Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

He placed a copper bowl before him and filled it with dried herbs that the knowledgeable shopkeeper had said would be necessary to complete the spell he wanted to perform. Then he removed the rare text on spirit banishments from his other pocket and found the sections that had been marked.

The shopkeeper had been closing up when he and Dru had arrived. It only took a small bit of persuading on Spike's part to convince the man to stay open a little longer. And it wasn't long before the old bloke and he were chatting about spiritual possession and how to evict an unwanted entity. After all, Pennywhistle remembered him from his last visit, when the now old man had been barely thirty, and the time before that when he'd been just a lad. Spike had known his father, and his father's father. The current Mr. Pennywhistle had a solid respect for his heritage that would have warmed Spike's heart if such a thing were possible.

Now Spike used his lighter to ignite the herbs just as the shopkeeper had instructed. He fanned the cloying smoke toward the resting Drusilla and began to read from the ancient tome. He wasn't sure exactly which forgotten language he was reading, but if it drove Laibach from his lover's body, it was certainly destined to become one of his favourites.

As he read the words from the yellowed pages, the flames within the bowl burned a variety of vibrant colours, just as the shopkeeper had told him they would. He removed a gnarled root, wrapped in plastic, from his pocket. The old man had called it the Limb of Impetus, a rare growth that resembled the malformed arm and hand of some tiny elven creature, the final ingredient.