Backfire - Spander Files

strong point.
Spike chuckled and turned toward Xander. With a smirk on his face, he patted the
human on the shoulder. “Let’s see how that works out for you.” He then sauntered
slowly toward the front door.
Xander held back a moment, running through his options in his head. Go get Buffy?
Bad idea. She’s dealing with the thing that I’m not dealing with right now. Option
2...fuck, I don’t have time for this.
“Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K,” Xander mumbled under his breath before
following Spike toward the store.
He stepped up next to the vampire again, just inside the door. Spike was looking
around, eyeing everyone. His gaze finally settled on the young man behind the
counter. The clerk was ringing up the purchases of a woman in her late twenties. A
four year old girl was attached to her leg, staring up at Spike. The vampire’s head
slowly lowered ‘til he was looking at the girl.
Xander reached up and wrapped his fingers around Spike’s upper arm. He held on
as tight as he could and whispered softly, knowing the vampire could hear, “Please,
Spike. Not the little girl.”
Spike’s head whipped around to face Xander. His eyes were gold, the other features
were still in human-mode, but the sneer was pure vampire. “Remind me to tell you
a sweet little story about a girl in a coal bin, someday.”
The vampire twisted out of Xander’s ineffectual grip and launched himself from the
door to over the counter in less than a moment.
“Hey!” the clerk shouted as he was shoved to the floor. Without slipping into game
face, Spike let out a loud growl at the boy, then directed it toward the woman and
several other people standing around the front of the store. Then he turned to
Xander, morphed his gold eyes back to blue, let his sneer turn into a smirk, and
winked.
But it wasn’t until Spike reached up to the shelf above the cashier’s counter that