Hee!

I'd cut

you bad lady, you."

Because the Dru pouting menace comes through more clearly without it.

Heh. Good point. Shall do.

Although I flatly refuse to touch "and now I'm all cross."

It's SO damned Dru.

Oh, no touching that. It's perfect.

...especially if you imagine her lunging, in full tooth and claw mode, one nanosecond later.

bit more for now:

"....eight, nine, vampires to dust, ten, eleven, man and woman together, oh Eyghon I offer these up unto thee, thy spell complete, eight, nine..."

"Bloody hell!" Emma turned towards the pentagram, and then dropped hurriedly to one knee as Dru sailed over her and smacked into a hideous claw-footed Victorian table.

"Emma! Get that girl out of here! Hurry!" Spike, either more careful or less foolhardy than his berserker ladylove, was feinting and dodging Crispin's moves. Emma's drop distracted him momentarily into a stare of admiration, and the lapse cost him, since Crispin promptly put the side of his foot against the vampire's chin. The kempo move would have snapped the neck of most men; Spike merely yelped and became instantly more careful.

"Not yet!" Emma called back. She hadn't forgot about Drusilla, who was weaving about a bit groggily, but Ethan Rayne had just taken precedence. Something was materialising behind him, something huge and dark and scaly. Hearing it, or perhaps sensing it, Ethan screamed "BEHOLD EYGHON!" and leaped for the edge of the pentagram.

"Oh no you don't, love," Emma said furiously. Grabbing him by the scruff of his shirt, she promptly tossed him back into the chalked icon. His eyes wide with disbelief, he backed away from both the furious Valkyrie he was supposed to be feeding to the demon he'd summoned, and from the demon itself. In doing so, he nearly backed into Dru. He shrieked and edged away, freezing as it suddenly occurred to him that he'd run out places to edge to.

"Ooooooh," she said. "Big and black and hungry. Big sharp shiny teeth. It smells of corpuscles and sewage. Yummy yums!"

The demon, taking on some definition, made a noise. Even Spike had stopped now, and was staring at it.

"Bloody hell," he said, "is that what Junior was doing all along, then? Doesn't he know you can't feed that sort of demon a vampire?"

I'd give a lot to see that on film.

For fuck's sake. It's hard to get something to 1000 words. Really, I'm going to have to get terse.

What? The flashfic challenge?

YES. I had a lovely little thing at 1300 words. I'm afraid that I'm going to have to lose the setting...

Say, could someone help me out with a definition of hurt/comfort?

It's a genre of fanfiction where one character in a relationship is purposefully maimed/injured/physically or emotionally cut down as a plot device so that another character can take care of them in a romantic/sexual situation.