(notes and disclaimer with part one)

“I'm not sure that old lady is going to recover from seeing us go poof,” Buffy growled in a low voice when they blinked and looked around, finding themselves in what was almost certainly a demon dimension.

Hank was too stressed to laugh, but he managed a weak smile. The old woman had been feeding pigeons around the statue, and had come into view at exactly the wrong moment.

Buffy stared at the wide, square body of Cyrelle as he walked in front of them, unconcerned about watching his back. With the relevant demon senses, he would probably know they were going to try anything before they did.

“Blue trees and green sky. Silver flowers and red water. Kind of tacky…like Star Trek…the original kind, wouldn't you say?” she drawled.

Cyrelle shrugged without turning, disappointing the Slayer. “It's not my world. I never heard of a dimension called Star Trek. What demons live there?”

“Little ones in gold shirts who can't keep their zipper closed and green ones with pointy ears, oh, and big tall ones with bumpy heads…no wait, that was later.” Buffy sighed, her clever reply shot. “This place is giving me the creeps. What does the Overseer need my dad for if there's nothing here but psychedelic scenery? No, wait. Please tell me this Overseer isn't trying to get back to the Human world…tell me he's not a totally ugly, really anaemic dude with a face full of teeth, a thing for blood and an allergy to sunlight?”

“He is not,” Cyrelle said, again, without turning.

A few minutes later they seemed to go almost 'between'. Buffy couldn't explain it, even to herself, but one moment they were in a grove of horribly yellow trees and the next they were in an equally tacky room.

Cyrelle seemed to melt into the background as a door closed behind them. One Buffy couldn't remember passing through.

Moments later the room filled with a presence, though no corporeal being appeared. “Why do you come here, Slayer?” a disembodied voice asked, more in her head than aloud.

Buffy looked around her, not liking the sense of suffocating presence all around her. “Because this man deserves a chance to pay his debt. Because I want to know what you're going to do with him?”

“He is nothing but refuse. His life is forfeit. It is mine.”

Buffy swung to look at her father, who was turning white before her eyes.

“NO!!” she screamed. “Take me instead.” Hank fell to the ground, gasping and jerking as his body spasmed. “Tell me what you're doing to him, then take me instead!”

“Take you?” the voice repeated, as though not quite grasping the idea of self-sacrifice. “I cannot. The energy of a Slayer would destabilize my world…”

Buffy, on the ground now, trying to help her father, took a moment to digest that while dragging him into her arms. “Are you trying to tell me you eat the energy of human beings to power…this place? Like, you're a kind of furnace, or power station or freaking Enron or something? Do people here have shares in you or something?”

“His life is forfeit,” the voice insisted, ignoring Buffy's facetiousness.

“Yeah, yeah,” Buffy growled, barely controlling her panic, “but why don't we, for the sake of argument, wait until we've finished this discussion before killing him?”

She looked all around her at the silence that followed, then down to watch the colour return to her father's face slowly.

“You heard me,” she insisted. “Take me, instead. If you're a demon, you've gotta get brownie points for taking the Slayer off the streets.”

There was silence for an interminable time.

“Very well,” the voice said at length and in the time it took for his last syllable to fade, Hank was gone.

“What did you do with him?” she demanded frantically.

“Be still. He has been returned whence he came. You are forfeit in his place.”

Cold dread lanced through Buffy. The relief that her father was safe, and somehow, she knew he was, was now replaced with fear, and with the pain of knowing she would never find Giles, that she might never see him again, even if she lived beyond the next few minutes...

“What do I have to do?”

“That depends on you.”

Buffy wheeled around, her eyes narrowing as she stared into Cyrelle's violet ones. The presence was fading from the room. “Why do I have the feeling that I've been set up?” she growled, her Slayer senses doing a jig. Those senses hadn't been more than normally aggravated by the almighty Overseer. Cyrelle, on the other hand, managed to tilt the machine every time he came near her.

