Note about timing: While the below Prologue takes place one year after the events of "Chosen," Chapter One ("Trouble, Again") actually picks up three additional years later.  The events of these four "lost" Post-Chosen years are purposefully kept a little vague, though many details are revealed as the main story progresses.  The book assumes BTVS and ATS canon up until the "Season 8" and "After the Fall" comic book arcs. In other words, the canon ends with the season finales of both TV shows.  If it happened on a TV screen, then it happened.  Otherwise it's bollocks.

Prologue

Rialdo Martin looked on in quiet horror as the girl descended into the rift, her form like a tiny silver bead sliding into an inkwell. It was a two-hundred foot drop to the first marker, a plateau of powdered concrete and cauterized steel that Rialdo had pegged as a erstwhile ice cream parlor. From there she'd have to march another two sloping miles to reach the D-Zone. That would be not picnic either. It was a long hard slog over blackened husks of minvans and asphalt roads snapped like craggy lengths of tree bark, flanked by a network of hot springs that peppered the way down with a mysterious, volcanic steam.

Well, mysterious for Rialdo, anyway. The old grave robber had jumped some spooky holes in his day, but nothing compared to the goose-pimply weirdness of this Southern California trench, the place other jumpers were calling Hell's Way Home. It was called something else once. But like all the fuzzy details of the catastrophe itself, that name had faded from the public consciousness. That kind of mass amnesia was pretty typical; no matter how big and terrible the event in question, people eventually find other big, terrible things to worry themselves about. They just move on.

Still, there was something different about this place. The explosion had cast a conspiratorial glow brighter then any H-bomb (one of the more popular working theories). It was so blinding and ominous that even the Bigfoot-and-UFO geeks kept their distance. Consequentally, Rialdo assumed that the less he knew about this job, the better.

Besides, the girl had paid him a generous cash advance; more than enough for him to bite his tongue. And perhaps several others, should the need arise.

"'No questions,'" was the woman's oft-repeated rule, delivered in that trilling metallic rasp or hers he'd grown to dread. She was a small and blonde thing, with huge, wet eyes the color of sea grass. Short, impossibly thin, with the kind of hair and suntan you find in plastic bottles; at a glance, one might easily mistake her for a high school cheerleader, not a creature that should inspire an ounce of anything like dread.

But, try as he might, Rialdo never could feel at ease around her. In the evenings before the jump, she'd summon him to the shabby motel room to study the maps. Invariably, he'd catch himself studying her instead; but furtively, just as a field mouse might study an eagle.

The girl's small body was a lie, he realized. She was like an athlete of some obscure sport, with a cage of lean muscle that seemed sculpted out of iron and misery. He would stare dumbstruck while she penciled her cryptic notes all over his elevations, hand and mind moving with the sort of feline intensity you'd expect from a four star general planning a massacre. More than once, he'd found himself avoiding her gaze. It ran contrary to every professional goddamn instinct he'd ever possessed, but he just couldn't help but look away. There seemed to be something terrifying lurking behind those ridiculous, Disney cartoon eyes.

Now, Rialdo Martin fed slack through a hard rubber spindle, watching as his disturbing employer sank into the seamy bath of twisted metal and scorched earth, her fireproof survival suit glittering like a jewel in the abyss. The last rays of the sun were already dying over the horizon, but she demanded a nighttime jump. She was mad, apparently, and rich enough to fund her madness.

A dangerous combination, Rialdo thought. He quickly spooled out thirty more yards, cranking faster than he would normally consider safe, suddenly wanting to put as much distance between himself and this strange creature as possible.

And then, just as she passed the jutting lip of an upended townhouse, she vanished, swallowed by shadows.

"Bye bye, psycho," he whispered. "Hope you find what you're looking for down there. Whatever the hell that is."

***

The darkness covered everything like a second skin, a welcome barrier against the whole broken world. There wasn't much left of the town that was recognizable.  The old familiar haunts and winsome duplexes were all mashed and melted together, like the blurred corners of dreams.  It had been three hundred and fourteen days since their battle with The First, but vast swathes of the site remained un-mapped.  Everybody seemed like they were in such a hurry to forget what happened here

There'd been the occasional scavenger.  Some were "fortune hunters": guys who dressed and talked like Indiana Jones but were actually just glorified grave robbers.  Kinda like the guy she hired, really.

Others had even murkier motives. She remembered the day when the sign went up on eBay.  Willow had sent her the link, sans subject line. The friendly white on green lettering looked strangely unspoiled in the pics, no worse for the wear. The seller was listed as "tasty81," and, after a bit of cyber-sleuthing, the Witch traced him back to a crappy basement apartment in Islip, New York.  She'd thought about making a bid, but the auction ended a day later: eighteen dollars and fifty-three cents for that little chicken cutlet of history.  The darned thing was probably hanging in some kid's dorm room now, nestled between a singing trout and an X-Files "Believe the Lies" poster.

And, ultimately, In-The-End-edly, this hardly seemed to matter.  A thought stuck with her, though.  She couldn't help but imagine what else might be lying around down there, awaiting some sordid Internet funeral.

Tuning her flashlight in wide arcs, she tried her best to familiarize herself with the revised landscape.  A blanket of raw earth covered the rubble of her old Armor Matter (Ammo Mutter?  Elmo Motto?) and any semblance of streets and intersections had been obliterated by the Big Bang, leaving no visible order to the random shards and tangles that survived.

Three ghosts howled some ancient lyrics at her, but they were far away and out of key:

'Maybe you could blow something up?'

I was thinking of a more subtle approach, ya know.  Like excessive not-studying. 'If there's something bad out there… we'll find, you'll slay, we'll party!'

Thanks for having confidence in me. 'Something's coming.  Something is going to happen here.'

Gee, can you vague that up a little?

As she crossed the intersection of State and Destruction, little needles of familiarity jabbed at her.  The wreckage old Sun Cinema suddenly reminded her of a huge crumbled aspirin.  Near the foot of the dark pancake that might have once been the Magic Box, the french-fried branches of a bush groped at her like a skeleton's hand.

Moments later, she was running, scrambling over the embankment of a shattered pool deck, the cobwebs there exploding into clouds like spent gunpowder.   As she bounded across a Super Mario-esque gauntlet of smashed brick piles, a thick mist leaked up from caverns hidden in the gaps, blotting out the sky above with poison vapor the color of rust.  Squinting up at it, it seemed to her that the town of Sunnydale was showing its true self at last, the one masked behind layers of green oxide grass and prefab kitchenettes. It looked like the Mouth of Hell.

(Is that you, baby?)

(Do you still smolder?)

In what she found to be a stunning turn of events, Rialdo Martin turned out to be worth his paycheck after all.  The high school was exactly where the Slimeball Sherpa said it would be.  Or, more accurately, it wasn't right where he said it wouldn't be.  A pair of ragged gashes gutted the earth from parking lot to football field, meeting in the center like the X on a giant map.

Wow, pirate reference, she mused.

Wish Xander was here for that.

She clambered down through a breach in the school's western wall, her footfalls echoing off panes of melted black glass like a round of ghostly applause.   The sound was a little too spooky, even for her.  In the shattered hallway, a charred banner proclaiming "Class of '03" sagged down like an old devil's smile.   She froze when she saw it, her fingers wrapped around the bent maw of a lunchroom doorjamb.   She stared for a good ten seconds at it, reminded of a thousand lost and unnamable things.

As she peered into the open wound of the cafeteria, she could make out the formation that Rialdo had nicknamed the "Stairwell" on his maps.  The twin cross-like paths drilled almost straight down into the earth at their meeting place, corkscrewing to form a kind of massive spiral staircase down through the rotted stone.  Compared to the shattered corpse of the town, this winding path to the basement was smooth, as if drawn by laser from some distant point below.

It's just a hole. A hole inside a hole.

Jeez, talk about metaphors.

Drawing in a sharp breath, she began her descent.  The air thickened sharply on the way down, as though nothing had breathed there for centuries.  An image sawed through her mind. She pictured a man, standing electrified in the swirling melee.  Slipping deeper into the shadows, she found herself urgently probing the crags and crevices with her beam, searching for any signs of movement, signs of…

(because you handed him a bomb) Shut up. (you left him to die alone you let him die a monster…) Shutup, shutup, shutUP...

Gritting her teeth, she wrestled the demon down.  She'd gradually learned to identify its voice over the years; a shrill, savage din that rattled up from her blood like a swarm of bees.  It was her strength, she knew, the violent ghost that gave her an edge in the most hopeless battles.

They hadn't seen him die.  Not actually.  They saw it in his eyes, heard it in his voice, for sure.   Since then, that old African wraith had gradually abandoned her too, draining into the narrowest corners of her soul. She could still feel its seething company sometimes, but it was a remote, alien presence now; a knot of spiderwebs and black ice and nerves gone dead.  It'd gone mad with grief at the theft of its lover, the unlikely kindred spirit who wore a bleach blonde vampire like a cheap suit.

Death had touched her before.  She remembered the Body, as still and polite as an old museum painting of vegetables.  She could still see it when she closed her eyes, and the couch, and the cordless phone with its large plastic buttons, and the hospital hallway with its green, germless walls.  They'd had a funeral, and everybody came to it and then left everybody left it.

Everybody except her.  She'd stayed to say an actual goodbye.  The whole group-huggy thing seemed totally ridiculous to her these days.  Death was the Big Alone

Fade to black.  Roll credits.

The End. She felt like it should have a question mark, like in some lame old horror flick when the monster's eyes suddenly flip open and it comes screaming back to life.  Did love have a sequel?  Some big, splashy, totally illogical blockbuster of a reunion?  And if not, couldn't she at least say goodbye? Xander had an eyewitness to Anya's death.  Tara died in Willow's arms.  She was jealous of those neat and horrible and final endings.  Clean cut and cut clean.  Plenty of fuss, sure, but none of the muss.   The muss, she discovered, is what keeps you up at night

She'd dreamt up the this X-treme Sports vacation shortly after they set down stakes in Cleveland, where the strange new machinery of their world was swiveling around her at a brisk clip.  But with Giles' hands now firmly gripping the purse strings, Council Redux had agreed to finance her little outbreak of Indiana Jonesing.

On the record, it was official Slayerly biz: a junket to investigate a burgeoning hell mouth in Lisbon.   Only Rupert Giles himself had known her true intentions.  She remembered his distant expression, the vague and persistent nodding as he stared out the window at a field of fresh recruits exercising in the yard.  There were no followup questions afterwards, nor any of the spiteful recriminations that almost sank their adult 'ship.  in fact, she couldn't squeeze so much as a disapproving, fatherly sigh out of the man anymore. She simply told him what she needed and then he had simply given it.  He would work out any messy details.  She thought it was very British of him.

Now, in the maze of shorn rock at the bottom of the Stairwell, she found herself running on Superchick autopilot again.  She dumped her pack and set out the generator and the stuff for the halo.  A sullen grin flashed as she remembered Rialdo's equipment checklist; he'd rationed thirty pounds of gear for her; she brought three hundred.  Clenching the flashlight in her teeth, she snapped the tripod together like a field rifle and screwed the halo to the top.  The generator buzzed to life with a faint hum, casting a blue umbrella of light over the nearby scenery.

It was the heart of the storm.  Ground zero.  Heart pounding, she slowly spun to get her bearings.  She didn't need the crappy map for this part.  She'd been here, standing exactly here, almost a year ago.  The immense silence of the place was both unnerving and profound, the altar of an empty church.  Everything around her was covered in a fine cottony dust that made the stir of echoes all but impossible.

As she tuned her flashlight, something suddenly leapt out of focus at the corner of her vision.  She breathed sharply, a hundred thousand nerve endings flaring into action.  But there was no danger here anymore, no magic.  It was only her shadows, a trio of blue phantoms lapping at the craggy bulkhead of the grotto. But the feeling stayed with her.  Her mind was on fire, and when she breathed again she knew why.  The scent was faint but undeniable, exactly the same rich musk of cigarettes and old leather that filled his old crypt.  Exactly.

This was impossible, of course.  A trick of the senses.  She doubled back and forth like a bloodhound, wanting and not wanting to rule it out.  As she roved in the direction of a short earthy mound, the aroma swelled, intoxicating her.

And, then she saw it.  An electric current raked through her, freezing the heart in her chest.   At her feet, black leather details peered out from beneath a film of gray ash.  A rusted metal zipper sneered up at her like a row of dagger-sharp teeth. Gone.

Just like that.

After a long moment, she stooped to touch the thing.  Instinctively, one hand swept at a dusty sleeve.  She had a sudden, terrible thought that froze her mid-motion, and her eyes began to rove the dark sugary film that seemed to coat the walls of the sanctum.

He was everywhere.

Unable to resist, she clutched the sad remnant to her chest, drawing in one soundless breath after another.  The smell was like something holy.  It tumbled down into her lungs like warm rain, untainted by the stench of a thousand dead soldiers of Hell. She kept gasping him in, awestruck, half afraid that she might choke on him or, worse, use him all up.  The tattered scrap of leather appeared to magically shine itself in her fingers.  It took almost a full minute before she realized she was crying.

She saw him standing in the doorway muttering something clever about heroes, saw the knowing-but-not-telling look in his eyes.  She saw him glowering at her in front of a police station, fanged teeth gnashing, jealously guarding her from an act of self-destruction.  Saw the boy-poet with the fake gold hair, her kinky knight-in-shining orgasms, the Big Bad who lured her back to a world she once yearned to leave behind.

She knew she once had love inside her.  It was selfish thing she refused to share; even with herself, until it was too late.  They'd clawed it away from her, those Murderers-That-Be.  This was all they left; a dusty trophy from a lone wolf's kill.

It seemed like enough, somehow.  More than she could have hoped for, when you get right down to it.  When she whispered his name, the soft powdered remains of the creature shook loose from the walls, raining down a storm of brittle gray snowflakes.  She breathed, resisting the horror of it, her lungs drinking deeply of his lost, ruined flesh.

And down there in the quiet darkness, kneeling at the bloody, swollen lip of Hell, Buffy Summers said goodbye.

Chapter 1:  Trouble Again

3 years later

---

Rome.

There was something so old and sad in the city’s soul, the way it dutifully endured horror and beauty alike.  For two thousand years it had withstood war and fire, survived chaos and treachery and tyranny galore, and still it refused to surrender its Rome-ness.  Unlike so many people she'd met during the course of of her short, weird romp through life, Rome had no other name and never would. She was always drawn back to it, for some unknown reason.  Even after the regrettable episode with the Immortal, she felt like she belonged there; zigzagging through the layered ruins of empires come and gone.

But mostly, in a very deep, inside-y place that she rarely acknowledged, Buffy Summers knew that her luck was finally running out, and that Rome – majestic, eternal Rome – would be a fitting place to die.

Again.

(Plus, the shopping was totally fab.)

She’d bought the villa in Lazio the previous Fall; a pretty perch high on the city's lush green fringe.  The Counsel footed the bill - yet another perk of the new Rupert Giles Express Sympathy Plan.  She didn’t feel totally cool with the whole allowance thing, so when the assignments started to roll in the previous Fall, Buffy was obedient in her ass-kickery. She even pretended not to notice how utterly lame they were: a rogue Fyarl demon here, a budding bloodsucker mafia there.  There were thousands of Slayers to carry her burden now.  This was all just polite busywork for her retirement, something to keep her in reasonably decent shape for the next apocalypse.

Or, apocalypses.

(Apocalypsi?)

The city felt empty as she strolled along the Via dell Gesu.  The windy night air seemed to have swept everything and everyone into the cluttered cafés that pockmarked the heart of the Old City.  She pulled her waistcoat tighter around her shoulders, hugged it to the silk blouse that clung magically to her small bare chest. The sensation was achingly wonderful; her heels clicking on pink stonework, alone in a city of secrets.

The Slayer had found a sort of peace in Rome, this second time around.  It had been over four years since Sunnydale bit the big one, and she'd come to terms with her strange life in ways she never imagined possible.  For one thing, the old Scooby spell had finally broken, and she finally realized this for the best.  She remembered watching in detached wonder as the old gang fragmented and was blown to the far corners of the world.  Ashes to ashes, and all that stuff.

Alexander Harris, shockingly, was the first to go.  In the beginning, he just tagged along in typically stoic, Xanderesque fashion. But soon after they set up shop at the Cleveland 'Mouth, it became clear that everybody’s favorite man-child was falling into a very deep and adult-ish downward spiral.  Construction was a tough racket to break into when all your previous projects are buried until ten thousand tons of demonic dirt, so he frequented the demon bars uptown instead, picking fistfights in between sips of what he called his ‘bubbly brain meds’.

Xander fought like a man possessed back then, trading on the fame that a half dozen near-holocausts had finally bought him.  She’d pulled his butt out of the fire constantly in those days – literally, once, when his butt was in a fire – but more and more it seemed like she was just stalling some inevitable deep freeze.  Something had finally broken inside him, and Buffy wasn’t going to dishonor her friend by pretending that she could fix it.  They were in the Hurt Business, after all.

Towards the end, only Willow ever seemed to crack his lobster-like shell, but it wasn’t nearly enough.  When the Council needed a trainer for the uber-deadly Ipswich ‘Mouth, he packed off with barely an aufwiedersehen-adieu. Buffy just assumed Mr. Strength had run off to die somewhere quickly and alone, like his vengeful bride-to-be.

And Buffy let him.  This was starting to become a familiar pattern, she realized, finally and too late.

When she arrived on the plaza, she made a sharp turn towards the Archivo, spying the porcelain features of The Goddess out of the corner of her eye.  The statue’s marble robes sung out in shocking white relief from the velvet sky, lit from beneath by a small garden of electric lamps.  The finely carved face was an unyielding stone; the jaw set for battle, the hooded eyes smoldering with blank violence and a terrible, terrifying wisdom.

Do you still smolder, baby?

Buffy shook a thought from her head.  Minerva wasn’t real.  Or, at least, she didn’t think so; maybe they just hadn’t met yet. But for some reason, the old statue did remind her of the Witch. Not the shrinking, sputtering Willow Rosenberg, but the pale thing that murdered a boy in the woods, the onyx-eyed monster who nearly destroyed the world.  Buffy knew the Witch had always been there, a cold and calculating machine reclining behind soft skin, waiting patiently for someone, somewhere to flip the switch.

Maybe Willow knew it too.  After Xander checked out, she seemed content to wallow in her sundry losses.  She started watching TV again, for one thing. “Dance, America, Dance!” and CNN Headline News became steady faves. The redhead would zone out for hours on end in front of the tube, delegating her Council duties to a threesome of catty young Wicca from Nevada whose names Buffy could never remember.

Every now and then, someone would gatecrash this Slackerfest, trying to snap Willow out of it with news of psychic tornadoes or zombie frogs or primordial seeing stones. Sometimes the Witch would muster a wan smile, or a vague pun.  Mostly, the response would be a nice and sweet and polite nothing.   The woman was somewhere else entirely, and lost there.  Boredom had done what fear and shame and loss and rehab couldn’t. Whatever magic was still inside her had curled up for a long night of sleep, and nothing Buffy or anyone else did would be enough to wake it.

The whole Kennedy deal fell apart, to the surprise of exactly no one. It was only “a bit of cold comfort to begin with,” Giles had sniffed, and post- Awakening it quickly became clear that Kennedy wanted nada to do with a washed up ex-Wiccan.  Instead, Little Miss Warrior Princess spent most of her time in Cleveland finding new and exciting ways to lie, embellishing and exploiting her role in the Battle of Sunnydale for whatever scraps of political clout could be had in a Legion of Secret Superwomen.

As a field general in Faith’s new Slayer Army, she’d earned a nose for trouble, too, leading recruits on one meat-grindingly dangerous mission after another to prove her war prowess. Her detail eventually became known as the Martyr's Brigade, boasting the highest Slayer mortality rate on three continents (four, if you counted 'Antarctica' as a continent, which Buffy always thought was a kind of silly thing to do).

When the murmurs about recklessness ballooned into howls of holy-crappiness, it was Faith who finally ordered the so-called "court martial."  Giles obliged it – even though, as he reminded them, they’d be making up the rules as they went along. Buffy remembered the way the brunette sneered her answer back at him: "So, what else is new?"

And throughout it all Kennedy was, well...  Kennedy.  Right to the bitter, Nixonian end.

She worked the whole ugly, defensive thing that had become her calling card over the years, flung accusations of cowardice and treason in every direction.  She zapped Buffy for her “barely there” leadership, nailed Faith for jealousy, busted Giles for megalomania.  But Kennedy saved her worst venom for the Witch, of course, branding her a “lesbo predator” with gross and thinly veiled insinuations about Dawn Summers.  It was all pretty much the opposite of fun, but fun went out the window with overalls and Doc Martens and baby doll dresses.  Fun was so 90’s.

In the end, it was Willow who cast the deciding vote, banishing her darling Ken Doll to a tiny outpost in the frigid, naked wastes of the Russian Steppes. Buffy recalled that neither woman had shed a tear that night as she was briskly packed off in a van, her fine suede luggage brimming over with dusky parkas and ziplocked K-rations.  In fact, Buffy couldn’t remember seeing Willow cry once since the day they sent Sunnydale crashing down to Hell. She looked too exhausted to feel much of anything, and it was possible there weren’t any tears left – for Tara, for Xander, for Kennedy or for anyone else.

And so, it was about a year after Xander The Great set sail to conquer England that the Witch trumped him with her own Houdini act, and simply vanished into oblivion.

Six panicked weeks passed before Willow bothered to send her first, glamorously brief email, outlining a pilgrimage to New Orleans and the shiny new life she’d built there.  She found work running a small internet café on the French Quarter, teaching bored teenagers to crack open government mainframes on the side. She’d tried to act nonchalant about it, claiming she just needed to “do something normal-ish” for a while.  Which, you know: fair enough.

For months afterward, she continued to write, but the notes grew increasing spare, eventually pared down to a few, breezy Hey-theres or the odd (like, really really odd) weblink.  Once she mailed Buffy a URL to an Oxford dissertation on “the Neurophysiology of Vampires”:

Scroll to page 47.  Big Bad would have had good larf.  Bloody hilarious!

- Will

Then came The Flood.

Pictures of carnage and ruin streamed through the TV like a looping horror movie.  Days and weeks passed without a word. Xander called then, momentarily snapped out of his own weary orbit.  He rented a mercenary coven down in Arkansas to search for her, and phoned in daily with fresh reports.  He’d even, against Buffy's wishes, written a letter to Wolfram & Hart, Angel’s endlessly disturbing side project with Hell.  These were all, ultimately, major flunkouts.  There was no sign that Willow Rosenberg had died in the disaster, but there was no sign of her life either.

Right around the time she disappeared, Buffy was invaded by a vivid dream of the Witch.  In it, the woman was standing at the center of the maelstrom, her coal snowman's eyes gleaming through the rusty spray, her arms held out threateningly against a bleached sky.  Had she fought the storm?  Or, had she, in some way, caused it?

Buffy confronted the Watcher with her suspicions, recalling the often supermodel-thin line between her nightmares and the reality of her nightmarish life.  Rupert Giles had remained aloof through it all, glowering down from the mahogany perch of his new study.  If he knew the beans, he wasn’t exactly falling all over himself to spill them.  “Patience,” was all he said, his voice a chilling instrument.  “All answers will come in time.”

Just not from him.  Secrets were his business now, his new Thing.

Giles:

He left too, soon after their little chit-chat and sharply, like a dagger raked up a naked spine. The new Council HQ in London was nearing completion, and he would “oversee the final stages, personally.”  Oooh. But in many ways he was never quite there with them anyway, had not been there for some time.

Since the Awakening, the man had ever more comfortably reclined into his new role as Big Shot Global Powerbroker Guy.  Gone forever was the sputtering, bookish old doof who confronted her in the Sunnydale High library, spreading out the large pages of “The Vampyre” like a children’s storybook.  In the run-up to their battle with the First, she had seen him reduced to a hunted old man, clutching handfuls of useless papers and Greyhound ticket stubs from Ottawa, Indianola, Trenton.

Now, everything had changed, yet again.  In the wake of the gang’s unlikely victory at the Sunndale 'Mouth, the remnants of the Watchers Council had rallied around the old Brit like a war banner.  He had gained the trust and respect of ancient societies and the loyalty of an army of demi-goddesses.   She saw the power trip seep through him like a virus.

Before long, the man she had yearned for as a father figure had vanished entirely. He had evolved into The Watcher: Keeper of Deadly Secrets, More Idea Than Man. Many of the youngsters had taken to calling him “G,” and it wasn’t long before the corny James Bond-y connotations of the nickname eventually melted into a strange sort of dread.

As the months and years passed he and Buffy spoke rarely, and then only in the hushed, narrow language of official Slayerly business. She recalled the day. so long ago now, when he'd given her the money for her Sunnydale spelunking trip.  Part of her was longing for that moment; a trademark polishing of the ol' spectacles that would betray his apprehension, if not something warmer and mushier. But the moment never arrived. She was halfway through the flight to LAX when she realized that he wasn’t even wearing them anymore. He’d traded them in for contact lenses.

Always a fashion thing, she mused, staring at the light that spilled from the mouth of the Pantheon like orange blood.  It was almost midnight, which supposedly meant she’d be getting in her weekly workout momentarily.  Darth Giles hath decreed it so, in this latest lame excuse for a “mission."

The assignments he sent her had long since turned cold and impersonal. As the Council grew in size and complexity, Giles had gone all technocrat on them. What had begun as detailed, handwritten letters had rather quickly dissolved into a terse, electronic shorthand, a sort of legalese for monster hunters. He eventually devised some convoluted system of spreadsheets and document templates to account for the various types and degrees of threats.  Currently, the Watcher’s Council communiqués resembled the sort of thing you’d expect to get from an insurance company, or the DMV. They had titles like “TR-D991,” and their tiny grid lines and checkboxes left little room for Buffy to write anything like a detailed report. Lately, she had taken to leaving vast portions of the things totally blank, or simply jotting down “It’s dead” somewhere in the cramped margins.

Privately, Buffy believed that Giles didn’t even type the things himself anymore. The writing style had changed, became a bit more compact than the windy Englishman was capable of. Stuff like “Target is 12’ tall, red w/ yellow stripes on butt“ and “Please describe tail (50 words or less).” It was like the old man had hired a few marketing interns out of Iowa State University to compose all his top secret-y occult missions these days.

Or chores. Or busywork, or whatever the heck it was supposed to be. They certainly didn’t seem very important; kill demon X, retrieve magic thingee Y,  rinse, repeat. She wondered whether she had just been out of the game too long, that maybe they'd simply lost faith in her powers over the years. Not that Buffy minded much. The gaps between jobs were pleasantly long, allowing her ample time for her newfound Brooding-and-Wandering hobby.

At night in the villa she would curl up in an empty bed, occasionally jacking into her laptop and trying to keep tabs on whatever and whomever she could. Xander still exchanged passive-aggressive emails with her from time to time, occasionally laced with empty threats to “hook up next Spring in Paris or something.”   Mostly, they tended to be gruff, military assessments of the Ipswich Hellmouth, peppered with little non-reports on the endless, seemingly hopeless search for a missing atom bomb named Willow Rosenberg:

The good news: she’s not dead. The bad news: she’s not dead.  No news period out of St. Louis in a month.

wtf am I paying them for?

- X

By far the most visible semi-Scooby was Andrew Wells, the spastic little murderer she'd once considered sacrificing for the cause.  Andrew currently held the world record for largest MySpace blog in existence.  It was also the only page that showed up when you typed in the keywords “ancient demonic forces” and “N’Sync fanfic.”  Buffy felt a weird, warm vibe whenever she visited his eye-bleedingly cute website.  It was so riddled with neon pink hearts and flashing Star Wars GIFs, she could almost hear the boy’s breathless patter as she skimmed his latest tales of monsters and superheroes

Buffy had tried to connect to his webcam once, but she was never very good with the hi-tech dealies.  Their conversation mainly consisted of a series of random stills punctuated by indecipherable squeaks of dialogue. The world had changed so much since high school. It was a remote, electronic thing now, a swirling lake of ones and zeros that just barely connected the dots between distant friends. She didn’t quite understand this new compulsion for communication. Some things, she’d learned, were better left unsaid.   Or, if so, then whispered, drunkenly and in the dead of night, preferably in a dim and cozy bedroom.

Because, when it was too bright – when the lines were too sharp and the signal was too clear – that's when they would all reappear.  Because some ghosts don't haunt you from the shadows.

Because some of them aren't even dead.

Still, she decided there was no use worrying about it.  The world didn't have one of those Supermanly rewind-buttons.  Time wasn’t going to go backwards, so neither was Buffy.  And when she needed to be reminded of the past, she always had Rome.

Changeless, ageless, eternal Rome.  City of marble and dust.

Minerva kept her stoic watch, and Buffy kept hers. It had been six weeks since her last mission, and she was surprised at how eager her body still was for the action.  For violence.

The folder had arrived that morning, Air Italia, in the same uber-bureaucratic manila envelope as the rest.  It was disappointingly lean this time: another generic search-and-destroy yawner about a frisky monster on the loose.  At least she didn’t have to “fetch” anything.

The only point of interest came towards the end, some anecdotal evidence that the Beastie Du Jour may have taken part in the murder of a Slayer last Fall, a certain Kelly Watson of Grand Rapids, Michigan. She was a fresh-faced recruit, barely trained.  Apparently, they’d caught her patrolling alone one night on a wharf in Baltimore harbor.  The report spared her the messy details, but some curt language about a search for “the remainder of the body” gave her the feeling it wasn’t pretty. Death rarely was.

(except for his.)

Stop it.

(he could feel his soul it stings a little...)

Cut it out.

Just then, something flinched in a long shadow of the Pantheon, causing it to twist ever so slightly.  Buffy felt her eyes focus in on it, and a moment later a bulky shape broke free, and was shambling towards the threshold.  She didn’t need to study it for long.  Her rising blood told her all she needed to know.  The rest was automatic.

It was game time. Again.

Chapter 2:  What the...?

The next thirty seconds of Buffy’s life went about as expected. Then everything went right, straight to Hell.

Craving the element of surprise, she stalked in the direction of the Pantheon at a languid pace, doing her best impression of a tourist who was lost and a little drunk. She saw the shape stiffen in the amber glow for a few tense seconds, then break into a sudden, beefy run.  Arms pumping like an Olympian, lungs steaming out breaths, the Slayer sprinted after it.

By the time she reached the temple's open maw, every molecule of her body was blazing hot and thirsty for battle.  The place was as quiet as any old tomb.  From the look of things, the place was undergoing major renovations. Plastic tarps draped like sailcloth from the steel masts of fresh scaffolding, offering a few too many hiding places for Buffy's comfort.  Her prey had already ducked out of sight, so she slowed her pace, cautiously snooping behind each billowing sheet and stone column that she passed, every muscle a cocked and loaded pistol.

The sky fell.

In this case, the sky was a great big belly-flopping demon. He landed nicely, and too fast for her to roll free.  She felt a rib crack under the monster’s bulk and heard herself let out a sharp scream.

Swiveling sideways, he went for her head.  A huge gray fist slammed down, atomizing stone as she rolled again, better this time, and then sprung to her feet.

“Fun!" she said.  "No boring chit-chat. I like your style, buddy.”

The monster was only a bit taller than your average steroidal  pro-wrestler, but looked to be almost twice as wide.  His face was the usual muddle of gross demon bits, with a pair of large pale eyes that seemed to sweat spoiled milk.  The breed wasn’t recognizable to her, but they rarely were. Seen one demon, seen ‘em all, that was her motto.  He wore nothing except a hard leather cuirass trimmed by some sort of pleated kilt.

“Cute skirt. Too bad it’s not my size…”

He charged mid-quip, pumping his sinewy legs like a star linebacker.  She spun gracefully out of reach, snapping a kick at an exposed spanse of throat, but the freak was deceptively lithe.  Stopping on a dime, he blocked and counter-attacked with a single, agile movement that sent her flying.

Arthritis , here I come.  She gave her opponent a second, slower look, eyes probing for a weakness.  The head was a craggy bone about the size of a basketball, with a wide jaw full of what looked like sixty or so razor sharp teeth.

Ouch, she thought. ‘Kay, so, not too keen on the face punching-ness...

Her eye wandered south.  The leather cuirass didn’t look like it protected much, except maybe the monster’s pride after a big turkey dinner.  Plus, the armholes had the cutest little dimples, one of which exposed a pale and quivering patch of armpit.  She had a pleasant thought about poking something pointy into it.

When he charged again, Buffy fired off a volley of rapid strikes, attempting to steer him towards a lattice of iron railings guarding a damaged segment of a wall.  The demon wasn’t having it, though.  In an astonishing display of chop-socky, he matched her blow for blow, his limbs an ugly gray blur of motion. She backed out of range, feeling a sudden spooky vibe about the fight.  The monster's moves didn’t feel like some sort of demon-y fighting intuition. The big galoot was going all textbook on her, as if it had been trained to fight.

Or, more specifically, as if it had been trained to fight her.

Suddenly, it flew forward, pinwheeling gracefully as a treelike leg slammed into her side. A dark thought struck her, then, as she curled into a defensive crouch.

Those are Slayer moves.

What the…?

It kept coming, massive arms firing like pistons.  The Slayer strained to deflect them, but he was too fast, and she heard the cracked rib explode as he dug a sharp elbow into her midsection. It was a dizzying sensation and, staggering backwards, Buffy thought she could taste her own blood. Things we’re going downhill fast, and she had yet to land a single punch.

Then, everything got several thousand times worse.

Buffy saw the girl too late, whirling ghostlike out of the shadows at the corner of her vision. She looked to be about sixteen years old, with spiky, cropped hair the color of fresh azaleas. Her eyes peered raccoon-like out of a dark bruise of mascara as she circled. She seemed human enough, but somehow Buffy didn’t have to ask whose side she was on; the leering young face betrayed her intentions with a sinister clarity.

She wanted a shot at the Big Time. Tall, Gray and Gruesome had just been the bait.

Okay. Weapon. Now-ish.

Guarding her flank against Lil’ Miss Punk Rock, Buffy slid sideways and crushed an iron gate with a brutal side kick.  The posts rattled out like like teeth from a jaw.  She popped a slender steel railing into her hands,  braced for impact. The beast obliged with a leaping assault, his arms spread like the wings of some great, primordial bird.

She had to time it perfectly. She did.

Feigning toward the head, she twisted at the last possible moment, planting the tip under the soft arch of his shoulderblade. The monster roared, but kept coming, grabbing at her with its huge paws.

Damn. Not deep enough, she mused.  

She was wrestling forward, trying to jam her makeshift spear home, when she felt the abrupt, stiffening agony of a boot chomping into her spine. The shock faded quickly, but it gave the monster more than enough time to slip behind her and lock in its death grip.

The strange girl arced languidly back into view. She was still smiling. It was a familiar look to Buffy’s eyes – a certain dazed, perpetual half-giggle that seemed to be the exclusive property of the young and the insane. A gleaming katana was sliding up from a scabbard that hung down loosely from the girl’s scrawny back.

Buffy struggled frantically, but the demon simply screwed tight its viselike grip. There was something frighteningly painless about it all. The monster did not jerk or growl or thrash her from side to side. Rather, he made subtle, almost tender adjustments to her writhing form, keeping the pressure to a slow, even crescendo as he murdered her. She felt her windpipe gently bend and squeeze shut, felt the strength drain out of her like cool sand.

Is it over? she wondered, cursing the dull sense of relief the notion brought on. Her mouth was dry. She could feel her heart throbbing in it.

Can we rest now?

As if to answer, the girl closed her small hands around her weapon, the fingers drumming sensuously along the silken hilt. Her lips parted, but she said nothing as she cranked the blade up over her head, the torchlight dancing in her crazed brown eyes like a pair of supernovas.

What happened next was a little...

Fuzzy.

She saw a big black...

Spider?

It crawled sideways down the wall behind her executioner. She heard something like a garbage disposal roaring. There was a short, piercing scream. Things went.

Dark.

And then she was falling.  And then she was dead.

No, she mused.  Not dead.  Her face bounced off cold stone, cheekbone cracking like a clamshell.  The oxygen surged back into her lungs at hurricane speeds, and before she knew what she was doing she was moving, arms and legs scraping for purchase on the marble floor.  Through a blur of tears she could see the spider again.

No, a man.

Or, at least, man-shaped. It was clad head to toe in black, and it didn’t seem to have a face.

Concentrate, dammit...

She gulped another blast of air and rose stubbornly to her feet, blinking at the peculiar scene unfolding before her. The stranger’s body looked like some sort of leathery, space-age biker suit, complete with matching gloves and a pair of butt-stompin’ knee-high combat boots. The head was a black metal ellipse that dovetailed neatly with the strange, studded armor plating around its neck and shoulders. Instead of a face, there was only a bulge of dark glass, like a TV screen turned off.

Getting to be a real party in here, she thought. But who invited you?

The fight was ferocious. The dark newbie moved with inhuman speed, lacing its adversaries with moves that were practiced and precise, but not at all textbook… at least not out of any textbook Buffy Summers had ever written. Limbs shot in all directions, a blur of inky violence that rained down blows faster then she could count them. The girl suddenly looked like she was in serious trouble, overmatched and overwhelmed. Her shrill voice started ringing out commands to her monster in between ragged, panicked breaths.

Oh, sure. Now she talks! Steeling herself for round two, Buffy took a wary step forward, searching for an opening into the brawl.

She took a second step. Then it was all over.

The girl had lashed out wildly with the sword, misjudging her foe’s position by a quarter inch or so. Carpe-ing the Diem, Captain Faceless yanked her sword arm past it's target, savagely rolling the blade’s momentum up through the skull of the grey demon/Slayer thingee who was sneaking up from behind. She barely had time to yelp before her opponent ripped the sword free, then neatly trimmed off her obnoxious little head.

Buffy froze. With the fight over, the adrenaline plummeted out of her veins. She felt the broken rib bite a bruised muscle and fought back the sudden urge to vomit. Limping towards the strange apparition, she summoned whatever strength she had left before she spoke.

“Okay,” she said. “I give up. Exactly what the fuck are you supposed to be?”

The creature stiffened at the sound of her voice. She watched it turn slowly towards her. The mirrored dome of its face seemed to gape at her in amazement.

“Um, sorry. Maybe you don’t speak-o da English-o,” she hissed. “Il vostro nome? Che cosa?”

When she said this, the creature went limp, looking for all the world like a puppet whose strings had just been cut. Her eyes roved over its sleek form.  She decided that it looked like something off the pages of Xander’s beloved old comic books. What she had initially mistaken for the silky-smooth surface of a bodysuit was actually a corrugated industrial landscape in miniature – a taut mesh of sinewed cable and beaded glass that seemed to pulse to the rhythm of a mechanized heartbeat.

Cautiously, she limped within range of the dead girl’s head.  Resisted a dark impulse to kick it.

“Look... I don’t know what you are...”  She wove a careful path between the corpses as she spoke, measuring each step down to the centimeter. “Don’t really care.  But since you just splattered everyone else around here, I think you owe me some factoids. Like, pronto.”

She was only a few feet away. A scent of rubber and burning ash filled her nostrils. The robot appeared to sense her revulsion, recoiling from it like a rusted spring. She reached out her hand.

“Hey. Listen…"

It sprang backwards, then wordlessly hop-scotched up a sheaf of scaffolding like some kind of giant squirrel.  A moment later was gone, sliding up and out through a sharp crack of night in the temple roof. The Slayer was in no shape to follow.

Buffy calmly surveyed the carnage. The demon’s head had basically exploded down the middle, the ruined remnants hanging in shreds around its limp maw. The girl was in better shape. Well, each piece of her was, anyway. She studied the face briefly, but it wasn’t ringing any bells. Her clothes were a Goth-punk hodgepodge, fishnets and leather sprinkled with a just a dash of Hello Kitty crap-itude. The sword appeared to be her only weapon, but she did have a small combat pouch strapped to the shoulder rig. Inside, Buffy found only a lavender iPod, one small Italian phrasebook, and a crumpled wad of cash. No Passport, no travelers’ checks. Nothing identifiable.

She stuffed the items in her coat pockets and left, shuffling gingerly down a maze of darkened streets before finally hailing a taxi. There was no sign of the black Whatever-It-Was.

Yeah, great job, buddy, she thought ruefully. Got a couple of Slayer assassins looking to carve me a new one, and you come along and waste them both before I can find out why?

The thought chilled her as she fingered the bruise at the base of her spine. The girl had a leg like a cannon. There was no question she was one of the Chosen. Which meant Giles kept tabs on her. Which meant…

What, exactly?

In a way, the demon disturbed her even more. She ran the fight again in her head, watching each punch play out in super slow-mo. She recalled the early days of her training with Giles, remembered the endless repetitions, honing each clockwork combination down to a hair trigger. The monster had it all down pat. He’d been studying the Art; probably not for long, but seriously - even passionately. Someone had taught him well.

Which means… what, exactly?

She cursed her rescuer again under her breath. If only she had a little time with one of them; time to break them, grind out truth. Now, she was just swimming blindly, a big blonde fish in a very small, very delicate barrel. Did her new buddy think they wouldn’t come for her again?

Rome. City of secrets. Empire of lies.

Thanks a lot robo-boy. Thanks, but no thanks. She gazed thoughtfully into the streaking night sky.

But, thanks.

***

Home was safe enough, for now. The lush green pan of upper Lazio was not an inviting battleground for a sneak attack. She could spot them coming for miles. Or, at least, that’s what she told herself.

The Slayer nursed her wounds with a soft dollop of chocolate ice cream. She’d never gotten used to calling it gelato, and probably never would. On the nightstand, her laptop dozed serenely, its screensaver a dream of 3D fish.  She gazed again at the mission brief spread across her lap, blinking to prevent the dreary municipal print from etching itself onto her retina. She wanted to sleep too. She wouldn’t.

His mark was there, the lacy Oxford signature unmistakable on her death warrant. Beside it was his seal, supposedly his family crest: a red falcon clutching the center of a spear. There was only one mold. The man kept it in his left breast pocket. She gulped down another spoonful. On the far end of the bed, her old warchest stood open like a soldier snapped to attention, the arsenal inside gaping longingly at her.

She picked up the phone and dialed. It only rang once.

“Buffy,” creaked the old familiar voice. “I didn’t know you had this number.”

“Hi, G.” Her jaw was clenched like a fist. She almost had to spit the words. “We need to talk.”

“Yes, well... I suppose I have a few moments to...”

“In person.”

There was a pause. “Are you alright?” He sounded distracted, but somehow still irritatingly cool. She waited. “Well, things are a bit of a mess right now, I’m sure you’ve heard. If you come Thursday we could…”

”I’m not going anywhere,” she snarled, the demon inside her straining at its leash. “You’re coming to see me. Alone.”

Silence again. Then, “I’ll book a flight tomorrow morning. I’ll call you from the airport, let you know the schedule.” 

The demon tore at her lungs, clawing towards daylight as it chanted her prehistoric song of blood.  “I’ll be waiting.”

She pressed END, put the phone down.

Picked it back up. She had one more call to make.

Chapter 3:  Touchdowns and Interceptions 

Guess who just got back today?
Them wild-eyed boys that had been away
Haven't changed, haven't much to say
But man, I still think them cats are crazy

They were asking if you were around
How you was, where you could be found
Told them you were living downtown
Driving all the old men crazy

The boys are back in town
The boys are back in town

-Thin Lizzy

***

I slog up an alley the approximate scent and diameter of a dog’s arsehole.  My head is still humming from the brawl and its aftermath.  Haven’t counted how long it’s been since she last set eyes on me, and I don’t want to.

By the time I got here the sun was already coming up, a red line poking out between the gaps, but lately I've been ignoring her.  The suit is stronger than a hundred sodding blankets.  My old yellow enemy can only paw helplessly at it, like a snarling bear trying to work a door latch.

Angel hadn’t much liked this particular caper of mine.  If vampires had their own Coin of the Realm, my current kit would fetch a price somewhere between the Hope Diamond and the Mona Bloody Lisa on the open market. No doubt that back in Hell-A, some powerful buggers were very powerfully pissed off at yours truly right now.  Somewhere under the helmet, the thought of this almost coaxes a smile.

Almost.

As I reach the alley’s black end, a filthy door creaks open and an even filthier face pokes out of it.  This is my "safehouse" as the Forehead likes to call it.  Angel has got ‘em set up all over the bloody planet these days, like Count Drac’s boxes of Carpathian soil. The face belongs to my landlord for this particular field trip; a certain Boschian nightmare by the name of Jainsithelbz Gogswazzingblkt.  Not certain how that’s properly spelt – or pronounced, really – so I’ve taken to calling him “Dr. Wankenstein” or just plain “Wanky”, on account of his resemblance to that bloke’s most infamous cockup.  Tall and expressionless, the ghoul regards me with his yellowed eyes for a moment, as though trying to recall where he's seen me before.  Since he’s done this every night for the past three, I’ve become convinced he is a lobotomy case of some sort.

“What’s the matter, Wanky?” I ask him.  “Igor take your brains out with the washing again?”

He grunts at me once and then makes way.  The accommodations ain't much, but I’ve seen worse and can make do.  I stride across the cracked and oily floor, then pass through the rotting skeleton of a doorjamb that guards my “room.”  It is four clapboard walls blackened by soot and mold, a crusty mattress sprawled on the floor and a small telly plugged into a socket that seems to spark more frequently then it should, considering the tiny trickle of power that feeds the lights in this dump.  Wanky turns one of these on in the kitchen, and it glows back at me wanly like one of the plonker’s own cataract eyes.  He sits at the little folding table and begins a staring contest with what might be a refrigerator magnet or nothing at all.

I don’t have a door to close, so I just try to ignore him.  I wrestle off the helm and gauntlets and then pop on the telly, start blasting the remote at it like a cowboy pistol, bangin’ my way through the rubbish Italian programming.  Half of it seems to be footy replays.  I freeze on one of the matches and watch the tiny poofters run back and forth for awhile.  They kick the ball and chase it, kick the ball and chase it, kick the ball and chase it. 

The mindlessness of it is as comforting as ever.  But her face keeps bleeding in around the edge somehow, those green eyes still blazing, even through the visor’s marshy fog.  I’d conjured this image in my rotten old brain many times over the years, fancied all manner of surprise and anger and ecstasy, but the face was never like this one, never filled with that unholy blankness, that bland human misery, that cold, businesslike detachment.

Part of me plays nursemaid.   Explains that she couldn’t see me, after all.   That it didn't count.

And then another, blacker voice speaks -- a hoarse and ghostly whisper.

I tune out the nursemaid and listen to this other voice for a while.  It's even more soothing than the little homunculi on the screen who kick the ball and chase it.  It reminds me it's good and proper that she didn’t see, and that this was the entire bloody point to begin with.  It sings to me the old song; whispers of the River Lesson, of that old Rule of Mouths.  It conjures that searing image again; a figure standing in the swirling vapors, black sun descending overhead.  The claws...

When I look down at my hands they are white fists, balled so tightly that blood is trickling out from between the fingers.

I shut the telly off and try to get some sleep.  Somewhere in Hell-A, Angel or one of the many twats in his employ is busy runnin’ all the numbers, figuring the where and the when of my next move.

I know that whoever is trying to kill her won’t pack up shop quite yet.  They'll try again, and soon. And when they do, I’ll be there.

For better or for worse.

I close my eyes.

I do not dare to dream.

***

Rupert Giles deplaned at 11:23am, Stockholm time, charcoal Armani rustling ever so slightly as he waded into the flock of Canadian tourists that for some reason had insisted on clogging up the damned gate.  He shook his sleeve loosely over the face of his obsidian Rolex, straightened a pant leg.  Checked the watch again.

The trip had been pleasant.  Not so much due to the deluxe accommodations – First Class was a given, these days, thank you – but rather because of the lack of anything to properly do, for once. For the first time in weeks, he had no new gadgets to fiddle with, nothing to write or read or review or approve. He’d resisted the urge, even, to order a drink, and left the three-star meal untouched on its plate.

Instead, he’d tried to make a solid go of doing absolutely nothing at all. This was an old Sufi trick, and when done correctly it presumably gave one the power to stand temporarily outside of his own consciousness, free to survey the fabric of his being from a safer distance. Rupert had been watching himself more closely than usual these days. He wasn’t alone.

Ciampino Airport was a crashing bore: yet another twenty-first century polymer hive in a world that was increasingly allergic to craftsmanship. Rupert hadn’t been here since before the war, and it seemed to him that the added security measures had transformed the place into a ceramic version of the Berlin Wall.  An occupying army from across the Atlantic had set down stakes, having dragged vast quantities of contraband pop culture behind it. Out with the café carts and cork barrel insalata stands, in with the Burger Tyrants and the Starbuckery.

He dodged past a herd of luggage centipedes, marched straight by the baggage claim and out into the crisp Roman afternoon.  The Head Watcher's pockets held all he needed these days: one lambskin passport, a Nokia cell phone, a small notary stamp for official business and a certain ornamental key which served a purpose so dubious it was a mystery even to Rupert himself.  A slim, black credit card handled everything else.

When he phoned from Heathrow that morning as promised, he’d assured the girl that he could arrange for his own transport to the countryside.  But she’d insisted that he call, regardless, the moment he touched down.

He realized she was quite angry with him.  Quite.

Rupert touched the tiny silver bead nestled just below the skin in the crook of his ear, and it purred to life. Instantly, an invisible grid lit up and wrapped itself around the face of the planet Earth.

‘Come alone,’ she said.  He rolled the bead clockwise, gently tuning an image that only he could see.

Oh, Buffy.

If only I could explain how impossible that is for me now.

He felt the familiar machinery of the Council convulse.  All around him, the Eyes awoke.  It was only for a moment, flashing hotly from a dozen pinpoints in the swirling crowd.  There would be more of them, of course; hundreds if he needed, burrowing themselves into the Italian countryside, waiting for instructions.  Watching.

He wondered, almost idly, if it would be enough.

***

“It’s not enough,” barked Riley Finn, and gunned the Humvee across the concrete island that divided A90 North from the Via Aurelia. “We need a clean corridor to Hen’s Nest. Flood the pan, goddammit.”   Twenty-thousand feet above them, a pair of black Harrier jets diverged, painting an infra-red rectangle the size of Lower Manhattan.  He cursed himself again, and retraced the last twenty minutes of his professional life.

Marco was right, it turned out: the Italian cops were a friggin’ joke. The last stato had given up pursuit about seven miles short of Casa Mattei. And if the carabinieri had reconsidered their generous bribe yet, they certainly weren’t doing a very good job of it.

But they had other problems now.

He’d first noticed them from his perch over the B Loop at Ciampino. They could have passed for ex-CIA if it wasn’t for their sucky taste in shoes.   Particularly the women.  A woman, Riley had learned, can compromise a lot for the right cause. Clothes.  Hair.  Makeup.  Boyfriends.  Everything was negotiable. But the second they go merc’, it was always ‘goodbye Converse, hello Manolo Blahniks.’ These ones were either amateurs, or they were really, really good.

There had been about eight of them down on the plaza, maybe twelve or so more on the mall. It was hard to tell. Tac-ops traced the beacon somewhere between the Falcon's skull and a Taiwanese ComSat floating 300 miles above Gibraltar. Whatever Mr. Giles shot up there was scrambled eggs on the way back down, but luckily the packet signature was still the same.

Riley knew that all the fancy gadgetry in the world couldn’t have marked them, so he had eyeballs everywhere. Including his own. It was the Japanese chick who blew it, the one gabbing on the cellphone. The Falcon had just touched his ear, and she was standing too close to him, only a few dozen feet away.  Riley saw her change.

It was just a moment, a blink-and-you-miss it kind of thing. But it happened. Target taps his ear and the girl looks straight at him. Bang. Her eyes flash, like a miniature sun rolled up behind the curve of her corneas. If he didn’t know any better he’d have thought she was taking the old man’s picture. Shit, maybe she was.

So, he radioed back to Marco and the imaging guys in the RV. They were the best – one playback and they marked them: the fat man with the tourist maps, the three college chicks, tennis racket girl, flower boy, geezer in the wheelchair. The old limey bastard had brought some backup after all.

Riley double-timed it down to street level, arriving just in time to see Giles fiddle with the taxi’s rear door. All the pieces jumped at once. B team hit the street hard to try to wrap up Rupert's Village-of-the-Damned gang. The Humvee roared up full tread, ramming the getaway cab about fourteen feet up the road. The jeep’s slide hatch was already open, Hector’s face leering out from the dark interior like a brown skull.

The Watcher seemed to turn in slow motion, lips parted to say something he never would. Their eyes had met for less than a second before they were both flying forward into the breach. Hector scooped them both up with one massive arm, slapped shut the hatch with the other.  By the time Riley said “go” the needle was already in the old guy’s neck. Hector was a good man to have around.

The next four hundred seconds were dicey. The Italians were infamously slow, but Riley figured they still only had about six minutes before they got the beltway sealed off. The Humvee thundered northeast around the gray loop of asphalt, whizzing past the fender-bender and the attempted rape they’d engineered as pre-op diversions.

By seven-point-two minutes, they’d hit the Autostrada and were riding hard for Magimalle.  The cops were history, but suddenly Tac-Ops was yelling something about “multiple bogeys.”  They had picked up about six tails, and the Taiwanese satellite was suddenly puking electrons all over the damned highway. Poking his head out the window, he spotted a pair of Fiats bearing down on them fast. He could see the drivers' eyes. They were gleaming like diamonds.

Now, as they slammed onto the Via Aurelia, the six had swollen to twenty. B-Team was incommunicado, and the bogeys were gaining, a hot rumbling haze in the rear-view mirror. Riley glanced at Giles still hog-tied in the back seat, probably enjoying some wonderful pheno-barbitol dream. Overhead, the two jump-jets were busy trading unpronounceable auth’ codes with Tac-Ops. Riley assumed they were just buying time while the honchos figured out a good cover story.

It seemed like an eternity had passed when the Go-Word finally came down, crackling in his ear like a prayer. There was an eerie hum, the sound of a thousand microwave ovens set to high and then dumped into the ocean. Riley felt the sudden urge to cover his balls.

The E.M.P. smashed down just a few dozen feet south of the Humvee, flooding a four-mile square with enough E-Mags to stop a small army. In the side view, Riley smiled as he saw sixty thousand horses worth of crap European engine cut off simultaneously. Rows of traffic were shoved to a standstill by a giant invisible hand.  The twinkling eyeballs of the drivers disappeared in the rear view mirror, like stars winking out in the early dawn sky.

Marco hooted. “Right on the mammajamma edge there, Finny! Ooo-Rah! ” Riley didn’t smile back, but he was feeling it: climbing back in the saddle. Felt right.

Twenty minutes later they were cresting over the green, sun-drenched warmth of Palidora hillsides. Giles was still a cold sack of dough, looking like he aged a dozen years in an afternoon. Riley slowed the jeep to a crawl at Malignanno. He and Hector jumped ship, dumping the sleepy Falcon into the trunk of a wimpy AR hybrid with a full tank of gas - or "lit battery" or whatever the hell was going on in there. Damned hippie government subsidies were killing his buzz again.

All things considered, the extraction went off without a hitch. At least she’d be safe. The reward would be anticlimactic. A wet, remorseful stare, he guessed.

Hey, or maybe a hug, if she was feeling generous.

And exactly that much was right in the world.

Chapter 4:  Red Falcon

“Wake up,” she said.

Buffy had been watching for almost an hour before his lips finally moved, dryly puckering the air. It was hard to keep still, not blow her cool. Ten minutes ago, she’d sent Riley and his bullet boys to guard the grounds. She had to do this part alone.

“What… am I… where is,” the Watcher muttered, still fighting through a chemical fog. “Finn?”

She peered out the window and glimpsed Johnson and Ward.  The two soldiers hovered like ghosts at the distant edge of the drive, their gun barrels gleaming red in the sunset. Somewhere writhing through the tall grass was a man named Jason Bakely, a toned and tanned beach boy setting up for a very long, very deadly shot.

Night was falling fast, the way it always seemed to do in the ‘burbs of Rome.  This villa had been a parting gift from the Immortal, and, she hoped, remained one of her few real secrets.  But she wasn’t betting on it.  There was no telling how long it would be before the Council knew the location of its kidnapped king.

“Buffy?”  Giles blinked in slow motion, his face suddenly owlish. “My hands.” He seemed to shrug against the ropes, not so much to loosen them as to make sure that they were real. “What’s happened?”

“Gee.  I was kinda hoping you could tell me.”

“Oh… please, don’t call me that.” Giles looked genuinely embarrassed.

“No.  No I didn’t mean G, like the letter G.” She frowned. “I meant Gee as in ‘Golly gee, why is my dear old Watcher trying to kill me?’”

His brain didn't seem to register the question.  He shook his head groggily. “Where are we?”

“My home. Thought you’d recognize it from the satellite pics.”

This one did the trick, and the man's pale blue eyes sparked up at her. “What in God’s name are you talking about?” She could see his arms stiffen under the pricey duds, testing the ropes for real this time. “Why am I tied up? Why…” He swallowed hard. “You had me drugged. Didn’t you? The yanks at the airport.  Oh, God…”

“God’s not going to help you now Rupert.”  She leaned in close, brought her lips one playful inch from his ear. “To be honest, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t exist.  And I kinda have some first hand experience there.”

Her Slayer blood lurched like a black wave, rallying towards a certain sinister impulse.  Without a second thought, she accommodated it.  Went with the flow.

“Do you know what I can do?” she whispered. “I mean, to a normal person?  Do you know what my hands are capable of doing to regular old human flesh and bone?” Her senses were running on full melt, and she could feel the hairs rise on the back of the man’s neck. “Sure you do, Giles.  You taught me, after all. Right?  You taught me everything I know…”

Her hand curled around the back of his neck.   A sharp thumbnail drew a line across to the center of his throat.  When it got there she pressed the button, and watched the man’s face go the color of old milk.

The ground fell away sharply.  It was as though something large had torn her loose from the world and dropped her in an empty, airless waiting room. This was the hard stuff, the bad stuff.  Somehow, she’d always known it would come to this, or something like it.  Life had a vicious shape, the edges sewn with endings like this one.  Knowing that didn’t help.  The inevitability of betrayal made it all the worse.

But, if nothing else, she would have her satisfaction.  She watched with horrible fascination as the man writhed in her grip.  He felt so frail.  Even more so than she’d imagined.  Holding his throat was like holding a little bird.  Another ounce of pressure, and bye-bye birdie…

“Buffy,” Giles managed at last, his voice a choking monotone. “Buffy.  When was the last time you checked your... email.”

“What?”

“Email,” he sputtered.  “Haven’t.  Been reading it.  Have you?”

She shook her head. He was trying to confuse her, stalling for time.  How lame.  Her left arm shot out, a crashing backhand that sent both Watcher and chair clattering to the floor. She could have broken his jaw if she’d wanted, she thought. Or his neck. But it was too early for that. She wanted him talking.  Wanted him singing.

“Oops, I did it again,” she said.  “Sorry about that, old chap. I guess I don’t know my own strength sometimes.”

She righted the chair, pretended to fuss with the ruff of gray hair. “But you do, don’t you Giles? You know I can break you apart a little bit at a time. That I can make it last for days.”

He laughed. It was the same fly-boy chuckle he used to put on in the old days, in the tightest of spots; the sound that said he was tough - not for what he could do but for what he was prepared to endure, to sacrifice. He knew she was prepared to kill him, and he was letting her know he was prepared to die.

“Glad you think it’s so funny.” That’s when she felt the tears hammering at the rims of her eyelids, tiny traitors trying to escape. “But you will tell me everything, Giles.  That’s no joke.”

“Yes, ahem, yes, of course,” he said.  “What was the question again? Why am I trying to ‘kill you’ is it? Well, dear me, Buffy, ahaha. I suppose I just got bored of saving your bloody life all these years, ahahaha!”

He couldn’t help himself now.  The laughter was bubbling out of him, choking him worse than her hand.   “Besides think of, ahah, think of all the money I’ll ahhhahhah, save on cruh- cruh- credit carhahahahahaheeheehahah!”

She was winding up for another whack when six-feet-two inches of Super Soldier suddenly burst into the room.  Riley stood there for several seconds, majestically stupid, like a big shaggy dog trapped in traffic.

“Uhh” he said, Frankenstein-ish.  “Uhhhhhhhh…..”

Enraged, she perp-walked him out into the corridoio.   “What did we say about knocking?” she hissed.

“Sorry, Buff. I, uh.  Heard a ruckus.”

“Ruckus?”

“Sorry.”  Riley glared at his boots. It was hard to get over how much older he seemed, the sideburns fading sharply to gray over the ear. But he still looked like a gigantic boy when he was embarrassed.

“Uh, it’s called an interrogation,” she hissed.  “There’s gonna be noises.  That’s, like, sort of the point, you know?  Me hit, him make noise.”  Somewhere behind her the Falcon cackled, filling her with the overwhelming urge to change the subject.  “What’s the status out there?”

“Frosty.  Nothing goin’ bump in the night.” He hesitated.  “I mean, it’s possible nothing’s coming, you know. We caused one hell of a traffic jam back there.  And his people… they were weird, but I think they were, you know… human.  Could be immigration picked them up already.  Or, uh, something.”

There was a slight kink in his military posture.  He was holding something back.   “What are you not telling me?”

“It’s nothing. It’s just…” His voice sank to a low, almost conspiratorial whisper. “It’s just, my people aren’t so sure about your theory here, Buff.  Something’s not right. The government’s been aware of the Council's existence for a long time.  They’ve had a man inside, for over a year now.”

Her mind raced, trying to process it.  “What?  You mean, like a spy?”

“Well, a plant, yeah. It’s not what you think, though. Certain… relationships have developed. It’s complex…”

“Then talk slow.”

He was shifting his feet, suddenly as uncomfortable as he was in the old days – in ‘their’ old days, back in the way back, when the game was all about hiding in plain sight, lying and rationalizing the lies.  Same old Sunnydale shuffle, and same old Riley still stunk at that particular game. “Look, I know you don’t want to hear this.  But all my sources are telling me that there’s no way in hell that Giles is dirty.”

“Ah, your sources.    Uh-huh, and you learned all this, what, just now?”

“Conference call” he explained.   “On the ride over. I think I might have ruffled a few feathers with this one.” He cracked a wry smile, despite himself. Getting chewed out by the ‘brass’ still seemed to tickle his usually microscopic funny bone.

“Yeah, well,” she muttered.  “Did you ever think that maybe your little sources might be part of it?”

“They’re part of everything, Buffy.  Doesn’t make them wrong.”

She nodded, absently, chewing on it but trying not to look like she was chewing on it.  “So.   Who’s the spy?”

“Don’t know.  Not my line of country.”

She glared back into the room at Giles. A red line fell from the corner of his mouth. “Find out what you can. But do it outside. I have a workout to finish.”

She waited for Riley to disappear down the hallway, then closed and locked the door behind her.  Giles grinned at the floor.  A cool breeze rustled through an open window like a whispered warning.  Buffy latched it shut.

“Tell me when it hurts,” she said.   

***

The sun was rising, a fat and glowing orb on the horizon. It painted the lazy pan of Viterbo with long red stripes that reminded Buffy of a hazy desert highway. She studied them sullenly.

Somewhere behind her, the man who had been her mentor crawled on the floor, gasping for breath. Strewn around him was the undeniable evidence of his crime. Papers, mostly, bearing his name and his personal mark. He bore it too, now. In a moment of creativity, she had branded his forehead with the Falcon stamp. It stood out like a stark red wound on his flesh.

He’d tried to trick her.  That much she was sure of.  Talked about Willow, mostly, something about her passing over into the “realm of the pure determination,” whatever that was supposed to mean.  The more she beat on him, the more that story kept shifting. Now she was alive, now she was dead.  Now she seemed to be traveling through time. Buffy mostly ignored his lies, but that last one tore it.  Exactly how gullible did he think she was?

She had to force herself to go easy on him, after that. Giles was a tough old bastard, but with extra emphasis on the ‘old.’  Her uber-ears had picked up a small heart episode, some kind of irregular thumpa-thump in the Watcher’s chest.  Nothing too serious, she thought.  But then again, she was no doctor.

He’d stopped denying everything since then. In fact, he stopped saying anything at all. At one point he wept, but not for long, and not loudly. She thought it was very British of him.

By then, it didn’t matter.  She was on a roll, doing the whole Perry Mason courtroom climax.

The paper trail had begun last March, with yet another a dull assignment in Tuscany. She was supposed to relieve a certain R’okklak demon of a scroll that supposedly was written by the first Watcher.  She remembered thinking this was a pretty lame thing to risk her neck over. The mission brief had mentioned nothing about magic such-and-so’s, or curses or that sort of thing.  It was just paper. Something to hang on a wall.  Like a hunting trophy for old, boring English guys.

The scroll’s language turned out to be a rare dialect of ancient Assyrian.   Not exactly her mother tongue. But just before the R’okklak went to that Great Big R’okklak party in the sky, he’d said something that stuck with her. “Nessun uomo è soddisfatto di guardare per sempre.”

Her Italian was still pretty rough, and the monster’s dialect was weird.   But the words had sent a chilly fingernail rolling up her spine.

No man is content to watch forever.

Before the pickup man from the Council had a chance to swing by, she decided to poke a little further.   Crossing a certain old wall of ice between them, Buffy decided to dump a few photos of the scroll into an email and let Dawn take a whack at it.  It turned out that girl still had her spooky facility for dead languages, but it still took several weeks before she was able to unlock even a few phrases. “It’s some kind of ordered list, I think,” she’d mused in her reply. “It’s weird. Like a set of stereo instructions, or something.”

There was only one line the girl was really sure about. It was written halfway down the page, the fifth instruction:

“In darkness do it. Her blood sets the stone of the eternal house. You are her only witness, and she is yours.”

There were five missions between that day and this one, each errand stranger than the last. For the first four, it felt like she was always fetching something, running through someone’s crappy grocery list. Then last night came the fifth. The fifth mission.

Her blood sets the stone…

There was something Spike had said to her once.  It was late in their endgame against The First Evil, around the time that Giles and Wood were secretly plotting the vampire’s dusty demise.  She had broken away from the group, leaving the Watcher and Anya to work out the boring details of the Chosen Ones’ travel plans.

She remembered standing in the archway to her mother’s old living room, watching Rupert Giles as he tore through a stack of airport schedules and birth certificates. He was so excited.  She could feel it.  And at that precise and terrible moment, she’d realized that it was more than just saving the world to him, now.  He was excited that Buffy was not the only one to Watch.

There had been a familiar smell of whiskey and leather beside her. “Who watches the watchmen?” he cooed. It was just a bit of old, stuffy poetry, but it‘d resonated through her in that moment. His intuition was a razor blade, always the most supernatural thing about him.

And Giles was going to have him murdered. He would take her on a pleasant, fatherly stroll through a graveyard, while her lover was being put down like a dog in a woodshed.

Something growled inside her. She picked up the small knife that had been screaming at her from the windowsill for most of a day.  She was ready.

“Buffy.”  His voice was distant, throaty. She turned to look, arms locked to her chest, masking the dagger. The old man had tried to climb to his knees but couldn’t. Instead he lolled sideways, groaning as his left arm turned under him. She had the dim realization that she had broken it.

It suddenly all seemed so useless to her. She felt herself floating again, back in outer space. The knife was in her hand. It was hard to see. She was crying. She was freezing.

“Buffy. I have to tell you something.”

She floated towards him. None of this felt real - not her anger, not his pain. She was suddenly certain that she was still dead, still buried in a makeshift grave in the woods of southern California.   She didn’t want to hear his confession, but it was too late to do anything else. She kneeled beside him, leaned in close. The knife was sharp.

“I love you,” he wheezed through swollen lips.  Her heart cracked in half.  “Please…please… Willow!”

He was on the verge of unconsciousness. Maybe worse. At that moment, Buffy saw something soft happen in his eyes. She recognized it immediately, and melted.

(no this is the man who will kill this is the man who will kill this is the man…)

Shut up for a second!

For the first time in twenty four hours, her brain began to call the shots. A sudden impulse came over her. She ran to her sleeping computer, hammered the space bar to wake it up.   It was true. She hadn’t checked her email in more than a week. She was sick of it, frankly. Ninety percent was junk, Chinese medicine and African banking. If someone really needed her, there were a dozen ways they could find her.

Wasn’t there?

The program fired up slowly, a blue loading bar inching forward like a caterpillar. Then the mail started pouring in at an alarming rate; one million, two hundred and forty seven messages loading up one at a time. The electronic letters flipped down the screen like lottery numbers, each iteration more insistent then the last. It all had a mesmerizing rhythm, the poetry of prayer:

FROM: wrosenberg@ebreakfast.com
RE: SPIKE
(…)
FROM: wrosenberg@saymyname.com
RE: SPIKE
(…)
FROM: wrosenberg@colddriptrips.com
RE: SPIKE
(…)

The room spun. Or, maybe she did. The frozen feeling had given way to something like delirium.  The computer kept churning out nonsense emails from and about dead people.

What happened to us, she thought. Where did we go?

She dropped the knife. Three things happened:

At the corner of her vision, she saw a flash.

A male voice yelled out something harsh over the sound of machine gun fire.

Less than ten feet behind her, a window shattered.

***

The bloody suit was chafing again.

He moved low and fast along the tree line, hovering just outside their cone of vision. There seemed to be five of them, but he’d seen these yanks in action before. They always had at least two invisible men, hidden far away in the tall grass, or huddled in the trunk of a distant car. And those blokes were usually the best shots.

Don’t be a poof.

Snaking through the brambles, he paused at the foot of the estate’s long grassy garden. The villa stood at the top of a fairly steep hill; a marvelous defensive post. Smart girl, he thought. Most people didn’t give her that sort of credit. But being a bit on the dim side himself, he’d always admired the Slayer's ability to put together a plan. In that spirit, he’d decided to pull back on the throttle a bit and try to work out some clever, devious method of getting inside.

So far, all he could come up with was to just make a bloody break for it. The suit was fairly flexible but it did slow him down a bit. He’d probably catch a few bullets, nothing too serious.

Get on with it, Nancy!

He hesitated. It was the first time in a long time - ever, maybe – but, in hindsight, it had probably saved his bloody neck. Up on his haunches, ready to sprint to the goal line, he paused to consider what he was about to do, how he was about to betray every oath he’d made to himself since the Buggers That Be drop-kicked him back onto this loony bin of a world. So, he was quite busy cursing his own stupidity and cowardice when the shot of lightening hit. There was a warm flash, and suddenly the yard itself became a very, very busy place.

In all his years, he’d never seen anything quite like it. Mostly, magic was so bloody theatrical. The big tricks were usually accompanied by a hash of dreary incantations, and wind and great, swirling clouds of smoke. But this was something else entirely. No fanfare, no hullabaloo. In a blink, an entire soddin’ brigade of Slayers had simply winked into existence all over his ex-lover’s front lawn.

They marched up the hill with an immediate, military precision, the ones nearest to him shouting out the orders. There seemed to be a thirty of them or so, all young sweet things decked out in the latest fashions from the pages of Guns N’ Ammo magazine. Looked like a damned coming out party for MI-5.

The yanks were mostly stunned. One of them, a young kipper with a bony brown face, wasn’t. He did a classic tuck-and-run towards an auto parked high up the drive, peppering the lasses with a hot clip of lead as he went. A line of them fell at once, maybe four or five. In the next instant, twice as many were right on top of the poor lad, hacking away like he was rough bit of steak.

After that it was a like a damned feeding frenzy. The Invisible Men were taking their delicately random pot shots, but when he saw a pack of six girls tear off in the direction of the lake, he figured those fellows wouldn’t be long for the world either. Up at the villa, he glimpsed a tall Abbo bird with an axe smashing out a picture window. He couldn’t see the boy, Finn, anywhere. It was getting hot in the suit. He started running.

Damn you, Slayer.

Who’ve you gone and pissed off now?

Chapter 5: Nicked

Okay, this is crazy, she thought, backflipping onto the bed amidst a shower of seven-thousand dollar imported glass.  Three foes sprang simultaneously, all waving pointy nasties at her. A tall black one took a wild swing at her with an axe, missed, and swallowed a swift kick. Outside, the world had exploded into a nightmare of gunfire and screaming.

She wasn’t exactly dressed to kill. The sheer nightgown was meant to knock Giles off his game, but now it just seemed like a big ol’ fashion faux pas.  She figure she’d have a minute or so to slip into something deadlier should the need arise.

A ratty-haired chick in camouflage gear took a swipe at her with a very large broadsword, whoosing it a millimeter from Buffy’s throat.  Suddenly everybody’s weapons seemed a whole lot pointier. Made her want one.

She launched herself at Camo' Girl with a flying backfist, watched her flop onto the pile of papers at the Falcon’s feet.  Giles strained mightily, pushing backwards into the mattress frame as he wrestled with his restraints.  The third attacker, an elfin brunette, leapt directly over him, yelling and flinging around a pair of nunchuks.  While they tussled, the reinforcements began streaming in from the rear. Buffy counted seven in the corner of her eye.  Might as well have been a hundred.

Suddenly, the brunette’s legs buckled. Giles, freed from his ropes, had rammed her headfirst below the knees, sending her tumbling into a knot of silk bedsheets. Buffy located the chick’s face down in the tangle, introduced it to her bare heel.  Meanwhile, the new arrivals fanned out around the bed menacingly.  These moved more cautiously then the first bunch. Seemed to be veterans. She thought she even recognized a few.

  Buffy stood bewildered for a moment. She was cornered, unarmed and practically naked. Her arsenal was hidden behind a half dozen superhuman killers. A plan definitely seemed in order, but she was all out of ideas.

“So,” she said, batting her eyelashes. “Who’s next?”

Before anyone could volunteer, the south wall of the villa, rather rudely, exploded.

Several of them turned around just in time to get the smackdown from a familiar pair of shiny black fists.   The robot tore into the pack of girls with unnerving ferocity. They were no match for him.  It.  Whatever.

Three seconds and a whole bunch of zap-biff-pow later, and the enemy’s numbers were cut in half.  Seizing the moment, she made a dash for Xander’s old iron-buckled trunk. No time for being picky.  She snatched up the first thing she saw – a Spanish rapier the length of her arm – and made with the slashing and the dashing. Two girls fell under a pair of short strokes. The tin soldier took out the last one with a crunchy twist of the neck.  Domo Arigato, Mr. Roboto.

The two stood gaping at one another for a long moment. The bot didn’t seem to be breathing heavy - or at all, really. But it had a nervous energy about it now, the fingers twitching spastically at its sides. There was a noise like someone whistling into a microphone at close range when it spoke.

“We must go,” it creaked, a frog at the bottom of a well. “There are more outside. Lots.”

“Lots,” she repeated, dripping with sarcasm, and sweat.  Mostly sarcasm.

“Urm, uh….” it stammered.  “Yes. Multiple… multiple targets. In the, ah… Target. Zone. Beep boop.”

Her eyebrow shot up. “Oooookay?”

“I have a… err, uh transport. It’s not far from here. Human.  Boop."

“What about him?” She pointed at Giles, who looked to be visiting Sleepyland again.

Something like a low groan emitted from the bot’s head. It moved - begrudgingly, it seemed - to the side of the bed, tossed the Watcher over its shoulder. Outside the gunfire had died out. A horde of dark silhouettes were shifting into position less than twenty yards from the house.  Too many to fight on their own. Sadly, Buffy noticed the limp remains of Hector Emmanuel slumped next to the front tire of the hybrid. There was no sign of the man named Riley Finn anywhere.

“Is there another way out?”

In lieu of answering, Buffy made a beeline for the basement. The creature followed closely behind. The smell of burnt tar and gasoline rose in her nostrils once again, but this time with just a hint of something more pleasant underneath.   They flew down the stairs into the darkness of her wine cellar. Halfway down a long rack of Pinot Noir, Buffy paused to yank out a bottle of 1994 Colliers.

“No time for that, I think…” croaked the droid.

“Shh… gimme a second.”

How does this stupid thing work again? She frowned, grabbed another bottle, this time a ‘92 Savignet, then a ’99 Aukland Farms. Finally, the room filed with a din of shuffling wooden gears. A rack of wine twisted slowly sideways, revealing a steel-strutted tunnel that seemed to burrow directly through the hillside.

“This will get us past the front lines. How far away is this ‘transport’ of yours?”

“Half a mile east of the lake,” the robot belched. “That’s if no one’s nicked it yet.”

Something prickled in her chest. She glared at the dark, glassy face. “What did you just say?”

From upstairs, dozens of footsteps and the sounds of wood shattering. They weren’t as patient as she’d hoped. “No time,” the bot barked. “Have to move.”

The creature shoved her into the shaft, its icy paw coming dangerously close to below-the-belt. She darted down the cool, dark passageway, bare toes wincing on the sharp gravel. Her rapier was jangling in her hand. The lanterns strobe-lit a band of human blood along the blade.  The stranger kept pace with her. Just beneath the sound of clomping boots she could hear Giles’ ragged, uneven breath. Somewhere behind them, sharp teenage voices yelped excitedly. They’d found her escape hatch, but it was too late.

We’re gonna make it, she thought. Just a little farther.

Ahead, an orange dot of sunlight was getting steadily larger. She could make out the scruffy branches of the cespuglio waving in the October breeze. It felt right, running again, heart lodged firmly in her neck. It felt like old times. The dot was becoming a circle of light. A promise.

Then - just like that - the circle went black.

Like old times.

***

Bloody hell.

This wasn’t how he’d imagined it going at all. He’d known they were coming for her, sure. Angel had caught him up to speed the other night. The old poofter had the early line on just about everything these days, being a Senior Bloody Partner now n’all. He’d just assumed he’d have a stitch or so to work things out with the Slayer, come up with some type of game plan.

He might have even told her.  Maybe she would have even saved him the trouble for once and worked it out on her own.  But now, this. He could hear their psychotic battle cries, deadly little girl footsteps closing in from both ends.  Wouldn’t be long before they were on them.  This was going to be such a stupid death.  He knew a thing or two about those…

Just rip it off now, man. Show her your face. Tell her…something!

No.  In a few moments it wouldn’t matter anyway. They would be cut down by harpies in a sodding mine shaft.  Better the original way, the one where he saves her and the rest of the entire bloody universe. Yeah, that was a pretty good death.

He looked at her. God, she was magnificent, still a damned empress. Her perfect feline body stiffened under the little see-through number, sword arm dipping forward gracefully, like a duelist of the old world.

“Slayer,” he said.

“I know,” she said. For just a moment, he felt the world crumble. “We’re fucked,” she added.

“S’cuse me?”

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just…what’s with the potty mouth all of the sudden?”

She squinted at him. “Okay, you are now officially the weirdest robot I’ve ever met. And believe me, I’ve met a few…”

Oh-oh.  Careful, old boy.

She shook her head. “So what am I supposed to call you, anyway?” He didn’t answer. The voices were almost upon them now, wailing insults and dark threats. “Get ready for hell, bitch,” one shrieked. Buffy's eyes sank. The sword followed.

