The lair was never silent. Warren knew this because he never really slept, and at night, lying in bed, he listened to the computers chugging thoughtfully now and then, and he heard their fans switch on and off. Sometimes he heard some potion Jonathan was brewing bubble or slurp ominously. He hated the smells that insinuated themselves into every corner of the lair from Jonathan’s concoctions. He hated the crude sounds and sick, violent colours of magic. However, he had to admit, it served its purpose. He just wished he never had to smell it, see it or listen to it.

Tonight, however, the lair was blissfully potion-free, and Warren lay in bed listening to the comforting gurglings of technology. The sounds came as a gentle hum through the closed door and in another place and another time, he thought, they might have lulled him to sleep. But not tonight, or any night here in this town. Not while he had plans to make and blueprints to draw in his head. Not with the Slayer so close. The game was nearly over. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred. Just roll the dice.

So far, he thought, the Trio had done well. Though they perhaps lacked the grace of the preternatural and the mystique of the divine, Warren liked to think that they made a somewhat enigmatic foe for the Slayer. Unlike her previous archnemeses – and he never forgave himself for that one mispronunciation, it must have been the degrading effect of the invisibility ray – the Trio were human, and would generally be considered by advertisers and television executives to be in the same demographic as the Slayer and her Scoobies. Their motives were purely self-serving and tangible, unlike, say, the motives of the old mayor, which, despite Jonathan’s repeated explanations, remained vague and incomprehensible to Warren. Surely there were ways of achieving immortality and invincibility that did not involve the marked downside of becoming a giant snake? And the Slayer’s ex-boyfriend brought the big blue guy to the mall, apparently, according to Jonathan, who was buying a slushee at that very moment, to wipe out all human life. His motive seemed to be simple insanity, if you could call that a motive. That was like, say, wiping out all the fried chicken on earth. A gesture that yes, would demonstrate your incontestable power, but would leave you without fried chicken, and what kind of existence is that?

He turned over at the thought, and pulled the blankets more tightly around him, though he was not cold. Warren could never lie still at night. He tried but inevitably failed. There was a suspicion somewhere in his mind that if he slept well, had one good dream, had one lazy morning, that something would look different, so he lay down every night and tried to sleep. Tried to ignore, for a little while, the constant buzz of thoughts in his head. There was always so much to think about.

The blonde chick people had seen hanging around the weird tower downtown, what her deal was no one knew. A big light show that you could see from the suburbs and then she was never seen again. And before that, there was that whole year when the army had been crawling all over Sunnydale – no one could explain why – and then they were gone without a trace. The Slayer had been mixed up in all of it. Warren had been away at school during those years, something for which he was eternally grateful, but Jonathan had told him all about it over AD&D one night. Andrew remembered stuff too, like how he’d heard about the Slayer’s sister cutting her arms and how Tucker said he knew a guy who knew a guy who once dated Cordelia Chase, and he heard that she was in LA now doing the Slayer’s vampire ex-boyfriend, who had apparently worked through his psychotic phase.

Despite the tangled web that was the Slayer’s relationship to impending apocalypse, Warren liked to think that the Trio was something new. Their power was their own, not borrowed from some big blue guy or whatever you needed to turn you into a snake. Not that he’d mind borrowing power, like from those orbs he’d read about in one of Andrew’s books, but so far, everything they’d achieved was based on their own ingenuity. Mostly his own ingenuity, Warren thought to himself with a certain satisfaction. Jonathan’s trick with the time loop was neat, but Andrew’s demons? Lame. Jonathan’s glamours were useful, for instance if one happened to kill a person and needed that person to be seen alive some time later. Jonathan was certainly useful. He had looked ridiculous in that skirt, though.

Jonathan was in his curtained-off section of the lair now, cocooned in a sleeping bag. The move to a new lair and the necessity of living together with Warren and Andrew stung Jonathan sorely. This, he told Warren, was not what he signed up for. The guys at SPECTRE never had to live together, he pointed out. So Warren, to placate him for the good of the plan, hung some old curtains across one corner and called it Jonathan’s Lair. Jonathan scowled at that too, but Warren could see him reasoning in his head. It was better than having to bunk up with Andrew, and it was better than being caught and possibly violently interrogated by the Slayer.

Not that Warren was certain Jonathan would have a problem with being interrogated by the Slayer.

