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Birdsong
by Lasair

The one thing Giles could never grow accustomed to about America was its heat. The Californian winters seemed barely worthy of the name, and the summers were raging torrents of sunrays which swamped Sunnydale in a deadly, sweaty lethargy. Somehow, the children, whose skin looked no more impervious to the sun than his, sauntered through it all unaffected, while Giles fanned himself with newspapers and spent ridiculous amounts of money on iced tea (an unspeakable perversion of the beverage, which nonetheless succeeded in ameliorating the worst of the weather for him). For the past few days, he’d been driving through Nevada, which seemed even hotter, if such a thing were possible, than California, in a bus whose air-conditioning had malfunctioned as soon as an over-enthusiastic Kennedy had attempted to improve its output. At least he was out of that bus now.

He wondered if the weather bothered Drusilla at all. Probably not. An English rose, blasted two centuries ago so that her petals could no longer feel the air around her – that was his captor.

She slumbered a few feet away from him, a veritable heat-haze surrounding her blanket shelter. Perhaps she wasn’t sleeping, perhaps the heat was too intolerable and she hid terrified and vividly awake under her shroud, fearing to move a jot lest one lethal chink of light appear.

Giles’ skin was cracked and peeling from the incessant sun, and his burnt hands chafed from the rope. He’d almost worn a long-sleeved shirt the last morning, he remembered, but had discarded it in favour of one with short sleeves which he thought better for the heat. Fool that he was. Short sleeves let the sun in to cook his skin, and only the water she brought kept him from being just another piece of noxious baking meat, slowly dissolving in the desert. Drusilla wanted information, and he was doing his level best to provide misinformation, but she was proving maddeningly difficult to entrap. At least she hadn’t tortured him – yet. Perhaps without Angelus and Spike to flank her, Drusilla was too muddled to slice precision out of prisoners.

A particularly vicious sunray blasted into his vision, and when the headache-inducing shimmering was gone, Giles saw a change in the sky. Black shapes wheeling overhead drew closer, plummeting towards him, coalescing into large stony eyes, fiercely-beating wings and overlarge beaks. Vultures, he thought.

(Are they vultures? I don’t know, I’m not an ornithologist. Could be ravens who left the Tower of London to peck my bonds free, for all I know.)

Giles laughed, or tried to – the dryness in his throat turned it into a hacking bark. One vulture turned sharply at the sound.

“That’s right,” Giles called hoarsely. “I’m not carrion.”

Two of the dirty-looking birds approached him, their wings making a soft hiss as they flapped through the air. One began to worry at his shirt-buttons with its formidable beak while the other alighted on his shoulder.

Giles was suddenly seized by the absurd fear that the shoulder-vulture would crap on him. You’re almost certainly doomed to a torturous death by dehydration or the reprieve of Drusilla’s fangs and you worry about this? he asked himself wryly.

Still, best to die with clean air after all, he concluded, and shook his arm the best he could to dislodge the brute.

It complied without so much as a peck, Giles noticed gratefully, and fluttered off to perch with its fellows on Drusilla’s shroud.

Six of them, arrayed blackly against the disappearing sunset, with tiny feet sunk into the thick carpeting of the blanket. Giles watched them, and even though no birds remained within six feet of his tree, began to feel an eerie sense of fear.

They were all so still. And then – they weren’t.

Six beaks stabbed downwards; they found the warm flesh beneath the blanket and cawed their triumph. Blood seeped through the fabric, dripped from their beaks – the red spatters flew everywhere, staining the sand and the blanket and the vultures’ feathers.

Drusilla screamed. The birds lifted off her in dismay, but not quickly enough – two arms flung off the bloody shroud and snapped two of their necks. Leaving two bodies behind, the flock hurtled off into the distance.

Yellow eyes gleaming in the twilight, the risen vampire chomped down on her would-be eaters. There’s a kind of natural justice there, Giles thought, before remembering that she was the evil one; the birds weren’t demons, much as they might seem possessed; they were just following their natures.

Drusilla didn’t seem to agree. She leapt to her feet, wringing the remains of her sun-shelter in her hands, and cried, “Horrid little devils of death!” after the black specks in the distance.

She approached Giles, weeping. “Not pretty and soft and fleet at all.”

“Fleet, perhaps,” he pointed out. She didn’t listen, being busy rubbing strips of blanket on her bare arms and making patterns with the blood.

“Birdies shouldn’t feed from me,” she murmured. “I have been a friend to so many birdies... even when my last bird went cold and still in its little wire house and my Spike told me it was dead, I was its friend.”

She twisted her head around to look at Giles sideways. “I used to feed my birdies little strips of flesh when I had taken the tasty blood. Maybe that’s what these birdies wanted.”

“They certainly took flesh from you.” Drusilla was festooned – if that was the right word, and Giles suspected she might agree that it was – with gaping wounds. Her short white dress, its colour still visible at unblemished spots, had suffered the same fate as her blanket.

She jerked her left shoulder up in a quick spasm. “My flesh lives for ever. But they took my shroud! And hurt me!”

“You’ll heal.” Despite himself, Giles was feeling better. Evening brought the chance – the increasingly high chance – of being eaten by Drusilla, but at least the blasted sun had gone down.

