Occasionally, just to herself, in a very quiet voice, once the room had been scanned for listening devices, Lilah Morgan might admit that she could be a little over-confident at times. Quite rarely, and less often than anybody else, of course. But it had been known to happen.
Hell was something she hadn’t been counting on in a very literal sense, for one, though she’d soon managed to wangle herself into a more managerial position, with good expectations for eventually getting enough spiritual gas money to get her old body motoring again on a more permanent basis. Corrupting Angel’s team had been a pleasant vacation on Earth, certainly, but she wanted freedom to work from there.
(Hey, in this age of telecommunications, anything’s possible.)
Of course, that pleasant vacation had caused her most recent fuck-up. Wesley forgetting all about their... relationship yes he admitted it was a relationship even if he’s forgotten, the bastard, she’s not going to damn well let him forget!
Well, that hadn’t part of the plan. Who would have thought Angel’s bratty son would have been so important to her life?
Given enough time, Lilah was pretty sure she could reverse the alteration. But that would mean burning all her bridges with Wolfram & Hart and throwing herself on Angel’s tender mercies, which would be chafingly embarrassing if he pulled a Lindsey McDonald-style mercy trick and damn near lethal if he pulled a wine cellar-style vengeful bastard trick. Either way, Lilah fancied her chances rather better if she poked a hole in the reality change instead of tearing the whole thing down.
Which brought her back to the Infinite Universes theory, a concept which had come in handy more times than she ever would have thought possible when she was a bored undergraduate staring at her tutor’s legs.
It’s pretty simple - every universe that ever could have existed, exists. Describe it and it’s real. The catch is that you can’t get into it.
Unless you know a handy little gadget to open up any universe you like. For the last four years, it’s come in red.
Lilah had a flunky with a gift for quantum triangulation work out the location of her particular universe, and the grooves and slots she needed to carve into the Master Key to make her fit. Different for every lock - this one required deoxygenated blood, freely given, cooled to 278 Kelvin and rubbed all over her naked body while she spoke a simple opening spell. (Lilah gave the man her best contemptuous look and he amended the directions slightly.)
The ‘freely given’ proviso was a kink Lilah thought it might take a week, maybe more, to work out. She hadn’t counted on how bored an adrenaline junkie used to saving the world on a regular basis might get, stuck in a pleasant little school some miles outside Florence. How much she might miss the thrill of danger.
*
“No - o!” Dawn Summers dragged the boy back down on top of her. “Leave it open, just a crack. Nobody walks by that door, anyway.”
“The bell just rung! People are going to be flooding the corridor!”
“Well, then...” she pulled down his boxers and snapped on a condom “...we’re just going to have to be quiet. Do you think you can manage that?”
“I doubt it,” Lilah said, pushing the door shut behind her. “Teenage boys have so little self-control.”
At the sound of her voice, the boyfriend wrenched himself around terrified, pulled on his clothes and ran out into the hall. His condom was still on, Lilah noticed.
Dawn had given a whimper of shock at Lilah’s appearance, but seemed determined to be nonchalant after the boy’s undignified exit. She lay back on the dingy floor, refusing to pull down her skirt.
Lilah waited, letting a slow grin spread over her face. Dawn broke first.
“Well? Who the hell are you?” she asked shrilly.
“I thought you wanted to be quiet?” Lilah reminded her. She laid a hand on Dawn’s thigh and added, “I think quiet could be arranged. Though I’m more used to loud...”
Dawn was breathing fast, her breath coming in hitches and gasps. Good.
Lilah moved her hand up a little, just past the place high on Dawn’s thigh where the skirt had fallen back down. The girl was still wet.
“You want me to fuck you, Dawn? Just nod yes.”
She jerked her head, those lovely chestnut curls rising and falling around her shoulders.
“But -” Lilah pushed two fingers into her - “that’s not quite enough for you.” She brought out the tiny, jewelled blade, lifting it high above Dawn’s head.
Dawn was frightened now. Just a little. Just enough to make her hot. After all, it was only a tiny sliver of metal - barely half an inch long. Just a toy.
Lilah caressed Dawn’s shoulder with it, grazing her skin with the finest of white marks that turned reddish in the wake of the knife. But no blood yet, though Dawn shuddered and pressed herself harder against the sharp point.
Lilah worked her harder with both hands, and wondered idly if the clit had veins. Probably not.
Though I wonder what kind of universe I could open with that? Clitoral blood spilled at the point of orgasm. Mmm, should ask Malcolm. I bet he’s researched that one already, the perv.
“Mmm...MMMM!” Dawn’s eyes were staring and wild.
Shit, was the girl coming already? Lilah slowed the pace. Softer with the right hand, harder on the left - Dawn didn’t seem to notice any pain. The knife was at her wrist now, poised just over the extruding blue vein, and all it would take was one long stroke -
“Ohhh, fuck!”
“I warned you to be quiet!” Lilah hissed softly at her. Dawn, convulsing around her hand, didn’t seem to care. As Dawn’s eyes rolled back in her head, Lilah dropped the knife and brought out the test tube, squeezing the girl’s slim wrist over it. The blood was flowing freely now.
“Che cosa era quel suono!” an irate male voice said from outside. “Chi - ”
As the door opened on a soon-to-be-suspended Dawn Summers, Lilah vanished.
*
Wesley’s door was the same as Lilah remembered. White paint, chipped in one corner, slightly loose doorknob. Was Wesley going to be the same too?
Stop hesitating, Lilah told herself. She took a deep breath, fluffed up her hair, and pushed open the door using a rather more mundane master key than she’d used earlier.
Wesley was only a few feet away from her, caught just in the act of opening a book. Wearing expensive cords and a shirt with a button or two undone at the top and christ, she could almost smell him.
The door clicked shut behind her and Lilah stretched out against it. “Well, lover, did you miss me?”
Silence. She tried not to let her come-fuck-me grin freeze as Wesley laid down his book and came towards her, close enough to touch but not quite. She couldn’t fathom the expression on his face, but that was nothing new. She’d learned other ways of reading him.
“You researched it perfectly, didn’t you?” he murmured. His breath floated across the small space between them, warming her cold skin.
He knew? “Sure,” she said nonchalantly. “Always do.”
“And you haven’t washed since performing the ritual. Too eager, Lilah?”
“Come on, Wes.” She ran the tip of her tongue along her teeth. “Haven’t you ever fantasised about me with another woman’s smell on my fingers? The twig’s, maybe?”
“I was referring,” he said evenly, “to the blood.”
“Hey, only a little. And she was hot for it, too. You know, that’s something we never -”
“I doubt she’d feel the same way now that she knows how you tricked her.” Wesley turned away. “Dawn?”
Lilah could only stare in shocked dismay as a slim figure emerged from Wesley’s bedroom, wearing one of his shirts. That jailbait Summers bitch.
“Unexpected things crop up when you tamper with causality, Lilah. One thing is altered and a ripple of new alterations ensue, leading to quite a different universe than one might expect.”
“And one of those alterations is you taking up cradle-snatching?” Lilah laughed bitterly. “Congrats, Wes. You’re even more fucked-up than in the last universe I saw you in.”
Wesley raised his eyebrows and looked about to reply, but his new little playmate stepped forward instead. “Wesley’s told me who you are. Well, we live here and you don’t, and I think you should go. Now.”
“You have no idea who you’re dealing with, kid,” Lilah told her.
But then Wesley looked her straight in the eye and said, just exactly as she remembered: “Don’t embarrass yourself, Lilah.”
She hurried out into the corridor. Strategic retreat, was all. Strategic retreat. She’d get rid of that girl - one way or another.