Still, Jonathan was bright, and Jonathan was useful. Why Warren kept Andrew around and didn’t just make his little outfit a Duo was sometimes beyond him. Andrew whined and made flowers out of Warren’s soldering wire. Jonathan whined too, but without flowers. Warren sometimes thought it was because Andrew was Tucker’s brother, and he used to hang out with Tucker, so that’s why he was nice to the kid now. But he knew that was bullshit. Warren felt no loyalty to Tucker. Sure they hung out, didn’t mean he actually ever liked him. The hell dogs? Lamer than flying monkeys.

The pillow was uncomfortable, so he punched it up and turned over again. Okay. Okay. He had to be honest with himself for a minute. Robot girlfriend, yes, a little lame. Not the actual manufacture, that took engineering skills that no one else in the world possessed. But the girlfriend part. Yes, she was a robot. Yes, he fucked her. Yes, he liked it. Of course he liked it, she was programmed to please him. But yes, lame.

And also an entirely negligible experience compared to looking down and watching another human being writhe underneath you as you gave them pleasure. He hadn’t realized, when he built April, that giving was as good as receiving when it came to sex. Katrina’s eyes gazed darkly at him when he angled himself a certain way and hit her right on the spot that sent electricity all through her body. He loved when she looked at him like that, it made him feel so powerful. And Andrew, when Andrew was about to come his face took on this open-mouthed expression of sheer ecstasy, and his hands clenched around Warren’s back and Warren loved thinking how much Andrew needed him at that moment.

He reached out his hand under the blankets and ran his fingers down Andrew’s naked, bony little back. He could probably count the ribs with ease, if he wanted to.

Recently, he had fucked Andrew face to face, rather than the way they had first done it. He needed to see that look in Andrew’s eyes. It thrilled him deeply to see someone trust him so much. He liked the feel of Andrew’s eagerness against his belly, and he liked a lot of kissing during sex. The oral fixation of the neurotic. He smiled to himself and pulled Andrew’s toy-like body towards him. He was careful. Andrew would be so easy to break.

He kept Andrew around because if he didn’t, he’d have no one to kiss, and he loved the feeling of his mouth full of someone else. If Andrew left – not that he ever would, but if he did – Warren would have to take up smoking or something. Or he’d start eating too much. Neither seemed like a good alternative to hot little Andrew. He already chewed the lids off all his pens, and these days, with the Slayer gunning for them, it was dangerous even to run to the store for another pack of ballpoints.

The Slayer gunning for them. That thrilled him, too. And soon enough he’d pick up those orbs and level the playing field, as soon as he could talk Jonathan into wearing a demon suit. It would be just like a glamour, he’d tell Short Round, only a little gooier.

And he’d just had an idea for a back up plan. He liked to have back up plans. Funny, he thought, how even simple turns of phrase could give him ideas for plans.

If the Orbs of Nezzla’khan didn’t work, well, maybe he’d go gunning for the Slayer. Literally.

That would be new. The endgame of all games.

Andrew mumbled something in his sleep and snuggled back into Warren’s body. Warren smiled again, and kissed him tenderly just behind the ear. Maybe he’d keep Andrew with him after the heist after all.

He’d have to take another look at those jet pack blueprints. Maybe he’d fix that flaw he’d built into one of them.

Maybe. Maybe not.

For now, he wrapped his arm tightly around Andrew and dozed. In his fitful dreams, Warren wondered where he could buy a gun.

She hoods her eyes when they mention Tara even though she knows they know how much it hurts. She covers it anyway.

Because they don’t know the details.

It was a long time ago and she had long wanted to forget. His eyes had been too cold that night, too mercenary when they looked at her naked skin and shy breasts. He had run his hand over her and it sounded like paper. He knew too much, his year on her made him too knowledgeable about things she had tried not to think of. Not even when it came to Xander.

But Warren, he had seen her. He had raised her hair from her shoulders one night after the Bronze and told her she was pretty and for a short time she was smitten with this man, at least her equal in intelligence and beyond her in years and worldliness. Warren could talk, he could always talk, and she felt, when he looked at her with those dark eyes, that she was the only thing he wanted to see. When he wrapped his arm around her, walking her home, she felt with some alarm but more arousal and deep, warm pleasure his hand on her waist, the pressure of his fingertips telling her that he liked his hand there, tucked into a curve of her femininity. He made her feel seductive.