She seemed to be ashamed of something. The Watcher’s condition, he guessed – she’d roughed him up something fierce. Or maybe it was the fact that she’d just led them all into a damned death trap. The soot from the cavern had muddied her face, and it made the woman’s huge, angelic eyes show that much more brightly. She’d buggered it up, sure enough, but he could feel himself ripping in half to see her like this, giving up. He wanted very badly to touch her, one last time.

No!  Think, damn you. Make a bloody PLAN for once in your life!

The tunnel was a tight fit, maybe five feet across at the widest. The girls could only come at them two, perhaps three at a time from either direction. And then, it would be awkward for them. Slayers were no Roman legionnaires.  They were trained for single combat, lone killers. Fighting back to back, they might have a chance.  Take it slow an’ methodical.   Use the darkness, draw them close.  Send them low patiently, one by one.  Yeah that was a good an’ proper plan.

He propped the Watcher against the wall. “Okay. Here’s what we do," he said. "We make a break for it.  Won’t be expecting it head-on like that.” He shoved her roughly behind him. “Just watch your back, and if you see an opening, run like all hell. I’ll catch up when I can.” He felt her stiffen.

“No!” she said. “No, we’re not leaving him.”

“I don’t think they want him.”

“You don’t think?” He heard her voice break. Her eyes were dancing. The Slayer was coming off her hinges.

Damn. Impossible woman.

He smashed out the nearest lantern with a fist. Then another. The small bubble of blackness felt comforting. Somewhere under the mask, he could feel his game face coming on. The world always became so crisp in the dark.

“Right.  You carry Watcher. Stay close.”

He forged ahead, killing every lamp along the way. The Sun Helmet dimmed his finer senses considerably, but he could still see perfectly well without light. He zeroed in on the bobbing shapes in the distance. There were ten of them, advancing two-by-two, each girl looking lightly armed and just a tiny bit terrified. He cocked his head and howled, the mask’s microphone twisting the sound into a blood-curdling roar of feedback. In the next second, all but one of them had turned to run.

Result!  Well done, lad…

He reached back for Buffy’s hand.  The last remaining Slayer seemed to be kneeling down, about twenty yards out.  She was fishing something small and metal out of her jacket. He felt his fangs slide out. She would be easy.

He was on the verge of making a dash at her when the bird suddenly tossed her bauble, sending it clinking up the rough walls of the cave towards them.

No.

The thing rolled to a stop a few inches from his heel. He could hear the dry sizzle underneath its cool nickel-plated shell. Moving faster then he thought possible, he gave Buffy a hard shove, launching her and the Watcher a dozen feet downstream. 

Then he flopped down on the grenade, smothering it to his chest.

The last thing he saw was the Watcher, his eyes suddenly wide and white in the darkness. The old man was staring directly at him, rubbing his earlobe very, very gently.

The last thing he thought was:

Oh bugger. This is really going to hurt…

***

It was just so stupid.

The apartment was cramped, in the first place, what with all of Reginald’s big stupid exercise machines and big stupid Reginald. And now Reginald got a big stupid dog and it was hogging the couch on the one night of the whole week when Andrew wanted to watch the big stupid TV. The furry monster just sat there, hating him with its beady little eyes. It didn’t even pant. What kind of a dog doesn’t pant?

A stupid one, that’s what kind.

Reaching out one hand, he attempted to will it off the sofa. This is not the couch you’re looking for, he thought serenely. Move along. But even that didn’t work very well. The dog just made a little grrrr sound through it’s teeth, which was enough to make Spock and Bones hop up onto the kitchen counter and start hissing like a couple of big babies. Babies who hiss. And are cats.

But Andrew wasn’t scared. He’d seen plenty of scarier things in his day. Plent. Ty. Nevertheless, his shaggy new roommate seemed to have won this particular battle. The epic fifteen-hour Star Wars marathon would have to be postponed, perhaps until such time as he could afford the new deluxe Blu-Ray boxed set of the original trilogy. The one that deletes that totally lame Jabba the Hut part. And changes the Greedo death scene back to the original version, the one where Han shot first. Which, as any true fan knows: He. Most. Certainly. Did.

He made a dignified retreat to his bedroom, tucking Spock and Bones under each arm as he went. Defiantly, he popped in his special anniversary edition of the John Williams soundtrack and cranked it up to eleven, just to remind the pooch who was the real boss around there.  Meaning Andrew.  Not John Williams.  Andrew was the real boss around there, in case that wasn’t crystal clear as a chandelier.  Duh.

As the rousing anthem of the Imperial March kicked in, he reflected on his own rich heritage as a bad guy. Those were simpler times, plotting and rubbing his hands together menacingly and… well, mostly those two things. But he did summon a demon who looked like a giant lizard man. And he killed somebody once. That was pretty badass.

But, alas, those days are at an end, he thought. For I have surrendered myself to the eternal service of the good and the lawful.

As if on cue, the music swooned into the love theme from The Empire Strikes Back. Tears welled up in his eyes as he thought of Han Solo standing so courageously over the carbonite chamber, and how Leia kissed him so sweetly just before he descended into the freezing darkness below. Except that Buffy was Leia and Spike was Han. And Andrew was Chewbacca. He didn’t know who C-3PO was, since the android was still strapped to his backpack.

He was just about to sit down at his laptop and write a short fic about it when the lights went out. At first, he figured Reginald had just forgotten to pay the stupid electric bill again. But if that was true, then why was the music still playing? And why could he see that man lying down a few feet away?

He was dressed in some kind of black suit of armor. It was very leathery and Sci-Fi channel-ish, with tiny little spikes and ridges and circuit-looking things all over it. He was wearing some kind of shiny black space helmet too.  It was hard to make out what he was doing down there on the floor. The guy seemed to be in some sort of a long dark tunnel. It made Andrew a little dizzy when he realized that he was in the tunnel too, sort of. From the angle he was seeing, it seemed like Andrew was buried up to his head. Or that maybe he was only six inches tall. Either way, it didn’t feel right. For one thing, his feet still seemed to be touching the bedroom carpet. For another thing, if he was six inches tall, how come his hand was so big? And old?

But it wasn’t his hand. He couldn’t control it, and he only wished he had a wristwatch that cool. It was like he was looking out of someone else’s eyes. A second hand came up and tapped insistently on the watch’s face.

What are you trying to say, gentle Old Man Hand, he thought. Do you want me to tell you the time? He suddenly wished the hand would just go away. He really wanted to look at that cool robot guy again.

Then suddenly, there was a big burst of light, and a bunch of dirt flew up in his not-face. Then he was just standing there, back in his room again. No more spooky tunnel. No more watches or awesome-looking cyborgs, either. Just Bones and Spock, lounging on Andrew’s freshly cleaned bedsheets, licking each others' furry little butts.

Something was definitely wrong here.

Chapter 6:  Enemies, Closer

Buffy awoke in a very clean, very brightly lit hospital room. The walls were polished white stone, trimmed by lengths of steel raceway. Her arms and legs weren’t bound, but try as she might she couldn’t seem to move them.   It wasn’t paralysis; not the scary, Late-Night Telethon-y kind anyway. She could still feel the caress of linen beneath her. It was as though her entire body was trapped on the verge of sleep. A wave of sweet, unexpected nostalgia swept through her. Nights on the Via Blanco returned, along with the feeling that all of life’s sharp edges were filed smooth.

The Dragon was so close. She could almost reach it; almost touch its golden skin.

No, a voice in her head scolded back. Don’t go there. The Dragon never waits for you. He’s always close, but he never waits.

Be here.

Be here now.

As she squeezed the old wound closed, she was suddenly aware of being naked. Panic began to creep in around the edges of her brain like chilly fingers.

This was no hospital.

Frantically, Buffy tried to piece together the series of events. They were in the tunnel, running towards the escape hatch that she’d paid the Reggio brothers to install last summer. The robot had been acting strangely, like it knew her or something. Giles was hurt. She was carrying him. Then the robot knocked them down. Then she woke up here.

No, that’s wrong, she thought. Something was missing. The robot pushed her, but that wasn’t what knocked her out. She remembers seeing the creature spread itself out on the floor. There was a pulse of blue light and a very loud bang. A bomb, maybe?

She struggled to lift her head, neck muscles straining against an impossible wind. There were glimpses; a taut ponytail, a shaft of blurry white fabric. Somewhere close, a pair of female voices, arguing.  One voice was low and gruff, the other a musical Southern drawl.  She couldn’t make out what they were saying.  Sounds still weren’t hanging together very well, and the thought occurred that the bomb shattered her eardrums. She tried to tilt her head sideways, groaning from the effort. Her mouth opened, but all that came out was a somewhat pathetic squeak.

Then the voices stopped, and two faces immediately popped into view.

One woman was thin and pretty, but unnervingly pale. Her eyes were as pink as a bunny rabbit’s, the kind of pink you see in flash photography, each one framed by a gauzy bush of long white lashes. The hair was snowy white as well, though she seemed to be no older than Buffy herself. She was dressed in a form-fitting nurse’s uniform, more like something you’d see in an old Playboy than in an episode of “E.R.”  The nurse shot her a dreamy smile. Buffy didn’t recognize her at all.

The other face was quite familiar. She wished very much that she could punch it.

“Welcome back, General,” said Kennedy.  “Remember me?”

She looked older than Buffy remembered.  Her hair was dragged into a taut, militant knot that revealed a network of tiny wrinkles blossoming in the corners of her brow. She wore a kind of grey thermal sweater that reminded Buffy of a commercial she once saw for the Navy Seals. Her brown eyes twinkled sadistically in the florescent light.

Somewhere inside Buffy's chest, the demon stirred to life. She felt a long muscle tense in her right arm. It snapped up like a wild dog on a leash, missing the brat’s chin by inches. Her left leg followed suit, sliding harmlessly across the ridge of the albino nurse’s hemline.

“Wh-hoa!” Kennedy yelled. “Looks like our little Chosen One’s still got a little spunk left in her. And I don’t mean the sticky vampire kind, either.”

Hands grabbed her roughly, and she felt herself go limp again.  The world had lost its substance, somehow, gone all wet and ghostly.  Buffy's face buried itself in a small feather pillow, and she had to wrench her head to the side to keep from suffocating.

“See, I told you it wasn’t enough, didn’t I?  You’ll have to forgive, Nurse Nancy, Buff. She’s got a great head for science and all, but she’s new to the whole Slayer scene. Cooked up this nifty little neuro-toxin to keep girls like us from getting all herky-jerky and karate-choppy when we don’t want them to.”

The “nurse” planted a firm hand on her neck. Buffy’s hearing was gradually improving. She heard two quick. wet snapping noises, and a sound like someone whisking a bowl of Jell-O.

Something trapped inside her was screaming.

Don’t.

A pair of hands went about their obscene business.  She gasped again, this time loud enough for them to hear.

“Ooh, I think she likes it Nancy!”

She tried to concentrate on the odd sensations rippling through her, knifing needles and the dull hammer edge of poison. She shut her eyes, tried to draw herself inward until the voices of her tormentors faded into the distance. The demon prowled along the edge of her mind, then, softy cooing his name. Relenting, she conjured him up, the way she used to do when he was still alive but very far away. Wolf eyes pierced through her, the dark eyebrow arching up like a question mark.

The answer was always “yes,” back then. Yes, do this to me. Yes, do whatever you want with me.

It was like a drug in those days. Sometimes, she’d just wanted the fire, the ferocity of fingers and lips attacking, cloth shredding, bodies smashing through toothpick furniture. Other times she had wanted very particular things. Weird things. Sick things, even. He'd understood completely.

He was there with her now, as she lay helpless on a clean white gurney, surrounded by enemies.

‘Shhh… Relax, pet. We’re going to play a game.’

‘What kind of a game?’ she wondered aloud.

‘Doctor.'

‘Oh boy!  I think I like that game. Wait, who’s the doctor?’

‘I am. Don’t you remember?’

‘Oh yeah. I remember now. You’re The Doctor. The Big Baaad Doctor.’

‘Yeahhh, s'right.  But we must be quiet, lamb. Mustn’t let our friends catch on. Wouldn’t be proper.’

Maybe I’m not proper. Maybe I’m baaad…

A long cool finger slid inside again, a knuckle brushing lightly against soft down. She felt a wet shock as the skin of his palm pressed momentarily against her thigh. She wanted to arch her hips, push back, strain against it. But she couldn’t do that.  Wouldn’t be proper.  Somewhere far away, she could hear the sound of something electric humming to life.

‘Now. This bit will sting, love.  But I want you to be a good girl and let the doctor go about his business, alright?’

Okay doctor. I’ll try to be a good girl.

Something hard probed at her; gently, and then insistent. A brief hiss of pain shot through her as it snaked its way inside.  She felt herself seize involuntarily onto it, strangling a cool, slippery surface with a muscle she never knew she had. A needle sank into the small of her back, touching off a hornet’s nest of nerve endings with a flamethrower.

Ooh, doctor. That hurts soooo much.

Good girl. Brave girl. You’re doing very well.

Now, you hold on to that for a few minutes, young lady, while I go an’ fetch my instruments.

Yes, Doctor.

Yes, my love.

***

Right.

That hurt.

Sodding Understatement Of The Year, actually.  Felt like his skull was the hotel room and the Mick and the Stones were having a bash. As his eyes gradually adjusted, he struggled to understand why he was in one piece and feeling bloody awful instead of being in several awfully bloody pieces.

Concuss grenade, he thought. He’d seen the Initiative blokes use them before, whenever a beasty got frisky but they weren’t finished playing with it yet. No permanent damage, but it gave them one hell of a raging headache.

The room was strange and yet dishearteningly familiar. Scorched stone walls, hung torches. Manacles dangling from the ceiling like jungle vines. And, of course, a personal pair wrapped snugly ‘round his wrists.

A damned dungeon.  How original.

He tested the chains. They were sturdy buggers; still, he might have broken through them if he wasn’t feeling so weak.  He hadn’t had a meal in a several days, or slept, for that matter.  Sometimes Spike forgot that he still had to do that last bit. Whenever he wore W&H’s fancy getup, he could just go charging about anytime, day or night, blankets be damned. But his mind would always need sleep, even when the body didn’t. It took a constant, Olympian effort for creatures like him to persist in the world of men, as though his very consciousness had to literally struggle under the heavy onslaught of science and reason. Being forced to watch a Discovery channel show about bloody comets with Dawn had drained him more than any hot and heavy marathon with Big Sis ever did. Go figure.

Buffy!

He tore at his bonds, roaring. The chains made a sound like an army riding, but held him fast. Images of her death flashed hot in his brain: a hundred different ways, burned and kicked and sliced and stomped, all while he lay like a useless lump. They would show no mercy on her.

He would show no mercy on them.

He wouldn’t rest until they had tasted every exotic flavor of misery and pain. Scalding hot oil on peeled flesh. Hounds eating entrails. Railroad spikes. At her grave, he would hang what was left of their bodies on a tree to rot.

Once he'd finished savoring this happy image, the rage inside him slowly subsided, yielding to the prickly sanity of dread. If they hadn’t killed him yet, it was possible she was alive too, and nearby. Perhaps being tortured; these types never could stomach a sharp, clean death if there was a chance they could rub it in your face a little first. Spike knew that particular drill quite well.

Eventually, he heard voices. One was composed of a growling, gutteral rubbish -- the Black Speech of some unknown refuge of Hell.  But, as they neared, he could make out the other one for sure. It was a dead ringer for that annoying little bird, the one who was always hanging off the Witch’s belt buckle in the days of Sunnydale's grand finale. It made a certain sense, her being behind it; the wench never could stomach playing second fiddle to Buffy, nevermind third, fourth or bloody eighteenth.

She appeared in the doorway wearing some G.I. Joe-type number, and grinning like Mr. Cheshire. He suddenly knew that Buffy was still alive, after all. Vampires were ruthless, soulless murderers, and if anything changed about their faces after a kill, Spike had never noticed. But the look of real human who’s just topped someone was altogether different, no matter who they were, always tempered with just the slightest twinge of regret. He figured this had little to do with conscience: it was the bloody finality of death, a door closed and never again opened. It was the reason serial killers re-enacted their crimes in such exacting detail, he supposed.

No, she hadn’t killed her. But she’d hurt her. It was as plain as the smile on her face.

Inside his chest, something dangerous began to growl. He lunged.

“Color me impressed,” said the bint. “Another little bundle of energizer bunnies. You Italians are tough, man.”

“I’ll kill you!” The sound of his altered voice hit the walls and shattered into a storm of feedback.  Instantly, a very large and brightly pissed-off looking demon charged to her side. He was a big grey fellow with milky white eyes, just like the berk he skewered in the temple. Spike still couldn’t quite place the breed, though; Angel was always better with these continental types.

“Settle down, fella,” Kennedy said. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” She drew seductively close, her pet beastie trailing half a step behind. Spike could hear the blood pumping in the long well of her throat, and desperately wished he could set it loose. “You know, I’ve heard a little about you: mysterious, masked superhero popping up all over Europe. Slaying beasties and rescuing maidens-fair. “ She squinted curiously into his faceplate, less than a foot away. “I guess you’re real after all.”

Spike decided to forego the pleasantries.  “Where’s Buffy?"

“Why do you care?” she answered, seeming genuinely puzzled. “She’s a nobody now. There are hundreds of us, exactly like her. Better, even, not to mention waaaay more motivated..."

She paused to fire a stiff uppercut into his solar plexus. A wave of pain ripped through his ribcage, and he felt the armor crack under the strain.

"See, there are two types of people in this world,” she continued.   “You have your well-meaning fools like Giles, Faith, Rosenberg, Summers. Sure they're talented, as far as that goes. But when it comes to saving the world, they've lost the thread. They’ve become selfish. Weak. They waste all their time focusing on all the small, pointless battles... that is when they aren't micro-managing each others' love triangles.  It's not their fault, really. They just don’t have the brains or the guts to see the big picture.”

“Yeah?  What’s that?”  As he said it, he noticed Kennedy's pet monster roving in a small circle towards him. He could feel the thing’s hatred sailing towards him on red waves.  It wanted to crack him like an egg.

“Control, of course," Kennedy said.  "I mean, bustin’ demons and dragons are one thing. Every once and awhile a bunch of scaly monsters are bound to get out of hand, force you to make with Big Beatdown.”  The pet demon snarled at this little insight, but its mistress ignored it.  She was securely in the driver’s seat with these devils, somehow.  “In the long run, though, mankind does a lot more 'evil' on a daily basis than anything you’d find crawling out of some silly old Hellmouth. Men who wage wars for cheap gas.  Men who sell women into slavery.  Men who abandon children to starve in the streets. Men, who...well, you get the picture.”

“Got it.  You hate men.”

Kennedy shook her head, laughing it away.  “Can't you see it?  The world needs order. Justice. Security. Slayers can provide that. With a little help, of course.” The demon hissed at him over the girl’s shoulder, and she cleared a path for it.

“So it’s to be torture is it?  Kind of my specialty, bitch.  Do your worst.”

“Torture a man with no name?  No face.  Sounds like a major waste of time, if you ask me.  Seems to me that you don’t know anything worth knowing.  Very few people do, these days.”

The monster gripped each side of the Sun Helmet, its rows of shark teeth flickering madly in the torchlight.

"So long, stranger."

A pair of clawed hands twisted sharply.

The world went black.

***

Drugged.

Again. Wonderful.

Rupert awoke in a clean cell, hands and feet bound to a chair. Again. This particular routine was getting to be a little tiresome, to say the least. He felt the sensor shift back into place, and immediately began broadcasting the environment, trying to serve up some additional clues for whomever it was he was able to synch up with back in the tunnel.

Unfortunately, the signal had to be randomly assigned. Thanks to that grenade, he didn’t have time to link up with the WatcherNet search engine. So he sent out a general REDCOM.SEEK command, a nifty little safety feature he’d dreamt up for situations like this one. The satellite would dump his visual feed to the first available device, remaining active for as long as he was conscious.  However maddeningly rare that seemed to be these days.

Luckily, his generally bedraggled state was enough to fool the children into thinking he was asleep longer than he actually was. He was able to get some very good reads of highway signs and landmarks on the journey in, including an extensive shot of the terrain at the border crossing. He even managed to get several full facial images of his captors discussing directions to the castle. If he was lucky enough to synch with a good lip-reader, they’d probably be rescued any minute now.

His cell, however, was disappointingly devoid of detail. There was only a small, barred window, his chair, and a large steel door with a foot long grate in it. The rest of the room was white stone, buffed smooth as silk. It all seemed surprisingly new, considering the way the castle had looked from the outside. Their enemies had kept fairly busy, it seemed.

He knew the place well. Never actually been here, mind you, but he’d read so much about it in the literature over the years that it felt like a second home. It was Castelul Drakul, an ancestral palace of the infamous Romanian despot, Vlad Tempes. Dracula’s summer home, practically speaking. The castle’s location had remained a closely guarded secret for centuries. It seemed both strange and oddly fitting that a rogue army of Slayers should take up residence there. If only he’d thought of it first.

Hopping like a mad insect, he inched the chair over towards the door. “Hello, there!” he cried out. “I say, is there anybody there?”

A gruff Amazon appeared in the grate. He recognized her as April Mahoney. The girl had joined Faith’s Army a little over a year ago, a late bloomer from Queens, New York. She was only sixteen then, hardly able to comprehend her powers, let alone the strange war she’d been recruited to fight. There was something vaguely tragic about the girl’s case. What was it? Something to do with her family, he recalled.

“April,” he gasped. “April, what’s happening.” The girl just glared down at him, expressionless. “Please,” he said. “Please, I need to know if she’s okay.”

April’s lips seemed to hover around her teeth. Her lidded eyes spoke of the kind of loss he hadn’t seen in a very long time. “Don’t know, G. Dead, for all I fucking care.”

He remembered, then. Her family was slaughtered in front of her. There was nothing supernatural about it. A “home invasion,” he believed they called it.

Four men had broken into April's house one evening. After scouring the place for money, they raped and murdered her mother, slit her father’s throat. Afterwards, they drowned both of her younger brothers in a bathtub.  No witnesses, they thought.  It happened six years before the Awakening. While he was teaching Buffy Summers to slay vampires in Sunnydale, April Mahoney had hidden herself under a sink in New York City, watching her entire life disintegrate through a crack in the cabinetry.

“I’m sorry,” he said, not entirely sure of what.

The girl hovered motionless for a moment, then disappeared. He sat quietly for several minutes, ruminating on the past decade of his life. Considering how much had happened, it had passed in an awful hurry.

Summoning his strength, he hopped back to the small barred window. He concentrated once again on the wilderness below, taking care not to move his neck around too much, to keep his gaze level and his focus deep. It was a clear day. He could see for miles. Behind his back, he began to move his wrists in a gentle see-saw motion over a rough shard of wood on the base of the chair.

“Take a good look, whoever you are. See us.”

Chapter 7:  In the Land of the Blind...

“Omigod!  Omigod. I see us!”

“What?  Are you sure?”

Andrew Wells was staring at a point on the ground about six feet away, duckfooted and wobbling, his blind eyes glowing like stars.  The little weenie still hadn’t quite gotten the hang of the whole “remote seeing” thing.  The last time Giles woke up, he got so dizzy he fell flat on his little dungeon-mastering butt.

“Yep!” he cried. “Yeah, that’s totally us… Hi, us!”  He waved his hand furiously.

Xander squinted up at the old, creepy castle on the hill.

Why is it always the old, creepy castle on the hill? he thought.  Just for once, he wished it could be the old, creepy beach resort on the hill.  Or even the old, creepy ski lodge on the hill.  It was all just getting to be so predictable.

It’d been a long hike in from the Romanian border.  They had to ditch the Land Rover at the crossing. Kennedy’s crew had taken up positions in a network of abandoned bunkers in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains.  It was slow going whenever Andrew’s Watcher-vision kicked in, but they’d still managed to make pretty good time in the past hour.  Maybe his luck was finally changing?

When Wells had first called, Xander was sure it was a really bad joke.  He couldn’t believe that Giles would pledge the little spazz into the Council, let alone make him an 'Eye.

'But the timing was all so accurate. The Official Council Know-it-Alls lost the Watcher and his kidnappers in Italy.  Apparently there was some kind of freak car accident.  Witnesses placed Riley Finn on the scene, but Xander just couldn’t buy that the government would get into bed with Kennedy’s little Lipstick Revolution.  Then again, with all the zany, madcap intrigue these days, the only thing Xander was completely sure of was that he couldn’t trust anyone, anymore.

Not anyone.  Except for Andrew Wells, somehow.

It was hard being around him, and not just for all the usual, annoying reasons. 

Shock of the Millenium Number Two: Andrew (Andrew Wells!) was actually competent, for once, and had pieced together most of the clues all by his lonesome.  Heck, the little nerdlinger taped all his visions, on one of those Official Replica Star Trek Annoying Swoosh Badge Thingees™.  And amid the pubescent maze of “Stargate SG-1” references, he even managed to glean some useful intel.  Pretty amazing stuff, all things considered.  Andrew Wells, ladies and gentlemen!

Their first clue was the watch: Giles' oh-my-god, zillion-dollar custom Rolex.  It had a certain feature that the Watcher would brag about endlessly with a few brandy's in him, but that only a true uber-nerd like Andrew would ever pay attention to, let alone remember.  Giles called it “real-time.”

Instead of using time-zones like a normal, non-Geeked-Out Superwatch, the Rolex maintained a link with a GPS satellite which measured the wearer’s exact meridian at any given moment in time.  So if Giles was traveling from, say, London to Moscow, instead of just jumping ahead a few hours at each time zone, the hands would register a smooth gradient of time, displaying his exact temporal position relative to Greenwich, England.

None of which made much sense to anyone other than Rupert Giles, of course. But the upshot was that they could narrow down his position to a single degree of longitude based on the hands of the watch in his visions. That head start, coupled with the various terrain features and road signs that Giles had managed to glimpse along the way, had led them quickly to southern Romania. And then to the woods.

And then, to the creepy old castle, on the hill.

“Can you see anyone else? What happened to that guard?”

“Wow, we look so tiny down here! I think we’ll have to climb some stairs.”  As he spoke, Andrew’s horizontal started drifting vertical, wheeling like a top.

Xander cocked his M-14.  It was a sturdy infantry model, hardly ever jammed.  That was important.

“Hey,” he said, and clapped the boy’s shoulder.  Andrew turned to face him, his creepy WatcherVison eyes a thousand silver miles away. “Listen up, little buddy.   You… you done good.  But, you're sittin’ this play out.”

His face twisted, heartbroken. “No!  I can help!  Really. I can be like your reverse-lookout man.  Or, something.”  It suddenly seemed like he might cry.  “I have to help…”

“You have, man.  We’d be lost without you.  Dead in the water.  But it’s gonna get rough.  Like, real rough. These girls are killers. And with Giles awake, you’d just be flying blind in there.”

“Well” he whimpered. “What if they knock him out again?  Everybody’s always knocking him out, right?”

Xander sighed. Before he could think better of it, he pulled his 9mm from his shoulder rig, pressed it into Andrew’s palm. “Alright listen. Here’s the plan.” He studied the landscape. “Can you see a pile of rocks over to the left… err, the right of the clearing?”

Andrew seemed to calm down a bit, snorting back a glob. “Yeah, I think so,” he said.

“Well, we’re gonna hide you over by those rocks.” He felt Andrew tense up. “Just for right now!  I’m gonna close for some recon, see if I can sniff a way inside. But as soon as Giles gets knocked out again, that’s your cue.”

Andrew fondled the gun blindly. “My cue to what.”

“To storm the gates, my man. To storm the freakin’ gates.”

***

The keep was pretty small for a mysterious, forbidden vampire fortress.  Xander’s depth perception was, of course, fairly sucky, but it still seemed to him that a top-secret lair like friggin’ Castle Dracula should have been more, well, cool.  In the afternoon sun, the walls looked grungy, made up of the kinda reddish, kinda grayish stone that seemed to peel off in places like the stucco on a suburban townhouse. It was sad, the way people just let big houses go to crap.  He bet himself that they didn’t even use copper piping for the plumbing. That was so important for these older country homes.

There seemed to be only a few guards on duty. Three of them ringed the parapets in a classic Thurman formation: northeast, east, southwest. If they followed the drill, the strong forward guard would rotate thirty degrees, and the weak front would sweep thirty five. They were like the hands of two crazy, overlapping clocks; a movement was meant to give everybody the widest possible angle of vision ninety percent of the time. He just had to wait for that ten percent slice of pie to arrive...

Hang on a minute.

Is she on a cell phone?

The girl on the western watch was blabbing away like a tween at a slumber party.  Her name was Cassidy Something.  He vaguely remembered her from the Cleveland days.  Cass was one of those ditzy, self-absorbed types, the kind of girl that always ignored him in high school when he asked to borrow a pencil – and sometimes he really did need a pencil!

Anyway, he couldn’t believe they would put a bonehead like Cassidy on guard duty. Xander wouldn’t have trusted that skank with a mop and bucket.  He decided that Kennedy really had to learn thing or too about discipline if she was going to give this whole conquering-the-world thing a shot.

Moving low under the shadows, Xander slid back the safety on the rifle and rounded towards the half-crumbled wall beside the gates.  It was about twenty five feet to the ledge; an easy climb if he could snag the hook somewhere good. In a single-fluid motion, he slid the grappler out of his backpack and flung it in a high arc over the wall. As soon as the metal claw sailed out of view, he felt a dull, wet thunk.  The rope stiffened in his hand.

First try, he mused.  Not bad, General Harris.  Or should I say, ‘Captain Hook,’ yarrghh!

No.

No, I really shouldn’t.

He pulled the line taut and gave it a few sharp tugs.  It seemed steady enough on the climb, although he thought he could hear something like a low, lonesome moan whenever he leaned back too hard.

Jeez, he thought.  This place is really falling apart!

At the ledge, he twisted himself over the top, commando-style!

And landed smack in a puddle of dead demon.  The hook sticking out of its gray face reminded him of a big ugly carp.

Okay, he mused. If anybody ever asks, you t-o-o-o-tally meant to do that.

The courtyard below was full of Slayers of all shapes and sizes, as well as dozen or more clones of the extremely unlucky demon he was standing on. They seemed to be in the middle of a training session.

He recognized Kennedy snaking through the ranks, barking commands like a shorter, brattier version of General George Patton R.I.P.  She was less then a hundreds yards out. Xander was pretty sure he could nail her from here.  He was equally sure that if he did, her minions would be all over him in a heartbeat.

The central keep was his best bet, he thought. He dropped on dirt behind a line of parked jeeps, crept silently along the eastern rim, keeping his eye fixed on the trainees in the yard. Then it was a quick, jittery dash to the tower’s wide arching entrance. If his luck held, Ken had Buffy and Giles stashed there, maybe with a few more total rejects like Cassidy watching them.  Not that it mattered much.  Xander wrote the book on Slayer military tactics.  Literally.  They wouldn’t know what hit them.

Suddenly, something hit him. He didn’t know what.

He looked up. About thirty feet up the spire, he could just barely make out the face of Rupert Giles beaming down at him. He seemed to have gotten free of his ropes. Pale fingers wiggled out through the bars in the window.  Xander made a hush sign with his hand, motioned for him to duck back down. But the old guy seemed a little out of it, just kept wiggling and smiling.

Taking a deep breath, he dove for the entrance, rolling ten feet down the corridor and out of sight. Blood thundering, he flew up the wide stone stairwell, one finger sagging against the rifle’s trigger. There didn’t seem to be anyone around.

The third landing opened out into a broad, modern hallway. The exposed lighting fixtures spoke of a work-in-progress. The gals were settling in for the long haul, he guessed. The height felt about right, but he was a bit disturbed by the lack of a welcoming committee.  At the far end of the hall was a large steel door with a grate in it, exactly like Andrew described in his last vision.

Xander made his move, more cautiously this time. He peered into the grate sideways.  “Giles.” He whispered.

The Watcher rose gamely from his chair to meet him, tossing aside a shredded rope along the way.

“Mr. Harris. Lovely to see you, again.”

Xander frowned.  “You spit on me.”  The Watcher cracked a wry smile. “Look, this door doesn’t seem to have a keyhole or knob or anything.  How do they get you in and out?”

“I don’t know.  Haven’t been out yet, actually.”

Xander felt along the seams.  There was a soft square of gel near the right edge, like a transparent sticker. He could see the very vague outline of a hand on its surface, and took care not to touch it. “Okay,” he said. “It, uh, looks like one of those fingerprint sensor thingamajigs.”

“That’s the technical term for it, is it?”

“Don’t get shirty!” Xander said.  “I’ll be right back. But first, I’m going to have to get me a hostage.”

He turned to leave. “Wait,” Giles gasped. “It’s too dangerous, Xander. There’s too many of them.”

Xander stiffened his jaw. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, G.”

“No, no, that’s not what I meant,” Giles stammered, looking for all the world like a man who was about to spare his feelings. “It’s just that, if you could find a way to get Faith and the others inside we could seize the whole bloody…”

He looked away sheepishly.

“You did bring the Slayers, didn’t you?”

“Well, no. Not exactly.”

“What do you mean, not exactly.”

“I mean ‘not exactly’ as in no, absolutely not!”  Xander felt his resolve sink in again. “It’s not like it’s exactly easy to know who to trust lately. Couldn’t take the risk.”

Giles chuckled in astonishment. “So, let me see if I have this right:  You didn’t want to take the risk of bringing any army of superheroes to fight another army of superheroes. So you instead elected to storm a castle with an antique rifle?  And positively no backup whatsoever?”

“Well,” Xander muttered. “That’s not entirely true.”

Giles stared at him, genuinely puzzled.

“Listen, I think it’s about time you turned off your eyeball cam, Giles. I got this feeling he’s falling down again.”

***

Ouch. Stupid rocks.

Now that Giles was walking around, all tall and everything, it was getting harder and harder for Andrew to figure out how high he was off the ground. He decided to sit down instead, and prayed none of the evildoers could see him.

Xander was waving his arms at Giles now and pointing at the floor. What was he saying?  It looked like Say, how are you?  Or maybe he was saying “stay.”  But that didn’t seem right either, especially since Giles was already locked up in a jail cell, and chances were he wasn’t feeling very good about that. Then Xander disappeared for a few seconds, and when he came back he had a little piece of paper in his hands. Giles got real close so he could read it. It said: ‘Stay right there. Do not move.’

Oh God, he thought, finally understanding.  Giles has gone deaf.

What have those animals done to him?

Then, suddenly the whole scene snapped off, and he was back in the woods.  Alone.

He tried to force himself to stop freaking out, but it was hard.  Poor Giles had gotten knocked out again, just when he was trying so hard to “stay right there” and “not move.”  He didn’t want to be too critical of his B.F.F Xander Harris, but Andrew knew that if he saw some evil type person sneaking up on Giles to clunk him on the head, he would have probably written him something like: “Move around, Giles! A lot!”

Well, I suppose it’s up to me, then. Andrew studied the gun. He was vaguely satisfied that he’d seen enough rap videos to know how it worked. First he had to ‘rack the slide’ or something.  He fiddled with the shiny thing on top until it clicked into place, and smiled.

Ready for my attack run, Gold Leader.

Let’s rock.

Clutching the weapon in both hands like those guys on TV, Andrew danced out from behind the rock pile and then broke into a wild, terrified gallop. He tried to shout the Klingon battle cry of Kalarf’hi, but all that would come out was a sort of high-pitched moan.

He was almost to the top of the hill when he fell, again. Except this time, instead of just bonging his forehead and feeling dizzy like usual, Andrew just kept right on falling down; down and down, as though the ground had just disappeared from under him. It felt like a long time before he stopped again. Luckily he landed on a big mound of something that was soft and kind of squishy. It also smelled a little like a farm. He wondered what it was.

The place he fell into was very cramped and very dark. Torches hung along all the walls and everything looked like it had been in a really bad fire or something. There were shadows and spooky dripping sounds everywhere he turned.

Okay. Calm down, he thought. This is good, Andrew. You’ve found a secret entrance or something.
Just as you planned.

Cautiously, he slid off of the friendly brown mound and tip-toed down a long, wide corridor. He got pretty excited when he saw the jail cells. They were spaced pretty evenly along the length of the passageway.   Kind of like the prison chambers on the original Death Star, except that these ones down here also smelled a little like a farm.

Then, as he swung his gun into the open doorway of the third cell, he saw something that shocked him to his very core.

It was him. Cyborg-man. The same one he saw in his very first vision, ever. The ‘bot was chained to the wall with large steel manacles, his knees dangling limply a few inches from the ground. It seemed very still, as though it were sleeping. The mask it wore now was slightly different than the one in the tunnel. Instead of glass, this one was full of ridges and tiny metal spikes, just like the rest of his totally awesome outfit. It looked like it wasn’t on quite right.

“Omigod,” he said, his voice quavering. “It’s you.”

He approached the figure slowly, feeling the orchestra swell up inside him again. He cocked his head and squinted at the dark being, dangling his pistol at his side. He tried to imagine how cool he must’ve looked at that moment, and suddenly wished that he had remembered to bring his camera-phone.

“So. We finally meet,” he said. “Here. In this… um, place.” He took a swaggering step forward.

“Andrew?” croaked the black Borg.  Its deep voice was strange and mechanical, with just a hint of a British accent.  Andrew felt his heart squeezing up into his neck.

“Oh wow,” he managed in between rapid breaths.  “Oh, wow, you know my name?!”

“Andrew,” the voice said, weakly.  “Help me take… this… mask off.”

The world seemed to stand still.  Andrew straightened, nodded solemnly.  “I understand,” he whispered.  “You want to look on me…with… your own…eyes.”

“No, you git!” it barked back.  “The damned thing is turned backwards.  Can’t see a bloody thing.”

“Spike? Is that you in there?”

“No, it’s the Queen of Bloody Hearts!”  The head tilted towards the sound of Andrew’s voice.  “Of course it’s me. Now, shut your gob and help me get it off, yeah?”

“Uh. How?”

“There’s a latch or something back there.  You… you kind of have to feel around for it.”

Andrew probed the helmets’ surface until he found a small, round ring. Instinctively, he pulled it up and twisted. Something popped out sideways at the collar, and there was a sound like someone opening a giant can of Pepsi.

“That’s a lad. Now, give us a good hard pull.”

Andrew gripped the place where the ears should’ve been and yanked with both hands.  The helmet came off with a short, shrill pop. The vampyre’s familiar face peered up at him, the shock of perfect platinum hair slightly mussed from the effort.

“Thanks,” said Spike.

***

“It’s really you!” the boy shrieked, wrapping the vampire up in his great, girly noodle-arms. “How did you get here? What’re you doing chained up?  Is Buffy okay?  Where did they put Giles?  Have you seen Xander?”

“Andrew,” Spike whispered patiently.

“Why are you in a space suit?  Does Buffy know you’re alive now? I never told her, you know, ‘cause you said not to that one time, you remember?  Do you think she’ll be mad?  How are we gonna find her? And Xander? And Gi-”

“Andrew,” Spike said, less patiently.

“Sorry.  Sorry.  Sorry.  Sorry.”

Spike waited for the boy to stop fidgeting.  It was getting very difficult for him to speak.  “Listen…to me closely, and for God’s sake don’t interrupt.  I have to… break loose these chains.  But I’m not strong enough. Haven’t eaten in a good, long time.”

Andrew bit his lip.  “Well, I did have half a peanut butter sandwich I was saving for lunch, but then Xander and me had to walk a lot farther than we thought, and then we found this secret pass in the mountains but it was really, really, really steep and Xander was like ‘We totally can’t do that’ and I was like ‘We totally have to try’ and then while we were climbing…”

“Andrew!” Spike shouted.  “Focus, son. I’m a vampire.  I don’t need peanut butter sandwiches, right?”

“Oh.  Yeah, right,” Andrew said, nodding his head.  A very faraway look came into his eyes.  “Oh,” he shouted, and instantly cupped one hand over his mouth.  “Oh.”

“Yeah.  ‘Fraid so, dodger.”

The boy just stood there for a moment, studying his shoes.  “No. I’m the one that’s sorry,” he intoned.  “Just do me one favor.  Tell them.  How it happened, I mean.  Tell them what I did here today.”

He could hear the wee wanker’s rabbit-like heartbeat.  It sounded like someone was starting up a toy airplane.  Trembling, the boy turned and knelt beside him, nuzzled his head against the vampire’s chest.  It lolled dramatically to one side, exposing the palest, scrawniest, most uniformly unappetizing neck he’d every seen in his life.

“I’m ready,” he whispered.  “Take me.”

Spike rolled his eyes.  “Um.  A world of no,” he said.  Andrew blinked up at him.  “Think the wrist will suffice, thanks very much.”

“Right, yeah, mmm-hmm, sure,” Andrew sputtered, and leapt to his feet.  The boy seemed relieved.  Mostly.  There was a long, somewhat awkward silence that needed some breaking.

“Right, so, um.  Best get on with it then, yeah?”

“Yeah, um, I guess so.” Andrew rolled up his sleeve, stuck his arm out timidly in front of the vampire’s pale lips.  Spike noticed a small shiver run up the boy’s frame when he felt his game face come on.  He lurched forward sharply, sniffing for the vein.

“Spike, wait.”

“What is it now?”

“When you're done, will I… will I have superpowers?”

“Dear God,” said Spike.  “I hope not.”

Chapter 8:  A Door in the Walls

Nurse Nancy returned humming a grotesquely chipper tune.  Which, Buffy surmised, could only mean more bad news. Kennedy was evil in a rather lackluster way; just your average run-of-the-mill, hate-filled uber bitch. But over the past two days, she had become convinced that the nurse was clinically insane. The little mutant talked to herself constantly, even when other people were in the room. Occasionally when they were alone together, she would sit in bed next to Buffy and stroke her hand lovingly.  She did this for several hours once, recounting every detail of a vegetable garden she had planted when she was nine years old, her pink possum eyes dancing hypnotically in the florescent light.

They hadn’t given Buffy any more “treatments”, thankfully. Rich fantasy life aside, she didn’t think she could deal with listening to Kennedy’s villain-y monologue-ing again.  The Nurse had installed some kind of an IV drip this morning, and Buffy couldn’t feel the effects of the toxin weakening like before.  She was stuck in a prison without bars, it seemed.

“Miss Special!,” the Nurse cried, her voice lilting into the familiar Southern drawl.  “Why, don’t you look positively radiant this afternoon.”  She drew a small needle from her apron, and jabbed it unceremoniously into the side of Buffy’s jaw.

She gasped, feeling the strength flood back into her face. “Wha… sha da infuh nee,” she said.

Nurse Nancy patted her wrist.  “Don’t worry, Miss Special. You’ll be singing like a beautiful bird again in just a few minutes.  Nurse Nancy gave you a special treat so you can talk to her.”

“Whyggg?”

“Oh.  Well, us girls are just going to have so much to talk about over the next couple of days!  You see Miss Special, you’ve been chosen.”

“Choshen,” Buffy managed, feeling her tongue slide around the word.  “Choshen, for whagg?”

“For Nurse Nancy’s Big Girl Cure!” she squealed, seeming genuinely thrilled.  “I been working on this great new wonderful chemical called Ectocetamiene Chloride - ain’t that a big word?”

She kept grinning and nodding, like she expected Buffy to answer.  She didn’t.  “Anyway, the thing is hun’, The Cause thought it was just such a shame that there were so very few girls like them in the world.  I mean there’s still lots an’ all, but it seems like they’re always dyin’ on us, and there will never ever be any more.  That’s why we got those Chakau’Ri fellas helping us out a little, you know, teachin’ them the moves and what not.  But still, it’s not quite enough.  Especially when you're gonna take on every army in the whole big world. And so we got to thinkin’, wouldn’t it be a hoot if we could make more Slayers? ”

“You can’t do that,” Buffy said, matter-of-factly.

“Really,” said the Nurse, tapping her nose with a slender white finger.  “You know, I thought so too, for awhile.  I mean, I read up on all kinds of special things.  Talked to all sorts of people about it, too.” She leaned in close, and her peppy falsetto sank to a low and conspiratorial whisper. “Even talked to some people who weren’t exactly people, if you catch my drift. And you know what? Turns out it’s pretty easy after all. Let me see if I can explain…”  The nurse whipped out a makeup mirror, held it up to Buffy’s face. “You see that? That’s you right?"

“Right,” said Buffy.

C’mon, what’s the punchline, bitch?

“’Cept it’s not you. It’s just a reflection of one physical implementation of you, some light from a star bouncing off of a real smooth stone.  We are beings who live in three dimensions, but think in two.   But there's so much more going on...

"You see, Miss Special, what we like to think of as ‘the universe’ isn’t actually so. There are plenty of them out there, all bunched and wrapped together, like a big ol’ fuzzy ball of yarn, each with it’s own slightly different thread of reality as we know it. Together they form what some people like call the Multiverse.  You following me so far?”

Buffy tried to nod.  Couldn’t.

“Now, when astronomers look up in the sky, they see mostly light and energy.  But that’s only about ten percent of what is actually up there.  The rest is made up of something they call ‘dark matter.’  And dark matter isn’t even matter at all. It’s more like a bunch of tiny doors where all of the various dimensions and alternate versions of the universe rub up against one another.  Isn't that just wondrous?”

The pink eyes stopped dancing, and Buffy thought she saw something soft float inside them for a moment; something that was like love, except farther away and less specific.  She stood there silently for what felt like very long time, rocking gently back and forth.  Nurse Nancy suddenly reminded Buffy of the vampire Drusilla, but somehow incredibly scarier.

“Anyway, turns out that the vamps are full of the stuff,” she finally said. “I mean, right down to the subatomic level.  A vampire in one dimension is physically connected to all the versions of himself in every other dimension.  It’s the same effect you get when you aim two mirrors at each other, just a big, empty nothin’.

"That’s why light doesn’t bounce off them.  Turns out it’s also the reason they don’t age. Time and space doesn’t exactly work the same way with their bodies. If they actually got older, that would cause what a scientist would call a 'paradox.'  Ain’t that just fascinating, Special?” Nancy squinted hopefully again, like she really wanted her opinion.

“Uh-huh," Buffy replied.  "You should have a cable show or something. But what’s all that got to do with the Slayer line?  Or me?”

“Well that’s the thing. See, I figure, if the vampires could attract that kind of dark matter, why can’t we? I mean, if there are a limitless number of other universes out there with billions of awakened Slayers in them, why can’t we just rub a smidge of that dark matter on ourselves, and build a nice little pipeline to their doubles all around the Multi-verse. It would be like the old well back home. We could pull out as much as we want, wait for the river to fill it back up, then pull up some more again. Except…”

“Except, what?”

Nancy flashed a shark-like grin.  “Well, the dark matter works just fine. Great, actually!  Remember how our girls popped up on your lawn the other day?  I did that!  Did you like that?!   Did you?!”  She was sweating now, practically shrieking at her. She seemed to be becoming unhinged.

“Yeah.  Yeah that was pretty, uh, special.”

“Oh, I’m so glad you think so. It was so very hard to stabilize it. You should have seen what happened to the first batch of girls.”  The bloodless face twisted up into an ewww shape. “Only one problem.  When you take something out of one dimension, you always have to put something back in. It’s a very old rule.

“What do you mean?  Like, give a penny, take a penny?”

The madwoman giggled and spun away dreamily, her bleached cotton skirt floating up like a ballerina’s tutu as she danced towards the steel-ribbed double doors and flung them wide.  A Chakau’Ri demon rolled in a large machine on a gurney.  The device was a smooth, ebony cylinder with a pair of strange, whiplike antennae protruding from either end. It seemed to ripple with mysterious energy, bending the nearby air into a fog of distortion, like a hot desert highway.

“That’s where you fit in, Miss Special!” A small square panel on the machine slid back when she touched it.  She tapped a set of controls. “You remember those awful paradoxes I was talking about?  Well, it turns out that you are one of them. In fact, according to most of the people I asked, you ain’t even supposed to exist at all!  Which is good news for us!  You’re like a big ol’ walking door in the fabric of time and space.

The picture was starting to become clear.  Buffy felt something hard and cold begin to twist in her stomach.

"All debts were settled in the grave, Chosen One.  Coming back to life in this world the way you did, it was like you erased the rules for every possible version of yourself throughout the entire Multiverse.  So all those millions and trillions of Little Miss Specials out there, it’s like they don’t even exist anymore, either.  We can pull as much Slayer strength out of them as we want, the poor dears.  And I'm going to pull it all.”

“FUCK YOU, PSYCHO!”

Nancy’s brow hardened, feigning disappointment.  “Don’t be like that! Don’t you realize that I saved your life?  Miss Kennedy wanted you dead in that dirty hole of yours.  If it weren’t for Nurse Nancy, those girls would’ve chopped you up into little, itty bits!  You and your friends.”

The panic set in again as she watched the Chakau’Ri tug cautiously at the antennae, its coiled length unspooling like a garden hose.  Nancy tapped a few buttons, and a pair of six-inch, glowing needles slid out through the tip of each wire.  The nurse caught the fearful look in Buffy’s eyes and giggled.

“Oh, get your mind out of the gutter, Special.  It’s not going in there. In fact,  I don’t think this is going to hurt one bit!" She paused, chewing a finger thoughtfully.  "But I’m not too sure about that. That’s why I need you awake. I need you to tell me if it hurts, okay?  We don’t want you damaged, after all. What good would you be, then?”

Moving glacially, the monster positioned itself at the side of the bed.  Buffy stared intently into the cone of yellow light directly above.

C’mon, you can do this, she told herself, reaching deeply for her demon.  You can beat this. Find her!

The creature bent over gently, almost politely, cupping her breast with a huge clammy paw.  Before she knew what was happening, it pushed the needle in, spearing her heart mid-beat.

She screamed.

***

One instant before that happened, something else did.

Once upon a time, on a little blue planet floating inside a distant, irreducibly small speck of reality, a pretty young tax attorney named Beth Anne Summers was just finishing up a pile of paperwork.  It had been a grueling week, the big late-July adjustment push that drove everyone absolutely nuts.  In an hour, she would hook up with her buddies Glory and Kennedy for a girls-night out.

It was going to be a celebration, of sorts.  The homeless shelter had just made Kennedy Deputy Director of Hand-Outs for Losers, or something.  That girl seriously needed to get a life.  Glory would be more fun, hopefully. Or, at least,  more drunk.

Buffy would leave early, of course, faking a headache.  She needed to be with him tonight.  Between her clients and that darn evil wizard Xander who just rolled in town, an evening with Willy was the closest thing to a vacation she was going to get for a month.

In the next microsecond, she felt something crumble inside her. She stood up from her desk, clutched her chest and screamed. It was the last sound she ever made.

***

Tuffy Sums revved the Hog twice, her blue Mohawk wagging like a puppy tail in the wind.  There was going to be another slammer tonight at the Silver. The Jokes were gonna play a set, and Tuffy loved those crazy bastards.  Especially their hot blond singer, Bloody Bill.  There was something a little off about him, though. With her shit luck these days, he’d probably turn out to be a vamp or something, and she’d wind up having to stake him.

Ooohhh, unless he stakes me first, she thought.

She sped out over a cracked, asphalt vein of downtown Sunnydale.  In the distance, the factory stacks loomed on the smog-choked horizon like a row of tear gas canisters.  The bike was on full melt, engine ready to flood. She eased off the gas, and starting thinking about the little psycho at the coffee shop again.

The girl had approached her of the blue two weeks ago, doin’ the whole grabby-grabby routine, like they was friends or somethin’.  A little redheaded squirt, looked like something the cat had puked up.  Kept sayin’ her name was “Willow,” and she kept saying funny things about space and time, and about Tuffy bein’ in some kinda serious cosmic-type trouble.  She felt bad for the crazy little biznitch, but it wasn’t like Tuffy was born yesterday.

“Look, head-job,” she’d told her. “Not sure what your game is, but I don’t know anyone goes by ‘Willow’ or ‘Sunshine’ or any happy hippy shit like that.  Some neckbiter tries to snack on ya, you give Tuffy a call. But ‘til then, try laying off the brown acid, ‘kay?”

That didn’t still quite seem to set her straight, but at least it got her off ol’ Tuffy’s back.  Can’t be seen talking to the queermoes.  Got a rep to keep. 

The wind suddenly picked up somethin’ fierce.  Tuffy felt her t-shirt rip up the middle like a napkin and float away. In the next moment, she realized that it wasn’t her shirt.  Then something inside her chest turned to string and blew apart.

The bike kept going for awhile.

Then it stopped.

***

In the People’s Republic of Boston, Massachusetts, Skaya Anastasia Somerz rolled down the window to her yellow ‘94 Citroen, on loaner from the Bureau. A very strange person had been banging on it with her fist. The woman looked a little bit like her old schoolmate, Willow Rosenberg, only a few years older and a lot less dead.

Curfew was set to start in an hour, and, Slayer healing or not, Skaya had no interest in getting shot tonight. “What’s your malfunction, comrade?” she hissed. “Don’t you know what day it is?”

“Buffy,” the woman stuttered. “Buffy, it's me. Willow.”

“That’s not possible,” she said, her voice turning to iron. ”She’s dead. The Spetzas killed her, in the Great Cleansing.”

Skaya studied the girl for a moment. She was a bit slimmer than the chubby young Wicca she remembered, and her hair was not as dark. Still, the resemblance was uncanny; she could have easily passed for a sister, at least. She was trembling, not at all dressed for the weather. Skaya considered the possibility that the girl was insane, but there was something so familiar in the voice, and the eyes. She unlocked the door.

“Get in,” she said.

She drove lazily across the threshold of Veteran’s Square, eyes sharp for resistance fighters. The girl who called herself Willow Rosenberg gazed silently at the architecture of the monument there, the single upraised fist smashing through a broomstick.

“So,” Skaya asked. “How did you find me?”

“It took a long time,” said the girl, sounding exhausted.  “I’ve searched the ends of existence for you, Buffy.”

The blonde felt a muscle begin to jump in her thigh.  She kept her eyes on the road, her foot easing ever so gently off the gas pedal.  “Stop calling me that,” she said.

“What should I call you, then?” whispered the girl. Her voice had grown as distant as her eyes.  There was something almost tender about it, but Skaya could feel something cold rising underneath.  “Little Skaya? The Scourge?”

The river, she thought, swerving the car as casually as possible onto a dimly lit back street.  Take her to the river.

Willow kept talking. “Back when I started all this, I thought I knew what I was doing. Thought I could handle it. But it’s messed me up pretty good, Buff. Life is so different than I ever imagined it. I didn’t realize how easy it was to get lost. A twist here, a turn there, and suddenly everything stops making sense. Except that it does, too. You know what I mean?”

“Yes,” Skaya said, gritting her teeth.  As they rolled into the massive shadow of the Sarkovsky Bridge, she thought of the gun lying in the back seat.  “But you’re not Willow Rosenberg. She‘s dead.”

“Dead. I know. Killed by Spetzas, right?”  Her face twisted into a bitter smile. The two women stared at each other for a very long time.  Outside it had begun to snow.  Skaya killed the engine, pulled the leather duster tightly around her shoulders.

“It had to be that way,” she said.  “The world was changing. There was no place left for people like us.”

Willow was crying, now. “You mean people like me.”  She seemed to choke on the words. “People like Xander.”

“That wasn’t my fault,” Skaya said. “I warned him. He wouldn’t listen.”

“You sold him out,” Willow spat.  “The SBF keeps immaculate records, Buffy. Especially of their payroll.  You’re the one who told them about the tunnels.  He’s dead because of you. Whore. Lots of people are.”

Skaya laughed then. The sudden absurdity of it all hit her hard. All the old memories were flooding back in. She recalled the feelings of revulsion she’d had as she watched the girl’s powers grow. She felt the awful ache of seeing her friends flock to her side whenever Willow snapped her magic little fingers. Back then, everyone was always either falling in love with Willow or trying to kill her. Sometimes both. Skaya had suspected it was some kind of spell, a sinister glamour that made everyone forget who was the strong one. Forget who was the Chosen one.

In the end, the redhead had been a paper champion, all principals and no punch.  The Wiccans had resisted each treaty, every accommodation the Revolution had extended.  Yet, they refused to fight an open battle, relied on shadowy, smalltime operations that succeeded only in pissing the enemy off.  She thought of Spike, how the vampire had died fighting Willow’s pretentious, self-righteous little war.  Lots of people, she thought bitterly, are dead because of you too, Comrade Rosenberg.

It had happened in the morning, just before sunrise.  Willow Rosenberg had always been a heavy sleeper, the victim of her own dreams.  Skaya remembered the feeling of her hands wrapped around the girl’s pale throat.  It had been so easy.

It still would be.  Skaya drew a deep breath, and lunged.

The car roared magically to life, veering sideways into the bridge’s steel ankle.  In an instant, the girl’s eyes turned to black pits.  Skaya clawed at them desperately, wanting to put out the horrible light she saw burning behind them.  With a small sweep of a finger, Willow sent her sailing out through the windshield into the freezing, night sky.

Scrambling for footing in the snow, she heard the terrifying voice of the Witch. It sliced through the howling wind like a dagger.  “Somewhere far away, there is another world,” she crooned.  “There are people in it who love you, and whom you love.  There is a girl who held the walls of reality together with her hands, and died doing it. I was the one who brought her back.”

Willow strode forward, arms rising from her sides.  A thick purple vein pulsed at the center of her forehead.  Skaya felt something burning inside her lungs.  The Witch was boiling her alive.  She dug down for the knife in her boot.

“There is a very old rule,” the Witch continued.  “I broke it. Heavy prices have been paid. The hands have come to fix what the heart has broken.” She stood directly over Skaya, electricity arcing from her body in long blue waves. “When you put something in, you have to take something out. And you’ll do just fine, bitch!”

The knife came up. A short sharp scream echoed out across the Charles River.

The snow turned red.

Chapter 9:  The Bloody Cavalry

Her scream hit his brain like a drug.  The world outside the mask was a blur of dim aromas.  Desperate for her scent, he tore it off, kept running.

The underground maze of tunnels seemed to disappear for a moment as his heightened senses came surging back.  He slammed through a stone wall, then another.  He could smell her fire.  It was close, but fading fast.

The next thirty seconds were a red haze.  There were faces of girls all around him, screaming, falling. He was roaring.  He felt a sword slide into his chest, felt himself shatter the arm that held it.

They kept coming, by the hundreds it seemed.  But so did he.  They disintegrated like paper in his hands. It was worse than the old days.  When the last few fled, he swallowed the urge to chase them down and tear their sodding throats out.

Then there was silence.  He sought out the monster inside him, forced it to heel.  A pair of steel doors loomed in front of him.  He kicked them off their hinges.

Buffy.

The room was dim.  She was lying on the slab, a needle pinned to her heart.  He couldn’t see her face.  A half a ton of ugly gray muscle charged at him from her bedside.

A hurricane of a left hook landed just south of his nose and sent him flying.  Rough claws grabbed him up, and he suddenly found himself writhing away from a pair of huge, snapping jaws.  He brought his knee up hard, praying that Kennedy’s little bloke-hating trip didn’t apply to members of the Demon Community.

Didn’t.

The beastie howled bloody murder and dropped him, mournfully pawing the pile of crushed grapes under its kilt.  Spike dropped an elbow like a hammer, smashing through a rocky chunk of spine.  The thing quivered once before it died.

Buffy.

“Spike,” said a familiar voice. He shuddered.

“Nancy?”

Oh, come-bloody-on!

***

Xander dumped the girl sideways at the door.  The shoulder was a red mess, now, and the area around his right collarbone felt like a bag of broken glass.  Everything below his left knee was a single, gigantic bruise.

“Okay,” he said. “Piece of cake.”

Giles blinked at him.  “Xander! My God, what happened to you.”

“No biggie,” he said, and swallowed something he hoped wasn’t blood.  “A little girl beat me up. Ya know, it happens to me a lot more often than you’d think.”

Xander grabbed the sleeping girl’s wrist and slapped it against the panel.  The door slid open sideways.

“Well done, in any event,” said Giles, stepping out into the hall.  “Oh, is that Casey Schwarz? I remember her. Lovely girl.”

“Yeah,” coughed Xander.  “Yeah she was cute.  She used do that little clicking thing with her tongue whenever she…” He trailed off, turning red.  Giles glared at him.  “So, hey, what say let’s get going before she wakes up?”

“Yes.  Well.  I’ve just arranged for some reinforcements over the WatcherNet, but I’m afraid it’s going to be a rather long wait.”

“Screw the backup, man! We’ve gotta find Buffy.”  Xander felt a surge of fresh strength well up in him.

“How?!  You saw what your little girlfriend did to you. There’s an entire army of them out there!”

He pointed at the Watcher’s earlobe.  “Andrew. Call Andrew on that…thing.”

“Andrew! My God, man. Do we want to fight them or tickle them to death?”

“Hey, go easy, alright,” Xander snapped, suddenly defensive. “The guy’s been solid. In fact, he’s the only reason we’re even having this conversation. And wasn’t thinking of fighting them.”

Giles raised an eyebrow.  “A diversion.”  He smiled wryly.  “I see.  What did you have in mind?”

***

It was beautiful.

They were charging out across the beach, white tufts of sand cascading over them like a sea of warm, dry kisses. The dark Arabian steed was frisky, today, bucking ever so slightly underneath the curve of his fresh linen pantaloons.

He clasped his arms more tightly around the man’s shirtless chest. The smooth, pale skin felt cool against his fingertips. Gently, he rested his head against the muscular back, catching a whiff of the musky scent that lingered near the crisp, blonde nape of the rider’s neck. Overhead, the twin suns of Tatooine shone like a pair of majestic yellow jewels in the morning sky.

The handsome face turned ever so slightly. He glimpsed the tight curl* of the man’s knowing smile, noticed the sharp ridge of a brow arching suggestively upwards.

“Yes, my friend” Andrew said, his eyes narrowing to slits. “The M’Lok Tharian warlords will surely know we are coming. But do not worry. We will fight them together. And side by side we will surely…”

Hey.

“…we will surely…”

What’s that thing?

On the rider’s left shoulder, a small green square was blinking at him. He tried turning away, but the stupid thing followed him around like a little puppy dog. A row of green letters winked up next to it.

WAKE UP ANDREW

He jumped. The dark walls of the dungeon snapped back into focus all around him. The overlay of little green letters was still there, hovering in front of his eyes like a DVD subtitle.

ANDREW. IT’S GILES. WHERE ARE YOU?

Andrew fought through the fog. The last thing he remembered was Spike biting his wrist, mumbling something about a “wet bloody noodle.” He must’ve passed out, then. He hoped Spike didn’t think he was a wimp now, or something.

Straining to remember the procedure, Andrew clasped his left ear and pressed it three times. There was a low buzzing sound. A small blue square appeared just above the green one. Wiggling the tiny sensor gently, he started typing.

GILES THIS IS ANDREW.

There was a long pause.

YES KNOW THAT. WHERE R U?

He started typing again. A minute passed. Then another.

HI GILES, ANDREW HERE. I AM STANDING IN A DARK DUNGEON. A SINISTER ARRAY OF EERIE LIGHTS AND FOUL ODORS SURROUNDS ME. THERE ARE IRON CHAINS HANGING FROM THE WALLS. A HINT OF BLOOD GLISTENS ON ONE OF THEM DARKLY.

The Watcher’s little green square just blinked at him sullenly. Ten seconds passed.

ANDREW

THE STENCH OF EVIL PERMEATES THE AIR. IT IS THE AROMA OF SUFFERING, PROBABLY DUE TO THE LONG HISTORY OF TORTURE AND PERIL THAT COATS THE PLACE LIKE A DARK BLANKET. THE AIR IS THICK WITH IMPENDING…

Suddenly, there was a sound like a tiny bell ringing, and Andrew’s little blue square vanished. After a moment, it was replaced by a pair of simple “YES” and “NO” buttons. He hoped he hadn’t broken something.

***

She glided out from the corner of the room, her white hair gleaming like raw bone. Dr. Nancy Stark looked as though she hadn’t aged a day in eight years. The little monster was notoriously allergic to sunlight, and the deprivation of it kept her skin looking quite young. He knew the feeling.

“Nancy,” Spike snarled. “Why am I not surprised that you’re mucking about in all this?”

“Nice duds, Hostile,” Nancy cooed. She was wearing some sort of Naughty Nurse Halloween costume. The taut white uniform seemed to blend seamlessly with the bloodless curves of her bare thighs. When he’d last seen her, she hadn’t been nearly so informal.

All things considered, the time he’d spent at the Initiative hadn’t been that bad. At least, not at first.  Lots of rest and alone time. If anything, it was just rather boring. He’d even gotten used to the experiments, the needles, the poking and prodding. After a few days it had all gotten to be such a bloody routine that he hardly knew whether he was awake or sleeping.

Then Nancy Stark came into the picture. And that all changed.

He’d met some fairly exotic lunatics in his day, but Dr. Stark took the proverbial cake. The Initiative had hired her, theoretically, to study the effects that ”extreme emotional trauma” would have on the chip in his head. In reality, the girl was just a bloody sadist with some capital letters behind her name.

She had seemed so sweet that afternoon when she first connected that sodding wire to his skull, taking great pains to make sure he was “cozy.” The machine was an odd bit of wizardry, designed to induce some new type of hypnosis, with the good doctor whispering soft suggestions, plucking the strings.

One of her more elaborate tortures still haunted the vampire to this day. He remembered the little box whirring to life, the sound of Nancy’s southern-fried voice elongating into a fine silver thread. In the next instant, he was standing in a well-lit elevator buried deep beneath the earth’s surface. His dead mother was there with him. Maggots were squirming out of her eyes. He remembered crying, clawing at the smooth mahogany walls for hours. He remembered the song. There were no lyrics, just the chilly, electronic tune repeating over and over, like some bloke forgot to change the tape at a shopping mall. He remembered how innocent and ordinary it sounded against the red opera of his screams.

Now, Nancy Stark was rolling casually towards him again, like an apparition from one of her own, cruel illusions. Except that this time he wore no chains, inside or out.

“Jeez-Louise,” she said. “Did you just go and bust up my guards all by yourself? Didn’t even need a weapon or nothin’?”

The woman was standing a few feet from Buffy’s gurney. Nancy had a duplicate needle in her, he realized, planted deeply into the pale center of her arm. Just like Buffy’s, the instrument seemed to feed back into some sort of an oblong metal gadget through a long hollow tube. He could smell blood inside.

“I am a weapon, bitch,” Spike growled. “And you’d do well to step away from her, ‘less you ‘d like a demonstration.”

Nancy beamed at him. She seemed to gasp as she tore the needle from her vein, like a junky savoring a fresh high. “Oh, Billy,” she moaned. “I’m ready when you are, sugar.”

He charged. She was faster.

The slender white leg hit like an atom bomb, launching him through the face of a tall steel cabinet across the room. He clambered over a blanket of broken glass, the sword wound suddenly howling up at him from his chest. On hands and knees, he tried to shake out the cobwebs, and ate a brutal roundhouse punch. He rolled with it, somehow, instincts on overload, and slid gracefully to his feet. The madwoman was giggling at him.

“She tastes wonderful,” she drawled, sensuously clawing her hair. “It was like eatin’ a rainbow, Billy.”

He lunged, fangs down, braying like a wolf. They met in the middle, their limbs an angry knot of action. He took the brakes off, moving loose. He could smell the fresh shot of Slayer blood pulsing under Nancy’s flesh. An old, shameful longing filled him. When she threw a high kick, he danced playfully out of reach, shrugging his shoulders like an East End hoodlum.

Time seemed to slow down, then. The little cow was quick, strong. Whatever she’d stolen from the Slayer seemed to ripple visibly inside her. But she was a novice at violence. The moves were too rigid, empty of the deadly poetry that made his lover so damned dangerous.

She tried something wild, a sort of whirling backhand, and Spike caught her with a hard right hook across the chin. She staggered under its weight, lurching backwards into a concrete wall. He followed in quickly, fists pumping a steady torrent of blows. A stiff boot to the neck finished it, and he watched the woman sink harmlessly to the floor.

He wasn’t through. The pile of white angles in front of him was burning, the blood inside pleading at his yellow eyes. His mind had become a terrible field of blank ice. He longed to fill it with something warm. As he moved in for the kill, something stirred at the corner of his vision.

He turned.

She was standing. The sheet was wrapped around her, tucked together at the arm. She looked like a marble statue of old, the kind that men carved when they wanted to remind themselves why Gods mattered. Her eyes were as wide and green and damp as they had been down in the cave, moments before his death.

They were looking at him.

He tried and tried to think of something clever to say.

“Hi,” he said.

Chapter 10:  RE: SPIKE

FROM: wrosenberg@hellodali.com
DATE: X-ERROR: TIMESTAMP 13001 ‘WRONG DATE REF'
TO: btvs@willowweb.com
RE: Spike

is on his way. Your Spike, that is. Hopefully he can stop her before she does any more damage.

I see a place near the river where you'll find the truth. Don't turn away from it. I see a white rabbit diving into a hole. Do NOT follow it.  Your death is there.

I'm sorry I can't remember any further. Stuff gets kind of blurry after that. If I never see you again, remember that I'll always love you all, wherever or whenever I am.

Oh and sorry if this email blows up your computer.  I think I'm starting to get the hang of this whole inter-dimensional hacking thing, but considering where I'm sending it from, I'm guessing some of this message might still come in a little, well, funky.

Love,
Willow

X-ERROR: FEED LOOP ERROR 901'Message footer unavailable or incorrect formatting'
RESTART BUILD CYCLE
MESSAGE ID: X00M345T12131
RESTARTING EMAIL…

Hi Buffy,

Sorry for leaving the way I did.  I wish I had more time to explain, but I can't hold this line open for very long.   Try to keep an open mind.  The stuff I'm about to tell you is gonna sound pretty crazy, I bet.  It even confuses me sometimes, and I'm the one who started it all.

Running off to New Orleans was kind of a chicken-crap move, I know, but Cleveland was killing me.  I didn't even know why I was there or who I was anymore.  I couldn't feel the magic, and I didn't even want to.

But it was worse than just that. Ever since Sunnydale went kaboom, I had this feeling like something went kaboom in me too.   The world outside that little bubble of "us" just stopped mattering.  I would watch the news and see all these disasters and wars, and I tried to care about it all, I really did.  But there was just this hollowness inside.  I didn't even know who to root for anymore. It was like watching some kind of freaky game show.  The world was full of ants, and we were living on the Moon.

And then when Xander left, even the Moon was gone.  It was like I'd lost my last reason to be "me."  So, yeah, I bailed, and it was wrong, and I'm sorry.

What happened to me in New Orleans is a little hard to explain. Being a stranger again was a wonderful feeling, Buffy. I dyed my hair pink and went for hazelnut coffee every morning on the way to work. I started hanging out with people who had jobs like "bike messenger" and "pastry chef," and sometimes we'd all get a little drunk and go dancing at this hundred year old bar on the river.

I know it sounds lame, but even doing annoying crap like paying electric bills became this big, amazing thrill for me. I told everybody that my name was Tracy Landau, and they called me "Trace" for short.  I even thought of getting it changed, legally. It was like being born again, minus all the Bibly, dunk-your-head-in-a-river-y connotations.

So then, one day, I was sitting in this place called the Lucky Streak Café when a very old man strolled in and sat down across from me.  The way he did it was so smooth, like we were old friends.

He wasn't much to look at, just another elderly Creole guy in a ratty old sports coat and beat-up penny loafers. But the moment he sat down and looked at me, my heart started racing like it was going to explode.  His eyes were indescribably beautiful, Buffy. When I looked into them it was like diving into a bottomless green lake.

He started talking, and while he talked the rest of world just fell away until the only things left in it were him and me and the table between us.

He told me lots of things. Comforting things. Frightening things. They all sounded true. He said his name was Jack Turtle, but that's not who he was.

He said there was no such thing as reality, that the band of existence we inhabit is only one of many, part of an infinite realm he called the Big Everything. He told me that the Big Everything was kind of like a universe, except that instead of being made out of Space and Time, it was made out of Choice and Accident.

He told me that each of the possible combinations of Choices and Accidents formed their own universe, a reality that was uniquely its own. He said that these worlds contained an endless supply of other Willows and Buffys, other Xanders and Angels - other everybodies and everythings. And he told me that, because each Choice created a possibility for new Accidents and vice versa, that the Big Everything had been a limitless place, a thing without a shape.

Then he started talking to me about that night in the woods in Sunnydale. When he spoke it was very gently, but I could feel all this big scary anger in him, frozen deep down at the bottom of every word.

In the next moment we were there, hovering above the scenery.  I looked down at a young red-haired Witch crouching at your grave.  I watched myself chanting ancient horrors, my eyes filling with the sacred blood.  It was terrifying.

When the Witch cried out the last word and was set aflame, I suddenly realized my mistake.  My fucking stupidity!

I could feel the infinite weight of the Big Everything slip sideways and crack, crushing some tiny piece of clockwork that had kept the heavens in motion for all eternity.  I started crying, Buffy. I started screaming.

I could feel Jack Turtle's arms around me, comforting me. What he whispered into my ear in that moment, I will never tell a single soul.

He took me to a different place, though it was not a place exactly. It was impossibly silent and dark, and so were we.  There was a feeling like being frozen, except I no longer had a body to feel with, or a brain to comprehend the feeling.  This was called the Now.

Jack told me that I broke The Big Rule when I brought you back; jammed an extra piece into an already finished puzzle. There was supposed to be a sacrifice, you see. A human sacrifice.   But I was too weak, too selfish to go through with it.

I thought I was so smart, Buff. It was the old cocky computer hacker in me, I think. Giles once called me a "rank amateur," but the truth is so much worse than that. Staring into that awful, eternal blankness, I finally knew what I was. I was a thief, and a stupid, sloppy one at that.

By then, the man calling himself Jack Turtle had disappeared and there was just The Voice, booming straight into my soul. It explained that the Now was getting longer, devouring every world in its path. There was an unimaginably small circle of light above us. It was a shape that was never meant to be – the shape of the Big Everything. It was getting smaller by the second

The Voice told me what I had to do to fix it.  It told me that I had to kill you.

Things got a little confusing then. I found something below me that felt like legs and I started running into the darkness on them. Time fell apart inside me as I went. I could have been running for a moment, or for a million years.

I reached for the light with the black shapes that my hands had become, and I suddenly found myself stretched out over its brilliant white surface like a skin, staring directly into the beating heart of the Multiverse. I was touching all the worlds with my fingers, like an old gypsy tracing a crystal ball. I saw the endless chains of Choices and Accidents threading around inside; the souls swirling across them like curls of smoke. I saw us, too, Buffy.

I wish I could explain what happened to me, then.  It was like, I knew exactly what I had to do, but I couldn't do it. I was looking into the bright face of Everything, and I suddenly knew that I would risk it all for my friend, that I’d hack the system one more time. I would defy God to save you, if that's what it took. I'm not sure what that makes me exactly, but I realize now that I really don't care, and probably never will. I can't bear a world without you in it.

So I jumped. I've been jumping ever since.

I won't tell you my plan. I don't think you'd understand, and I'm afraid you won't forgive me even if you did. That's the only thing I'm afraid of anymore, actually.

I'm writing you this email from a public library in Miami. Where I am now, Anya is married to Giles. They have three beautiful children. And - check this out - you're the Governor of Florida!  A Vampire Slayer in charge of the Sunshine State.  Irony, thy name is Multiverse.

Spike is here too.  It's strange – lately you guys seem to have a "thing" wherever I go.  Not sure what it means, just yet.  Not to bum you out, but there's this hidden camera video of you two floating around the Internet right now. Real racy stuff; a big fat scandal. Your hubby, Wesley, is not pleased.  LOL.

Of course, this isn't the weirdest place. Not by a long shot. I've seen some pretty crazy stuff over the last couple of years. It's been great seeing some old faces. I never thought I'd be so happy to see Cordelia, even if she was all vamped out and stalky-like. And I'm afraid I'll never look at Giles, Xander and tapioca pudding the same way ever again. Yikes!

But what's even weirder is how we all seem to be together out here, no matter where I go. It's like our souls are all wound up and knotted. It's a good feeling to know that. Somehow it made my choice that much easier.

Unfortunately, "Willow" wasn't around to help bail Governor Summers out.  I only seem to be able to enter worlds where I have already died.  In this case, it was from Hodgkins disease, believe it or not. Have to remind myself to get checked out, if I ever make it back.

And it's very possible that I won't, Buffy. I can feel the darkness closing in around us all, swallowing up realities faster than I can leap between them. Time is running out. Literally.  I will try my best.

Now, listen carefully, Buffy!  This is the most important part, and the reason I risked sending you this message. When I was still floating in the Now, I saw some things you need to know. You and everyone we love are in terrible danger.

It was all so easy to see, drifting around up there, like reading the moves of an old chess game. But now that I'm living in "time" again, I'm having trouble remembering most of it, and the parts I do remember don't make much sense to me. Hopefully, they will to you, when the time is right:

There is an army of Slayers gathering. I saw a castle in the hills, where a murderer used to live. Kennedy is there. She is afraid of you. I think she wants you dead. I saw her stamp something on a piece of paper, a bird made of blood.

There was a white-haired woman with her.  She pretends to be a doctor, but she is something else entirely. You need to stay far away from her, Buffy. Your breath is in her eyes.

I saw a statue and a dark awning. I saw you standing in a temple, and a hundred cars scattered like toys on a highway.

I saw Giles sitting in a dark house, laughing. Blood is running down his chin. You must help him, Buffy - he's the only other one who knows where I am.  But if you can't, try to remember to keep him in the light.  He needs to see something important, I think.

I saw Andrew and Xander, climbing a mountain. I saw three men sharing three eyes.

I saw you on a table, surrounded by monsters. There was a needle in your heart.

I saw you being pulled through a door over and over again by pale, hungry lips. I saw the white woman growing larger, filling with ghosts. I saw the First Evil devouring worlds without champions.

You must stop her Buffy. She's clever, but the drug is an illusion. Your strength doesn't come from your body, try to remember that. Xander and Giles have a plan, but they will need your help because Andrew isn't going to make it. And, this is going to sound a little crazy, but I'm pretty sure that

X-ERROR: FEED LOOP ERROR 772 'Thread %? Non-existent.'
CHAIN BUILD CYCLE
MESSAGE ID: X00M345T12131 THREADING
RESTARTING EMAIL

***

Where did we go?

The ghost was standing a dozen feet away. Or a dozen miles, a million years. It was.

Hard to say.

 Hi.

She took a step forward, not daring to take her eyes off of him. The face was a pale horror of sinew and tortured veins. The familiar ridge of the monster's brow slanted low, as if to hide the yellow glow beneath it. Sharp fangs glistened somewhere at the lip, still hovering over the small, impossible word that had been there, just a moment ago.

He still wore the costume, but the mask was gone. All the masks were gone. He was beautiful.

She tried another step. The leg refused, stubborn, her small bare foot rolling over sideways instead. The phantom vanished, and suddenly there was only a black grid of tiles rushing to meet her. It never did. Strong arms locked her at the waist, drew her close. A hand smoothed her back straight, brought her face to face with the cruel blonde hoax. It was different now, the skin as smooth as polished ivory, eyes retreating into haunted blue pools. He was breathing, or pretending to. It was something the dead man had always done in her presence, without need or explanation. Breathing was the gift he gave to her.

She felt a wave of panic hit as the face began to dissolve, twisting into a pale fog of tears. Raging, she forced them back.

