-floored lobby, where only one set of footsteps could be heard.
Angel kept his papers in an office that adjoined the lobby. He had a big desk in there and several leather chairs, but Spike threw himself down on a padded bench that was just outside the office and flopped onto his back. Apparently the ceiling was fascinating today.
Lindsey sprawled in a chair that had been placed conveniently close to the desk. On the rare occasions when clients came to the hotel, that was where they sat. Angel eyed the nearby bottle of whiskey, sighed slightly, and then bent over a big stack of papers. Lindsey let him work for a while, watching as Angel frowned and poked his thick fingers at a calculator and scribbled things on scrap paper.
“Hey,” said Lindsey, just as Angel was in the middle of some sort of complicated calculation. “I was wondering.”
“Shut up,” Angel said without looking up. But he lost his place anyway, growled a little, and hit the “clear” button on the calculator before beginning to add again.
Once again, Lindsey waited a few moments, until he sensed Angel was nearly finished. “Did you ever fuck Spike?” Lindsey asked brightly.
That earned a Gaelic curse, which made Lindsey grin and brought Spike over to lean in the doorway with his arms folded on his chest. But then Angel sat back a little and smiled. “Which of us would you be jealous of if I had, Linds?”
“Not jealous.”
“Yeah? You haven’t been fantasizing about his tight ass, with—”
“Oi!” Spike interjected. “He is standing right here, wanker.”
Angel nodded. “With your tight ghostly ass. You picturing the noises he might make when he’s being fucked, Lindsey? The way he’d gasp and beg, and his nipples would go all pebbly, and he’d buck and writhe and squirm?”
Ghosts could get hard-ons. It wasn’t fair. They didn’t even have circulation, but somehow their phantom blood could flow to their dicks and their dicks could get hard, and their too-tight jeans would feel even tighter. They couldn’t fucking do anything about it except, as Lindsey did now, shift uncomfortably in their chairs.
Angel noticed of course and his smile grew more evil. “Or maybe what you want, my little man, is for me to bend you over this desk right now and shove my cock so deep inside that you can taste me, and plow into you until you can’t remember your own mother’s name.”
“Fuck!” Lindsey muttered and stalked out of the room.
Spike smirked as he passed by. “My turn,” Spike whispered.
Lindsey decided to figure out what was so fucking fascinating about the lobby ceiling.
#
Angel didn’t leave the hotel all evening. In fact, he didn’t do anything except more of that damn paperwork. Then he drank some of the blood that was delivered twice a week and collapsed on the loveseat in his suite to watch some stupid hockey game he’d recorded. Neither Spike nor Lindsey liked hockey, although the violent parts were kind of fun.
When the game was over, Angel went into the little room next to his suite. It wasn’t much larger than his bathroom, but he’d brought in some guy a few months past and had it ghost-proofed. Which left the ghosts themselves hanging aimlessly around the suite.
“I’ll wager he goes in there to toss off,” Spike said. He was sitting in a chair with his hands between his knees and his head hanging low.
Lindsey looked down at his own crotch. “Least one of us can, dude.” His dick had eventually gone soft again, but his balls still kind of tingled, like they hadn’t forgiven him for not emptying them in a really long time. Not that it was his fault, but you couldn’t reason with your balls. “You haven’t even tried to get him angry today. If you don’t act soon, I get another turn.”
Spike glanced up with a glint in his eyes. “No worries, mate. I’ve something special in mind for the old bastard.”
But when Angel woke up the following afternoon, it turned out that Spike’s big plan consisted of nothing more than belting out the Sex Pistols’ greatest hits nonstop and at full volume. Which might have been successful, except Spike actually had a halfway decent voice—as good as Johnny Rotten’s, anyway—and Angel eventually just sighed and shoved his earplugs in.
Angel went out that night, skulking through some of the darker parts of the city in search of some bad guy or another. Lindsey hadn’t bothered to pay attention to the specifics. They found the quarry in a weedy alley in South Central, Angel slaughtered it, and then he went home with his ghostly retinue alongside. Spike rode on top of the car, which wasn’t fair. It was Lindsey’s turn for that.
