But they didn't need him to attend most of the rest of the meetings for this project -- thank god -- and so he was going to have some free time until they could actually start work on the site. Once all the zoning issues and budgeting issues and scheduling issues had been negotiated, Xander would be pretty much in charge of implementing all that stuff on-site. But that would probably take another couple weeks, and so he was going to have to find ways to keep busy or he'd go insane. Too much Domino's pizza and "Star Trek" re-runs while wearing a bathrobe just wasn't as enticing as it had once been.

So he planned to do some work on the house. Frank and Luba had expressed interest in having a window seat built into their bay window, and Xander wanted to try to fix the creaking stairs. It sort of made up for the ridiculously low rent they charged him. Sure, Frank and Luba didn't need the money -- Frank had retired at 23 after making millions as a programmer for a start-up before the Dot Com Crash -- but Xander still felt a little guilty. Heck, he wasn't paying all that much more than his parents had charged for the smelly basement. Given the usual exorbitant rents in San Francisco, it was ridiculous. So he'd set up a workshop in his spare bedroom, and he did work on the house when he had the time.

He'd gotten lucky with the apartment, too, of course. Another perk from knowing people at work. Frank's uncle was one of the engineers at Overaa, and he'd been the one to give Xander Frank's phone number. You need a place to stay, my nephew's got a duplex, he won't charge much rent 'cause you're a good kid, yaddah yaddah yaddah...

In Sunnydale, it all would have seemed like a suspicious coincidence. He would have started wondering if there were demons involved. Maybe a wish. Or a spell. Good things just didn't happen without evil strings attached, right? So when things were going this well, he couldn't help waiting for the evil shoe to drop.

It took him a while to accept the fact that it might actually just be good luck and nice people. That whole "good luck" thing was pretty unfamiliar, so it took some getting used to. It was starting to look like people who didn't live on a Hellmouth and didn't hang out with vampire slayers had relatively happy lives. Less exciting, maybe, but less traumatic, too. He was reasonably certain that when Luba and Frank got married -- if they ever got married -- no vision-giving demons would show up to ruin the proceedings. And Josie at work was unlikely to have her eyes go black while she flayed the skin off of contractors who pissed her off. And Gary's teenage daughter was unlikely to get kidnapped by angry gods wanting to use her as a key to access alternate dimensions.

And random blonde men on the street outside the public library were unlikely to be vampires.

* * *

As he often did when he had something on his mind, he started taking nightly walks. Long walks, sometimes. Not patrolling, just walking. But now he carried a stake in his coat pocket, for the first time in more than a year.

He'd stopped even thinking about vampires, after a while. In fact, he hadn't seen a single vamp since he moved to San Francisco. He figured it was probably because the city wasn't built on a Hellmouth ... as far as he knew, anyway. But it probably also had a lot to do with the fact that there weren't any real cemeteries in San Francisco. Instead, dozens of them were clustered together several miles away in a town called Colma, like huddled exiles banished from a city vibrating with life.

So. No Hellmouth. No cemeteries. It made sense that there wouldn't be fledges popping up all over the place. So Xander had gotten lazy. He'd started believing in this cozy little life he was leading now, and he started forgetting or ignoring everything that might lurk in the shadows.

That changed, though, after he saw that blonde head in the rush-hour crowd. Of course it wasn't Spike, but it was like a jolt to Xander's Sunnydale-honed instincts, a visceral rush that screamed, "Vampire!"

And so he'd started carrying a stake again, tucked into the inside pocket of his coat, when he went out at night.

His neighborhood, North Beach, had started out as a tight-knit Italian community, and there were some hints of that past still -- a lot of Italian restaurants and pastry shops, old men playing bocce in the public park on Sunday afternoons, Italian street names -- but the neighborhood was more mixed now. Chinatown was only a few blocks away, tourists flocked to both areas day and night, and the blinding flashing neon signs of the dozens of strip clubs on Broadway attracted a rather different sort of visitor.

Frank and Luba's duplex was uphill on a relatively quiet side-street, but when Xander walked down into the less residential areas, North Beach was buzzing at all hours with drunken frat boys and excited tourists who'd never seen such a big city.

Okay, so he'd been pretty wide-eyed, himself, when he first arrived. But now he was old and jaded and the tourists just made him impatient when they stood gawking on the sidewalk.