It hadn’t lasted long, just a few weeks of furtive kissing, of leaving Xander and Jesse at the pool table or dancing by the stage and beating a path for the door under the guise of a headache or homework or insane study that always passed the escape test with those two, because she was Willow, the quiet one, the one who spent too long with her books and not enough time shopping or pretending at the Bronze that soda was as fun as the other smells coming from the bar.

She didn’t need the other things you could get at the Bronze. Warren was always waiting outside, a gleam in his eyes that she took for pleasure at seeing her. Maybe it was. When she recalled it now it was hard and frightening, a look perfectly moulded to fit the face that killed her lover.

Everyone said the bullet was a stray, a ricochet, a frantic shot behind him as he fled his own crime scene. She could not convince herself. Warren never used a weapon he didn’t know how to handle.

He knew how to handle her. He brushed the back of his fingers against her cheek and she leaned into his hand wanting more. He kissed her lightly, and it was she who opened her lips. Any invitation in this town is dangerous. His mouth was soft and hers was pliable and he taught her how to kiss with greed. His basement hummed under its breath because he never turned his computers off. A screensaver glowed palely in the eerie gloom, and he undressed her under its half light. Skin can only be white at times like this. His was ghostly and he was hairy, and she had never imagined liking that but she did. It was more proof of his adulthood while she tried to smooth out her virgin fumbling. She tried to imitate his suavity but it came out like immaturity. She felt exposed and amateur.

He held her hands to his heart and reassured her with his mouth and eyes. He kissed her tenderly and unpeeled her layers, all childish buttons and zips and she desperately ached to wear something more grown up and suitable. This moment would never come again.

She had tasted him in the back of her throat when she had told Oz before graduation that it was her first time. She had pushed him away, gagged him. What she told Oz was the truth. Oz would never look at her that way.

He kissed her everywhere, and she had never imagined the feeling of a man’s mouth in places she was still reluctant to touch. He was tearing her naivety away with hands and mouth and the grate of new stubble against her inner thigh, and there was nothing she wanted more than to feel the secret things Warren gave her with every touch.

She recognised the look in his eyes only when he finally entered her. Not even a moonstruck young thing could mistake the ownership in that gleam. She was suddenly afraid and angry at herself for being afraid at a time like this. She was wrong, Warren had told her he loved her. Not in so many words. In all the nothings he whispered to her, the secret looks in acrid school corridors and the dark trysts, stake in his back pocket, because he was no fool and he’d protect her from the strangers in this town. He loved her and he was making love to her, not rendering her used and soon useless, and not counting her another thing.

Though that was what his eyes said.

Afterwards he wrapped himself around her in his bed and held her close and she almost relaxed again. His sincerity and sleepy whisperings muffled her silly doubts. The first time can never be perfect, she told herself quietly.

In school the following Monday he smiled at her with lessening intimacy, as if the knowledge they had secretly shared for weeks had been dissipated and there was no longer any need to maintain their bubble of seduction. Xander and Jesse bounced along beside her and demanded to know what was wrong in the world of Willow but she smiled and told them, nothing, nothing, she was fine. Just a little tired.

No major surprise, Will, they laughed, with all the study you been doing lately. You should chill, take it easy. Come to the Bronze later.

They sat under the sun and she agreed and over there, the other side of the quad, Warren was talking to that blond kid, kind of gangly, who looked a bit like Tucker Wells. He was wide eyed and Warren was brimful of charm, talking the way he could, his eyes full of conviction.

She wondered if she had ever looked like that kid.

Two weeks before Buffy arrived in Sunnydale, Warren left for another high school, one that would properly exercise that brain of his. Willow thought how much she would like to go to a school like that, but no one asked her. She watched the blond kid biting his lip as he walked morose and unseeing in the corridors. He barely heard the jocks when they laughed at him. She wanted to say something, but there was nothing to say.

He was in the Summers’ kitchen now, gingerly taking a Hot Pocket out of the new microwave.

And Warren was dead.

He still whispered to her in bed, words that smelled of acacia and wrapped her in his fairytale. Some nights the moon flayed the sleepless darkness in great white swathes and, stepping softly to the kitchen, she remembered the humming light in his basement.

Often Andrew joined her. He would open a bottle of something red and pour tawny glasses of cheap forgetfulness and then they would sit at the breakfast bar, mostly silently, trying to will the ghost away.

Sometimes, when the bottle was nearly empty and the candle burned low in the glow of imminent dawn, they almost believed they could.