"Why?" she heard herself ask.

He shuddered, loosening his grip. It had sounded like an accusation, she realized, slanting to a point from her lips. She lurched forward, crashing her body to his, fingers scrambling over the leathery surface, aching for the skin underneath. She could smell him. He was everywhere.

"Dunno, pet," he whispered, the smoky voice suddenly choked with emotion. "S'pose I thought you'd be. Well.  Mad."

A charge ripped through her muscles, stiffening her spine. The demon bellowed something hot, and Buffy felt herself wrench free from his grip. She saw the creature's eyes widen worriedly for a moment, caught the glimpse of resignation in them just before she let him have it, Big Time.

(mad)

The arm fired a cannonball across his porcelain chin, rocketing the vampire halfway across the room. Buffy could feel the teeth grinding in her jaw, her eyes going slick with fury and dark rain. She advanced mechanically, the old iron gleaming like a spear through the glaze of the Nurse's poison. At her chest, the makeshift robe seemed to be coming undone, but she ignored it. She would kill the bastard in the nude if she had to.

(yeah he would like that wouldn't he would like that wouldn't he would )

The old monster propped himself up on his elbows, peering at her in astonishment. A line of blood fell from the corner of his mouth. She could only assume it wasn't his own. Spike lived on borrowed blood.

Spike lived.

"Oy!" he barked.  "The bloody hell was that for?"

She was almost upon him, rolling to a stop at his booted heels. They seemed to study one another for a long time. The armor was shattered in places, and a wet gash in the ribcage hinted at a brutal day of work. The costume had been such a lame trick, but those were the only kinds of tricks Spike knew. And she fell for it, of course.

This is how we are.

He gazed up at her, his eyes pleading for a kind of mercy he'd rarely been shown in life. She sensed no anger there; only gratitude, and a strange and simple fear. She knew that he was afraid she wouldn't touch him anymore.

The old pain came swarming back. The sensation was horrifying, the feeling of drowning in warm waters. She'd hurt him again, like always. And the most he could manage was to be grateful.  Amazed that she would condescend to touch a thing as wretched as him. Terrified that it would be the last time. It was all the same.

This is how we are.

She wanted to fall over him, hear him gasp when she crushed his lips with kisses. She’d tell him, over and over. There was still a chance to turn back, for something new and bright. She would be strong this time, merciless with her love. He’d believe her. She would force him to.

But before she could move, he turned away. She felt herself crumbling, felt the steel inside her breast running to milk. It was too late. She’d lost him. Again.

"Spike?" she sobbed.

I love you. I love you.

But the vampire was no longer paying any attention to her. Something had locked his eyes, and Buffy followed them to the corner of the room, the place where the Nurse had been.

It was empty.

Chapter 11:  Infernal Rackets 

Azazel cast his grim gaze across the blood-soaked battlefield. His old rival's legions were ranged in tidy lines across the charred, oaken wasteland. They would remain hidden in shadow, he knew, concealing their horrific forms until their death blows were upon him.

His own shattered brigades were strewn in chaotic piles nearby. He had driven them at the lash, exploited every dark gift in their arsenals. And yet, still they had failed him.

Once more, a bitter defeat was at hand. From behind the enemy ranks, the Archfiend Pazuzu's bestial wail stung the air, urging Azazel to make haste with his maneuvers, to speed the course of his utter annihilation.

"Awwww, C'mon, bi-otch!" the demon crowed. "Dude, you are so-o-o-o slow."

There were a bunch of them chillin' up in Belial of Dexidron's crib. It was another typical afternoon in Hell. Once again B.O.D and Epheadra were spilled across the couch, wrapped up in another episode of "E! True Hollywood Story." Once again, Kallustrian the Defiler was squatting by himself in the corner, reading a back issue of “Stuff” magazine and absently munching from a bag of severed heads. And once again, poor old Azazel was losing a round of Battle Monsters: Gamma Arena Struggle, while that smarmy fuck Pazuzu laughed his lying, cheating ass off. The guy was just a total nightmare. Every time he played a Power Keeper card he would belt out some gay little sound effect. It made Azazel wish they could go back to playing beer pong. Or Connect Four. He was motherfucking unstoppable at that game.

Furrowing his mighty brows, he pulled a desperation move, laying down a 6th Level Alakazammo with the Thunder Wave enhancement.

"Aw, naw yaw dint," squealed Pazuzu, flipping over a pair of measly Krackatoads. Azazel was just about to clear the cards to his side when his opponent tossed yet another "Dashing Hero Ultrabeams" spell into the fray.

"BRrreeewwWhoooeeeiiirrROooo! Kkkkssssshhh!" screamed the scrawny beige fiend, and belched a swarm of locusts right into Azazel's second-favorite face.

"Such TOTAL bullshit," he muttered, flinging the remnants of his depleted deck across the coffee table. Pazuzu cackled like a cartoon witch, gathering up his cardboard trophies with wide swoops of his sticky, crablike arms. Azazel felt like cracking one of them open and sucking out the juicy ooze.

That's when he heard it, like a tiny rat tickling his eardrums.

"We beseech you, oh eminently sneaky one," lisped a far-away voice. "Cast your devious spells of confusion to bewitch, bother and bewilder our captors.  Lead them far afield, so that we might verily make our great escape.  And stuff."

With that, Azazel saw a swirling vortex descend over his vast, misshapen bulk. Before he could muster so much as an uh-oh, he was being sucked up into the maelstrom, two thousand pounds of ghastly green muscle rippling like pond-water in midair.  At the center, he glimpsed a familiar spray of white light. It filled him with dread.

Crap. Now what?

Azazel studied the yellow-haired waif on the ground before him.  It lay in a crumpled heap at the center of a lovingly drawn pentagram, the requisite silver ring still pressed to one of its dainty apple cheeks.  The summoner was clothed in a blue Gap windbreaker and cargo jeans.  A whiff of fresh mammalian urine hung in the air like an off-color joke.

Something was wrong here.  Had to be some kind of colossal screw-up, he guessed.  Wasn't like it'd never happened before.

Back in the old days, it seemed like some hot-shit sorcerer or psychotic emperor was always pulling old Azazel out of a hat to do his dark bidding.  The errand was usually something of magnitude.  Liquify that rebel village, Azazel or Disembowel the Six Hundred Horsemen of Hapip, Azazel.   Straightforward crap like that.

And then, once every millennium or so, some minor league ass-clown accidentally snaps his fingers three times instead of two, mispronounces the silent "P" in "Prenicausticus" and kerblammo!  Suddenly Azazel's gotta figure out how to "weave all metals into gold," or "divine the future" or "reunite old friends long parted."  The last time around had gotten so bad, he'd actually tried to get his name legally changed to 'Melvin J. Peterson'.  Of course, he'd given up on that eventually.  In Hell, the paperwork was a cinch, but, man, talk about a long line.

He guessed it was just as well the little douche had fainted.  Usually, the first thing these typo-jerks do is claw their little virgin eyes out, screaming for "God's divine forgiveness" and that sort of thing.  Once, some poor bastard actually dashed his own brains out with a sharp stone, hoping to obliterate all memory of Azazel's horrifying visage.  That one stung a bit.  Made him want to join a gym or something.

Well, not much to go on here, the demon thought, shaking one of his smaller heads dejectedly.  Might have been that the boy was trying to call his brother-in-law Azial, Archduke of Monumental Fraud.  Whatever.  It was his problem now.

Azazel took a casual account of his surroundings.  Old castle.  The stonework looked vaguely Romanian. He hated those dicks, especially the royalty.  Always plotting to "bring Hell upon the Earth" and that sort of thing.  And wouldn't that be just his luck, if one of them actually did that shit.  Lucifer's dread realm was no picnic sometimes, but these bastards up here were friggin' Koo Koo for Cocoa Puffs.

Cocking a random eye at the sleeping boy again, he wondered what in the world he should do with him. He decided that he couldn't just eat him.  If he did that, poor Azazel would be stuck in this boring-ass dimension forever. It was a very old, very stupid rule.

And if he just left him sleeping here, what then?  The wuss looked about as sturdy as a Jell-O pudding pop on a sunny day.  If someone happened across him and snuffed him out, the demon would have failed his task, and would wind up every bit as stuck.  It was times like these Azazel wished he was just a Minor Devil, so he could fly below the radar and avoid all this political junk.  Or, shit, even an Angel would be a nice change of pace. It seemed like those spoiled little assholes could do whatever the hell they wanted.

Sighing, he scooped the summoner up in his long, scaly tail. It coiled into a taut rattle down the length of the boy's body, and the demon had to resist the urge to give it a little shake. Hopefully, the dweeb would eventually wake up on his own, and give him the lowdown on all this "sneaky escaping" stuff.

Either that or he'd die of a massive coronary.

But, hey! That crap ain't my fault, right?

***

The numbness had taken over again, but this time it had nothing to do with the Nurse's drug.   She watched the back of his head sway furiously as he stormed down a polished steel capillary of the laboratory, his boots clanging out a heavy beat on the chromium slats.  The rhythm of it was as familiar to her as it was agonizing.  Buffy strained to understand the cruel force that kept her chasing it.  The more the poison retreated from her body, the worse she felt.

It had been a busy week for Death.  She remembered killing the two girls in the villa.  She could still picture the terrified look on the second one's face the moment she realized a sword was inside of her body.  They hadn't been the only casualties, of course.  The big body of Hector Colon was probably still in her driveway, hacked apart by Kennedy’s butchers.  And the man named Riley Finn, she realized, was almost certainly dead.

Rupert Giles escaped his own fate by accident, it seemed.  The memory of his broken body mocked her now, writhing in agony on her bedroom carpet.  She remembered how the knife had seemed so small and light in her hand.  In that exact moment, she finally knew what it was those old magicians had forged in the cave long ago.  All that crap about saving the world was just filler, a bedtime story that her friends told themselves so they could stand being around a monster like her.  Death may have been her Gift, but Pain was her Art.   And she effortlessly transformed anyone who came close to her into a masterpiece.

And now, it seemed her greatest work had returned from oblivion, an unfinished canvas eager for fresh strokes.  Had he stalked her from afar?  Recited bad poems from the deep shadows of the Lorenzonna, or sung them through keyholes perhaps?  Or maybe he'd fled to some far off land, scarred his wrists in a motel in Indianola, whispering her name.  It was possible her talent was improving, that she could hurt people without seeing them, without knowing they exist.  Maybe she could hurt them across continents, or deep in outer space.

Satellite of Pain.

Every night he saves you.

(Killer. Destroyer. Monster. Slayer.)

No, dummy!  We saved him first. We can stop this.

She fought through the haze. "Stop," she commanded.

Buffy grabbed him by the arm, and instantly regretted it. The thing that turned to face her was carved from dead wood.  A pair of vacant, azure eyes suddenly betrayed the fiend's age, and the weariness she saw there was almost reptilian.  She wondered how much of that had been her fault.

Once again, a gallon of air filled her chest, but no words arrived. Her cursed blood leapt up in hot, familiar rush.  She felt herself strangling it inside her veins, trying to shape it into something useful, for once.

"I can smell Watcher," he murmured, trying to change some non-existent topic. "Straight above us, 'bout fifty yards or so.  Xander too, I think."

"What?" she gasped.

"Yeah. And that little pain Andrew.  Like a soddin' Scooby Christmas Special ‘round here."  The vamp stormed off, pausing to stoop near the base of a gleaming pylon.  When he stood again his face had vanished, safe behind the shield of featureless black glass.

"We don't have much time," belched the grainy electronic voice.  "If Nancy warns the others, s'game bloody over. For all of us."

"You're right," she stammered, summoning the old steel.  "Let's go."

As he spun away, Buffy clutched the bedsheet tightly around her chest.  She was freezing.

Let's go be heroes.

***

"But, did it work?" Xander was pacing again.  The boy's impatience was mildly irritating, considering this had been his ridiculous plan in the first place.

"I don't know, Xander," Giles repeated.  "I told you, I lost contact.”

Xander slapped his arms at his sides. "Well, uh, get it back!"

Rupert Giles shook his head.  They should have just waited for reinforcements.  There were already too many variables floating around, too much happening at once.  He secretly prayed that Wells botched the summoning.   The notion of tossing a Hell Demon into this stew didn't exactly fill him with breezy optimism.

There was, of course, one other variable; one that he'd neglected to mention to Xander.  During his brief, yet utterly exasperating conversation with Andrew Wells, the boy had disclosed the identity of the masked man he'd seen in Buffy's villa, the creature's familiar name winked up in blazing blue letters at the corner of his vision.

Suffice it to say, Giles wasn't exactly thrilled to see it again.

The creature had been known to the Council for some time, but only in a peripheral way. The Eyes had nicknamed it "Robocop," and their various reports had found him lurking around the edges of the Business for more than a year.  A free agent, of some sort.   Nothing to lose one’s head over.

Yet the thing's sources were utterly uncanny, always showing up at the right place and time to lend a bit of muscle to a fight. Some of the Eyes had even developed a frustrating sort of affection for the creature, and grew reluctant to divulge any information that might lead to its capture. As far as Giles was concerned, "Robocop" merely represented another leak to be unceremoniously plugged.

And, as usual, the truth was several orders of magnitude worse.

Certainly, there had been no love lost between the pair of them over the years.  During their Sunnydale days, he’d bitterly swallowed his revulsion for Buffy's pet monster, and thoughts of the vampire's sudden passing rarely conjured any emotion apart from stark and utter relief.  Knowing now that the vampire Spike was alive and slithering into their midst once more, all he could feel was a sort of heartsick dread.

No, he dared not tell Xander.  Apart from adding more chaos to an already confounding mess, it almost seemed beside the point that William the Bloody was somewhere skulking through the shadows.  His reputation as a "Slayer of Slayers" notwithstanding, the vampire had the strategic mind of a rabid bull terrier.  It was altogether likely that he'd be captured or destroyed before he had the chance to do anything too stupid.   And then the monster could simply vanish again. Like Willow Rosenberg and her strange quest, Spike's final tale would drift into the sea of old, bad memories, yet another secret to warm the Watcher's grave.

"Giles," shouted Xander, snapping his fingers.  "Hey, you awake there, buddy? Am I boring you?"

"What? No. Sorry, you were saying?"

"I was saying, what about the witches?"

"Witches? Which witches?"

"Delilah, Gwenneth, Jasmine," Xander said, incredulous. "Our witches, you know.  Uh, the ones who replaced Willow?"

Giles blinked, slowly comprehending. "Right.  Yes.  What about them, then?"

"Well, why can't we have them do a locator spell, sniff out Buffy's position?   Or maybe they could zap Faith and the gals over here, even out the slumber party a little."

Giles shook his head dourly. "No, sorry.  It doesn't work that way, I'm afraid," he said.  "Kennedy chose this place well. Castelul Drakul is renowned for its ability to disrupt even the most powerful sorcery.  This fortress is simply invisible to the magical world."

Xander head dipped in thought for a moment. "Okay," he said finally. "But not to the technological one." His eye was twinkling again. "Like, say, a certain government satellite?"

Giles shivered, his entire body retaliating against the notion.  "Oh, no. No, no, no. No more bloody plans! We've made quite enough of a mess already without bringing her into this, don't you think?"

Xander was already moving. "C'mon, man. The signal will be better on the roof."  Before he could protest, the boy was sailing up the corridor.

"Castles don't have roofs" he muttered dismally, shuffling out into the hall. "It's called a spire, you twit."

***

Azazel inched his hideous bulk up the tiny dungeon corridor. It was a hard slog, and his riot of rancid flesh and warped appendages banged and scraped painfully against the walls.  Feeling a bit claustrophobic, he lurched toward a crumbled breach in the stone and began to wriggle through, like a butterfly from the chrysalis.

He was about halfway across when the aperture collapsed, sending a shower of stone pouring down all around him.  A huge block sagged heavily atop his scaly back, and he felt an abattoir of rotten organs pinch shut in his torso.  One head howled in protest as another tucked its chin down and drove grimly forward.  Of course, the gesture succeeded only in getting the old demon more thoroughly and painfully stuck.

He almost wept then, contemplating his ridiculous plight.  Wiggling a deformed tentacle at the blank space in front of him, Azazel concentrated on drawing air into one of his mammoth lungs. As the sickly bladder slowly filled with gas, he could feel the snug stone cage complain and slowly crumble to salt along the length of his ribcage.

When he felt he had made a sufficient dent, the monster rose to his haunches and heaved his gargantuan mass squarely upwards. The dungeon ceiling exploded in a gigantic cloud of black ash.

He stood immediately to his full height, rising to meet a crisp afternoon sky.  The courtyard was littered with little girls in army getups.  They seemed very surprised to see him. The feeling was mutual.

He twisted slowly clockwise, surveying the crowd.  The earth rumbled as he moved, causing the closest set of humans to clatter to the ground like bowling pins.  He was stuck about a third of the way into the castle bailey now, having managed to free only a head, an arm and a long skinny thing that he never could quite identify.  He liked to think of it as an "antennae" of some sort, but he never really “sensed” anything special with it.  Like so many of his parts, it seemed primarily designed to wig people the fuck out.

In that regard, it seemed to be working.  In fact, based on the various looks of mind-shriveling horror that beamed back at him from the crowd, it seemed very unlikely that Azazel was going to "bewitch" or "bewilder" these folks into doing much of anything.  If only the summoner had said something like "mash their limbs into jelly," he might have had a chance.

Right, he thought. Might as well give it the ol’ college go.

" Urrrmmm...uhhhhhh…." he rumbled. "Sup.  How's it hangin’, yo?"

Upon hearing the deep, alien tones of his voice, the gang of tiny women seemed more unnerved then ever.  Ranks of them scrambled left and right, yelling out commands in their rickety human tongue.  The sound of manspeak was always a touch grating to the old monster's eardrums, like the clicking sound of pencils snapping in half.

"Battle stations! Battle stations" clicked one of them ludicrously, and shimmied up a length of rope to a nearby rampart.  At the same moment a row of girls charged at him, screaming and twirling their adorable little swords.

"Now, hold on a sec," warbled Azazel as the young ladies hacked and hewed at a gelatinous hump of his exposed flesh. "Maybe we can talk this through?"

As if in response, a psychotic-looking redhead leapt down onto the back of his neck. She let out a noise like a deranged spider monkey, and immediately began jabbing a sharp javelin into his spine.   "D'owwwww," the demon cried. "Cut it out! I'm like, not even kidding, dude." She didn't seem to be paying attention though, and he winced when he felt the tip dive into one of his favorite hearts.  To press the point home, Azazel scooped the girl up in a free hand and started poking her with his antennae-thing. "There. See? Now, that's really annoying isn't it?!"

Even though he was only trying to illustrate a point, this act seemed to drive the rest of them into a hyperventilating frenzy. They shrieked inanities like "Oh my God, Lisa," and "Hang in there Leez," and "Oh shit, I think I'm gonna hurl!"

"It's cool," he managed. "Alright, no probs."  He saw a dim realization cross several of their faces. They seemed understand, finally, that he was speaking words to them, but were still trying to deduce exactly what they meant.  Gently, the demon set 'Lisa' down on a mound of displaced earth.  "Yeah, so I just need to talk to whoever's, like... in charge around here." An eerie silence descended over the scene.  "Just for, like, a minute," he added hopefully, feeling a little self-conscious.  Public speaking was never really his forte.

A slim brunette rose from behind a small battery of howitzers, crossed warily into the yard.  She was flanked by a pair of familiar looking demons, though he couldn't place where he'd seen them before.  TV, maybe.  "I’m the one you want," she said, seeming just a bit less terrified then the rest.  "Speak quickly, monster, or prepare to be destroyed."

Azazel sighed, trying to sort through the twisting maze of horrible, confusing ideas in his heads. "Ummm, yeah," he said finally. "It's like this, okay? My, uhhhh, dad used to own this place, like, a hundred years ago?"

He nodded slowly, as though that alone ought to have done the trick, but a sea of uncomprehending stares seemed to suggest otherwise.  "See," he continued, "I grew up here.  Sorta.  Aaaaand, I was, like, in the neighborhood and I was hoping I could drop in for a few minutes. Ya know, take a peek around?  Old times sake?" He tried putting on what he thought was an innocent smile, noticed a woman with curly yellow hair collapse into a gurgling, vomiting fit.

The brunette took a few wary steps sideways, her eyes locked to the archfiend's hideous leer. "I see.  And how long do you think that will take?" She seemed to be signaling someone behind her with one hand.

"Oh, not long!  I mean, I don't want to be a pest or nothin'.  Just a quick little tour-ski, is all." Feeling suddenly more confident in his acting prowess, he wriggled a tentacle out from the dungeon and pretended to wipe a tear from one huge glowing eye.  "Its just, now that Dad's passed on," he sniffed.  "The memories... are, like, all I have left."

Somewhere behind the brunette, Azazel could hear the grind of a rusted gear.  Out of the corner of seven eyes, he glimpsed the nose of an artillery cannon tilting ever so gently downwards, until it's thick black nozzle was leveled straight at him.

"Yeah, ‘specially dad's old prison cells," he continued, unfazed.  "Oh, me and good ol' Daddy!  We had such wonderful times playing with the all the prisoners we used to keep in those, uh, prison cells."  The audible thunk of a mortar shell striking a copper well rung through the air.  "Say, you gals don't happen to have any, um, prisoners handy, do you? Gosh, if I could just have a peek at a few of those, I would totally be on my way..."

There was a dry rattle of a flywheel reeling round, and a heavy metal cylinder sliding sharply into place.

"So, yeah, um... Anyway.  Is that cool with you guys?"

Chapter 12:  Big Game

It was gross.

They had smelled it five minutes before they saw it, and Buffy still wasn’t sure what was worse. The hideous growth bulged out from the shattered wall like some vast, inoperable tumor. As far as she knew, they hadn’t invented a crayon to match the thing’s color, although “Puke-Umber” had a nice ring to it.

The ghost was still haunting her.

Don’t look. Stop with the looking, already.

The pain inside her chest was subsiding now, but it hardly seemed to matter. The last ten minutes of her mortal existence was a gigantic, colorless blur. She knew only that the Nurse had taken something important from her.  Or though her.  With each step, Buffy could feel the line between dream and reality fade sharply to white. She could still hear the thousand voices that screamed in unison when the needle drilled down into her heart. They all sounded vaguely like her own.

(fly we should be flying instead we can still fly why can’t we fly)

As she watched the vampire inspect the disgusting wall-cancer, her thoughts drifted to Drusilla; the saucer-eyed psycho that Spike had endlessly, hopelessly loved. When the vamp’s sanity had failed her, Drusilla had found her comfort in prophecy and poetry.

Are all poets crazy? she wondered.

Buffy’s eyes fluttered closed again. She watched helplessly as the world slipped its leash and bounded away into a white cloudless sky.

Doesn’t matter. He loved her, anyway.

(SHE WAS HIS KIND she BELONGED SHE turned him SHE turned TO him)

And what will we turn to? What will turn to us? Or, turn us into?

(DOESN’T MATTER the white woman has TASTED US we are LESS now)

That’s not true, she thought. The play’s the thing. What’s my line? My name? Bee, Buff, Buffy. Tuffy? Who’s that? Who is Skaya the Scourge? By any other name, were we just as sweet? As sweat?

(YOUR NAME YOUR NAME IS CUNT)

No.

(cunt You Cunt YOU cunt you CUNT)

No. Not cunt. Hunt. We are the Hunter. That’s our name. It’s what we do.

(IT’S WHAT WE DO we’re hunting WABBITS be very, very quiet we’re hunting WABBITS wabbits WABBITS …)

She swooned, felt herself being wrenched into the void again. She braced herself against a dingy stone wall, praying for breath.  A damp blonde mop of curls dragged across her face, the last word tripping through her brain like a song on a scratched forty-five.

Get a grip, Summers, she scolded herself. Don’t be so fucking, selfish. They need you now.

He needs you now.

Open. Your eyes. Now.

The dungeon was dark, but the reflected light from the hung torches still managed to reveal the horror in bold, excruciating detail.  Spike was kneeling beside a long, sinewy mass that protruded from the center of the blob and curled up around the far wall like a giant question mark. Some sort of long, slimy fruit was swaying gently from the tip, wrapped up tight in the coils of a snakelike rattle. It was a bizarre tableau; the Garden of Eden on a hilariously bad acid trip. She felt her mind straining at the image, trying to smother a wave of unwholesome laughter that was lapping the pit of her stomach.

Buffy waited for her heartbeat to drop back into a semi-normal tempo, smoothed her hands over her shoulders. She was fine.  The Nurse was the nutjob, not her.  All that junk about dimensions and doors was ludicrous, the sort of science fiction crap the shut-ins rant about when they’re off their medication.

Buffy Summers was fine. Totally intact, manageably sane.  Little stressed out, maybe, but there were a whole bunch of perfectly reasonable, non-nervous-breakdown-related explanations for that. Not the least of them the sight of her barbequed Ex charging to her rescue.  That’ll tend to throw a gal off her game a little.

And the latest reason, of course: the big scary, crash-y sound they’d heard back in the tunnels. Upon closer inspection the Gross-ness in front of them was probably the source of it, since the world had pretty much gone all kablooey around it. The blob’s surface was mesmerizing; a sea of dark lesions and turbulent, ropelike scars. Two years of high school biology scrolled through her brain at warp speed, trying to assign it a genus or species or something. Whatever it was, it was super big, and super yuck. Yuckus Maximus, she decided.

“Thoughts?” Buffy whispered.

The dead man shrugged, gave his mirrored helmet a doleful little shake. She glanced quickly away. The mask was helping her to deal, for sure.  But she still couldn’t bear looking at him for long. It was like staring at the sun.

She wandered idly towards the dangling fruit, instead. It was roughly the size of the heavy bag in her old gym and looked ripe with unpronounceable diseases, like the kind of thing you’d dare someone to touch at 4th grade recess. Something alive seemed to squirm just beneath its briny surface. Dreamily, she watched herself reach for it.

“Um,” she heard Spike say. “Wouldn’t do that, Slaye...”

The thing lurched heavily to the left, sending sheets of black powder raining down across the slimy canvas of skin. Buffy sprung backwards with a yelp, tumbling down onto a pile of freshly pulverized rock.

Above her, the strange fruit continued to pitch and writhe, as though something inside was straining awkwardly against the membrane of a rancid womb. Spike dashed to her side, and they watched together in silent horror as the coil trembled and split open at the tip. A familiar face peered out of the crack, upside down and gasping for air.

“Andrew?”

He didn’t respond. The eyes were closed, the face a swollen bag of radishes.

“Andrew,” she hissed again, springing to her feet. She felt Spike follow, tried to ignore a hard chill in the air. “Andrew, wake up.”

Suddenly, the boy’s eyes bulged wide, and his small, red mouth popped open. The sound that came out was sad and shrill, like a Chihuahua trying to swallow a whistle. She was on the verge of slapping him when the noise stopped short, a song snapping off mid-note. The Mini-Watcher gaped down at his old comrades in childlike wonder.

“Oh. Hey Buffy,” he said, blinking wearily. “Hey Spiiiiiiii...derman.” He squeezed his eyes shut, wincing.

“Yeh, brilliant recovery, mate,” said Spike, the grainy, electronic voice drenched in sarcasm. “The Slayer knows, okay?” Buffy cringed at the S-word, decided she preferred the Nurse’s needle.

Why won’t you say my name?

”Ohhhhh... Wow! That’s pretty cool,” Andrew chirped. “Um, isn’t it?” Buffy shifted uncomfortably, hard tears spearing her eyes. “Whoops. I mean, wow, that’s none of my business. No problemos, muchachos. Not gonna pry open that can of worms. Or any cans of worms, really. I don’t even like worms.” His face twisted up into a scowl. “Or caterpillars,” he added with a shudder.

Time seemed to pass in slow, strange bunches: her staring dumbstruck, Andrew rocking nonchalantly in his gruesome hammock. Buffy had the sudden fear that he might start whistling. “Sooooooo...” he said, finally. “How come you guys are upside-down?”

“Mmmm. Good question,” Spike muttered. “What do you remember?”

Andrew’s huge blue eyes clouded over with thought. “Well, it all started a few days ago. There was this big, stupid dog, sitting on my couch...”

Spike cleared his throat. “How about we skip ahead a bit, yeh? Say, up ‘til the last time I saw you not all covered in goo?”

“Oh. Sorry,” Andrew mumbled. “Okay, right, yeah. So, right after you bit me...”

Buffy winced. “After he what you?” A low groan echoed through Spike’s microphone.

“No, it’s all good,” Andrew sputtered. “I mean, I wanted him to.” A look of sudden, animal panic spread across his face. “No! I mean, I didn’t want him to! I mean, I didn’t want him at all. And.  He didn’t want me. Too. Buffy.” He tittered nervously.

At that moment, the grotesque clog of flesh rumbled, mercifully cutting Andrew short.  Dark dust roared down from a web of fresh cracks forming in the dungeon’s ceiling.

"The bloody hell was that?” Spike growled as the enormous vine trembled to life and slithered sideways. A moment later, Buffy felt the goose-pimples bubble up along her spine when the thing’s voice rang out. It was as rich and unearthly as a whale’s song.

“Yo,” it said. “Uh...little help up here?”

Nobody moved. Even Andrew was struck speechless, the color draining from his face. Buffy clung to the far wall, suddenly and painfully aware of her weakened state.  The green blob was pulsating, now, and she could see a bright mass of alien tissues straining at its core. With a dull, sickening pop, a lidless eye the size of a volleyball emerged from somewhere deep within the ooze.  The terrible organ was spoked by dozens of pale, strangled veins. They watched in stunned silence as it darted back and forth in its makeshift socket, casually sizing up Buffy and Spike with a single, unblinking iris.

There was something so unspeakably horrible and ancient about the movement, it made the creature’s next words sound almost innocent by comparison.

“Dude.  You guys are with the newbie, right?”  The voice carried an otherworldly resonance, like a million insects chattering at the bottom of a deep, deep well.  Despite her revulsion, Buffy found herself unconsciously searching for a mouth. “Oh, man. This is some serious bullcrap, yo,” it added absently.

Across the way, she could see Spike’s black form creeping towards the beast, his body tensed for single combat. The Yuck-ness stiffened visibly, appearing to sense the vampire’s intentions. “Whoa. Chill, bro,” it gurgled. “Got enough problems as it is.”

The tail sprung wide.  Andrew let out a little bark, then flopped to the floor with a sloppy, wet thump. A half-second later, Buffy was leaping to his side and dragging him clear.

Spike pounced, then, all four limbs flashing like black blades in the flickering torchlight. It was a blistering assault, a deadly spray of punches and kicks that hammered into the sack of grisly meat like a machine gun.

Buffy pulled Andrew close and gasped, steeling herself for the creature’s inevitable Giant Badguy Counterattack. She wondered absently what it would be this time.  A miasma of flesh-eating gas, maybe? Or a swirl of murderous tentacles, trimmed with poisoned razor blades? Or, maybe some magic blob-monster spell that would turn them all into smaller, less efficient blob-monsters? Or, maybe a...

Nothing?

Hey.

Spike’s symphony of violence gradually wound down, finally evaporating into a drizzle of half-hearted jabs.  The crimson eyeball just regarded him curiously.

“Bugger this,” the vamp muttered, a husky twinge of embarrassment in his voice. “Right.  We’ll be on our way, then.  Cheers.”

“No, wait!”  plead the blob.  “Um, you guys called for help, didn’t you?”

Andrew tensed in Buffy’s arms, perhaps feeling everyone’s eyes on him.  He raised his hand gingerly “I... might have, a little,” he whimpered. “Sorry.”

Buffy scowled. “Andrew!  What did we say about the whole... no... demon...summoning...thing?”

“It’s not my fault!  Xander and Giles made me!”

“Right. And I buy that because?”

“It’s true! God! Nobody ever takes my side!”

“That’s 'cause it’s always falling off a bloody cliff,” Spike noted.

“Ahem,” said the blob, "yeah, this is real entertaining and all, but can we get back to this whole ‘escaping’ crap?  My back is killing me, here.”

“It’s okay, guys” said Andrew. “I brought him to help get us out of here." He rose dramatically, gesturing towards the lumpy mound with an outstretched hand. “This is Azalla, Grand Earl of Mass Deception.” He squinted at the beast hopefully. “Right?”

The monster emitted a low, lonesome sound, like a foghorn sounding at the bottom of the sea. “Aw!  No friggin’ way,” bellowed the Yuck. “Man, I hate that dude. Seriously, you gotta run a spellcheck on your grimoir or something, guy.”  Somewhere above them, there was a thick bubbling noise followed by the thin echo of female voices yelling. “Actually,” the beast continued,”you screwed up pretty royally, man! What was with that whole ‘sneaky, wily, wimpy’ bind you threw in there at the end? Do I look like friggin’ James Bond to you?! ”

“W-Well, I just didn’t want anyone to get hurt, is all.”  Andrew turned to Buffy and Spike, eyes pleading. “I mean, I know they’re bad people and everything. But they’re still...you know. People.”

“Great. Good job, Andrew,” Buffy groused, feeling just a little like her old self again. “Big, ugly, uncooperative Hell Demon in Castle Dracula. What could possibly go wrong?”

“Hey, I’m not uncooperative,” the deep voice griped. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. I totally wanna, like, eat your skin and rape your world and all that crap. But, ya know.  Can’t. The noob here ordered a big, sneaky rescue of some sort, so that’s what I gotta serve up. It’s a really lame rule.” The blob seemed to trail off bashfully this time. There was something so absurd and Saturday-Night-Live-ish about it: big slimy, self-conscious monster stuck in a wall, trying to channel his inner MacGuyver.

See? she thought. Poorly-timed pop-culture references. Crazy Buffy wouldn’t make those.

Spike was shaking his head. “Oh, well, that’s just bloody grand of you, in’it,” he said.  “I’ll bite, your Royal Befouled-Ness. What’s the big ‘sneaky’ plan?”

The blob shuddered visibly, a network of raw, black veins seeming to choke back a sigh. “Well,” it burbled. “That’s just it, dude. Don’t gotta clue. I mean, this sort of thing isn’t really my bag.  Used to breaking into castles, not out of ‘em. I guess you could say I’m more of a ‘Type-A’ personality.”

A long moment of silence passed. “Well, how’d you break into them,” Andrew asked innocently.

“Man, that was easy,” the fiend replied. “I would just pick a wall and run into it, roaring at the top of my lungs.” The monster seemed to be waiting for a response of some kind, but all they could manage was an unblinking, collective stare. “That works for a lot of stuff, actually,” it added, almost shyly. “You’d be surprised.”

“Oh,” Andrew chirped. “Well, can’t you just do that? Except, like, backwards?”

“Hrmmm,” replied the monster doubtfully. “Yeah, maybe.  I mean, shit, I’ll try anything once.”

Buffy heard Spike inhale sharply. She reacted quickly, cutting off the inevitable Spike-ism that would get them all horribly murdered. “Great. Sounds like a plan... sort of,” she said. “So, what do we call you, anyway?”

“Ow! MotherFUCKER,” it suddenly howled.

“Sounds French,” Spike quipped.

The blob quivered and coughed, sending tiny shards of brimstone flying in all directions. Somewhere far above, Buffy could make out the thin sound of a girl’s hoarse voice shrieking. “Sorry,” it said. “I kind of got a thing going on upstairs with them.”

“Them?” she asked. “Who-them? Slayers-them?”

“Oh, is that what these chicks are? Man! They can be really unreasonable.”

“You’re telling me, mate” Spike murmured. Buffy glanced at him hopefully, her heart skipping a single beat. She prayed he didn’t hear it.

“Anyway, I think they’re gonna blow me up,” the demon added casually. “They got some kind of big-ass cannon up there, or something.”

Andrew face scrunched up. “Jeez. Won’t that hurt?”

The creepy red eye floated towards the boy, sending a visible shiver up his spine. “Yeah, prolly. Honestly, I was kinda hoping you guys could help dig me outta here first.” The thing’s tail wagged optimistically for a few seconds, causing a row of gruesome boils to burst loudly near the tip. A thick, dark sludge oozed out of one, and Buffy felt her tummy roll over.

“Oh, and the name’s Peterson, by the way. Melvin Peterson. Don’t wear it out.”

***

He’d only taken it along as a last resort. That, and because, of course, she’d demanded it. The young woman had a knack for becoming incredibly persuasive when lives were on the line. Incredibly scary, too. Xander guessed that it ran in the family.

They had sequestered themselves in a small, spooky chamber at the tip of the tower. Xander cracked open his pack and spread the contents across the floor. The Agency’s beacon had shipped in a compact styrene tube the length of his forearm. Unfortunately, it had also come unassembled, and in about a freakin’ billion or so little pieces.   As if to mock him further, the instruction manual seemed to have been written in some deliberately cruel hybrid of Japanese and Swedish. It was sometimes hard for the girl-in-question to remember that not everyone shared her uncanny talent for languages. And, of course, the dark thought occurred to Xander that she may have done it on purpose. It was so hard to say these days.

The Spy had slipped him the beacon in Heathrow three nights ago, mere minutes before their scheduled departure for Rome. It had been raining hard outside the terminal for several hours by then, and Xander was staring anxiously at the long lines of wet tarmac shimmering under the pylon lights, threatening yet another costly delay. Andrew had fallen asleep, finally, curled like a cat on a plush tan bench next to the gate.

He’d seen her reflection first, painted across the dark, rain-streaked safety glass like a watercolor ghost. The hair was darker then he’d remembered it, and the posture was a tad more formal. They spoke in code that evening, as usual. Since the morning of The London Pact – as Giles so geekily insisted they call it – everything having to do with Dawn Summers had become a secret code or puzzle, a lock to be gently picked.

The government had needed an ear inside, someone close to Rupert Giles. And, of course, the reverse was equally true. At the time, it’d seemed like a reasonable little maneuver, particularly to Dawn herself. She had always longed to make herself useful and, after Buffy bugged off to Rome again, Xander saw that innocent desire twist into a raw, manic sort of thirst. With Big Sis out of the picture, she wouldn’t be satisfied being a carefully defended pawn anymore. She needed to become a player in the Big Game. And she did.

He hadn’t asked her where she got the beacon from, let alone how she was able to sneak it into a large, post-9-11 international airport. He didn’t even ask who the thing would call if he managed to activate it. It was Dawn’s one and only secret spy rule: No Questions Allowed, Ever. As a double (possibly triple? Quadruple?) agent, Dawn assumed that both the Council and the Agency we’re watching her every move, twenty-four seven. As long as everyone remained confused about whose side she was really working for, she could stay alive for one more day.

In the meantime, they’d just have to trust her. And when it came to Buffy’s safety, Xander knew that they could. So for the moment, the only mystery that mattered was how in the world Xander was supposed to put her stupid little gizmo together.

He was still scratching his head, trying to figure out what the hell the phrase “moven speyk piecen R-R1 LEFTwise,” when the missile slammed down, raw and deafening. The entire castle rattled in the wake of the blast. It sounded a little like an old 150 millimeter shape charge. Mid-range, Ukrainian model. The same kind of cheap-ass ordnance the Soviets sold to those NLF bastards back in ’68.

Jesus Christ! How do I still know all this stuff?

After a few panicked seconds, Xander flew out onto the spiral parapet and stole a glance over the lip of one of the tower’s narrow casements. Far below, Count Dracula’s courtyard had been transformed into a billowing typhoon of soot and rich, red smoke. An aftershock nipped at Xander’s spine like a string of mosquito bites.

Kennedy’s Slayers didn’t seem to be handling it well at all. Xander had to stifle a grin as he watched them scurry haphazardly around the yard. His cadets, he was sure, would have at least scurried in roughly the same direction.

Inside his brain, a key turned a familiar ignition, and he watched helplessly as the ghost of G.I Joe leapt back into the driver’s seat. The old plastic soldier’s trained eye was suddenly working the scene, probing for casualties, trajectories, escape routes. The South Wall, it appeared, had taken the brunt of the discharge, the craggy remnants now framing a red canvas of late afternoon sun. Above the din, he could just barely make out the sound of Kennedy’s husky voice barking orders, and the dark notion occurred to him that now might be the perfect time to get in a little target practice.

He peered curiously at a splotch of movement near the center of the swirling cloud. A huge, dark shape was wriggling out from a hole in the ground. It was impossible to make out any details.  The silhouette looked like a giant octopus french-kissing a tank.

“Way to go, Andrew!” he shouted. “I...I think...”

Giles seemed even less enthusiastic. The Watcher sighed morosely as he knelt beside him at the window. Xander had a feeling that if the old bastard still wore glasses, there’d be some serious, hardcore polishing going on right about now.

They watched in silent horror as the shadowy form lurched up through the fog, a dozen deformed limbs scrambling for leverage on the shattered earth around it. Then, shockingly, one of the arms seemed to suddenly snap off and run away from the rest of the body.

Waitaminute...is that?

She materialized at the edge of the cloud. The fallout from the exploded castle wall had bronzed her from head to toe in soot. A grimy towel seemed to be her only clothing, like she’d just taken a reverse-shower or something.

She was very far away, and the only eye Xander Harris had left hadn’t so much as glimpsed her face in almost two years. No way in hell he should’ve been able to recognize her.

No way in hell he wouldn’t have.

Buffy.

“Xander,” Giles whispered, his voice suddenly crackling with emotion. “Dear God...they’ll tear her to pieces.”

Wordlessly, Xander sprang into action. In less than ten seconds, he scooped the unfinished relay into his pack, popped an ice cold clip into the rifle, and drew a long, deep breath.

Yo Joe.

***

It still hurt.

The dying rays of the sun slashed at his eyes like ragged fingernails as they ascended into the firestorm. Spike closed them, patiently counting the seconds until he felt the sensor kick in, heard the familiar electric whine of the filter sliding into place.

It's not right, he thought, as Wolfram & Hart’s crude facsimile of daylight snapped into focus above him. He didn’t pretend to understand how the gadget worked. It was some sort of a computer reconstruction, he knew; a bunch of ones and zeros glued together so his eyes didn’t dry up like prunes and explode.  It was a decent enough trick, but it still wasn’t right. There was something off about it. Slightly greener or something.  Always made him heartsick for the real thing.

He was stronger than most, he knew. Even in the old days, the others would marvel at the way he'd defiantly scurry about in it, the sunbeams flogging his cursed flesh like a headmaster. Dru’d sussed it was his way of showing up Peaches, proving his insanity was more potent then her sire’s old, terrible wisdom. But Angelus had known better. He understood perfectly well what William the Bloody saw in the light, and it was something the helmet could never hope to imitate.

His fangs slid out automatically as he emerged into the tinted nightmare of the courtyard, muscles tensing for battle. Through the smoke, he could make out the shapes of girls running everywhere, choking on dust, crying out in wonder and terror. He ignored them all. His eyes were searching for that other beautiful, excruciating light, his private yellow sun. But she was already gone.

He tugged at Melvin’s massive, scaly hand, prying himself free from the creature’s grip one claw at a time.

“Lay off, wanker,” he barked. “Ride’s bloody over.” He plummeted to earth, nerves shrieking as he rolled up into a feral crouch and threw up his fists.

Melvin kept rising, his dark, alien form looming above the swirling chaos like a black wave. All the Major Demons, Spike had learned, tended to get bigger and uglier with age. It was a kind of dating method for Hell’s favorite sons. Sort of like counting the rings of a tree, except that in this case you counted boils, and extra body parts and whatnot. “Gifts” – that’s what the filthy buggers called them. Although why anyone would equate a rash of infected globs with ribbons-and-bloody-bows was beyond him.   In any case, by that standard Andrew’s bloke looked to be one positively ancient, gifted bastard. Spike stood transfixed for a moment as the monster’s largest, nattiest head beamed a bashful smile down at the swarm of enemy Slayers. “This isn’t what it looks like, I swear,” it bellowed.

It appeared the giant prat was serious about that “obey-the-rules” rot after all. Instead of stamping the Slayers into flat, pink jellies like he should’ve, Melvin suddenly reminded Spike of a circus elephant on its hind legs, gingerly dancing away from the handful of girls who were brave or stupid enough to engage him. Andrew flailed just out of their reach atop one of the demon’s whip-like tentacles, too terrified even to scream.

Buffy.

He waded towards her through a boiling storm of crushed cinder. She seemed disoriented, snowblind. He knew they would kill her, now, the moment they spotted her. Buffy wasn’t the sort of bird you wanted to give a second chance to. Odds were she’d use it to cut your bloody heart out.   She was so close, less than a dozen yards away. He reached for her.

From behind, a mass of tiny hands gripped his arms and neck, spun him into the path of a blistering side kick. He swung blindly, a growl rising at the bottom of his throat, but  found only air. Before he could recover his balance they had him surrounded, unleashing a blizzard of punches that battered in from every conceivable angle. A titanic blow struck his chest, and he felt the armor around his sword wound crack and split wide. Spike stifled a scream as a streak of sunlight poured into the breach, the bare skin there sizzling like buttered meat.

The sensation swept him to the ground. He shielded the burn with a clenched fist as his attackers stomped him mercilessly into the muck. He felt his head float briefly as a bug-eyed lass bonged it with a steel scepter. Before he knew what was happening, two pairs of concrete legs were doing a tap-dance number on his ribcage, and he was suddenly having trouble remembering how to stand up.

Somewhere in the haze, the cannon fired off a second shot, blowing a gray convoy truck to smithereens. He spotted Buffy whirling around, then. She was yelling something, screaming it. It sounded a lot like his name.

Run! Run you silly bint!

Suddenly, his ears picked up the unmistakable sound of an engine roaring. A pair of glowing headlights was slicing towards them through the smoke and ash. The jeep missed Buffy by inches. He glimpsed the Harris boy hunkered down low in the front seat, watched Rupes wrap his long arms around the woman’s body and haul her into the back.

And then they were off and racing, the jeep’s wheels grinding hard over the smoldering rubble. He saw her hair blowing against the orange frame of the dying sun. Getting smaller and finer.

Feeling for his blood one last time, he staggered towards that other, golden sun. It was fading fast.

This is the land the sunset washes,
These are the banks of the Yellow Sea;
Where it rose, or whither it rushes,
These are the western mystery,

What rot, Spike mused.

Bye, love. See you next life.

***

Rupert held her as tightly as he could, for as long as he could manage.  She was so damned strong.

“No,” she cried, the slender arms drying to lead in his grasp. “No, we have to go back!” She shook him off roughly and lunged for the open canopy at the rear of the car. Xander rode the jeep hard down the side of the hill, and Giles could feel the front axel twist savagely as they slammed over a rough patch of granite.

The Watcher brought his weight down solidly, momentarily pinning the woman’s small body to the steel frame. It was a noble, if somewhat ludicrous, effort. In just a few moments she’d have the better of him. He would lose her, again.

“Xander,” he bellowed. “I need some bloody assistance here!”

“Little busy now, G-man,” he yelled back. The vehicle lurched heavily to the right, grazing the fossilized trunk of a massive tree.

Buffy was still clawing resolutely forward, dragging Giles towards his certain death. They were less than a foot away from the rear fender, dark shrapnel from the mountain path biting up into his skin. In the distance, he spied the long, heavy gates of Castelul Drakul swinging wide.

There was no time to reason with her. His hand groped blindly into the well between the passenger seats, fingers scrambling for purchase on the cold steel cross there. He rose halfway, planting a knee in the small of the blond woman’s back.  With a devil’s strength, he swung the tire iron in a lethal arc, hammering the base of her pretty, little skull.

For anyone else – anyone on the entire, godforsaken planet – it would have been a killing blow. But not for his girl. Not his Slayer.

She was so damned strong.

>>Chapter 13: The Wrong End of the World

Chapter 13:   The Wrong End of the World

I said, baby, when you walk you shake like a willow tree
I said, baby, when you walk woman you know you, shake like a willow tree
Why does a girl like you could love to make a fool of me…

- Buddy Guy

“The stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the willow survives by bending with the wind.”

- Bruce Lee

***

Willow strolled across the quad, her thoughts a pleasant muddle of algebra and the farming techniques of 19th century rural Burma.  It was a little chilly outside, but it sure beat the heck out of the cafeteria.  Nothing was worse than being alone in a roomful of people.

She cracked a smile as she dug into her sack lunch.  Sounded all crinkly.

Yay, tuna salad! Nummers …

”Hi!  Willow, right?”

The blonde was standing a few yards away, wearing a sly grin and an oh-so-perfect outfit.  It was somewhere between sexy schoolgirl uniform and preppy caz, broadcasting just the right amount of leg.  Not that Willow was looking or anything.

”Why? I mean, hi!  Uh, did you want me to move?

”Why don't we start with, 'Hi, I'm Buffy,' and, uh, then let's segue directly into me asking you for a favor. It doesn't involve moving, but it does involve hanging out with me for awhile.”

”But aren't you hanging out with Cordelia?”

”I can't do both?”

”Not legally.”

Buffy sighed.  ”Look, I really wanna get by here.  New school.   And, Cordelia's been really nice.  To me, anyway.   But, um, I kinda have this burning desire not to flunk all my classes, and I heard a rumor that you were the person to talk to if I wanted to get caught up.”

Friend Ship alert!

All hands on deck!

”Oh, I could totally help you out!  Uh, if you have sixth period free we could meet in the library?”

”No,” Buffy said matter-of-factly.  “We can’t go there.  Ever again.  Don’t you remember?”

Willow felt a rail of ice slide up her spine.  Something was wrong here.

Just then, Xander popped up behind them.  His goony pal Jesse leapt in like a jungle cat, and suddenly they were drowning in a sea of boy.

”You guys busy?” asked Xander.  “Are we interrupting?  We're interrupting…”  He tossed his book bag to Jesse.

”Hey!” Buffy chirped.

”Hey!” Willow squeaked.

”Hey there,” Jesse winked.

Drat, she thought.  Foiled again.  And I was so close!

She gestured to the two bug-eyed hormone factories. ”Buffy, this is Jesse and that's Xander.”

Xander froze.  “Oh, me and Buffy go waaay back. Old friends, very close,” he said.  A dark cloud seemed to pass behind his eyes.  “Then there's that period of estrangement where I think we were both growing as people.  But now here we are, like old times.  I'm quite moved.”

”Is it me, or are you turning into a babbling idiot?” Jesse quipped.  He was looking a little sick, kinda hollow around the cheeks.  Willow wondered if he’d caught something.

”No, it's not you,” Xander almost whispered.  He was staring at Willow very intently now.  “It’s us.”

Buffy’s body stiffened to stone.  Willow could smell something terrible, old food spoiling in the sun.  Only the blonde’s lips were moving now, like something puppeteered from within.  “Well, it's nice to meet you guys, I think.”

”Well, you know, we wanted to welcome you, make ya feel at home,” said Jesse.  “Unless you have a scary home...” He suddenly looked very pale, and his eyes were ringed with red.

Xander hopped down and unzipped his bag.  “And to return this,” he said, holding out a wooden stake.  “The only thing I can think is that you're building a really little fence.”

”Garden,” Buffy replied, her voice dropping to an arctic drawl.  “It’s for our garden.”

Xander nodded slowly. But he was still staring at Willow, and his eyes seemed to bore directly into her soul.  Run, he mouthed.

Cordelia came running up.  “Are these guys bothering you?”

The smell was overwhelming, now, formaldehyde and putrid eggs.  Willow felt her breath catch.  ”Sh-She's not hanging out with us,” she stammered.

”Hey! Cordelia!” shouted Jesse.  The boy had now turned corpse-white.  When he spoke her name, Willow glimpsed a horrible flash of something sharp.

”Oh, please,” Cordelia groaned.  “I don't mean to interrupt your downward mobility, but I just wanted to tell you that you won't be meeting Coach Foster - the woman with the chest hair - because gym was canceled due to the extreme dead guy in the locker.”

“Dead?” asked the blonde, her lips a chilling instrument.  The smell was coming from inside them, Willow realized. For the first time, she noticed the color of Buffy’s eyes.  They were pink, like a thing that lived deep underground. The world blurred and shook along her outline like the edge of the sun.

”Totally dead. Way dead.”

“It’s not just a little dead, then,” Xander quipped.  But his mood was anything but playful. Run, he mouthed again.  Jesse started to giggle.

”Don't you have an elsewhere to be?”

The sky darkened and the wall frosted over beneath Willow’s legs.  The blonde's hair seemed lighter somehow, almost platinum.  Her lips opened again, pulled by some invisible string.   ”How did he die?” they asked.

“Jeez, morbid much?” Cordelia sighed.

“This isn’t right,” Willow cried.  “Something’s not right here!”  Jesse was laughing wildly, now, his mouth full of shark teeth.

“Run, Willow,” Xander whispered.

Buffy’s pretty pink eyes were dancing, a knot of stars spinning in the pupils.  “How did he die, sugar?” she asked again.

“They peeled off all his skin.”

No.

“His name was Warren.  Something…” Cordy closed her eyes, as though lost in thought.

NoNoNoNoNoNo

“Warren Mears..."

“Run,” Xander suggested.

“I don’t know. Some geek…”

“Run!” Xander screamed.

Willow’s nerve shattered like glass.  The world streaked by in a nightmare blur as she sprinted back over the quad. By the time she reached the school, the gray September afternoon sky had turned black.  As she flung the doors wide, she thought she could hear Xander’s voice cry out to her.  It sounded like “Not that way!” but by the time the meaning registered in her brain, it was too late.  They clinked shut behind her, sealing her in.

The place was deserted, but it didn’t feel empty, exactly.  A locker door hung halfway open, like a hand raised to a horrified mouth. She refused to look inside.  A clock mounted high on the opposite wall appeared broken, the hands frozen at one minute to midnight.

The foul odor welled up in her nostrils again, and in the distance a woman’s voice began humming a cheerful tune.  Willow started running, the halls growing darker with each new turn.  The woman’s song echoed off their walls like a requiem.

By the time she reached the library, the world had become a black tomb.  A line of yellow warmth trickled out from the door crack.  It drew her like an old lover, promising that same shelter it had granted them all those years ago.  She took a deep breath.

Opened the door.  Screamed.

The chamber stretched back for nightmare miles, a bottomless well turned sideways.  A thousand steel cages were stacked floor to ceiling, laid out in precise rows like a morgue.  From within, a galaxy of tiny coral eyes gleamed at her.  She heard a chattering noise, the sound of insects mating in a sweltering marsh.  Something ancient breathed her name.

wwwhhhWillllllowwwwwww…

***

“Willow?  Willow!”

Soft fingers smoothed back her hair.  The voice that spoke now was a tender flute, the soundtrack of Willow Rosenberg’s most beautiful and painful dream.  Slowly, she opened her eyes.

The girl’s face glowed amber through the darkness.  Willow traced each delicate lip, danced across the round smile of the brow.  She saved the eyes for last.  They were sad and haunted, with just a glint of backwater wisdom simmering underneath.

Where did we go?

“Welcome back, stranger” the ghost murmured, wringing a cloth over a foaming lobster pot.   She looked like a plate from an old religious text: the Angel bent to earth.

“Tara,” Willow whispered.  “Oh, Goddess.” She tried to sit up. A deep wound in her belly objected, shocking her awake.

Willow’s brain suddenly started making sense of time again.  A dozen crazy images flashed through it.  The bridge.  Broken glass on snow, like shards of ice.  Buffy’s knife, gleaming red under a floodlight.

Then, the growl of tires on blacktop.  A pair of familiar voices shouting.

“Please,” Tara whispered.  “Don’t try to move. It’s not healed, yet.”  The woman’s hand glowed green for a moment, hovering inches over Willow’s punctured side.  She suddenly realized that she was naked.  Sorta.  A white towel was draped across her for modesty.  It occurred to her to wonder why she needed that.

“She awake?” hollered a gruff voice.

“Yes!”

Sound of stuff breaking, Dammit Footsteps.  Then another old face, careening into view. The two people peered down at her, side-by-ridiculous-side.  It was so crazy that Willow almost chuckled.  But it would’ve hurt to chuckle.

And besides, it really wasn’t all that funny.

“Hey,” the man murmured, nursing a wry stoner’s grin.  “You okay?”

“My head feels.  Kinda big”

“Nah,” said Oz.  “It’s head-sized.”

***

Colors.

There were colors, but no light.

Color don’t happen without light. That’s impossible, woman.

Impossible Woman?

Who’s that, sugar? Superman’s gal?

She remembered the colors. Blood orange tides flecked with gold and sliver, swimming across the black landscape of her eyelids. Instinctively, she reached for the soiled sheets to bunch up over her head. The colors meant she was back in Georgia, curled asleep on her shopworn mattress near the foot of Hunt’s Creek. They meant she’d pulled another dumb-dumb and left the window shade wide open again, and that her archenemy was now prowling on the other side, whistling down her sweet, yellow poison. In another moment she would open her eyes and feel the peeling red wave wash over her body. The burn would last for weeks.

Slowly, her eyes fluttered open. She was biting her lip, bracing for the anger of the dawn. But it was an illusion. The colors were gone, and that violent old star was off napping somewhere on the wrong end of the world. She tasted a bitter tang in the back of her mouth, and gulped it down.  She was outdoors, lying on the grass.  Waiting for the monster to arrive.

It was still midnight in the Garden.  The biennials were in full bloom, each column and row painstakingly sketched with sun-bleached yarn and long wooden stakes the color of new corn. Pale bouquets of umbels trembled like children under the blind, haunted eye of the moon. It’d been twenty-six years since she’d been here. Nothing had changed.

The ramshackle RV park hugged the tattered western fringe of Dexter County, a mile south of where Route 17 shattered into a jumble of jagged dirt paths and deserted barns.  Its name appeared on no map or sign she knew of, but all the folks who had ever lived and died there called it Bride’s Folly, and so Nancy called it that too.  Home was a rundown 56’ Stentwood trailer that Daddy Stark had bought off a colored carpenter for seventy-four dollars in the year she was born.

A generation had passed since Nancy had laid eyes on her Garden’s pristine square. She lay flat on her tummy in a patch of high weeds a few yards out, marveling at the coolness of the soil. Her bare toes dug into the dirt, absently testing a shard of beer glass there.

The sensation suddenly reminded her of the world behind, of torn patch dresses and late night stumblings in the dark.  Somewhere south of Nancy’s toe, men breathed whiskey out of paper bags and flung out their knotted fists at sins both real and imagined while women cackled drunkenly through broken, brown teeth. And everybody – absolutely everybody – was afraid of the sun tonight. Their animal souls cried out, knowing full well how the new day was already curling around the edge of the earth, slowly shining it’s flashlight on the wreckage of their lives.

Their Saturday night was getting shorter by the second, and Sunday would bring with it a hundred bright miseries and sober recriminations and the slow death that those things marked. But, for now, all Nancy could see was her Garden and their children, gently quavering under a healing dome of midnight.

They’d survived six summers together since that strange, vanished evening she’d discovered it.  It was worn-out whore of a thing then, a weedy patch on the far side of Murray’s Hill that was thick with matchsticks and ciggy butts and rotting aluminum cans. She’d spent that entire first summer nursing the soil back to health.

The book she’d used was pure prose, a hard monochromatic block of science from the county library that she followed down to the letter.  Nancy Stark dug deep, tilling with hoes and hands and yanking deep yellow weeds like hairs from a lion’s skull. She stirred the soil with stolen dung and potassium extract hauled seven sweltering miles from John McNamara’s family farm.

Since then she’d seen dry spells flatten the wet, succulent petals into brown paper, battled swarms of caterpee who chewed the rosette leaves so full of holes that by mid-July that they resembled the merciless symmetry of Rorschach tests.  The Garden had grown invincible through the years, tempered by fire, salt and the thousand murderous intentions of mice.  It had become an eternal shape on the horizon of her young life, a masterpiece even by the standards of those rich snoots up in Sylvan Hills: the sort of red-faced hens who bred gardenias and clucked over ten-penny ribbons at county fairs.  Of course, that kind would never come to see it. No kind would, and that was just as well. The Garden wanted only one lover, and that one was as pale and as poor as fistfuls of rice.

It had been a crop of Imperator carrots this summer, her first attempt to generate the brawny, orange root.  Each seed was a handpicked champion.  She remembered the day she’d found them, how she strolled like a Sunday lady up and down the rows of McGrudy’s Nursery, the wide, white brim of her hat slung low on her forehead to defend against the sunset.

Soon after, the healthiest forty were lined up like soldiers along the windowsill, where she drew surgical slits in their mericarps with Daddy Stark’s old hunting knife. Later that same night, she would steal out to her secret clearing at the edge of the park and plant them in shallow graves of crumbled cowshit and rich Georgian dirt.

Her work had paid off in late June. The growth factor had been shocking; a pubescent spurt that sent the leafy stems shooting up like the grass on a giant’s lawn. By August the umbels were brushing the tops of her budding bosoms.  She’d pulled up a handful, then, to prevent the taproots from squabbling over water.

Each had been a miraculous specimen, unaccountably plump and vibrant for something grown in the Folly’s hardscrabble womb. She remembered how good they’d felt in her hands, those hard lengths of tapered orange wood that begged to be tested against fingers and lips in the cramped, shadowy vault of her bedroom.

Now, the muck ringed under her colorless nails and stained her cotton dress with dark, earthy fingerprints. The nails would go unnoticed, but the dress would earn her proper ass-whuppin’ tomorrow. Daddy was a terror in the summers. With no work to be found, he would set about raising his daughter with a fervor that was downright biblical. Years later, she could sometimes still hear the dreadful, lonesome sound of that old trailer door slamming shut.

Tomorrow, he would command her to strip down to the raw, his shrill voice salted with malt liquor and bummed cigarettes. “All’it, girl,” he would shriek. “Every goddamn stitch!”  She would peel down, quick as a Friday night dance step.  Daddy would pace like a jungle thing as she bent spread-eagle over the kitchen table, the old leather belt a writhing, snapping viper in his hands.

The unspoken ritual. He’d wait for her to cry before he laid in, beg him for a mercy that could never, ever come.  Hot tears would glue her cheek flat to the cheap green vinyl, a sparkling shame ringing though her like a psalm.

She would cry and think about how goddamn shitty she was, how shitty the both of them were. Trash, trash, trash of the worst, whitest kind. To the world they were less than nothing, a handful of dog-eared polaroids and misdemeanors and old incest jokes. The Folly was a graveyard for a more polite, modern age; a place where the dead clung savagely to the edge of consciousness and the living mourned them with offerings of canned Thanksgiving peas and all the shapeless, stainless hand-me-downs of blond, middle class goddesses.  Nancy would think of those girls when the old man’s belt finally came slashing home, biting into her narrow, milky frame.  She would squeeze her eyes shut and conjure them, imagine violin lessons and marijuana picnics, sweet sixteen parties and blue, blue swimming pools the color of the sky.  She would ponder their football boyfriends with those thick, dazzling smiles, and the sloppy, monogrammed hearts scratched onto their Geometry textbooks.  She would dream of an endless line of them gliding down staircases in clean cotton dresses, smiling like movie stars as they descended into the air-conditioned paradise of their lives.

Daddy Stark was usually too drunk to count, and tomorrow would be no different. Tomorrow he would beat her and beat her and beat her to the point where her skin was a torn, stinging flag of red and white, until she had no more wind left to scream with.

He would be the one to cry, then; to cry and rant and ramble about Nancy’s fat, spiteful jezebel of a mama.  Cry and curse the governor and the president and the country and the whole rat-shit-eating world and the God who runned it.  This was the key part of their ritual for him: seeing her frail body slumped over the crooked kitchen table like so much spilled milk, shouting and cussin’ at the welts.  Calculating whether they were deep enough, whether he was spoiling her.

When he finally left, she would grab a tattered dishrag and a handful of ice from the freezer and limp gingerly back to her room to nurse her wounds. Wincing, she would stretch lengthwise across damp polyester sheets, her head and shoulders dangling over the foot of the mattress.

She would reach underneath there with both hands and feel for the cool, soothing texture of her dearest friends.  At fifteen, Nancy Stark no more had a teddy bear to hug than a pot to piss in.  But she had the books.  She had the words and the pages and the glossaries that mapped them all out in sterile white rows. Each one was a flat, perfect world of its own, singing the whos and whats and hows in the remote, soothing tones of science.

Tomorrow was the day her books would sing about chemistry. Tomorrow was the day that everything would change.

But that was tomorrow, and at this moment, lying in the dirt on the far side of Murray’s Hill, the side you couldn’t see from the road, it seemed like tomorrow might never come.

As far as Nancy knew, it would be midnight in the Garden forever, and this midnight in particular had belonged only to Nancy Stark. This was the night she would slay the Beast.

It had left all the telltale signs. The southwestern quarter was littered with red, half-eaten corpses and black pebbles of scat.  It was as though the thief intended to mock her with a display of almost human wastefulness.  This one was likely a lone male, out scavenging for a final hump before the autumn chill set in.

It had been precisely at midnight that Nancy had caught her first glimpse of movement along the ranks.  And she was here again now, pressed flat to the earth, her entire body as pale and as still as a cadaver.  She slowed her breath down to a trickle and scanned up and down the rows, her finger sagging heavily against the trigger of Daddy Stark’s air gun.  Nancy had laid the bait at sunset: a plump, sacrificial virgin with a woody taproot the length of her calf.  She’d done the Beast’s dirty work for it.  All it had to do now was chew.

There was another hard rustle. Then she saw it. The thing came loping out of the darkness in the distance, elongated haunches sawing mechanically under a tattered grey pelt. Its eyes were huge, alien orbs that gleamed white with the reflected radiance of the moon.

Nancy detected the thing’s soul in them: a cowardly, clockwork wraith of greed and letchery. The world loved him, in its naiveté. It worshipped his gentle bearing and his soft down, mistook his vegetarianism for morality. She knew him better. A tattered old book told the tale. He wore old voodoo charms for shoes and lived in the hollow filth of the world, hiding from the same yellow sun as her.  She knew he bred like an insect and that, like his brethren, he spent his nights stealing whatever wasn’t nailed down, and leaving the rest to rot.

There was a dark ancestral instinct at play in him, something no book could hope to describe. The rabbits of Bride’s Folly were like any other thing that walked or crawled there: the mothers would feed what young they could for as long as they could be bothered to do so.

The rest of the brood – the weak and the lame, the odd of pelt – were left for the buzzards. It was a very old rule, one that the Beast had learned young and well.

An ear so long it could hear a sinner’s thoughts pricked casually in her direction, correcting for a hundred hidden velocities as its owner limped gamely down the row.  Nancy watched it pause at the foot of the root, saw it rise suddenly to its hind legs. Its breath shot out in rapid, violent pants that convulsed every part of its body from the neck down.  Nancy leaned in with the rifle, drawing a bead on the monster’s miniature heart.

She hesitated, but only for a moment.

The air gun’s metal grip buzzed in her fingers as the pellet thumped out. The sound was small and hollow, barely distinguishable above the nattering of the crickets.

It was a true shot.  But, in the time it took for the sound to twist its way into Nancy’s human brain, the Beast was already gone, bounding safely back into the warm, dark void.

It was the Devil’s ear, she realized. It was long enough to eavesdrop on the future. Long enough, even, to hear the confessions of a bullet.  Nancy could wait a thousand nights and fire a thousand shots, and the result would never change. The gun would never kill it.

Poison, then, she thought.

Tomorrow, it’ll be the poison.

***

The jeep was toast. Xander stared gloomily at the burnt, black engine, silently praying that Sergeant Rock had managed to squeeze in an auto-shop class in high school.

Nah, he thought.

The guy was probably too busy getting laid.

He flapped the hood shut with a groan.  The bunker was a good ten miles out from the Romanian Border.  It was a broad, dreary hunk of Soviet era architecture that he thought could make a pretty compelling museum of Glad-We-Won-The-Cold-War-ness.   In a facility built to house sixty or so Commie Super Soldiers, there was only one toilet, and it was broken.  The walls were gray concrete slabs designed to bleed every last drop of warmth from the human soul.  Xander had seen cozier tombs then this.  Literally.

There was still no sign of Kennedy’s crew.  He allowed himself to toy with the notion that Andrew’s mystery pet had already gobbled them all up.  On the other hand, the gals were packing some serious firepower back there, and he kinda doubted they’d miss twice.  He didn’t get a clear look at the demon, but it seemed like a pretty big target.

Andrew.

I’m sorry, man.

A strange, foreign substance leaked out of Xander’s eyeball.  He dabbed it with a spare finger as he stormed back into the main barracks.  There was still a ton of work to be done.  The jeep may not have come with a how-to manual, but Dawn’s relay did.  Of course, he had no clue what it would do or who it would call when he turned it on, but he supposed anything would be better than just waiting around to get massacred.

In the Captain’s quarters, Giles was sitting under a pool of electric light that hummed down from a single overhead bulb.  Xander had managed to get the generator on-line pretty damn fast, and now he was regretting it.  He’d been amazed at how much the last five years had seemed to age the man, but tonight the Watcher seemed positively ancient.  Loose piles of wrinkles cascaded down his forehead, almost hiding the bare blue eyes that stared directionless into the darkness.  The vaguely Irish twinkle was gone from them now, replaced by a weight that was almost magnetic, like the gravity of moons.

“Hey,” Xander said, knocking on the open door.  “Sorry to interrupt this whole Brooding Mastermind thing you got going.” Giles didn’t budge.  He was doing something strange with his hands, wringing the palms over and over. “Any luck yet with the... you know?”  Xander tapped his ear.

Giles answered without looking up.  “No. The network is still down. Some kind of interference. From the mountains, perhaps.”

Xander nodded dully.  He never really understood the whole “WatcherNet” concept. When they rolled it out last year he had steadfastly forbidden anyone on the Ipswich ‘Mouth to join up.  It wasn’t the spooky brain implants that bugged him.  Well, it wasn’t just those, although they were pretty damn skeevy, too.  After all the gang’s experiences with mind-control rays and chipped vamps in the old days, one would think that Giles would have learned that monkeying around inside people’s skulls is pretty much the definition of Major No-No.

But, all the tedious ethical issues aside, the idea just seemed a little.   Well.   Insane.  These days, the world was already bathed in so much radiation from wi-fi and cell phones that all their kids would probably wind up with fourteen toes.  But retinal cameras and bionic earlobes seemed like the worst kind of campy sci-fi crap to him, and that was coming from a guy who’d once been turned into a giant, two-legged hyena.  And then, of course, there were all the lame puns. Like, suddenly everything had to have the word “Watcher” in front of it.  WatcherVision and WatcherWiki and the WatcherMobile.  It all made him wanna WatcherPuke.

As Xander entered, a shape stirred in a dim corner of the office.  Leaning through the darkness, he glimpsed a small form writhing on a cot.  He stood dumbstruck as a grey woolen blanket slid casually to the floor, revealing an unbroken line of bare flesh.  For a fleeting moment his eye moved on its own, tracing every forbidden curve.

A hundred simultaneous emotions ripped through his brain.  For some reason, Xander picked Rage.

“Nuh,” he shouted, blushing like a bandit and jabbing a finger at the Bad, Bad Man in the chair. “Nuh. Naked!” Giles glared back at him as though he’d just lost his marbles.

“What?”

“Why?  She?”  The thought turned to scrambled eggs as his eye drifted back to the bottle-blonde goddess in the bed. “Naked,” he finally yelled. “Naked HER!”

Giles glanced in Buffy’s direction, and something seemed to rip apart inside him.  Xander flinched as he watched the man rise and shuffle slowly towards her.

“No!” Xander roared.  “You. Stay back from. Naked!”

Giles kept going, limping to the foot of her makeshift bed.  Without making a sound, he knelt down and replaced the fallen bedsheets, tucking them into the soft crook where the woman’s neck met the curve of her shoulders.  He watched in awe as the Watcher smoothed a mop of yellow locks from Buffy’s face, his brow knitting sharply to crush back a tear.  Xander’s face reddened all over again, recognizing his own stupidity.

“Is she… Is she alright?” he asked.

“No,” said Giles, his voice ground down to a hard whisper.  “She’s not.  She has… some kind of fever, I think. And her... her... head.”  He trailed off, strangling a sob in his throat. Xander watched in awe as the librarian stiffened, his fingers tenderly grazing Buffy’s pale cheek.  His shoulders were shaking, head trembling like a stroke victim who was trying to speak one, final word.  The old bastard was fighting two battles at once, Xander realized, and losing both of them.  He thought it was very British of him.

When Giles finally broke, things got ugly fast. Ninety percent of the time, Rupert seemed to be the world’s most lifelike robot, a wind-up toy of mystical factoids and parched English wit.  But he was different with her.  Everyone was different with her.  She had saved the world ten times with her bare hands, but Xander knew her real powers appeared in no dusty old tome or legend.   She could turn monsters into men with a sideways glance, raise the dead with a kiss.  For her alone, the Watcher wept.

It was horrible to watch; the white jaw working silently on its hinge, tears funneling down through the broken cliffs and valleys of his face as he fought for every breath.  Near the round hump of her shoulder, his wrinkled hands were clasped so tightly that Xander expected to see blood trickle out between the fingers.

Is he praying? Do people still pray?

Xander felt a cool wind rustle through him.  He tried to imagine himself going to his old friend to comfort him. He would tell him that forgiveness was real, that he’d felt it happen and that it was more powerful than a whole library full of magic tricks, more intoxicating even than love.  He would tell him that, or whatever other crazy, impossible lie popped into his head.  It’s what families did, when the chips were down. And their chips were most definitely down.

A kinetic urge swelled inside his chest.  He suddenly wanted to kneel too, to beg the stupid Commie concrete ceiling for a second chance.  He wanted his family back and he was willing to pray for it. And if he thought he had the strength, or the right, he would have.

Instead, Alexander Harris quietly turned, stepped out into the hallway, and closed the door behind him.

Chapter 14:  Lost and Found

Miriam Kennedy-Corliss wasn’t happy.

The tank treads burned a ragged line across the Carpathian foothills.  Kennedy’s hefty M-9 Abrahms lead the way, guns loaded for bear.  An armored troop transport brought up the rear, warehousing twelve of her best Chakau’Ri assassins.  The rest of her column was a pack of nine slender Iranian Wolf-Spiders: all-terrain vehicles fitted out for maximum speed and maneuverability down in the twisting mountain passes.  Their quarry had moved faster than seemed possible, given its size, and it had taken her people a full four minutes to get their fucking asses in gear.

Do I have to do everything myself?, she wondered.

She popped the hatch and mounted the gunnery turret, a hard curse peeling off her lips. Night was on the way.  The sun had already sunk to a red halo around the switchbacks, and bright blades of twilight were now lancing out between the gaps.  Brimming her eyes with a hand, she conducted a rough survey of the landscape.  Gnarled, bare branches clawed up through the slanted earth, like ancient fingers grasping at the eternal fog.

She had chosen this terrain carefully. Lord Dracula’s curse had been like a premium life insurance policy for The Cause, something to keep the Council’s hag squad out of their hair. Magical bullshit didn’t work here.

Or, wasn’t supposed to, at least. Yet, that thing had somehow broken through. She imagined the monster must be having a good laugh right now.  It had toyed with them, humiliated The Cause in their own headquarters.  Humiliated her in front of her troops. And then, just when she’d had it in her sights, the beast just trotted off into the sunset like a giant green thoroughbred, with Buffy's latest boy-toy and - if Lt. Braxton was to believed - that little moron Andrew Wells in tow.

And, of course, in all the confusion, Barbie and the Head Peepster had flown the damn coop. She should have slaughtered them both back in Italy.  Now, things were getting complicated.

Fucking Nancy, she thought. Some days, Kennedy regretted ever getting mixed up with that walking recessive gene in the first place.  Then again, the icy wastes of the Russian steppe hadn’t exactly been an ideal place to network.  You took what you could get out there, and Nancy had the military connections and the balls to use them.  So to speak.

And, of course there were all of those wonderful toys she made.  There was true genius buried deep inside the woman’s psychosis, she knew. In time such flights of creativity might force Kennedy to destroy her, but for the moment, she would be classical in her governance.  History taught that every successful revolution required someone like Dr. Stark: passionate, resourceful and, if necessary, willing to sacrifice innocent lives for the good of The Cause.  No matter how badly the little freak screwed up along the way, Nancy was still indispensable.

And gorgeous, she mused.  One day, she was definitely gonna have to tap that ass.

“General,” cried a tinny voice. “The trail’s back ma’am! Heading is south by southwest.” A massive Clydesdale cantered alongside the tank, the rider sneering up at her from the saddle.  The cadet’s name was Juliana...something.  She was a good little scout, but otherwise a total waste of space.  Just another insipid lollipop with a bad temper and zero vision.  The army was full of raw material like Juli, aching to be sculpted into a vanguard of the New World. Kennedy spat a fresh set of coordinates down to her driver, tugged her beret low across her brow. The tank roared west down a snaking switchback, chomping a fallen tree in half. She suddenly wished she’d remembered to bring her cigars.

They were racing the clock, now.  If those little bastards managed to reach the border, there’d be no way to stop them from getting to England and warning the rest of their loser pals.  Which would mean she‘d have to switch to Plan B.

And Plan B was so very, very messy.

***

This isn’t happening.  This isn’t happening.  This isn’t happening.

Andrew held on for dear life as Melvin galloped headfirst over the ridge.  He clung to a mound on the demon’s broad, goopy back.  The flesh there wormed up between his fingers like a pile of melted grasshoppers.

Don’t look down. Don’t look down.

Up wasn’t much better. The night screamed by like a plane crash as they barreled into the darkness. A few feet in front of him, Spike was whooping up a storm. The vampire steered with a pair of overgrown antennae, his calves gripping the ridges of Mevin’s spine like a champion equestrian.

“Yaaahhh,” he bellowed, and clapped his heels against the monster’s scaly hide. The mechanical voice was fizzy and hollow now, like the microphone was busted. “Get on, ya overgrown ponceZzzzzzpp! Ain’t payin yazZZzzby the hour!”

“Dude, if you call me that one more time, I am SO going to eat your skin.” Melvin made a sharp turn and bounded ferociously down the face of a steep, rocky vale. Once again, the world around Andrew became a roller coaster of terrifying smells and sights. He fought heroically to keep his lunch where it belonged.

“BzzZZzzttalright back there, Andrew,” Spike asked.

Amazingly enough, he was. Again. It was a little freaky, the way it kept working out like that. The courtyard had been pretty chock full of sharp, clean Andrew-sized deaths. He remembered girls everywhere, running and shouting and waving all kinds of crazy swords. There was shooting too, and even a giant, exploding truck. It was like one of those summer action movies that would star Thomas Jane as a disgraced FBI agent on the run from a murder charge, and Jessica Alba as his tough-yet-sexy partner with a checkered past. The only problem was, Andrew wasn’t either of those people. He was just Andrew. He should be, like, super, duper dead by now. It’s not like it would even matter that much.

He knew he wasn’t exactly Mr. Popularity, what with the whole being-an-ex-archenemy and all. Andrew figured he was kinda like Spike that way, except without that sexy, smoldering Brit-rocker thing he had going on. He got the feeling they’d been tolerated mainly because the gang didn’t really know what else to do with them. On the one hand, they weren’t Evil enough to kill. Yet, they also weren’t Good enough to, say, invite out for a frosty mug of hard cider. And the day that Andrew and the vampire met their bitter, potentially special effects-related deaths, it was a safe bet nobody would be especially broken up about it.