“You do not disappoint,” a voice said, though Cyrelle's lips didn't move.

Buffy rolled her eyes. “You're another thingy dude like the Overseer…only you're actually here and he wasn't... Actually here, I mean. You just hitch a ride with stupid, here?” she asked, pointing at the now glazed eyes of the demon, standing like a wound-down toy.

“You belong to me now.”

“Man...er…thin air…of few words,” Buffy retorted, more bravado than real calm, then freaked as she found the reality around her melting, to be replaced by a large, mansion-y looking entrance hall. It was as alien to her as the Overseer's acid trip, but at least it was human…hopefully.

She looked around. Black and white tiled floor, really, really old…as in antique-y. Carved wooden cabinets, some with glass doors, filled with what looked like porcelain figures and fine glass figurines; a chandelier, like something out of Phantom of the Opera, and a huge, winding staircase, surrounded her.

“Wow. Big day for the clichés,” she said aloud.

When nothing answered her but the faint echo of her own voice, she turned slowly to check out the front doors. They were huge, heavy and looked decidedly locked. Before she could step toward them, a voice halted her.

“Welcome.”

She wheeled. It was a cross between a predatory growl and a throaty baritone. She swallowed.

“Are you working solo, or are you another taxi cab for one of those no-actual-body guys?”

The figure on the staircase blinked and tilted his huge head. He hadn't seen anyone in a very long time, Human or otherwise, but those who had seen him in the past…those whom the Overseer had sent to him…had all been too horrified or too self-conscious to look him in the eye. All had been swiftly taken away again. Yet this slip of a girl was holding a conversation with him as though he were some local she'd met on the street.

“I have no name.”

Buffy heard the question in his tone. “Buffy. Buffy Summers,” she told him, wondering how that was possible. “So what do people call you?”

He looked away. “I generally try not to hear what they call me.”

“What is this place? Why was I sent here? What are you to the Overseer?” she demanded, her patience worn thin by everything that had happened to her, the distinct lack of explanations and a sudden over overwhelming surge in her need to see Giles again.

“Patience,” the creature growled and descended the rest of the stairs. He walked as an animal might if it were raised to stand on its hind legs, as though his knees bent the wrong way.

When he reached her, he towered over her, her brow only reaching the bottom of his sternum.

Buffy expected him to smell all doggy or horsy or at worst, like the hyena cage at the zoo, but despite the fawn coloured hair that seemed to cover his body and face, the huge jaw, triangular, canine ears and fairly stunning canine teeth, he smelled of herbs and the soft fur on a puppy's head.

He was dressed in jeans with a heavy belt, boots, and a heavy, black collared shirt buttoned two from the top.

“Well, you dress better than most demons I've known,” she said, looking up at him.

He seemed to smirk for the barest moment before becoming serious again, staring down at her with surprisingly soft brown eyes. “You have been sent here to keep me company. The Overseer needs me, needs my services, but I get… I haven't been able to work lately.”

“So why doesn't he just kill you and get someone else?”

The creature's eyes grew melancholy. “I'm told there is no other who can perform the tasks I perform. He can punish me, and rage at me, but he cannot kill me until he finds a replacement. Since none of those things worked, he decided, once again, to try to address the problem, in his usual ham-fisted manner.”

Buffy frowned. Something about the creature was wigging her, way beyond any normal wiggins, but she couldn't put a finger on it.

“You don't exactly look or act like the regular kind of demon I fight. Are we in your dimension?”

He shook his head slowly. “We are in Yorkshire.”

“I'm still in England?”

“Back in England,” he corrected and raised a hand before she could ask more questions. “We're a long way from civilization and no, we are not allowed to leave.”

“Great. I'm so going to kill my father when I get back.”

“When?” He made the word a question.

Buffy made a face at her captor. “When,” she repeated stubbornly then froze, before raising her eyes very slowly. “Tell me,” she said very slowly, “that they don't actually want me to marry you, or mate with you and make Super-Slayers, or something equally ookie?”

