Buffy hugged the soft woollen coat around her, trying her best to ignore the shivering of every part of her body that was shaking her to her very core, though she knew that it was not merely the biting cold that was causing her to tremble like a child, frightened of the dark. She knew that she had travelled too far, and made too many sacrifices, to find the man she thought she might, maybe, love, and the imminence of seeing his face again was enough to send her heart through her stomach in a way that she had not known since she had first went to Los Angeles to see Angel.

Angel. She spat the name in her mind as she struggled through the hard, caked snow of the barren streets of St.Petersburg, trying to ignore the malevolent attention that her Western garb was drawing from the starving, freezing beggars who held out their hands in front of well- practiced expressions of despair. Raised in opulence and comfort in California, she had seen little of true poverty besides those shows on past prime-time that she sometimes watched when she was bored, but she had seen enough of it in the last four months to write a post-graduate thesis. If she ever went back to college – hell, if she even survived long enough to think about it – she would study poverty, its causes and its effects. She wanted to know what kind of circumstances could drive people in far corners of the world to behave with the same uniform, ruthless, savagery. She thought that she had seen the depths of what the world could spew forth from years of living on the Hellmouth, but on her quest, she had learned that Sunnydale did not sit over the mouth of Hell. Hell, she had learned, was easily enough created by man on earth. In Sunnydale, the enemy was clear, the battlelines well drawn. Here, and in South America, and in Africa, and in Sicily, there were no lines of battle to mark her enemies for her, for there had not been a demon among them. All those who had tried to kill her, all of them that she had buried with increasing steel in her mind against the pangs of her conscience, all had been human. As she sidestepped agilely to avoid a drunk who snarled at her, she wondered idly why she had believed for so long that evil was the sole domain of the soulless. Humans were worse – most of them had the choice.

Choice.

Had he not, too, made a choice, only one infinitely more difficult? It was easy for men and women to start down the road of the damned, for they were ever but one step from the barbarity from which they had emerged but which was still locked in their genes as the first tool of instinct. But he had no such easy heritage on which to fall back. Childe of Drusilla, grand-childe of Angelus, of the line of Nest, of the Order of Aurelius. A heritage steeped in evil, drenched in the blood of innumerable innocent lives. That was his burden. The strength that he had to possess to make the choice to reject that, and more, a century of evidence that the only joy could be found in the slaughter of humanity, was colossal. On the rare, secret moments when she prayed, she prayed to have the kind of strength that he had shown, and that she had refused to see until it was no longer in front of her.

'Please, please, I have no money to feed my child,' a scruffy beggar pleaded with practiced despair, shaking her from her revery. She tried to ignore the woman, whose face was obscured by the driving snow and the thick, filthy shapka on her head. Buffy's Russian was good, learned quickly with a talent for linguistics that she had never known she had, but she did not wish to speak to this creature.

'Please, lady, pleeease,' she whined at the muffled American girl, all the while her hardened eyes probing for any sign of conspicuous wealth. Despite the surprising strength of the girl, the beggar refused to relinquish her hold.

'Get away from me,' Buffy snarled at her in passable, though heavily accented, Russian, throwing the woman from her with one flick of her wrist, sending the beggar tumbling to the ground in a roll stopped by the crumbling pavement. Buffy heard the snap of her ribs clearly, and the muffled cry of pain. She grinned tightly to herself. She knew from experience, though she was but two days in this pestilential remnant of the ambitions of Tsar Peter the Great, that the only way to ensure that she would not be bothered was to show a toughness, a willingness to resort to the most extreme depths of violence in order to be left alone. She had learned that lesson in Rio, though why she had ever thought that Spike would be in Rio she could not recall.