Except for Buffy. She wouldn’t cry or anything. She was too tough for that kind of stuff. But she would cry on the inside. Buffy was always pretty cool about not judging people for the little things. Like, say, a murder or two.

I mean nobody’s perfect right?

The thought evaporated as Melvin plunged into a thick tangle of trees. A gauntlet of bare, pointy branches tore angrily at the riders as the beast scrambled deeper into the brush. Andrew ducked low along Melvin’s slimy spine, screamed as a thorny shoot raked across his thigh.

“What the zzztbloody hell do you think you’re doingZZZP!”

“Shortcut,” Melvin muttered. “Don’t be a baby.”

“Hello!  Vampire here! Diving headfirst into thousands of pointy wooden sticks s'not exactly my cuppa!”

“Oh yeeaaaahh,” replied the monster dryly. “Jeez, how insensitive of me.” Spike let out a little growl as a white shaft sliced into his bicep. “Look just quit yer bitchin’ for a minute, half-breed. We’re almost there.”

“Almost where?!” Spike barely had the chance to finish the word before they popped out of the thicket into a wide, manmade clearing. A weird kind of fort-thing stretched out before them, crammed between two mountains.

It didn’t look so friendly. Then again, what did these days?

***

The girl was still breathing.

That much was clear. Exactly that much.  The gash at the base of her skull had already healed over, the shattered bone knitting to a smooth familiar curve. The hair around it was stained brown with blood. She had stirred only once. Whether it was a dream or a nightmare was unclear. Rupert Giles wondered if the girl even noticed the difference anymore.

But she breathes, he thought. She breathes, and that’s what counts, old man. He smoothed the bedclothes shut along the outline of Buffy’s twenty-six year old body. He kissed her forehead, a dozen old war wounds groaning as he bent.

Old man. He felt it happening, finally. There had been a time it wasn’t so. Sunnydale had been a veritable obstacle course of monsters and mayhem, and he thought he’d done quite well for himself, considering. But the years had not been kind in London. He’d indulged in far too much black pudding and Guinness stout and not enough training. Their workouts, he realized, had been more important for him than for her towards the end.

Joints creaking, Rupert Giles crept out into the main barracks. Xander sat at his makeshift workshop, fiddling with Dawn’s gadget. Perched upright on the table, it looked strangely beautiful, like some sort of clockwork wildflower. As Xander touched a tiny sensor, a halo of blue lights flared up at the thing’s skeletal tip, accompanied by a low electric whine.

“Eureka,” Xander announced. “I did it!”

“Did what?”

“Well, I’m not sure, exactly. But you have to admit that was kinda cool.”

Rupert grunted, and gazed thoughtfully at the slot of night sky streaming in through the lone barracks window.

“You did the right thing, man,” Xander said.

“What?”

“Leaving him, I mean. He knew the risks. I would’ve wanted you guys to do the same thing if it was me.”

He glared at the boy for a moment, suddenly realizing that they were talking about Andrew Wells.  He nodded slowly, but said nothing. Xander still hadn’t mentioned the Man in Black, and that was probably for the best. Giles really didn’t feel like having that discussion right now. Or ever, really.

“What are you going to do about them,” Xander added, quickly changing the subject.

“The Slayers, you mean?” Giles shook his head sadly. He’d turned the notion over and over since his first night in Romania, but still couldn’t quite get a handle on it. It seemed that the situation had gone far past any censure the Council could mete out. Suddenly, this had become about survival, no matter the cost. “We can talk about that when we get back to London.”

“If, you mean.”

“Yes. If.”

Still staring out into the black void of the bunker’s quad, Giles saw something twist in the moonlight. Near a patch of foliage, the bulky shadow of a hillside seemed to come screaming to life. Before he could so much as gasp, a huge shape was charging out across the valley. It was headed right towards them.

“Xander,” he managed to say.

But he was already gone.

***

She awoke with a start. The bunny was gone. The room was strange, a small office of some kind. There was only one window. It was full of stars.

Wait.

Bunny?

Her senses returned; slowly at first then in a raging flood. She saw the Castle in stark red relief, slipping into the distance of her life. She heard herself crying out his name.

Her arms and legs sprang up like a trap. Before she knew what she was doing, Buffy was rolling sideways and landing on the floor with a big, naked flump. Clutching a sore nose, she scrambled to her knees and spun wildly to get her bearings. The place was some kind of gray, bureaucratic tomb, full of abandoned paperwork and dust. It reminded her of the visits to Dawn’s social worker in the old days. An old motivational poster loomed in front of her, advising her to “CTOЙKA.”

She spent less than a second thinking about it before she slung the blanket around her shoulders and barged straight out the door. Her eyes probed the shadows for signs of her old teacher. She had something to give to him before she began the long trek back to the castle. It was not an apple.

The barracks was underwhelming: row upon row of glum, spartan bunk-beds that seemed designed to warehouse an army of evil clones.  It looked deserted, but something was amiss.  She zeroed in on a small device sitting on a workbench in the far corner of the room.  It was blinking.  And speaking.

“Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisci velit...” The thing blathered on mindlessly, to no one in particular. She drew close, frowning at its delicate metal form. The sound was a vaguely feminine drone, the same kind of pre-recorded robo-voice you heard when you tried to pay a late cable bill over the phone. The words sounded familiar to her, though. She strained to remember where she’d heard them before. “Et palleus,” chirped the thing. “Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nasceteur ridiculus mus.”

A ring of blue and yellow lights twinkled hypnotically at the tip of a metallic stem as she drew near. Cautiously she reached towards the thing. Her fingertips flinched as they breached a field of angry electrons.

No time for touchy feely, Summers.

Daylight’s on the way.

Buffy slid open the wide drawer under a nearby bed, revealing a dusty retangle of crisp gray fabric. She dropped the sheet and unfurled the garment like a flag, quickly measuring it against her bare chest. The machine cut sleeves hung down past her knees. Taking a furtive sideways glance, she donned the billowy shirt and began dashing from bunk-to-bunk, frantically searching for the one that had belonged to the World’s Shrimpiest Soldier. She finally found his drawer near the end of the row, and tugged on a pair of his old, cotton-blend trousers and matching blouse. The combat boots were a little too big to be useful, so, she double-cuffed the pant legs above her bare calves instead. A wool military topcoat completed the outfit, and Buffy grunted as she belted it snugly to her waist. She ignored a sudden, embarrassing urge to locate a mirror.

“Aliquam felis!” blurted the little machine suddenly. As she spun to face it, the dull percuss of a gunshot echoed somewhere in the broad dark pan outside the window. Squinting into the blackness, she could make out two human shapes writhing at the foot of the outpost’s perimeter. Just beyond them, a huge shadow shambled back and forth outside the tall metal fence. Another pair of shots rung out in quick succession, followed by an indiscernible shout of dismay.

A moment later, a massive floodlight blazed to life, illustrating the scene in shocking, microscopic detail.

She felt her breath catch midway down her throat. A mysterious warmth flooded every inch of her body as she flung herself out into the chill autumn night.

On the horizon, a nightmarish being was rearing and snorting under a cone of vivid, white light. Its grim rider slid the reins masterfully to one side, his black shape glistening like a pool of freshly spilled blood.

She ran to him.

***

“Um,” said Xander. It was the best he could muster. Whatever it was he was looking at seemed to defy whole dictionaries. “Um,” he said again.

“Ehhhhhhhh,” the Watcher replied.

The thing was...well, “ugly” wasn’t really the right word. In his line of work, it was easy to become blasé about stuff that is merely ugly. On average, Xander saw about ten ugly things a day. Twenty on weekends. In point of fact, the entire concept of “ugly” had started to wear thin for him lately.

But this was.

Different. The thing was.

That is, parts of it were... Sticking up out of the...

With the whole writhing, goopy (handmouthfoottongue?)

And, that yellow stuff leaking from its...

Oh.

Oh God.

Is that a NIPPLE?

Giles puked first.  This was a small – and, in all likelihood temporary – victory.  But the Brit had been riding him so hard all afternoon, Xander decided to take what he could get.  He patted the old man’s back sharply.  “It’s okay, kid”, he said. “Happens to a lot of us the first time out.”

Giles glared at him. “Bloody comedian, are you?” he whispered. “You see what you’ve gone and done?”

“Look at the size of it,” Xander heard himself say, suddenly spellbound.  “I mean, and that’s just the head. I.. I think.”

The thing twisted slowly, revealing an anatomy meant for nightmares and botched surgery TV specials. Xander watched in horrified fascination as it spoke, the pair of huge scabby lips worming around a string of deep, oddly musical words.

“Well, hello to you, too, guy,” it crooned. “Jesus!  Did everybody in this dimension take an Asshole-Pill today?”

Before Xander could answer, the black rider steered the creature sideways, revealing a pale, shivering blonde who clung nervously to its back.  Xander allowed himself a sigh of relief.  Then he threw up too.

Giles rose stiffly beside him. The old man’s features were pinched shut, now, his narrowed eyes piercing into Andrew’s cyborg-savior like a pair of British lasers. It felt like a showdown from a cheesy old western. Xander desperately wanted to break the silence, but the longer he stared at the bizarre image in front of him, the more unlikely it seemed that he would ever have anything interesting to say again. Nothing could top this.

Suddenly, there was a sound of tiny, bare footsteps. Before he could react, Buffy was standing next to him, her white breath panting out a single word.

“Spike,” she said.

Xander's head snapped sideways. “Buffy,” he said, then whirled quickly around. “Spike?”

“Buffy,” gasped Giles.

“Giles,” Buffy growled.

“Giles,” Xander asked, and pointed up. “Spike?”

“Spike,” Giles groaned.

The rider popped off his helmet, revealing an old, familiar face. “Buffy,” Spike said.

“Spike,” Xander shouted.

“Harris...”

“Xander...”

“Watcher...”

“Buffy...”

Andrew suddenly flung up his hand.  “Ooh. Andrew.”

The demon cut loose with a long, weary sigh. “Are you sure you guys saved the world?”

Chapter 15:  Three Excellent Questions

“I warn you,” Andrew intoned, his nostrils red and flaring. “Consider your next move very, very carefully.  'Tis a matter of life and death.”

A clawed, quivering hand angled slowly through the darkness. Andrew drew in a sharp breath as he watched the misshapen paw swivel in mid-air, then plummet towards the black matrix betwixt them. His eyes widened anxiously as it peeled back a slender tile, twisted it slowly skyward.

A chill hush descended over the room. Melvin tapped a finger impatiently.

Flashing a sly grin, Andrew suddenly flipped over a card: a moon-walking dinosaur skeleton wearing a single, silver glove. Without missing a beat, he topped the beast with a “Famous Defense” Power Keeper card. Melvin roared a stream of profanities, the ghastly tangle of heads snapping and twitching in unison.  “Lucifer’s sweet ass hole!” he roared.

“Hey, hey, hey,” Andrew sputtered, slashing a finger across his throat. “Ix-nay on the Elling-yay, mister.”

“Aww c’mon... seriously, where the heck did that thing come from?”

“What did we just talk about? M-O-M, remember?”

“Uhhhhh...” The demon furrowed an enormous brow. “Manage... our minuses?”

Andrew’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Yes, young Padawan. Manage. Our. Minuses. A game of cunning and imagination, ‘Battle Monsters’ is.” He fanned his deck out masterfully across the dining table. “All the top tournament players keep their weakest monsters and their most potent spells in reserve, patiently waiting for the moment when they can be combined for maximum bad-ass-ed-ness. In this case, all my Wacko Jacko-saur needed was a defensive spell strong enough to nullify the powers of your Hanging Judge.”

“But, what if I used my Infinite Dragnet of Doom?”

“An interesting proposition... but, no. No, I would have merely countered with my Mindless Legions enhancement and it’d be bye-bye Judgie-boy.” Andrew tapped his chin thoughtfully. “But this... all this is academic. You must unlearn what you have learned.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. I’m trying but...”

“No!  Do, or do not. There is no try.”

“Uhhhhh...”

Andrew felt a surge of emotion ripple through him. “Luminous beings are we! Not this crude matter.” He patted one of the demon’s slimy tendrils.  Instantly regretted it.

Melvin snorted at him. “Dude, how come you talk like that? You get dropped on your head or something?”

“Huh? Oh, that. That’s nothing, nothing. Just a little something I picked up from my travels.  In the Orient.”

Melvin shrugged and went back to shuffling the sad remnants of his deck. “Man, they’ve been in there for a long time, huh,” he muttered. “Maybe you should check on them. They seemed kinda... I dunno. Mad.”

Andrew sighed wistfully.  “Oh silly, silly satanic hellspawn.  I know it may appear that way to the casual observer.”  He stood, heart swelling with pride as he gazed across the access road towards the rundown army bedroom-thingee they’d been so gently advised to vacate.  “Yet, beyond those doors are gathered four of the greatest champions the world has ever known.”

Melvin yawned and blinked wearily at the window. “Uh-huh. Yeah, you keep saying that... ”

“Oh, they may ‘quarrel’ from time to time,” Andrew continued, his  voice suddenly ripe with a Shakespearian swagger. “But in the end they will always stand united against the hideous forces of darkness... um, no offense... and emerge from the battlefield hand-in-glorious-hand, forged together in the bonds of duty, friendship and flawless, immortal, storybook love.”

“Wow. Seriously?”

“Oh yes, my oily ally” Andrew replied, clutching his fist dramatically. “In fact, I suspect they have already set aside their petty differences, and are even now in the midst of plotting the cunning stratagem that will bring our enemies to their very knees...”

***

“YOU! Are UN! BELIEVABLE!”  The Slayer was actually shivering with rage, now. Her eyes bounced around the room, unconsciously searching for something old and precious to destroy.

“I’m unbelievable?” Giles replied, his own voice leaping several decibels. “Well, that’s BLOODY RICH! Considering the PRESENT, BLOODY COMPANY!” He jabbed a finger at Spike, who had been reclining silently in the shade of a nearby bunk for the last ten minutes.

Buffy pounced, snarling like a jungle cat. Xander intercepted her at the halfway mark, offering his empty palms as a shield. “Stop,” he managed to say.

“Don’t make me hurt you, Xander!”

“Oh, what?!  So you can hurt him instead?!" he cried.  "Don’t you think you’ve done enough of THAT already!” It stalled her momentarily, and Xander seemed to sense the opening.  “Besides. Giles has a little bit of a point, here, right? I mean how do we even know he is who he says he is?”

“He is who I say he is. That should be good enough.”

The vampire's voice came creaking out of the darkness. “Any chance I get a say in all this?” he whispered.

Rupert slammed a table with his fist, freshly enraged. “You’re DAMN RIGHT you do! And you had better start saying it fast if you enjoy sleeping with your eyes closed, love.”

“Keep talking like that,” Buffy said, “and I’ll break your jaw.”

Giles seemed to realize he was riding a very fine edge, backed off a step. “Buffy,” he said, forcing an air of rationality into his voice. “Look, you’ve obviously been through quite a bit of... that is, I’m only trying to...”

She cut him off, cackling. “No, no, I get it, now!  You’re only trying to protect me, right?  Why, how incredibly noble of you, Giles!  Guess that’s why you never mentioned Kennedy’s Bitch Army, right?  Or Willow’s little whatever-the-hell-she’s-doing!  Or HIM!”  The last word practically exploded off her lips, shattering into a hurricane of unsettling echoes.

A fresh flame shot up in the Watcher’s eyes. “I don’t know how many times I have to say it, Buffy, but I did not know about HIM!”

Xander threw up his arms.  “Okay stop, everybody, STOP!”  Scowling, he stormed the vampire’s makeshift nest. “SPIKE!  WHEN?!  WHAT?!  WHEN?!”

An immense hush swept over the room. Buffy shot Spike a glassy look as he rolled slowly upright in bed, groaning from the effort. His drawn, white features pierced the shadows like a phantom as he spoke.  “Right.  Well, if y’want the abridged version...” He started counting off fingers. “Saved the bloody world.  Died.  Got brought back. Saved the bloody world.”  Ignoring everyone’s goggling stares, he clapped his hands once and sank back into the darkness.

“Um,” said Xander. “Think we might need a bit more detail there, bub.”

“Agreed,” added Giles sharply.  “You’ll forgive me for saying so, but that sounds like a load of utter...”

“Giles,” Buffy snarled.  Steeling herself, she took a step towards the bunk.  She could feel his eyes track her approach, and tried to meet them softly.  “Spike,” she said, so low that only he could possibly hear. “Can’t you just tell me what happened?”

“What’s the bloody difference?”

She frowned. “There isn’t any ‘bloody difference’.   I’m not… I just...”  He was only a few yards away.  She could make out one of the gloved hands pawing at the hole in his breastplate, nursing a wound there.  “Did you really die?”

There was a long silence. “Yeah.  Yeah, I died.”

Somewhere behind her, she heard Giles groan.  She ignored him this time, took another tentative step forward.  “Well, I mean.  How long have you been aliv... back.   How long have you been... back?”

She waited.  The vampire emitted a low, bitter laugh.

“Pointless,” sniffed Giles. “It’s pointless. He’s never going to tell us. Even if he is William the Bloody...”

“Giles," she said. "SHUT! UP!” Spike was up and moving even before she could finish that last word. Displaying a burst of preternatural speed, he made a beeline for the front doors, blew them wide with a boot. “Hey!  Where are you going?”

“To sleep. Can’t catch a wink with you barmy hens clucking about.” He paused with his hand on the latch and shot Buffy a venomous stare. “Mind you don’t follow me, love.”

Then he was gone, the door almost slamming off its hinges in his wake. The remaining trio froze momentarily, each lost in his own heavy orbit.  Buffy smeared a hand across freshly damp cheeks, snorted back a sob.  Xander sat heavily on a trunk, picked a staring contest with the floor.  Giles seemed content to just play dead. He didn’t move a muscle.

“You have no right to treat him that way,” Buffy finally said, to no one in particular.

“He is dead.  Remember?  Dust.  You said so yourself.”

“So was I, once.”

“That was different, and you know it.”

“I know it’s him.  I can feel it.”

“Why?  Because you shagged him?”

That one stopped her cold. She studied the Watcher’s weathered face for a moment.  Hit the rewind button.  Made sure she’d heard right.  “Excuse me?”

“I’m through playing this game with you, Buffy,” the Watcher groused.  “You’re an adult now.  High time you put away your toys and started growing up, yes?”

She felt something hot slither to life in the pit of her stomach.  “Toys,” she repeated thoughtfully.

Rupert Giles crossed his arms and sniffed, suddenly old-womanish.  “Fine.  Perhaps it was slightly more at the end, but whatever that was is gone, now.  And for all we know, that thing out there is some sort of trap.”

“Giles,” Xander sighed.  “C’mon, don’t do this, man.  Please.”

“I mean, you’re not exactly a neutral party in this, Buffy,” Giles continued.  “Are you?”

“Neutral party,” Buffy murmured, nodding her head in amazement.  She crept closer, prompting Xander to launch into his ridiculous Slayer keep-away routine again.

“And I’m sorry, but I’m not prepared to let your guilty conscience get us all killed.”  The Watcher’s old arrogance had returned full flush.  He was standing arrow-straight.   For the first time in a decade, he seemed to tower over her.

“Why are you like this?” she whispered softly. “He saved all of us.”

“Mmm.  Yes.  Quite accidentally, as I recall...”

“He has a soul.”

“So did Hitler!”

It was her turn to pour on the super-speed this time, feet barely grazing the floor as she closed the gap.  In an instant she had the Watcher pinned to the wall, hands scrambling dangerously close to his jugular.  Xander pounced, struggled frantically to peel her off.

“Andrew,” Giles gasped finally.  “Andrew knew he was back... told me... in the castle...”  The Watcher stared blankly as she released her grip, his face hardening into an unreadable mask.

“Andrew,” she repeated, feeling oddly shaken by the notion.  “That’s a lie. He wouldn’t...”  She glanced at Xander, but he was no help at all.  Her old friend seemed more exhausted then anything else.  And she caught a twinge of something darker there.

Was it jealousy?

“Acta est fabula,” chirped a distant metallic voice. “Plaudite!”

***

Buffy padded quietly down the trail, her bare feet smarting on bits of rock as she went.  Silhouettes of mountains loomed in the distance, carving jagged black heartbeats through a firmament of stars.

It hadn’t taken much squeezing to get the full story.  Truth be told, Andrew seemed relieved and a little thrilled to finally tell it, despite the somewhat less-than-amused demeanor of his audience.  They had listened in stunned silence as he recounted Angel’s version of the events, how the amulet had arrived by mail at Wolfram & Hart headquarters and squirted out a familiar vampire in non-corporeal form.

Some of the tale had been wrenching, and Buffy had shielded her eyes when Andrew spoke of the vampire’s severed hands.  Other parts were just plain weird.  She had the feeling that Andrew was purposefully leaving things out, or not explaining them the right way, or something. She let it all pass. He seemed nervous enough, and there was a tenderness in the telling that made it sound a lot like truth.

Eventually, Giles began to fill in the blanks from the Council’s perspective - however lame and incomplete that seemed to be.  Still, Buffy listened intently, taking care to remember the Englishman’s recent flexibility with the facts.  His explanation of the ‘Senior Partners’, for instance, wasn’t the least bit logical, nor was his threadbare account of the Circle of the Black Thorn.  The info-overload was somewhat dizzying.  The same names kept popping up over and over.  Some were familiar, others not so much.  There had been casualties - Cordy and Wes, and someone named Charles Gunn.

There were lots of dead bad guys, too.  He rattled their names off like a grocery list, but none of them rung any bells. There was a lawyer named McDonald who’d left Wolfram & Hart for a time, and had offered the Watcher’s Council certain mysterious services during his absence.  There was something called a ‘Shanshu’ that Rupert Giles was either unable or unwilling to explain.  And, of course, there was an earthquake in L.A. - the Big One, the one that made all the news.  Her heart sank when she heard it mentioned again. She remembered the brief, strange call the evening after, remembered that tone in Angel’s voice when he said everything was “okay” that said ‘Everything is the exact, polar opposite of okay.’  She had almost gone to him, then. Almost.

In the end, the details hardly seemed to matter. There was a prophecy. There was an apocalypse. There was a fight.

Wasn’t there always?

The Watcher’s tale stopped there. Whatever kind of sources he had in L.A. apparently hadn’t survived to tell the rest.  He’d looked directly at her then, his eyes threatening tears.  He swore once again that he didn’t know, and promised he wouldn’t have told her if he did.  She thought it was very British of him.

Andrew’s small voice was barely audible when she’d stood to leave.  “I felt so bad,” he whimpered.  “And it never stopped, Buffy. The feeling bad part. But I promised...”

Now, she felt miraculously small and delicate moving through the rough Romanian landscape. Her breath shot out in pinched white puffs as she scouted the rim for signs of the vampire. Her mind swam with memories and vague, unfinished stories.

Too much to process. Always had been. Kinda why she’d left in the first place.  As the One and Only Slayer, she’d always taken more of a point-and-click approach to the job: Bad Guy come. Slayer fight Bad Guy.  Bye-Bye Bad Guy.   The Awakening had changed that little math problem forever.  The Chosen Ones hailed from all walks of life, all backgrounds. They spoke dozens of languages, formed scores of nasty little cliques and subcultures.  Voted on stuff.  It was a lot like she remembered high school being, and it wasn’t long before Buffy Summers began to feel like an outsider all over again.

Of course, they would’ve never said so to her face.  The Legend of Buffy Summers loomed large over Faith’s army, like a shorter, blonder Mount Rushmore.  But it became increasingly clear that the girls were on their own adventure, now, and it was very different than the one of the problem child who burned down a school, and her band of misfit geeks.

Rome had helped a little. Those first months at the villa introduced her to a new kind of warmth, the countryside weaving its soft spell on her. The evenings had been particularly nice; the two sisters carousing in the quiet, rustic parlor, Dawn practicing her Italian and Buffy practicing her wine.  Following an old, uniquely European custom, she’d gradually learned how to exchange happiness for comfort.  Before long, eating had become as important as breathing, and whenever the two would go out dress-hunting, she’d quietly revel in having plumped up a pleasant size or two.

But, soon enough, even the shopping became a dreary chore.  What had begun as mad, giggling raids on the Via Borgognona eventually cooled to a steady, selective drumbeat of acquisition. Catalog stuff. Web stuff.  Before long, their home was piled high with the finest silverware, the most luxurious fabrics, the French-est designs. Weeks flew by, the days blended. Little by little the Summers sisters began to inhabit their strange new lives, and Buffy rarely felt anything more or less than content.

Then one sunny afternoon, in the sixth month of her self-imposed exile, everything changed forever. She had begun to remember.

It all started innocently enough. They’d been picking through a cramped boutique on the Piazza di Spagna, searching for the perfect espresso machine.  The girl had fallen in love with the bitter black bean during her downtown boy-hunting excursions, and she had a birthday coming up.  As Dawn perused a line of matching drinkware, Buffy tried to practice her butchery of the Italian language with a cute store clerk.  While they chatted, he’d made a passing remark about Buffy’s lovely young companion, and asked for her name.

She’d stared at the girl for what felt like an eternity. And didn’t have a clue.

Over the next few weeks, the memories returned: slowly at first, then in red, raging tides. It was Hemery that had spoiled it, really. She had kept trying to place her sister in her life back then, recounting the days she had strolled the school’s wide, white hallways. But the piece named “Dawn” simply would not fit into the puzzle of L.A.

She’d remembered one blazing September afternoon in particular, how her blouse stuck to her still annoyingly flat chest.  How she had squatted on the curbside with a frizzy-haired brat named Halley Winterbottom, choking on her first-and-last-ever joint.  There were no such things as monsters or destinies that afternoon. They were just a couple of California teens, swapping hormone-drenched gripes about how sucky it was being an “only child.”  For whatever reason, the memory of that afternoon struck hard in her and refused to let go.  Birthday parties arrived next; then Christmases, and Fourths of July, and a thousand lame family dinners.  By the time the real Sunnydale had reappeared on her radar, the monks’ spell was long broken.  The Key had been unmasked, once and for all.

She had tried to ignore it, at first.  Pretended it was a stupid detail, that it didn’t matter, anyway.  After all, she’d known the nature of her sister’s “birth” for a long time.  But it was useless.  Nothing had changed, and everything had.  Their evenings together suddenly seemed cooler, the nineteen-year-old’s scattered ramblings somewhat less than adorable.  Yes, the girl was still her blood. But Elizabeth Summers didn’t have a sister anymore.

She never told Dawn about it.  Instead, Buffy tried to outrun her life, dodge her own shadows.  More wine. More food.  More shoes.  More more, and faster.   She started bleeding lira like a Hilton sister on a Saturday night, and drinking like one too.  A liter of Chardonnay suddenly became the ultimate hangover cure, and it wasn’t long before lines of mysterious white powder started appearing on CD jewel cases and makeup mirrors scattered throughout the villa.

Then one night in a disco on the Via Blanco, a short, neckless man named Orto introduced her to the Dragon, taught her to chase it in folds of crumpled tinfoil.  The sensation had been nothing short of miraculous, the closest thing to heaven she had tasted since her death.  One kiss and the Slayer surrendered to the drug.  She had chased it relentlessly, after that.  And the Dragon, of course, chased her back.

If Dawn had any opinions about her sister’s murky new hobbies, she’d kept them to herself.  She opted to become a ghost, instead, and vanished for days at a time.  Buffy hardly noticed, barely cared.  Everything went gently downhill from there.  The numbness was a blessing - a freedom she’d rarely been afforded in her youth.

It was also horrifying to The Key, she realized, a reminder of bad old days she’d thought were long past. Soon, their heart-to-hearts dissolved into a sullen game of midnight phone tag.  Then one morning, there was a short note stuck to the fridge, a set of keys on the dresser. Silence.

Yes, it hurt.  But only barely, like a memory of pain.  And for that, there were dragons and wine.

And him.

The Immortal had outlived whole empires, floating glacially across an ocean of the dead. His curse, she’d eventually learn, was less magical than it was biological, a bizarre hiccup of nature. Yet, there was a sort of wonderous stillness within him, and it drew her as easily as the drug.  Down through the centuries, everything had become insignificant to him, punchlines to an old joke that only he knew how to tell.  Art and politics, war and poetry, love and hatred and suffering and redemption - all the aspirations that had driven human hearts for ten thousand years blew apart like sand on his lips.  She would listen for hours at a stretch, his deep, soothing voice reminding her that a human life was a short, meaningless string of moments between eternities.  Nothing more or less.   It had seemed like a lovely idea, at the time.

“Choose to spend them as you like,” he’d say, stroking her long blonde locks. “If with me, so much the better. I’ll enjoy them for as long as they last. Or, you could spend them chasing Dragons. Or slaying them, if you’d prefer. A million years will pass, regardless. And a million more after that.”

She had found something so gratifying about his world, a place where pain became futile, love impossible. In the course of his unimaginably long life, the Immortal had lost too much to comprehend what loss meant anymore. Given all the time in the world, time eventually ceased to exist for him, with each new moment becoming indistinguishable from the last. So he’d turned his attention to borrowing the moments of others, instead, trying to perfect them somehow. He was like a vampire in that way, if in no other. Time was like blood to him, and at that point in her life, Buffy possessed very little else.

No, she hadn’t loved him. The Dragon - ever the jealous boyfriend - made certain of that. But she admired him like no other creature, longed for the clarity of his old, terrible wisdom. She imagined an entire life spent slowly dying in his arms. There had been a strange sort of freedom about this image: releasing her whole broken existence into the hands of a gentle, undemanding God, watching her life empty out like water into the ocean.

Then one evening, it was over.  He was gone from her life as quickly as he’d appeared.  She’d been warned it would likely happen like that, instantly and in the most mundane way possible.  In this case, it had been in the middle of supper on the Via Cortello.  The Immortal had been recounting a rakishly funny story about a trip to Ethiopia in 1367, when he, suddenly and politely, excused himself from the table.  The blade was sharp.  Simply tucked his napkin neatly under a plate of half-eaten risotto, straightened his lapel, and sauntered out the front door into the dark Roman night.

She never saw him again. Didn’t try to.

Moments, she thought. We’ve missed too many of those, my love. Don’t fight me over the rest...

She found her old enemy crouched out on the far edge of the rim.  Stripped to the waist, his skin seemed to glow a metallic blue under the starlight.  She paused to study him from a safe distance.  His body was as still as a corpse, elbows propped lazily across his knees.  She crept closer, noticed his jaw clench when he picked up her scent.  But he didn’t turn. Refused to budge.

Typical.

Dreamily, she sat down next to him, her long army coat blousing out in a gray circle.  The vampire kept his gaze fixed steadily on the horizon while she drank him in.  He looked exhausted.  The ordinarily perfect coif leapt out in pale tangles now over the gaunt human mask.  He wasn’t breathing.

“A little rude of you, don’t you think?” she asked, forcing in a chipper note.

“Was it, now?”

“Sure.  All zipping off without saying goodbye.”

“Yeah, well.  Wasn’t in a mood to play twenty questions with the Hardy Boys back there.”

“Wasn’t talking about back there.”

He seemed to think about the words for a moment, then nodded his head slowly.  They sat together for a long time like that, staring at the gaps between stars.  When he spoke again, his voice seemed very small and far away.  “There was.  Damn.  S’bit hard to explain...”

“I know.”  He stole a furtive glance at her, his brow creasing sharply.  “Andrew told me everything.”

“That so?” he marveled.  “Captain Quirk finally gave me up, did he?”

“You did a pretty good job of giving yourself up, didn’t you?”

He sighed at this, but seemed to accept it. Moving cautiously, she inched her body closer to his. Her calf brushed his thigh, and she shivered at the sudden electricity there. Life was frightening and intimate all at once, a very precise sensation that Buffy thought she’d never feel again.

“Yeah well. Sorry ‘bout that too,” he said, the voice a flat sheet of ice.

She could sense his old defenses rising up, walling him in.  She studied his too-blue eyes.  "What happened to you?”

For a moment, his head sank into the well between his legs. He allowed himself the weird luxury of a breath, then reappeared, gazing longingly at the night sky. “You know,” he said, “I been walkin’ the soddin’ planet for more than a hundred years. Never seen stars like these.”

“That’s...uh... Huh?”

“Not even when I was human,” he continued. “Back then, the night seemed like a holy sort of a thing. Full of magic and terror.” He suddenly looked at her, and she gasped at the hollow misery in his eyes.  “Ain’t no stars in LA, pet.”

“Spike.”  She leaned in close, grasping his knee and feeling somehow blessed when he didn’t pull away. “I need to tell you something. And I need you to listen this time...”

He seemed to sense what she was going to say, and cut her short.  “We fought hard. Gave a good show, we did.  Didn’t hold back. Wasn’t enough.” He almost spit the last word, and she thought she caught a flash of fang. “Shoulda seen this lot, Slayer.  Made Sunnydale look like Mansfield-bloody-Park.  But we kept ‘em back.  Held the line.  Angel even slayed his damned dragon.”  He closed his eyes and smiled, conjuring an image that only he could see. But when he opened them again, they were filled with an unspeakable blackness.  “But, it's like I said. Wasn’t enough. So we cut a deal, instead.”

"Deal?"  The moment he said it, a cold dread swelled in her chest. “What kind of deal?”

“Was the only way out for us, pet. There was this... prophecy. ‘Bout a vampire with a soul. Angel and me, we knew bugger all what it really meant. ‘Til it was too late, I s’pose.”  Spike squinted sharply, as though he were trying to remember something that happened a long time ago, and to someone else.  “Turned out bloody simple, it did. A sort of... fee. For services rendered…”

Buffy felt a dull horror creeping in from the edges.  “No,” she said, struck by the note of childish petulance in her voice.  Remembering what Giles said.

“Angel thought it was s’posed to be him...”

“Please... Don’t...”

“...an' maybe it was. But you’ve seen what a wanker he can be without one. Couldn’t take that chance, right?” He chuckled, eyes twinkling with a sinister glee.  Buffy’s brain was screaming, now. It dawned on her, what he was saying.  The truth of it smacked her chest like a hammer, and she was suddenly panicking, fighting to breathe. Her eyes clouded over, twisting the stars into violent splashes of paint.

He turned to meet her gaze.  The air of serenity about him was just another mask. She stared straight through it into his...

Soul?

What have you done?

He’d caught the flash of horror in her eyes, and grinned mercilessly at it.  There would be no more hiding for him.  Buffy had seen the hollowed out place in him that had briefly contained a man, saw that the fire was snuffed out, again and forever.  And now, he had decided to hurt her for it. “No worries, Slayer. It was easy, really...”

She should have run, then. Or screamed, or wept.  And she would have, if it weren’t for the song.  It came out of nowhere, sweeping down through her like a warm wind.  All at once, life seemed so simple and certain. So easy.  The vampire kept right on smirking, of course, sure he’d already won. He was still so cocky.

She’d have to educate him.

“Spike,” she said.

“...like signin’ over a car...”

“I need to tell you something...”

“One soul, slightly used... ”

“...and you need to listen to me this time.”

“No!”

“I lo-“

“IT is GONE!” He was standing, now. Crying. Roaring. Something was still singing in Buffy’s chest, and she was still listening. She stood to meet him.

“I don’t care,” she said.

“You LIE!” he screamed, his face a twisting mask of agonies. She advanced slowly but forcefully, suddenly realizing how close they were to the edge of the cliff. “You’re a LIAR, Buffy!  An’ you stay THE FUCK away from ME!”

“Not gonna happen,” she said, filled with an otherworldly calm.  "I’ll never stay away from you again. Deal with it.” These words seemed to break him finally, and his face contorted into a hideous scowl of rage.

It wasn’t much of a plan. She just charged.  Spike was faster, still her most dangerous prey after all these years. He spun easily out of reach, fangs snarling down.  They circled at sword’s length, then, a mirror image of their very first fight.  Only this time, he was the terrified one.  His yellow eyes darted wildly in the darkness, and for a moment she saw them flash longingly towards the steep, tree-lined abyss below.

Praying for strength, she sprang again.  He met her head on, this time, limbs blazing with hatred.  The world fell apart around them as they fought, melting into a blur of desperation and shame and rage and fear. Spike was stronger than she remembered, more ferocious.  He whirled like a blade as they danced, answered her open arms with brutal, slashing blows that rung through bone.  But the song kept its beat, drove her forward, demanding that she win or die trying.  When he missed wide with a hook, Buffy pounced, sending them both crashing to earth.  They rolled to a stop an inch from the edge of the cliff, the vampire gaining the upper hand. He pinned her to the cracked stone, gnashing his teeth.

“This what you want, you stupid cunt?” he screamed.  “Want me to hurt you?!”

Buffy stopped fighting back, felt herself go limp in his grasp.  “Spike,” she said, more forcefully this time. “I need to tell you something…”

Once again, the words seemed to strike the creature physically. He howled with rage, clapped his hands to his ears. Buffy took advantage of it, rearing up like a viper, and in the next moment their positions were reversed.

His fangs melted away, then, leaving the wreckage of a man she never knew in its place. The misery there was unreal, a swirl of emotions a human face didn’t seem designed to convey.  He was whispering.  She could barely understand him through their tears.  “S'gone lamb, so stupid, no spark, no more spark we’re sorry, fresh out luv, so sorry, we're so sorry, luv, we’re so sorr...”

She kissed him.

It wasn’t easy.  There was a sudden, bitter awareness that it never would be.  His lips were cool and dry at first, like bands of marble.  She strained at them ferociously, pried them in half.  There was a familiar taste inside. She explored it, her red tongue gliding across an old, beloved landscape.  The lost years revealed themselves. He still smoked Morleys, still gargled shyly with a spoonful of Crest.  She felt her body soften when she located the fang, hidden high in a firm socket of flesh above his left canine.  She lapped at it gently, enjoying the throaty little growl that her mouth still provoked.

She gasped when he kissed her back, gripped his hair in her hands.  Life was violent and supple again, all at once.  They used everything they had left.  He kissed with his entire body, a hundred muscles pleading at her like a chorus. She could feel her soul swimming in their mouths.  An old door flew open, love pouring out like blood. The world fell up.

An eternity passed. She forced herself to come up for a single breath.  Tried to put it to good use, for once.

“It’s okay, dummy,” she whispered. “You can have some of mine.”

***

She brought the field glasses up again. The lens took several seconds to adjust, gears whining as the two fuzzy green shapes on the ridge slid back into focus. She zoomed in, and felt a tingle in her belly when she recognized the man’s face. It was just too perfect.

“Lieutenant Sykes,” she barked. “Get the troops in formation. We’re moving out in thirty minutes.”

“Sir!” Sykes snapped a salute. “I can have them ready in five, sir!”

Kennedy smiled. “Unlikely, lieutenant. We have a bit of prep work to do. Tell the troops I need the flamethrowers fueled up and primed to go.”

“Sir, yes sir!” She turned to leave.

“Oh, and Sykes,” Kennedy sneered. “Have them carve some stakes, too. Sharp ones, enough for everybody. We’re going to have ourselves a little history lesson tonight."

Chapter 16:  Out of the Woods

Xander stormed around the bend, his rifle tucked in a sharp line. Ready for anything.

Except that.

Crap.

Their bodies were entwined at the edge of the cliff, looking for all the world like the cover of some trashy harlequin novel. He froze in the shadows for a moment, watching them kiss like they invented it, and suddenly wished that Caleb had a few more seconds to work on him before Buffy turned him into evil preacher steaks. When it became obvious they weren’t gonna stop for invisible, jealous pirate guys, Xander cleared his throat.

Two moon-white faces turned to stare at him in unison. Buffy’s looked strange to him in the starlight; starved and tranquil and terrified, all at once. And Spike’s face looked like…

Well, it looked like Spike’s stupid face.

“Hey,” Xander said. “Sorry to interrupt, but…” He stopped himself.  Frowned. “Okay. Not so much with the sorry part, really.”

They kept gawking, totally bewildered. Not at what he was saying, he got the feeling. They just seemed confused by the whole idea of ‘Xander Harris’ in general. He tried not to take it personally.

“It’s the thing,” he said. “Dawn’s thing.” He flung out his free hand, as if to mime the crazy image still lodged in his brain. Buffy’s eyes clicked wide at the sound of the girl’s name. Time seemed to stop moving again. It was like they were all trapped in some really lame play, and everybody forgot their next line. “It’s, um.  Doing stuff,” he explained.

Buffy shot up. Her expression was something Xander hadn’t seen since the nights of Sunnydale; two parts brooding , one part exasperated.  Hold the pickles.  “Stuff,” she said.

“Kinda hard to describe. We think it, uh… wants you.”

The blondes didn’t seem to move so much as defrost, their limbs gradually writhing back to life. They were eerily quiet as they approached; not daring to look at each other, but not daring to drift too far apart either. An old, forgotten wound cried out, begging him to say something nasty. But that particular well had been dry a long time.

So, that’s how they marched: Xander picking his way down the black path to the compound, the Slayer and her favorite prey following silently behind. When he thought about it, there was no really good reason for the one-eyed normal guy to be leading the way, stopping every thirty seconds to shine a light on his antique field-compass. Yet every time he stole a backwards glance, he could almost understand why. The pair was shaking, walking on stiff knees. They reminded him of two people who had just survived a bomb blast. Whatever he’d interrupted seemed way too big for their bodies to hold inside.

Xander paused at the foot of a gnarled old tree, pretending to shake the compass back to life. After a few moments, he peered meekly at his old friend. She was looking at Captain Peroxide again. The softness he saw there was unexpected. It was one of those surreal and heart-mulching looks that said ‘Attention, Xander Harris! This ‘ship has totally sailed. Nothing to see here. Move along.’  He swallowed something hard in his throat. “I’m sorry,” he said. Buffy glanced at him, a weird kind of pity flashing in her eyes. At that precise moment, something very small and very fragile died inside him. “I’m sorry,” he continued, faking a more jovial tone. “But…uh… this thing is just totally busted. Darn army surplus rip-offs.”

Sullenly, he suggested that they lead the way. And they did.

He was blinded by the night, and moved forward by following the crunching sound of their feet. But somewhere in the darkness, Xander could just barely make out the outline of her small, white hand grasping his.

A little too tightly, if you asked him. He hoped no one ever would.

And for the first time in a very, very long time, he thought about Africa.

***

What are you?

He let the question roll around in his head for awhile, hoping it would pick up a bit of traction somewhere. As usual, it did not. Should’ve been easy. Had a bloody century to sort it out, after all. Then again, it wasn’t quite so simple.

He’d been lots of things, after all. A man, once. Then a monster. And later, by his own idiotic choice, a perverse combination of the two. But in the end, he was just a bit of nonsense, a bloody ridiculous magic trick. If only she could spot the damn card moving, the Slayer would end it, once and for all. After that he could retrace his steps, look in on Dru maybe. Wolf down a couple of human Happy Meals, and he’d be right as fucking rain. Couldn’t be that hard to remember how it’s done.  Hundred years or so of that, and everything would be back to normal.

If she would just let go.

She was gripping his hand now.  Except it wasn’t his hand, didn’t belong to him. He wanted to tell her all about it, wanted her to know that every inch of his body was a lie - the evidence of an old, forgotten crime. Armed robbery, to be precise. His rotten old brain still held the memories of the victim - a certain dead English wanker. But those memories gave comfort rarely, and answers never.

As her fingers tangled his, he was struck with a bright recollection of his second death, his favorite one. It had been quite a bit of fun, all things considered.  A touch on the short side, perhaps. He remembered how the light crept outwards from his chest like cracks in a dam. When the fire finally came it was a benediction; some crazed God’s parting gift for a job…well, done, anyway. It was greedy the way it gobbled him up, never pausing to savor his old atoms as they giggled their way down to Hell.

Or, at least, he had hoped that was where they were headed. As usual, he wasn’t so lucky.

As the last speck of William Pratt’s corpse flared up in a red cinder, Spike had the sudden, shocking realization that he’d never had a body, not actually. The burned off scraps of the curly ponce had been a prison for something else entirely - something old and terrible. It was the precise substance of darkness, a non-flesh that had moved from host to host down through the ages. In his death moment he looked down and saw the sun, black but shining and ringed by a thousand spiders. The thing reached up for him like a nightmare flower, and then he was falling, down, down into an empty star. The instant before he perforated its glassy membrane, the vampire had glimpsed his reflection in it. And he knew himself, finally.

He knew that no blistering Lake of Hades awaited him on the other side of death, nor horned and horny devils to drive pitchforks up his arse for all eternity. Nor puffy clouds, nor chubby little bints strumming on harps, nor any such bloody nonsense. Nothing awaited him on the other side of that mirror, because he was nothing. He was a microbe, a thing beneath punishment. A meaningless smudge in a universe as dead as wind over old bone. In the end there was only darkness for his kind. And silence.

Or so he thought. After the fire and the darkness, he was transformed once again, made firm by some unseen hand. Well, not firm, exactly. He became a sort of shade – a flimsy old night-nicker sent to haunt his grandsire in the City of Angels. But, whoever or whatever bound him there had been flimsier still. And each time he started to feel like his lusty old self, he would vanish, snuffed like a bloody birthday candle. He never told anyone where he went during these stretches, not even dear Freddy. Largely because he couldn’t think of the right words to say.

Well if you must know, luv, I am quite suddenly thrust into a reflection of my true self. Which, by-the-by, turns out to be an impenetrable black void comprised of infinite space and time. Basically, I am at one with oblivion. Absolute zero. The precise cosmic absence of warmth and light. Pass the tea.

No, no, no. That’s not it, dull boy.

Yet, here again trod old Spike. The “master vampire” made flesh once more. Back to square one at last. Or minus one, if you wanted to get technical about it. Spike the Empty Vessel. William the Thirsty Virus. Ludicrous monster, cursed to plod the world rim in an itchy costume, subsisting on the stolen kisses of angels and the blood of pigs and rats.

Poor stupid plonker. Dead times three, no bloody rest for thee.

Shut up and look at her.

The third death. The third one. Another damned suicide. So fucking stupid. He flinched, tried to force the memory from his mind, but it was useless as stifling a sneeze.

”Taking this whole ‘champion’ thing a little too seriously, don’cha think, old buddy?” Angel howled from across the chasm, the sound of his voice half drowned in the swirling vapors.

“Says the bloody Yankee Doodle Dandy,” he snorted back. “What’s the matter, Peaches? ’Fraid I’m gonna sop up all your glory and pathos again?”

“Says the Boy who Lived.” His grandsire’s face was strange and sad out across the boiling mists, yellow eyes glowing like stars. “We don’t do this. We find another way.” As if on cue, massive footsteps shook the earth. The Destroyer had arrived.

“Too late for back’sies, gramps,” he gasped, feeling the Shibborrhim spread through him, its chill white talons clawing their way through his soul, slicing it to bite-sized ribbons. “Never tell her. Promise…”

Somewhere far away, a hand squeezed his. It was warm as flame.

Promise.

Look at her, wanker.

She’d aged. Not much, but visibly. She wore it well, and whatever cruel wisdoms the world had forced upon her over the years had only seemed to make the girl’s beauty that much more devastating. Green, green eyes caught his, and somewhere in his chest, his heart skipped its phantom beat. The notion was absurd. At once a dozen bad old ghosts cackled at him from their roosts, Drusilla’s chief among them. Her corpse lounged catlike at the edge of his sanity, the once lithe body fallen to a state of rancid decay. She smiled. Horrible, debauched mouth limp and cracked, loose against her fangs like an ancient dog. She whispered:

In shabby rags the peasants rake these fields,

fat with guilt, if not with flesh. Sour milk,

fouls their doorways, where harvest virgins give teat,

to vacuum salesmen from the shining towns.

But, our law is a winter’s law,

And casual. She too can be grim,

Snatch her light by violent claw,

And claim glory for the deed, like him…

NO! NO! NO! LOOK AT HER, DAMN YOU!

Green eyes. Dazzled and dazed no more. Gazing softly at her monster. Damning them both with a reckless thump of her heart.

No, he thought. Just me this time, luv. I swear it

Fourth time. Fourth time’s a charm.

He tried to let go, then. Bones whistled, tendons strained like longshoremen.

But she was so, damn strong.

***

“I say, there! Could you come down, please?”

Giles paused hopefully for a moment, then proceeded to jab it with the broom again. The thing scuttled crablike along the ceiling, a jumble of random metal parts blinking and shuddering like a child’s wind-up toy. “Et etrusius,” it screeched. “Quo est Buffy?! Metedoro!”

“I think you’re making it madder,” Andrew offered. “Maybe we should try singing to it. You know, like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

”Ah, yes. Thank you Andrew, I’ll try to bear that in mind the next time it FLIES AT MY BLOODY HEAD!”

Things weren’t going well at all. It’d been almost twenty minutes since Dawn’s gadget had decided to suddenly sprout legs and raise up such a fuss. In the space of five seconds, what had begun its life as a delicate neon flower had transformed into a snapping, clattering nightmare of Science Gone Wrong.

A row of spidery legs contracted as the broom brushed across the thing’s hard plastic belly. It leapt down at them once more, copper joints hissing like a nest of angry vipers. Giles beat a hasty retreat to the corner of the room, flinging a mattress into the creature’s path as he went. His young companion leapt up onto Xander’s workbench, striking a kung-fu pose.

Whirring like a drill, it scrambled towards them. “Buffy sempre lagui amet,” it demanded. “Quo est Buffy?!”

“Yes, well, you’ll have to talk more slowly. My Latin gibberish is a bit rusty, I’m afraid...”

“I’m right here, Dawn.” Giles turned just in time to see her striding through the doorway, green eyes blazing. Spike and Xander flanked her cautiously, fanning out in a small arc to surround the thing. It snapped to attention at the sound of her voice. The gleaming, dish-like structure where it’s head might’ve been swiveled clockwise.

“Y-You understand it,” Giles stuttered.

“No, but I know my sister” she said, her voice ringing with an authority he’d thought had vanished long ago. “Especially when she’s throwing a tantrum.”

As if in reply, a gear churned to life at the core of the dish. There was an electric whine, and a geyser of brilliant blue light shot straight into the air. He could see movement in the projected glow. Dozens of spectral shapes swam into position, slowly congealing to form a familiar face.

“Hey, Buff,” said Dawn. “Sorry it took so long to get this thing online.” The image of the girl’s face floated eerily in a cone of ghostly light, like something underwater. “We had it keyed to respond to your voice-print only. Just in case. Hard to know who to trust these days, you know?” Giles winced at the implication, uncertain whether or not he deserved it.

“I understand,” Buffy said, her voice flat and professional. “What can you tell us?”

“We’ve sent an evac-team to your present coordinates. They should be there within the hour.”

“We?” Giles asked. “Who is we, exactly?”

Dawn seemed to ignore him. “You’re in trouble,” she continued mechanically, her eyes staring blindly through a shower of static. “Our latest satellite readings shows multiple units converging on your position.”

Andrew gingerly crept down from table, karate hands still ready to chop. “The slayers,” he noted grimly. “The, uh, bad ones, I mean.”

Dawn nodded. “They call themselves ‘The Cause.’ We’ve been tracing their movements over the past seven months. Lost track of them after they crossed the border from Byelorussia. They’re using some sort of new technology to move people and supplies around quickly.”

“How close are they?” Buffy asked.

“We can’t tell. They stopped moving twenty minutes ago, about a half a mile out from your perimeter. We think they’re hiking the rest of the way in on foot.”

“Sneak attack,” Xander muttered, a note of bitter admiration in his voice. “Holy crap.”

“They could be inside already,” said Buffy.

“Who is we, exactly?” Giles asked again, feeling a bit agitated.

The vampire paced, suddenly indignant, “Let’s mount the bloody ramparts, then. Give ‘em somethin’ to remember us by.”

Dawn’s features darkened at the sound of the vampire’s voice. “Spike?”

The vamp’s jaw hardened. “Uh, right. Yeah.  ‘Lo.” The girl’s head spun away momentarily. She seemed to whisper something angrily to an invisible person on her left, her eyes as round as teacups.

“It’s uh… it’s a long story,” Xander chimed in. “We’ll fill you in if we manage to not get too overly dead tonight.”

When Dawn face turned back to face them, it was clear to Giles that something was very, very wrong. Her lips were moving quickly, but no sound came out. Without warning, the image started breaking apart.

Buffy leapt forward, a sturdy sort of panic in her voice. “Dawn? Dawn!” Before their eyes, the girl’s features dissolved into a swarm of blue fireflies, then vanished. She spun to face Xander. “Weapons?”

Xander almost scratched his head. “Well, I guess they probably have an armory somewhere. But this dump is pretty old. If the commies left anything behind there’s no guarantee any of it will work…or, ya know, not blow us all up.”

”Get on it,” Buffy barked, eyes flashing. “Take Andrew with you. Grab as much as you can carry and bring it to the garage. Spike, Giles and I will meet you there in ten minutes. We’ll make our stand there.”

Giles stood awestruck for a moment. The girl seemed to glow under the dim electric light. She was a general, again, rallying her troops to yet another Waterloo, to one final bloody Thermopylae. All this despite the horrific circumstances – or, perhaps, because of them. For one fleeting moment, he found it impossible to not feel proud.

And utterly, insurmountably vexed.

Dawn.

Who is ‘we’, exactly?

***

Their approach was pure liquid ice. Sykes and the Chaukau’Ri raced off around the southern lip, ready to grind through the electro-fencing there if it was still hot. Kennedy took point with the rest of the squad. The flamethrower felt wonderful in her grip, heavy enough to offset the strange shame she felt, slinking though the shadows like a thief. She kept thinking that revenge shouldn’t feel so friggin’ sneaky.

But not for long, Summers, she thought. It’s coming soon. And its gonna be LOUD, bitch.

The path to the bunker was wide open, but it didn’t allow for much in the way of cover. And with their vamp back in the picture, odds were the bad guys might smell them coming anyway. Still, it seemed like a better plan than just roaring up full-tread with the tanks. Even if Buffy’s dimwitted dildo managed to pick up the scent, they’d only have a couple of minutes to scrape together a defense. And if she knew them, they’d probably waste those bickering.

The squad paused at the foot of the gate, eyes sharp for traps. Kennedy motioned to a lean, angular recruit named Seven McCabe; a fiery Irish lass with a penchant for making things go kabloowie. Seven slung her flamethrower across her back and yanked a small arc-welding torch from her knapsack. She made a swift, almost casual gesture with the tool, and in seconds the squad was racing out across the courtyard towards the main barracks.

Kennedy held them there with an upraised fist, scanning the camp for signs of the enemy. Everywhere she looked it was lights-out. The stolen jeep was parked at the foot of a rusted observation tower. They hadn’t even bothered to cover it up.

There were twelve Slayers in her squad, all armed to the fucking teeth. In a stand-up fight, it’d be no contest. But between Summers and Harris, the enemy had just barely enough brainpower to make sure it didn’t come to that. They’d try to dig in somewhere, maybe set up some kind of ambush. And when you added a master vampire and a hellbeast the size of a goddamn tank into the mix, the odds suddenly became a bit more even.

“Sykes,” she hissed into her headset. “Report.”

The Lieutenant’s husky voice crackled in her ear. “We’re in. No sign of hostiles at the south gate. Beginning our sweep now.”

“Negative,” said Kennedy. “Hold position there, in case they try to duck out the back.” Seven was crouching nearby, chomping lazily on a chunk of Hubba Bubba. “Well,” she cooed. “What do you think, McBabe?”

The girl squinted into the blackness. “Dunno, mistress. Could be they just dug down in the underground bunkah, tryin' to wait us out. The reds built ‘em to survive a fookin’ atom bomb… But…”

“But, what?”

“Well, problem is once you’re down there, ain’t goin no place else. Only one way in, one way out. ‘Less I was plannin’ to hide down there all fookin’ wintah, widn’t want ta bury me’self inna fookin’ tomb, wid I? Especially with a hungry vampire an’ no fresh blood.” Kennedy marveled at the sight of the redhead’s gears turning. Seven was one of the smart ones, a born hunter. Her soldier’s emerald eyes smoothed a line over the horizon, finally coming to rest on a massive maintenance hangar at the east end of the complex. “Nah,” she continued slyly. “Wid it were me in this mess, I’d try ta get someplace big. Lots a space ta hide, but lots a space ta move about if I had ta. Place with lots a ways out, but only one way in. Know what I mean?”

Kennedy grinned, landed a hard shot across a pair of sweet Irish buns.

“Lead on, bonny lass.”

***

The garage was the size of a football field. Three stories up, a vaulted steel dome locked away all memory of the sky. A herd of rusted armored troop carriers littered the floor in various states of dismantlement. Every movement created a symphony of echoes, so she had stopped moving long ago. She’d seen cozier tombs than this. Literally.

Xander prowled the elevated runaround thirty yards to her right, swinging along on one stiff leg, She spared a moment to drink him in, trying to remember a time when she didn’t trust the man with her life. At age twenty-seven he had seen and done things that defied whole centuries of science and reason, but the past few hours had clearly worn him down. He desperately needed a shave. He desperately needed medical attention. He desperately needed something else that she couldn’t possibly give him. But he just kept limping along, and staring out the skinny little windows.

Down on the floor, Andrew fiddled with a yellow haz-mat tarp. He was trying to pull it over the Grossness, in a vain attempt to disguise it as a forklift. At her urging, the thing had finally agreed to shut up, although how long that would last was anyone’s guess. Once more, Andrew himself seemed to intuitively grasp the need for silence. It was strange watching them together, the boy calmly fussing the plastic sheet over the creature’s bulk as though he meant to give it a haircut, not conceal it from an army of superkillers. An officer’s pistol stuck out of his waistband. It contained exactly three bullets.

In a well of shadows near the heavy roll-doors, Giles hefted an old Kalishnikov rifle of suspect reliability. It seemed to suit him. His old white jaw was set, a pair of naked, predatory eyes glistening through the darkness. He’d held her once. It seemed so long ago. Everything did.

Dawn’s robot proxy nested in the rusted out hull of a tank, pretending to be a busted engine. At the very least, their rescuers could home in on its beacon. Aside from that, she stuck the thing in the same category as Andrew’s pet. She simply had no idea what it would do. Maybe nothing. Maybe that was for the best.

Spike hovered beside her. There was a time when his presence was comforting in this way only: the soulless comrade-at-arms with the slightly icky crush, something to endure and appease until the battle was won. The vampire had donned his dark armor again, but he refused every weapon offered to him. They were similar in that way. Preferred their bare hands. Preferred their bare everything. Win or lose, she needed to tell him something.

And I need you to listen this time, she thought, staring at the dark glassy face. Just need one more night. (yeah some general you are some general you are some general…)

She wanted to tell the voice to shut up, but it made a valid point. It had been such a long time. She’d almost forgotten how this particular game was played. Everything was expendable. Even the Slayer. Especially the Slayer. There was no tomorrow. Not unless they forced there to be one.

Gradually, her breathing found its rhythm. She felt her muscles elongate around bone, pulling in fresh oxygen, filling with rich, red blood. She ground her feet on cold concrete, found her weight there. It was time. Her soldiers were ready. She was ready.

Sort of.

***

0:00 seconds

Kennedy’s Slayers split up, pronging the bunker on three sides, tiny flames licking from the tips of their weapons. Kennedy beckons to Seven McCabe. The redhead crouches at the structure’s southeast corner, slicing open a four-foot square with her arc-torch.

A steel slab bursts and falls flat, marking the way in. Kennedy nudges her scout Julie to go first. The girl takes three steps inside. She attempts a fourth one. A lonely shot rings out, and the left side of Julie Whatsername’s head disappears in a cloud of blood.


0:14 seconds

Xander clears the chamber, loads another shot. His face is a grim blank. This is not the work he wants, but she laid the rules of engagement clearly: take as many as he could, for as long as he could.

Spike is a spectre moving along the western wall. He intends surprise, and something more permanent. Behind the mask, yellow eyes pierce the darkness, searching for his final prey. He wants Willow’s dark-eyed bitch, wants her bad. There’s a last bit of business to settle there. He means to take her quick, and in full view of her skanky little mates. They seem capable enough, and the flame licking up from their arsenal beckons to him like the red song of Sirens. He assumes that they will take care of the rest.


0:15 seconds

Kennedy stifles a cry. With a white finger she orders the rest in. They charge in single file, flamethrowers blazing sideways. More gunshots erupt from within. She leaves the grunts to it, whirling around the southern edge to join her second unit. The four girls there have already cut through. She signals the charge and follows in behind, eyes sharp for the sniper.


0:27 seconds

Andrew ducks low behind a stack of tires. Echoes of gunshots sting his ears. Nobody is saying anything, the good guys or the bad guys. It creeps him out a little, but he manages to stay quiet and out of sight. There are three bullets in the gun.

Buffy is moving, snaking low under the porous rim of the runaround. A moment ago, it was dark enough to blind everyone but Spike. Now jets of orange flame expose the scenery in nightmarish strobes. Her pulse races, images of dead friends flashing through her brain. She needs to get behind them somehow, fight them in close.


0:29 seconds

Giles is on the wrong end of the action, but he spies a clean line and makes a break for it. Diving low beside the shoeless foot of a tank, he opens up with the Kalishnikov. A hot bracket of lead slings out, nailing two skulking girls in the torso. One seems to die straight off. The other staggers sideways, as if drunk, a finger still glued to the trigger of her mechanical dragon. Her fire stream touches the girl next door, igniting her. A brief horror show ensues. The girl’s black outline shambles forth heavily, ringed by flame. She is a shrieking solar eclipse. The fuel tank on her back explodes.


0:30 seconds

Xander doesn’t see the second set of girls until its too late. They fan out quietly, far away from the fiery diversion. One of them lays down suppression fire with a sub-nose SMG. The bullets scream off steel, turning the garage into a friggin’ rock concert. It’s blind fire, though, and he recovers his nerves to lean in for another shot. He imagines it might be his last.

Kennedy dashes for cover behind a concrete column. Her dark eyes scan the runaround for the sniper’s muzzle flash.

Seven McCabe leaps over the smoldering remains of her fallen comrade and makes a beeline for a set of stairs, desiring the high ground. She fingers the sash of hand grenades at her chest, peels one off.


0:32 seconds

Three more Slayers drive relentlessly towards Rupert Giles, their murderous shapes framed by fire. A wave of hot metal rolls past him, and for a moment he is quite sure that he’s dead. He drops to his knees, fumbling with a fresh clip of ammunition. He glances up just as they pass a lumpy yellow tarp.


0:35 seconds

Azazel moves without thinking, his massive tail sweeping two girls to the floor. The third sees it coming, jumps it like skipping a rope. She unloads, pounding the old monster with a sheet of bullets. Ribbons of yellow plastic and black pudding fly in all directions.

Spike drops down into a pile of shadows in the corner of the hanger. He can see the bright little bitch. Her back is towards him. He starts running.

Buffy spots a lanky redhead make a move towards the stairs. She’s clutching a metal sphere in one hand. She starts running.


0:37 seconds

Andrew stares moon-eyed as a monsoon of lead slams into the hell demon. The monster flails blindly under the sheet, a huge, hooded falcon. Just when the girl’s gun seems to run dry, a second one appears at her shoulder. Her flamethrower roars out, a thick tongue of flame turning the tarp into a frat party bonfire. Melvin makes a noise that would haunt Andrew for the rest of his days. There are three bullets in his gun.

Seven McCabe hits the stairs sideways, her eyes sharp on the angles. She sees nearly all of them. The one she doesn’t see lands a savage karate chop mid-chin that sends her crashing to Earth. Slashes of yellow and gray strobe her eyes as she clings to consciousness.

The demon’s unfortunate distraction allows Giles a few seconds to react. He uses them wisely, diving for cover behind the burnt-out hull of a jet engine. He estimates that he has three seconds. Gritting his teeth, he manages to jam the clip into the rifle during first two. He wastes the last one on a prayer, then leans towards his dark business.

Spike is almost on top of her, but the suit is noisy. She hears him, turns in slow motion. The fire licks by as he tackles her low, a gloved hand grabbing her weapon’s muzzle as they fall.


0:40 seconds

Melvin the Monster roars, the tarp falling away in fiery tatters. The smell of sulfur clogs the arena as he swoons.

Andrew aims. Aims. Aims. There are three bullets in his gun. It is a shining block of ice in his hands, freezing him solid.

Time sizzles like a hot watch. Giles makes a decision. Two girls die.


0:41 seconds

The redhead scrambles crabwise over polished concrete. She’s tough, and inside a moment she’s on her feet, brandishing a grenade and a sinister leer. She lunges, locking Buffy’s wrist in an iron grip. The Slayer watches in horror as her enemy thumbs the pin off her tiny bomb.

The cunny is strong. Spike manages to keep a deathgrip on the flamethrower, eating blow after brutal blow. She’s roaring a stream of obscenities. Her finger keeps a steady jet of fire screaming heavenward. Steeling his frame, he delivers a vicious head butt with the helmet, feels Kennedy’s nose crunch and splinter beneath its weight. The finger straightens. The gun jiggles free.

Xander sees everything at once. He spots the scuffle on the stairs, the wrestling match on the floor, the demon on fire. It takes him less than a second to decide which to handle first. He tries to draw a bead on the redhead, but they’re circling too fast. He spots the grenade. Inhales.


0:43 seconds

Pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. Jammed.

In the same moment, another second of Buffy’s life ticks by. The redhead is laughing, whispering, setting a warm bath for death. A savage voice cries out in her over the bang of drums. She feels muscle loosen around a bone in her arm, and she feels an old black wraith slide through it like a tendril. She only has one chance, and she uses it to twist. The redhead’s wrist goes, a snarl of crunched roots.


0:45 seconds

Kennedy scrambles to her knees, blood shooting from her nostrils like two rivers. “Fucker,” she screams, yanking a fresh oaken stake from a hip holster. Spike crawls in a semicircle, like a man trying to find a contact lens.

Giles charges into a red fog.

The demon smolders, gagging on its own dire fumes.

Andrew stares helplessly at two soft female faces ringed by red. There are three bullets…

Seven McCabe resists the urge to scream. A hunk of iron leaps up and kicks her in the sternum. She’s flying, launched backwards into the darkness. It takes forever to land. It takes three seconds to land. She forgets to let go of the…


0:48 seconds

Xander sees the flash. Somewhere below him, a redheaded Slayer is shattered into three, smoking hunks. He wrestles with the chamber, but the gun won’t cooperate. He can’t see Buffy. He can’t see anything. He


0:50 seconds

wants to get out of here. The vamp is moving too fast, now, a gleam of black mirrors. Kennedy waves the stake, out and away like a switchblade. Steaming blood runs into her mouth. She can

taste it. Giles can actually taste the smouldering flesh, wafting from a girl’s corpse like a homecooked meal. April Mahoney was her name. From Queens, NY. A home invasion they

called it. A swirl of singed tentacles tears the yellow plastic bib from over his heads. It’s the closest he’d been to dead in a million


0:52 seconds

years, it seemed. Decades. Generations. Time was passing in super-duper slo-mo. It was as though their deaths were a filmstrip that Buffy was studying frame-by-agonizing-frame. A curtain of

fire blares out from behind. Spike feels the heat in the nick of time, flips sideways like a circus bloke. He threads the needle, but just barely. He is running out of

chances. Not that Xander thought he had one in Hell. But if he was gonna go, he was gonna go down on that goddamn floor with them. With

her. She was already moving, on her way to save her bloody monster again. Giles could see Kennedy’s lackeys filing in from both sides. It wouldn’t be long

now. Do it now, Andrew. They need you now. All you have to do is pull the stupid


0:54 seconds

trigger. In the old days, all it had taken was a fucking song to turn Summers' butt buddy into the snarling thing that faced her now. He is closing on her fast, a blue murder shining in his limbs. A voice in Kennedy’s head tells her that she only has a few seconds left to live.

Then she sees it. It’s just a sliver; a thin line of white flesh peering out from his cracked breastplate. It would be enough. Kennedy would sing the vampire a different song tonight. A lullabye.

She slams a lethal kick into his ribcage. The vampire stumbles backwards a dozen feet, arms whirling to keep his balance. Something mechanical flickers through her. The wooden shard flips over magically in her grip. In a single fluid motion, she spins and flings it directly at the monster’s stone dead heart.

Just then, a shape cartwheels in from the corner of her vision. There’s a familiar flash of blonde, and in the next instant, Buffy Summers is standing between them, the stake pressed neatly between her palms.

They stare at each another for what feels like an eternity. Kennedy studies the blonde’s grim face and understands, suddenly and deeply, what hatred means.

There’s a thunderous sound, like the wings of a gigantic bat. She thinks it’s her heart. It isn’t.


0:59 seconds

The ceiling


0:60 seconds

explodes.

***

For a moment everything was grey dust and white, white light. It streamed though the gaping hole in the ceiling like an angel's death ray.  The world screeched to a heart-attack stop.

In the next instant, two dozen ropes tumbled into the center of the melee, uniformed men gliding down them like spiders.  A flurry of flashbang grenades went off like the Fourth of July, followed by the red roar of gunfire.

Buffy looked at Ken again.  The monster flashed a dark grin at the Slayer and the Vampire, a promise to finish this dance some other time. Then she vanished, dodging into a cloud of ash.

This next fight lasted a long time. It lasted eight seconds.  The remaining Slayers backpedaled into the shadows, laying down a curtain of flame to cover their mistress’ retreat.  The soldiers on the zip cables touched down and fanned out, eerily silent behind identical gasmasks.  Tin canisters rattled off the concrete floor, spewing orange oxide fumes. She watched Andrew stagger away from one, choking as he fell.  Somewhere nearby, a Slayer rammed a freshly carved stake through a soldier's ribcage. Moments later, she is chewed up in a well-timed crossfire, and drops to the ground beside him.

They are the last casualties of the night, it seems.  The sound of the copters was deafening now. Their blades blew the smoke clear, affording her one last glimpse of the girls as they fled.  A chunk of soldiers tore off from the pack and gave chase, filing out like lemmings into the chill Eastern night.

For the hundredth time today, she’s wasn’t sure what to do next.  She turned to face Spike, but he was inscrutable beneath the mask, his body stone-still.  She looked down and realized she was still holding Kennedy's stake, hands clamping it tight, like a mockery of a prayer.  Over his shoulder, she spied Xander puffing down a cage of stairs, his lone eye calculating the new madness swirling around them.  Giles peered in astonishment at the helicopter, his gun clattering to the floor as a pair of soldiers brushed past.

Finally, Spike wrestled off the helmet.  He stared in wonder at the divine white glow shining down.  Buffy looked too, just in time to see the last rope slice through it. Its rider sailed down, a pair of chunky combat boots clapping neatly beside them.  From behind a dusky gasmask, bright eyes locked onto Buffy's.

“You two okay?” said a muffled, yet strangely familiar voice. “Are you hurt?”  Buffy shook her head, her brow knitting low.  The stranger tugged a strap at the back of its head, pulling the mask free.

“Good,” said Samantha Finn. “It’s gonna be a long ride home.”

Chapter 17: Passover

The halls of Castelul Drakul drizzled into place around her - gradually at first, then in a mad rush. Like everything else, they glowed.

Nancy Stark rose to her feet, and felt the ground quake beneath them. A titanic blast of air entered and exited her lungs, every nerve in her body flaring like a firework.

She crossed to a set of steel doors, tore directly through them. Suddenly, the whole world seemed to be made of paper and porcelain.

A wafer thin voice cried out from somewhere in the dazzling landscape. “Mistress Stark! We thought you were dead.” Nancy sought out the speaker through the haze. The girl glowed too, like fine crystal in candlelight. All Nancy could see was heat and heartbeats, action and blood. She moved toward the blood.

“Hello Jasmine, dear,” she drawled, emerging from a pile of shadows. The girl’s name came to her as if in a dream, and she dangled it from her lips like fresh bait.

“Mistress,” said Jasmine. “The General and her team are on their way. They were attacked in the mountains, ambushed by…” The girl fell silent, mesmerized by the being that drew near.

“That so?” Nancy whispered. “My, my. How dreadful.” Jasmine didn’t reply. She was inches from the girl’s face now, and she could smell the wonderful, wonderful light pulsating inside. “Well, is anybody hurt? I am a doctor, you know.”

“I know. I mean… I duh-don’t know,” Jasmine stammered. Her entire body trembled with an instinctual, animal fear. She had the look of a gazelle on the edge of the water, in that precise moment where it smelled the lion. ”What’s?  What’s wrong with you?”

“Fit as a fiddle, hun’. Why d’you ask?”

She was sobbing now. “It’s just… your… your… eyes… your…”

Something black unzipped at the bottom of Nancy Stark’s soul. A sea of burning wasps poured out, racing like buckshot though every vein. The universe shuddered like a leaf.

“My eyes,” she repeated.  Her voice was ringing like a savage church bell. Casually she took the girl’s hand in her own. Crushed it like a flower petal.

“Please child. Tell me all about my eyes.”

***

The tank roared across the drawbridge, perfectly mimicking its driver’s mood. A dozen Slayers scattered out of the path as a pair of the battle-scarred Wolf Spiders limped in behind it.

“Close the fucking gate,” Kennedy screamed, leaping down from the hatch. Lieutenant Marsden scampered up like a handmaiden.

“General! What happened?”

“I want recon and defense teams online,” barked Kenned, mid-stride. “We have a Code-fucking-Red.”

Marsden went white as a sheet. “Sir?”

“Yes, that means we’re under attack. Yes, that means now.” As the Slayer scuttled off, Kennedy dropped her assault rig and made a beeline for the keep, eyes peeled for pasty nutjobs.

Much as she hated to admit it, she needed the albino’s brain on this one. Those G.I Joe punks had chased them all through the mountains, harassing them with blind fire the whole way. Kennedy ordered the demons’ carrier to hit the brakes near Mount Orsiva, and cover their retreat. She lost contact with them twenty minutes later, and assumed they got chewed up by the helicopters’ guns. It was only a matter of time before they tracked her here.

Kennedy roared into her cell phone as she approached Dracula’s court. “Nancy, get your fucking ass up here NOW!” She slammed the gilded doors wide, and then she froze dead in her tracks.

“Hello, darlin’,” Nancy purred. “Lovely of you to join us.”

The Nurse lounged catlike in the old devil-king’s throne, bare legs draped lazily over an armrest of human skulls. Her uniform was stained brown with blood.

“Nancy?” Kennedy stared in horrified wonder. Something shuddered at the edge of Dr. Stark’s outline, and staring at it, Kennedy felt like she might lose her mind. Power seemed to pour off the Nancy Stark in thick, black waves.

And.

Her eyes…

“They,” Kennedy droned. “That is. We were. We were chased.”

“Shhhhh….It’s okay sugar,” the Nurse soothed. She slithered from her throne (a chair, only a chair) and closed the distance between them, shedding clothing as she went. Finally the thing that had been Nancy Stark stood before her, alabaster nude, radiating the heat of a hundred suns. She leaned in close, and for a moment, Kennedy wasn’t sure if she was about to be kissed, or bitten in half.

Mercifully, it was neither.

“Awwww…. don’t fret, now, Miss Kennedy,” Nancy whispered, and spread her arms wide. Unable to resist, Kennedy fell into them.

"And, don’t you go worryin’ bout them  fishy Finns, neither” Nancy cooed, rocking her in a warm embrace. “The doctor is in."

***

The sky was a band of pink, pockmarked with a rash of fading stars. A second copter wove into view beside them, dangling a massive cargo drum full of Yuck.

On the far side of the fuselage, three friends slept like broken dolls in their flight harnesses. Buffy studied their faces, soft and silent at last. They were getting older. She marveled at the purple hollow under Xander’s good eye, noticed the puffy dollops developing at the edge of Andrew’s jowl. Was he a drinker, now? It suddenly didn’t seem too far-fetched.

And Giles. Giles seemed ancient, a crumbling antique. What had been everyday mortal weakness was slipping into frailty. Had his heart withered too? Cloudy with regret. Gray rainbeats. Death was the aftertaste of age. How long did any of them have?

(sound like him now you sound like him)

Don’t you ever shut up?

The costumed vampire dangled motionless beside her, a limp corpse in a flight harness.   Ageless and soulless.  A Swanson’s frozen TV dinner of Darkness, skulking through a century of midnight snack attacks. She’d been warned early on not to romanticize them.  As Giles once said, the world was already “steeped in their pornographers.”  It wasn’t just that namby-pamby Anne Rice crap, either. Everywhere you turned these days there were plastic surgeons and anti-fat pills and Super Sweet Sixteens. Grown men collected toys, virgins were Born Again (and again and again and again). Somewhere along the way, it seemed that people had quietly agreed to lock themselves inside time capsules of their former lives.  To stop changing.

An old memory of Merrick intervened. Drunk on dessert liqueur, four days before his own, violent death.  “A sticky proposition,” he’d groused, eyes like two swollen red grapes. “Lots of people seem to like the idea. Being strong, staying young. But at the bottom of it, eternal youth means never having to hurry. And if you asked me, I’d wager that’s where evil begins…”

She glared at the black shape. Spike had hurried plenty. Dumbass was always in a rush.

And she loved him.

It was impossible to know whether he slept or not, or if he dreamed when he did. She’d have to ask him some day.

“Sorry about the rough chop.” Sam Finn’s arms were braced in the cockpit’s archway, the loose fabric of her flight suit flapping like the wings of a bat. “That Chinook over there would’ve been a smoother ride. Of course, we had no idea you ran with such a big crowd these days.” Buffy nodded vaguely, unsure how to answer. Sam tossed her a Cheshire grin. “Anyway, we’re making good time. Should be in ‘Jolly Old’ by noon.” She cast a dark glance at Spike’s motionless form. “Unless there are any more surprises, that is.”

Buffy gritted her teeth. “Surprises,” she muttered. “Yeah, I guess we’re all full of those today, huh?”

Sam prowled across the deck to meet her, the smile fading from her lips. She took a military knee, offered a strip of brown jerky.

Buffy made an eww mouth. “No, thanks. All good on the dried cow face tip.”

Sam shrugged and snapped off a healthy chunk.

“Riley?” Buffy asked.

“Five-by-five,” Sam chirped sarcastically, then squeezed the salty snack down her throat. “No thanks to you, I guess.”

Buffy stifled a chill. “I couldn’t help him,” she explained. “I mean, I wouldn’t have left him behind.” For a fleeting moment, she wondered if that was true.

“Well, like I said, Ri’s fine. The brass gave him the standard ass-kicking, of course, but that was just for show. You know how bureaucrats can be.” She shot a sly glance at the sleeping Watcher. “But everything’s straightened out now. He got a full brief from the new chain-of-command. We all did.”

“Sounds great. Mind filling me in?”

Sam chuckled wryly. “Sorry, cheerleader. That info’s about as classified as you can possibly get. Besides, you’ll get the scoop when we reach home base. I know someone who is just dyin’ to tell you.”

Buffy felt like throttling that smirk off her face.   She took a yoga breath, let it go. “So where is he?”

“My husband, you mean?” Buffy nodded, careful not to signal anything but palsy walsy concern. “Well, if you must know we passed him, already.  About forty miles south of Milan.”

“Passed him? I don’t get it…”

“I mean he’s on route to the target. Riley’s leading the assault team. They’re going back to clean up the Council’s little mess.”

