Revenge is a dish best served over multiple courses.

It really hit the fan when I cast that enhancement spell thingie and made myself into a paragon. I felt like I was the one who wasn’t special, who wasn’t good enough to be hanging with my college-bound friends and their new Initiative buds. Thanks to the spell, I became rich, famous, smart, talented, funny and popular, perfect in every way. I was one of People magazines 50 most beautiful people that year. (I was number 14.) The Initiative called on me for tactical advice on dealing with Adam. (I suggested slapping a timed shaped-charge anti-tank mine to the small of his back where he couldn’t reach and detonating it. I heard later that Willow levitated it into place while Buffy distracted him, so I guess that worked.) I wrote the script for Toy Story and played Wolverine in the X-Men movie and swam in the Olympics and pitched the Sunnydale Hellions into the Guiness Book of World Records. I also had two girlfriends sharing my enormous bed in my spacious mansion, and that’s were it really went bad when the spell ended, because those girlfriends were also my best friends, Buffy and Willow… When the magic was broken, they realized how I’d used them. Riley wasn’t too happy with my taking his girlfriend away either, for that matter. From paragon to pariah in one easy step. Buffy and Willow wouldn’t talk to me, Joyce was livid, Giles was outraged, Riley and his commandos seemed to have orders to let me get eaten if they saw me in danger, etc. The rape word was used a lot, although it didn’t feel like rape when they seemed so willing, at least while the spell was still up...

That was my first visit from D’Hoffryn. He chuckled and congratulated me on the misery I had inflicted on my friends, saying that I had really taught them a lesson about underestimating me and ignoring me all these years. I tried to punch him, but I ended up hitting a wall and he was behind me again. He tossed me a little amulet thing and told me to call him if I ever wanted a promising career in ‘professional vengeance services.’ I shoved the amulet in the back of my closet and forgot about it. Buffy was back with Riley, Willow had hooked up with Amy, of all people, having figured out how to de-rat her from me, back when I (briefly) knew more about magic than her. I think Giles and Joyce may have been having an affair too.

So there I was, alone. Then came Anya. She had left before graduation, but now she was back, having been attracted first by the stink of D’Hoffryn around me, and later saying that she had fallen in love with me. A year and a half later, I proposed to her. Six months after that, I came home early from one of the numerous double-shifts I was working to pay for the outrageously expensive apartment that she enjoyed so much, to find her in bed with Spike. I have no idea how he didn’t hear me, or even smell me, but maybe he did and just didn’t care enough about what I thought to stop.

I went to the Magic Box, which was already closed for the night, broke a window and started rifling through the books on black magic and curses. Anya had told me of a dozen really gruesome ones, her idea of ‘pillow talk,’ telling her current lover about interesting ways to make a man’s privates come alive and strangle him to death, but I ended up having to settle for the only one I could read, and find the ingredients for in the store. Stopping by Spike’s crypt, I managed to snag a few of his shiny hairs from his stash of hair-care products, and then killed a few beers before returning home at my usual time.

Anya took the role of attentive and cheerful house-wife, who’d waited all day for her snookums to come home. I played the tired and overworked fiancé. We both won Oscars, in my head, and she patted me soothingly and put me to bed, understanding that I was ‘too tired’ yet again. I had never noticed how often she had encouraged me to just get my rest lately. I should have realized that she wasn’t suffering for lack of orgasms just because she wasn’t getting them from me… So I gathered a few of her hairs from the pillow and waited until she was asleep to cast the spell in the kitchen. Twining the hairs together and sealing them with wax and gunk and herbs from the shop, I invoked the curse, surprised by the similarities to the long-ago love spell. I returned to bed and Anya became restless next to me. I knew who she was dreaming of. She got up a few minutes later, checked to see that I was ‘asleep,’ got dressed and left quietly. I heard her running down the stairs a minute later and she ended up taking my car.