The buildings overhead were towering, grey and bleak. Buffy grunted to herself as she walked, avoiding the refuse that was strewn on the streets, trying not to see that she was hemmed in on all sides by the graceless stone architecture of the old Soviet Union, knowing that she was as alien to this place as any creature of the night. It was not that she was American – being the Slayer meant that her sense of nationality was hazy at best, for she fought not for Americans but for everyone. It was that she was a creature of the sun, meant for light as a symbol of that for which she fought. And died, she thought ruefully. This place was her idea of hell on earth. It was the middle of the Russian winter, the same winter that had turned back Napoleon and defeated Hitler. Fifteen hours of continuous night. It was a vampire's dream come true, and it was for that reason that she struggled through the snow, the wind, the beggars, and the claustrophobia. This was a vampire's paradise. And the last place on earth that she could look for, she knew, if this came to nothing, she would return home and bury her heart in the same restless prison with the other emotions that she had learned, since her resurrection, to suppress. This was where the trail would run cold.

She turned left, down a narrow side alley that led from the main road, quiet though it was. She knew where she was going – leaving Sunnydale and its familiar environment had triggered latent senses that she had never known that she had because she had never had need of them before. She could sniff the undead, now, she could taste their scent, as they could sense humans. There were precious few left in the Old World, now, they had come to prefer the glamour and easy living of the New. But still, there were some, and she had spent days tracking them since she had arrived here. There was a bar, nameless and anonymous. One thing held true for the world, from Buenos Aires to Kinshasa to Kowloon to Paris. Vampires loved bars.

The building was nondescript, looking like nothing more than another useless and derelict holdover from the Soviet era. Overhead, there was nothing but a few badly nailed boards, no glitzy neon, no Budweiser sign. The door was heavily locked, but not so heavily that she would not have been able to kick it down, were she to so desire. It would not be necessary.

'Papers,' the hulking vampire at the door demanded in a bored tone. He was not in game face, this was not Sunnydale or Los Angeles. She looked at him as a predator to prey. He sensed it, his eyes becoming wary, but he could also sense that it was not him that she was after, not this night. She smelled human, she knew, but more than human. Bouncers did not ask questions like that.

'Don't have any,' she replied, equally bored, looking him straight in the eye. She tilted her head to the right. 'Want to give me yours? I'll keep them as a souvenir when I rip off your head if you don't let me in.'

He looked at her, hard, but he could sense that she had the force to back the deadly serious words. With a quiet snarl, he pushed the door violently open, the cast iron crashing against the wall behind with a resounding shriek that was muffled by the screaming wind. Without a backward glance, she walked inside.

It was like every other vampire bar the world over – dark, tasteless, badly lit and poorly maintained. Bloodsuckers could nor care less about creature comforts, the only vampire that she had ever met who did was Angel. Her face darkened as she made her way quietly through the thin crowd, swaying to the lack of harmony of the unoriginal heavy metal that boomed through the large, two-levelled chamber. Were it not for Angel, she would be at home, in bed with the man whose disappearance had taken her halfway across the world.

She propped herself up against the bar, ignoring the hungry attention of the two vampires beside her. They, too, could sense that they were outmatched. It was the old fight-or-flight instinct that held true even after death. They knew what not to mess with, not this night and not this human. They pulled away, acting as though they wanted to. They didn't.

She attracted the attention of the barman with an arrogant toss of her head, removing the shapka and tossing her blonde hair carelessly.

'What'll it be?' he asked her.

'Information.'

'Not on sale here,' he replied, turning away, only to be pulled back, his head slammed against the bar with such force that it caused heads to turn halfway across the room despite the booming of the speakers.

'I wasn't going to pay for it,' she told him sweetly. 'I'm looking for a vampire.'

'Take your pick.'

She twisted his head painfully, eliciting a grunt of pain. 'Not these. I'm looking for a Master.'

'There's only one Master in town,' he gasped. She knew he was human. She didn't care a great deal, for the search was almost over, one way or another. 'Jur'Khan Chung, lord of the north. No other Masters allowed.'

She tasted the sweet bile of disappointment, yet again, but swallowed it back. If there was ever a vampire who didn't care about the rules of even his own society, it was Spike, and no other would dictate to him where he could or could not go. Not even her.

'Where will I find him?'