Back at the Hyperion, Lindsey waited until Angel had eaten and showered and pulled on another pair of silk jammies and then crawled into bed. The minute the lights went out, Lindsey perched at the edge of the mattress. He wished he could bounce up and down and make the bed shake. Instead, he said, “Do you still dream about it?”
“Dream about what?” Angel asked.
“The shit with Wolfram and Hart. All the crap you went through—the crap your friends went through. And that last battle. I wasn’t around for that ’cause some fucker had a bullet fed to me, but I hear it was a doozy.”
“I’ve seen a lot of fighting, Lindsey.”
“Yeah, but this time you dragged your pals into it. Good guys. Not to mention the friends who didn’t even make it that far, like Cordelia and that cute little Fred.”
Angel’s voice was cool as ice. “You didn’t know Cordy or Fred.”
“I seen pictures. ’N if it wasn’t for you, they’d probably all still be alive. Even Spike here.” He waved in the direction of the other ghost, who was watching quietly from across the room. “Doesn’t it haunt you to be the only survivor?”
“I’ve got two hundred and fifty years of murder on my conscience. A few more deaths don’t make much of a difference. Especially since this time I was doing the right thing.”
Damn. The vampire still sounded perfectly calm.
“Are you sure it was the right thing, man?” Lindsey asked. “I mean, it’s not like you wiped out evil or anything.”
“Evil never gets wiped out. But you can beat it back for a while, and I did.”
Lindsey glanced at Spike, who was listening carefully, his head cocked to one side. Spike nodded a little and added, “We did, you mean.”
Angel’s teeth gleamed when he smiled. “Yeah, okay. We did.”
Lindsey huffed in annoyance. This was turning out to be harder than he’d expected.
The next evening Angel had several meetings with clients. Lindsey kept a low profile, but Spike amused himself by popping in and out of sight, usually behind the clients’ backs, and usually making obscene gestures. It was a pretty pitiful attempt, and all that Angel did was roll his eyes and mutter something to the clients about needing to find a good exorcist.
And yet Spike seemed in an inexplicably good mood later that night as he sat on the loveseat and watched some kind of documentary about a war Lindsey had never heard of. Angel was watching with him, and sometimes the two of them critiqued various details of the program. They were getting along unusually well, actually, and Lindsey felt a little left out. Wasn’t his fault he wasn’t old as dirt.
But things grew even worse when a new show came on, this one about nineteenth century Vienna, and Spike and Angel fucking started reminiscing about the olden days. “D’you remember when Dru got it in her head that Sachertortes were meant to be made with blood instead of apricot jam and she tormented that poor pastry chef until he promised to make her one?” Spike asked, smiling fondly.
Angel laughed. “It tasted awful.”
“It did, but Dru ate every last bite. And she even let the chef go. Wonder if he ever told that tale to anyone.”
“And then we broke into Stephansdom—”
“You were after the nuns again. Always were a predictable old bugger.”
Angel only shrugged. “But we couldn’t find any that night, so Darla and I—”
“Fucked like monkeys in the Chapel of the Cross. I remember.”
Lindsey scowled at the reminder of Darla, but the other two ignored him. Anyway, Angel was still dredging up memories. “We spent the next day in the Kapuzinergruft, sleeping in the Habsburgs’ sarcophagi. And the next night we all hammered nails into the Stock im Eisen, for good luck.”
“Didn’t work so well, did it? You ate that gypsy girl only a few weeks later.”
“Yeah,” Angel said with a sigh. “But Christ, for a while there I felt like a king.”
“Know what you mean,” replied Spike, and then they simply sat there, both of them with far away expressions.
Lindsey faded out.
#
Spike was pretty quiet and distant all the following day, which was fine with Lindsey. Angel woke up late and spent hours with his nose buried in books—most of them were reference works, but a couple of them looked like philosophy or something. In German. He spent the most time of all, though, leafing through some really thick book about magic, a book bound in what Lindsey strongly suspected was human skin. Angel took notes, too, and wouldn’t let Lindsey see them.