I got dressed again and walked to the cemetery to see the effects for myself, stopping at a convenience store to get a six-pack and some popcorn. At Spikes crypt I found the door hanging open and his duster lying on the floor. Downstairs, I could hear them moaning as the bed-springs creaked. I knew they couldn’t stop now for anything, the spell was sealed, so I went ahead and lowered myself down the stairs. They were on his bed, an old fold-out couch like I used to have in the basement (actually, I think it was the fold-out from my parents basement, how strange is that?), both naked and glistening with sweat, even ‘though it was cold down there. They clearly heard me, and watched as I pulled up a chair and sat down to crack a beer and have some popcorn. But they couldn’t stop, not for anything, and I listened as Anya figured out what had happened, what curse I had used, and they begged me to lift it (well, she begged, he mostly threatened). I threw popcorn and offered suggestions as to positions that she enjoyed and critiqued their technique, wishing I’d thought ahead to bring a marker and some cards, so I could flash up point-totals and rate their performance, or perhaps a tattooing needle, so I could make sure that Spike died with a really embarrassing tattoo on his ass, since they wouldn’t have been able to do anything to stop me. I guess I was pretty drunk by that point, or I would have probably thought of something better. I finished the six-pack and I think I fell asleep for a bit. I wandered out before sunrise, the creaking and cursing still going on behind me. I closed the trapdoor to the ‘basement’ before leaving, so no one would hear them calling for help.

I came back on my lunch break. She had lost consciousness at some point and was no longer sweating. According to the helpful diagrams of the spells symptoms, she was now at the ‘dehydrated and won’t wake up again’ phase. He had given up on threats, and apparently lost his voice at some point, as he just croaked to me, begging that I stop this, that I was killing her. I corrected him. He was killing her. I was just watching. I came back again after work and she had finally died. And still the curse was on him. I knew that it worked this way, but I hadn’t really thought about how it would affect a vampire. The curse lasted 28 days, but Anya had said that no human had ever survived more than a day and a half, that she knew of. Spike might well survive the full month. His face was a wreck, it looks like he had spent the last few hours crying, and he had no tears left in his body. I didn’t even find this interesting any longer and left before even finishing the six-pack I had brought, getting nauseous at the sound of air wheezing into and out of her dead lungs, pushed by the rise and fall of his body on hers.

Days three and four, I ended up missing, because I had a lot of work and was tired, and maybe a little scared to see how bad it had gotten. Day five was the last I needed to see, and I had to work my courage up to even go finish the job. He was skeletally thin, having apparently used more energy than even a vampire body could sustain, without blood. And still he pumped away, unable to find release while the spell remained, unable to stop trying until I ended the curse. Anya smelled pretty gross by this point, having bloated a bit. But I knew this would be the last of it, I wasn’t going to make Spike go through the whole 28 days. I had brought a can of gasoline with me, and poured it over his grinding body. I reached for my lighter, and remembered that I had left it in the car. I turned to go get it, and there was D’Hoffryn, with a box of matches in his outstretched hand, head askance as he watched Spike move, like an art critic looking for the right word. He didn’t have to say anything. I just nodded my thanks, struck a match and watched them burn.

Upstairs, he flicked his wrist like a stage magician, and the box of matches transformed into what looked like a golden snake dangling from his closed fist. Opening his hand, there was a necklace with a glowing green stone. He told me that across the world thousands of people cried out for vengeance, for a chance to avenge the wrongs and betrayals done to them, to make those who had hurt them regret having done so. That I could do for them as I had done for myself.

I couldn’t meet his eyes, and was facing the floor as I whispered my reply, “You want me to hurt people? People who may have just made a mistake and hurt the person they love more than life itself, whose greatest regret may be not being able to undo the awful things they’ve done? Mutilate them and curse them and make them suffer through misery and pain and death?” D’Hoffryn said nothing, and I looked up to see him just looking at me as if disappointed by my reaction. “I thought so,” I reached out and took the necklace from his hand, “I’m your guy.”

And that’s how I became a Vengeance Demon.