Buffy shook her head, horrified. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“Kennedy’s little Slayer junta. We’ve deployed a full air complement to take out Castle Dracula.”  She studied the shock on Buffy’s face. “No reason to worry, Summers. They’re fully trained to handle this sort of situation, I assure you. Drop a few J-Dams to soften ‘em up, then move in with heavy infantry to mop up the stragglers. It’s a standard counter-terrorism op.”

“Counter … Are you insane? Do you have any idea what you’re dealing with?”

“Sure I do,” Sam replied. She leaned in close, a bitter leer spreading across her face. “We’re dealing with the same batch of sad, delusional little freaks we dealt with back in that bunker. You know.  The sort that imagine they’re special ‘cause they know a few karate moves.”

Buffy felt a sharp twist in her gut. “Please. Samantha - I’m telling you to call this off. Before it's too late.”

“Already is,” she shot back. “Besides, I don’t have the authority.”

“Who does?”

Samantha snapped off a big hunk of jerky, chewed it with her smile.  “It’s like I told you," she said.  "As soon as we’re home, you’ll find out all about it.”

***

Incoming text message…
RE: dinner
Hey farmboy. In transit w/ BS and crew. ETA 1200 hrs. Let’s get steaks at Le Jardin at 1900.
Blondie says hi. Swear I won’t kill her if you get home soon.
And remember what you promised, K?
XO
S

Riley tapped END and tried to get some goddamn focus. The Carpathian mountains stretched out before him like a hillbilly banquet, all craggy dips and dollops. As they scrubbed in low over the foothills, he thought of the first time he’d ever seen the Rockies. Six years old. Felt like forever, but when he closed his eyes he could still see them, as invincible as they were beautiful. When they got stateside again, he’d have to take her.

The ‘right’ her, he thought. What a long strange trip that was, finding her.

It made him think of a certain lost, awkward country boy. Eighteenth birthday. Signed up for the Army like he was writing a ten dollar check. Sometimes Riley wondered why the hell he didn’t go to cow college like everybody else. Just wanted to get the hell out of Iowa, he guessed.

It was murky waters, after that. Riley had the sort of rough competence that field commanders loved, and the patience for more delicate operations. His old C.O John Healey once told him he was “born to be ‘deleted.’” Those early days were tough on him. He’d seen some pretty bad things. He’d humped through Sudanese killing fields with the safety on, saw warlords slaughter infants in the name of dead fathers. Then black ops in Uzbekistan, Bali, Argentina. Sometimes things would get fuzzy, and it got hard to remember who the good guys were. Mostly, it was just hard staying quiet, never being able to share the things he’d seen or done.

Then, in the summer of ’97, he shipped out with a strike team to Nepal. It was there that everything changed forever. He met his first “scaly” on a dusty highway near Buranj, just a short walk from the Chinese border.

Years afterward, he’d learn its name, its origin - everything anyone ever wrote, spoke or whispered about it. The Initiative called it a G’longa demon. They were lightbenders, leftovers from a failed demonic invasion that happened 2,000 years before the birth of Christ. G’longas were mostly scavengers these days, preferring to feed quietly on the fringes of third-world conflicts. But that night, young Riley Finn didn’t know any of that stuff. That night it was just the Monster; a fairytale bogeyman come to life. In less than twenty minutes, the thing had ripped his entire squad to bloody, bite-sized shreds. It would’ve have killed Riley too, if it wasn’t stuffed full of Green Beret. He remembered how it ambled so slowly towards him, like some huge, drowsy toddler, a bib of blood and steaming entrails smeared across its matted chest.

Riley had waited for it to get close. Real close.

He’d made it back to central command on foot the next day, humping sixteen sweltering miles across the rocky wasteland. He filed his report with his C.O, curled himself up in the brig’s rickety green cot, and fell into a deep, deep sleep. The psyche-test was administered later that evening when he awoke; the court martial, the following morning. Col. Taggert handed him his discharge papers and a one-way ticket to the Madison International airport in Cedar Rapids. He’d have to find his own bus fare from there.

And that’s the reason he was boarding that Army airbus one fateful June morning, eleven long years ago. A strange woman named Margaret Walsh had intercepted him on the tarmac, offering a sly smile and the “adventure of a lifetime.” Riley never did make it back to Iowa.

Now, he was flying again, crossing yet another set of mountains. Alpha squadron formed a sloppy wing formation nearby. It reminded him of a damn redneck air show, and he felt his blood pressure spike.

“C’mon, tighten up people! This isn’t a goddamn exercise.” Two heavy-duty Blackhawks instantly flattened out on either side, rotors huffing out a perfect trancelike rhythm. Hunched low in the pilot’s seat, old Captain Gault pulled their own chopper narrowly ahead of the pack. Riley’s rule: If anything was gonna happen, it would happen to them first. They hugged low to the foggy ridges, eyes sharp for enemy guns.

Suddenly, Marco’s voice came crackling over the headset. “Yoo-hoo, boys,” he chided. “Poppa’s got some sweet-ass visual for ya.”

“The castle?” Riley barked.

“Well, if it’s big, old, and creepy as a three-tittied whore, then yeah, I’d say so! Transmitting coordinates. Finn, you owe me fifty bucks and a blowjob.”

Riley grimaced, “Make it a hundred and call it even. Alright ladies, you know the drill. I want everyone locked and loaded, but no independent fire. I don’t care if you see King Kong in a hejab down there - nobody fires without my mark! Understood?” A wave of half-hearted “oohrahs” was answer enough, and Riley tapped Gault to home in on Marco’s dots. Within seconds, a dark structure loomed on the horizon, peering through a cloud of spectral mist.

“Yep. That’s our bingo tent, alright,” Riley murmured to Gault. “Take us in a half-a-click, skipper, then call in the bomb-boys.” That last part made him scowl. Personally, Riley wouldn’t have minded getting in close for some fast-and-furious with the uber skanks, but he’d promised Sam: no “cowboy shit.” Plus, the B-52s were the safest bet. Barring any major fuckups, two bombers would drop 4000-pounds of Happy New Years right in Kennedy’s lap. He’d once seen those things powderize a M’lok Tharian War Hive in a single run. Compared to that, ol’ Drac’s crib would be a walk in the park.

Riley’s Blackhawk crawled into position a half a mile out, with Marco’s Cobra assault copter falling in tight on his left flank. Gault’s fingers fluttered over the transponder, punching in the attack code with the skill of a concert pianist. He uttered a quick string of Greek letters to verify coordinates, but it didn’t go through. For some reason, the short-band had gone all wonky on them.

Riley tapped his earpiece. “Diamond-One this is Escrow. Do you read me, over.” The only reply was a long hiss of static. “Diamond-One, we have a visual confirmation of target, please respond, over.”

Gault flipped a switch on the console, dumping the radio feed to the cockpit speakers. Deep in the nest of feedback, a female voice was humming a ghostly tune. “Some kinda wave-jammer,” Gault theorized.

Before Riley could respond, a blanket of black smog rolled overhead, blotting out the pre-dawn sky. The darkness seemed to enshroud the entire squadron, and the Hawk’s instruments were freaking out about it.

“Christ,” Gault whispered. “What in the sweet and sour ketchup is that shit?”

“Bad,” Riley suggested, watching the altimeter spin like a pinwheel. Dead ahead, a long crack of light appeared in the sky. It seamed the air like the lips of a nightmare womb. At its center, Riley could see something huge wriggling through. A pair of massive batwings folded away from serpentine flesh as it tore its way into their dimension. “Real bad.”

“Holy Stripper Christmas, Finney!” Marco screamed from the comm’. “You assholes seein’ this shit?”

Gault gritted a set of brown teeth. “Okay. Now, somebody please tell me that ain’t what I think it is?”

As if in answer, the dragon flexed its gigantic wings, giving them all a textbook view of its anatomy. The scales glistened like luminous copper plates as it swooped toward Marco’s Cobra. The chopper slid sideways a half-second too late, and Riley watched helplessly as a set of man-length talons sheared off the vehicle’s tail.

“Evasive maneuvers!” Riley yelled, and stormed back into the fuselage. The hatch was already jammed wide. Sgt. Kane manned the gatling gun, scanning a sea of black chaff for their mythical foe. The remainder of the squadron was almost invisible in the dark cloud. Miraculously, Marco’s pilot had managed to steady his craft into a smoking tailspin. But the dragon had already completed its lazy arc, and was on its way back to finish the job.

“Marco!” Riley yelled. “Take it down! I repeat, put your ride down now!”

“Rear engine’s toast,” replied a crackling voice. “Switching to auxillary…lost all visual. Dark… Can’t see shit, man. Where the hell did it g…” Just then, the dragon slammed through the Cobra’s cabin, the rotors shattering across its scales like toothpicks. A ball-shriveling scream echoed over the speakers. Then the radio just rolled over and puked. No static, no song. Just silence.

It didn’t last long. Kane opened fire with the gatling, pouring an avalanche of tracer rounds into the void. The monster didn’t even slow down. Instead, it executed a slow roll until it was hovering directly in front of their formation, like a drill sergeant at roll call. The snakelike head rotated, calmly selecting a new target. When it found one it liked, the thing’s throat puffed out like a terrible lung. An instant later, the copter on Riley’s right flank vanished in a cloud of flaming dust.

The next twenty seconds were pure mayhem. The formation busted apart at the seams, helicopters scattering left and right, trying to find their range. The dragon wove through their ranks like red ribbon. The Hawk’s crew watched in horror as the monster made short work of the squadron, slicing through the other crafts one-by-one. Just as the last friendly disintegrated, the dragon carved a sharp u-turn and headed straight towards them. “Everybody hold on,” Gault screamed, and banked hard.

Riley grabbed hold of a loop of leather. The Hawk was kicked sideways by a heavy gust of wind. He breathed a sigh of relief as they watched a canvas of lizard skin whip harmlessly past the windshield. The beast let out a cheerful screech, pirouetted, then dipped into a long, lazy dive. The monster suddenly reminded Riley of a sea lion at the Zoo, like it was putting on a show or something.

Toying with us, he thought. Only a matter of time...

“Captain,” Riley hollered. “Get us up to three-thousand feet.”

Gault peered back at him in astonishment, headgear jammed sideways across his leathery neck. “Whoa! You wanna go higher?”

Riley nodded. “We’re jumping. Set your vector and grab your ‘chute, Captain.” Riley flung open a strongbox and started handing out parachutes. As the dragon arced in for another strike, Riley shoved a squad of nine grizzled vets into outer space, watched their parachutes blossom like white flowers. With each bailout, Riley found himself counting down the remaining packs. He smirked grimly as he reached the bottom of the pile.

One short. Fucking Congress.

“Okay, skipper,” he said. “Time’s up!” He watched as Gault thumbed the auto-pilot and hauled ass into the fuselage. The old vet eyed Riley suspiciously as he wrestled his pack on.

“Where’s yours?”

“Hid it under the front seat,” Riley said. “You know I don’t trust these jarheads.”

“Bullshit!” Gault observed, his lower lip trembling. John Gault was an oldie but a goodie, the sort of man who would have been brass by now if he didn’t love flying so damn much.

“It’s your bird, Cap,” Riley muttered. “You wanna go down with her, I guess I can’t stop you. Here… at least let me help you off with that thing.” Gault nodded warily and turned his back. In the same instant, Riley charged the old dog, shoving him sideways into the black void. Seven seconds later he cracked a smile when he saw the chute pop open and sweep lazily out of view.

Okay, he mused. Now what, smarty pants? Heart racing, he jammed himself down in the pilot’s seat and lit up the engines. It had been awhile since he’d driven one of these things, but as he curled out of a hard arc it all started coming back to him. In the corner of his eye, he saw the dragon shift, swinging low in the direction of the parachutes. It was probably hoping for a quick snack on the go. Riley popped a few hundred rounds into it from the Hawk’s turrets and changed its mind.

C’mon, you ugly sonovabitch.

Twirling in space like a ballet dancer, the monster came slashing towards him. As it passed on his left flank, the spiny tail lashed the Hawk like a whip, crippling the chopper’s horizontal stabilizer and turning the rear engine to pudding.

Reflexes on overload, Riley flipped on the auxiliary motor and yanked the throttle hard, gradually drawing the thing into his sights. With no time to lock-on, he took a wild guess and blasted off a trio of Hellfire missiles in quick succession. Just as he’d hoped, the beast dodged sideways to avoid the first two, then slammed into the third. There was a blaze of light and a terrifying shriek. Pieces of the thing’s carcass fell away in burning hunks.

“Wooo-hoo!” Riley cried. “Say hallo to my leeeetle friend!”

It wasn’t over. Howling, streaming blood and fire, the creature hurtled blindly towards its executioner. Riley Finn tore desperately at the console, but it was no damn use. The Hawk’s flight controls had died just a few seconds after that tail walloped the holy-hell out of it. The fact that the missiles still worked was just a sweet little bonus, the consolation prize of some half-assed God.

“Figures,” he murmured.

The dragon was a screaming fireball now, running on pure instinct. Six seconds to impact. He still had one rocket left, but he was waiting for it to get close.

Real close.

Just then, a funny little thought occurred to him. It made him smile, despite himself. The monster was closing in fast, its smoking carcass gradually blotting out the world. He had to type faster.

RE: dinner
S
don’t wait up
love always
R

Riley Finn hit SEND. Closed his eyes.

Went home.

Chapter 18: London Calling

(excerpted from the blog of Dr. Nicholas Fineman)


Wednesday, September 27

I have a new client (Finally, it’s been eons!) The consultation arrived on referral from good old Jake Seward down in Ashford Commons. Seward specializes P.T.S.D cases. Plane crashes, bomb victims, dead babies - that sort. It’s been years since that rummy sent me a genuine tragedy, so I must admit my curiosity is peaked!

The subject’s name is Patricia Bower. Ms. Bower is thirty three-years old, but probably doesn’t look a day over thirty-two. West Cambry native; raised by one of those fine, old patrician families who packed her off to King’s Church for her A-levels mere moments before they had forgotten she ever existed. The girl might have proved a touch underachieving in that regard, having toiled as a part-time “art therapist” for the past seven years. Whether this was due to true shiftlessness or some sort of misguided, neo-hippie mentality is an open question, I suppose. Nevertheless, I’d wager that teaching half-wits how to make macaroni sculptures probably wasn’t her late mum and dad’s idea of a proper legacy.

The case sounds fairly mundane on paper: bourgeois urban professional with a vaguely neurotic family history and a tragic twist of fate. The only difference is that Ms. Bower’s tale boasts a spectacularly gruesome climax. It seems she was widowed last August while on holiday in northern Spain. The happy young newlyweds had set out for a weeklong trip through the Pyrenees – a la one of these horrible “Reality TV adventures” you’d watch twits endure on the BBC4. Unfortunately, this particular trip served up rather a bit too much reality for our starring couple. On the evening of August 23rd 2004, Ms. Bower wandered into a San Gaspiard police station, babbling incoherently and covered in blood. Authorities discovered Francis Bower in the woods near their campsite ten days later. Well, they discovered a small percentage of him, anyway. It seems the poor lad had been brutally mauled by some unidentified animal.

Ms. Bower vanished before the police could question her, leaving the in-laws to claim the body. She apparently managed to stay off the radar for more then a year after that - not that anyone seemed particularly anxious to find her, mind you. Francis Bower’s death was ruled accidental: a “freak occurrence.” My personal opinions on this subject are murky at best. If a bear happens upon you and devours you in your sleep, can one really consider that an accident? Or is this perhaps some degree of murder?

I can imagine my dear chum Henry chuckling at such naked animism, and, as usual, blaming it on my Catholic upbringing.

God, I hope she’s good looking.

***

Friday, September 29

My sincere apologies for yesterday, dearest online diary. Or blog-ary. Or whatever it is I should be calling you (I swear I can’t keep up with the techno-babble!) Came down with a minor case of “not-giving-a-toss,” yesterday, I’m afraid, but I’m feeling much better now. I will credit this miraculous recovery to my intriguing new patient!

Ms. Bower arrived at the office ahead of schedule. When I opened the door, she was already lounging on the couch, her slender neck propped at a low angle, pale, lithe arms crossed neatly on her chest like a funereal corpse. I confess, the sudden sight of her in this pose gave me a jolt, and the memory of it has continued to unnerve me for reasons I cannot fully explain. For nearly an hour, the patient barely spoke, and then only in a series of strange, acerbic riddles that suggested “treatment” was still the farthest thing from her shattered little mind. When I mentioned her husband, she responded with a shy smile, as if to shame me for being such an insufferable bore.

I promised dear Henry that I wouldn’t “talk shop” in these personal logs, but her consultation was so unusual that I feel I must record a few thoughts. To be quite honest, my practice – though modestly successful – is typically a very dull, dull affair. I mostly earn my keep by providing an audience for Luddites with bland childhoods and tedious sexual dysfunctions. The tragedy is, most people already know exactly what they want to tell their analysts the moment they make the first appointment. How many sessions it will take to actually reveal their “dark secret” is a function of how deep their pockets are and how utterly melodramatic they want it to sound when they finally do. As that old firebrand Ned Fordham used to tell his new wards on their rotations at Langstrom: “Welcome to the new priesthood, lads.”

(That sounded right cruel, I know. But, as dear Henry has suggested, this journal is for my therapeutic benefit, not theirs.)

To my delight, Ms. Bower was nothing like the gray, suburban solipsists I’ve grown accustomed to. So far from them, in fact, that I allowed her to do nearly all of the talking. I even bothered to take notes for once! At this early stage, my best guess is that the woman suffers from a form of latent paranoid psychosis, with an onset triggered by the violent death of her spouse.

To say that Ms. Bower is delusional is an understatement. Unlike traditional schizophrenics, however, Bower does not appear particularly troubled by her delusions. There could be a multitude of medical reasons for this: post-traumatic shock, self-medication…even good, old-fashioned denial might do the trick! However, my suspicion is that we are dealing a rare form of highly functioning Cognitive Dissociation Disorder. C.D.D. would allow her to maintain a modicum of outward stability without ever needing to confront the eccentric beliefs that govern her bizarre behavior. A C.D.D sufferer develops a core belief system based on some brand of popular otherworldly phenomenon; an interior logic that is fantastic on its surface, yet adheres to a set of concrete rules and idioms that are so widely known that it can be connected - albeit just barely - to the real world. UFOs usually do the trick nicely. Then again, so does Jesus Christ.

Victims of C.D.D will often use the illness as a tool of empowerment, attributing to themselves special talents or supernatural qualities that act as defensive walls against future trauma. As she spoke, I instantly recalled a case ten years ago, while a resident at Canns-Jofre Hospital in Strand. A fellow named Wilson Reed had recently lost his adolescent daughter in a terribly dreadful tube incident. Without warning, a disturbed young manic-depressive had shoved his nine year-old daughter from the platform mere seconds before the number nine local train pulled into the station. The tragedy was replayed dozens of times in all the tabloids, but it took almost a full year before Reed’s C.D.D dementia reared its ugly head. When it finally did, the poor fellow began to loudly proclaim that he’d gained the ability to read minds.

The cause and effect there was so bloody obvious, I doubt one needed to attend a medical school to sort it out. You see, Reed could’ve saved his daughter, if he’d only had the capacity to know her killer’s thoughts at that fateful moment in the Underground. Telepathy became Wilson Reed’s “talisman.”

For Patricia Bower, it is vampires.

***

Wednesday, October 5

Started the day off in Chelsea. A quick bite at Union Counter, then met Henry for a short match. Unbearably short, it turned out – a 6-0 trouncing. I have to stop eating rich foods before these bloody games! Henry wanted to go two for three, but I faked a hamstring injury and called it a day. Not very sportsmanlike of me, I know, but I wish he hadn’t been such a right bastard about it. Pointing with his racquet, calling his shots. I had half a mind to tell him where to shove it.

Attempted the novel again. Not exactly bruising the keys nowadays, mind you. These evening hours are making me lazy. But what shall I write about? Neurotic bankers with soft penises? Write what you know, indeed. At this rate, I could be the next James bloody Mallory. Inspiration, where art thou?

Ms. Bower showed up early for her session again. This time, I was certain I had locked my door, and Justine insisted she never saw her go in at all. It is a precarious thirty foot climb to the south window of my office, with only a weathered old trellis to use for footholds. Still, I wouldn’t put it past her to try. Paranoids will often go to great lengths to reinforce their delusions.

Either way, she was there, adopting the same lifeless façade as before. I don’t mind saying I am sexually attracted to her. She is beautiful, but in disquieting way, like a doll’s alien beauty. Her piles of still black hair cascaded over the end of the chaise, like a painting of the Thames at night. As usual, her eyes were huge and savage, bulging like wet dollops of blood from the wide, white plain of her forehead.

I let her speak. Her words match her looks so flawlessly; wan and iridescent, like clouds of moths. There are moments I begin to wonder if she is attempting hypnosis. She stares at me unblinkingly, and describes a dozen crimes too terrible to repeat. She speaks of a thirst I do not understand, tells of wandering the earth for centuries, bathed in death and dark, dark visions. I am enthralled, immobile. I can hear the sound of my own heart beating, and something strange tells me that she can too; that indeed she is timing her poetry to that muscle’s manic rhythm, coaxing the questions from my lips. “What of conscience?” I ask, foolishly. “Hunger is the conscience of Gods,” she whispers.

The hour ended too quickly, though I confess I do not recall her leaving at all. I will tell Justine to cancel all my appointments for the week.

This bird needs a lot of help.

***

Friday, October 14

I had Henry over for dinner tonight. What a pest! He must’ve left a hundred messages on my machine, voicing his “mild concern” over my recent absence. I explained that I’d been a bit under the weather, and still wasn’t feeling very much like a night on the town. But, being a good-natured bloke, he offered to stop by with a hot curry and a spot of brandy instead. How could I rebuke such a heroic gesture?

It was almost 8 P.M. by the time he rung me up. I’d been awake for hours by then, and, truth be told, I was utterly famished. Good old Hen poured us out a couple of snifters, then set to clattering about in my kitchen. We made some small talk as he fussed over a flaccid lump of beef from the corner market. Henry droned on and on about this horrid-sounding little nature show, something about a family of ferrets or squirrels or some bloody nonsense. The roast looked so limp and white in his hands, and there was something incredibly unappetizing about it. I couldn’t help but ponder how long it had been dead; it’s organs scooped out by inbred Yorkshire surgeons, the meat soaped and scalded by a hundred gray processes to disguise the fact that it once had eyes and teeth and a heart and a mind to drive it all.

After what felt like an eternity of ferrets and eviscerated cow, I finally coaxed Henry to sit down for a freshener. He noted my somewhat pale complexion, and promised that the spot of brandy would be enough to “redden my cheeks.” I nodded hopefully and inched closer to him on the sectional. I hadn’t bothered to pull on a pair of trousers yet, and the leather felt good against the skin of my thighs. I thought of all that tough gray meat, trapped behind my masquerade of skin . Henry’s body looked much better: a taut, pink balloon full of blood and electricity. I could smell the whole evening on him. He’d popped down a few drinks before he came by. Probably working his nerve up to do something rash, but I sensed I was going to beat him to it. For the first time since I’d known him, I could read the man’s hidden passions like a tawdry magazine. It was a wonderful sensation, sliding forth gracefully, meeting his green eyes with mine, the hot music of his breath thumping out of his chest.

I kissed him. The too warm tongue rolled slowly in my mouth, an underwater death roll. “Oh,” he gasped, his eyes like two pinned stars. Delicately, I took Henry’s hand in mine, and steered it my lips. “Do you fancy a shag, my dear Henny boy?” I purred.

The shock didn’t register on his face quite the way I’d hoped, but in the next moment it no longer mattered. Unable to contain myself, I felt my fangs slide down, crunching through bone. The finger cracked off at the knuckle, and I brandished it like a grisly cigar in my smile. Henry flopped backwards on his bum. An ounce of his steaming blood dotted my yellow Djbouti runner like a modernist painter’s masterstroke. For a long moment he sat there, clutching the red stump, his eyes filling with the dull, blank misery of a doe in the killing fields. Whatever Henry glimpsed in my new face had changed him, instantly and forever. I slid the severed digit in and out of my mouth suggestively, giggling and suckling as the wonderful red warmth drained down my gullet.

“Don’t look so glum, love” I told him. “Imagine if I’d got your knickers down first.”

A sly, mammalian look crossed his face, and then he was moving, stumbling blindly into the void of shadows, upsetting my Arbisher chaise and smashing a shelf of soft jazz CDs along the way. My love rose like an empress in his path. He was screaming like an infant lamb when she tore his throat out. To my new ears, it sounded like a beautiful, lonesome sonata.

I know so many things now, dear diary. This new education of mine has been like awakening from a long, long dream. I know that food is a memory of youth. I know that evil is morality absent time.

I know that “Patricia Bower” is not my mother’s real name. Poor Patricia and her husband met the same bear in those woods that night. She found me sleeping as well.

As we dined, she spoke to me again of the two blondes: one less than alive, one more than dead. One was a monster in the shape of a girl, with fire for blood and ice for hands. The other was a boy called William, and he was to my mother as a favorite hound. The girl must pay an old debt, but she wishes the boy by her side again.

She needs my help.

But I know that when they arrive, I will let neither one of them live long enough to hurt her again.

Got to go, now. Justine just rang up with a cup of hot lentils, and I’m still starving.

***

“Welcome to London,” hollered the unremarkable man in the even less-remarkable suit. “Watch your step…”

Buffy took his hand instinctively as she hopped off the platform onto a grassy plain. It was like the stranger had been handpicked to match the weather. His drab clothes and cloud-wisp of a hair were a perfect camouflage against the sky. But - rain clouds aside - it sure didn’t feel like “London.” No Big Ben, for one. No cute double-decker buses or uber-serious guards in big, furry hats, either. Instead, the place had the look of a grim suburb, like Sunnydale with an extreme dose of the flu. At the horizon, a quartet of smokestacks belched something not quite brown that crumpled like a wave over a checkerboard of beat up rowhomes and cracked asphalt. The air smelled a little like toast. Which would’ve been nice, except that Buffy knew it definitely was not toast. Gazing past the headquarters’ black gates, she thought she could make out some kind of rundown strip mall.

So much for the glamorous homecoming, she thought.

The “headquarters.” That itself was a whole new level of whatever, entirely. The architecture of the new Watcher’s Council seemed to fail in spectacular ways. A dozen bleak stone rectangles littered the sprawling campus, competing for attention with a grid of souless shrubbery. At the center of it all stood a dowdy old cathedral, complete with a rose window and a hackneyed bell tower. The grounds seemed more like a low-rent boarding school than a Top Secret Monster Hunter Command Center.

Which (duh) is probably the whole point.

One by one they filed off the chopper into a bustling throng. The strangers were identically dressed and friendly in a majorly spooky way, like an army of mimes. A pair of them flanked Sam as she emerged. A third in an old leather bomber moved in sharply, his eyes buried behind a giant pair of Aviator sunglasses. He was saying something that Buffy couldn’t hear over the rambling of the helicopters. She watched Samantha Finn’s face start to twist…

Somewhere in the crowd, an American voice called out Buffy's name, and seconds later a lanky, scarlet-haired woman swam towards them. The woman's face was familiar, but just barely. Buffy was feeling stronger since the nap, but the process of connection actual dots still gave her a sort of musty headache.

“Hey,” she managed. “Err…Mandy. Melanie?”

The girl looked crushed. And a little P.O’ed. “Vi,” she sniffed. “Violet Singer.”

For some bizarro reason, an image of dry cornflakes popped into Buffy’s head. “Hellmouth!” she blurted. “Hellmouth Vi. Right. Oh, sorry. It’s, uh, been a while…”

Before she could finish digging the foot out of her mouth, Xander brushed past her, wrapped the girl they used to call Shy Vi up in one of his warm, trademark hugs.  A weird volt of jealousy slashed through her.  Buffy hadn’t gotten one of those.

Giles picked his way forward, gaping in abject horror at the intruders. “Ms. Singer. Mind telling us what the devil is going on?”

The slayer collected a military posture, her eyes glazing over with something like contempt. “Rupert,” she said. “I’m sorry.  Really, it just couldn’t be helped.”

“What couldn’t be helped? Who are all these people?”

“…an’ keep your soddin’ hands off me!” bellowed Spike. The vampire burst from a scrum of uniformed soldiers, batting them away like flies. He grabbed the nearest one by the scruff of the neck and marched him up, flanked by a half dozen wary men. “This todger jus' tried to give me a jab,” he explained, nodding at the needle in the terrified man’s hand.

“Bl-Blood sample,” the hostage stammered.

“Standard quarantine countermeasure,” Violet explained. “Had a parasitic zombie virus last month, traveled in the host’s blood.  Messy stuff, lost a lot of good people…”

“Ridiculous.” Giles’ eyes were blazing. “I wasn’t notified of any… zombie virus, did you say?”

“There’s a lot of things you haven’t been notified about, G,” Violet quipped.  Buffy studied the woman's sharp expression. There was something darker going on there, a smug satisfaction. She'd been looking forward to this, maybe for a very long time.  Behind her, on the green knoll that bordered the landing pad, a procession of C.I.A. looking guys and Slayers was closing in quickly.  “You’ll all need to come with us now.  Management wants to meet with you.”

There was a tense silence. “Bollocks,” said Spike.

“Pardon me?”

Spike steered his hostage into a rough headlock. “Ain’t goin’ anyplace with a pack of soldier boys jus' took a poke at me.  So, what say Management drags its flabby posterior out here and meets us, yeah?” A ring of soldiers closed in, drawing a bead on him with a dozen crackling Tasers. “That’s it lads, come along,” he chided. “’’Nother step, Professor Prickles here loses a head.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Xandered sputtered.

“Don’t,” Buffy said. “It’ll be okay.”

“It will not be okay!” Spike retorted. “You don’t know this lot like I do, Slayer. Leave it to me.”

“You’re bluffing,” said Violet.

The vampire stiffened.  “Yeah? You can’t imagine how wrong you are, love.”  Buffy pictured that icy old leer spreading behind the mask.   She watched helpless as Spike's elbow twisted slowly sideways, and saw the medic’s face turn purple when he tried to scream.

“Stand down,” called a reedy voice from the rear, the soldiers parting before it.

Its owner strode forward, chestnut hair blowing like a mane.

“He’s not bluffing,” said Dawn.  “He never bluffs.  That's why he sucks at poker.”

Chapter 19:  Cute D'état

Andrew peered anxiously into the gloom of the quarantine tent.  A few yards past its crinkled plastic veneer, a huge dark shape was stirring ever so slowly, like a beached whale struggling to breathe.

It was a little past three already, and Andrew had just lost a staring contest with a puddle of mashed potatoes back in the Council infirmary.  He still felt queasy, but found his legs just couldn’t sit still.  He’d decided to nurse his wandering bug with a quick tour of the new facility.  Everything was much, much cooler, now, full of curvy white furniture and super slick track-lighting and big plasma screen TVs.  It was like walking around inside a giant i-Pod!  He made a point of nodding at all the new faces he saw along the way.  Most of them seemed to be doctors, and, in Andrew's dangerous line of work, it seemed like a good idea to be on friendly terms with a few.

The tent was set up in a big empty room, the door to which had a bunch of scary X-Files-looking warning signs printed all over it, but Andrew had learned that these were almost always the best doors to open, especially when somebody forgot to lock them.  Either way, it didn't seem like the kind of place tough enough to hold a super big Hell Demon for very long. Then again, maybe that wasn’t the problem.  Maybe, like him, Melvin the Monster just couldn’t think of any particular place to go.

“Uh, hey there, bro-ski,” Andrew finally said.  “Sleep okay?”

The shape just lurched sideways and moaned.  It reminded him of Warren that morning after he had one too many Fuzzy Navels.

“So,” Andrew persevered. “I guess we’re all safe now, huh?  You know… Yaaaay?”

Strangely, it was Andrew's own voice that answered him, except more sarcastic. "I guess were all safe now, huh?" it said.

"Hey! That's pretty good.  You should have, like, a show or something."

“I’m not talking to you, dude,” rumbled Melvin in his regular, grouchy tone.

“Oh. Um, why not?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

This question, unfortunately, was all too familiar.  It seemed to Andrew like people were always asking him if he was kidding, but he got the feeling they usually didn’t want him to answer.  It was more of a rhetorical question, sort of like ‘Hey Andrew, are you really that much of a super idiot jerkface?’  Or ‘Hey Andrew, why don’t you just go away somewhere and die you big, fat, stupid loser-head?’  But, of course, Andrew usually went ahead and answered anyway, and that would just make everyone even madder than usual.

“No,” he answered anyway.

“Holy stripper Christmas! ” roared Melvin, even madder than usual. “Hey, lemme ask you something, kid.  How did you do it?  How is it even possible?  Do they pass out spellbooks at the local Mickey D’s now? Free ‘Bind of Galgamek’ with every Happy Meal?!”

“It was a Barnes and Noble, actually…”

“Shut up!” bellowed the beast.  “Shut your little monkey pukehole and just fix it already!”

“Oh, yeah,” said Andrew.  “Heh. Funny you should mention that, really. It looks like we may have run into an eeny, teeny snag on the whole ‘let’s send Melvin back to Hell’ front.”

“Yeah? What’s that?”

“Well, I can’t do it.  For one thing.”

“Excuse me?”

“Well,” Andrew mused thoughtfully, “I mean, I’m no expert or anything.  But I’m pretty sure you can’t leave until you finish doing your, you know.  Your thing. ”

The monster’s silhouette twisted sharply.  “What are you smoking, guy?  I already did my thing.  Or was that some other two-ton Overlord of Darkness getting his ass shot off?! ”

“Right!  No!  I mean, yes!  That was... that was great stuff.  It’s just the whole, you know, binding spell thingee.  I think I might’ve maybe messed something up… a little.”

“No way!” Melvin boomed.  “Really? I’m shocked!  Shocked, I tell ya!”  The big blobby shape was pulsating now, and something told Andrew that the demon might be getting a little aggravated.  He stole a quick glance at the door behind him, just to make sure it was still there.

But the monster just sighed, and sunk into a silent, sullen pile, and, for a moment, the conversation felt like it was over.  Again, this was all-too familiar terrain. In the movies, it seemed like people would constantly end conversations with something friendly like ‘peace-out’ or ‘Yo, catch you on the flip, g-money.’  But in real life, Andrew found that it was incredibly rare for people to let him know when they were done chatting with him.  Mostly they’d just stop talking all of the sudden, and then ignore him until he walked away.

Still, Melvin seemed so sad (for a blood-drinking disciple of Satan, at least) and Andrew suspected that some of that was maybe even partially his fault.  “Well, why do you want to go?” he asked.

The beast’s silhouette remained frozen, as though Melvin was lost in deep, deep thought. “What do you mean?”

Instinctively, Andrew crept closer to the tent.  “To Hell, I mean” he said.  “Why do you want to go back to Hell?”

There was a big, crazy noise, like a hornet nest full of grenades and saxaphones.  The plastic bubble of the tent flared out like a giant popcorn bag, and Andrew suddenly felt gusts of intense heat leaping off its surface, singeing his eyelashes.

In a flash, one of Melvin’s smaller heads slammed flush against the plastic barrier, the shark like face straining at the surface.  A pair of silvery lips peeled back, uncovered two saw blades encircling a ragged, briny hole.  The voice that wafted out of it was craggy and worm-choked, like old water echoing through a tomb.

“We are the orphans of eternity, ” it said. “Since the dawn of ages we have feasted from the pig troughs of your miserable species. Gaily, we butcher your daughters in their cribs, and burn your sons to dust.”

Andrew’s stomach was dancing the Boston Shuffle down in his bladder again.  “I suh-see. Now, when you say guh-gaily…”

The head’s rotted jaws gaped wide.  Six black eels slithered out, hungrily tracing the outline of Andrew's ashen face across the plastic.

“Solace! Solace in the putrid hollows of the ten thousand hells. Solace, in the pit of Baal’s ulcerous womb.  Solace in that fallen realm of cannibal mothers and faggot saints, where the burning winds die and the seas fill with the infected sewage of a million murdered whores!  Solace in the raped and boiled loins of the strangled, screamingBLLAAAARGGggghhh-chahukahukahuk…Ughh!  Pardon me, pardon me...”

The writhing, snapping nightmare withdrew into the darkness, like a shy finger abandoning a knee. “Happens every now and then,” Melvin said.

“Uh…”

“Sort of like a sneeze, I guess.”

“God… bless… you?”

“Pffft!  Yeah, like that’ll happen,” Melvin snorted.  “Sorry, man. What was the question, again?”

***

Does it have to be the library? he wondered.

Rupert strolled slowly up the aisle, pausing once to neaten a shelf.  The section he’d wandered into was mainly composed of newer reference books; heavy on theory, light on practice.  Most of the truly powerful enchantments were located in the northern wing, locked tight with a barrier spell courtesy of the Nevada Three.  The trio of Wiccans had proved competent replacements for Willow Rosenberg, if not especially creative or talented ones.  They were disciplined, at the very least. Discipline was one skill the redheaded Witch never could quite master; now, it was possibly too late.

And too late for you, too, old man, he thought. But does it have to be the library?

He rested his palm on a thick red spine with gold stitching. The title glowered down at him like an old headmaster:

Lucifer’s Jest:
Un-Life, Para-Life and Other Fallen States of Man

by Quentin R. Travers

It was misfiled, he realized.  He knew the tome well, one of the few items he’d loaned out from his personal archive.  Rupert was given it to read during his very first year as a Watcher.  It was a rite of passage at the time.  Of course, much of the information was hopelessly outdated now, and the format was perhaps a bit too conservative for the internet generation.  But once upon a time, it had served as a salvation for a certain confused, angry young man, a lifeline thrown in a boiling sea.  He opened to the introduction, absently selecting a random passage:

Yet, we continue to pose the eternal question: 'What is Life?
For the academic, the answer is often straightforward. To the physicist, life is a series of electrical charges, measurable through time and comprised of unique paths that are finitely predictable. To the biologist, it is a democracy of organs, whom together chart a course towards sustenance and sex. To the theologian, life is but a waking dream; a shared hallucination that reveals the moral arrangement of our souls within the context of eternity.
The relative accuracy of these definitions should not concern the Watcher, however. If we must develop for ourselves a definition of life, perhaps it should likewise stem from the context of our own unique mission. In that light, “life” can most simply be described as a state of delayed death.
If this is our hypothesis, perhaps all 'un-life' is drained of its romance.  The enigmatic vampire can be reduced to a mechanical force, like gravity. Our enemy becomes less a supernatural bogeyman than an agent of universal efficiency, designed to hasten death’s delay...

“The butler did it,” mocked an all too familiar voice.

Rupert glowered at the vampire, who was slouching against “P-to-Pr” like a schoolyard bully.  Spike was holding a book as well, cracked midway open in one hand.

“What are you doing here?”

“Lookin’ for a spell, you know?  Something to turn you all into toads. Although, in your case…”

Rupert snapped the book shut.  “No, Spike.  What are you doing here?”

Spike’s eyes widened.  “Take it you’re still not happy to see me, then, Rupes?”

The Watcher closed the distance menacingly, but cautiously. It had been a long time since he’d feared this particular vampire – since he’d physically feared him, at least.  Still, Spike was undoubtedly the most unpredictable creature he’d ever encountered, and had a well documented history of turning the tables when you least expected it.  “You may take it any way you want.   As long as you’ll do us the favor of taking it elsewhere.”

“Bold words,” Spike said, and casually resumed nosing through his spellbook.  “From a bloke in your position,” he added darkly.

“And what position is that?”

Spike nodded at something over the Watcher’s left shoulder.  Rupert turned in time to glimpse a black-suited stranger, hovering at the edge of the third floor rail.  A shaft of light glinted off the rifle in his hands.  “Congratulations.  Looks like you got yourself your very own Watcher these days, mate.”

Rupert gritted his teeth.  “Yes,” he admitted.  “I suppose I do.”

“Don’t suppose you have a plan to go along with it?”

“Actually, Spike, I have that as well. I’m giving up.”

“Ah, very inspirational.  Churchill would be proud…”

“A few minutes from now. I’m going to sit at that long table over there.  There’ll be a very polite meeting, much like a business luncheon.  I’ll be told that I’ve done some ‘good work,’ but that it’s time to move on and let the professionals handle things.  For Buffy and Xander’s sake, they’ll tell me that there’s ‘no hard feelings,’ and then they’ll send me on my merry way.  But as soon as I’m out of sight, all that will change.  I know far too much to be allowed to leave this place. I will be dead before I reach the front gates.”  Giles smiled bitterly at the reality of this last bit.  Saying it out loud did not help.

Spike scanned his face warily. “God, you're serious. Well, in that case, any last requests?  Someone in particular you’d like me to smother, maybe?”

“Actually, I do have one last request, Spike...”

Rupert studied the vampire’s earnest blue eyes. It was a strange experience to look into William the Bloody’s eyes.  Over the years, the Watcher had learned much about his enemies’ horrifying methods, but the human mask was always the most mysterious and deadly weapon in a vampire’s arsenal.  The most skillful among them could mimic a human so precisely that they became almost indistinguishable from their prey.  But for a trained observer, the average vampire’s eyes were almost always a dead give away.  They were a shark’s eyes, a doll’s dead eyes, and if you gazed into them long enough, you would surely meet the monster.

Not so with Spike.  The old fiend was a great many things, but average was never one of them. 

“Leave her,” Rupert said.

Spike glared back at him for a long moment, then softly shook his head. “Can’t.  Can’t do it.  It’s up to her, now.”

Rupert drew a deep breath. “I know," he said, "that you believe that.  But you have a will of your own. You’ve surely proven that much.”  This was a last ditch effort, one final charge unto the breach before the curtain fell.  Anger and threats hadn’t worked.  Neither had treachery and violence.  Now, at the very end, Rupert Giles would try understanding.  Reason.  And staring into that impeccable mask of his, he suddenly believed it might work.  He drew even closer, allowing Spike to feel his warm, living breath on his face, to listen to his heartbeat.  He wanted the vampire to be able to run that infamous little lie detector of his, to recognize the place from which he spoke.

“It’s the age difference, isn't it?” the creature jeered.  “You can’t blame the girl for robbin’ the cradle, mate. I’m adorable.”  But his eyes were focused, narrowing.  He was paying attention.

“There is something different about you, Spike,” Rupert continued.  “It's taken me all these years to see it, but I finally do. You are the most incredibly, impenetrably stupid vampire ever made.”

Spike stiffened visibly.  “Beg pardon?”

“No, I mean it. You may honestly be the most slow-witted being to ever prowl the face of the Earth.  My only guess is, you must have been at least as moronic in your human life.  Were you a banker, perhaps? Or a poet?”

“Now, wait just one bloody min-”

“You stayed away once. Stupid though you are, you know how this story of yours ends.  Deep down, you do.”

“I tried!”

“I know you did. Try harder.”

“Yeah, well, its not as easy as all that, is it?” Spike growled.  “Can't just shut it off like some bloody chip in your head!  You don’t know what it’s like…”

“I do,” Giles corrected him gently.  “He stole her in the night. Ripped her away. Remember?”

Spike started shaking his head again, trying to dismiss the gonging truth of it. “It could be different,” he explained.  “We’ll sort something out. Just need a bit of time is all.  Think things through…”

“Time won’t change a bloody thing,” said Rupert.  “Time will only make it worse. Look at her.”  He peered into the main hall.  Buffy sat quietly at the foot of the long study bench, arms folded, lost in dark thoughts.  “Look at her!” he demanded.

Reluctantly, the vampire did as he was told, his slotted eyes widening as he gazed at the girl, hypnotized by her beauty.

“How many years?” Rupert asked. “Fifty or sixty. Seventy, maybe.  Maybe.  She's strong, but not that strong. She will die…”

“I know tha-”

“She will die,” the Watcher repeated, trying to drive the point home.  “And what will you do with your eternity, then?”

Spike didn’t answer at first.  He just kept staring and softly shaking his head.  "What’s it to you, anyway?" he finally asked.  "I mean what do you care what I do, after she…”

He trailed off, unable to say it without imagining it.  The creature was starting to slip into the shadows again, feigning an aura of cool indifference.  Yet, Rupert could see the fact slowly dawning on him. William was a dullard, yes.  But not quite that dull.

“Ah, you see it, now, don’t you?”

“No,” Spike said, and swallowed something hard.  “No, you’re wrong. I’d never…”

“You will," Giles insisted.  "Not today, or tomorrow. Perhaps not for a very, very long time.  But, someday, you will do it. You will turn her.”

Spike was crying now, showing off his mask’s fine craftsmanship.  For the second time in Rupert’s life, he wondered if the demon had worn its human disguise for so long and so well that it had forgotten it was all a lie.  And, for the first time in his life, he was counting on it.  As he studied Spike’s eyes, he felt his  intuition screaming at him, kicking open a door.  The answer was suddenly so obvious.

“You’ve done it before,” he said, genuinely astonished by this fact. “Haven’t you?  Turned someone you loved?”

Horrified, the vampire shook its head in protest.  “No.   I... didn't mean to. Didn’t know. What I was doing…”

Rupert clasped the monster’s shoulder.  “I know,” he lied. “I believe you.”

“I was so young,” Spike gasped, his voice suddenly choked with tears. 

There was something tortured about the way the vampire used the word young, filling it with an unnerving stew of emotions both real and imagined.   Whatever else he was, Spike was surely a tortured beast.   And, though he was undeterred, a thing like pity stabbed at Rupert Giles.

“We’ve all made our mistakes,” he said, his mind drifting towards a small, black memory of his own.  “The only grace is, we sometimes learn from them, and get the opportunity to do the hard thing -- the right thing.”  He gently tugged Spike's shoulder, bringing him face to face once more.  “You can do the right thing. For her.”

Spike had stopped pretending to breathe, and the tears bled down his white cheeks like water over a fountain statue.  The seconds ticked by too slowly, and the Watcher was suddenly afraid he’d miscalculated, that he'd overplayed a weak card.

Then, incredibly, the monster began to nod.  “For her, yeah,” he said, and extended his hand.  Rupert took it, and for a strange moment they stood there like two Englishmen -- old hearth enemies sealing a gentlemanly pact.  He quietly prayed this would be enough.

When it was over, he left the vampire to his business of lurking about in the shadows.  Knowing Spike as he did, he assumed the bastard would find some way to wriggle out of this mess they were all in.  The old devil was more slippery than a bag of snakes, and seemed to have an endless supply of lives.

As for Rupert Giles, he only had one.  And, as gracefully as he could, he strode out to meet the end of it.

***

Does it have to be the library? she wondered.

It was a little sick, Buffy thought.  Not like it was some perfect replica or anything.  Thirty-foot vaulted ceilings yawned like elegant, frozen waves over the facility’s cavernous gothic wings.  The main hall stretched back fifty echoing yards, and sported four gleaming spiral staircases that rose from the marble floorings like the strands of God’s DNA.  There must have been thousands of books; maybe hundreds of thousands.  It was a far cry from the random scraps of paper that Giles had salvaged from the ruins of the old Quentin Travers regime, or even from the Council’s temporary Chicago digs.  It certainly looked nothing like the tiny state-funded book farm that had once served as the gang’s secret headquarters, all those years ago. Did Dawn even know about that place?  Did she ever go there? It was still so hard to remember.

‘And a child will lead them’, she mused.  Did the Bible say that? Or was it The Lion King?

There were times at night when she could close her eyes and just be back there again.  As usual, they’d all be sitting around the big table, pouring over a truckload of crappy old books.  Buffy would just sit there pretending to read, a totally bored buttkicker waiting for someone to point her in the direction of a butt.  Willow would get things going with an ‘Ooh, listen to this.’ Giles would say something British like, ‘How utterly fascinating,' and then he’d start droning on and on about something that wasn’t the least bit utterly fascinating, which Cordelia would find some delicate way to point out.  Around that time, Xander would stop daydreaming about Cordy’s legs long enough to say dorky thing number one ('Whoa, wait, whoa'), followed by your basic Lightning Round of half-baked plans that would make Wile E. Coyote look like Napoleon.

Crazy days.  Old days.

Gone days.

Willow was… What?  On vacation?  On Mars?  The witch’s absence was never more palpable.  Minus her adorable stutter, the whole scene was just unbearably drab and awful, even by British standards.  And Cordy was just dead, period.  Hunched in the long, stale angles of the archives, it almost felt like their funeral.

Buffy furtively studied the survivors.  Goofy, loveable Xander Harris looked like a man battling the shady side of fifty.  The good eye was half-closed, ringed with dark, purple gullies.  It was even worse than in Chicago.  No trace of boyishness remained in the clenched, stubbled jaw, and those cute little flecks of salt and pepper hair were quickly transforming into rivers of gray.  She wondered if that was an occupational hazard of monster-fighting, and made a mental note to beef up her Lady Clairol budget.

Xander hadn’t said much so far. He still seemed to be playing his cards close to his chest.  Being in charge of the Ipswich ‘Mouth had changed him. Leaders eventually learn to keep their mouths shut until they have all the facts, something she’d learned the hard way.  He drummed his fingers idly on the mahogany table.  The weird echoes of the room twisted the noise into a stampede of horses.

Giles busied himself by pretending not to notice.  She’d never seen him like this, looking so small, so unofficial.  He’d abandoned the Armani jacket for a flimsy nylon pullover that made him look a hundred years old.  Whatever he’d thought he would get out of this whole saving-the-world business was gone, now.  For the first time in a long time, she wondered what Rupert was like as a young man.  Minus the whole unavoidable “mystic destiny” thing, what exactly gets someone into the business of fighting monsters?

As if to answer, Xander started thrumping his fingers again. It was annoying, but no one was telling him to stop, and the likeliest candidate to do so was off in the shadows playing ‘Creature of Darkness’ again.  She tracked him through narrowed eyes as he loped down a length of dusty old books.

There was something intensely grrrr about the sight of him. There was the costume, for one thing.  Despite the lateness of the hour and the cozy, non-flammable setting, Spike had stubbornly refused to take it off.  Wearing it, he was still a suspicious, extraterrestrial shape, a thing less than real.  There had been nights in Rome when she longed to see that leather duster again, swinging clocklike as he swaggered through his crypt.  Spike’s clothes were the key to knowing him.  A pair of black bootheels clacking on sidewalks, a few irritating steps behind.  That lame necklace that was so 1979 it hurt.  They were all badges of slow change, evidence of a mind in search of a more human sort of belonging.  Maybe this was just the latest vampire fashion craze, a symbol that he’d moved on, yet again. Techno Bondage-Wear.  Post-Buffy Chic.

But, that kiss…

Buffy shook her head, feeling stupid again.  Personally, she’d welcomed her own wardrobe change.  Dawn had one of the Council’s snotty Slayer wannabes bring it to her in a rumpled paper bag.  Lime chiffon blouse?  Check. Black velveteen flares?  Check.  Clunky, open-toed, fuchsia Salt-Waters?  Yuck, but check.  She’d pulled the gear on in a ladies’ room the size of a small gymnasium, and then gazed begrudgingly into the mirror.  It would take a month’s worth of Mr. Bubble baths to wash off the past four days. Her skin looked, well, gross, especially around the eyes.  Her lips were cracked lips, her hair paper-dry and dandruffy. And at the corner of her mouth: a juicy pink zit.

Twenty six years old, she thought.

Ex drug addict. Part-time killer. Popping a zit in a London loo. Hopelessly in love with a soulless monster.

Quick!  Somebody call Cosmo!

On cue, a set of twin doors at the far end of the library swung wide. Dawn marched through them, flanked by a Hollywood entourage of black suited stiffs.  A cliché tough guy in a leather bomber brought up the rear, and after a moment Buffy recognized him as the man from the airfield who’d somehow managed to make Samantha “Take No Prisoners” Riley cry.

Kid sis’ entrance was dramatic, alright. Her gait reminded Buffy of one of those sirens from an 80’s Wall Street thriller: long strides, conservative but bold, with the knees crossing smoothly, almost hypnotically in front. It was the opposite of a 'model walk', oozing the kind of professional, fuck-you confidence that inspired the phrase “bitch on wheels.” Nude stockings glittered over a pair of sculpted, womanly legs. Slate pencil skirt, trimmed at mid thigh.  Cute silk jacket, buttoned once, and spread way, way, way too open at the chest.  Little sister, all grown up big.

Especially the chest part.

Dawn seized the chair at the head of the table, with her staff falling smoothly in place all around her.  The atmosphere was a little more intimidating than Buffy was used to.  For one thing, they had briefcases.   Xander and Willow never had any of those.  Oz had a guitar case, but it wasn’t really the same thing.  Giles studied them all resentfully.  Even Spike swung nearer from his perch in the shadows, his curiosity getting the best of him.

“Thank you all for waiting,” Dawn began.  “I know you must be pretty tired, so we’ll try to keep this brief…”

“Ah, the infamous we!” Giles sneered gleefully.  “Of course, Xander and I are well aware of their identities, my dear girl. But don’t you think your sister deserves to know what it is you’ve done?”

“What I’ve done?” Dawn repeated coldly, her eyes beading from one face to the next.  “Two years ago, a man - a man I knew and loved, a man I trusted like a father - sent me on a suicide mission. I was to infiltrate a rival supernatural intelligence organization known only as the Agency, detail its activities, its methods and its weaknesses, and prepare for the inevitable conflict of interests.”

“Yeah,” Xander chimed in.  “So what happened?  They offer you better dental, or something?”

“You could say that,” Dawn replied.  “Giles suspected that the Agency may one day attempt to stage a hostile takeover of the Council.  After carefully weighing the costs and benefits, I chose to facilitate that takeover.  That is what I’ve done.”

“What you’ve done is treason!” Giles snarled.  “You’re a traitor to this Council and to everything it stands for.”

“Stood for,” she corrected him.  “It’s you who betrayed us, Giles. The Watcher’s Council?  Did you really think that’s what you built here?” The young woman’s voice dropped an octave, her eyes narrowed to accusatory slits. “This place was a sick joke. A psycho factory that cranked out freakshows like Kennedy. Why do you think Willow left?  Or Xander, for that matter? After what happened in Sunnydale, you think his heart just went all aflutter at the idea of living on top of another Hellmouth?  Even Andrew eventually ran away screaming at the sight of your perfect little society, and that guy has no life whatsoever.”

Giles creaked backward into his chair, the heavy brow creasing slyly. “You can’t take this place. You don’t have the right.”

“Actually,” said Bomber Jacket Guy,“we do.”  His voice was thundering, authoritative, and tinted just a little bit Texan, like Yosemite Sam on steroids.

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really,” boomed Bomber Man, matter-of-factly. “Approximately one hour ago, the shell corporation that funds the Council was charged under seventeen different international anti-terror statutes.  This entire facility and everythin’ in it is now under our direct legal auspices.  That includes every asset – the books, the computers, the chairs you’re sittin’ in.  Hell even that fancy little chip in your head, Mr. Giles.”

The Watcher stared at the man in amazement.  “Under whose authority?”

“Classified.”

“Classified by whom?”

“Also classified. You wanna try for three’sies?”

The Watcher’s cheeks flared a deep shade of purple. “And who, may I ask, are you? Or when I report you to the authorities, shall I simply tell them, 'sorry but that’s classified?'”

“No sir, not at all. My name is Frank Grange.  And if you’re goin' to the authorities, would you mind tellin’ me which?  See I run a Friday night poker game with most of the big ones, and I could let them know you’re coming.”  Grange rocked back in his chair amiably, looking like a cat who’d finally swallowed a long sought canary.

“Don’t you have anything to say, Xander?”  Giles asked. “Or are you just going to sit there.”

“I’m just going to sit here,” Xander shot back.  He turned to Grange, “Uh, I can still 'just sit here', right?”

“Oh, sure thing, son!” Grange bellowed back.  “In fact we were kinda hopin’ you would all hang around.  Despite what Miss Summers believes, we prefer to think of this whole thing as more of a merger than a takeover. Your assets, our assets…”

Xander smirked wryly.  “One big, happy pile of assets?”

“Where’s Faith,” Giles said.  “I demand to see Faith.”

“On your six, G-man.”  Everyone whirled to look. The raven-haired beauty was grinning down from a second floor terrace. “Couldn’t find any popcorn.  Are we havin’ fun yet?”  She threw Buffy a sharp wink. “Hey, welcome home, Bee. Lovin’ the shoes...”

Four thunderstruck seconds elapsed, and then Rupert Giles lost it. Peels of inappropriate laughter poured out of him, echoing across the library like a madhouse opera.  It was the sort of unbridled giggle-fit that only the truly hopeless could ever hope to master: condemned criminals, broke gamblers and Watchers who’d suddenly run out of stuff to watch.  Under other circumstances, it might have moved Buffy Summers to tears, but these weren’t ‘other circumstances.’

Everyone waited in stunned silence.  When he finally stopped, he grinned at Buffy.  “Well then. What’s it to be? Firing squad? The gallows? Might I at least get a blindfold…?”

It was Grange’s turn to chuckle now, a smoky rumbling sound that was weirdly cheerful given the question.  “Hell no,” he chortled.  “My God, Mr. Giles, you do have a rather high opinion of yourself, don’t you?  We rounded up the last of those ‘Eye’ fellas of yours this morning.  Those poor sons’o’guns even volunteered to have their implants surgically removed.  Good thing too.  All that brain zappin’ crap was probably gonna give them cancer, fer chrissakes!” After he said this, Grange seemed to reel himself in a bit, then, noting the bitterness written all over Rupert’s face.  “Not that it matters," he continued.  "The Watchernet satellite is being disabled as we speak, and the project has been shut down. Permanently. It’s just, you know, obsolete. And... weird.”

“You’re free to go, Giles,” Dawn said flatly, sorting through a stack of files.  “No one here will try to stop you.  But you do need to leave. That was always part of the deal.”  Buffy detected the tiniest crack in the girl’s velvety, Big Girl voice. It wasn’t much, but it was a sliver of... well, something.

Was it regret?

“It’s nothing personal,” Dawn added softly.

Giles ignored her.  He was still gazing serenely at Buffy and Xander, as though he lacked the physical strength to turn away, his eyes glittering with something rare and wet and long overdue.  “Well,” he said. “I suppose that, as they say, is that. ”

And it was.  Without another word, Rupert Giles, one of the last living remnants of the Ancient Order of Watchers, stood up, straightened his ill-fitting Harajuku Girls warm-up jacket, walked in a long straight line through a pair of heavy double doors, and shut them firmly behind.  There was a finality about the sound that Buffy couldn’t quite get over, and she wondered if this new world of hers would be even colder without him in it.

As if in response, Buffy sensed her vampire drawing nearer.  She hadn’t minded his distance until that very moment.  Spike was always growly, downright surly in any group setting.  He preferred to lurk in shadows, jump out from behind trees.   It was his nature.

She turned to glance at him, anyway, hoping to steal a sign or signal or something.  But the vamp’s eyes were fixated on Dawn now, the face a slack mixture of confusion and awe.  Xander was gaping at her too.  To be fair, it was hard not to.

It had been more than a year since she’d seen her pseudo-sister’s face, but it seemed like much longer. New angles jutted out in abstraction, making her appear almost supernaturally lean under the cool florescent light.  She looked hungry; not in a bloodsucking way or a double mocha fudge sundae way, but in the way Buffy often felt sliding off a high, lost in the mists of the dragon.

Mirrors were cruel fixtures in those days, and she avoided them like a vampire. But every now and then, Buffy would catch a glimpse – passing a storefront, maybe, or in the crooked corners of a ladies restroom on the Via Cortello.   There was real hunger there, an emptiness impossible to fill. Now, she saw it again in her sister who was not a sister or even from a mister, and it chilled Buffy to her very core.  Human or not, all at once Buffy realized that life had been an exceedingly brief and agonizing pageant for the Key, and that it had learned well from the experience.  Rupert Giles had misused and abandoned her.  It was only natural that he would be thrown under the bus.  In a moment of sheer and giddy dread, Buffy Summers wondered if she was next.

“What about us, Dawn?” she finally asked.  “Are we part of the deal too?”

The girl’s jaw hardened to glass.  “He’ll be safe,” she replied. “Now that he’s no threat, they’ll leave him alone.”

“She’s right,” Grange agreed, either misunderstanding or ignoring the implication.  “Our enemy sees Faith and her army as their primary obstacle, not ex-librarians.  Chances are he’s safer out there then he would be in here.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” Xander observed.

“Okay, check this out,” Buffy snarled, rising to stage her own dramatic exit.  “I’m not going to pretend I know what’s been going on around here, and, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.  But Dawn Summers, if you’re thinking of running off to play war with this Tom Clancy reject, well then you’ve got another thing coming, missy!”

Instantly, the Slayer felt a dozen sets of puzzled eyes staring at her, and caught Dawn’s face turning three shades of red.

Holy crap, she thought. Did I really just say ‘missy?’

Grange leapt at the opportunity, ditching his sunglasses.  His eyes were dark and intelligent, and more youthful than she’d expected.  “I know what you’re thinkin’, Summers,” he said.  “Big, evil government guy, right?  Probably tryin’ to take over the damn world himself, just like Walsh.” The name snapped a tiny twig in Buffy’s head. “Yeah,” he added. “I knew her. Maggie was one of ours, once. So was Nancy Stark…”

Buffy gritted her teeth.  “Oh, gee thanks, that’s real comforting.”

“… and Kennedy was one of yours, right?  That don’t mean you throw out the baby with the bath water, now does it?”

Faith chimed down from her perch.  “Hear him out, Bee.  The man makes a whole lotta sense.”

“Thank you, Faith,” she shouted back, suddenly exasperated. “But, hey, forgive us if we don’t exactly trust your taste in men.”

“Oh, yeah, look who’s talkin’,” Faith scoffed, casting a sly glance at Spike. “Want me to read the scorecard out loud, babe?”

“Riley Finn is dead,” Grange boomed suddenly.

The last word reverberated through the library, through the table, the floor, through the past and the future and the bottom of Buffy’s spine.  The revelation was not a surprise, not by a long shot. Still, something long buried seemed to shudder in its grave.

Riley Finn is dead.

“How?” Buffy whispered.

“You know how!” Grange roared, and slammed a massive fist. “They murdered ’im.  Him and his whole goddamn team! Good men. And you know they won’t be the last.”

Buffy kept trying to concentrate, kneading the concept over in her mind, letting the teeth sink all the way in. And when they finally did, all she could feel was rage.

“Unless we stop ’em,” Grange added, so softly that it coaxed her to look up.

When she did, she saw an oddly familiar sight: a room of war-weary human faces.  Dawn and her entire entourage looked haggard, wrung dry from exhaustion, fear and doubt.  But they all were beaming hopefully at Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  And so, she realized, was Xander.

For one bright, shining moment, the world began to make sense again. Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  Her Calling was…

Well, 'calling'.

“Okay,” she said, nodding sullenly. “Whatever.  I’m in.”

“Same here,” said Xander, and seemed a little surprised at the sound of his own voice. “I mean what the heck. It’s time for payback, right?  Don’t care who’s signin’ the checks.”

A dozen faces lit up like candles, and the table erupted into rowdy applause.  Only Dawn seemed unmoved by this gesture, her face frozen in a polite, clinical mask. Grange himself clapped loudly, then leered into the shadows.  Spike was still looming wraithlike near the mouth of a stairwell, the vampire’s sultry blue eyes more impenetrable than ever.

“And how about you, my undead friend?” said Grange. “What do you say?”

“Sod off, usually,” Spike quipped. “But in this case, think I’ll just tell you to go shag yourself.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Save the world?” he scoffed. “Been there, done that. Trust me when I say, s’not what it's cracked up to be.”

And on that irascibly brief note, William the Bloody stomped off in the exact same direction as Rupert Giles had.  No glance, no nod. Not even one of those little thumb-and-finger ‘call me’ signs. Nada. Buffy felt her heart crashing down into the bottoms of her cheap, cheap shoes.  Spike kept walking, bootheels clacking away like a snare drum on the marble tiles.

“Wait,” she cried, the word dying in her throat.

“Done waiting,” an icy voice hollered back.  “Keep an eye on the brat for us, Slayer. Seems like a cheeky one, all told.”

And that was it.  Door.  Bang.  Slam.  Gone.

Again.

Grange waived a hand nonchalantly.  “Keep yer panties on, Summers,” he drawled.  “He ain’t goin’ far…”  He leaned leaned forward like he was about to tell a dirty joke, dark eyes flashing with something that was almost sinister.  “And if he does, he sure as hell ain’t goin’ alone. Trust me. We’ve been keeping an eye on that one for a long time, now.”

Join the club, mister, she thought.

Then, for some unknown reason, almost instinctively, she found herself scanning the balcony for Faith.

And, of course, she was gone too.

***

Stupid, plonking, ridiculous, ignorant, foolish, half-brained…

Spike measured his stride down the posh corridor.  The place looked like a reformatory for French debutantes.  He’d dined at a few of those in his day…

…ludicrous, witless, preposterous, buggering, blundering, bungling…

“Hey, Dead Zone! Where’s the fire?”

“Oh bloody perfect,” he said, not bothering to break stride.

“Aw, don’t be like that, babe,” she chirped.  “Don’t you remember all those good times we almost shared?”

Spike stopped dead in his tracks.  “I never liked you, you know.”

Faith batted her long eyelashes. The bird was dead sexy, like it or not.  There was something slithering around inside her that was just impossible to ignore. “Just wanted to welcome you back, is all,” she cooed.  “Bet it hasn’t been the warmest reception, so far.”  Leering, she began to stroke his arm.  “Ooh, nice duds, vampire. Where’d you get ‘em?”

“It’s a long story,” Spike grunted.  “Well, actually, no it’s not. I stole ‘em.”

“Really? Who from?”

“None of your business, pet,” he said, and jerked free. “Needless to say, not the sort of blokes you want to come ‘round collecting.  Which reminds me, you’d do well to send Andrew’s doggy back home right quick. I’m a bit familiar with that sort, and you do not want to see them when they get hungry.  Now, if you’ll excuse me…” Satisfied he’d put the stopper to it, he turned and stomped off again.

“So, where’re we goin’?” she asked, keeping pace.

“Right.  What part of ‘I dislike you intensely’ did you not understand?”

Faith spun him around sharply, her devil strength whistling through him like an electric charge.  A second hand shot southward, fingers scrambling roughly over his crotch.  “What part of ‘welcome back’ did you not understand?”

She pursed her red lips, hissing. The monster inside him roared to life.  He flung her to the ground, his teeth grinding like a gear. The stench of the blood in her veins filled him with a fresh wave of guilt.

“Relax tough guy,” Faith griped. “I was just kiddin’ around, Jeez!”

The monster was still roaring inside him, clawing at its cage. “Touch me again, and I’ll show you what a real 'tough guy'looks like, love.”

“Alright, already!”  She picked herself off the floor gingerly, stretched her back like a Bengal tigress. “ Just thought, as long as we’re stuck together we could have a little fun. But, hey, suit yourself.”

“What do you mean, 'stuck together'?”

“Sorry. Doctor’s orders, babe.  Gotta keep an eye on you. Make sure you keep outta trouble.”

He goggled at her in disbelief.  “Are you mad? You really think a ridiculous little Yank like you can keep up with a purebred Londoner? On his bloody home turf? ”  He laughed loudly for effect, but the truth was he didn’t find any part of this lass funny.  Not in the least.

“Hey, try me, hot stuff!  'Bout time the ‘big, bad wolf’ knew what it was like to have an annoying little pest for a shadow."  She cracked off a sadistic little grin. "Poetic justice, doncha think?”

Spike marched grimly on.  Night was falling fast, and if he hurried he could make the 5:45 shuttle to Chelsea.  He’d hit the girl up for a few quid, then.  Or maybe just hit her.  Buy a pack of smokes, change of clothes, bottle of Kentucky bourbon, cheap hotel room.   He’d drink it down in one go, then out the window, down to the underground again, east this time, as far east as east went.  Hit a pub or three.  ‘Nother room, ‘nother bottle.  Bit of sleep.  If he was lucky, maybe he’d even have a dream.  He missed those the most.

Then again, he wasn’t very lucky after all.  Fact was, he might never get past the 5:45 shuttle.  Or the quid, for that matter.

Well, that’s why they call it a plan, mate, he thought.  Best get on with it.

Going to be a very long life.

Chapter 20: Departments of Education

It was late and grease-hot in the Tri Kappa dorms. The rebels had the thermostat turned way up to accommodate their latest recruits: a half-dozen M'Zog demons. The horned monsters sat shivering in the swelter, huddled around the glow of an old Dell laptop and watching an old rerun of "Too Close For Comfort."

The rebel hideout was pretty snazzy, all things considered. After the Battle of California, the mystics and their non-human allies had regrouped in Cambridge, hunkering down on the abandoned campus of Harvard University.  Apparently, the location was Willow's idea – the other Willow, that is, the deader one. Which kinda made sense to the Willow-Willow, actually, since she (Um, they?  We?) had always dreamed of doing her (Their?) undergrad there.

In this version of the world, the mystic revolution had actually begun as a sort of joke. Before her hometown’s nosedive into hell, “magic” was still considered total geeksville – the stuff of cheeseball Vegas acts and Harry Potter junkies. Normal people never seriously considered the idea that demons and vampires and sundry other bugga-boos actually roamed the earth, twirling their mustaches while they plotting mankind’s doom. But then the First had to come along, acting all First-y, and then 'splodiness of the Sunny-D mouth hit the gossip circuit with a nuclear force, and pretty soon survivors were popping up all over web forums, in trashy tabloids, on drive-time talk radio. Bloggers spun wild tales of alien conspiracies, government experiments, and sorcery of all kinds.  In the beginning, the media would only portray them in a hoaxy, semi-serious sorta way.  When Letterman did his “Top Ten Reasons to Re-elect Corey Feldman,” governor of California, reason number one was: “All the damn vampires!”

Then, L.A. happened.

The rebels' enemies in the New Humanist movement labeled that one a "genocide,” and ,while it wasn’t quite that grandiose, the death toll was still unbearably high. Twenty-four hour news cycles filled entire broadcasts with the footage, rewinding and freeze-framing, scrutinizing every scale and fang and claw.  Which, hey, fair enough.  After all, it wasn’t every day that the world woke up and saw a genuine, honest-to-goodness dragon laying waste to a major U.S. city. The immediate result was pure, unadulterated chaos, followed by a prolonged period of mortal terror (which, according to Oz, was only slightly more adulterated.)  Commissions were formed, task forces assembled. People wanted something done. Which, of course, made sense.

Don't they always.

Just as Willow thought this, Oz reappeared, striding through the makeshift compound like the general of a rag tag, third world army. At each post, demons, Slayers and Wiccans lay in huddled piles, under siege, their eyes looking hunted and hollowed from the strain of constant warfare. Willow watched in rapt silence as the boy she once loved navigated the ranks, pausing long enough for a raunchy joke or a solemn salute. He was a man now, and a leader here, sort of. That made sense too.

Tara cut a strange figure amid the paramilitary scenery.  Her dress was dark and majestic, with a sheer, spectral back that reminded Willow of a widow’s veil. A pair of uncharacteristic combat boots pierced the hemline, laced hard up to the knees. More than once, Willow caught the demons in the den study her with a kind of awe.  It was as if even they longed for that small, strange smile, for the silky music of her voice to tell them everything would be just fine.  Willow knew this feeling pretty well.  She felt it stabbing through her as they stood together in the dingy kitchenette, four agonizing feet apart. It was all she could do not to pounce like some big, nerdy, lezzy tiger.

Her dead lover seemed oblivious to this particular looming peril. She fussed absently with a brew the color of molten lava, her normally easy-breezy expression hardened into a polished, unreadable mask. A day and a night had passed since Willow awoke to her gentle ministrations, and the charms had mostly numbed the pain. But some wounds were easier to heal than others.

“You’re not her,” said Tara abruptly.  The observation was shocking. A torn dress.

“Huh?”

She tapped her spoon anxiously on the rim of the smoldering cauldron. “You’re not her.  I mean, you are, but you aren’t.  Right?”

Willow winced.  It wasn’t an accusation, but it didn’t exactly sound friendly either.  “Is it that obvious?”

Tara shrugged.  “You used to be… angrier.”

Willow laughed a big, jingly belly laugh. It still hurt to laugh, but it felt like she’d been saving this one up for a long, long time. Then Tara shot her a disgusted look that shut it down, hard.  “Oh Goddess, I’m sorry,” Willow said. “I – I didn’t mean it like that.  I mean, I’m sorry that she’s dead… I mean, that I’m dead… that we’re, um…”

“Forget it.”  Tara glanced away, shaking her head. “It’s not your fault.  Besides, you’re with us for a reason, whatever you are.”

“Oh, totally,” Willow agreed.  “All about the reason-having, here.”  Tara only glared at her expectantly.  “I mean, um, it’s a little hard to explain, but it’s a super-good one. Trust me.”

They stood like that for a long moment, Tara studying her with a grim, lidded gaze.  Mercifully, Oz appeared in the long archway, cradling a shotgun.  “I miss something?”  He looked much older In his combat fatigues, scanning her beneath a dark red ruff of hair.

“We were just talking.”

“Yeah,” Tara murmured thoughtfully.  “Talking.”

Oz threw them one of his trademark aha looks.  “Well, when you ladies get done playing catch-up, you might want to change into something a little more seasonal.”  They stared at him, uncomprehending. “We found her,” he explained.

Willow felt her stomach slowly knotting.  “Buffy,” she whispered.

Oz nodded. “K’Harn and the Widow marked her downtown, in some craphole called the ‘Sunset Palace.’  But we gotta move fast.  We might never get a better chance.”

Tara gritted her teeth.  “Tell them to stay on her,” she scowled.  “Don’t let her out of sight. We leave in an hour.”

“No dice, babe.  The Widow says she looks nervous, could jump any sec…”

“I said NO!”

Oz squinted at her apprehensively. Even the M’zog demons were stirred from their endless YouTubing, and peered up at her with huge, orange eyes.

“Willow and I have business to settle first.”

***

Two’o’six pee-em, lied the clock.

She traced the elegant spear of the hour hand with her eyes.  The machine was not an “antique” - not in the traditional sense of that word, at least.  Kennedy had seen her fair share of those growing up.  She recalled the stately grandfather in the parlor, whose brass pendulum swung out a tidy marching step. Then there was her bedroom piece, the gleaming New Haven rounder, with its pearly face that shimmered like a private moon.

Those were mere treasures; worldly trophies for the moneychangers and their wage slaves. But she knew that the Count’s clock would fetch no earthly price.  Its craftsman was anonymous, lost forever in the shadows of time.  Wearily, she calculated the blade-sharp angles of the millwork, studied the red, beveled luster of each Roman numeral.  A thought occurred that the clockmaker probably wasn’t even human.  After all, the Castle’s former owner had been a creature of infamously exotic tastes, even before the ink was dry on his pact with Hell.  At best, it was a museum piece for a particularly intrepid curator. At worst, a blood omen, the herald of shattered empires.  Its hands swept as smoothly as a headsman’s axe, promising a sudden, gruesome end to all stories. Spinning a tale of death, second by second by second...

Yeah, Kennedy mused. But whose death?

The White One arched suddenly, as if in reply, a long pale leg slithering out from beneath crimson velveteen. Nancy was still asleep, or something like it.  Her muscles worked automatically under the sheets, limbs writhing as if swimming through heavy water.  Though she still slept, those pink eyes of hers were open again, as blank and dreamless as stones.

Don’t look.

Kennedy rolled sideways, landing with a thud. Lord Dracula’s bed chamber was a dump by any modern standard, living or dead, so she was glad she could barely see it.  Apart from the gilded divan they’d shared, the only furniture was the tattered corpse of 16th century chaise lounge and a dinged-up oil lamp.  Everything else was desiccated limestone, the stuff of untended tombs. Her nudity felt alien against it, and she scrambled to find a scrap of cloth.  Any scrap, really. Something that the doctor had forgotten to destroy.

Two o’ six, she thought.  Black soup still swam beyond the windows, a massive bubble of darkness that sheathed the castle for a mile around.  The world ended sharply at its perimeter, a knife edge.  The black dome looked as ancient and unnatural as the serpent it had so recently given birth to.  She knew Nancy had made both happen, somehow. Not with a fancy gadget or an ancient spell, either.  Whatever made the dome was far beyond the reach of human science, and whatever hot-wired that dragon was older than a god.

She scanned the room.  Trash, everywhere.  Her clothes were torn to scraps, heaped in a small pile beneath a portrait of a Romanian lady with pale, haunted eyes.  She eyed the velvet bedsheet longingly, then shook with horror as she watched Nancy’s tiny porcelain claw creep around its edge. Unnerved, Kennedy spun around and ran smack into a wall. It hurt, but she kept going, ping-ponging down the corridor that connected the Count’s private quarters to the castle keep. There was a flicker of torchlight at the end of the passage.  As she hobbled slowly towards it, she forced herself to remember.

She remembered the eyes most of all: beautiful and sun blind and ravenous, dreaming the death of all things. Those eyes had watched the battle with Kennedy at the parapet, filling with glittering fireworks as their owner’s pet tore the helicopters to fiery ribbons.

Hands had come next; white hot on flesh, kneading her battle-hard muscle like clay. It wasn’t sex as Kennedy remembered it, but it wasn’t a fight either.  She was just beaten.  Beaten easy, like a child would be beaten.  Nancy gave no warning; just a small, vaguely sad smile as her hand shot out and tore Kennedy's uniform from shoulder to knee. She remembered racing down this same hallway, lungs pumping hard steam, the doctor hunting her down with all the playful certainty of a nightmare.

Then, strong milky arms came, drawing her into an embrace.  There was a chilly giggle and a hummed song, cool breath melting on Kennedy's neck as she was wrestled flat.  Warm wet fingers scrambled southward, tearing her pants. A tongue moving north, west, south, side-to-side, like a clock’s tick-tock.  There was movement without time, and a memory of someone else’s lie.  There was darkness, and the feeling of falling forever towards it.  She remembered crying.

Now, Kennedy limped down the length of the corridor.  It was a less than dignified retreat – sore all over, drunk on the smell of her own sweat.  Yellow and purple bruises flared out across her like spilled paint, and blue fingerprints speckled her elbows and thighs.  No, the Nurse hadn’t meant to hurt her.  The power Kennedy felt in those hands could’ve have crushed mountains like paper cups, but Nancy Stark didn’t want her dead.  Not yet, at least.  For now, the freak just wanted to show her something.

The dragon was just the beginning, a preview.  Something had happened to Stark down in her laboratory, when the Slayer and her Bloodsucker made with the big escape.  Those pink eyes had witnessed a truth; something simple and terrifying that everybody else in the world had always missed, somehow.  Kennedy's gut seized up when she pictured the girls watching from the runabout, that massive cheer they sent up when the dragon and the final chopper came crashing down to Earth.  It was the kind of noise that rallying soldiers made for Queens.  One funny little light show, and Kennedy lost them forever.  She was second banana now, and Nancy wanted her to get her used to the idea.

That’s why she broke you.

Kennedy tried to shake the thought from her head, but it was too strong.  She felt the doctor's hands on her body again, heard the pale monster rambling in her ear about gardens and galaxies.  That wasn’t sex.  Non-sex, maybe.  Un-sex.  Didn’t sex have soft orange hair that brushed her belly?  Didn’t it have lips that mushed against cool skin, tiny pebble toes that tangled with hers in the smell of clean sheets...