He wasn't sure why he felt this restless need to get out and walk in the dark so often. Old habit, maybe. Maybe even some kind of unconscious need to check out his surroundings and make sure everything was safe. But now that he was carrying a stake again, he felt wrong somehow, out of place, like a return to an earlier time in his life.

The fog was rolling in, so he pushed his hands into the pockets of his coat and hunched his shoulders a bit against the cold. A bunch of college kids staggered past him on the sidewalk, laughing too loudly.

Without even realizing it, he wandered in the direction of Civic Center.

* * *

It wasn't stalking. Really. It was just ... loitering. With a cup of coffee. Near the public library. Every day at sunset.

There weren't any benches -- the several rag-tag men who played chess every day on the widened sidewalk nearby always brought their own folding chairs and tables -- so Xander just sort of ... leaned. Casually. Not stalking. Just ... leaning. He tried not to think about what substances might be on the wall he leaned against, because this was definitely not the high-class part of town. His trusty sheepskin-lined denim jacket would protect him from wall-induced germs.

He sipped his coffee and watched the library. Thinking back, he wasn't sure if not-Spike had been coming out of the library, walking past the library, going into the library, or what. But he did definitely remember libraryness being involved. So he hung out across the street from the library and watched.

Really, it was silly to wait until sunset. Since this guy definitely wasn't Spike, he could show up during the day. But Xander had spotted him the first time after sunset, when the sky was growing dark enough for ... well ... for vampires to come out and play. So every day he showed up around the same time, and waited.

He stood around like an idiot three nights in a row, and then suddenly on the fourth night there he was. Not-Spike. Right there, coming out of the main branch of the public library, glass doors swinging closed behind him. It was 6 o'clock, and the sky was definitely dark enough for vamps, but that didn't matter of course. Because it wasn't Spike. This was just some guy.

Some guy wearing ... glasses.

Xander blinked. Obviously not Spike, then, because Spike wouldn't be caught dead -- no pun intended -- wearing glasses. Xander had occasionally seen four-eyed vamps, but Spike definitely wasn't the type. Not unless he was pulling some kind of nefarious scam that involved making himself look like a math nerd.

But, even from across the street, the guy really did look a lot like Spike. There was something in his walk, in the set of his shoulders. But he was pretty far away, and the growing darkness and the bustling crowd and not-Spike's own movement, his face often turning away ... it all made absolute certainty impossible. Xander would have to see the guy closer up in order to be sure.

So Xander followed him, from a discreet distance, of course. Not stalking. Just ... following.

The guy either realized he was being followed or was just congenitally paranoid, because he furtively glanced behind him before ducking into a narrow alley. Xander scurried to catch up, but only got to the corner in time to see a flash of blonde hair disappearing behind a giant green dumpster. Out on the main street, you could still see that the sky was an electric blue, but in the alley, tall buildings on either side made the shadows dark and deep. It was a bit daunting.

Xander waited a few minutes and then cautiously approached the dumpster. On the other side, a large window was boarded up. Walking backward a bit to get a better look, Xander realized that the entire building was pretty sorry-looking, with boarded up doors and windows and plastic sheeting wafting through holes here and there. The window behind the dumpster must be a make-shift entrance or something.

Xander was tempted to push at the boarded up window to test his theory, but he really didn't want to go crashing into some random blonde guy's crack den meth lab full of gun-running gang-bangers. So he backed away, hands in the pockets of his coat, shoulders hunched nervously, and wondered if he was being watched. He eyed the boarded-up windows, wondering if there were eye-holes, wondering if not-Spike and his gang of thieves were up there plotting mayhem, wondering if he was being paranoid, wondering if this not-Spike was actually some kind of mass murderer. Um ... sort of like actual-Spike.

The whole Spike or not-Spike question was still unresolved, and now that Xander had tailed the probably-not-Spike to his shabby lair -- or meth lab or whatever -- he wasn't going to give up that easily. In a dark corner beside a different dumpster, he found a plastic milk crate. He turned it over and sat down, hidden as well as he could, and watched the spot where not-Spike had entered the building.

Xander pulled his coat around himself firmly, glad that his hair had gotten long enough to protect his neck and ears from the wind, and stubbornly hunkered down for a long wait.

Next >>