He had been watching her with something approaching admiration for her lack of fear, poise and ability to make light of a serious situation. Now his face dropped. “No. Nothing as foolish as that,” he told her softly, unable to prevent her from seeing the hurt in his eyes.

There was regret in hers for a moment, but she was too angry with the Overseer, her father and life in general, to linger on the thought.

“Look, tell me what I'm supposed to do. How can I do anything here if I don't know what Mister 'where's-my-body' wants me to do?”

“You are here to be with me. No more, no less.”

“Um…I think we've already been this way.”

The creature shook his head. “A companion,” he growled. “Will it appal and revolt you so much to be a companion to one such as I?”

Buffy sighed a heavy, frustrated sigh. “Get over yourself, already. I've been way past appal and revolt,” she growled. “You're a teddy bear compared to some of the guys in my past.” She reached up unaffectedly and touched his cheek with the back of her hand. “And you're warm, which has to be a major plus. So can we move on to where I sleep and whether being your companion is going to eventually involve shared bodily warmth? I so don't want to have to kill you.”

He blinked. There was strength in her voice, though her tone was dry, and yet there was a sense there that given reason to, she would most certainly kill him.

“As I said. You are here to be my companion. The Overseer believes that if I have a companion I will…” He paused for a long moment, as though talking about himself was utterly foreign to him. “That I might cease to have nightmares, to be so restless…so… lonely.”

“Let me guess: he expects bringing me here to increase workplace performance and output from you?”

Again the creature looked nonplussed for a moment, then nodded.

“Just great,” she growled, her eyes widening when her stomach followed the words with a loud growl of its own. “Food,” she announced suddenly.

“Food?”

“As in I'm hungry and thirsty and if I'm going to be stuck here, I should know where to go to find it when I need it.”

“Would you not prefer to see your rooms first?”

Buffy's curiosity overcame her hunger. If she was going to be stuck here for any amount of time it was reassuring to know she wasn't going to have to sleep in his bed, or at his feet or on the stupid kitchen hearth like Cinder-freakin'-ella. “I have rooms? You mean like a hotel suite?” She gestured and he led the way.

There were, indeed, rooms. A large door opened into a sitting area furnished with antiques, but with a woman's presence in mind. There was soft rose and grey carpet, matching rose and cream drapes, furniture definitely looking like something boudoir-ish out of a period novel and a huge cream bowl of open, and half open, pink roses on the small table by the sitting chair. They were unexpectedly real and fragrant.

Beyond it she could see a bedroom through an open door. Inside there was huge bed with an equally huge patchwork quilt. More antiques, porcelain figures, and long, heavy cream drapes patterned delicately with blown pink roses and soft green leaves, covered the bedroom windows. There was also a bathroom. It had been modernised, tiled in grey tiles, with a replica cream coloured antique vanity, a shower over a matching cream coloured antique bathtub with legs, and shiny pewter-look fittings all round.

Someone had really attempted to cater for a woman's needs. There was an assortment of unopened items on it from shampoo to cosmetics, even feminine hygiene products. Those made her chuckle in spite of the ludicrousness of her situation.

“Something is wrong?” he rumbled from the bedroom.

“Good ears,” she muttered. “No. Someone was pretty thorough, though.”

“We are a long way from anywhere. Your needs had to be accounted for,” he explained patiently. “Are the accommodations acceptable?”

Buffy strolled back out. “Not really,” she said honestly. “But they're okay for a prison…actually they're kinda pretty,” she conceded, picking up a priceless shepherdess figurine and wandering over to the drapes.

The creature watched her open them with one hand and stare out past the grey, unwelcoming weather, to the endless moors beyond.

“It is supposed to be a prison, isn't it?” she asked, his sensitive ears detecting the first faint note of despair in her voice.