“Sir?” The voice quavered up through the darkness.

“Who’s there?” Kennedy barked.  A timid face materialized through the red flicker, a few yards out.  She was young, only a private.  Kennedy thought her name was Gail.  She looked more than a little freaked, and when Kennedy joined her in the pool of lamplight, the nymph almost jumped out of her skin. It made her feel a little better, tasting that fear, so she decided to just go with it. “This is a restricted area, private,” she snarled.

“I – I know” Gail stammered, blinking nervously around the edges of Kennedy’s nudity. “I'm sorry.”

Yeah, much better, she thought.  “What are you doing here?”

“I heard a noise,” she explained. “I thought I heard…”  She trailed off, thinking better of it.

“Screaming?” Kennedy asked, feigning sympathy.  The girl nodded, but refused to look up.  “Let me explain something to you, private,” she said.  “The chain of command has a purpose.  And when you disobey orders, when you leave your post, you break the chain.  When you break the chain, people get hurt!”

“I'm really sorry, sir!"

Something old and ugly stirred in her. She tapped Gail’s chin, straightened the collar at her throat. “You know the punishment for breaking the chain, private?”

“No,” she whimpered.  “No suh-sir.”  Kennedy could almost feel the heat melting off the girl’s body in waves, almost hear her tinny little heartbeat echoing off the old stone walls.

“Remove your uniform.”

“Sir?”

Kennedy reached deep, rousing the demon from its bitter, wounded slumber. “I think you heard me just fine. I said take off your goddamned clothes, bitch.”

Private Gail obliged, ever so slowly, a sniveler through and through.  No stiff upper lip, there.  The girl shed real tears when she peeled off her underwear. Her body shone unearthly in the glow, a gaunt and luminous clay, bending to any and every whim in the world. She had two tiny afterthoughts of breasts, and nipples like startled, pink eyes, and she immediately hid them with one arm, cupped her sex with the other, shaking, shaking like a damn leaf the whole time.  It was all Kennedy could do to stop herself from giggling.  The truth was clear as ever; there really were two kinds of people in the word, and that Miriam Kennedy-Corliss was the other kind.

When the command came to face the wall, there was no more hesitation.  Private Nobody knew exactly who was in charge.

Or, if not, she will…

“It’s nothing personal, private,” explained Kennedy, her patience masking something much, much colder.  “But when you break the chain, the chain breaks you back.  It’s a very old rule.”

***

The Now.

The name didn’t say it all, didn’t even come close.  But Nancy understood its purpose, at last.  An old, old voice had breathed it into her soul while she slept.

The Now without the Then.  Time’s Adversary.  The Devourer of Devourers.

It had always been there, and it never had.  The Now was the unwritten ending; the last period of the last sentence of the last page of the last book.  It merely required an author.  Together, they would close the circle of Time, scrub clean the slate for Nancy to start anew.  She could see the Garden so vividly in her mind's eye, that land of long shadows and swift hands.  She saw a constellation of brilliant black orchards stretched over light years.  She saw a new shape of the Big Everything forming, lovingly sowed and tended and reaped by small white fingers, forever and ever.

It’s coming, she mused.  But not yet, not yet, not yet.  There’s still work to be done.

Till the soil. Pull the weeds. Cleanse the earth. Kill the Beast.

The poison, this time…

She opened her eyes in the brittle certainty of a vampire’s bedroom.  The child named Kennedy was already gone, off to lick her wounds. She was a silly thing, when all was said and done - another narrow, ugly little mind, easily bent.  With the Slayer’s essence coursing through Nancy’s veins, her wonderful body had become pliable as well.  All bodies, it seemed, and all minds had become so simple to command.  Everywhere around her, a sea of soft matter begged to be sorted and shaped by its new master. To prove it, Nancy floated weightlessly from the mattress, the song of the Shadow roaring like a river in her veins.

The black void howled back at her from the mouth of the balcony.  This was the flesh of the Now, a small piece of it torn free to do her bidding. She'd gently folded the castle into its black, makeshift womb.  It took real strength to do that, and even more to pull the Dragon through it.  Nancy was surprised at how much the work had drained her.  Even Kennedy’s pitiful demon had proven somewhat challenging in the wake of that exercise, the slayer's ultimate humiliation more an effort of the muscles than of the mind.  It seemed that the power she’d borrowed through Buffy Summers had its limitations, after all.

She would need much more, if she was to survive the Now’s cleansing tide. She would need it all. And time, quite literally, was running out.

Floating through the chamber, she sought out the Count’s long dressing mirror on a sudden whim. The glass was old and devil-wrought.  It had gleamed like a silver lake through the centuries, undisturbed by its master’s cursed form. Nancy examined her full length in it. The flesh shown there was immaculate, corpse white. Framed by the black skin of the Now, it could have been the surface of the moon. She stared deeply into her own eyes, flitting into them, like a canary diving deep into the airless mine.

“Mirror, mirror on the wall,” Nancy murmured, remembering a small, cruel joke from her youth.  She kept going, kept falling, swam deeper and deeper into the hidden grottos of her soul for the answer.  All she knew was that she wanted to see the Special One, again, to get another taste of that golden light.  She wanted to swallow her whole.

***

Tara led Willow along a bucolic old path.  The campus itself had been defunct for years now, as far as the outside world was concerned; it was one of the revolution’s many unintended consequences.  Razor wire rode the tops of the old stone buildings that lined Dunmore Square.  On the lawn of Whitten Hall, a bullet ridden Escalade sat with the engine idling, the back seat crammed full of ravenous looking vamps.

Tara spoke softly as they walked.  She paid attention as well as she could, but her mind kept drifting.  In all her interdimensional travels, amidst all those old names and faces, Willow had never once glimpsed hers. Up til now she’d been strangely grateful for that, afraid the sight of her might shake her off course, or tempted her to linger too long in worlds on the brink of oblivion.  But as time wore on, as the days turned to months and years, a terrible pattern seemed to emerge.  After a while, it dawned on her: wherever Willow Rosenberg was out of the picture, Tara Maclay ceased to exist. Now, even that terrible truth had seemingly been thrown into doubt.

As Willow pondered this mystery, Tara continued her history lesson.  Havard, she explained, had been the obvious choice for a last stand.  In the run-up to the war, the Mystics had found allies in various corners of society, but their most critical support came from within the realm of academia.  Some of their newfound friends were more obvious than others. There were ACLU types, the “Multi-culti” crowd - your basic random smattering of aging hippies with axes to grind. Or bongs to grind.  Whatever it is that hippies grind.   Others had been a little harder to predict. Shockingly, a wide range of conservative think-tanks quickly rallied to their cause, citing their “super-meritocracy” and “frontier excellence” as potential boons to global markets.  Some of the more hawkish pundits lent a hand as well, holding out hope that an army of Slayers and Witches might lend a hand in certain sticky, international conflicts.

But in the end, it was the center that damned the world all straight to Hell.  Soccer moms railed against the “culture of violence” that Slayers and their cohorts glorified.  Ministers thundered from pulpits about the moral perils of witchcraft and sorcery.  And the media cemented them all into an impenetrable bloc of blind, fearful rage.  The  average person didn’t care a lick about civil rights or multiculturalism, and they didn’t give a damn about free markets or geopolitical strategy, either.  They were satisfied with their bland, boring, workaday world of death and taxes.  They wanted that world back, and, by golly, they were willing to fight for it.

“Here,” Tara whispered.

They stopped at the foot of a small clearing.  Wind kicked up snow like the dust on a old highway, exposing short, stubborn knuckles of grass beneath. In the center of the quiet patch, a round stone marker jutted in abstraction.  About the size of Frisbee, it pierced through the white field with all the subtlety of a wart on an otherwise flawless chin.

“What’s this?”

“We didn’t have much choice,” said Tara, her voice grainy and distant in the wintry howl.  “She told me… I mean, she wanted to be buried back home, in what was left of Sunnydale.  But it was too dangerous.  I couldn’t risk it.”

Willow crossed the wind swept plain, pausing near the foot of the stone.  A pair of runes crisscrossed its face. They were lovingly wrought, as familiar as old socks.  Friends Forever, was the rough translation.  She’d drawn it on Tara’s window shade the morning after they’d first made love.  With a start, Willow Rosenberg looked down and realized whose grave she was standing on.  It gave her a strange feeling; sickened and reassured at the same time. “Why?” she asked.  "Why did you bring me here?"

“Because I wanted you to see,” Tara replied.  “I needed you to know what she took from us.”

“Tara, I do.  Believe me, I do.”

She gently reached out to her, but Tara shrunk away horrified, hard tears spearing her eyes.   “Like hell, you do," she said, every word filled with hatred and grief.  "I don't know what your world is like, but here they hunt us like animals. Willow lead us all through the darkest days. Gave us hope. Buffy Summers stole that hope.”

“I’m here to kill her.”

“That’s not enough!” Tara cried.  Lightening crackled along her outline, like the halo of some vengeful god, and a sharp blow sent Willow crashing down onto the snow.  When the shock wore off, she scrambled for purchase there, arms and legs flailing, drawing angels.  “The Willow I knew was powerful. Before she died, she could command the forces of nature, could bend the will of the Ancients to her every whim!  And if you made it here, it means you’re even more powerful than she was.”

“So, what are you saying?” Willow cried, feeling more lost and alone than ever. “You want me to fight your war for you?!”

“No.  I want you to bring her back!”

Willow felt the wind rustle through her. “I can’t,” she whispered. “I can’t do that.”

“You have no idea what you can do,” said Tara, her voice a chill blade. “When you put your soul to it, you can do anything you want.  My Willow tree taught me that.”

“It’s not so simple, Tara.”

“Nothing worth it ever is. She taught me that too.”  Tara’s eyes seemed to be glowing under her swirl of sandy hair.  This wasn’t her, either, Willow realized.  Not her girl.  Not anymore.  “But you’ll do it," she continued. "If you want the Slayer, you’ll find a way to get it done.”

“You don’t understand what you’re asking,” Willow begged. “It’s not possible. Not without…”

“A sacrifice.”

Willow felt her blood drain into her shoes. “That,” she said, “is not going to happen.”

“How dare you judge me!” Tara screamed.  “I’ve sacrificed more than you will ever know! You think I buy that you came here to help us?  You’re here to fix your own screw-up!  Admit it!”

“What? How did you know tha…?”

Tara raised her hands threateningly against the sky.  “Necromo Sancti!” she roared.  Instantly, the falling snow changed into a churning shower of black, volcanic hail. The pebbles bit sharply into Willow’s brow, and dark shards tangled in her hair.  “Willow only taught me half the spell,” Tara shouted, straining to be heard above the gale. “She didn’t trust me enough. Knew I’d use it.”

“It won’t work without the offering.  And only I know how to make the rite.”  Tara shrieked at this, the sound thickened by a sudden chorus of crows. “I’m sorry,” Willow cried.  “Sometimes, you just have to learn when to say goodbye.”

Tara’s tough act crumbled then, betraying a decade of misery and horrors, maybe a whole lifetime.  Tears streamed freely down her face, mixing with blood and black, shattered glass.  “Why?” she begged, her voice hoarse and aching. “When there are so many who deserve to die?”

Willow waved her arm in a graceful arc. The hailstones hovered for a moment in mid-air, pirouetting like dancers. Willow whispered a small word, and they changed into a cloud of butterflies.

“Because,” she said, “we’re the good guys.”

Chapter 21: Watchfulness

Right.  How’d we get here?

Jumped the 6:12 to Hounslow. That was cock-up number one. Hounslow had always been more or less alien terrain, as far as he was concerned. The stench of those horrid chemical stovepipes had kept him and Dru at bay for the better part of a century. Besides which, there had always seemed to be something a bit off about the taste of a Hounslow man, a tart nip of lemon zest and quinine that you’d have to sort of choke down.

These days, Hounslow might as well have been a continent on the bloody moon. At each new turn, another appalling café, packed to gills with wankers, all of them jones-ing for their nightly Double Mochachino fix.

So, yeah, anyway, he got a bit turned around at first, stomping irritably from one corner to the next. Eventually, he got his bearings.  Button-hooked around Arthur till he spotted the bridge.  Then, he took a leisurely stroll up King Williams until the dowdy, old vein of Cannon Street popped into view. From there, he recalled it was a straight shot to Monument Station and the tube. But he opted to get fancy, instead.  See if he couldn’t shake his babysitter loose first.

So, he bore left instead, snug to King’s brawny brick shoulder.  Spike and Faith trudged together in an awkward formation that way, passing row upon row of the morbid little hatboxes that passed for family estates these days. He kept the casual bit up, lulling the girl into his sullen, rhythmic pace that he hoped seemed like resignation. Then, just as they breached the intersection on Swithin’s Lane, he made his play.

It was an ace one, he thought; quick feign left, a good, hard shove to the jubblies and the little cow goes airborne. Before her shapely bum could so much as slap a stone, Spike was already moving, bounding like a mongoose down the warren of black alleys that stitched together Oxford and Bond Courts. It was a giddy feeling: racing into the night like a mad thief, hearing the wind whistle through his pearly, pointy whites. Like the sound from an old gramophone, it transported him to a past that was terrible yet utterly, unbearably intoxicating.

Cock-up, number two. He’d only gotten about five blocks before he remembered he was still sober, still skint, and still wearing the equivalent of a tragic Halloween costume.

Truth was, the vampire missed his old things. He missed the wee silver Zippo, oiled and glossy, her orange flame gleaming suggestively along the dark, endless passageways of his undeath. He missed his damned coat. The original one, mind you, not the flimsy leather phantom that followed him back from oblivion. He longed for the sensation of throwing her on, his arms diving down her lengths like pale serpents. It was a gesture he’d had thirty long years to perfect, and, like everything bloody else these days, the habit died hard.

Cursing his stupidity, Spike stamped back in the direction of the girl, nose twitching wolfishly for her scent. But somewhere beneath the layers of oxide and muck and ancient grease, it was a different aroma that flickered up, the unmistakable scent of bergamot and grave mud. For a moment, his head turned to white fuzz, her anthem howling up at him from Hell.

Dru?

Sprinting back through the gloom, he found their shapes; five fledgling vamps, raking and keening at Faith like a pack of stray dogs. Their own kit was an abomination as well, a thumb in the eye and up the arse of fashionable villains everywhere. Football jerseys two sizes too big bloused ludicrously over pairs of saggy gray denim.  Logos seemed plastered over every visible inch, and the effect reminded him suddenly of one of those dreadful NASCAR rallies in the States.  It was enough to make a dandy old monster cringe.

Yet despite their recent vintage, the curse of Aurelius smoldered in them. There was a distinctive aura to his breed - the shining anarchism of the mad bomber tinged with the caprice of aristocrats. That recipe of merry violence had been handed down wholesale through the centuries, with each new trustee adding his or her own peculiar aromatic note. For Drusilla, it was more of an acoustic impression; a fiddle string plucked at the final knot of the spine and the crystalline chatter of a bell row in winter.

As he watched them hoot and holler from his place in the shadows, he slowly realized his error. These boys were far too worldly for his old lover’s taste. Dru had nothing but disdain for London's teeming masses, the hooligans and the housewives and the whores.  She could barely stand to eat them, let alone clog up the food chain with their kind.  Still, he could feel the madwoman’s ghost flitter through him, and the sensation wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

“’Oy! Lovely evenin’ we’s havin’, innit?” shouted a frisky little runt with a diamond-shaped hairdo.

“Out for a litt’ul stroll then, lovey?” hissed another, his yellow eyes measuring their meal. “Don’t s’pose we could interest you in a bite ‘nstead?”

Faith giggled at them. “Oh," she said.  "Oh man! You’re kiddin’ right?”

The vamps exchanged a puzzled glance. “What you mean, kiddin’?”

“That’s the best you could come up with?”  Faith cocked her neck, cruelly aping the murderous little midget. “Don’t s’pose we could interest you in a bite ‘nstead, eh? ‘Ello govner! Lovely evenin’ innit?”  She snorted haughtily.  It was such a raw and irritatingly American sound that even callous old Spike had to stifle a cry of wounded nationalism.

Go on, lads, he silently cheered. ’Least give the quim  a proper run for her money!

Black eye, broken nail.  Something.

The wee chap was the first to try, slithering out like viper. The girl played him off stage real easy, throwing an adorable little patty-cake of a block. The vamp swayed off-balance, stumbling a few degrees the wrong way. It was all over, then: Faith leaning through gravity, her stake tipped outwards like a gruesome bucktooth. A moment later, her prey vanished in a screaming cloud of sand. The others howled with laughter at the sight of it.

“Dekko ‘at!” screeched one, his beady eyes bright with malice. “Poor old Benji is lookin’ a bit fagged now, eh Jeffers?”

“Tosh, mate,” sung a tall, baggy-jeaned monster to his left. “E’s lookin’ a bit sweet fanny adams, you ask me! This minge is one of ‘em clever naysayers, I wager.” The adolescent monster loped to his mark a few yards out, grinning like a skull.

Faith tittered again, still monumentally unimpressed. “Oh snap!  Is that one of those cockney rhyming things? Naysayer-slayer?  How lame is that? ”

“It’s talkin’,” croaked the one calling itself Jeffers. “But it ain’t bleedin’ much. Let’s see how well it talks with the throat hangin’ out, wot?”

The fledglings danced in savagely, a hurricane of claws and fangs. Faith took the worst of it this time, eating a sequence of punches and kicks. The circle tightened reflexively around her, aroused by the sudden scent of blood. Spike jammed his helmet down.

“Now, now, lads,” he barked, tilting out from behind a corroded dumpster. Instinctively,he went to shove his hands in his pockets but, realizing he had none, he just waved them in mid-air like a nutter. “’S’no way to receive a guest to our fair shores."

The creatures stared for a long moment, transfixed, before bursting into peals of laughter.

“Wawhawhaw!” bellowed one. “Duh-duh-dekko, lads! It’s-it’s-it’s…”

“Batman!” squealed another, and set the pack roaring.

“Oh, very mature,” he growled. The creatures showed no signs of relenting. And, for what felt like the hundredth time that week, William the Bloody desperately wanted to hurt something.

Right.

There was a dark flicker-flash and then he was moving, William Pratt’s tired old bones hurling combinations like a champion prizefighter. Jeffer’s grin imploded with a sharp left hook. A swirl of colors charged in to take his place, and then a second young killer went airborne, flopping like a ragdoll into a pile of tin drums. Faith drew a long knife from her boot.  Beheaded the hapless bloke with a single slice.

The surviving vamps merely shrugged in defeat, and there was a sound of nylon scraping as they quit the battlefield. “Come back, wankers!”, he shouted after them. Faith pursed her lips, examining a broken red nail. “Bloody hell! Did you see that?“

“Vampires? Yeah, man. See ‘em all the time, unfortunately….”

“Yeah, well so much for British pride,” he mused, helping her up. “Churchill must be doing jackknifes down there, right about now.”

“Who?”

“Churchill,” he repeated, thoroughly aggravated. “You know. Winston bloody Chur... oh, bugger it.”

Spike and Faith stood still as statues in the darkness, breathing hard for no good reason at all. They stared at one another for about two seconds too long.  Somewhere, far off, a clocktower struck nine. The thought occurred to him that it was jolly old Big Ben, and a random quote popped into his head:

The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even the past.

Miserably, he realized who coined it: another bloody Yank.

“Mind if I borrow twenty quid?” he said.

***

Heat. First, heat.

She touched a small rotary sensor, a soft orange glowed flaring to life at her fingertip as she dialed the temp to eighty five degrees farenheit. The room hummed to life, an array of digital appliances pinging each other hello. The Super Milk-Tracking fridge high-fived a self-cleaning oven. The Tivo frenchkissed the I-Pod.

…And the dish ran away with the spoon. Dawn fingerpunched a digital display, and an orchestral swell belched out of the speakers; Bach’s Coffee Cantata. The piece was composed as a light-hearted wedding accompaniment, and concerned a certain daughter’s addiction to that drink. Another quick stroke and the lights flared to full strength, revealing the room in shocking white detail. There was an almost clinical neatness about her new quarters, the bland civility of a bank office. That was her own fault, of course.

A sustained vibrato struck her belly like a swarm of butterflies as she drifted dreamily towards the bed. Flopping on the sheets, she stole a sly glance at the camera, bolted high on the south wall. There was another embedded in the widescreen, she knew, and a micro-lens peering out from the aluminum stem of a nightstand lamp. Everywhere, unblinking electronic eyes studied Dawn Summers, broadcasting every inch of her from in blazing 1080-P. She was always somebody's favorite show. Yep, they watched channel Dawn twenty-four seven, same as they had for years. That was her choice too; a life of Importance and Danger. The absurdity occurred to her, quite often in fact. Dawn was much smarter than anyone had ever imagined, and probably by a very, very wide margin. No matter how advanced or expensive the equipment, the eyes had little hope of capturing the real her. They only glimpsed the surface, blindly cataloging every fraud and forgery, quietly recording every lilly white lie and missing the really, really big lie. The Being Human Lie.

Easy mistake, she mused, studying her reflection in the dark mirror of the Sony. Her body was human, surely. Right down to the flimsiest little strand of DNA. The monks made certain of that much.

A viola carved violently through the measure, derailing that particular train of thought. She smiled playfully, plucked open the top button of her blouse, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one. From a light fixture above the bed, the electric grind of a focal motor. It was yet another hidden camera, as wonderfully distant as a star.

She rarely considered the minds behind those eyes. Were they old or young, male or female? Human or… what-have-you? But when she did, she always liked to imagine whole roomfuls of them; men with crisp haircuts and uniforms, quietly studying those monks’ ingenious design. She tried to imagine them now, sitting in a squalid little room somewhere, tittering nervously as she seamed back the lapels of her blouse, swallowing hard as she fingered the tiny silver fastener at the center of her bra. There was a helplessness to watching, she knew; that seeing without touching, the guessing without the knowing.

It was getting harder to keep up the old masks, to hide herself in old habits. So, she tossed her head to one side, let a scoop of dark, dyed hair fall across one cheek, listlessly booted up the boob tube. As she thumbed through its seven hundred-odd channels, distorted faces loomed back at her from the screen. New TVs made everyone look much bigger than they were, monstrous even. Too much detail was visible in those smiling masks of theirs.

Click. A pair of dancers sugar-step across a stage full of miniature Roman columns.

Click. A woman in a bathrobe is harassed by a giant, decaying molar.

Click. A talking turtle sells car insurance.

Click. Dracula and Scooby-Doo ride a roller coaster at Disneyworld.

CLICK.

The images kept flickering past, and they barely registered any meaning on their own. But together they seemed to be telling the strange, sad story of all their lives. It almost made her cry.

Then, on the very next click, she saw something that did.

It was the face of a young woman, unknowable yet ruthlessly familiar. She was standing in a prism of gauzy yellow glow. The light dotted in the actress' large brown eyes, creating an illusion of a person on the constant verge of tears. This was Veronica Sewell, the sassy, beloved ingénue of ‘Passions.’ It had been ages since Dawn had last tuned in, and the years told on Veronica’s face. It wasn’t much – a subtle crease at the brow, a dimple slowly stiffening to a jagged line – but time was going to have its way with her. Not long from now, she would probably marry Rico. They’d settle down in a big fat dream house on Brandywine Hills, poop-out a brat or two. The writers would scramble like fighter jets then, changing the shape of Veronica’s life in a thousand imperceptible ways. Her usual plotlines about secret crushes and doomed love affairs would gradually morph into stories of financial skullduggery and broken friendships and cutesy-wootsy, baby-momma drama. If she’s really lucky, they’ll wind up putting her in a coma so she can co-star in some shitty made-for-TV movie.

And sex? Forget it. Sex gets traded in for a evil in-laws and a fuck-ton of suspicion.

"Oh, golly gee! I wonder who Rico’s cheating on me with this week?"

"I wonder why I'm not good enough, anymore…"

She could suddenly hear that train-of-thought chugging away again. Thankfully, there was a knock at the door.

Unthankfully, there was also a Xander at the door. He looked wiped out. Clumps of salt-and-pepper hair clung to his brow like octopus arms. Along with the eye patch, they made him seem hundreds of years old.

“Hey,” he chirped. “Mind if I have a heart attack?”

“Sure thing. Come on in.”

He pasted himself on her white sofa with an achy little hrrummmph. “Ooh, nice. Is that Tunisian brocade?”

“Huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah what?”  So irritating...

Xander reclined, weirdly catlike. His big rusty jaw dropped wide open, and Dawn braced herself for all those super-keen Words of Wisdom’ that were about to fall out.

“So,” he said again. “You’re crazy now, huh?”

“No.”

“Crazy-esque?”

“No!”

”…ish?”

“Xander!”

“Well, what is it then? I mean, is this, one of those rebellious phases I’ve been hearing so much about?” Dawn grunted and crossed her arms. He was trying to make her smile. At the library, he seemed to be the least weirded-out by all of it, and made about a dozen goony cracks about “measuring the curtains.”

“You know,” she said. “This whole Unflappable Sergeant Harris act is starting to wear thin. I remember a time when you… you we’re so totally...”

“…Flappable?”

And that tore it. She choked on a snotty little tear as he stood, gathered her in his arms. It was warm. In the background, Veronica was still speechifying about “destiny” to the dulcet tones of Bach’s wedding ditty.

“We can’t talk here,” she whispered. “They’re watching.”

***

“Oh no,” he groaned. “No, no, nonono.”

They lounged in Dawn’s “cleanroom” - an allegedly bug-free zone in the basement of the Brixby Hall. Mounds of obselete stereo gear lined the perimeter, packed against walls made of foam eggcrate and three-inch steel. It reminded him of a low rent recording studio he once raided in Chicago. A pair of Greater Goblins were embedding hypnotic messages in SAP broadcasts, so they could spawn an army of homicidal Mexican carpenters. No, seriously. They were.

Of course, Xander killed the heck outta those goblin jerks.

Which is what you’re supposed to do with demons, right? I mean, sure, that whole “peace, love and understanding” bit plays nice on the daytime talk shows, but this is a war. And, in war you just gotta kill every single badguy you meet. It’s a very old rule…

“Xander? Are you even listening to me?” Dawn had her arms folded again. She still looked about fifteen years old when she did that. He had to keep reminding himself that The Key was never fifteen years old. Not actually.

“Sorry,” he said, and he suddenly was, feeling weirdly ashamed. “What were you saying?”

“I said, what are we going to do about Sp…”

“Right! No! Why does everything always have to be about that bleach-y, skeevy freakshow?”

Dawn groaned. “I thought you were over all this stuff.”

“Oh? Which part? The 'boinking-my-soulmate-on-public-access-TV' thing  or the whole 'trying-to-murder-me-hundreds-of-times' thing?”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Uh-huh, yeah. So was the Spanish Inquisition.”

She gave up. Old Frustrated Dawn probably would have thrown a pouty-party, stomped her little foot, slammed a door. This one breathed a long, low breath, drew a tiny circle on her thigh with a finger. Changed the subject. “Okay,” she whispered. “What do you want to talk about then?”

Xander blinked at her in amazement. “Me? Hmmm… oh, jeez, I don’t know. Hey, how ‘bout this weather we’re having, and OH WAIT! An army of superpowered-psychos on their way to kill us all to death! How’s that for a topic? Ooh, or maybe our dear old pal Willow, who’s lost in cyberspace or whatever? Or how about the fact that, less than an hour ago, the world’s oldest secret society of demon hunters ceased to exist because you woke up one morning and decided to pull the plug!”

She didn’t answer at first, intent on finishing the masterpiece on her lap. Then, “You think I made a mistake.”

“Yes!” Xander cried. “No. God!” He started rubbing his forehead. He hurt all over, and chunks of him felt like they were still up in that helicopter, flying in hard chop over unpronounceable European countrysides. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “Honestly, I don’t think I believe in anything enough to care anymore.”

“And Kennedy?” asked a voice, startlingly direct.

He gazed up at her, astonished, finding the woman in the little girl. She wasn’t crying, wasn’t about to. The blue glow of her eyes and the frame of dark hair suited her completely now. It reminded Xander of an old painted saint. And also that hot Shakira chick, somehow. In any case, Key or no Key, she was a Summers for sure. There was steel under that skin.  “We’ll be fine,” he lied. “And, hey, even if we won’t, big sis is here, right? She’ll fix everything.”

“Yeah? What makes you so sure she even wants to?”

“She fixes stuff,” he explained. “I don’t think she can help it. It’s sort of her job, you know?” Dawn seemed to think about this for moment, then cracked a smile. “What?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s just, I always kinda thought that was your job.”

***

They curled around the edge of another tidy hedgerow. The leaves glowed an unnatural shade of green under the street lamps in a way that reminded her eerily of Sunny-D U. Meanwhile, her guides continued to blather on about all their neat-o new crap. One of them was Lieutenant Ruddock; a tall, wiry Midwesterner wearing a “Korn” sweatshirt and a perpetual grin. Neither seemed to suit him too well. The other was Polly Doakes; one of the surviving members of the Cleveland crew, and, like Violet, a girl she barely remembered at all. It was a cynical move, she realized; Frank Grange’s crude attempt to lend an air of normalcy to the weird new order of the world. The pair gave her the grand tour of her new home, joking and gossiping the whole way like a couple of morning talk-show hosts. Trying to let her know they were all “one big happy family” now.

“… and over here we have a state-of-the-art R&D facility for experimental necromancy, cleverly disguised as a Student Book Center. And that thing that looks like the Women's Studies Department? Ectoplasmic Containment Unit.” He prickled with pride.

“Ecto-what-o?”

“Ghost Jail,” Polly chirped. “Lieutentant Nerdlinger over here likes to rattle off the big words. Thinks it makes him sound macho.”

Ruddock continued, unfazed. “Actually, it’s a little more than that, Poll. For instance, at the moment we're housing two pan-dimensional Fireworms, a time-bending Effrit demon and a physical manifestation of the emotion of 'Guilt.'”

“I see,” she lied.

“Not to mention your big Hell Demon buddy, too” Polly added cheerily. “Not that he’s a prisoner, or anything. I hear he’s snug as a bug in a rug in there.”

“'Melvin' is not my buddy.” They followed the winding path past a line of plain-looking dormitories, with Ruddock stopping here and there to extol yet another wonder of modern yada-yada. But when Buffy suddenly veered towards the front gates, their mood quickly changed. She heard them stop mid-banter, rustle quickly after her.

“Ms. Summers, Ms. Summers,” Ruddock stammered.

“Wait, Buffy!” shouted Polly. “What’s the dealy-yo?”

“Going for a walk," she replied, not breaking stride. "If that's a problem, then it's, uh... well, your problem.”

Her handlers were sputtering breathlessly when they caught up, probably fearing for their jobs. After all, losing the Original Flavor Vampire Slayer on her first night home wasn’t exactly something you wanted to put on the ol’ resume. Feeling merciful (and exhausted), she allowed them to coax her back up the long grassy drive. “Duty” was a strange thing that way. It was as though everyone who ever felt a sense of it shared a sort of secret, unspoken bond.

They bustled her to her private quarters, a small cottage tucked away at the far western edge of the campus. She left them at the front door, where they seemed content to drone on about all the Very Important Meetings they had to attend tomorrow.

Ah, to be young and annoying, she mused.

The house was nice, but not overly so. Its plush furnishings and modest kitchenette were a far cry from her juicy spread in Lazio.  But it also felt homier in some ways, more "lived-in." Buffy busied herself with the mundane, fleeting pleasures of life. She drew a hot bath in the loft's old-fashioned tin tub, and explored the rest of the space to the soundtrack of running water. For a few fretful minutes, she even searched for a bottle of wine, before finally thinking better of it. In a small oak cupboard above the sink, she found a box of strawberry pop-tarts, which she wasted absolutely no time in pillaging. She tried to imagine Dawn putting it there for her, as a sort of weird peace offering. But as she crunched away, she realized how improbable that image was. If anything, she'd ordered someone else to put it there. And in that light, the gesture seemed almost empty, even a parting jab. More than anyone in the world, Dawn knew how much of Buffy’s life was ruled by her impulses, her weaknesses.

Her addictions. She stared hard at the pastry.

And, we know how well that always works out, don’t we?

The bath was short. There was a bottle of bubbles behind the vanity mirror, but she forsook it for a brick of translucent yellow glycerin, which she rubbed obsessively over the place where the nurse’s needle had pierced her chest. Several times she peered down at her frame, wondering at the absence of scars on her 26-year old body. That didn’t seem right, somehow.

Once, she closed her eyes, and tried to remember what Buffy Summers was like at age seventeen. For her generation, seventeen was still a child’s age, a time reserved for excess, and foolishness.

(and fire...)

‘Duty’ wasn’t supposed to be part of the bargain. In some important ways, she’d grown up faster than almost anyone else in the world. It was Merrick Jamison-Smythe who asked her to partake of that particular cup. But it was Rupert Giles who taught her to savor it.

(firefirefirefi....)

Cut it out! she commanded. The voice snapped off, a dog coming to heel.

Afterwards, she wrapped herself in the big fluffy bathrobe hanging from the towel rack, then wandered into the house’s humble media room. Compared to the current era of 65’ hi-def plasma technology, the TV there was pretty teensy and clunky looking. On a plain white shelf nearby, an ancient VCR and a DVD player were stacked under a pair of gigantic, velvety brown 1970’s speakers. Once again, it seemed the whole world was conspiring to convince her she was old.

Despite the set’s advanced age, the stuff on the television was pretty much the same as usual. These days, it was hard to find a corner of the world that didn’t have five-hundred channels or so. The only difference in England was that three hundred of them were showing soccer games instead of basketball, and ninety percent of the rest were broadcasting what seemed to be some mediocre European version of MTV. She flicked through the latter in a daze, catching snippets of drum solos and clumps of gangsta rap. As if to mock her, Billy Idol made a brief cameo, writhing and sucking in his flawless cheeks atop a speeding limo. Click!

Somewhere around channel 412, she stumbled across one of those aerobics workouts, the sort of infomercial they show to sell you a useless training tape. She lingered for a dreamy minute, zoning out on an especially silly looking exercise that seemed to combine stepping backwards with grinning-like-a-dork. Buffy got so lost in the monotony of it, in fact, that she didn’t even notice the girl at first. She was hanging out near the back of the pack, a pale, red-headed waif struggling to keep up with her instructor’s insanely chipper commands: “And RIGHT... and LEFT... and BACK... and CHANGE.” At one point, the poor schlub twisted her ankle the wrong way, and almost fell flat on her butt. None of the other girls seemed to notice. They just kept grinding away, never skipping a beat. The whole thing struck Buffy as very…

Weird.

Right on cue, the TV cut to a closeup of the craziest thing she’d ever seen in her life.

Now, if Buffy Summers were to have taken a step back and examined this bold statement, it probably wouldn’t have turned out to be true. Seeing crazy things was part of the job, after all. In no particular order, she had borne witness to undead cowboys, satanic girl scouts, a horde of killer mimes, an android stepdad, prom-crashing hell hounds, a cat-resurrecting spirit mask, a giant snake with a master’s degree in urban planning, an ancient Incan skank-mummy, a headless Frankenstein, a love triangle between two witches and a werewolf, a love triangle between two Xanders and a vengeance demon, a nasty bout of fish-monster ‘roid rage, an organ-napping puppet, geeks with jetpacks, a gender-bending, brain-sucking hell god, a giant flaming hole in the fabric of time and space, and The Kingdom of Freakin’ Heaven.

And now this: a leg-warmered, leotarded Willow Rosenberg, jazzercising to Taylor Dayne’s 1988 smash dance hit, Tell it to My Heart.

Somehow, it managed to take the cake.

Chapter 22:  Happy Hour

I find a door with a 'Maid Service Requested' sign on the knob.  The Skeleton Key does not work, at first. I need to jiggle it some, finessing the tumblers like a burglar. I would have paid for this room, if I weren't in such a hurry. Still, this is not the worst thing I’ve done today, or even in the last five minutes.

The room itself is empty as pockets. Flavorless textures map every surface, from the cheap sheets to the stained brown stubble of the carpet to the naked plaster of walls. It would make a fitting ending for me, but the end isn’t here. Not quite yet.

I heave the suitcase onto the mattress and get straight to it. I retrieved it from my dead-drop twenty minutes ago, once I slipped my tail. Inside are the old tools, a workman’s delight of hard corner and shining, deadly edge. But I go for the duster first, smearing its rumpled shape flat with my palms. Time is a thief, but it fits better than I imagined, with a sidelong drape that tickles the knees like an old lover. I jam the bowler cap low on my forehead, and douse myself in cheap cologne to complete the disguise. The rest of my arsenal gets cinched up in an unassuming knapsack and slung over one shoulder. I take a moment to tuck a few pounds under the pillow, and then head back out into the cool night air.

It’s difficult to think of London as home, though a portion of me knows I never left it, not actually. I accidentally bump a man’s shoulder on the march up Cannon Street. He turns to say something, but it’s lost in his throat the moment he sees the look on my face. Even in this age of touchy, feely talk shows and internets, it occurs to me that the lambs still recognize the hounds.

Seven minutes and one muttered spell later, I locate my quarry once more. They are luminous, and stand out like twin pyres in the black old London night. Blonde and brunette, they swagger block to block, blathering and bickering like small children. It’s difficult to imagine that one of them is over 100 years old. But imagining such details is my job. Or, at least, it bloody well used to be.

I calmly track them from the shadows, then pull back to a safe distance as they enter an unassuming pub. The battle must’ve have made them thirsty, in one way or another. I wait for them to vanish completely inside, and then decide to wait a little longer; to wait and see what else has been following them this evening.

***

“Laaast cawwwoll feh alkyhooool!,” the barkeep sang.

Bloody turnip, Spike decided. S’whuh ‘e looks like.

A pair of miniature black eyes worried back at him from a pale brow, like a pair of warts on a pig’s skull. The barman’s stink was soup-thick, hemorrhaging from pores the size of knife wounds. Spike watched in disgust as the man rubbed down the bar over and over in a hurry to usher them all out. To end the night.

Yeh. Good luck wif ‘at one, mate.

The clothes fit. A black ribbed sweater had stiff, militant patches on the shoulders that he rather liked, and he decided he could get used to the slightly draggled clutch of his new gray Levis. His professional garments were tucked neatly in the duffel bag stuffed under his barstool. He’d been wearing the Wolf’s ‘sun suit’ for over a week straight, and if he was a real live boy it would’ve reeked like a Shanghai harem. But as things stood, it simply smelled a tad musty, as though nothing had been inside them whatsoever. It felt good to have them out of sight.

Faith, for her part, proved a top notch shopping guide, and not unpracticed in the art of protracted borrowing. For his kind, theft was often more of a necessity than a wicked diversion. Due to the odd hours one must keep to avoid bursting into merry flames, it was rare for a fashionable London vamp to find himself perusing the boutiques at his leisure. Clothes were either scavenged from victims, or pirated from shuttered shops in the dead of night. And while the former option was clearly not on the menu these days, the girl clearly had no moral barrier against the latter. Her eyes had twinkled madly as they crept through the dim aisles of an Evan & Baileys, swapping thudding insults as readily as fashion tips. In some ways, the patter had reminded him of his old rows with Buffy Summers. But there was a tantalizing, almost merciful ease about Faith when she was fully on. The daggers were real, and sharp, but they somehow always - just barely and purposefully - missed their mark.  He got the distinct feeling there was no sin too Great and Terrible for her to shrug off. She would have made a brilliant vampire.

He turned to sneer at the pub’s sheeplike clientele. The last time he’d set foot in the Black Row Inn was in the summer of 1968. Dru was in one of her moods, so he’d decided to bugger off on his own for awhile. Back then, ‘Mod’ was all the rage, and the place was packed to the giblets with porkpies and beatleboots and that breed of unkempt, snotty youth that set a dead heart all a flutter. Hour upon hour, the jukebox jangled out the latest-greatest from Georgie Fame or the Kinks or the Spencer Davis Group. And, whenever it did that, well, everybody, Everybody, squealed and shook like it was the mad, miracle opus of some sexpot saint.

Closing his eyes, he recalled them; the endless horde of fit, moist-lipped boys snogging their spotty girls to a snare drum beat, everyone swimming in a bath of peppermint and cigarette ash. That was the smell of the new England, the bawdy aroma of sweat at Punk Rock’s back alley conception. And Spike there among them; cunning old monster lurking in plain sight, sporting a skinny Italian suit as crisp as a naked bone. Back then it was a funny game; sitting amongst the herds, decoding the delicate riddle of their purposes.  He would try on their wild, worldly new expressions in his mind’s backstage mirror. Back then, he could taste every last gorgeous one of them, and felt filled with that longing peculiar to his species: the desire to become them and to devour them, all at once. That was how it was, to study prey.

By comparison, this new lot looked right drab and awful.  High-definition TVs papered the old chipped plaster walls, below which a trio of chubby, t-shirted account managers was giggling about whichever inane BBC sit-com best parodied their useless little lives. Off to one corner, some blowdried tosser wrestled with one of those hideous new music kiosks, tapping his toe to Neil Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman” and probably trying to unearth something even more witlessly ironic. It was as though this latest generation had shed the capacity to feel anything like joy, and they seemed to be quite chuffed about it. If Churchill was spinning down there, Spike was quite certain that Andy Warhol was laughing his bloody bollocks off.

A number popped into his head. “Twenty-seven thousand, three hundred and seventy five.”

“Hmm?” Faith peered up from her drink, feigning a casual interest.

“Nights,” he replied, somewhat groggily. “On average, of course.” The girl just frowned at him, the way a maid might frown at the leavings of mice. “That you people get,” he explained, as politely as he could muster.

“So?”

The vampire shook his head sadly. “Oh…sew buttons.”

She tittered, cruel suddenly, and then gave her drink a sexy little swizzle. “You are so weird ,” she said. “I mean, it’s not just the whole bloodsucking, shithead vamp thing. You’re just kind of a weird dude, ya know?”

“I don’t suck blood anymore,” he fired back. “I sort of just.  Swallow it. An’ besides, you’re one to talk, pet. Way I hear it, you was snugglin’ giant snakes an’ callin’em da da. Talk about issues….”

“No, I mean it, man,” she continued, mockingly earnest. “What we’re you, anyway? Before, ya know…” She hooked two fingers across her lips like fangs.

“Pirate,” he said, automatically. “Highwayman. Mercenary. Nasty sort. Not the kind of bloke you bring 'round for supper.”

 “Yeah, bullshit.” She smirked devilishly.  “Still, I’m curious how it feels, you know… killing people again...”

Ah, the game's afoot. The whiskey was starting to wobble him some, so Spike measured his words carefully. “It feels different, pet," he said.  "Bit less fun. You’re not dessert anymore.”

“Got news for you, bite-boy. We were never food to you freaks. And I seen a million creepy crawlies who put ‘man meat’ on the menu."  She let the pun hang in the air a moment, bloody well pleased with it.  "You guys ain’t hungry for blood. You’re hungry for hurt, babe.” She looked at him sidelong, almost bashfully. “And yeah, I am one to talk about that.”

“Ah’m a bloody monster,” he slurred, so low and so suddenly that it stung him. “Wuh’s your excuse?”

“Fucked up childhood.”

She was tough little snake, he'd give her that. Never missed a beat. He looked smack in her boozy brown eyes, and, though he completely forgot what he was on about, suddenly decided there was no way in Hell he would let her win. “Bollocks,” he said, and lashed out an accusatory tumbler of bourbon, a wave of golden poison sloshing drunkenly over the lip. “We don’ buy what you’re sellin’, pet. No fuh one bloody minute.”

“Oh, is that why you let her get away? Too cheap to spring for it?”

“Eh?  Whuh you on about now?”

“She’s in love with you, Skippy." There was a certain way that she peered at him over the rim of her glass, and a tone, like she was accusing him of murder most black.  "I mean, damn, babe.  What’d you say? Twenty-seven-thousand-and-whatever many nights?  And how many of those you want her to spend alone?”

They sat and considered this for a moment. Yes, she was infuriating. Yes she was probably right. Bloody Yank to the core. Still, he was on the verge of launching the perfect comeback when the aroma filled him again. His old terrible mum’s scent was back.  It was everywhere and nowhere at once, a cool downwind breeze from Pluto.

“What?”

“Think it’s bottom's up time,” he whispered. “Here be tigers...”

***

“No, wait!”

Willow roared into the blue pool, watching Buffy’s face ripple and dissolve. The portal collapsed in mid squat thrust, as did the TV studio, the Tiffany tune and the horrible leg warmer brigade. She was back standing in Harvard’s gymnasium, blinking at an tableau of empty, glittering grandstands.

“Wait for what?” asked Oz.

“It didn’t work. Too fast.” She felt out of breath, and it wasn’t just from the jazzercising. These long distance calls were starting to charge a stiffer toll. She realized she might not get another chance. Not without a really big, whopping power boost.

Oz clasped her shoulder warmly. “It’s okay Will. Like you said, it was a long shot. Maybe, you could try again, if you make it fast…”

“No.”  Tara stopped pacing. “We need to move on the Slayer now, before we lose her again.” The girl’s face was stone hard. It occurred to Willow that this reality had burned away everything but her hatred, and a half-assed reunion with her lover's trans-dimensional twin wasn’t going to change that.  And she had a point; maybe it wasn’t the best time to reach out and touch someone, after all.

The visions we’re getting stronger as the Now grew near. Like echoes from the void, they sang of a death so vast it made all former apocalypses seem like spring cleanings. Meanwhile, back in Willow's own reality, the players were all gathering together for the endgame. Like pieces on the chess board, everyone would play their role, and their final moves were becoming more real by the minute. She saw the massacre, blood drenching the walls of the Watcher’s Council like a Jackson Pollak, and the whole of London swallowed by the Nurse's robe. She saw the fiend Drusilla grinning like a shark as she shredded an old masterpiece and destroyed the artist in the same, black stroke, and saw a boy falling into darkness, never to return.  The pieces were scattered and blurred, but it was becoming easier to see how they fit.  If she only had more time…

She followed the pair of ghosts out of the gymnasium and found a car waiting. A tall, cloaked chauffeur ushered them inside, and they were off, winding down an elaborate network of hidden paths that eventually landed them on a boulevard a few miles west of the campus limits. Oz and Tara discussed strategies and tactics, the names of a dozen unknown people peeling off their lips. But they seemed to keep coming back to one name, over and over.

“Who’s The Widow,” Willow finally asked.

Oz peered back at her guardedly. “She’s… an, uh, operative,” he said.

“And this operative, she’s going to help us… well, you know.”

“Let’s just say she has an old score to settle.”

“Don’t we all.”

“Not like this one,” she explained. “Settling old scores is what she does best.”

***

Three bottles loomed directly in front of her: tequila, tequila and something brown. Skaya opted for the safe bet, and mused that only in her fuck-tastic reality could ‘tequila‘ possibly fit that bill.

“Yo, barkeep,” she shouted, and slapped the table. “I’ll have an Agent Provocateur. Make it a double…”

The creature turned to face her, looking even sharper than usual in his immaculate white apron and crisp bowtie. He was so well put-together that even the horns and the neon green blaze of his skin seemed designed to complement the outfit, albeit in a somewhat cartoonish, demony way.

“Careful with those, honey,” he lisped. “You remember what happened last time.”

“Lorne, when I want your opinion, I’ll… never want your opinion, actually.”

The bartender shot her a pained, cautious grin. “Hey, your funeral, sweetie,” he said, then muttered something that she couldn’t quite hear, but decided to let go. He was a freemon – the demonic equivalent of a prisoner of war. And while they weren’t exactly “free,” the Revolution had decided to grant them a few privileges over the years – the big one being, of course, the right to exist. As things cooled down, a few of the less dangerous ones were given permits to travel in human zones, and even hold down menial jobs. She supposed it was one of those unintended consequences of The Revolution. When a third of your labor pool suddenly gets turned into newts and toads, you look for help wherever you can get it.

Even if that help is green and horny and a total…well, you know…

“Fag?” asked a musical voice behind her.

“Excuse me?” She spun to face the stranger. He was pale and petite, with jet black hair and eyes that seemed to be remembering a particularly filthy limerick. After a moment of looking into them, it occurred to Skaya that she was holding an unlit cigarette, and had been for about ten minutes straight. “Uh, got one thanks.”

“It’s funny, don’t you think?”

“What’s that?” she asked dryly, already losing interest.

He nodded at the barman. “I mean, we spend four years and zillions of dollars fightin’ his kind, and now we order a Guinness and hope he gives us a good pour.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s a regular laugh factory.”

The man flashed a salesman’s smile. “Didn’t catch you’re name,” he said.

“Didn’t throw it.” The guy was suddenly making her feel a little wiggy, and she started scanning the entrances and exits.

“Mine’s Allen. I’m sort of new to town.”

“Uh-huh.” Skaya honed in on a couple of dark-suited women in the dining section, realizing that they hadn’t touched their drinks in ten minutes. Nothing to freak out about, really. Not normally. But something was definitely up.

The guy went for something in his jacket. A long muscle in Skaya’s arm coiled like a cobra, preparing to slam a fist straight through the dude's scrawny throat. But Allen merely dropped a small business card on the table, flashed a tiny grin that might have been charming in other circumstances.

“Allen Francis Doyle, Paranormal Modeling Agent?” she read aloud. “That supposed to be some kind of a joke?”

“Not at all,” he laughed. “You’d be surprised at the demand for plus-human models in this day and age. There’s a virtual goldmine to be made in the supernatural lingerie market.”

“Who says I’m supernatural?” Buffy asked. Across the room, the pair of women stood, one by one, and retreated to the ladies room. She fired a glance at the balcony, sensing a sharp but subtle shift in the light there, and suddenly she realized shouldn’t have drank so much booze, or let anyone get this close.

(stupidgirlstupidstupidgirl)

“Now, now lass. You don’t stay in business as long as I without learning to spot someone who’s a bit… well, special.

A swooning wave swept through her, like a ripple in time. She stared in horror at her empty glass, then back up at Lorne. The demon was studying her with a look of clinical satisfaction, a fisherman admiring a very big, very blonde fish.

Remind me to slay you later, you green asshole.

“Special,” Skaya repeated, grabbing Dolye by the necktie. “Fair enough. You ready for my audition?”  Gripping the tie like a fulcrum, she launched the Irishman high over the bar. His body slammed into the mirror, showering the room with glass.

The next ten seconds were critical. The room convulsed with movement, people screaming, running in all directions. Among them, several undercover Revolutionary agents sprang into action, and for the first time ever Skaya was thankful her new employers were so suspicious of her loyalties. But they were all sitting ducks right now. Skaya had to find the enemy, before the drug sank in and took the fight out from under her.

A volley of gunfire erupted from the balcony, she found herself diving for cover behind the bar. In the same moment, the front doors exploded, sending the bouncer flying into the coat room, and sending the coat room flying down the stairwell. It was real power, whatever it was. And real angry.

No.

The monster sashayed to the center of the dance floor, hair blowing around her face in crisp, laser-cut rows. Two husky agents leapt in for the kill. She tore through them like a hot knife, a sadistic leer marring her beautiful, milk-fed face like a scar. Her ridiculous, sing-song voice rang out as she gave a man’s neck one final, violent twist.

“I heard this place is great for parties,” the vengeance demon chimed. “See, I’ve been planning a wake for a long time now. And you’re the guest of honor.”

Joints screaming, Skaya twirled onto the bar, flinging a broken shard of ‘02 Merlot. Anya brushed it out of mid-air, the face contorting into the grisly landscape unique to her ancient breed. Her eyes were twinkling with a murderous glee that she hadn’t seen since the good old days.

Murderous glee. She liked it more back then.

***

He gulped hungrily at the Glenfiddich, savoring the lovely, 12-year-old warmth that drizzled into the back of his brain. He had more edges to take off than he could realistically count, and tonight he planned to drink until he couldn’t count at all. Dawn had been gone for a couple of hours, and Xander was still marveling at how quickly he had gotten used to the new order of things. It was probably another leftover from that old Halloweenie spell. Military men respect the chain of command, and the concept of ‘service’ was usually deemed more important than who you, in fact, served.

There’s was a neatness to that. There was a neatness to the Scotch too. If the crappola was going to hit the fan tonight, Xander Harris wasn’t going to be a whole lot of help.

“Hey,” the voice came, both as flat and sudden and silvery as ever.

“Hey.” Buffy had appeared almost phantomlike, leaning in the short hallway that connected the living room to the kitchenette. Her expression was as crossed as her arms. “Drink?” he asked, and wiggled the bottle at her.

She mumbled something he didn’t quite catch, and moved into the light. As usual, she had somehow parlayed a fresh set of designer duds. A snug red sweater and calfskin skirt hugged her in all the wrong-slash-right ways. She was the best dressed mass murderess since Joan of Arc. Xander settled deeper into the lounge chair, and gave the bottle another good, hard tug. Buffy staked out a familiar brooding position by the window, the moonlight pooling in one visible eye.

“I saw Willow,” she whispered.

“Willow?  Willow where?”

“On TV.”

“On TV.” Something was convulsing inside him. “You mean, like… on the news?”

“No. She was doing… lunges. It doesn’t matter. She spoke to me, Xander.”

He lurched forward, mind whirring. “What did she say?”

“Not much. There was a lot of static, I guess.   I think she was trying to warn me. To warn all of us.”  Her gaze drifted sideways and down, away from a tiny lie.  “We need to find Faith.”

 “Faith?”  Xander snarked.   “And I guess it’s just this massive coincidence that she’s out chaperoning Sir Dies-A-Lot.”  As the words left, he tried to picture jamming them back in with his foot. But the blonde was still staring dreamily out the window. “Well, maybe Dawn could help with that.  She likes to keep tabs on people.”

“Maybe,” she said wistfully.  “Maybe not.  Call me crazy, but I think my kid sister and her new buddies know way more than they’re telling about this whole Kennedy deal.”

“Yeah, no duh. That Granger guy had a file on me going back to the fifth grade, when I pulled Kelly Ferucci’s hair in social studies.” He shook his head in disbelief. “Boy, they really weren’t kidding about those permanent records.”

“Wait. You talked to him?”

“Yeah,” he said.   “I mean, he took me on the grand tour, ya know? Soldier to ex-semi-super-soldier. And I tell ya, not such a bad guy, either. He means business, Buff.”

“And just when we’re you planning on telling me about your little private war council?”

Xander tried to will himself to stand up to her, then settled for a round of fierce finger-pointing. “Pardon me, your highness. But I haven’t seen you in two freakin’ years! You walked away from the game, Buff. Remember?  And you left Willow and me and Dawn to pick up the pieces.” He soothed his throat with another swig, turning over the thought inside his head. “And then Willow left me… to pick up, you know, a bunch of other pieces."

 "Xander..."

"And then, just a couple hours ago, Giles leaves too.  No more Council or Scoobies or whatever you wanna call it.  No more us.  Just a bunch of broken little pieces that barely even fit together. And me, I’m just… I'm just making this up as I go along.” He wound completely down, then, his voice trailing off into a hoarse whisper. Buffy Summers didn’t move a muscle, didn’t even look at him. There was a lake of ice between them, finally. And for once Xander was glad. It was the safest distance ever.

“You really hate me now,” she said, somber but still matter-of-fact. “Don’t you.”

“Hate you? What for? I swoop in for the big rescue, risk my taut and crispy buns against an army of psychotic Amazons, only to find you making lip pretzels with my sworn enemy?” He gargled back the last drop of scotch, smeared his face on his sleeve. “So what’s to hate?”

“Sorry.”

“Yeah.” He did stand this time, wobbling on gumby legs into the bedroom. “Me too.”

“Where are you going?”

“Getting dressed,” he called back. “Hey, I mean, if I’m gonna take my B-F-F out for a night on Olde London Town I might as well go in style.” He pulled an old pair of workpants out of the closet, laid his crossbow on the bed gently, like a wedding gown. “We'll call Andrew from the car.”

“No," she replied, in her familiar old Boss Lady voice.  "Let’s keep a light footprint. If Willow said what I think she said, things could get a little bit stabby.”

Xander poked his head out the door. “What is it you think she said?”

Buffy was standing in the hall. Her eyes were almost glowing, two embers in the darkness. “A name. Rhymes with Godzilla.” Xander blinked at her, clueless. “Sort of…”

“Oh,” he said, getting it. “Well, that sucks.”

***

It’s near one-thirty when they finally emerge; stumbling onto the curb, clasping each others shoulders in such a way that it was difficult to tell who was supporting whom. I recede deeper into my cover, guessing that, even sloshed, the vampire had a decent chance of sussing me out.

“Them suits and snappy salutes may have you fooled, but me I got experience,” Spike says.

“Please, spare me the whole Initiative violin routine. You got off lucky.  If it was me in charge, you’da been dust bunnies, babe.”

“Look, I'm no’ going back there, so you can just stuff it.”

Faith digs an elbow into his liver, tossing him backward. “Well, shit! Go find a cozy little graveyard. Like I wanna watch you two dweebs makin’ moon eyes at each other, while I do all the heavy lifting.”

“Oy! I’m the one who went traispin’ halfway around the globe to wrap up these bloody minges, while you and the platelet was playin’ house with them X-Files rejects. Sounds t’me like I been doing your lot’s job for you.”

“Oh, you mean when you pissed all over a sting operation I spent the last year of my life setting up? That what you’re talkin’ about?”

“No!  I’m talkin’ about saving lives!”

“HELP!”  We all see her at the same time. The woman hobbles around the corner from the alley behind Severin Street, feebly waving an arm like a leper. A neat wool sweater is torn in places by hard claws that draw a convincing amount of blood. Her curly auburn hair is a tangled mop over dark, intelligent eyes.  “Someone, please help me!”

“Steady, pet. What’s the damage?”

She paws pleadingly at the vampire’s shoulder. “Oh God… they came out of nowhere! Didn’t see them ‘til…” Her face goes dull with horror, a million mile stare. “Hazel. She’s still back there with them… Oh lord…”

“Right, no time to wait around for Him,” Spike says and tosses his gym bag at the Slayer. A moment later he is racing to the rescue, Faith in hot pursuit, shouting profanities. I track at a distance, keeping them in my line of sight. All of them.

The moment they disappear around the corner, our helpless damsel’s posture straightens menacingly, the body contorting into a predatory shape. Her wet, dark eyes gleam suddenly golden, and fangs descend. She leaps behind the wheel of a white van parked nearby, kicks the engine on hard and careens after them down the alley’s black throat.

I’m running as fast as I can manage, reaching the curb just as the van barrels back out onto Severin. I don’t know if they’re still alive or not. And if I don’t act fast, I never will.

I spy a lonely motorcycle leaning up against an all-night laundrette. My hands grip the old Skeleton Key in my pocket; a charm I learned to stop using a long time ago. That doesn’t stop me from mounting the bike, coaxing the steel purr from its gearbox. Pinching the damned thing.

It is not the worst thing I’ve done today.

Chapter 23: Housecalls

The storm came on, roaring down from a black square of sky like gunfire. At the far end of the alley, the shadows bobbed and bucked and throated their war wails. Nestled deep in their ranks, a thing the size and shape of ten men shambled forth. The horde parted like a river around the monster, but not before it tramped a smaller fiend underfoot. Spike looked on balefully as the poor wanker’s bones crunched, a slick red jam squeezing out from the fingers of his ribcage.

“Let’s go to work.”

He could hardly mouth the words “bugger that” before the lunatic was off, coat and saber flashing like some Poor Man's Errol Flynn. One hundred grim bastards howled their approval, and a savage wave immediately swelled over the hapless old git. Through their tangle of arms and claws Spike could barely make out his grandsire’s blood-streaked face, grinning eerily as he lopped an ogre in half at the waist. In the next instant, legions more were streaming past the melee, casting their crude gazes on the trio of stragglers in the rear.

Spike shrugged a farewell at Betty Blue, tipped a wink to Charley.  Had his bloody go.

The beasties fell in twos and fours around him, their death rattles drowned out in the teeming downpour. They were a Tolkien lot; roughhewn but slow, and plump in all the wrong ways. At one point, Illyria appeared beside him, popping the head from one hobgoblin’s shoulders like a champagne cork. Even poor Charles seemed to be doing well enough, depriving a snarling axeman of his weapon, his legs and his life in a single, savage sweep.

Things were going so well that, for one mad moment, he thought they might even stand a chance. But in the corner of one eye, the behemoth was inching nearer, bellowing his metabolic song. And somewhere in the void above, he could make out the piercing cries of the Great Wyrm circling. Even if they managed to escape the giant’s lower intestine, the dragon would bathe the alley in her flames, assuring that Spike and The Grand Forehead wouldn’t be the only ones to meet a dusty end tonight.

Gunn and Illyria beat a hasty retreat to his side, the three of them grafting a defensive wedge. Like clockwork, a new wave of warriors moved to surround them, but closing more cautiously then before.

“These creatures fall too easily,” noted a chill voice beside him. “They toy with us. I do not like it.”

“Yeah, man,” groaned Gunn. “We should be dead meat by now. It’s like they're stallin’ or somethin’.”

“Right” Spike growled. “Let’s be on our way, then.”

“Suppose you got a plan?!”

He blinked despairingly at the grim tableau. The place where he’d last seen Angel was still newsworthy, a jumble of hacked heads and gizzards tossing away from the center of an unseen butcher’s block. “Well, no, not exactly. But I know a bloke who might.”

With that he was moving, dashing through a gauntlet of hell-hardened muscle, every nerve banging on full melt. At the edge of Angel’s scrum, a rancid ape popped up and ran him through with a javelin. Spike dashed the fiend’s rotted brains with a stroke, then, screaming, drove the spear out the other end to shish-kabob a monster behind. In the same moment, it seemed, his grandsire poked his head up from the fray. “What are you doing?!” he cried.

“Saving your irritable hide!  Bloody cavalry, an’ all!”

Just then, the dragon swept low, strafing the crowd with a pillar of the hot stuff. The vampires dove to safety a few yards out, leaving a dozen of their antagonists to boil and bubble in the serpent’s wake. Angel slammed hard up against a wall, clutching a bright wound at his side. Spike grabbed the big boy around the shoulder, straining to lift them both to their feet. In the distance, he saw the damned thing pivot round a radio tower, gear down for another run.

Meanwhile, the other damned thing beside him was talking again. “I was doin’ okay,” the old vampire whinged.

“Rot! ‘Nother moment and you’d’ve been well-done! Ol’ Puff the Maj’ up there has us figured for a couple of sirloins.”

“Fair enough,” Angel noted sullenly. “We gotta get out of here.”

“Oh, d’ya think?!”

Before he could answer, another band of horrors carried forth, seizing upon the tender moment. The front ranks fell upon them like wolves, growing ever more savage as the battle raged on. In silent concord, two game faces snapped sharply into focus as if they, too, were abandoning some last morsel of humanity. The pair drove resolutely forward, the field vanishing out before them in clouds of red confetti. Through the haze, Illyria and Gunn were fanning feebly at another mob of freaks. Spike instantly thought of her, missing out on all this glorious, empty-headed, suicidal carnage, and it broke what was left of his heart.

What a way to, go, love.

He felt the Giant rising behind him, the noxious fumes of its sweat clogging his throat like wet salt.

He saw a steel ribbed door, drenched and glittering with an inky blend of rain and blood.

He heard…

Smooth jazz?

What the bloody...

***

“…hell?”

Spike awoke in a posh private office.  Mahogany furniture loomed everywhere, carrying a loving French polish and the pine-scent aroma that comes from fleeting wealth.  He himself was lying lengthwise on a smooth leather settee, his wrists and ankles bound fast with steel bands.

“Kenny G,” explained a voice somewhere behind him.  “Something off the Gravity album, I think.”

“So, it’s to be torture, is it?”

A man emerged from the shadows.  The fellow was small and doughy, dressed rather unimaginatively in a fawn turtleneck and stone-washed denim.  Wispy blonde tufts clung for dear life to his scalp over a set of large aquamarine eyes. “Well,” he whispered, “many of my patients find it relaxing.”

Spike groaned in pain.  Tiny brambles of nerves were still popping off like firecrackers.  He remembered everything, suddenly; the hen in the alley touching him with her sparkler, the world turning white and loud.  “Then, they must be as off their nut as you.”

“Actually,” the man lisped politely, “most of them are.”

Spike snickered at this, genuinely delighted.  “Right, doc,” he said.  “Let me tell you how this old song goes.  You spend the next hour or so taking the piss, and jabbering on and on about your harebrained scheme.  Then, either I break loose or someone breaks me loose.”

“Really?”

“’Fraid so, mate," he said, mocking sympathy.  "And in the end you wind up very, very sorry we ever met.  I know, it’s cliché.  But trust me.  Happens all the time…”

The man just gazed down at him, a daft little grin still playing on his lips.  Through the dizzying fog, an alarm rang off in the back of Spike’s skull, notifying him that his captor wasn’t exactly human.  “I’m not here to hurt you, William. Believe it or not, I’m actually here to help.”

“Goody,” he muttered back.  “And who the bloody hell are you?”

The man smiled warmly. “My name is Dr. Nicholas Fineman,” he said. “I’m your brother.”

***

There was a tickle, at first. Saltwater trickling up her sinuses, moths flapping behind her eyes. Dark forms the size of galaxies passed through, knowing her to her exact core. Meanwhile, four billion scrambled molecules of Nancy Stark blipped in and out of existence, frantically scouring the Big Everything for the proper strand of reality to latch themselves onto.

Never taught this in school, sugar.

When they found it, the long black brushes went to work, patiently scribbling and stenciling until she sprang fully formed from the Now's howling chasm, her army of dread angels trailing closely behind. Just like in Italy, Nancy had managed to rewrite them all into a new patch of time and space. Tonight, it was inside a vast sanctum, deep within the bowels of a place called All Hallows Staining. It was one of the few old churches that had survived the Great Fire of London, and stood as a scarred relic of a more medieval sensibility then most folks were used to. The chamber hidden beneath it was long rumored to be the final dwelling place of Esther Chalk; the powerful and luridly insane witch suspected of starting the blaze in the first place.

Once they'd all finished passed through the Now's black facade, Nancy's goddess brigade gaped in wonder at their pristine new accommodations. An old glamour had preserved the madwoman Chalk’s secret estate across the centuries. Under its thrall, worm-choked mud appeared as gleaming marble floors, and crushed quarry stone became a queen’s spoils of plush and velveteen.

“Whoa,” sighed one precious little girl. “Head rush.”

“Sorry if the ride was a little bumpy, my darlings,” Nancy drawled. At the head of the throng, Kennedy was glowering at her again, bright hatred pouring off in waves. “But that’s life, sometimes…”

“Where have you taken us, Dr. Stark,” Kennedy demanded.

“London, of course,” she replied, as sweetly as she could muster. “That was the plan. Wasn’t it, my mistress?”

The girl squinted helplessly at her, and then went back to barking her vague orders at the flock. Nancy realized that, above all else, this was what Kennedy enjoyed doing - not to mention what the poor girls expected - so she allowed it. After all, who was "Trailer Park" Stark to deny them such cold comforts in their final hours of existence?

She, on the other hand, had very specific business to conduct. And if the flesh was willing, Nancy would have gotten straight down to it. But, once more, her trip through the Now had drank her body dry, and the clutch of blonde monsters writhing around inside her howled out for mercy and sleep.

So, like a wounded animal, she picked her way down a grotesquely festooned hallway, pausing once to admire the late Ms. Chalk’s tastes. In a mockery of her Catholic upbringing, a tainted twist on “Stations of the Cross” lined the way to the dead hag’s boudoir. Instead of tracking the Lord’s crucifixion, twelve exquisite reliefs detailed the journey of the sorceress Lilith, rutting and murdering her way to her blood drenched throne. One particularly vivid scene gave Nancy pause. In it, the pagan queen was shone cavorting with an assortment of beasts, each one abusing her body in ways so filthy and degrading they could’ve melted the panties off a chaste old nun.

After a moment, she was able to distinguish three animals at work on poor Lilith down in their lewd tangle. One was a large wolf. Lines of froth bled from his jaws like two boiling mountain streams. There was also a ram; a shaggy, mindless brute, hung heavy with muscle and blind lust.

But for Nancy, the third creature was the most captivating of all. Peering out from behind one of the queen’s ravished flanks, a large stag had sunk one antler deep into the woman’s ribcage. It seemed a clear allusion to the Roman legionnaire at Golgotha - the man who plunged his spear into the side of the Christ, trying to find out whether he was dead or alive.

The hart, she mused, and grinned at the dark, dark pun.

The most dangerous pleasure of all.

***

“Holla,” Faith chimed for the fifth time, followed by the perfunctory beep.  Buffy hung up, and once more resisted the urge to crush the iPhone like a ball of very expensive tinfoil.

She turned to the driver.  “So, you wanna tell me where we're going?” she asked.

“Here,” said Xander.

“Great. That’s so helpful.”

“Being helpful and helping are two very different things,” he quipped, and dragged the Cutlass to a halt over a retro patch of cobblestone.  “Figured you would’ve learned that by now.”

It sucked. She hadn’t learned much about “General” Harris’ tenure atop his very own Hellmouth, but it appeared to have given his sense of humor a corrosive tint.  She had a million questions: about Willow, about Faith and Dawn and their new B.F.F’s, about Giles, Nancy Stark. About other people.  But, rather than break open the Council's giant toy box full of magic doodads and hi-techy whoozits for the answers, Xander insisted on doing things in his own infuriatingly mysterious way.

Which, apparently, involved driving to the sketchiest neighborhood in all of England, to talk to some kind of fish.  Gritting her teeth, she slammed out of the car after him.

Figures.

Everything felt automatic, now.  She could envision the whole boring set-piece. There would be some hidden passage or phantom way or some other mystical, magical blah-blah-blah, that would transport them to a world unseen by mortal eyes, etcetera, etcetera.  There they would: SEE hideous demons, SMELL hideous smells, HEAR ancient prophesies and poorly-timed observational humor.  Maybe she would even get to KICK a little ass.

Wait.

Do fish have asses?

She followed the man in stony silence down a gas lit lane, the blind leading the blonde.  They passed by a crowd of twenty-something smokers huddled under the awning of a pub, a darkened tobacco shop, a “For Sale” storefront priced in Euros with the big glass window bricked shut. Behold! Romantic Old London, in all its glory…

Xander stopped at the foot of something called a “Haberdashery,” which sounded to her like it sold some kind of exotic foot fungus.  A set of stairs out front pointed the way down to a gloomy looking cellar apartment.  At the bottom, a crooked painting of a glowing cartoon spine hung on a doorway, the words “Happy Lucky Hello” stenciled on it in lipstick red.

“You’ll have to take them off,” he whispered, and pressed the button on a tiny metal buzzer box.

“What off?”

“Your shoes.”

Before she could protest, the buzzer box crackled to life.  The voice that came out of it was perky, with a disarming, oriental lilt.  “Good evening Mister Harris, Miss Summer. How may we help you?”

Buffy started to ask how she knew her name, but Xander quickly shushed her.  “Uh, we’ve come to see him, Madame Orso.  We have questions.”

There was a long, clicking pause. “You are mistaken.  The Dauphin is not seeing anyone tonight. The Dauphin is sleeping. You try back next millennium? Okay! Thank you!”  The speaker snapped off dead.

“Well,” Buffy murmured.  “Was that helpful or just helping?”

Frustrated, Xander slapped the button again, and then twice and three times, before finally he slumped his forehead on the doorjamb.  Buffy guessed they were about to pack it in when suddenly, almost apologetically, he began to knock.

The door immediately flung open, revealing a small Chinese woman in a nylon jogging suit who peered warily at them from its threshold.  Her mouth hung open, horrified.

“Mr. Harris… you dare knock?”

“It’s very important,” he explained.  The woman shifted her gaze back and forth between them, suspiciously. Apparently not finding what she was looking for, she seemed to acquiesce, sinking backwards into the building and beckoning them to follow.

They were ushered in to a small, empty parlor.  Red, cheapo carpets ran wall to wall under bargain furniture from 1972. “Shoes,” said the woman.   They sat and quietly peeled off their footwear, Xander plunking a pair of swampy work boots off sideways, and handing them to their host, lace first.  Reluctantly, Buffy did the same with her black leather Rampages. Easy come, easy go, she mused.  The woman accepted them with a nod and vanished though the partition of lacy K-mart curtains that separated the waiting room from the rest of the building.  From a set of hidden speakers, Buffy could hear a woman chanting a foreign melody over the sound of plucked, punctuating strings.  The queasy aromas of incense scented oils stung at her nostrils.  They seemed to have seeped into every last atom of the walls.

“So, this dolphin. What is he, some mystical Yoda type?”

“It’s Dauphin”, Xander corrected her.  “And, no, not exactly.  He’s more like a Watcher.  Except he’s been watching stuff for, you know, a really, really long time.”

“So, he’s not a fish.”

“No!” Xander hissed, and glanced around anxiously.  “For goshsakes, Buffy, do not ever call him a fish.  He gets very touchy about that.”

She offered him a disinterested little grunt, and casually started flipping through a magazine on an old card table. There was a…

Say… that’s a whole lot of X’s!

Whoa! The hell is she doing with those salad tongs?!

She snapped the book shut, a horrible realization washing over her.  “Xander? Please tell me this is not a whorehouse.”

“This is not a whorehouse,” Xander replied.  “It’s just, you know.  A house… that happens to have some whores in it.”

“Okay,” she decided.  “Here’s me, leaving.”

“Wait, Buffy,” he pleaded, the note of panic in his voice freezing her mid-stride.  “You said you wanted answers.  Well trust me.  He’s got ‘em.  Boy-and-how, does he got ‘em.”

The curtains suddenly flung apart. Orso smiled cheerfully at them, looking a bit too catlike for Buffy’s taste.  “Good news, Miss Summers.  The Dauphin has agreed to see you, now.”

They followed the woman down a short hallway painted a mesmerizing shade of purple.  Ornately carved doors lined the way, each one broadcasting its own raunchy soundtrack of grunts and bumps and animal wails.  At the far end, a gold portico glittered back at them.  A large wheel was mounted on its face, like an airlock on an old submarine.

“So,” Buffy said.  “How much time do we get, with this Dauphin character.”

“Time is irrelevant,” the woman purred.  “The One Who Swims traffics in chance and causality, not time.”

“The One-Who-Swims?” Buffy whispered.  “Wait, I thought you said he wasn’t a fish?”

“Shhh! What did I just tell you?”

The woman calmly began turn the wheel counter-clockwise.  There was sound like air rushing out of a very big balloon.

“Mister Harris,” she intoned, the balloon sound getting louder and louder.  “I am afraid you must wait here with me. There is a small matter of a bill to be settled, given the inconvenience you have caused.”

Xander gazed ruefully at her, slowing nodding his head.

“Xander, what is she…?”

The door clicked and swung wide, revealing an impenetrably dark room.  A gasp of icy air breathed over her.

“Its cool,” said Xander, a little too bleakly.  “Go do what you gotta do. I can handle myself, you know.”

She took a guarded step into the chamber.  Then another. It felt a whole lot like the freezer back at Doublemeat, minus the baffling smell of their top secret “muster-naise” sauce.  She squinted into the blackness, trying to force her eyes to adjust.

“Hello,” she crooned, the sound dying out with an eerie metallic echo. “Look, I don’t know what you’re trying to pull,” she said, turning to confront the Madam.  “But I don’t see any friggin’…”

But Orso was already gone. So was Xander.

Everything was.

Chapter 24: Thicker Than Water

It was a peaceful night – the first one of those in a long time. And from the smell of things, maybe the last one of those for a long time, too. Frank decided to take advantage of it, and began to type.

As a fresh-faced young officer in the sixties, this particular duty had been an onerous one. The electric typewriters of that era were unforgiving hunks of chattering steel, built for men of deliberate words and thoughts who hardly ever made mistakes. In 21st century, letter writing had become a fairly painless exercise in hunting and pecking, tugging and tweaking. There were no more crumpled pages filling up wastebaskets and ticking off treehuggers. Now, it was just the white phantom blaze of the monitor, and that old painstaking debate between thought and ink had been replaced by a small plastic button called “BACKSPACE.”

Dear Mrs. Finn,

On behalf of a grateful nation, I regret to inform you that your son, Colonel Riley Finn, was killed in the line of duty, October 28 2008.

Colonel Finn was on patrol in the town of Taji, 30 miles North of Baghdad when insurgent forces exploded a roadside bomb beside a convoy that included Colonel Finn’s Humvee. The blast caused massive damage to the side of the vehicle where Colonel Finn was seated, and the resulting shrapnel seriously wounded your son and two junior officers.

Combat medics were deployed immediately to the your son’s position, but Colonel Finn ordered them to stand down when he detected a sniper team of insurgents firing from local rooftops. Colonel Finn died returning fire at the snipers. His heroic actions saved the lives of Corporals John Maddox and Juan Lopez as well as that of combat medic Captain Jeffery Bell, who would have walked directly into the ambush.

Due to the extraordinary heroism of his actions in the service of his country, I will be nominating Colonel Finn for the Congressional Medal of Honor…

There was a knock at the door, soft and familiar, and, since Frank Grange never, ever locked his door, he just ordered her to come on in. The Summers girl appeared, once again looking young and full of doubts. As far as he was concerned, those were two character flaws that didn’t blend well.

“Have a seat.” She obeyed, but did so with a loosey-goosey cadence that irked him; swatting a hair out of her eyes and filling the seat with all the moody slouch of a teenage drama queen. If the Agency project was still military, he’d have dropkicked her little butt straight out of his office, and probably kept booting it until it was out of the service altogether. But there was nothing “military” about the work these days. That old dream was as discarded as congressional war powers, or the jetpack.

Besides which, truth be told, Frank Grange found there was less and less Army left in him all the time. It was an occupational hazard, he guessed. Or maybe he was finally just old. But he still insisted on typing the letters. He’d be goddamned if he let anyone else do that.

“Drink?” he asked, already pouring one.

“No, thanks.”

“I understand you had a chat with Mr. Harris.”

“Yes. I understand you did too.”

"Bright young man. Hard to believe he never served.”

She threw him a defiant glare. “He served, sir. All of us served.”

Grange stifled a chuckle, mostly on account of Dawn Summers might take that the wrong way. He took a long sip of the brandy, waiting for the inevitable words to arrive. When they didn’t , he said them for her, as plainly and politely as he could manage. “You’re having regrets.”

The girl turned to stone before his eyes; her palms flat on the arms of the chair, gaze fixed like a falcon. This was a gambler’s front, the way spies looked at you when they were caught red-handed.

“You,” he continued, “made a biiiiiiig mistaaaaaake. And now you wish you could take it all back. Maybe, turn into everyone’s favorite little puppy-eyed sweetheart again.” None of these were questions, so he didn’t expect an answer.

“It’s not that simple.”

“Don’t let ‘em tell ya anything is, Summers,” Frank drawled. “'Cause they’re lyin’ to ya.”

He felt inspired, suddenly – whether by the lateness of the hour or by the drink he did not know – and found his hand digging into the second drawer of his new desk, pushing past a jumble of ridiculous old medals to find it.  When he did, he plopped the damned thing on the table with a grunt and an old tiger’s toothy grin. After a few seconds Dawn gave in, peering at a framed black and white photo that was taken a million lifetimes ago.