The sun which, when it rose again, would burn Drusilla alive. The holey blanket she was still clutching (security blanket, how perfectly suited to her child-like obsessions) would never shield all her skin again. The short, stained dress with its huge rip across her navel would be no use either.

Even if she realised, she would never be able to walk to shelter in time. And Giles would have the chance of getting out after the sun hit her; thirst would still be a factor, of course, but he might live. He might.

His eyes had been closed during this reverie, and he opened them to find Drusilla a mere inch away from him, staring intently into his eyes. No, wait, that wasn’t true exactly – they weren’t focused on him. She seemed to be looking at something further away, something deeper.

“Wha-”

“Sssssh.” Dru pursed her lips, and leaned forward to land a butterfly-light kiss on his mouth. “I’m listening to another birdie.”

Look at me, Giles remembered. Be in me.

Jenny...

But it was different now. No Angelus, no Spike, no imminent end-of-the-world. Just crazy Drusilla, who might, just possibly, have neglected to realise that she was doomed in nine or so more hours.

Of course, no Buffy or Willow or Xander either. Just him, Dru and the chill of the swiftly-fallen desert night.

Absent-mindedly, he thought, Drusilla began to stroke his chest, soothing his shivers. She was looking right through him, right through his eyes.

“You wouldn’t sing for me yesterday,” she crooned, half under her breath. “I waited for you to sing a very special song, so patiently, but –” She paused, seeming to listen. “Oh? He wouldn’t let you sing? He’s a nasty man. Though he let you sing very prettily for me before when I touched him on the inside, oh, such a lovely cave of clouds you sang in then.”

Her hands were tracing small whorls above his hipbones.

“Soon, soon, you’ll sing in the warm open sky, little bird. He won’t trouble you anymore.”

A very minute shift happened in Drusilla’s blue eyes, and she was back.

She stepped away from Giles, and the night was so thick that she’d moved no more than a few paces before it veiled her from his view, till he could clearly make out only the glitter of her eyes and the flash of white as she tore away her ruined dress. That discarded, she returned to his side. Her body – still streaked her and there with blood – was healed completely.

Giles swallowed. He’d been close to death before (often in the company of ludicrously attractive women, as it happened) and he’d never had this... encumbrance, logical though it may be in a primitive way, occur before. Then again, he’d never been in a situation quite like this, and the one time he and Drusilla had interacted in a similar fashion Angelus had been dancing attendance on him, a move guaranteed to deaden lust.

“I have a new birdie friend,” she announced brightly.

“I’m sure that’ll make up for the two you killed earlier.”

Drusilla whimpered, and covered her breasts with her hands.

Giles watched with interest. “Are you sorry you killed those birds, Drusilla?” Talk at her. While away the night hours.

She put her thumb in her mouth. “I’m sorry they killed me. Tried to kill me.”

“But birds – birdies – like you, in general?”

She bent down and brushed her lips down his cheek, across his mouth, and in a curving journey around his other cheek and chin before returning to his mouth again. The variation in – pressure – her breasts crushed against him at one moment, faintly touching him the next, and her naked crotch so almost at just the right spot – it was maddening. Giles moaned.

“Yeees,” she moaned with him, “the song is coming! You can be a pray-lude. A pree-lude. A pray-a-lude, a pree-a-lude.” She let the words roll delightedly off her tongue.

If distraction was the name of the game, Giles would play it. He lunged forward as far as his head would allow and seized her mouth. Maybe the last woman. He opened her lips with his tongue and thrust in, and when her teeth lengthened he clenched his eyes tightly shut and just tasted the elderberry madness of her, her cool, liquid tongue. Maybe the last taste.

Her fingers scrabbled lightly over his straining zipper, and then she freed him and straddled him in one quick moment.

“Come, little bird,” she sang, “while nobody’s watching.” She rose up and bore down on him, silkily strong. Ohh. Somehow you don’t think vampires will be wet. Eyes closed. Try not to care that your hands are tied behind your back and you can’t get at her with them. Listen, she’s off again, probably thinks we’re lovers on a camping trip in the Sahara half the time. “Come, give me your song.”

“Thank you, little birdie,” Drusilla said in the grave voice of a little girl playing grown-up, as Giles groaned deep in her throat and finally spent his orgasm inside her.

She pried his eyelids open with her fingernails, and he conceded, too weak to resist her.

She was in full vamp face, and still astride him. “The birdie inside you sang,” Drusilla announced happily.

Among so much else, Giles was finding her baby-talk disturbing. “Is that what they told you to call it back at the nunnery, Drusilla?”

She looked puzzled. “No birdies at the nunnery.”

“Well no, I’d imagine not.”

“No, no.” She frowned. “While you were busy playing with me, he could sing. He told me the song I wanted to hear. Now I can use your machine to summon men who will bring me to a city before sunrise, and I know what to do when I get there.”

A cold horror dawned over Giles. “You mean...”

Drusilla bit down on him, severing the jugular with eager, messy fangs. As Giles drifted out of consciousness, his last coherent thought was a wild prayer to God, Verizon or whoever might be listening, to let his cellphone battery please be dead, please -

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