“It was made so.”

“Where did you live before?”

His shoulders drooped. “I do not know.”

“You don't remember?” He shook his head. “Did you get hit on the head?”

His eyes grew amused and his lip quirked. “Not to my knowledge.”

“Then why…?”

He shook his head again. “All I know is that I am here now.”

“And you don't want to know…?”

For a moment he looked at her with such bleak despair that a lump rose in her throat.

“Some days my heart is so sore with yearning that I feel as though I might die…and yet I know not that for which I yearn.”

Buffy flicked a glance toward the moors again. “Freedom?”

“Perhaps,” he said softly.

She translated that as: 'Close, but no cigar.' He still looked like someone had just shot his mother. Her stomach rumbled.

“You think maybe we could find some food now?” she asked, and rubbed her arms. “I don't suppose this place has central heating?”

“Food yes. Heating, I'm afraid not. I will light fires for you early today, but they will take time to warm the rooms.”

Buffy sighed then gestured to the fireplace in the sitting room. “Go ahead. Don't let me stop you.”

The creature stooped and lit the pre-laid fire with matches from the mantle. “The brass bucket here contains fuel. It is not ordinary wood. It will last as long as you want it to.”

She frowned. “Magic?”

“If you want to call it that,” he said cryptically, and moved toward the door. “You said you were hungry.”

They lit three more fires on the way to the kitchen, Buffy doing the last one herself.

When they reached the big room with its flagstones, heavy overhead beams, huge wooden table, big antique stove and chimney, big central work area, with, Buffy noticed, modern ceramic cook top set in it, and the view beyond the window to what looked like a thriving herb and vegetable hothouse, despite the bleak weather out-of-doors, she actually sighed with pleasure.

The creature looked at her sharply as she looked around, colour seeping into her chilled, pale cheeks.

“You like it?”

“It's warm,” Buffy conceded, and moved closer to the wooden stove. “Why is it so warm?”

“The stove is always on. It provides hot water to keep the pipes from freezing in winter and the herbarium warm all year around.”

“That's all?”

“My understanding is that this is a very old house and that aspect of it must be respected. However, wherever modern convenience, like power, water, bathroom facilities and such like could be added discretely, the previous occupants did so.”

Buffy frowned. “Previous occupants? I know you said we were in Yorkshire, but I sort of thought this was like a Dracula's castle deal. Like, if I ever get out, and then come back, it'll be gone.”

“The house is neither an illusion nor a trans-dimensional artefact,” he said simply. “It was, and it will be when we're gone. There is food there, and there,” he added, pointing first to a modern refrigerator and second, to a large pantry.

Buffy opened the refrigerator door. “So, you do your own cooking, shopping?”

The creature made a rumbling noise that might have been a chuckle. “Before you came this was not here. Before you came food was provided. When I was hungry I would come to this table and there would be food.”

“That sounds like a deal I could live with,” Buffy told him. “Why the fuss for me?”

Again the creature withdrew a little into itself. “Not just for you.”

“Oh,” Buffy realised. “You didn't like it? Not…the food,” she guessed, “the other.” He nodded. “Nothing homey about fast food,” she agreed, taking an apple and a piece of cheese from the refrigerator. “Must be a bitch to be alone all the time, with nothing to do, no one to talk to. Are you ever going to tell me what you do for the big O?”

He blinked at the change of subject. “If you really want to know,” he said quietly and extended an arm toward the door.

They went through several rooms to a den, Buffy mourning the temperature drop from the warmth of the kitchen to the relative chill of the rest of the house. It was going to take a long time for those fires to heat the place up…

The den was large, with dark carpet, big heavy, ebony writing desk, port wine coloured heavy drapes and weapons on the walls. Buffy, however, didn't focus on any of those things. Her eyes were for the bookcases. So many bookcases, all full. The sudden connection to the library, to Giles, to his book-laden apartment, shook her. She couldn't stop her eyes growing very bright.