“Handsome little devil, huh?,” he asked. “Know who that is?”

“You,” she said flatly, feigning disinterest. But the look on her face told otherwise, whispered a whole graveyard full of ghosts. “Where was this taken?”

“Cambodia. Nineteen sixty two,” he bellowed. “This was a few years before the commies took over, back when they were still calling it a “constitutional monarchy.’ Whatever the hell that’s supposed to mean…”

The girl kept goggling at it, mesmerized. “I don’t believe it. It looks just like…”

“Sunnydale,” he agreed. “Well, Sunnydale afterwards, that is. But then again, so does the damn Grand Canyon.”

She shook her head skeptically. “It was a Hellmouth?”

“I was only twenty nine back then, and spoilin’ for a fight. Wanted to do something great.” He drizzled the last drop of sweet brown booze into his glass, fighting back a tough old memory. “I was too young to enlist in the Big One. But I remember watching all those great reels at the movie house. I remember I used to watch them and imagine my father there. Storming hills and castles, spearing godless krouts on his bayonet three and four at a time.”

“He sounds pretty brave.”

“Hell if I know,” Frank shrugged. “Turned out those newsreels would be my only memories of him. Daring, dashing superman, reeling at Nazi windmills on the other side of the world. Glories of war.  All that gunk.”

Dawn nodded in mysterious agreement. She fingered the picture gingerly, and Frank watched her pale eyes narrow sharply, zero in on the band of figures gathered at the chasm’s edge. “Who's that?”

Frank chuckled, knowing exactly who she meant. “That,” he boomed, “is Gular G’Rith, Grand Arbiter of Nob. Me and the boys all used to call him “Ghoulie.” Boy, he hated that, lemme tell ya!”

She shook her head, disoriented by the notion. “Wait, he was a demon?”

“Yeah, that’s right. From a dimension called ‘Arashmahaar.’ Maybe you’ve heard of it. Lovely in the summers, if you’re a fan of molten lava.”

“He worked for you.”

“Well, more like a partnership,” he chuckled. “That’s the way he'd put it, anyway. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He grinned wearily at the faded image, tracing the swoop of the old fiend’s horn. “But he was a decent enough fellow, once you got to know him. One hell of a poker player, too.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“I don’t know,” he confessed. “I’m old, Dawn. I get sentimental, I suppose.  Fight enough wars and you’ll get that way too. I guess it's a defense against gettin’ too damned hopeful.”

She kept looking at the picture, couldn’t tear herself away from it. Sometimes, there was an almost bottomless anger in her, he realized.  She was jealous of jealousy itself. “He’s dead,” she said.

“Dead,” Frank agreed, astonished by the waning bitterness of this particular fact, the taste of bone-dry cereal. “All those guys. Dead and gone, now.”

There didn’t seem to be much more to say. So they sat for a long time like that, the remorseful Judas-ette and the mean old fox who lured her down to Hell. He took the time to examine his brand new office. Mister Giles had himself a rustic streak.  Battered brass, old maps scribbled with red fountain ink. Ancient scrolls sheathed in leather tubes lined a boxframe, arranged alphabetically, like things he might eventually grade. Meanwhile, the white box of the computer screen glared blindly at him, the twelve point font of a fake obituary giggling and daring him to “Save.”

“I’m not sure,” admitted the girl, finally. “If anyone really trusts me anymore, I mean. I don’t think I even trust myself. How can someone like that lead?”

“Real leaders makes the tough choices, Ms. Summers,” he said. “We may regret them later. But if we don’t look back, then it’s damn unlikely anyone else will either. You said it yourself, after all. Ten thousand Kennedy eggs, just waitin’ to hatch. And that old scroll, the one they made your sister dig up. You know what it said, knew what was coming. And you used that knowledge, the best you could.”

“She’s not my sister, you know,” said Dawn. “I don’t have one.” She kept staring, straining hard at that old photo, as if an answer lay somewhere at the bottom of that dreary old hellmouth. “Or a father. I dreamt of a mother, once. But I’m not sure if she was even real. All I know is, I’m not.”

“Key,” he murmured, rattling his brandy just to feel it lap the glass. “Mr. Giles wrote quite a bit about that. He was obsessed with it.”

She nodded. “Those monks changed everything.  Brainwashed everyone. They twisted the entire world to make me happen. I’m not a person, Frank. I’m a more like a disguise, made to hide something terrible.”

“And that bothers you? Knowing what you are?” He screwed the cap off another bottle, set it on the desk alongside a fresh glass. “It’s funny, when you think about it. The rest of us poor bastards spend our entire lives trying to figure out the one thing you wish you never knew."

“And what about you? Do you know what you are?”

“No, not exactly,” he laughed. “But I know it doesn’t matter. There’s the work. Work matters. My philosophy is, you fight the good fight and leave the philosophy to the navel-gazers.”

“That’s it, Frank? Fight the good fight?  No matter who we hurt, what we destroy. The ends justifies the meanies?”

Frank kicked back in his chair, satisfied and brandy warm. He was an old man, and not so long for the world. He realized this truth so suddenly that it bit him. But it was okay, because he suddenly knew she would be good enough. She would do. “Dawn Summers,” he sighed, “that part’s up to you. Either way, you are still you. You may not be a person, but you sure as hell ain’t no vampire. You still gotta look at yourself in the mirror every morning, just like the rest of us mutts.” 

"Frank," she whispered, “I’ll have that drink now.”

***

“Stop!” the vampire howled. “Stuh-Stop! You’re killing me!”

Nick scribbled down a small note, checked his watch again. It was half past two, and London still twinkled outside the long picture window, still breathed hot.  “Am I?” he asked.

Mum's blond dog kept on snickering, maddeningly amused. “Muh-Mate, mate,” he managed. “I mean, s’not like I don’t think she needs it. It’s just… well, don’t you think it’s about a hundred years too late?”

Nick wanted to punch the damned fucker, tear its fucking balls off, rip its fucking lungs out, bathe himself in blood and dust. But he smiled instead; the same neutered little smile he practiced for manic chartered accountants and their depressed housewives, and scribbled down another note. “Believe it or not, she’s found our sessions quite therapeutic," he said, "and I believe you will, too.”

“God, you’re serious.” His captive flinched again, visibly testing the restraints. “Good luck with that. Better cooks than you have tried to scramble my egg, doc. Stuck chips and souls and bloody magic rocks in there. No result.”

Nick eased deeper into his chair, stretched the toes of one foot. The gesture was automatic, left over from the days when he still breathed. “You’re afraid.”

Another peppery laugh came, like a hard slap. He was beginning to hate the sound of it. “Of you, piker?” Spike asked. “Not bloody likely.”

“Prove it.”

“No," he sneered.  "Not unless you answer my question. Then you can show me as many soddin’ ink blots as you like.”

“The Slayer’s alive. I’ve given her to my secretary for the time being, to watch over until mother gets here. What happens to her next depends entirely on how cooperative you are willing to be, Mr. Pratt.  Do you understand?”  Spike’s eyes narrowed, showing he did.  The monster’s slim body was still vibrating, almost invisibly, testing the binds for weaknesses.  There was power there.  He would be a handful if he got loose, Nick realized, and he groped the wooden shaft in his pocket for comfort.  It would be easier to finish him now, get it done with.  But mother would know.   If he killed the blond and lied about it, she would know and she would destroy him and forever would be over just like that.  He would have to be clever.

The clever boy lets others do,

the what and how and where and who.

“First off,” Nick chided,  “no ink blots.   That sort of rubbish went out the window with electric shock, penis envy and that dreadful, dreadful past life regression. I personally find our modern therapeutic techniques to be far more practical and permanent.”

“Yeh? An’ what are those?”

“Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Oh, and I hope you won’t mind if I switch on my tape recorder…. I find it useful for my notes.”

Spike sighed, exasperated. “Yeah, sure thing. Whatever knocks yer rocks. Doc...”

***

DR FINEMAN:  Excellent. Are you comfortable?

SPIKE:  I’m stapled to a bloody cot. (A sigh.) Been worse off.

DR. FINEMAN:  Good. Let’s start with your childhood. What can you tell me about it?

SPIKE:  (Laughter.)

DR. FINEMAN:  Would you describe it as happy?

SPIKE:  I’d describe it as short!

DR. FINEMAN:  Why is that?

SPIKE:  It was just… I dunno. Look we’re talking over a hundred and thirty years, mate! I can’t be expected to remember every little thing.

DR. FINEMAN:  Come now, you must remember something? Your old schoolmates? A favorite pet, perhaps?

SPIKE:  My childhood. (a long pause) I remember, the house.

DR. FINEMAN:  The house. Your mother’s house?

SPIKE:  What? No. No.

DR. FINEMAN:  What house then?

SPIKE:  Just a house. On the waterfront. Big place. Had these old green sea grasses growin’ up one side.

DR. FINEMAN:  Who lived there?

SPIKE:  No one. Lots of blokes.

DR. FINEMAN:  It was a rooming house, then?

SPIKE:  Yeh. Sailors and whatnot.

DR. FINEMAN:  What happened there? Why do you remember this house? Did one of the sailors put his hands on you?

SPIKE:  Listen, don’t get cheeky mate! I’m not in a mood.

DR. FINEMAN:  Sorry. (papers rustling) Go on.

SPIKE:  There are other little things like that. You haven’t been dead very long, everything probably still feels fresh for a bugger like you. But you’ll see. In the end you just get… flashes.  Never the big picture.

DR FINEMAN:  And what other flashes do you get?

SPIKE:  It’s like I said. Just rubbish. (a pause) I do remember a schoolmate, almost. I think his name was Bigby. And no, I didn’t shag him, so don’t bother…

DR. FINEMAN: Tell me about him. Whatever you remember.

SPIKE:  He was taller than me. I remember I didn’t like that much. We were only about six or seven, and it didn’t seem bloody fair! (laughter) He taught me to play rounders in a very green park.  Also remember a man named Frank Sully. Made applejuice ale and used to sell it for a penny a pint down on York and Essex.

DR FINEMAN:  You drank it?

SPIKE:  Well a bit yeah. It remember it made me sick. (laughter) I remember Sully’s smile. He had the sort of gamy grin where you could see all his teeth. Yellow, rotten, tobacco smirk.

DR. FINEMAN:  Well, dentistry was more of an art than a science back then, I suppose. (mixed laughter).

SPIKE:  As opposed to now, mate? (more mixed laughter) I mean, we conquered half the bloody planet, you’d think we could conquer flossing.

DR. FINEMAN:  You still think of yourself as an Englishman, then?

SPIKE:  (a long pause)  Been everywhere that mattered, more or less.  But, still, there’s nothing like a good pint and a footie match. (a long pause)  Ain’t my home, though.

DR. FINEMAN:  Do you think that’s because of your travels?

SPIKE:  No.

DR. FINEMAN: What then?

SPIKE: (exasperated sigh)

DR. FINEMAN:  I noticed you do that quite a bit.

SPIKE:  What?

DR. FINEMAN:  Breathe.

SPIKE:  Oh.  That.

DR. FINEMAN:  And why do you think that is?

SPIKE:  Dunno, doc. It’s sort of like being British, I s’pose.  Just one more nasty little habit.

DR. FINEMAN:  And Darla and Angelus? Mother? Did they breathe too?

SPIKE:  Hardly, hah!  Well… every so often, maybe. When they were feelin’ out a kill.

DR. FINEMAN:  It was a way to get close. Without being noticed?

SPIKE:  (A long pause.) Something like that.

DR. FINEMAN:  So, tell me more about this house.

SPIKE:  What house?

DR. FINEMAN:  The rooming house. You mentioned it first, but you never told me why.

SPIKE:  Maybe I don’t remember anything else. Maybe I don’t feel like talking about it.

DR. FINEMAN:  (papers rustling) Well, which is it?

SPIKE:  ‘Scuse me?

DR. FINEMAN:  Do you not remember or do you not feel like talking about it?

SPIKE:  Both! Can we move on please?

DR. FINEMAN:  What would you like to talk about?

SPIKE:  Oh, I dunno.  The weather.  Arsenal’s chances at cup.  Bloody hell!  I don’t want to talk about anything!  You’re forcing me to.  Remember?

DR. FINEMAN:  I forced you to mention the rooming house?

SPIKE:  No! (exasperated sigh) I... Look you know what I mean!

DR. FINEMAN:  Right. Again, forgive me. I don’t mean to upset you. That’s not my intention. Let’s talk about something else. What can you tell me about your family?

SPIKE:  What. Dru and them?

DR. FINEMAN:  No. Let’s talk about your other family. Your human one.

SPIKE:  Not much to say.

DR. FINEMAN:  Any brothers? Sisters?

SPIKE:  No.  Well, I had a sister once.  But she died, in her crib.  (A long pause.)  I didn’t eat her!

DR. FINEMAN:  I never said you did.

SPIKE:  Well, it's just your lookin’ at me with those gog-eyes… I wasn't turned yet…. Was barely knee high… 

DR. FINEMAN:  And how did you feel about that?

SPIKE: I didn’t, really.  Like I said I was quite young myself. Didn’t really get death yet. It was hard on mum, though.  I noticed that.

DR. FINEMAN:  (papers rustling) (scribbling) Go on.

SPIKE:  Well those were hard times. Not like now, with all the hospitals and vitamins and that rot. It happened. Bein’ born was a sort of crapshoot.

DR. FINEMAN:  And your father? How did he feel? ( a long silence)

DR. FINEMAN:  Did you hear the question?

SPIKE:  Yes.

DR. FINEMAN:  How did he take it?  Was he as sad as your mum? ( a  long silence)

SPIKE:  You think you’re clever.  You think you’re a clever little cunt, don’t you?

DR. FINEMAN:  No, I don’t think that at all.

SPIKE:  Where is Dru?

DR. FINEMAN:  Mr. Pratt.

SPIKE:  Bugger this Mr. Pratt rot!  Is she here?  I can smell ‘er on you, you know.

DR. FINEMAN:  Perhaps she doesn’t want to see you quite yet.

SPIKE: Why?!

DR. FINEMAN:  Perhaps she’s not ready. Perhaps she’s frightened of you.

SPIKE:  (laughter) Oh that’s rich! That’s very rich, mate.

DR. FINEMAN:  She’s knows about the things you’ve done, William.  And what you might still do.  She has the sight.

SPIKE:   An’ she wants you to cure me first? Of my soul? (laughter) Bit late for that, doc.

DR. FINEMAN:  I know. You gave it up, yes?

SPIKE:  Well that’s one way of puttin’ it.

DR. FINEMAN:  How did that feel? After all the… sacrifices.

SPIKE:  Yeah, well.  Hard come easy go, mate.  That’s the song.

DR. FINEMAN:  Like your sister, you mean.

DR. FINEMAN:   Mr. Pratt?

SPIKE:  Yes.   Like her.

DR. FINEMAN:  Mr. Pratt…. William.  I wonder if we could talk a bit more about that house…

***

Faboo.

She inched forward into the frozen blank, shivering, pupils stretched the size of two golf balls. Something that wasn’t quite ‘fear’ rattled its way up her spine. It felt like making that very first solo pee-trip in the dead of night; little-kid fingers groping the invisible geometry of a hallway for a light switch, only to recoil when they found it, afraid of what sort of monsters the light might suddenly, horribly reveal. Except tonight, Buffy’s fists did all the groping. They hung in the middle-guard position a foot in front of her, a taut bow of flesh ready to seek and destroy.

(Destroyer. Liar. Slayer.)

About ten yards in, she passed through a plume of moist air. The electric droning she’d heard since the door shut seemed to suddenly get louder, become a rumbling tin roar. It reminded her of the radiator in their old L.A. house, the one she once warned her baby sister that Dracula slept inside of.

Except, she didn’t have a baby sister.

(Liar…)

Suddenly, her fist bumped something hard and smooth, like a pane of curved glass. She leapt back with a yelp, muscles reorganizing themsleves into a catlike crouch. The electric hum snapped off, died with a hiss. In the same instant the freezing air seem to leap five degrees, melting the frost on her nose into a teardrop. Somewhere in the distance, a constellation of pale light swam slowly into view.

She stood transfixed as the thing drifted forward, moving with the grim certainty of a fog rolling onto nightmare shores. A tangle of horrible shapes twittered and convulsed, revealing tidbits of something big and alarmingly bug-like, like a long, anemic lobster on steroids. There was still no light source to speak of, and as the creature arrived at the surface of its giant fishbowl, Buffy realized it needed none. It was glowing, the light bleeding through its translucent armor like neon moonbeams. It made her think of fish who lived at the very bottom of the deepest ocean trench. But the Dauphin was several times more unearthly then any of those Discovery Channel mutants. It’s bananna-shaped body seemed fringed by hundreds of horrible dangling legs, and antennae as thick as sail rope. The tail was a fossilized flower of overlapping ridges and iron veins. For one terrible, inexplicable moment, she thought of…

Sea Monkeys.

“Mmmmmmmmmm,” purred a deep and arctic voice. The creature pressed two pincers to the glass, drummed it like a polite but impatient gentleman. “Been a long time, Summers.”

“Yeah,” she agreed. “It’s been, what? A whole never?” She felt another gust of ice blow through her, and soft needles drilling down into her skull. Horrible laughter bubbled back at her from the void, the Dauphin swatting its shriveled old appendages like a round of applause. The sound was hollow and indistinct, dribbling in from everywhere and nowhere at once. It could have come from inside her head. She almost prayed it had.

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” it continued. “You don’t remember me, do you.”

“Third grade,” she cracked. “Miss Mendoza’s class, right?”

“Many years from now,” the Dauphin purred, “Off the shoals of Nuuk. In the Baffin Sea.”  It wriggled horribly, shaking out the last word. Framed in absolute black, the movement shook loose a storm of glittering particles, like white fireworks. A foot from the Dauphin, the particles themselves wiggled to life and swam off into the black waters. She was pondering whether they could be some form of horrible children when the beast did it again, sent a hundred thousand microscopic little monsters rocketing away in a second shimmering wave. It was hypnotic, a sort of slow, glittering breath.

Buffy slowly batted a eyelash. The invisible needles were still worming deep into her mind, lulling her into a kind of sleep that reminded her of the Dragon’s embrace, only much, much colder. “And just how am I supposed to remember the future, mister?” she murmured.

“Oh, right, right, people” the Dauphin groaned, barely disguising its contempt. “I keep forgetting. You’re half person.”

She frowned, squinting into the mollusk’s hypnotic glow. “Full,” she insisted, dreamily. “I’m a full, um… person.”

“Whatever you say, Vampire Slayer,” it replied. “You’ve waited a long time to remember this moment. You all have.”

“All… we?” Drowsy. she thought. Getting drowsy. Too cold

“Yes, all of you,” it soothed knowingly. “You’re a lovely bunch of kids, but you’ve always been my favorite. The Turtle’s too, though I’m sure he’d never admit it.”

…cold...

“Turtle…?”

“And Nancy Summers has waited a long time as well,” he interrupted. “Or Buffy Stark, maybe. Whichever way that cookie crumbles. It’s so hard to remember… Stark. Stake. A stark stake…”

“Stop…. Your not making any suh-sense.”

“Your name. The name you lost. You will remember a new name, but it doesn’t belong to you. Or to him.”

Her legs felt like poured concrete, nerves going numb. The Dauphin’s shape flittered like a kite in a stew of warm mist, mocking her. “Pratt,” she droned, staring into the creature's bright and terrible core. The word had just popped into her head, but was so meaningless that she had to say it again. “Pratt?”

“Well, well, well, now” the Daupin scoffed. “That is very optimistic, isn’t it.”

Another soundless wave crashed over her, shoving her further out of her skin, bathing her mind in warm milk.  Mom milk.

Mom.

Pick up the phone.

She felt a glob of clotted blood scratch and crawl its way up a vein. In the back of her brain, something was screaming the word “hypothermia,” but she she was having trouble remember what that word meant. She only knew she her lips felt dry, and that she was dying.

Pick up the phone…

“Nevermind,” sighed the creature, casually, as though changing some imaginary subject. “What do you wish to remember, Buffy? The past?” Trembling, she managed to shake her head. “No, no, no… the present. The most distant memory of all. You wanna remember the Now. Want to know about Jazzercise and Turtles.  Doctors and Gardens and whatnot.”

“Juh-jazzercise. Wuh-want to know juh-juh….”

“It’s aerobic, Buffy. Air is a second death for the dead. Oxygen feeds the flesh one day, eats it the next...”

“Not that, you fruh-freak,” she whispered, white knuckling through the pain. “Wuh-wuh-wuh.”

”Witch!” he exclaimed. “Aha! Your murderer, you mean?”

“Nuh-no… fruh-friend…. Suh-saved me.”

 “Too much person in you, Slayer,” the Dauphin scolded. Buffy could barely hear the voice any more. The low notes of the Great Fishy’s old voice were bleeding into the spectral hum of the radiator. It was all a trap, she finally realized. She would die down here, and, somewhere very nearby, Xander would pay his own gruesome price. Visions of old ghosts tumbled through her mind. They were singing.

Mom’s milk. White blood in the Tetons.

Not strong enough… not strong….

SLAAAAAAYYYYYERRRR! The Dauphin's roar shattered Buffy, brought her blinking back to life.   The ground felt hard again where she knelt. The monster pressed its entire bulk against the glass, pulsing like a blue flame. Do pay attention please, added the sea beast, almost lovingly.  Or you’ll be more right then you know. You will do what I ask, won’t you?

“Yuh-yuh-yuh,” Buffy stammered, then just nodded in reply.

Don’t try to speak, girl. You waste so much effort, butchering air.  We can hear you fine without it.

She closed her eyes, drew in a long breath. Whatever you say, she thought.

And don’t question me again.  I have all the time there ever was, but you and your friends have precious little.

I said I’ll do it, goddamn you!

Then swim with me little girl, the Dauphin said. And I will tell you about the world.

***

Move. Now

Skaya slid down the lip of the bar, blood thundering. Across the floor, Anya Jenkins was tearing the leg off a table. The demon leered at her as she splintered the wood, a white skull’s grin. “Remember this trick Buffy?” she beamed. “The ol’ stake in the heart routine. Kinda fitting, doncha think?”

She glanced in ten directions. The bar had an uber-shitty design. Lots of ways in, but only one way out. And that was through a mighty pissed off vengeance demon who was just aching to make herself a Slayer shish kabob. She yanked the knife from her boot. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s do this thing.”

They met in the center of the dance floor. Shingles of Technicolor light wove patterns over Anya’s face, somehow amplifying the hatred there. They circled one another cautiously like that; Skaya jiving and feigning with her blade, the demon brandishing her makeshift stake like a Roman Hoplite’s spear. Hot little curses were peeling out of Anya like breaths, but Skaya knew better than to listen. When she delivered a short sharp kick to the ribs to start things off, the demon buckled but held her ground. The reply came too fast, a thunderous backfist to the Slayer's jaw that sent her flying.

“You know the funny thing about revenge, Buffy?” Anya sneered. “It’s a talent. Just like fighting. Or love. Sure it slows down over the years, gets rusty. But it never really leaves you.”

Skaya flattened herself to the ground, waiting for her enemy to get close before she found her feet. “That what this is all about? Revenge?”

“Isn’t everything?”

“Maybe you’re right,” she hissed, eyes finding their range. “But it’s not like fighting.”

She charged, then, on all fours at first. A yard away she pulled the trigger, bowling herself into Anya’s legs like a fullback. They tumbled over and over, the crazy disco lights spinning in their eyes. Four seconds of pure violence passed, the two women thrashing and stabbing like wolverines. Finally Anya bucked, sent Skaya sailing overhead. The exit was in sight,. Skaya made a break for it, saw the small square of darkness growing larger and more real. A promise.

Like old times.

As she crossed the threshold, she allowed herself one fleeting glimpse backwards. A bloodied Anya Jenkins knelt in the middle of wreckage, her eyes as white and cold as distant moons.

“In fighting,” Skaya gasped, “speed kills.”

Chapter 25: Depth Perception

Buffy dove.

The water was blood warm, breathable.  She remembered something about placental fluid, from some long ago Health Class, how babies breathed water in the womb.  The Dauphin swam past her, grazing her arm with its electric bulk.  She took a deep breath, drinking the liquid into her lungs.

How do you feel?

Gross, she said/thunk.  But I’ll live.

Maybe.  Maybe not.

She felt a groan coming on.  Is this the part where you go all Yoda on me?   Because, I’m really not a fan.

The Dauphin swam closer, sliding it’s long tail around her leg.  A huge neon eye blinked curiously at her, a few inches from her face.  Nah.  In fact, I’ll let you do most of the talking, Slayer.  I don’t know the answers, you see.  I only know how to know them.

Okay, see?  You threw in a little Yoda.  Right at the end there.

Sorry.  I... don't get out much.

Fair enough.  So, how do we get start…?

***

“-ed.”

Study Hall.

For real? 

Buffy was slouched low in her little desk-let, her ballpoint Troll pen frozen mid-doodle.   She was wearing an egregious sweater-vest over one of those billowy white blouses that were popular for eight seconds in 1995.  Her shoes weren’t something she’d want to discuss in mixed company.  Two rows in front of her, Betty Farmer was playing oogy eyes with Brent Whatshisface.  Austin?  Or was that the Six Million Dollar Man? 

Mr. Pulchaska sat observing them over his horn-rimmed glasses, with that same creepy Future Serial Killer look in his eyes.  In the seat next door, a monochromatic goth kid snored into his open copy of “The Body Thief.”

“What the hell is this?!”

You don’t know?

“Yeah, I know what it is.  And it’s got zilch to do with Willow.”

Doesn’t it?

“Hello?  Not even Sunnydale.  It’s freakin’ L.A.!”

“Ms. Summers!” Mr. Pulchaska boomed.  “Study hall is QUIET TIME!”

“Oops,” she said, strangely embarrassed.  “Sorry, Mr. P.”

So what am I supposed to do here?  Meditate, or something?

Well, Slayer, it’s Study Hall.  Why don’t you try studying?

Nobody actually ‘studies’ in Study Hall, dweeb.   Exasperated, she glanced down at the drawing on her textbook’s brown bag cover.  It was pretty detailed, actually.  Way better than the unicorns and dancing panda bears of her artistic past.  There was a country road winding around the side of a very steep hill.  At the bottom of it was a van covered in flames, curly-cues of smoke roaring up into the sky.  Nearby was a person on their knees, crying.  Not as cheerful as the pandas, mind you.

Curious, she flipped the book open and started thumbing through it.  It was boring, boring Math, of course.  Columns and columns of nonsensical equations,  “a2= b2 x c2,” etcetera.  And what the heck was pi, anyway?  Something to do with circles. Pies were circles. She could really go for some pie.

She got to a section with some word problems, and stopped to check it out.  She remembered these could be fun, sometimes.  Made it easier to picture things in your head without it going all kabloowie.  She started to read:

Question 1:

The universe is placed 10 superstrings away from a black hole 800 billion times the mass of our galaxy. How many days will pass before the black hole swallows all of Reality as we Know It?

Whoa!  These problems were bit more complicated then she remembered.  She mouthed the words once, carried the four, and wrote down the answer.  “2 days.”  Sounded about right.

Question 2:

Willow and Buffy are hiking in an alternate dimension.  They decide to leave their tent and walk around a lake. They start going in the opposite directions. Willow hikes at the rate of 2miles per hour. Buffy hikes at the rate of 3 miles per hour. The perimeter of the lake is 260 miles. How long will it be before Willow meets Buffy, and kills her?

This was a tough one.  She always hated these travel-distance thingees.  Bit her tongue.  Scratched her head.  “52 hours.”   Hmmm, she thought.  That’s a bit late…

Question 3:

The most brilliant hoax of the century has been planned!  Sheriff Summers is giving a Lie Detector test to a pool of six suspects, trying to discover the identity of the Mastermind and his Accomplice. 

The Sheriff knows that four of the suspects have been duped into believing that the true Mastermind is innocent, and will make one statement saying so .  Of those four suspects, three have been also led to believe that an innocent person is the Mastermind, and will make one false accusation.

Other than the seven false statements listed above, every other statement made below is true.  Also, one of the suspects correctly identifies the Mastermind.  

The Mastermind's Accomplice is afraid of getting caught by the Lie Detector.  He or she does not lie, and doesn’t mention the Mastermind’s name.

The Mastermind has had him/herself hypnotized in order fool the Sheriff.  Therefore, the Mastermind is capable of making one or more of the seven false statements without setting off the Lie Detector!

From this information, can you tell who is the Mastermind and who is the Accomplice?

Willow said:

   It isn't Dawn

   It isn't Kennedy

   It isn't Drusilla

Dawn said:

   It isn't me

   It isn't Rupert

   It isn't Drusilla

   It’s Willow

Rupert said:

   It isn't me

   It isn't Frank

   It isn't Drusilla

   It’s Dawn

Kennedy said:

   It isn't Willow

   It isn't Frank

   It isn't Rupert

Drusilla said:

   It isn't Willow

   It isn't Kennedy

   It isn't Frank

   It’s Rupert

Frank said:

   It isn't Rupert

   It isn't Kennedy

   It isn't Willow

   It's me

Aha, A brain-twisty logic puzzle!  Hrmmm.  She tapped her pen thoughtfully, tried to get the ol' rusty gears churning.   These sorts of puzzles were rarely as complicated as they seemed, she recalled.  There was always some kind of trick to the wording, and – after you eventually cheated by looking up the solution - it all seemed so fiendishly simple.  Feeling pressed for time (and more than a little Blonde) she flipped the book upside-down and peeked at the Answer Key.

  No way!

  Holy duh!

After the Meat Grinder of Intrigue she’d just been pulled through  - all the double and triple and quadruple plot twists – she almost had to laugh.  Made perfect sense. 

But why didn’t they just tell me?

Question 4:

When Kennedy sets off her thermonuclear bomb in the ECU, what would be the nuclear binding energy in joules (to 4 significant figures) of 19F if the experimental mass was found to be 18.9984 u?

She decided to skip that one and come back to it.  Sounded like a job for Mr. Copy Your Nerdy Neighbor, anyway.

Question 5:

A van leaves from London at 8:00pm traveling north at 35 miles per hour.  140 miles into the journey, it will swerve over the edge of an embankment and tumble down onto the rocks below, killing all but one of the passengers.  The sun will rise at 6:00am the next morning. 

How many hours after the crash will the final passenger die?

***

“Five hours,” said Faith.   “That’s how long before they set the dogs out looking for us.  You got five hours left to live, babycakes.”  The vamp was getting fidgety, now, starting to pace.  Second guess itself.  Would’ve been fun, under other circumstances.  Freak got the drop on her, though.  Caught off her game.  Fucking England.       

“You wouldn’t say that if she was here,” Justine hissed.  “Grans would set you straight.”

“Princess, I know all about your grans.  The bitch is blah to the power of blah.”  She tested the restraints.  Casually.  No need to look all Damsel in Distress.  Tied up helpless wasn’t her bag.  It wasn’t true, so much; the thing about Drusilla.  Faith didn’t know all that much about the Big Bad’s Big Ex, except that she was all Psycho Killer, Qu'est Que C'est.

Still knew more than this baby bloodsucker, though.  Dumb vamp was a scared vamp; scared vamp was a soon-to-be-dusty vamp.  “Granny’s gonna crap her panties once she finds out you got me tied up like this," she said.  "She might be crazier than a snake’s armpit, but even she don’t want this kind of heat.”

“Nana is not mad” Justine protested.  “She was confused.  Doctor Nicky helped her.  She’s much better now.” 

“Ooh, bad news,” Faith snorted, trying any old goddamn thing, now.   “Crazy was your only hope.  If that that wannabe Mortisha's got enough Christmas lights on to see how bad you fucked this up?  It’s gonna be maximum spank for you, kiddo.”     

Five hours, she thought.  What a steaming load of crap that was.  Once Drusilla showed up to this party, she’d be lucky to get ten seconds to kiss her ass goodbye.  Heard she has a thing for Slayers.  It would take a miracle for Frank and the girls to find them in time, and Faith Lehane wasn’t exactly on speaking terms with the miracle crowd…

Justine picked the knife up again.  Looked like the little bitch was gonna graduate Night School after all.  “Perhaps you’re right,” she said.  “I suppose I’ll have to make extra nice with Nana.  Give her a present.”  The vamp grabbed one of Faith’s ears and nestled the blade. “These will make a beautiful, beautiful necklace.” 

Faith closed her eyes.  Braced for it. 

It’s coming off. 

Nothin’ you can do about it, girl.

Fucking get ready.

Any second now.

Any second.

Hey.

She opened her eyes.  Justine was gaping down at her chest, awestruck.  A crossbow bolt had shish-kabobbed her, right through the love muscle.  Their eyes locked for a beautiful, beautiful moment before she dusted.

Faith peered into the gloom of the cellar.  “Nice shootin’, Tex,” she said.  “Timing could’ve been a little less dramatic, but who am I to complain, right?”  It was too dark to make out the shooter, but she could hear his wheezing dude-breath.   “Alright, enough suspense, pal.  Just tell me who I’m supposed to put on my Kwanza list this year, and get me outta here, kay?”  There was movement out in the shadows, the sound of  footsteps slowly retreating up a set of stairs.  “Hey!” she cried.  “Aren’t you forgetting something?” 

The footsteps paused for a moment, then kept going.

“Don’t be stupid.  One dusty little vamp doesn’t make you Rambo, man!  These things are gonna kill you!”  She thrashed her legs to try to loosen the chains, tried to gnaw at the straitjacket with her teeth.  “Let me out of here!” she screamed.   But he was already gone.

Asshole!

***

“So,” he said.  “How long have you been having these feelings?”

The vampire  started squirming again, increasingly restless.    It clearly wasn’t a subject he was comfortable with.  “It’s hard to say,” he admitted.   “I’ve always been a bit.  Well, experimental.”

“I see.  Go on.”

The creature closed its eyes, as though trying to translate some impossible and tarrying tongue.  “I mean, I’ve always wanted him.  Never wanted to admit it to myself, I suppose.”  He was nodding now, trapped in some sort of tragic agreement with himself.   “I’ve been with women, too.  Obviously.  But there’s only been one person… one man… who’s ever really understood me, you know?” 

“And this man…. Does he feel the same way, about you?”

“Damned if I know.  We use to work together.  But we’re always fighting.  Bickering.   We'd have these arguments that feel like they’re a hundred years old.”   He was shaking now, practically gagging on the truth.  “But in my dreams…”

“Yes?”

“In my dreams.  He takes me to his bed,” he confessed.  “Where it’s dark and safe.   It’s like…”  The poor beast was shivering now, his dead bones trying to mime an emotion he could no longer truly feel.  “It’s like he can taste my music.”  He glanced away quickly, mortified.  “Sorry.  I’m not even sure what that means.”

Spike shook his head sadly.  “Well, the diagnosis is simple,” he said.  “ You’re a ponce.”

Doctor Nick shot him a ferocious scowl.  Apparently, he wanted a second opinion.  

In a helpful mood, Spike tried to sculpt him one.  “You know.   Pillow-biter.  Nancy boy.  A mincing little poofter.” 

That set  Dru's infant right off, sent him leaping to his feet.  He looked deranged standing there; sparse, cotton candy locks all distressed, eyes crossed from straining his pint-sized wit, trying to work out when the tables got all turned around.  It was the closest thing to entertainment Spike had all year.  He'd almost forgotten how fun it was to torture small anim–

"I've named all the stars," she said.

And she was just there: alabaster sheathed in a shocking crimson, guarded over by a pair of huge and alien eyes.  Her hair was different; a dark, lush bob, like Louise Brooks on the Moon.  Everything else was the same.  The thought struck him that a hundred years would eventually pass.  People would wear bloody jetpacks, fly into outer space on great ships.  And Drusilla would float into their black company as well, and name all the bloody stars.

He tried and tried to think of something clever to say.

Chapter 26:  The Eyes Have It

Skaya's car growled to a stop at the checkpoint.  The guard peered at her warily, clutching his rifle like a security blanket.  She flashed the badge at him dismissively, not waiting for a wave before she rolled right on through.

She parked down in the Institute’s concrete belly then stormed the elevator bay.   Rocketing up toward the 31st floor, she closed her eyes, and that old tape of The Way We Were began to play inside her brain.  She conjured her friends again: the Xan Man and the Willow Tree, battling side-by-side with her against the Forces of Evil™.   Of course, those days seemed like a big fat joke now, of the unfunny kind.

And, through them all, they’d never understood the thing that slithered inside her.   The wise men knew, all those years ago.  Fight fire with fire.  The Shadow Demon wasn’t pretty, but the stuff that works rarely is.  And now, bleeding and hunted, it commanded Skaya to visit to the wisest man of all.

The doors slid open onto his lair. The room was the same old spartan square she remembered.  Squalid furnishings and stacks of book rallied towards the distant desk where he sat, scrutinizing whichever puzzle was presently occupying his humongous English brain.

“They found us,” she said.

Rupert Giles regarded her owlishly.  “They,” he said, “were always going to find us.   Frankly, my dear, I’m shocked they haven’t done so sooner, considering your lifestyle.”

This was an ongoing thing between them.  All the years she spent denying his withering critiques, only to discover they were all so infuriatingly right.  It wasn’t just sloppiness, either.   Ever since the Harris situation, she'd gotten so brazen that she was practically taunting them.  Although she'd changed her name to please her new employers in the Resistance, she’d stubbornly refused to keep a low profile.  Skaya offered herself up as an emblem instead; the last sentry on the wall between the worlds of Man and Magic.  It was only a matter of time before her old ‘buddies’ figured out a way to kill her.  And it looks like they finally did.

“She’s alive,” she said, failing to disguise the fear in her voice.  She saw the old man’s cool façade crack, ever so slightly.  “They brought her back, somehow."

“Are you positive?” he asked.

“Pretty much, yeah.  Considering she positively tried to deep fry my butt the other night.”

“But… how?”

“Oh, so you’re askin’ me?  There’s a new one…”

“Of course,” he grumbled.  “Quite right.” He rose and began prowling around the room then, all Deep Thinky.  Or trying to look that way, at least, for her sake.  And, to be fair, it did make her feel just a little better.

“Well, we’ll start by consulting the literature,” he finally said.  “Or rather, I will start by consulting the literature.  See if I can’t patch in Rayne on a secure line, too.  He’s has a fairly extensive background in the Necromancy.  Could prove useful.”

“Sounds like a party,” she said.  “So, what am I supposed to do?”

Rupert glared at her intently.  “Nothing.  Good lord!  You’re bloody lucky to be in one piece.”  He seemed to be trembling a little when he said it.  She’d never seen the Watcher this shook up before, and it was downright unnerving.   “We’ll get you to a safehouse, as soon as we can arrange one.   Lock it down tight, until this is all sorted.”

  “Sorted?” she asked.  “You don’t honestly think that Ethan can fight her, do you?”

“No,” he agreed.  “No, she’s too damn strong.  A direct confrontation would be suicide, obviously.”  He turned his gaze onto the large picture window that overlooked the city, as if canvassing all of Downtown Boston for the answer.  Delicately, he removed his eyeglasses.  Gave them a good polishing.  “We’ll need to move cautiously.  Find some sort of back door…”

***

"Ow!" yelped Harmony.  “Watch where you stick that thing, buddy!”

"Sorry," said the demon, sheepishly.  “It’s my first time.”

Harmony peered down at the red blot on her sweater, where the sword had been a second earlier.  Her favorite, cashmere sweater, mind you.

Amateurs!  Guh!  

“Okay, did everybody catch what just happened there,” she hollered, addressing Tara’s Tuesday Night Nerd Herd.  The monsters all stared back at her, with a seriously durrr look in their eyes.  Finally, one of them waved its paw.  “Yes!  You!”

“Uh,” croaked the creep. “He won?”

“No,” she pouted, squinting at the freak’s lumpy blue face.  “I mean, well, yeah.  But that’s not what was supposed to happen!”  They blinked back at her, totally not in the Land of Getting It.

Ugghhh, she thought.  Stupid war.   She wished it would just end already, so she could get back to her regular old life.  Death.  Whatever.

So, that’s what she was thinking when they suddenly barged in, looking all freaked out and super cheesed off.  There was stupid Tara and stupid Oz and stupid Willow, all carrying stupid Anya through the warehouse’s secret magic door.

Waitaminute.  "Stupid Willow?"

“Harmony!” Tara yelled.  “Get these people out of here.”

“Okay, people,” Harmony squeaked, delivering that last chestnut with pair of curly finger-quotes.  “You heard the lady!  Major, magicky things going on here.  We’ll pick this up later, and YOU-” she snarled at the trainee still clutching the sword.  “You are gonna pick up a dry cleaning bill, mister!”

As the mob bustled back into the tunnels, Harmony turned her attention back to the dead witch.  “Hey Wills.  Um, correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t you bite the big one?”

Willow glanced up at her.  “Yeah.  I get that a lot lately."

They laid Anya down on the snack table, swooshing all the cute little cheese and cracker setups onto the floor.  She looked dinged-up pretty bad.  It was kinda hard to tell for sure though, what with the whole Freddy Kruger Face thing she had going on.  Apparently that part was normal.

“Oz,” said Tara.  “Find Ursula.  Tell her to bring a Root of Oreshi, some Gobo leaves and a Shol Pon Magrah healing stone.”

“Ooh,” said Harmony, “and a Diet Coke.”  Oz shot her a tired look, then shuffled off into the tunnels to go do Oz Stuff.

Anya was moaning and wiggling around on the table, in and out of contestants (Consanants?  Consensus?) while the witches started in with their witch mumbo jumbo, and rubbed their hands all over her.  Which, you know: squick!   Not that Harmony was trying to judge anybody.   She knew they were ‘lebanons’ or whatever, and she was basically cool with that.  In theory.  But she thought that was a pretty lame excuse to cop a feel when some chick was lying un-contestants or dying or etcetera.  That was just.   Eww.

  Anyway, Anya seemed to be pretty mad about something, and it wasn't the tragically retro blouse she was wearing.  She kept blabbing away in a made-up sounding language -- ‘Ish Lish Osh Kabosh’ or something to that effect -- when all of the sudden Harmony heard heard the demon say a word that made sense.  It sent a chill up her spine.

“Slayer,” she cried.  “Did she say Slayer?  As in, like, the Slayer-Slayer?”

Tara nodded.  She had a look on her face like someone just crapped in her soup.  “She’s here.”

“In Boston?”

“That would qualify as here, yes.”

“Well,” Harmony stammered, suddenly and totally freaked.  “Well!  Well, I mean what are we gonna do?!”  Tara glared at Willow for some unknown reason, so she did too.  The redhead kept on chanting her abracadabra stuff, blissfully unaware.  The way she looked at Anya was seriously weirding Harmony out, too  It didn’t  seem like a lebanon thing.  It was more like she was looking at a basket of puppies.  In this case, bloody, gross demonfaced puppies, but puppies nonetheless.   It also looked like she was about to cry.  “Hel-lo!”  Harmony chirped.  “Earth to Not-Dead Willow.  What are we gonna do, oh fearless and apparently funeral-proof leader?”

The Witch finally stopped witching long enough to pay attention.  She looked a little different than Harmony remembered.   She heard a rumor once that Rosenberg would use some spell to make her boobs bigger (which was, like, totally unfair or whatever, but she could respect it.)  But it wasn’t just the de-boobage factor, though.  The way she looked at everything, it was almost like there was a completely different chick running around inside Willow’s bod.  Harmony surprised herself a little bit, that she was able to figure this out.  She guessed it must be those super keen vampire instincts she was always hearing about, finally kicking in.

“We know where she is,” Tara answered.  “We had her followed, after she did this.  She’s holed up at the Institute.  With Rupert Giles, I assume.”

“Oh crap,” Harmony muttered.  “So, lemme guess.  We’re supposed to break in there and bust out the whole Kill the Heck out of Everything That Moves routine, right?”

“Not everything,” whispered Willow.  “Not her.  You leave her to me.”

***

“That's enough,” said Violet, not really thinking it was even close to “enough”, but too troubled by a million other thoughts to care. The girls obeyed; they stopped their sparring match mid-punch, gave their teacher a practiced bow, then scampered off in the direction of the cafeteria.  As late as it was, it made sense.  Once upon a time, a good fight used to make her pretty hungry too.

She lingered a while to sneak in a workout of her own. She started off with basic katas – Open Mountain and Eagle's Claw – then moved on to weapons. Her Dragon Spring Sword technique was still too loosey-goosey; she could almost hear Kennedy's voice screaming the corrections into her ear. She eventually tossed the sword in frustration, and moved on to Jin Gang Big Knife. There she found her rhythm nicely, carving big, birthday cake slices out of her invisible foes.  She capped it all off with a Yang Family Spear routine (also tight-ish, to her relief).  After the final thrust, she bowed to an audience of invisible mentors and left.

Back at the dorm room, Vi took a quickie shower then gave her teeth a long, hard scrubbing, like she was trying to strip the paint off a car door. As she did so, she carried on a quiet conversation with the girl in the mirror too, asking herself if it was all worth it.  Dawn's plan went off without a hitch, sure.  Rupert Giles was gone, sure, and with him two long years or suspicions and frustrations and recriminations and doubts. It was what she wanted.  Or, at least, that's what she always told herself. She wanted things to be different, and it was. Everything was different now. Except, somehow, for her sucky Dragon Spring Sword technique.

She spit out a glob of green paste.

Everything is different except you, she thought.

Vi decided to skip dinner. It would be cold pizza-ish anyway, and she found she wasn't hungry enough to perform the simple tasks required to warm it up. So, she hopped online, instead, feeling that small but welcome jolt of anonymity and escape the moment her fingers touched the keys. In Internetland she was neither Shy Vi Singer nor Violet the Violent Vampire Slayer. She could be "Viral Vi" or "Vlogger Vi" or "Viably Viviparous Vi, Queen of Awkward Fertility Clinic Quesitons."  She had more aliases than James Bond, wrote under weird screen names like redletterdaytripper and lonelygal85.  Surfing the web, she could be anything to anyone, or nothing to nobody, and – when you cut right down to the heart and guts of it – wasn't that what it really meant to be free?  It sure felt that way to her sometimes.

Despite this sentiment, Vi had her routines in computerland as well. She checked her email first, which was basically all spammy crap, then she moved on to Skype. There was a invite for a video-conference in her notifications list, and a little icon beside it that told her the sender was online.

She stared hard at the name:

Harvey Lee

As in Lee Harvey. As in Oswald, of course.

She never changes either, Vi thought. Even her dumb, sick jokes never change.

After a moment of quiet deliberation, she donned her headphones and clicked the link. Kennedy's dark, somewhat pixelated features instantly filled the screen.  “Hey, old timer," the brunette said.  "Long time no see.”

“Yeah. Long time.” Kennedy was smiling, with more warmth than Violet thought she was capable of. It surprised her, but for some reason she couldn't help but think of swamps and crocodiles. “What do you want?”

“World peace.”

Violet chuckled at that one.  “Riiight.”

“I'm serious, Vi. We shouldn't be fighting each other. There's gotta be a part of you that knows that.” Violet just shook her head sadly, but at the same time she was quietly trying to scrub the word “yes” from her brain. “We're your sisters. Your kind. Can you really picture yourself taking orders from General Incompetence and Buffy's Bouncing Baby Biopsy for the rest of your life?”

“It's not like that, Ken.”

“No?” The woman handed her one of her sly, trademark grins. “You really think you're anything more than a pawn to these people? To Buffy?  Did she even remember your name?"

Violet winced at this one, and felt her cheeks begin to burn. Somehow, after all this time, Kennedy still knew how to press all the buttons.  “She didn't start this fight, Ken.  And neither did we.”

The brunette gave her shoulders an innocent shrug. “Hey, it's like I've been telling ya.  I only want peace. That's all I've ever wanted.”

“Yeah, you keep saying that.  And yet, the mounting body count?  Sorta screams otherwise.”

The smile disintegrated from Kennedy's lips.  “You're right about that.  And I hate it, more than you can ever know.  I'm not like Buffy, Vi.  I let myself feel every death, and I've mourned them all. But it doesn't have to be like this.  We can put an end to all this killing, if we work together...”

“No.”

“Vi, please.”

“You're asking me to betray my friends.”

“I'm your friend too,” Kennedy said, almost begging her to believe it.

Violet gave her old comrade-at-arms a long, careful look. With her soft yet determined gaze, she was almost selling it, as if she was channeling Buffy Summers herself.  Some other day, if the stars were lined up just right, Violet might have even taken the bait. But there was something off about Miriam Kennedy Corliss, and she suddenly realized that there always had been.  Off.  Wrong.  The words were a little too simple; she looked into Kenny's beautiful face and knew it was a mask for something horrific. Even across the muddy pixel soup of the laptop screen, the woman's dark, starving eyes gave her up.

Some things never changed.

“I gotta go now,” Violet said.  “I got something in the oven."  Then:  "I guess I'll be seeing you, huh?”

“Sooner than you think.”

Violet clicked the hang-up button and closed the window.

She opened a browser.

Browsed.

***

“My beautiful William,” she said.  “Ee’s  bin a bad dog, he ‘as.   Gotten into the medicine cabinet.”   Drusilla streamed forth like an empress, weaving her delicate old spell.  “Oh, it’s so horrid!  Ms. Edith would not approve…” 

Her mood was as capricious as ever.  The sly innocence which begat orgasmic terror, which then blackened to merry melancholy, all in ten seconds.  It was a familiar trajectory; one, Spike knew, that eventually prompted all manner of party invitations and dripping entrails and corpses compiling on the riverbanks.  The Doc sat watching with a slightly daffy look upon his face, enraptured by this tragic little sport of hers. 

“Lo, Dru,” Spike said, attempting nonchalance.  “See you’ve been to the alienist, love.  Whatever you’re payin‘im, it’s too bloody much.”

“Your big brother’s still playing the old game, Nicholas.”  She glided to where he was bound.  Her scent was tantalizing. In a moment, she was at his ear, tickling his skin with a tooth.  There was something odd about her, after all.  She seemed thicker.  More solid.  “Spike,” she breathed.  “My darling, deadly boy.  I brought something for you.”

Now, it was a rarified occasion these days to see something truly jarring.  Spike supposed this happened to everyone eventually, blood-drinking monster or not.   Experiences accumulated like snowflakes.  They piled up over the scenery, slowly bricking away all color and form.   Surprise was not a feeling that registered often.  Bloody puppet ranked up there.  A handful of kisses, as well.  But the moment he looked up into her eyes – those hypnotic and treacherous vessels – he was immediately and thunderously cannoned out to the edge of sanity.  Down beneath the waves of Drusilla’s pickled old depths, something was…

Burning.

What did you do?

“Oh, It looks so lovely on me, don’t it?” whispered his monstrous queen.

It did not.  Not hardly.  Ludicrous and unclean and impossible is what it looked.  Well Past Wrong.

In the stormy, slightly disorienting wake of this vivication, a memory squeezed its way into his brains.  They were driving out across a hot strip of Nevada desert, racing the rising sun to Las Vegas.  He was working the gear stick when he felt a hand enmesh his, the tiny cool fingers weaving expertly for purchase.  When he looked down at Drusilla she was wide awake, the softest smile playing upon her lips.  He feared she was going to ask for 'Daddy', who – by merit of their continued existence – had surely just been skewered on the end of the Slayer’s rapier.  “Can’t we stay out for the picnic, darling,” was all she said. “Mr. Yellow wants our breakfast prayers.”

Angel, the brooding ponce, never said what it’d been like for him.  And vice versa, of course.  The topic was mutually forbidden, though perhaps for separate reasons.   He suspected his grandsire wasn’t wordsmith enough to express it properly.  Not that he was an utter twit in all matters; beneath that ridiculous shrub of a hairdo lay a head possessed of a certain admirable facility to organize matters.  “A” before “B” and “B” before “C” and all that rot.  This made him quite compellingly evil, in the old days.   And when that old hag’s curse reunited Angelus with his shade, the sickness probably arrived in a likewise orderly fashion.  A tidy column of dark deeds and feeble contritions.   Spike would wager that coming to terms with this was a long and excruciating exercise for Angel, but not an utterly confounding one.  

For his own part, Spike found madness a wholly unavoidable side effect.  The trip back to the states had been long and strange.   He’d spent that first sleepless leg of it in the bowels of a cargo ship.   He still remembered what it was like when he caught and slew his first meal, the bizarre pity he felt when he heard the thing’s little toy heart pitter its last.   That’s how the vampire spent his second night of ensoulment: kneeling down in the filthy hold of a Mexico-bound freighter, apologizing to a rat. 

Then later, in the cellar of that miserable school, things had gotten rather fuzzy.  The ghost stabbed relentlessly at the walls of his rotten old head, a hostage rebelling against its demented captor.   Demon and man fought for every inch of real estate, and the racket kept his brain horribly awake and aware.  As the nights wore on he found himself whiplashed back and forth between worlds of fantasy and despair.  One moment, he’d be conjuring a sort of fairy tale scenario that would make a schoolgirl blush.  The next, he’d find himself screaming into a shining pane of glass that held no reflection, aching to liberate his eyes from his skull. Grand delusions and agonies washed over him like fevers, macerating the world into a stew of half wrought phantoms and savage poetry.  In plain English, the soul drove him bonkers.

Drusilla, however, was already bonkers.

So, where did it drive her?

“How did,” he started, momentarily witless.   “That is.  I mean…”

“Shhh…” she cooed.  “We mustn’t talk about her, Spike.   She’ll wake up.  Daddy gets very angry when she awakes.”

Spike felt his innards stiffen at the D-word.  “Daddy?   What, you mean he’s here?  In London?!”

Drusilla grinned impishly.  “No, not that Daddy.  The poor pony!  My other Daddy.  The one who 'angs over the Moon.”  She snaked around him now, smothering him with her scent.   “‘’Ee pokes the holes in the night, my Daddy does.  Lets the sunshine trickle in.  Oh, but he does get so displeased.”  

Off to one side, Dru’s shrinky-dink was practically panting at them.   It seemed the little tosser had earned his wage after all.  Monkeyed with her pickle jar just enough to get her over and on with it.  Now, Doctor Nicky was in her thrall.   Which - Spike recognized - was a bloody easy place to find oneself.   Drusilla was always a lethal beast; drenched in a power as mysterious and magnetic as the Sea.  And with her soul now intact, she was even more than that.   She was a fiery Perdition; a bright red nova illuminating the infinite night for all her spawn.  The little hobgoblin would probably stake himself if she’d asked him to.  Spike bloody well wished that she would.

“Make him stop looking at me like that, Mummy,” Nicholas whined.  “I don’t like it.  He’s been very, very rude to me an-” 

“Hush child!” Drusilla scolded, her mind so suddenly and disturbingly in attendance that it cut the wanker dead.  “Don’t be cross with my Nicholas, darling.  We’ve all been naughty boys and girls, once or twice.  Gone to bed without our suppers.”

“Yeh.  An’ it seems like there’s a great buggering lot of those runnin’ round these days,” Spike retorted.   “What’s the matter, pet?  Got lonely?  Empty nest syndrome?”

“Yeah,” she said, once more sounding rather alarmingly rational.  “Somethin’ like ‘at.  Came to me in a dream one morning.  My Daddy told me how it could be.  All of us under his bright old shadow, dust blowing over old stone.  We’ll make our way to him.   Ride together in a big fat carriage all the way up the valley walls.”

“Only the pretty ones, Druzy,” Spike said.  “Remember?”

“But they’re all so pretty, now, my darling, darling William.”  Her eyes were shimmering.  She was using the Sight again.   “We were misers, we were.  Locked away our precious medicine.  Too many patients and not enough doctors.  The white one brings her summer locusts to till the fields, but we must plant a different seed.”

Spike sat there motionless for a moment, considering all this.  It seemed the alchemy of madness poured upon madness had brewed a frightening sort of sanity in her.  Past his maker’s reliably batty word scrambles, it was all so profoundly rational; The Witch made more of them, and so Drusilla would make more of us.  “Buildin’ a bloody army,” he figured aloud.

“Very bloody, my love” she said.  “An’ together we’ll butcher them.   Drink them all up dry.  Daddy wants the world back right.” 

An eternity seemed to pass.  “Well, sounds grand,” he agreed, finally.  “Good luck with that.  S’ben great playing ‘catchup with the kookoo ex’ an’ all.  But if you don’t mind, I’ll just be collecting the girl and we’ll be on our merry…”

“Oh no,” she clucked.  “I’m ‘fraid not.  Not until you’re all better, my poor sick lemon.”

“Yeah, well – no offense – but s’gonna take a bit more than a dose of Siggy Freud over there to make me ‘all better’, lamb.  Things have changed.”

“Oh yeah, don’t we know it!” she teased.  “Our little Spiky’s fresh out of candles.  Lost a bet with Sam Scratch, ‘e did.”  She was giggling at him, now.  It was like rats nibbling at a scar, picking open the seam.   “You ‘aven’t eaten in an age darling.  All skin and bones, you are.  One sweet taste of Slayer is all you need.   And then we’ll be together, again and forever.”

“No.”

“Nicholas.  Go an’ help your sister fetch our supper.”

As he watched the little houseboy toddle off to do her bidding, Spike tested his bonds again.  Haven’t eaten in an age.  It was maddeningly accurate, that bit.  He’d always felt so weak without the fresh blood of the kill; that hot human geyser firing into his lips, pouring authentic life from one cup to another.  Once upon a time, he could’ve crushed the bracelets like glass.  He thought of the Wells boy, again.  That drink had been far more dangerous than anyone would ever know.  He’d almost lost it, almost drained the little louse.  The thirst was a hand at his throat, forever squeezing. 

He’d tried so bloody hard.  There were all manner of schemes and methods he’d devised along the way; ways he learnt to cage the thing.  But it would be all for naught, soon.  The sight of the lot of them feasting on Faith would finally break him, awakening the monster.  He was on the sliver as it was, hanging by his fingernails.  A little push was all it would ever take, he knew, to send him hurtling back to Hell.  His dread princess would offer him the Slayer’s long, lithe throat…

And you’ll drink.  You’ll drink, damn you.

Doctor Nick opened the office door.  He sort of cocked his head, puzzled by something on the other side of it.   Screamed.

“Lectus servi!” a voice boomed, and Nick was sent careening twenty feet through the air.  He smashed into a bookshelf with a satisfying crunch.  His assailant swayed into the room, wielding a large white crucifix like a loaded gun. 

He looked different.  If Spike was ever forced to confess it, the bastard looked downright formidable; the black-on-black suit reminiscent of some thundering young Fire and Brimstone priest, hellbent on setting the whole crooked world right.  And the man's pale eyes confirmed it, twinkling as though their owner knew a secret that he was giddy to finally tell.   He didn’t look like that nob Van Helsing.  He looked like…

Looked like Winston Bloody Churchill.

“Drusilla, darling,” said Rupert Giles.  “You’ve been a very naughty girl…”

Chapter 27:  Breakthroughs

All eyes were glued to the Watcher as he picked his way into the office, still brandishing the cross like some lunatic bishop.  The geezer seemed a dozen years younger; cheeks flushed, eyes foxlike as they quickly chopped up the scene, the corners of his mouth showing just the faintest curl.   If he didn’t know any better, Spike would’ve thought the bastard was actually having fun.

Drusilla shrank in horror as Rupert closed the gap, fell shrieking to her knees.  “No! No! No!” she cried.  “Daddy don’t want us yet!”

“Hello, Spike.”  The Watcher kept his eyes fixed to Drusilla as he steered clockwise toward the bound and utterly boggled vampire.  “I see you’ve been exercising your most prodigious talent, again."  The Watcher fished a bauble from his pocket - a talisman in the shape of a skull - and waved it over the iron bands.  The bracelets sprung open like a pair of gobsmacked jaws.  “At this rate, tying you up will be declared an Olympic sport.”

Spike ignored the crack.  He was still blown sideways by the goings-on in the corner of the room.  Drusilla was kneeling (Kneeling!), hands clasped like a penitent in the sodding confession box.   Bright tears striped down from her huge, unearthly eyes, her mouth silently working a prayer. “It’s not fair,” she wept.  The voice she used now was wholly unrecognizable. 

“Had a bargain, love,” said Rupert.   It was an almost gentle reprimand, as one might correct an errant child.  “Time to hold up your end.”  The Watcher stood directly over the keening murderess, the crucifix holding her in thrall.  The shape was frightening in a subliminal way, the upshot of a very old and very powerful curse on his kind.   But it wasn’t that bland and familiar animal terror in Drusilla’s eyes.   It was a thing much larger; more akin to awe.  Spike felt it too, albeit for different bloody reasons.  He crept alongside the pair of them, peering in cautious wonder at it all.

“We can’t, Watcher,” she pled – and so softly, more of a stranger by the moment.   “We can’t wake her.   He gets so displeased.”

Giles held the holy post three searing inches from her face.  “In darkness do it” he intoned.  “Her blood sets the stone of the eternal house...”

“But.  We can’t-”

“You are her only witness, and she is yours…”

“Enough!” Spike heard himself bark, the last twig of sanity finally snapping.  “If someone doesn’t start making sense right now, I’m gonna bite every last soddin’ one of you!”

As if to answer, a pair of arms locked the old man ‘round the torso, then Doctor Nick’s jowly game face came snaking in over Rupert’s shoulder for a nibble.  Spike pounced instinctively, sending the three of them reeling across the room, furniture smashing and clattering to bits in their wake.  The doc was howling like a wounded dog when Spike finally peeled him loose from his intended supper.  He had the fledgling wrestled up against the wall when he heard the Watcher’s grim voice ring out behind him.  “Spike,” it said.  “Duck.”

Spike cocked his head just in time to see Rupert’s sword flashing out.   An old, delicately honed muscle flexed, and he heard the blade sing a few inches over the top of his skull.  A second later, the thing squirming in his grasp crumbled to dust.  “Oi!   A bit close doncha think?!”

Rupert's eyes glittered back at him for a moment, then burned with sudden alarm.  Spike followed the man’s gaze to the door, and caught a wisp of his maker’s black hair disappearing around the frame.  “Stop her!” Rupert cried out.   But Spike was already moving, bounding after her without a thought in his thoroughly bewildered brain.

Drusilla was a fleet footed wench when she wanted to be.  She flew down the stairs, her mournful wails echoing off the walls like a chamber psalm.  He could hear Giles racing after them, shouting a dozen hoarse commands that both vampires ignored.  At the second floor landing, Spike hurled himself over the rail, hoping to somehow head her off.

It turned out there was no need.   Ten feet from the entrance, a sight had stopped the woman dead in her tracks.  She stood transfixed by it.  Whatever it was, it must’ve been even more impressive than the Watcher’s damned cross.  Spike snatched her tight round the chest.  Followed her eyes across the foyer to a long dressing mirror.

And saw Drusilla in it.

***

Nancy lounged across the altar, stroking her new pet.  The beast lifted its snout to her, whinnying its approval, its scaly length coiled taut along one leg.  It was a freak, of course; the sort of beautiful and impossible mutant the Greeks conjured from Mother Nature’s spare parts box.  Like the dragon, she’d ripped it whole from the maw of the Now.  She had come to understand her dark ally’s substance.  The Now devoured whole realities, and the fallow voids it left in its wake had become like clay to her.  The familiar monsters were the easiest.  Dragons and basilisks, trolls and unicorns and all myths close to this astral plane were torn free like apples from the branch.  But the world of Choice and Accidents was dwindling like a flame in the night, the Multiverse getting smaller by the nanosecond.  Sooner or later, she would be able to pull anything at all out of that blackest of hats.  A battleship staffed by Elvis impersonators.   Earthworm fluent in Japanese.   Chocolate candy hurricanes.

A throng of Chakau’Ri warriors kept their needless watch all around her.  Kennedy had insisted that Nancy be given a “round the clock security detail” while she ran whichever fool’s errand she thought would give her back the upper hand.   This was more nonsense, of course.  The brat was still smarting from her spanking.  She wanted to keep tabs on Nancy, and these ogres still owed her some mysterious vestige of loyalty.  But all their rough strength would prove useless.  And the same went for Kennedy and for the girls, and for Miss Special and Hostile Billy and for all their friends, too.  Nancy was filled to the teeth with powerful demons.  The Chosen One’s essence flowed through her like a black ocean.  She knew the girl better than she knew herself, now.  Back in the castle, a thousand of her private heavens and hells were laid bare in a single instant, bonding them for whatever was left of Eternity.  Even as Nancy lay there, she could almost hear the Slayer’s thoughts, feel her bungling around London like an amateur detective, trying to solve a puzzle before the puzzle solves her.  

No matter. By this time tomorrow, Nancy would finish that meal the vampire had so rudely interrupted.  It was the only way she could be strong enough to resist the Now’s cleansing tide.  And then she could sow her Garden anew, fill the world back up with whichever glorious fruits she desired.  She would become the Alpha and the Omega; the God of Gods, ascended and made flesh. 

While she considered this, the monster in her lap suddenly peered up her and made a sound that was ripe with love and terror.  It was music to her ears.  She gently traced the animal’s brow with a finger.  Toyed with the notion of caving in its skull.

The Witch, she mused.  The Witch was the only one who could stop her.  She’d heard the echoes of the redhead’s footfalls, a blind and monstrous hound set fast on her trail.  Willow Rosenberg was her name.   The girl was small and foolish, but in her short life she’d racked up a list of allies and enemies that would make any ol’ deity quake in their holy boots.  She was on the loose - leaping between worlds, trying to hack and hotwire the system.  Like Nancy, she was racing against the Now.   But while Willow wanted to stop it, Nancy merely needed to survive it, conquer it.  They were both running out of time.

She wouldn’t stoop to chasing the Chosen One all around London Town, like some character in one of Sir Doyle’s adventure tales.   After the castle, the game had become devastatingly simple, as clear as a ringing sleigh bell.  She would seize their pitiful ‘Council,’ and capture that small piece of the Slayer’s heart that Summers left behind.  They’d named it “Dawn”, but Nancy knew what she actually was.   Yet another key to a door the Witch left so wonderfully unwatched. 

Nancy no longer needed the drug.  Nor the table, nor even the needle.  All she needed was to gaze into that little girl’s eyes. 

And feed.

***

Bazzucot reclined heavily in his chair, drawing in another fragrant plume of G’hannat leaf.  He was trying to look relaxed – and perhaps, he realized, trying a bit too hard.  His boys were fanned out around him, looking anything but.

Across the table, the girl was playing a similar game.  She was a narrow, wiry beast.  Her raven hair was pulled into a taut knot, revealing eyes like a pair of black nails tacked to stone.  Her people looked almost bored.  They were strewn in casual twosomes and threesomes, here and there, treating his hideout like a college sorority den.   One little monster dangled her leg over the arm of a chaise lounge, listlessly punching commands into an iPod.  Another leaned against a door jam, polishing her battleaxe to a sinister, mirror-gleam.

A year ago, if you’d described this scene to Bazzucot – a dozen Slayers in his lair beneath the streets of Shadwell, ironing out the details of a deal – he’d have laughed in your face, loud and long, the grey horn on his chin warming to pink.  Of course, that was a year ago.  Now, times were tough, and all the old rackets were drying up faster then a dead dog’s arse.  Ironically, the Slayers themselves were the root cause of the recession, just as they were responsible for his current living arrangements.  Gave new meaning to the phase “London Underground,” that.  The glory days of the East End Syndicate seemed like a distant memory now.  Ever since the Watcher and his army of ‘Mean Girls’ set up shop, he was sweating like a virgin at a prison rodeo.   Business had always required a certain degree of uncertainty, sure, but it was bloody hard to find partners willing to cross these birds.

There was another old rule of business, however:  Water finds its own level.   They’d grown too much, too fast.  It was only a matter of time before the bobbies, having run out of crooks to collar, would turn on one another.  That much power don’t like company.    A large portion of arms dealing, experience had taught him, is patience.   Wait around long enough in any room, and eventually someone will get the bright idea to pick a fight.

“So?” Kennedy asked.  “Do we have a deal or what?”

He stretched his neck sideways, felt the scales there flutter soothingly as he expelled the rich red smoke from his lung.  He gestured to Darmok.  His big lieutenant lurched in stiffly from the rear of the pack, placed the heavy lead briefcase on the table face up before her and then, looking like he might in fact piss himself, scurried back into his roost in the shadows.

The Slayer’s eyes glittered at the prize inside.  “How do I know it works?”  she asked dreamily, too enraptured by the gadget to look away.

Bazzucot tittered nervously.  “Slayer,” he purred.  “Come now, love.  You an’ I both know that if the bloomin’ thing was a dud, you minxes would come back here and kill the whole lot of us.”

It took some visible effort for Kennedy to tear her attention away from the product.  But when she finally did, the look in her eyes was terrifying.  “Do you really think that?” she asked, so politely and innocently that every word hammered an icicle into the old monster’s spine.

“Yeah,” he managed to say.  “Yeah, course I do.”

She snapped the hatch shut.  Her girls suddenly writhed to life all around the room.  There was a ragged old song, the sound of metal unsheathing.

“You know what, Bazz?”  Kennedy sighed.  “I believe you.”

Ten seconds later, he was dead.

***

Feeling smarter yet, Slayer? crooned the Dauphin.

Buffy was back in the tank.  The blood warm liquid was starting to trap her, the sensation of being in the pool for so long that getting out seems just a little scary.  ‘Smarter’ wasn’t exactly the word for what she felt.  The answers were all still rolling around in her head, a bunch of marbles yet to be scooped back into the bag.

Better than losing them, she thought.

The sea monster’s tentacles unfurled in slow motion, gradually untangling themselves from her form.  She drifted free, a fetal shape tumbling end over end in the midnight lake.  Well, then, it said, sounding strangely contented.  I suppose the rest is up to you.

Rest?  What rest?

Precious little, I’m afraid.  The Gardener is here.  The turtle cannot save you from her.  It’s a very old rule.

She thought it over for second, letting the lesson sink in.  The answers were more and less than she bargained for, and for questions she would've never thought to ask. 

And what about him?

Yeah?  the Dauphin replied.  What about him?

Will he and I?  She strained mightily, tried to force the question into actual, English words.  I mean.  Will we?

What am I, psychic?  The great fish was already receding into the distance, neon organs twinkling like strings of Christmas lights.  No spoilers here.  Bake your own cookies, Chosen One.

Wait!  Don’t leave me yet.  I need to know about the van.  And the, uh, man.

Sorry, Slayer.  Not my line of country.  The lights of his body flickered in the distance, like a city skyline slowly succumbing to the night.   If everything works out, guess I’ll see you in Baffin.  I should have arms by then.  We’ll drink some beers.

As the last light blinked out, Buffy noticed a hard current swirling all around her, steadily building in force.  She pumped her arms and legs, suddenly terrified as she felt a whirlpool slurping her down into the void.  Three seconds later she was rocketing through a long metal tunnel.  A circle of light bloomed sharply at the end of it. 

She braced herself for impact…

***

“Buffy?  Buffy!”

She opened her eyes.  They were back in the waiting room.  Xander was cradling her in his arms.  The look in his eye was as familiar as it was infuriating.  Everyone was always so damn worried these days.  And, for the first time in years, that seemed to her like a pretty crazy thing to be.  

Did everyone forget how we do things around here?   Will was in trouble, Dawn was running with a wild crowd, Giles was getting in over his head and there was a Big Fat End of the World on the menu tomorrow night.  It was do or die.

Hey, I’ve died twice.

“Uh, Buff,” he said.  “Are you just gonna lay there ogling my chiseled, Adonis-like good looks, or are you gonna say something?”

“Something,” she whispered.  “I got flushed.”

“Yeah,” he laughed, and smoothed a clump of wet hair from her eyes.  “Yeah, you sure did.  ‘Bout time, too.  Thought maybe you guys ran off to find Nemo or somethi-”

She hugged him.  The move seemed to take him by surprise, but little by little she felt her friend slowly defrost and come back to life.   An old reliable muscle unwound inside him, recovering from a very long and unlucky bout of amnesia.  “How did we get here?” she whispered.

“Scenic route.  Long drive.”

“I love you, you know?”

He wrapped her closer than ever, buried his face in her neck.  She’d almost forgotten how warm he could be when the world actually let him.  “Yeah, I know,” he said.  They stayed that way for a while, brother and sister at last.  Looming Apocalypse be damned. 

“So,” he said finally.   “What’s the sits, o’ fearless leader?”

“Xander, old pal, you would not believe me if I told you.”

“Will it involve lots of bare knuckle, chop socky action?”

“Sure will.”

“You gotta plan?”

“Nope,” she said.  “But now I finally know who does."

Chapter 28:  Fish and Chips

Hungry.

There were six of the goobers, roaming around aimlessly in the little room outside the bubble.  They were all covered head to toe in billowing vinyl outfits, like the World’s Crappiest Astronauts.   Satan-only-knew what they were doing out there, with their charts and their booping gadgets.  Azazel closed all of his eyes.  He pictured himself tearing off one of their little plastic heads and squeezing the gooey juices into his mouth like the world’s biggest Go-gurt.

Hungry.

A long, hammy muscle coiled like a python around his spine.  The electric leash these d-bags had put around him crackled back in protest.  Azazel ignored it, wrenching his body into a U-shape around a washing machine-sized gizmo that sounded like it was generating the beam.  With a grunt, he smushed himself, face-to-booty, and crushed it like a soda can. 

Right on cue, all the geniuses outside proceeded to lose their tiny little minds.  They scrambled helter skelter in a dozen directions, making monkey noises and pressing buttons and pulling useless switches and whatnot.   Azazel just sliced through the bubble and rumbled full speed ahead.  About a dozen yards past the pack of jibbering spacemen he spied a set of big steel doors, and bore down on them like a freight train.

The impact made a dent the size of a Buick, but they somehow managed to hold.   The archfiend flailed windmill-style, mad from starvation and boredom.  A tornado of clawed fists and toothy heads lashed out, snapping and ripping like a pack of ravenous wolves.  He shoved random parts of himself through the holes he was making, every inch pushing and prying until the metal finally gave way with a blood-curdling screech.

In the hallway outside, blaring klaxons and red strobes turned the world into a groovy disco nightmare.  He galloped down one long corridor, then another, then another, panting for the scent of anything remotely non-human.

Starving.

It wasn’t by choice, of course.  Normally, Azazel was a huge fan of the Soul Food.  Their aroma was always so bursting with flavors: that come-hither stench of mammalian B.O. soaked in a French bath of speed-stick and mouthwash and cooking grease and hairspray and perfume and laundry detergent and fabric softener and all those gallons of lovely sweet-and-sour sauce that raced through their veins.   People were fattening, sure, but the Yum Factor was through the roof.

So Hungry.

He wasn’t picky either.  For instance, some snobs only went for virgins.   And not just any virgins, either.  We're talking the sort of doe-eyed, tender young morsels who devil worshipers tied to trees, or set out like screaming, wiggling buffets on the altar of some oh-so-chic Satanic shrine.  Puh-leease!

Not Azazel, though.  He liked all kinds.  Variety was the spice of death, and this latest smorgasbord was no different.  He wanted to chow them all down like Doritos, starting with that little goober who summoned him.  But, thanks to said goober's lame spellbind, the old monster was like a castaway, marooned on an island full of tasty and poisonous fruit, and some lingering shred of sanity kept him nosing for a snack that was a few branches closer on the ol’ family tree.  The kind of snack that wouldn’t get him stranded in this puke-worthy dimension for all eternity.

Moments later, at the intersection of WhereAmI and WhoGivesAShit, he picked up a scent.  It should have been sickening, he knew; that seamy bouquet of Malevolence and Insanity.   But the Hellbeast's hunger was a river, now, roaring in his ears, so he swallowed down his disgust. 

He found the poor, unlucky chode at the end of a prison block.  He was little red dude, with a rubbed raw snout that made him look like a skinned bulldog.   Three snakelike eyes blinked back at Azazel through the cell’s little window.  “Hey,” the creature burped.  “Uh, wha'sup?”

HUNGRY.

Azazel let out a howl so unspeakable it that it even made himself nervous, then slammed his huge bulk against the prison wall. 

Krooooonng!

“Whoa, waitaminute!” the little Happy Meal squeaked.   “Can’t we talk this over?!”

Azazel ignored him.  Flanks shivering, he circled back for another try, this time twisting like a linebacker as he burst forth. In his mind’s eye he imagined the little punk’s innards squeezing outward, slicking his claws like melted chocolate.   

He connected with another painful-yet-satisfying bong.  There were a hundred sounds of metal bits crunching and buckling, tiny bindings snapping loose.

The little imp flipped completely out, then.  He started hollering for help, presumably from the same jerks who’d locked him up to begin with.  The smell of his terror was exhilarating.  Azazel kept ramming away like a mountain goat, each assault echoing down the halls.   Sometimes after a charge he’d fall down and lie panting on the floor.  Whenever that happened, the red dude would ratchet up the volume to obscene levels, his delicious screams goading the ancient Hell Demon back to his feet.

Eventually, a troop of soldiers came tramping in from the rear.  White lightning laced into Azazel from all sides.  He roared in agony but kept smashing away, whanging his biggest skull on the cell door.   His tormentors replied in kind, turning up the juice on their boom sticks.  The blasts hurt Big Time.  They were like a hundred freezing snakes, swimming faster and faster through his guts until he just couldn’t take it anymore.  With an aggravated whoosh of his tail, he swept them all to the ground and slithered back down the maze of hallways. 

The sonsofbitches just wouldn’t quit, it seemed.  Their scent bounced down the walls like fresh wolf piss.  It seemed like everywhere he turned, their scheming little footsteps were closing in, heaven-bent on finding him. 

In a moment of pure panic, he realized he wouldn’t be able to control himself when they did.   The old metabolic song was gonging away in his bowels, drowning out all reason. 

Somewhere nearby, a hot wind breathed up from a hole in the floor.  No, it wasn’t home, but a wave of nostalgia swept over him nonetheless.  Blind, running on pure infernal instinct, Azazel shambled towards it. 

It looked like some kind of a mineshaft, drilling straight down through the bedrock in the middle of a dazzlingly lit chamber.  Steel safety railing ringed a mouth the size of a Merry Go Round.  Azazel peered over the lip into the darkness below. 

It looked good.

***

“Well, find it,” Dawn said.  “I mean, duh.”  On the other end of the line, Lieutenant Hoffman started stuttering about protocol or whatever, but Dawn thumbed the “End” button mid-excuse.

Great!  More fun problems…

Needless to say, the first day of the Dawn Summers Era wasn’t going exactly as planned.  The missing-in-action list was growing: Buffy, Faith, Xander, a certain Un-Dead-ed undead babysitte.  And now, Andrew’s Great Big Oopsie From Beyond had flown the coup. 

Oh yeah, and Willow, of course.

And G.

The unease welled up inside her again.  She strode the length of the armory, trying her best to hide it, and spotted a pair of Slayers she didn’t recognize perched near a rack of gleaming swords.  There was a sort of chilling serenity about them; they were so damn easy in their skin it was scary.  They suddenly reminded her of a pair of big cats.  The kind who were lazy and playful right up until the moment they tore out your throat.  

Dawn realized at last that she should be scared, and that maybe everyone on the whole darn planet should be scared.  That whole Girl Power speech had sounded so cool on paper.  “Get ready to be strong” and all that progressive, uplifting, empowering yada-yada.  Like the Love Boat, it all felt so exciting and new.   But a funny thing happened on the way to Utopia.