Several times throughout the evening, Lindsey tried to goad Angel into conversations. About the stupidity of vampires trying to be heroes, about how Irish cuisine sucked, about how the Emerald Isle’s only great contributions to mankind were Lucky Charms cereal and getting shitfaced on March seventeenth. Angel pretended he couldn’t hear. Finally, out of desperation, Lindsey raised a subject that was sore even to him.
“Darla used to tell me about you,” he said.
Angel didn’t look up from his book, but Lindsey thought maybe those broad shoulders tensed a little.
“Told me how you were this total manwhore when you were alive, pretty much good for nothing except fucking—and not even so great at that.”
“I got better,” Angel replied mildly.
Lindsey snorted. “And she said how you always marched around like you were all that, but really she had you wrapped around one of her fingers.”
“You’d know what that feels like, Linds. She used you even better.”
“Maybe she did. But she’d never have kept me on a leash for a hundred and fifty fucking years, like she did you.”
Angel finally glanced up. “Nope. Because she never would have thought that you were worth turning. Face it, Lindsey. I might have been her pet dog but you were nothing more to her than a doormat to clean the mud off her pretty little feet. There you were, drooling all over her, and she cared about as much for you as she’d care for a tissue she’d use to get the extra lipstick off her face. Just wiped and threw you away.”
Angel was still calm but Lindsey was furious. This wasn’t how the conversation was supposed to go. “Well, she was a fucking bitch anyway,” Lindsey growled.
“She was. You know what, though? Right at the end there, she did the right thing. Would you have?” With a smirk, Angel clapped his book shut.
Later, while Lindsey fumed silently and wished he could kick things, and Spike watched a rugby match on TV, Angel locked himself in his ghost-proof room. God, Lindsey felt so fucking impotent! He couldn’t even get a rise out of a stupid vampire anymore.
It was nearly dawn when Angel appeared again. He washed up and put on his pajama pants—black this time—and climbed into bed without a word to either ghost. He used his remote to click off the TV, and Spike barely complained.
And then, just when everything had gone very still and quiet, and when Lindsey was considering zoning out, Spike floated over to the bed and loomed over Angel.
“What?” Angel said sleepily.
Spike gave an angelic smile. “Caveman wins, mate.”
Lindsey didn’t know what the hell that was supposed to mean. But he found himself scrabbling backwards as Angel shot out of bed with a roar and attempted to wrap his meaty paws around Spike’s neck. Which didn’t work, of course, and Angel only became angrier as Spike simply hovered there, feet a few inches above the floor, and grinned. Angel vamped out, his fangs all prickly sharp and his brow even heavier than before, and he tore at his pillow until feathers floated everywhere, and he swore in a dozen languages that Lindsey recognized and several he didn’t.
Then Angel roared once more and stamped into his ghost-proof closet.
“What was that all about?” Lindsey asked when he was gone.
“’T’s me winning, innit?”
Lindsey had to concede. “But what did it mean? What’s the deal with cavemen and why’d he go off the deep end over it?”
“Doesn’t matter. You’ve learned a lesson. The mick and I have a century and a half of history in common, and if anyone knows how to get the bastard’s goat it’s me.”
“Yeah, okay. But—”
The door to the off-limits room flew open so hard that it banged against the wall, and Angel came rushing back out. Before either of the ghosts had a chance to react, Angel was tossing some sort of silvery sparkly powder onto Spike—and the powder stuck to Spike’s hair and clothing and skin instead of just passing through.
“What—” Spike began. But he didn’t get to finish, because Angel grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and dragged him over to the bed. Spike was probably too stunned to fight and Lindsey could only gape. Before Spike could get his wits about him, Angel had yanked down Spike’s jeans with one vicious tug and pulled Spike down onto him, so that Angel was sitting on the bed and Spike was ass-up over his knee.
Oh, and it was a very nice ass. Pale, of course, and not as wide as Angel’s, but muscular. It reminded Lindsey a little of an ass you might find on a Roman statue, like one of those sculptures of athletes standing there ready to throw a discus or something.
Angel managed to get Spike’s hands behind his back, holding both wrists tightly in one of his own hands, and then he gave that pretty ass a resounding wallop.
“Oi!” Spike cried.
“Shut up.” Smack! “Do you have any idea”—smack!—“how long I’ve wanted to do this?” Smack!