“You…you like books?” she asked as he brought yet another fire to life.

He rose and straightened before tilting his head and looking at her. “Of course. This is where I work. I research…I provide knowledge, information, locations, methods… whatever the Overseer requires…”

Buffy looked at the books: everything from demonology to accounting, geography, anatomy…even theology.

“So…this Overseer…not a God, huh?”

The creature's eyebrows rose. “Trans-dimensional demon. They cannot exist here, or between, in bodily form.”

“So what's the what? Why are they here? What do they need research for and why was the Overseer going to eat my father? I don't buy that energy story.”

“He would have been consumed…his life energy would have been utterly consumed, and then one of them would have taken his body.”

“So why the money thing? Why not just take whatever bodies they want, at will, after the first few. I mean they get the bodies of a few hulky demons or bouncers or something, then they can go kidnap all the fresh bodies they want…”

He curled his lip into an amused half-smile. “This is not a horror movie, and they are beings, not snarling, brain-sucking monsters. The financial organization exists. It is a registered business. The money finances many of their terrestrial activities. Magic can do many things, but it cannot provide everything. Believe it or not, their purpose here is not to kill human beings, but to keep their own world from dying, by any means necessary.”

“Weird,” Buffy said, still assimilating the information. “So are they evil or not?”

The creature made the chuckling noise again. “In terms of this world, probably, but insofar as the primary motivation is the preservation of their world at any cost, philosophically, probably not.”

“Okay. I think I'm going for evil, here. I hear what you're saying, but they were going to kill my father and they've imprisoned me here, for like, eternity.” Buffy cleared her throat when her voice cracked. “And they've probably killed a lot of other loan defaulters already. Besides…that fake, 'between' world deal I was taken to? Trust me, anyone who could deliberately make a place that tacky…so very evil.”

His lips curled up even more. He could see the fear and the pain in her eyes, but still she made jokes, her strength as palpable as her vulnerability…

“Perhaps you would like to sleep now?”

Buffy shrugged. “I'm not tired.”

He could feel the tension in her. “Then perhaps you would like to sit for a while by the fire? It might be restful to read, or play chess, or perhaps you would like to start a tapestry or some small trifle of embroidery?”

It was Buffy's turn to laugh. She wasn't sure if it was a nervous laugh at the absurdity of it all or mild hysteria setting in.

“You really don't know me too well, do you?”

He tilted his head. He wanted to know her. He wanted to know why in some rooms her eyes were blue, in others green…and when she looked out the windows at the bleak weather, they were as grey as the clouds themselves…and he wanted to know how she came to be so strong and why her spirit felt so old…why she could seem so childlike and yet have such iron self-control and courage seemingly beyond measure.

“I do not, but there is plenty of time.”

A slow look of revelation, turning to horror, passed over her features. “No! No there's not!” she cried. “I'm going to get out of here. I'm not spending the rest of my life playing parlour games with a giant, walking stuffed toy!”

He watched her shake with anger, her eyes flashing, with a heavy heart. Nothing that free, or that lovely, should ever have been caged…for any reason.

“I am sorry,” he said simply, turned and left her alone.

When she recovered from the irrational sense of abandonment that followed, Buffy took herself upstairs to her rooms…and her fire. After a little poking and a few more pieces of fuel it flared wonderfully to life, reminding her of the fireplace at home and her mother's penchant for lighting it each Christmas in Sunnydale, regardless of the weather. It was a small step from there to memories of asking if Giles could spend that Christmas with them, of his face when she asked him to help her with Angel. A wave of weariness washed over her, but not enough to obliterate the memory of his face, nor the sure knowledge, with the ease of hindsight, of what it had cost him to help her…

Her next, barely conscious, impression was of being carried, the way her father used to carry her when she was very small…the way he carried her after all those early ice shows, from the car to the house, when she was so happy and so tired she could barely keep her eyes open.