Spike was yelping with every blow and trying to wiggle free, but Angel had Spike’s legs pinned in place with one of his own and about the best Spike could do was buck ineffectually. Which was interesting to watch. Lindsey looked down to see a bulge in his own ghostly jeans. “My daddy used to use a belt,” he said helpfully.
“I don’t”—Smack!—“need a fecking belt.” Smack!
Those white, rounded cheeks had gone a pretty shade of red. Angel hit them again and then, as if to keep Spike on edge, smoothed over the skin for a moment with the palm of his hand before striking again. Someone moaned and Lindsey realized it was him. His cock was throbbing and he sat down on one of Angel’s chairs just a few feet from the bedside. “How are you touching him?” Lindsey asked after another couple of blows.
Angel replied with a quick volley of smacks then paused to admire his handprints. “Magic.”
Spike had allowed his head to drop low, but now he twisted around to look up at Angel incredulously. “You mean you’ve been letting the two of us drift around like bloody clouds when you could have—”
Angel interrupted him with an especially hard blow that made Spike cry out.
“I’ve been working on the spell for a while. It’s hard to do and the ingredients are really hard to find. And it only lasts about thirty minutes. I’ve been saving it for the right occasion.” This time he pinched a couple of the incipient bruises. “Like when one of you pains in the ass needed a real pain the ass.”
“Bloody hell,” Spike said. He allowed his head to fall again and stopped fighting Angel, only jerking each time the hand connected with his butt.
Lindsey swallowed another moan and found himself wondering what that big palm would feel like coming down on his own ass. God, to feel anything again after so many months of nothing would be like heaven.
Maybe Spike thought so too, because his eyes were scrunched tight and, when Angel paused again, damn if Spike didn’t whimper and hump himself a little against the mattress, trying to wiggle his rear end invitingly.
Angel chuckled. “It’s supposed to be punishment, moron.” But he obliged with more hits and Spike’s abortive little movements became more desperate and Lindsey discovered he could bite right through his own lip—but wouldn’t taste any blood.
When Angel stopped swinging his hand and instead trailed a broad finger down the small of Spike’s back and into his crack—and when that finger went slightly but definitely in—Spike howled and convulsed, and Lindsey saw goddamn stars.
When Lindsey could see straight again, Spike was down on his knees between Angel’s spread legs. Spike’s jeans were still pushed down to his knees, exposing his cherry-red ass, and his head was bobbing busily over the fly of Angel’s pajama trousers. Angel had his head thrown back and a look of intense concentration on his face, and the hand that had been striking Spike was now playing gently with the curls on Spike’s head.
In the end, Lindsey had to remain quiet for three whole days. But he figured he hadn’t really lost, not when he’d been able to watch Spike get spanked, and Lindsey had gotten his rocks off for the first time in about a million years. Spike hadn’t lost either: he’d had a good orgasm out of the deal and was thrilled to discover that the soreness in his ass lasted long after he’d gone insubstantial again. As for Angel, he walked around looking a hell of a lot more relaxed. Sometimes he even smiled.
And those days when Lindsey had to keep his mouth shut? He spent them planning ways he could get Angel to use the magic dust on him.
#
On another plane of existence, two celestial Beings sat at a small café table. One of the Beings wore flowing robes and had a long white beard, while the other was all in red, with sharp little horns and cloven hooves. A bit clichéd, they both knew, but what the heck. It was fun to play.
“Well,” said the Being in white. “I won that one pretty easily, didn’t I? You can hand over my prize any time.”
The one in red dug around in his pocket until his hand emerged holding a ball. It was a pretty thing, all blue and green and streaked with white. He set the ball on the table but held up a clawed hand when the Being in white reached for it. “Hang on. I’m not so sure you won this round. Your pretty vampire might have pushed Angel over the edge, but my pretty lawyer benefitted just as much.”
The Being in white nodded. “Yes. I suppose you’re right. Guess we’ll have to call this one a draw.” He eyed the ball thoughtfully and then grinned. “I’ll bet my vampire can be the first to make Angel get drunk and sing Barry Manilow.”
The Being in red smiled and stuck out his hand. “It’s a bet.”
~~~fin~~~