The Chosen Ones weren’t a bunch of neo-feminist metaphors.  They were flesh-and-blood killers, and designed to work alone.  Hanging around each other was breeding a sort of insanity in them, and it wasn’t just Kennedy’s crowd that was affected.  Just as this thought entered her brain, one of the girls flashed her a grin that reminded her more of crocodiles than she cared to admit.

Dawn gave the girl the once-over: the Slayer was sixteen and pretty and slim and fashionable and ancient and monstrous and terrifying.  It was all the same.   She tossed back her best Wise Beyond My Years nod and then continued on to the door marked “Executive Access Only.”   With as much nonchalance as she could muster, she fed the keycard into a black plastic slot, waited for the beep, and walked inside.

The office was way shabbier then the one Frank Grange was currently nesting in.  This one looked like Giles hadn’t used it in years, and there was very little in it that reminded her of the man.  A bookshelf sat mostly bare, with just a few technical manuals and an old manuscript of Yogi Mysticism left to stand guard over a bay of fancy computer equipment.  From what Frank could ascertain, the Watcher had mainly used the place as a “clean room” to test out the latest versions of his creepy WatcherNet stuff. 

WatcherNet.  That whole mess was still impossible to wrap her brain around.  All that hi-tech blah-diddy-blah seemed so totally out of character for an old English dude who could barely work an iPod.   He’d hired an army of private contractors to design the crap, all paid handsomely from the Council’s seemingly bottomless trust fund.  M.I.T’s nerdiest dropouts toiled eighty hours per week to bring the Watcher’s digital monster to life.  She still recalled that final, chilling day.  He’d gathered them all in the well of the engineering bay for a champagne toast.  When Dawn arrived on the stage, the witch Delilah was standing by his side like a dutiful Senator’s wife. 

A small incantation later, and the whole team was staggering out of the room in a dizzy, bewildered horde, months worth of their memories scrubbed as clean as a summer chalkboard. 

It all seemed so wrong.

She settled into the Aeron chair in front of the biggest monitor and thumbed the power button.  The desktop blinked awake with a long musical tone. Its wallpaper was a cruel taunt; an old scanned photo of Buffy’s 16th birthday party.  Almost everyone was there.

Almost.

Dawn talked to the machine, in the only way she knew how: one hand gently dragged the cursor, the other fluttered over the keys.   Willow was a maestro when it came to these things, full of the kind of spontaneous and brilliant artistry that would make any uber-geek slobber.  The Key was only competent by comparison.  But she was a fast learner.  That was by design, Dawn guessed.  She hammered her way through a maze of passwords, hosing down one mighty firewall after another until, finally and mysteriously, she found what she was looking for.

The folder was named “Fox Kestrel.“  Ordinarily, those words wouldn’t have meant squat to her.  Tonight, they set off a ten-alarm fire.  Somewhere down in that supernatural nook of her brain that processed language, she knew she’d stuck gold.  

But as she pored through the small collection of files inside, she could feel something like a cold switchblade ramming into her ear, over and over.

The Plan. 

It was all so ridiculous.  And considering the summary of Dawn Summers’ life so far, that was really saying something. 

Figures, she thought.

Nobody ever tells me anything.

***

“Ohhhh, I get it now,” Xander said.  “Except,” he added, “okay, no.  I still don’t get it.” 

He was contemplating yet another left turn, trying to get his bearings.  London was still a total mystery to him.  The streets were the sort of chaotic spiderweb you always find in these older ‘bergs.  After a few hundred years, a city wasn’t so much planned as it was piled up.   He remembered reading somewhere that London cab drivers were among the most highly paid workers in the whole damn town.  You had to go to school for, like, four years to become one.  As he passed a pair of signs that each seemed to say he was driving on a different street, it occurred to him that four years probably wouldn’t be enough.  Heck, it took him almost two just to remember he had to drive on the left.

“Willow’s trying to kill me,” Buffy said again, her voice filled with infuriating cool.  “And we need to help her do it.”

“Yeah, see, that’s really the heart of the Not-Getting-It deal.”

Buffy racked the crossbow taut, a steel bolt thunking into place.  “When you brought me back,” she explained.   “You cheated.   I was supposed to be, like, Dead-dead.”

“Not just a little dead, then?“

“Turn here,” she commanded, “and find a place to park.”   The tone was spooky familiar.  In fact, everything about her was spooky familiar, ever since they left the Dauphin’s underground Google Palace.  He wasn’t sure if this was a good or bad thing, but the dose of Vintage Buffy Summers was somewhat welcome given the circumstances.  He backed the car into a slot at the west end of Lorry Street and cut the engine.

“Buffy,” he said again.  “I know the whole getting ripped out of Heaven thing was hard on you.  But this is just-“

“This isn’t about that,” she said, matter-of-factly.  “It’s about Willow, and what she did.  There are all these rules.”

“Rules?”

She nodded.  “How everything works.  How it all fits together.  I can’t explain it, really, but I understand it, now.  So does Will.  She broke something, and when it broke, it started this kind of storm.  It's like a big swirly nothing that’s swallowing up reality, piece by piece.”

“A nothing?  You mean, like, a black hole?”

“Nancy called it the Now, when she was inside of me.”

“Uh huh,” he said, pretending to have a clue.  “So this, uh, Now thing.  You’re saying we made it, and it’s going to destroy the world?” 

“Yep.”

“And so Willow is trying to save the world from... Us?”

“Pretty much.” 

“By killing you.”

“A me.  Not the me.”

“Because she brought you back.”  He was shaking his head again, still blown away by this particular factoid.

“That’s the thing, Xander,” she said.   “You can’t just ‘bring people back’ all willy nilly.”  Buffy was staring out the window at a drab four-story townhouse across the street, probing it with her steely Slayer eyeballs.  “There was supposed to be a sacrifice, but Willow didn’t have the guts for it.  She tried to hack her way around it. Thought she was so darn smart.”

 “Fine.  Okay,” he said, giving in.  That was also an eerily familiar feeling.  He only had so much fight in him when it came to the Slayer and her wacky schemes.  “So, how do we find this Mean Buffy she’s trying to ice?  Does she have like a facebook page or something?”

 “She’s not here.  Not in our world.  The one she’s from is not so nice.  There’s a war going on, and she picked the wrong side.”  When she said it, there was an almost savage gleam in her eyes that gave Xander the heebie jeebies.  “At least, as far as Will’s concerned she did,” she added resentfully.

“Well, then how are we going to help, you know…”  He trailed off.  He wanted to tell her to screw all this hocus pocus, oogy boogy crap.  The thought of killing any Buffy, anywhere, wasn’t exactly a club his brain wanted to join up with, college applications be damned.

“There are these doors,” she answered.  “Places where all the worlds intersect.  I saw one of them up close and personal, the night I died.  Saw one the other night, too, when Nancy stabbed me with a needle.”   The way Buffy said this was so deadpan you would’ve thought she was bored by the idea.  And maybe she was.  She seemed fixated on the house outside, turning something over and over in her mind.  The lights were all off, but Xander got the sudden, unsettling feeling that something was home, and maybe looking back.  “If I can reach into my other self, I can maybe trip her up, somehow.  Give Willow a fighting chance.”

The way she made it sound was all very reasonable.  Fucked up beyond all possible recognition, but, you know:  Do-able.   “And Giles?” he asked.

“Giles is...  Ugh.”   The look that crossed her face was hard to get a handle on; a stew of unrelated emotions that would make Doctor Phil blush.  “Xander, believe me when I say he’s the most screwed up part of this whole mess.“

“Oh, I highly doubt that.”

“He’s trying to help,” she murmured, still shaking her head.  “In the weirdest way possible….”  She drifted off again.  Xander had never seen the woman with this much on her mind.   Whatever deck of clues the Dauphin dealt her seemed too big to fully process.    “He’s got some sort of big, crazy plan. I don’t know.  He can help us.  But for some reason, I get this feeling he can’t help me.”

He made the conscious decision to let this last almighty riddle hang.  He felt like if he talked about this stuff for one more second, his brain would Jiffy-Pop right out of his skull.    “Got it,” he lied.   “Screwed up.  No sacrifice.  Black hole.   Willow fix.  Kill Evil Buffy. Giles weird.  Open door.  Fighting chance.”   He leaned back heavily in the driver’s seat, and realized that he kinda-sorta did get it, after all.  Of all the crazy crap they pulled off back in the old days, the resurrection had always creeped him out the most.  It just seemed too easy, in the way that all the worst things are.   “And how do we find one of these Door Thingees?”  She was still staring at the townhouse, and, suddenly, Xander found himself staring at it too.  “Right.  Gotcha,” he said.  “So, what’s the game plan, boss lady?”

“Let’s start by knocking. Worked so far tonight.”

“Yuh huh.  And when that plan utterly Fails At Life?

Buffy shrugged, slung the crossbow over one shoulder. All Annie Oakley-ish. “Guess we’ll play it by ear.”

***

“BOLLOCKS!” Spike yowled.  “You’ve gone ‘round the twist, mate!   Sixpence short of a bloody shilling!”

  It’d only been a dozen minutes since they’d nicked the ride, but it seemed clear to the vampire that the world and everything in it had since gone bright, sparking mad.  Outside, dreary old Londontown slid harmlessly by, oblivious to the carload of dangerous lunatics prowling her veins. 

He studied Dru again.  They’d trussed her up in one of the doc’s old antique straitjackets, iron chains crisscrossing her like a treasure trunk.  The wardrobe change, while fitting, hardly seemed necessary.  She hadn’t so much batted a lash since the whole Mirror-Mirror gag.  Spike found it deeply unnerving to see her like this; slumped like a big broken doll against the rear passenger window, eyes held captive by the reflection of a woman playing across the dark glass. 

“Gotta hand it to you, Watcher,” he muttered, almost to himself.  “Bein’ the fruitiest loop in this bowl is no mean feat.”

Rupert sighed again.  The old buzzard was perpetually exasperated of late – a fact which seemed bloody ironic, given the tsunami of blithering nonsense that had just poured from his throat.  “Spike,” he chided, striking a professorial tone.  “Look, I’m not sure how else to explain it to you.  I’ve tried my best.”

“Try harder!”

He could see the Watcher’s eyes in the rear-view.  They flashed towards the empty seat beside Drusilla, then fluttered uneasily back to the road.  Spike was as invisible to the glass as ever.   And sitting alongside her he suddenly felt all the more monstrous for it.  “Three years ago,” Rupert explained,  “I decided to save the world...”

Here we go again. 

It had all started back at the late Doctor Nick’s flat.  No sooner had Dru’s brain buggered off down the rabbit hole when the Watcher started in with his tale; some risible gobshite about universes and accidents and bloody time and bloody space.  At first, Spike was content to just let the poor sot prattle on uncontested.  After all, he was preoccupied with the immediately Pressing Fucking Issue of his suddenly-souled, rigidly catatonic and highly reflective old mum.   But, once he’d finished cinching the old monstress up, when he went to go fetch Faith from the basement, that’s when the bastard went the full hatstand. 

We can’t get Faith, Spike. 

Well, why bloody not?

Well, ‘cuz that’s not part of the bloody plan.

The Bloody Plan!  Best as he could stitch it together, it went like this:

So, apparently, while Spike was off in L.A. playing mail-order Marley to Angel’s Scrooge, Rupert Giles arrived at the stunning conclusion that he and Big Red had rather copiously bollixed up the world.   Seems Willow had neglected to read the fine print on the whole “one girl in all the world” business.  It turned out those old sorcerers had a sodding good reason to queue up the Slayers the way they did.   Fancy that.  Spike could’ve told him that two Slayers was mess enough, nevermind a vast horde of them.

So what did they intend to do about it?  'Nother bleedin’ spell, of course.  After all, that tactic always came up aces!  

And not any old spell, mind you, but The Spell.  The very same those crackerjacks in the cave conjured, all those centuries ago.  The way Giles and Rosey figured, they was gonna start over from scratch, suck all those Awakened little birds drier than nun’s cabbage.  Not just Kennedy and her skank brigade, mind you, but Faith’s Londoners as well, and Xander’s foxtrotters over in Ipswich, and the reservists in Chi-Town, and all of them, and everywhere.  Tabula Rasa.  Rupes meant to pull the plug on the whole bloody works, and then put the power back in Buffy's hands, where it belonged.   Set the world right.  The deranged lunacy of it aside, this last bit had sounded proper enough to Spike. 

And the way the Watcher told it, he was damned close to pulling it off, too.

The puzzle pieces were mostly of the standard variety.  A few musty baubles needed collecting, most of which had been smuggled off to the ends of the Earth for safe keeping.    They also needed the poem itself, of course; the parchment that would serve as Willow’s bloody teleprompter for the Great Sodding Magic Show.  Some things never changed. 

There was something else, though.  A catch.  Turned out they were clever, those cave wankers.   Knew they’d let something very dangerous off the leash; a creature quite a bit closer to Spike’s kind then any old “Watcher” would’ve liked to admit.  Spiritus, Animus, Sophus, Manus.  Bunch of rot, that was.  This Slayer business was no Hippie Granola Momma Earth Sex Magick.  It was a curse; black and unrepentant.  Plagued by devils, those old wizards conjured forth a devil to defend them, and trapped it down in the body of a girl.

But, strong and clever though they were, they couldn’t do it alone.  So they cut a deal, instead. 

With an angel, of all soddin’ things.

An angel, Spike thought.  Now, there was a commodity in short supply these days.

Gatherin’ up the baubles and scrolls and scripts and whatnot - that was all child’s play by contrast.  Can’t just waddle off to the nearest cathedral and pray for one, no, no.  That’d be too fucking easy, after all.  Got to have yourself  a direct line.  Got to have a conduit of sorts, and that didn’t mean doddering old wankers in gowns and funny hats.  People were born with that sort of power.   Joan of Arc was born with that sort of power. But she’d been dead for six hundred years.

Drusilla, on the other hand, hadn’t been dead nearly that long.

Spike spun the thought in his brain as the car rumbled north up Hampstead.  Out the window, the Gardens of St. James whizzed by like a cold and soggy shudder.  He thought of the year he and Dru spent there.  It was only the pair of them back then; snug in a little tomb-for-two, nestled amongst the graves of powdered old barristers.  A big buggering hotel stood there now; the sort of ripe hive that catered to the pied-à-terre crowd.  Not so long ago, they might’ve stopped in for a snack.  But as he stared at the image of his old lover, peering at her reflection in chlildlike wonder, “not so long ago” had never felt so bloody long ago.

Dru.

Rupes was well off his nut, dragging her into this.  But The Plan, such as it was, turned out to be madder and madder still.  Turns out that when it came to the Gift of Celestial Gab, his dark mistress put ol' Joanie to shame.  Once upon a time, angels were ringing Drusilla off the hook.  Only problem was, Angelus and Darla cut that cord well over a century ago, when they murdered her.  What remained – that tortured shard of dire prophecy – it was but an echo of her true powers.  The Vampire Drusilla was like a master’s instrument haunted by the final note plucked.  He wondered if Angelus and Darla ever truly understood the scope of their evil that night, when they turned a Saint.

Saint Dru.  Immaculate Matron of Gory, Dripping Entrails.  Spike imagined whole bookshelves of bibles bursting into flames.

Giles did the homework, though.  Learnt the full score, knew what had to be done.  Lure the harpist back to her harp.  Get her fire going long enough to duplicate the Slayer’s curse.   Then he and Willow could do their little ditty, and rattrap the world all over again.

No, he didn’t ask.  A thing inside him howled and keened like a dog in the rain, but with some effort Spike was able to shut the door against it.  How the Watcher did it – how he souled her – was a matter best left for another time.

If bloody ever, mate.

Plan, plan, plan.  Rupert had stalked Drusilla quietly over the course of a year, finally tracking her to a tomb in Prague.  She’d languished in mourning there, to whatever degree was possible for a devil like her.  Darla was motes of dust.  Angelus was lost to her forever, drowned by the Grand Pufter in a sea of penitent tears.  But it was Spike who struck the deathblow himself, he realized.  William the Bloody was her creation; her child and masterpiece in every way that mattered. To see her greatest work so utterly vandalized by human sentiment was more than she possibly endure.  No, Drusilla did not - could not - love Spike.  But she prized him above all other things.  The despair must have been staggering: two families lost in the course of one lifetime, mad and alone in a world of black visions.

Perhaps, Spike mused, that’s why it hadn’t taken so much convincing.  The arrangement was simple enough; together Rupert, Willow and Dru would wipe the slate clean.  Surely, the opportunity to defang an army of Vampire Slayers was a large deciding factor there.  Drusilla loathed them in a way that even bad, old Darla could not understand.   Still, something whispered to him there was far more to it than that.  Perhaps she thought if she hitched a ride aboard the Soul Train, she might at last be reunited with her two favorite toys.

Anyway, the whole works went reliably arse-end. 

The spark had scalded Drusilla, of course, and sent her jibbering into the wilds.  And if that weren’t enough, the Witch buggered off to New Orleans and got herself swallowed up by a hole in the world.

Yeah, bloody shocking, that, Spike thought.

Rosenberg was the Wile E. Coyote of the Black Arts, always falling off one cliff or another, but with her out of the picture the already-slim odds of pulling off their Mystical Switcharoo dwindled close to nil.  Meanwhile, the Slayer Nation grew ever more fearsome and fractious by the day, and Giles noticed Frank Grange and his soldier boys had begun to sniff around the yard.  It was an odd contest, to be sure; Grange was bent on capturing the crown, while the Watcher was trying his damnedest to shatter it forever.

And that, dear friends, is when our tale begins to go bug-shagging bonkers.

A preface, for the sake of context:  Spike the Vampire liked the telly quite a bit.  Big, big  fan.  He’d watched all sorts over the years: game shows and soaps, sports and murder mysteries, cop-and-robber bits, musicals. There were even a few shows he pretended to himself he didn’t like, but quite sadly did.

One item he’d never been a fan of was ‘Science Fiction.’  It was rubbish.   All them rocket ships and tin ‘bots and ‘puters and bumpy-headed space wankers.  The writing, in particular, was all shamefully bad.  Twas all plot, plot, plot and no bloody heart.   Their stories were too clever by half, and the true world was far stranger and more terrifying than any of those spotty, virginal poofs who wrote them could ever possibly imagine.  But the tale that Rupert Giles had spun out over the past twenty minutes made that least of them seem like a starched and stoic BBC documentarian.

“You’re tellin’ me,” Spike started, stifling a bitter laugh.  “You’re tellin’ me, you chipped yourself?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Giles ruefully agreed.  “If that’s how you insist on putting it.”

“Well, how else would you bloody put it?!”

“It was too risky,” he explained.  “Faith and the others, they would have never understood.  Power like theirs tends to have an addictive quality.  You don’t give it up so easily.”  With that, the Watcher swerved the car onto Mornington Crescent.  The ride’s bald tires squealed their approval, as though sensing a destination was close at hand.  Spike could detect a giddy excitement in the man, pouring off in red waves now.  “I had to conceal my true motives, you see.  Even from myself.  What other choice did I have?  In a world full of bloody witches and psychics and spies...”

“So the, whoositz?” Spike scoffed, “the soddin’ Watcher’s Web.  An’ those Eye blokes-“

“The Watcher-Net program,” he nodded.  “The satellite, the implants.   The whole bloody works.”  He was smirking now, too clever by half.    “I mean, you don’t really think I’d toss away billions on something so utterly daft and useless, do you?”

“Yes!  I do!”   

The Watcher shot him a sly glance.  “It was all rubbish, a smokescreen to mask my true purpose.  I programmed my instructions very carefully, buried them deep at the bottom of my subconscious mind.  Had to remove myself from the equation, you see, convince them all I was out of the game.  Make sure they’d never see it coming.  I’m quite certain that’s something you can relate to, Spike.”

“And the platelet,” Spike fired back.  “And Soldier Boy's little coup d’etat!  You’re tellin’ me you planned the whole sodding package?  An’ that you’ve been, what?  Flyin’ on autopilot all this time, tryin’ to get yourself sacked?”

“More or less.   It was fait accompli, no?  Once Dawn and Grange captured the Council and unplugged the satellite, it would all come rushing back to me, and no one would be the wiser.”

“Balls!  Ain’t buyin’ it.  Too bloody perfect.”

“Hardly," said Rupert.   "Frankly, I’m shocked the enterprise hasn’t gone entirely up in flames.   Ironically enough, you’re about the luckiest stroke to come out of this whole bloody catastrophe.  If it wasn’t for you, I might have never drawn Drusilla out of hiding.”

“Look, you really ‘spect me to believe all this rot?  As I recall, we’re not exactly in the Trust Circle, Rupes!”

“Not really, no,” Rupert agreed.  “Which is precisely why I’m going to show you.” 

They pulled to stop at the end of a residential street.  A drab townhouse loomed like headstone before them.  The Watcher grabbed their gear and practically leapt to the sidewalk.  Spike just sat goggling at him.  “Well, come on, then,” the old wanker yipped.  “We haven’t got all night!”  Against all better judgment, Spike kicked the door open and scooped Drusilla into his arms.   The three of them collected under the glow of a porch lamp.   Drusilla’s body sagged like wet dough in his arms.  He corrected her on reflex, pressing her face up to his neck.  She nuzzled there greedily, a plaintive little sigh escaping her throat.

Madness.

“Look, Watcher, if you’ve got yourself a bird tucked away here, you better fess up now.  Not exactly of a mind to play your wingman, tonight.”

Giles fished the bauble out of his pocket again, face set in stone.  “When Willow departed this plane of reality,” he said, “I had to recruit a suitable replacement to perform the Slayer rite.  And, just as I had to mask my motives with the chip, I required an ally who could similarly operate under the radar, hidden from whatever forces might oppose us.”

“Right.  Well, then you mind tellin’ me what we’re doin’ here?  ‘Fore the bobbies come to bag us up, I mean.”

Giles was waving his key over the doorknob now, as though jiggling some unseen tumbler.  “I suppose you could call it a safehouse of sorts.  Our host has placed a very ancient protection spell over it, immune to almost every known form of magical energy.”

“What, this dump?!”  Spike eyeballed the place skeptically.  Looked like a rooming house for old librarians.  And, considering the present company…

“Don’t judge the book by its cover, Spike,” the Watcher warned, brow knitting as he fought with the lock.   “This ‘dump’ happens to be home to the second most powerful witch I have ever known.   It is practically unassailable by all conventional and metaphysical means, and its whereabouts have been rendered invisible to even the oldest and mightiest of Gods.”

“So you’re sayin’ it’s, like, what?  Buckingham for the Oogy Boogey Set?”

“What I am saying” the Watcher intoned, “is that this house is immune to every form of divination and prophecy known to man or demon.  That its existence is hidden from the very Fates themselves.”   Something clicked down by the man’s hand, and tendrils of mysterious blue light spilled out along the surface of the door, pushing it slowly ajar. “What I am saying, Spike, is that tonight, this dump is the most closely guarded secret in the entire bloody universe.”

The tendrils melted to ether as the door swung wide, revealing a…

Dowdy little parlor.

Two-and-a-half sets of eyes blinked back at them from within.  Their owners were arranged neatly on a leather chesterfield the colour of sunburnt oak.  The Harris boy wielded a dainty teacup, American fingers despairing at the handle whilst a wanker Spike didn’t recognize poured him a fresh spot.  Apart from a passing resemblance to Boris Karloff, the bloke was wholly unremarkable.

The girl, on the other hand, was as remarkable as sodding ever.  Her gaze fluttered from him to the monster cuddling his neck and back again.  The vampire braced himself for the worst, but whatever reaction he'd expected never materialized.  Buffy just kept looking and looking at him, calm as a wick.

Top Secret, my arse.

“Ah,” the Watcher strained, his face turning three shades of crimson.  “That is.   I mean.  Erm…”

For a long time, no one moved a damned muscle.  Somewhere a clock was patiently ticking off every futile second of their lives.

“Well,” Spike said, fucking-finally.  “Someone gonna invite us in or what?”

Chapter 29:  Safe as Houses

Skaya followed the old man into the geometries of the Institute’s lower depths.  The paths were marked with weirdly familiar symbols.  Above one archway: a pyramid with a lone, baleful eye perched at the top.  Etched onto a square of marble flooring: a clock with hands frozen at six and twelve, guarded by a sly-faced moon.

This part of the building was only as creepy as Rupert allowed it to be, she realized.  Her Watcher traded in secrets that were older than many gods, but it was possible that most of this crap was just for show; stuff to keep the plebes from getting too nosy.  He was smart like that.  If Skaya was the Revolution's strong right arm, then Rupert and his Institute of Post Normal Science was its giant, pulsing, thinky brain.

Rupert Giles.

They weren’t friends, exactly.  She would say she trusted him about as far as she could throw him, but the truth was she could throw him pretty far.  No, she wouldn’t leave her guard down, but she needed him now.

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, she thought, as her hand brushed the back of the man's jacket.

Memories from before the War were already becoming a little cloudy, fading to gray.   For the longest time the nightmare was hers alone.  One girl in all the world, battling Hell in obscurity and the cutest shoes a teen allowance could afford.  It started out as a cozy little destiny built for two: a Slayer and a Watcher in a world full of folks who’d rather go their whole lives without worrying about monsters jumping out of the shadows at them.

But then, Hell-A happened.  Then a dragon barbecuing a skyscraper live on the 6’o’clock news, and YouTubed demons stampeding down Hollywood Boulevard.   In the words of a dearly departed friend, the world was “bent and buggered proper, sans the dinner and movie, pet.”   It was as though her curse had been suddenly and violently thrust upon the entire planet.  People were angry and afraid, and they had every right to be.

After the purges started, everyone had a different plan.  The Witch and the Watcher were at odds from the very beginning.  Giles toed the Council line, pushing for patience and self-concealment and quiet, cautious resolve.  Skaya thought it was very British of him.

But Willow Rosenberg would have none of it.  Something burned inside her.  The way she talked about "them" and "they'", she could’ve been talking about any old nest of vampires or demons, something to be unceremoniously staked or baked.  If human beings had become 'they', then what did that make Willow?  What did it make the Slayer?

Reactions to the new war were predictable.  Tara dutifully carried water for her lover, and Xander went along with the Math of Oldest Friends.  Oz strummed his way towards whatever patch of Hell looked coolest.  Angel - weary of heartbreak and corporate management - vanished into the shadows, never to be heard from again.  Cordy disappeared along with him, probably hoping to sleep through this latest sequel of Apocalypse Now-ish.  Faith and Wes defected, Anya defaulted and Spike, as always, deferred.  That vampire loved nothing better than a good, violent brawl, but he waited to see which direction his beloved Slayer would break.  As usual, it seemed the battle lines were being drawn directly across Buffy’s heart.

Buffy Summers. The little moron mangled beasties by the boatload, but never had any idea why.  "Good" and "evil" were subjects more mysterious than Trigonometry -- boring details for the nerds to sort out.  Skaya remembered all those mind numbing afternoons spent in the well of the high school library, or huddled like thieves in the Magic Box.   She'd always felt allergic to all those piles of musty books, spilled across long tables like they were at a cram session for some big, boring test she had no hope of passing.   Just like Spike, the Slayer was always waiting for someone else to choose - to shout eureka! and point her in the general direction of butt-kickery.  Then, after all the blood and dust had settled, she could get back to focusing on the truly earth-shaking problems of shoes and boyfriends and ex-boyfriends and ex-boyfriends-to-be.

There were no shortcuts this time around.  Just the Watcher and the Witch and the moral canyon between them.  So Buffy Summers picked a side.  Stupidly, almost randomly, it had been Willow’s.

Her vampire tagged along, of course, loyal down to the last atom of his being.  Together with the others, they tried to wage the Witch’s campaign of terror as humanely as they could.   But as the war raged on, so did Willow Rosenberg’s bitter contempt for anything remotely "human".  More and more, it felt like Giles had gotten it right.  There were good reasons that shadowy beings and secret societies were kept all shadowy and secretive, and that the worlds of Man and Magic had been so stubbornly held apart for so long. 

If only she’d figured it out sooner, seen the writing on the wall.  But those were days were long gone.  "Buffy Summers" was as dead as Xander Harris, and more dusted than William the Bloody.  Skaya the Scourge was all that remained of her, and vengeance was all she had left to give.

“Watch your step,” Rupert advised, shaking her loose from her thoughts.  “Things tend to get a bit confusing, down here…”

They descended a winding stone staircase.  The further they walked, the darker the world became.  A noise like a hundred snakes hissed up at them from the depths. She heard the Watcher mutter a small word, and a ring of silver flame burst from his left hand, revealing the way down in rippling iridescent waves.

The stairs deposited them into a squat passageway that seemed carved out of volcanic rock.  Crumbled black statues lined the way in, their elongated limbs and sharp features more demonic then human.  The tunnel spanned about a dozen yards before abruptly vanishing into a thick blue mist. She could make out a person’s shape in it.  It floated moth-like in the swirling vapors, legs crossed, hands pressed together in some twisted mockery of prayer.  As they drew closer, the grim lines of Ethan Rayne’s face snapped into focus.  The warlock was whispering words; an alien poetry so quick and lilting that the overlapping echoes sounded like a note from single droning horn.

“Rayne?  What the hell is this?”

 “He can’t hear you, Buffy," said Giles.  "He’s between worlds at the moment.”

“Don’t call me that.”  She waived a hand in front of the old Chaos worshiper’s eyes.  His trance had turned them a rich orange, the color of molten iron.  “And, what do you mean, between worlds?”

“It’s the only way he can hold open the portal.  We’ll need to keep you out of sight until we can deal with our Rosenberg situation.”

“Out of sight where?”  She gazed into the gently folding mists.  It wasn’t just a fog, she realized.  The corridor melted and swirled along the seam of it, as though submerged underwater.

“It’s rather like a safety deposit box, I suppose,” replied the Watcher.  “Rayne designed it to be hidden from even the most powerful seer.   To protect certain…”  Something strange happened in his face, then.  He removed the glasses, rubbing them with a renewed zeal.    “Certain assets.”

She frowned at him.  This wasn’t her style.  Hiding.   Frankly, most days it was hard for Skaya to care whether she lived or died.  But she didn’t want Willow to be the one to do it.  Anyone but that coal-eyed bitch.  “Sounds kinky.  But if you lose?  I’m, what, stuck in here forever?”

 “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that,” he replied, eyes shimmering down at the lenses, fingers scrubbing and scrubbing.  “If we fail, I’ve a feeling Willow will find some way to grind the truth out of us.  I’ve heard her methods are very persuasive.”

When the old man finally met her gaze, there was a certain familiar vintage of softness there.  An old ache leapt up inside, so raw and unexpected that it terrified her.   “And besides," he added, "I think you’ll be...”  But the lips defeated the tongue before it could finish, and the pale eyes sank to reconsider the wisdom of whatever he was about to say.  The bastard was being Hella British tonight.

“What else have you got locked up in there, Giles?”

He just shook his head.  “Everything is going to be just fine,” he lied.  “I’ll get word to you soon, I promise.  Just trust me.  If only this one last time…”

She studied the whole setup again.   Looked from the Watcher to the portal to Rayne’s horrible eyes and back, whirled her fingers through the boiling blue steam.  It felt surprisingly solid, tugging at her coat sleeve like the fingers of greedy children. 

She lidded her eyes, took a shallow breath.

Thought, Screw it.

Went through.

***

Arranged in the parlor as they were – five of them in a loose circle around Ethan Rayne’s coffee table, a sixth trussed up on the floor, reciting the Lord’s Prayer to an old gooseneck lamp – was an experience that resisted all known labels.  ‘Uncomfortable silence’ would be a majestic understatement.    

Only Rayne himself seemed unaffected.  He sat slurping his tea like a mischievous old spinster, a smug curl teasing the ends of his mouth.  The notion of being this close to his face without sticking a boot in it was a weird new sensation for Buffy.  Of all the opponents she’d ever faced, only Warren was more reptilian and only Spike more unpredictable.  Rayne wasn’t 'evil', in the old-fashioned sense of the word.  He was something a thousand times more dangerous. 

As Buffy thought this, the man suddenly acknowledged her with his impenetrably black eyes, and she was possessed by the chilling notion that he heard her, somehow.

“It’s been fun seeing you all again,” said Ethan, as tranquil as an owl in a hayloft. “Especially you, Ripper.  Been so long, I almost jumped ship on our little bargain.”  Giles shot the warlock a wary look.  “Well,” he added darkly,” it’s not as if I haven’t gotten other offers…”

Xander was still gawking at Drusilla, blown sideways.  “SO, A SAINT YOU SAY?”  His voice was inappropriately loud, Old-Deaf-Guy-ish.  “THAT’S JUST.  GOLLY.”

Giles shook his head.  “Xander, don’t start.”

“START WHAT?  WHO’S STARTING?”  Xander had been acting a little off-kilter since the moment Rayne answered the door, but the revelations of the past hour seemed to have steered him straight off the highway.  “I THINK IT’S A GREAT PLAN.  I’M ON BOARD WITH THIS PLAN.  I’M IN ON THE GROUND FLOOR, BABY.”

Ethan sipped and sipped again.  “Well, there’s much to be done yet.  Events are in motion, on the other side.”

“Yes about that,” said the Watcher.  “Willow mentioned-“

“WILLOW MENTIONED.  GOLLY…”

“-mentioned something about a convergence.  Some sort of emerging pattern, across the dimensions.”

“Yes, well, I'm afraid it’s a bit technical, Ripper,” Ethan replied, suddenly dripping with condescension.  “Best way I can explain it is that our reality and hers are distant in form, but close in essence.  There are shared themes, metaphorical tides.  They impose order upon the chaos of the Multiverse, and then chaos upon that order, and so on, and so forth.  The similarities aren’t always sensible or proportional, but they can provide footholds from one dimension to the next. It's all quite literary, actually.”

“Well, that sounds very nice.  But how does it help us?”

“Well, it doesn’t necessarily help you, mate.  But for us so-called worshipers of Chaos, it means we can thrust our hands across the boundaries between worlds, and perhaps even alter the pattern.  For instance, I’ve already been in touch with my other self, there."  Rayne grinned like a shark, and sunk another bag into his cup.  "Nice chap," he said.  "Shame we’ll have to kill him.”

Giles seemed to drink this idea down smoothly, either understanding what the warlock was babbling about or pretending to.   But no matter how creepy Ethan was, Buffy found his air of arrogance weirdly comforting.  If he actually could help Willow to perform her sacrifice -- to banish The Now -- then maybe it was possible he could also bring the woman back home.  Whether he would actually do it, or what tricks he’d have hidden up his sleeve after he did, was a whole other bag of beans, of course.  

Agent of Chaos, and whatnot, she mused.

Guess that’s what crossbows are for...

Spike ignored them all, continuing his scientific study of a floorboard.  This was the first time she’d seen him in actual clothes since Sunnydale, and the effect was searing.  It made the distance between them somehow feel more real and excruciating.  And although the Dauphin had prepared her - in his own frustrating way - the image of him cradling Drusilla was a dagger in a lung.   Her demon had howled like a wounded dog, and, for the first time in a long time, she heard the rest of herself wailing right along with it. Buffy's world usually seemed too huge and strange for love, but down in the freezing darkness it was now love, love and nothing else, suicidal and screaming and red raw.  Love that hurt like a murder weapon.

She picked idly at a patch of lint on her skirt and swallowed a gulp of warm spit, feeling sickeningly human.  On the floor near Spike’s feet, Drusilla continued to chant prayers, her little girl voice mocking all the world’s favorite old delusions. “And lead us not into temptation,” she whispered.

And exactly what sort of God would  'lead people into temptation', Buffy wondered.  It occurred to her that out of everyone in the room, or maybe even the world, "Saint" Drusilla probably had the best answer for that.

No wonder she’s totally nuts.

***

The girl was about eight feet away, a measurement he collected via a pair of foolhardy glances and a wolfish twitch of the nose.  While the Watcher and his mate talked shop, while Dru played the penitent and Xander the wheedling nob, Spike the Vampire sat weighing his paltry options.

1.      Don’t look at her.

2.      Look at her.  Wanker.

3.      Yell at Watcher.

4.      Jump out the bloody window.

He reached for the lowest hanging fruit.  “Enough!” he barked. “Gonna drive us all potty, you keep at it!”

They all turned to gawk at him.  Her included.  Thinking fast, he lit a ciggie, managed to locate a fascinating patch of ceiling.  “Carryin' on like Dr. Phil and bloody Oprah," he said.  "Jus’ tell me who or what to point my fangs at and be done with it.”

“Perish,” Dru said, momentarily snapped out of her prayers.  “Perish and be plentiful, my love.   The bright morning by the hillside.”   Her eyes were wet with the Vision, but there was suddenly no question to whom she was speaking.  Something chill ran all through him, but he’d be damned if he let it show.

  “Spike,” Rupert sighed, his voice reverting to form: a haggard, pompous git once more.  “It’s not quite so simple as that.  There are rules-”

“Oh sod your rules, Watcher!”  He was feeling genuinely angry now.  Righteously pissed off in fact.   “Bloody rules and regulations and traffic lights.  Had rules for Sunny Hell too, an’ look where it got those poor bastards.  Not to mention all of us.”

“Yes, well, that’s very helpful-“

“He’s right,” said Ethan Rayne, his bastard eyes gleaming.  He was still so irritatingly mellow, filled with the cool wind of politicians and murderers.  “We’re running out of time, and I can only do so much from here.  Might have to break a few eggs, Ripper.”

“What are you saying?”

“Saying we might have to send someone through.  To the other side.”

Spike stole a glance at the Watcher.   That craggy Oxford tenor of his was cracking a little, the old badger’s face gone snow white.  “Are you mad?” he asked.

“Hardly,” Ethan answered, and took another docile gulp of tea.  “This thing that’s coming – this nothing, this Now.  It’s not an enemy, so much.   Can’t negotiate with it.  Can’t punch it around.  Can’t use tricks to turn it back or slow it down.   It is mindless and bodiless, like a force of nature.  So yeah, we might have to bend the rules slightly.  Take our bloody chances.” 

“Willow,” Buffy said.  “Willow’s closing in on her... me.  The Dauphin showed me.  But she’s not going to make it.  Not in time.”

Rayne nodded. “She’s clever, your girl.  But she’s jumped into a world she doesn’t quite understand, to kill a version of the Slayer who is more ruthless and vengeful than she could have possibly imagined.  She nearly died in combat with her once, already.  I fear her next attempt won’t turn out so well.”

“I’ll go.”  The girl’s voice was cast iron.  Spike gave up and looked.  Her face reminded him of that night in the gas station, on the lamb from a slag goddess.  It suddenly felt like no years had passed between then and now.   They were doing it all over, trapped in the same sodding orbits.  The notion put its claws in him. 

This is how we are.

But Rayne just shook his head dismissively.  “You can’t,” he said. 

“Why not?”

“Because, darling, you are already there.  As am I.  As is Mr. Giles.” 

The cheeky cunt left off there, dabbed his mouth with a nappie.  It set Xander all a-twitch.  “As is…” the boy mewled, willing the words with his hands.  But they never arrived.  “Oh,” he said, taking the point at last.  “Well. Darn it.”

 “No worries Xander.  You’re not going through.”  The warlock grinned, and cocked his head at Spike.  “He is.”

***

Lieutenant Ruddock appeared suddenly beside him, guiding the beam of his flashlight out along the prison's cavernous walls.

“We’re going in,” he said.

This wasn’t good news.

At least the suit was way cool.  Black with lots of pockets, very Mod Squad.   Andrew tapped the earpiece (also cool).

"Twisted-Sister-this-is Gold-Leader,” he whispered.  “We’re going in. Over.”

Static.  Damn.

“Gold-Leader-to-Twisted-Sister.  Do you copy?  Over.”

“Shhh!” Ruddock hissed.  “Godammit, Wells, what the hell did I just tell you?”

“Um… no unnecessary radio communications?”  Ruddock glared at him, doing his mean 'Sergeant Rock' thing again.  “But this is, like, totally necessary.   Dawn's our Mission Control.  Plus, she’s like... smart.”  Ruddock muttered something Andrew didn’t catch, and grumped off into the darkness. 

Guy has a serious attitude problem, he thought

The vaults underneath the Ecto Containment Unit were as huge and creepy as anything Andrew had ever seen back in Sunnydale.   This was where the Council kept all their scariest bad guys - the ones they couldn’t kill, anyway.  "Worst of the worst was what Polly told him, back in the dorms.  Time traveling phantoms and giant Space Worms, and something she called a "Fury."  That last one in particular didn’t sound so friendly.

  Anyway, they went in.  Lt. Ruddock took point, with Polly Doakes and the rest of Andrew’s Elite Strike Force tailing in close behind.  It had been a few minutes since the power went out, and the little blossoms of emergency light just made everything ten times spookier, caking every nook and cranny in long black shadows.  The humming sound of the generators was like the soundtrack to a nightmare, hives of metal bees.  About twenty feet above them, a big sign hung down from a hinge, its faintly glowing letters warning them that they were about to enter “D-Block.”

Nope.  None of this was of the good variety.  This was Aliens Vs. Predators meets Freddie Vs. Jason meets Sanitarium III: Nuns of Pestilence.

If it was a movie, Andrew figured, then this would be the really quiet part, the scene right before everything went all World’O’Suck.  Like, he’d be walking along, looking all badass and stuff, joking with his buds about how he's gonna kick some Satanic booty and THEN SUDDENLY BAM!  SOMETHING JUMPS OUT AT HIM, OH GOD!  And the whole audience goes “Oh!” and “Ah!” and “Huhhhhhhhh!”

Usually, it turns out to be a cat or, like, a mop falling out of a closet or something lame like that.  He’d be safe, for now.  The audience would laugh it off.  Maybe clap a little.

But they know, he thought. 

They know it’s coming, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it...

“Okay, listen up people,” said Ruddock.   “We’re gonna split in two squads.  Polly, I want you to take Angie, Palmer, Frenchie and Stiles and go check out the containment deck.   The rest of us will fan out and cover administration, maintenance and… for... for god-sakes, what is it now?!”

Andrew lowered his hand timidly.  “Um, it’s just, this whole splitting up thing?”  He felt his face and stomach twist, a towel wrung from both ends.  “Not so sure that’s the greatest idea in the world, you know?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Well, it’s just,” he stammered.  “I mean, it never really works out so good.  People are always like ‘oh hey, let’s split up, we’ll cover more ground that way.’  And then, you know...”

A dozen sets of eyes blinked back at him.  He tittered nervously, sawed a little finger across his throat.

“Hhhhhhhhkk,” he explained.

“Okay, slight change of plans,” said Ruddock.  He pointed at Polly.  “You take Andrew.”

And with that, Elite Strike Force B-Squad scampered.off into the bowels of the vault, their footfalls receding like a round of half-hearted applause.

Polly led the rest of them up the stairs towards the containment deck.  Where, Andrew assumed, various things were contained.  A ring of massive metal bulkheads loomed above an arcade of interlocking platforms and catwalks.  Andrew jiggled his flashlight up and down the seamless, rust-red coving.

"So," he whispered, “if this is a jail, then where are the doors?”

"There aren’t any doors,” said Polly.  “Nothing down here is ever supposed to get out."

"Well, what about that one?”  He shined the light on gaping hole in a bulkhead, about sixty feet away.  The wall seemed like it was torn inwards, by something roughly the size of pickup truck.  “Oh,” he said.

Angie sidled up next to him, and shined her light on it too.  "Looks like your pet was here, Wells," she murmured.  A second after she said it, something flinched near the edge of her beam, and sent a blade of shadow slashing through it.

Huhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

Polly gritted her teeth, drew a long sword from a scabbard across her back.  Angie and the rest of the gang followed suit, guns and blades clicking into place as they crept down the length of the catwalk towards the shattered wall.  There was a new sound beneath the droning of the generators, now; a soup of human voices that giggled and whispered and screamed.   Andrew’s heart rebelled against it, two tiny fists hammering his ribcage.  As they peered into the cell’s cavernous innards, the soldier named Palmer traced the edge of the hole with his light, settling on a pair of numbers etched into the steel.  “Sixteeen,” he said.

“Oh God,” he heard Polly Doakes whisper. “Oh no, no, no, no.”  The young Slayer’s voice was ragged, verging on terror.  A ‘scared Slayer’ was a fairly new concept to Andrew, as mysterious as a talking dog.  He didn’t like it.  Polly turned to him, balloon-eyed and drained of color, practically in tears.  “Andrew,” she gasped.  “Oh God, Andrew, I’m so sorry."

"What do you mean?"

"We should’ve never brought you down here.”

“What is it?” he asked.  “Is it the worms?  Those time-guys?”

"Oh shit," cried Angie, like she just realized the same thing.  “Oh shit, Poll, we gotta get him outta here.  Now.”

Before Andrew could figure out what was happening they were all moving, retreating in a hasty line towards the stairs.  But something was standing in their path, now.  It was an outline of a person, slight and boyish.  The pack of young warriors instantly fell into a defensive wedge.  Their arsenal bristled back at the small silhouette, a gleaming fringe of Death. Shoulders sloped and passive, head cocked at a shy angle, the figure shouldn't have been the least bit threatening.  But something down at the bottom of Andrew's soul was vibrating like a harp string.

Why? he thought.

Why is it looking at me?

FROM:  theheadcheese@wolframhart.com
TO:  ormochtheunsightly@lakeoffire.org
SENT:  Friday, September 21, 3 A.F
SUBJECT: RE: Missing Inventory Item #9784

Dear Grand Inquisitor Ormoch,

Sorry it’s taken me a few days to get back to you.  Needless to say, the ongoing merger has been causing a lot of headaches all around.  In this time of transition, it’s almost a given that paperwork is going to get lost in the shuffle, things are going to get misfiled, etc.

My team finished their investigation into the item in question, but unfortunately nothing has turned up.  If you ask me, the darn thing probably got thrown into the wrong crate in the Wintermill warehouse.  You ever been out there?  That place is a real mess.  Frankly, I’m surprised they can find anything.

Anyway, I’m sure it will turn up eventually.  If you need anything else from our end, please contact Gladys Lee in Operations.

Warm Regards,

A

FROM:  theheadcheese@wolframhart.com
TO:  ormochtheunsightly@lakeoffire.org
SENT:  Friday, September 21, 3 A.F
SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: Missing Inventory Item #9784

Dear Grand Inquisitor Ormoch,

I understand your frustration, but I feel like we’re going around in circles here.  How many ways can I say “I don’t know where your stupid Sun Suit is?”

Honestly, I’m just trying to run a business here.  And even though my exact duties are a little fuzzy, I don’t think keeping track of the stuff in your wardrobe department should be one of them.  If you have a problem with that, I suggest you take it downstairs. 

Or if you prefer, you can come over and we can discuss it face-to-face.   You’ll know which office is mine.  It’s the one with the really, really big desk and the sign that says “ABANDON ALL HOPE YE WHO ENTER HERE.” 

Warm Regards,

A

FROM:  theheadcheese@wolframhart.com
TO:  ormochtheunsightly@lakeoffire.org
SENT:  Friday, September 21, 3 A.F
SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Missing Inventory Item #9784

Dear Grand Inquisitor Ormoch,

Thanks for sending over your collection agent.  Not much of a conversationalist, but it was the most productive meeting I’ve had in months.  Too bad it had to end on such a sour note. (see attached JPEG.)

As soon as Maintenance is done scraping him off the walls, I’ll have my secretary Fed-Ex him back to you.

As for Mr. Spike’s whereabouts, let’s file that one under “Below Angel’s Pay Grade” too.   If there was anything I cared less about than your boss’ fruity Halloween costume, that would be it.

Warm Regards,

A

FROM:  theheadcheese@wolframhart.com
TO:  ormochtheunsightly@lakeoffire.org
SENT:  Friday, September 21, 3 A.F
SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Missing Inventory Item #9784

Dear Grand Inquisitor Ormoch,

Okay this is just getting lame now.  Do you even have a clue who you’re messing with?

Sending those dire wolves to chew on my security detail is one thing.  But sending over a bunch of lawyers?  To Wolfram, Hart & Angel?!  Exactly how dumb are you???!!!

Anyway, that brief of theirs was real cute.  I had my top guy go over it with them this morning.  He said a bunch of fancy legal stuff, gave them the big corporate spiel and then made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.  Basically, they all work for us now.  And we’re suing you for harassment.  Oops!

Warm Regards,

A

FROM:  theheadcheese@wolframhart.com
TO:  ormochtheunsightly@lakeoffire.org
SENT:  Friday, September 21, 3 A.F
SUBJECT:  RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Missing Inventory Item #9784

Dear Grand Inquisitor Ormoch,

So, now we’re down to voodoo hexes.  Very mature.  Anyway, if you think that my people aren’t equipped to deal with some broken down old Houngan you dragged off a bar stool somewhere, maybe you should consider playing for the other team.  I hear they have good dental.

Let me break it down for you, tough guy:  You can’t intimidate me, and you sure as heck can’t beat me.   I am Hell’s top attorney, and the ruler of the most evil city the world has seen since Sodom and Gomorrah.  In terms of power, that’s like taking the world’s biggest, meanest, ugliest grizzly bear and strapping a rocket launcher to its face.

If I ever catch you out on the street, I will show you the meaning of pain.  Then I will show you your own lungs.  I’ll rip them out of your chest and eat them like pancakes covered in strawberry jam.  The last thing you’ll ever see will be my smiling face, smeared in your rotten, steaming blood.

Warm Regards,

A

***

The War Room.

Okay, it wasn’t really as grandiose as it sounded.  A few years back, Xander Two had apparently hollowed out the guts of the Harvard Debate Society’s headquarters, which Tara Two and her Willow proceeded to fill with candles and crystals and orbs and various witchy knickknacks of dubious usefulness.  The result was a sort of cluttered, supernatural flea market feel, like a Franklin Institute for the Blessed Be set.  Somewhere beneath their feet, a factory full of powerful Psions worked their mojo, shielding the campus from the eyes of mankind.

But the “War Room” was even more V.I.P, Willow realized; it was a mask behind a mask.   Tara’s plan was on a need-to-know basis, and she kept this club as exclusive as possible.  Only Willow and the four of them were allowed inside.

Them.  She’d begun to think of them as The Twos.  There was Oz Two and Harmony Two and Anya Two and Tara Two.  The quasi-bigotry of this made her a little uncomfortable.  Was that supposed to make Willow a “One” or something?  Yeah, like she was so great and all.   But, on the plus side, the distinction helped to keep her brain from melting out of her ears.

Anyway, they were all there: four majorly cheesed-off Twos and one slightly disoriented One.  At the moment, they were huddled around a raised pool of mystical waters, waiting for it to… 

Well, to do something 'mystical'.

“This is boring,” Harmony said.  “Like, not even magic-boring.  This is math-boring.”

“Kinda gotta agree there, Will,” said Anya.   The old vengeance demon looked much better now.  Her hair was still a brown mop, and a dark purple bruise flowered around one eye, but she seemed altogether Anya-esque again.   Eyes pouting, arms folded all ‘tudy under a white robe, Willow mused that she could’ve almost been her Anya.  “I mean," she continued, "I could do this stuff in my bathroom.  And, naked.”

Tara glowered at them.  She was still wearing the Leather Motorcycle-Ho’ From Hell outfit, complete with matching vibe.  “Be silent!  It’ll never work as long as you idiots keep breaking the circle.”

“Oh, come on!” Harmony whined.   “It’s been hours.”

“It’s been twenty minutes!”

“Oh big diff, Esmeralda,” she pouted.  “Look, this Willow you guys got is obviously broken.  Can’t we get another one?” 

The blonde witch made a sound like a lit fuse.  Willow sensed a helpful-buddy opportunity, and decided to roll with it.  “Hey,” she chirped, “why don’t we try something different.”  She beamed at them hopefully.   “Maybe, um, meditation!  I mean, look at Oz.”

“Hmmm, wha?”  The guitarist roused himself to life, stifling a yawn.

Tara threw her hands up in disgust.  Willow watched helplessly as the woman stormed off into the shadows again.  This “Two” left no room for illusions about what she was.  She even moved differently, hips clicking like an old grandfather clock.  The truth of her otherness burned like hellfire.  There’d been so many nights Willow dreamed of their reunion, as she hopscotched through a hundred worlds empty of her grace.  Now, this bullshit, broken shard of her was all she would ever get, all the Powers would ever allow. 

Because they hate you, she thought.  

And, for the first time in a long time, Willow let herself hate them back.  

The Powers that Be.  Their game was rigged, she realized at last.  A carny scam.  They dangled it all out there, made it seem so freakin’ possible...

And, so,  you take the bait, she thought.  You spend your life filling yourself up with so many lies that you can’t even tell the difference, can't see the card moving or the moustache twirling.  You go for it, because it seems better than doing nothing.

You  try and try, but the bottles never fall down and the clown’s head never pops.  No teddy bear for you, kiddo.  It always Almost and Never Quite.  You fail.

But the bastards have your money.  And you think ‘What the hay?  Let’s give it one more try.’ 

And then you reach for your wallet. 

Because you are.  Exactly what he said you are.

Rank.  Arrogant. 

Amateur.

As Willow thought this, the waters began to trouble and glow.  Golden tendrils churned upwards from the surface, weaving a column of spectral light.  Soft shapes began to swim before their eyes, gradually hardening into black capillaries and constellations of light.  A moment later, the floor plans of the Institute snapped vividly into place.

“Helloooo nurse,” Oz murmured.

“Oh,” said Anya.  “This is a good thing, right?”

Tara returned, eyes glittering like stolen jewels.  They sprinted over the architecture, quietly measuring and cutting, already searching for a chink in the Watcher’s armor.   Normally, this would’ve been a job for Buffy.  Or Xander, maybe.   Tara Maclay was neither builder nor destroyer.  She wasn’t a thief like Willow, either, or a know-it-all Giles or a beloved monster like Anya or Angel or Dawn or Spike.   But this horror show of a world had forced her to be all of those things, burying her white gifts under its rubble. 

All that remained was vengeance.  Willow watched helplessly as her sweet, fallen angel spoke again, jaw hardening to steel around each word.

“Let’s go to work,” Tara said.

***

38 minutes later

---

“Well, this kinda blows,” said Oz.

Anya looked up at him, bleary-eyed.  “Oh, what about here-” she started.

“No!” they all yelled.

But it was too late.  No sooner had Anya pointed towards the rooftop terrace when the Yoruggnol came roaring back to life.  They all ducked instinctively as the mini-monster flung little darts of electricity in every direction.  Willow was a bit slower this time, and felt a bolt of heat slash across one eyebrow.  “Ow,” she said.

“Sorry, sorry.” 

It was the third time they’d set that one off, and it likely wouldn’t be the last.   Truth be told, they were running out of things to point at, and the map seemed to know it.

Willow glared at the stolen blueprints hovering above the water.  Their first discovery about them was that they were alive.  The second discovery was that they were really, really nasty.  They rendered all the Watcher’s traps and tricks in alarmingly realistic detail, like a sort of Diabolical Pop-Up Book.  Mention a seemingly unguarded air duct, and a nest of teensy cobras slithered out, fangs snapping hungrily.   Propose opening a certain door and it morphed into a miniature black vortex, sucking in a poor, unsuspecting housefly who flew too close. 

Minutes passed like years this way, the certainty of their deaths screaming back at them in cartoon-y, Technicolor waves.  No point of ingress seemed to have escaped the Rupert Two's attention.   There was no screen door, no spare key tucked under the welcome mat.  The Institute was “locked up tighter than a mother superior’s butthole,” as Anya so elegantly put it.

Willow traced a lazy path up a sewer main with her pinky finger, waiting for the inevitable school of tiny 3D piranha to swim in for a bite.  Something green and scaly leapt up instead, snapping its long jaws.

Oooh, killer, mutant crocodiles, she thought.  Even better.  Thanks, Giles.

As the Twos settled into another round of insult-flinging, Willow let her thoughts drift to the other "Rupert Giles", the original flavor one.  That first email she sent him was a whopper, more draining then any spell she’d ever cast.   She knew they weren’t exactly friends, anymore -- he’d been suspicious of her for a long time now, and she couldn’t say she blamed him.   But she also knew their emotional distance would be an ally in this mission.  The Watcher would be just as ruthless and cunning in their regular old dimension as he was in this one.  Armed with the knowledge of the approaching Now, he’d pull out all the stops to save whatever was left of reality.  It was his nature.  He would do anything, sacrifice anything...

Anything?

Willow stared at the plans again.  A key was turning over in her brain, starting to click.

No, she thought.  Not anything.

Not if it was against The Rules.  Giles always played by The Rules…

Giles ALWAYS plays by The Rules!

“Oh!”  she gasped.  “Oh Goddess.   I think I got it.”

They all shot her a weary look.  “What?“ Anya asked, torn away from Harmony mid-insult.  “Herpes?”

“No,” said Willow.  “A plan.”

***

The shape started moving towards them.  It was walking real slow, taking its time.  Strolling, really. 

Before Andrew knew what was happening, Angie grabbed him by the arm and they were running together into the darkness.  Behind them Polly was shouting orders over the hot whoosh of Palmer’s proton gun.

“What’s happening,” Andrew cried.  “What was that thing?”

Instead of answering, Angie shoved him down a long corridor full of flashing red emergency lights.  There was a large steel door at the end, with the words “Restricted Access” stenciled across it.  Angie handed Andrew her sword and fumbled with a key card.  She was sweating buckets all of the sudden, her eyes darting around wildly.  Andrew toyed with the idea that she was trying to protect him, but this only served to terrify him more.  He couldn’t see the creature’s eyes, but he still knew.

It was looking at you.  Looking right at you.

Finally, Angie pushed the card into a slot.  The door slid open with a giant wushhh sound, like something out of a movie.  Everything was out of a bad movie, now.  She grabbed him by the neck and tossed him inside.

“Don’t move until we come for you,” she said.

Then she slapped a button and the door slid closed, a lock firing into place.   Everything was quiet after that.  Andrew was alone. 

It was some kind of control room, he deduced.  There were panels filled with mysterious gauges and switches.  Screensavers of a dozen or so monitors cast an eerie glow, the WatcherNet’s creepy falcon logos bouncing Pong-like across their black faces.  There was no sound anymore, not even the wheezing breath of the generators.

He wasn’t scared.  He wasn’t. 

Andrew Wells was a Summoner of Demons.  He was a Pisces.  He’d been a Watcher of Vampire Slayers, and of Babylon 5.  He was a virgin.  By choice, of course.  He’d never really loved anybody, or been loved by anybody from what he could tell.  Tucker, maybe.  Andrew hadn’t spoken to Tucker in six years.  He didn’t like thinking about the past.  He didn’t like being around people, either, not even superheroes and good people and family.  He was twenty-five years old and he was single and he was slowly becoming a very private person.  

Almost a year ago, Andrew Wells quit being a Watcher of Vampire Slayers and moved far, far away.  He had a job as a clerk at Book Barn, where he babbled a lot and tried to act nice and pretended to be good and normal.  He bought his lunch at the same place every afternoon, a deli where he could pick up a pre-made sandwich in a plastic cube container and pay for it quickly and leave.  Andrew also taped things obsessively.  Not digital stuff; actual tape.  He once spent a whole day-off taping these birds in a park.  He fed them and taped them and fed them and taped them until the tape ran completely out.  He was alone a lot.

Andrew had trouble talking to people.  Even normal people, like the guy at the deli, or like the cable guy or the landlord or stupid Reginald.  It was something about their eyes.  He didn’t like looking at them.   Or maybe it was something about Andrew's own eyes.  Something that didn’t like being looked at.

Andrew avoided mirrors like the plague.  He was somehow sure there were things inside them, waiting there to eat him.  He never went out at night, and he stayed out of basements and stairwells and rooms with too many corners.   He took lots of pills.  Long white ones and tiny round orange ones.  Andrew Wells had nightmares. 

Andrew Wells had nightmares like you wouldn’t believe.

Andrew Wells woke up screaming every night.

“Andrew,” a voice whispered, crackling like a prayer over the earpiece.

He snapped wide awake, then.  So did the big monitor directly in front of him.

It showed a boy standing in the middle of a dark hallway.  His clothes were wet, sopped in wine.  The color leaked down the front of his shirt, and pooled in the pantlegs.

That’s his life.  That’s his life, all over his clothes.

You let it go there.

You let his life go outside.

Shaking, he reached out towards the screen, pressed the OFF button.  Four others blinked to life.  Ten.  The boy was standing in all of them, hands stuffed in pockets.  His lips were bloody, life leaking out there too.  It smeared down his white jaw, just like it did in all of Andrew's dreams.   The boy's eyes were so wide open and so blue that he could almost read his mind.  But, he wouldn’t dare to.  He didn’t need to.

“I’m coming for you,” said Jonathan.

***

Rayne’s basement was definitely a change of pace from the rest of the joint.  Though it was hard to put a label on the décor, “Satanic chic” sprung to Xander's mind.  Ethan appeared to have built an entire Cathedral of Chaos under his  London duplex, which forever settled the whole renter-owner question.   The vaulted ceiling loomed high over a black onyx altar, framed by the most charming art installation of human skulls he had ever seen.

Drusilla didn’t seem to be aware of any of it.  Xander watched the creature writhe on Rayne’s sandbox full of sandalwood and myrrh, singing another one of her cheerful church ditties.  Buffy had asked him to “keep an eye on her” while she was gone.    He knew there was probably a stellar quip in there somewhere, but he was still too stressed out to look for it.

A SAINT, YOU SAY?

The vampette’s eyes were broadcasting bold new frontiers of schizoid, now; crazy with a side of crazy sauce.  He felt a little chill when they suddenly met his own lonely peeper.  The monster titled her head at a soft angle.  “Such a pretty boy,” she whispered.   “Love is his name, and he is loved.”

“Thanks?”

So, the gag was this:  Drusilla - who’d once ranked fairly high on Xander’s list of prime-time nightmare material - had herself a shiny new soul.  Now, this in itself wasn’t a totally bizarre concept.  It seemed like if you threw a rock these days you’d hit a vampire with a soul.  And, if you were Xander Harris, you’d probably pick up another rock.  Buffy drew those suckers like flies to…

Well, okay, that’s a little harsh.

Anyway, what was deeply weird was the kind of soul she had.  Not that Xander was a religious guy, mind you.  Church hadn’t loomed large on the ol’ social calendar in the Harris household.  They were more of a Christmas-and-Easter sort of family, except that they usually skipped Easter too.  He’d only skimmed the Good Book a couple of times, in that bored-out-of-your-mind-in-a-motel sort of way.  He figured he grasped all the major themes, though.  Apples and snakes.  Heston and the Big Ten.  Preggers Virgin.   Loaves of bread.   Thirty pieces of silver.  Cue big death scene.  Cue big resurrection scene.   Cue Apocalypse.  That stuff all felt pretty straightforward.  Heck, a lot of it seemed pretty darn ordinary, if you asked him.

But, saints?  Saints were a whole different ball game. 

He recalled a long ago sunny afternoon.  He was at John McCall’s eleventh birthday party, down on Rollins Road in East Sunny-D.  John’s family was so Catholic, they hung a framed picture of the Pope in the bathroom.  He also had what seemed to be roughly twenty older brothers and sisters.   They ran roughshod over the young partiers, dealing out nuggees and purple nurples with psychotic abandon.  Xander fled the carnage to a small, pink bedroom upstairs.  After a brief, scientific inquiry into the contents of Mary McCall’s underwear drawer, he stumbled across a book called “The Lives of the Saints,” and began leafing through it to pass the time. 

A few minutes later, young Xander decided on a far more appropriate title: “The Horrifyingly Gruesome and Painful Deaths of the Saints.”  Page after page read like something out of a torture-porn flick directed by Mel Gibson.  From what he could gather, a “saint” seemed to be someone who talked to God a whole bunch, got caught doing it, and was then executed via removal and/or burning of various body parts.  Each tale included a helpful illustration, just in case you lacked the imagination to picture being tied to a tree and shot with a hundred arrows, or having your eyes gouged out with a fork.

Of course, the book made no mention of a hundred-something-year-old, bloodsucking murderer getting all chummy-wummy with the Man Upstairs. Somehow the authors managed to gloss over this nugget of Dastardly Deuteronomy.  

 Nearby, Rayne and Giles busied themselves with their clichés; posing magical doohickeys, lighting creepy candles and leafing through musty old books.  They seemed to actually know what they were doing; a fact which kinda scared the hell out of him.   Xander couldn’t help but wonder how much of the past four years had been a product of all their big, crazy lies.   If he believed Giles – and that was a morbidly obese “if” –  the crafty old Brits had this caper planned all along.  Inserting Dawn into the Agency, cramming chips inside people’s brains, going all Meglo – it was all part of some twisted game he and Rayne had dreamed up years ago.  And, even with all that was happening lately, Xander wasn’t so sure he wanted to play.

Kennedy and her band of psychos were one thing.  He’d pull the plug on those freaks in a heartbeat.  But the girls at the Ipswich ‘Mouth, they were his girls.  They were brave and loyal.  When he was with them, he felt like the coach of the big championship team.  They loved him, and he loved them back.   He bled with them. 

And, now, Giles was going to break them forever.  They’d need to go find normal jobs in a world where a degree in Advanced Vampire-Staking wasn’t exactly high up on an employer’s list of prerequisites.  Xander wasn’t looking forward to handing out those references.

Well, her typing skills aren’t so hot.  But you should see her handle a machete!

The fact that Ethan Rayne was all tangled up in this definitely wasn’t in the Land of Helping.  Xander wasn’t going to pretend he understood exactly what Willow was trying to do, or exactly where she was trying to do it.   But the notion of Hell’s favorite fashionista sticking his nose in her trans-dimensional beeswax wasn’t exactly giving him a warm fuzzy.

And as much as he despised Killy Idol, having Rayne shoot him into a dimension full of evil, mustachioed Bizzaro Scoobs wasn’t exactly giving him a warm fuzzy either.  All consuming hatred aside, he did – technically – owe the vamp an eyeball. 

Besides, there was Buffy.  Sure, she might be the biggest dope in the world for chasing his lame, undead ass.   But she was their dope.   Xander figured he’d rather share her with the Worst Boyfriend in the History of Boys and Friends than watch Rayne’s spell break what was left of her heart.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

She was gone, again, off chasing her monster through the byways of Ethan’s top secret-ish lair.  He remembered times when it was so totally the other way around.  The Good Times, he liked to call them. 

He imagined they would try to say their goodbyes, and fail miserably.  Honestly, everyone that Xander Harris knew stunk at that particular game.  But the two of them had the combined emotional IQ of a pack of starving wolverines.  They would either kiss like rock stars or beat each other to bloody, oozing pulps.

Or both. 

Either way, Ethan better have plenty of insurance…

***

Buffy kept staring at the door.  It was a very nice door, she decided.  Solid oak stained to crimson.  Old brass knob polished to a mirror orb.  It was very nice and expensive-looking and it was closed.  She hated it very much. 

She started thinking about the game plan again.  Speed was key, here.  If they didn’t talk, this would all go down so much smoother.   Talking was the Express Elevator to Doom. 

But: first things first.   There was still a door to deal with.  She tried to picture herself going all Superchick on it.   Booting it off its pricy hinges, racing across the room like some Nationally Geographical lioness. 

The orchestra swells.  They kiss.

And the crowd goes wild...

Or, not.  Or he grabs her mid-pounce, and hands her that old lizard eye.  Tells her he doesn’t feel it anymore, that he’s somewhere else and that she should go find a somewhere-else, too.  Maybe he is even kind about it.   Maybe he’s all thanks-for-saying-it about it.   Buffy figured any more kind words like that would kill her on the spot.  She would just melt into the floorboards like Dorothy’s witch, or crumble and explode like a vampire.

Like fireworks… 

“In or out, pet?”

She stood there for a moment, feeling lame. 

Vampire.  Duh.

There was no going back now.   It was Game Time.  She took a long, loose breath and, as gently as she could, pushed open the door.   

Ethan’s bedroom was nearly as dark as the vampire’s old tomb, illuminated by a lone lantern on a nightstand.    The décor was very Warlock-of-Chaos, she thought.  Black walls enclosed an assortment of ornate Rococo furnishings, all rather tastefully evil.   

He stood quietly beside the bed, scrutinizing an empty mirror.  He was wearing the suit again.  The getup seemed more forced than ever before, like he was getting ready to go to some dumb job in some dumb world.  The top part hung halfway open, revealing the wound next to his heart.  It was nearly healed, now, looking rather like a pair of seamed white lips.  The sight of it threw her off balance a little, made her question her tactics.   After a moment, she decided to  abandon the whole wild jungle-cat plan and eased her way inside, trying to force her face to do something that looked serene.  He ignored her, and quickly started buckling up the jacket.

“Hi,” she said.

 “And just how’d you manage to sneak off?”

“Bathroom break.”

(stupidthingtosaySTUPIDthingtosaystupidTHINGTOSAY)

 “Ah,” he said.  “Probably not such a grand idea, though, leaving her alone with them.   My Dru gets loose, an’ you’ll be up all night picking them out of her tonsils.”  He stifled a bitter laugh.  “Oh, but that’s right.  Got herself a soul, now.   S’pose that means we can trust–”

"Don't."

“Don’t what?”

She felt her fist balling up.   Going bad already.  Word-count skyrocketing.  “Look,” she said.  “Can’t we just be normal about this?”

“Normal,” he snorted, suddenly cruel.  “You back on the sauce, Slayer?  Or did you finally take one too many shots to the skull?”

 “No.  It’s just me.  I’m me.  I just want us to...”  She reached hard for the end of the sentence, but it turned to string and blew away.  This isn’t where she wanted to go.  She wanted them to talk like Romans.  Talk with their hands.  The demon began chanting stern commands from its perch in her chest, making it hard to focus.

(CHARGE.  CHARGE.  CHARGE.  CHARGE.)

“Want us to what, Slayer?”

(Killer.  Monster.  Destroyer.  Slayer.)

"Stop."

"Stop what?

"Don't."

"Don't.  Stop. Go. Start.  I want.” His voice was still quiet, but something hard was churning at the bottom of it.  “Oh, welcome back, Slay–“

"Stop!" she cried, and wished she hadn’t.  “I mean.  Please... please stop calling me that.”

He shrugged.  “It’s what you are.”

(Killer.  Monster.  Destroyer.  Slayer.)

“It’s what I do.  What I did.”

"Yeah, well.  We are what we do, love,” he said, with a voice as black as midnight.  She could feel the darkness moving through him, spreading like a virus.   “And we damn well are what we did, too.  Can’t leave the past behind, anymore than you can leave your shadow.  Even you should know that, Slayer.”

"It’s not my name.”

"And Spike’s not mine.  But that’s how the old song goes.”

Too much talk.  Going bad now.

"Just.  Say my name."

“Alright, Buffy then,” he growled, close to rage.  “Buffy Summers.  What do you want from me, Buffy Summers?”

She stood there quietly, thinking about the question.  Considering the Dauphin’s little pop quiz, this should’ve been an easy one.  A gimme.  But somehow the answer always got stuck on the way up her throat, tangled in old webs.  Words always failed.  It made her wish she’d stayed in school, memorized great poetry.  The poets knew how to say these things.

"Us,” is what she said, praying it would be enough. 

When finally he turned to look at her his eyes were drawn to weary slits.  “Well, too late for that, pet.  Dunno if you heard, but I’m off to go kill you.”

“Don't–” she started to say.  Bit her lip.

“What, ‘fraid I can’t do it?” he scoffed.  “Came close a couple of times.  It’s what I do, after all.”  He scavenged a soft pack of Morleys from Ethan's nightstand, fishing out the last cigarette.  “’Besides, isn’t much time left to put it through the bloody committee.  Red and I don’t off you this time tomorrow, it’ll be the big lights-out.” 

His jaw was working like a gear when he lit up the smoke, eyes like black storms.  And that’s the moment when she knew.  

He’s not coming back. 

(charge)

She walked to him, steeling for the worst.  He kept struggling with the suit, cigarette clenched in his teeth, trying to fasten a busted latch.  Dreamily, she watched her hands work around his wrists, tugging the seam back open.  The motion felt so small and natural, she could have been helping him off with a tie.  She felt the darkness drain out of him as she softly plucked the rivets, one by one.   As she neared the bottom he was just swaying, hypnotized by the strange gentleness of the act.  They’d been many things together, but rarely gentle.  They watched together in quiet awe as her fingers went about their strange business of undressing him.

"Can't," he said, voice gruff and creaking.

"She’s not me,” she murmured.  “I’m right here.  I’m me.  And I’m in love with–"

He ripped free, batting away her hands.   He had the same look of horror in his eyes that she saw on the cliff.  The cold daggers went to work on her again.  She felt her face twist as she wrestled forward, trying to steal the moment back.  But his long arms cut her dead every time, guiding her hands up and out and sideways.  Staggering backwards, eyes squeezed shut, he could’ve been a blind man fending off a thief.  Old tears of frustration welled up inside.  Her demon moaned its disapproval as he kept pushing her away, as her soft advances degenerated into something more savage and desperate.

“Let me,” she gasped, clawing her way inside his reach.

"Buffy...”

Why did you talk?  When will you learn?

(doitnowstupiddoITnowDOitNOWDOITNOWSTUPID)

Without another word, she sent them crashing down onto the bed.  He tried to shove her off, but she was moving faster than him now, showing off her gifts.  Bare hands and knees pinned him out like a butterfly, and then her legs were moving, slithering for traction on velvet, lifting her face to his neck.  When she got there, a breath fired out of her lips, steaming off skin. 

“Let me.”

"No,” he said.

But the word didn’t register, made no sense.  His eyes were sick with grief, but were also blue, and as familiar as skies.

She began to kiss him, then: neck weaving drunkenly, tongue lashing at whatever scraps of flesh it could reach.  When he broke one hand free she thought it was all over; that he’d crush her, killing this and them.   She prayed he’d make it quick. 

For a terrifying moment, the hand did nothing at all.  When she felt it alight on the nape of her neck, it was like something magical.  His mouth dropped open, inviting her inside.  It was suddenly their game again, all heat and inches.   The hand pressed hard against her, plowing down her spine to the final knot.

Clothes suddenly felt unbearable to her, as ugly and useless as words or doors.  Who would invent such stupid things?  She tore at her own like they were on fire, smoothing her length along his body.  The skirt dragged over the rough surface of the suit, inching up over her bare legs.  She did it again, snakelike, enjoying the way the tiny spokes and divots raked her skin.   He let his hand fall along her bare thigh.  It was the same, smart hand she remembered, ghosting along the muscle until it discovered the fleshy curve of her ass, her shoulders shaking as it traced down the seam, a fingertip straying onto secret contents.  The abrupt, electric shock of it paralyzed her, and suddenly she was burning.  She was burning alive and wondering how long it had been since she last burned.

Unable to move, she set his other hand free, willing it to go about its business, do whatever it wanted.  It settled for her face and neck, then her hair, tangling in it.  Gripping her at both ends he began to rock her, back and forth, pressing her so tightly to his chest that she knew he was trying to feel her heart beat.

She tore her blouse sideways, sick of it, back arching like a cat.  Parts were moving by themselves, now, a vibrating empire of the senses.  Her hips were steered by unseen waves, grinding and writhing in his grasp.  An army couldn’t have stopped what their lips were up to, brushing and bobbing to the hot music of her breath like it was the only sound in the world.

Breathing is the gift he gives you.

It was too much.  It was love, love and nothing else.  Love like a murder, like war.  She closed her eyes and watched the last six days of her life vanish over a stormy horizon, leaving only a screaming white panic in its place.  It was always the same.  There was too much to do and no time left to do it.   It wasn’t fair.  It wasn’t fair, and never would be.

(charge)

Shivering, she set to work on the Sun Suit again.  But the garment was suddenly infuriating, demanding more attention than she was willing to give it.  Her once gentle hands only wanted to rip and shred now, to violently plow the field for flesh.   One of them dashed off, searching for easier prey.   It found a strip of flimsy cloth between her legs, and destroyed it with a merciless twist.  She felt his entire body jump at the sound of its death, as if suddenly realizing what hers had known all along.

This is going to happen.

And after it does, it will never stop.

And you will come back to me.

Soul or not.  World or not.

Something growled down in his chest.  He was shaking his head.   He had daggers too.  She swept her hand across his brow, trying to smooth the knot there.  “Shhhh,” she whispered.  “It’s okay.”

We're almost there, my love.

Almost home.

Let me.

She rededicated herself to a latch, eyes and fingers focused like lasers on the chore.  But something strange was going on above her, now, distracting her.  He was trying to stand.  She shoved back hard with her hips, then continued to pick and pry at the clasp.  She could open the fucking thing by herself.

But Spike kept going, kept standing.  He was moving so slowly, now, like a huge and ancient animal, his limbs hardening to lead.  The blood in her chest began whispering something she refused to hear.  When he turned away she felt her whole body seize onto one of his leathery arms, clamping down on it like a jaw.   She gave it a savage twist, wrenching him back down with such force that it crushed the box frame.

(lucky for the bed)

He was talking again, all nonsense, all Greek to her, and trying to kick his way free.  But she still had the arm.  It was her arm now, and she decided it was staying with her, even if he chewed it off.   She dragged it down sharply, shoved the hand between her legs.  Cool fingers scissored there for a moment, ghosts acting on old orders.  She was instantly wet, her heart drumming behind her eyelids.   She rocked forward, straining to push them inside.

"Don't fight,” she said.  “Don’t fight me.  We need this.”

But he fought.  He fought anyway.  It was his nature.

She pulled harder, battle strength whistling down her spine.  She felt something crack in his wrist.

It's okay.

This is nothing.  This will pass.

You dreamed you killed me.

This is nothing.

He was bucking like a horse under her, shouting curses.  She stuck a hand over his mouth to put a stop to it.  Like pressing a button, the fangs fired down, slicing deep into the center of her palm.

Almost there.

This will pass.

Every night you save me.

She was okay now.  And he would be.  And they were together, at last, and it would be easy.   This was how they are.  The rest was all just clothes and words and doors and history books on a bonfire.   She clawed at the latch again, sick of it.  Somewhere above, she could feel her other palm becoming slick with blood.

Doesn't matter.

Get the clothes off.  New jobs for tongues.

Love you.

Need this.

Almost home.

She felt cool fingers wrap around her throat.  It took her mind a few seconds to register that he was choking her, and several more to begin to care about this fact.  Just as the black waters crept in around the edges, an old, honed instinct took over.  She abandoned the arm, and in the next instant she was flying out across the room.

Her back thudded against the wall, smashing apart the plaster there.  She felt it rain down on her like cool sand as her brain swam in and out of orbit.

Somewhere out in the blur, she could see his dark shape moving.  She rolled sideways, shaking the cobwebs out.   The demon inside went about its duties, boiling the clouds away at blazing speeds.  After a few seconds, the room snapped back into focus all around her.

She was sitting alone in it, covered in black paint chips and fine, white dust.  A door loomed before her, open like a wound.  The wood, she realized, was just as exquisite on the inside, stained the color of old blood.

As the haze subsided, she realized that she did know one poem, after all.  She thought it was a funny one at the time, a clever thing to say when the moment was right.  The words roused themselves to life now, leering back at her from the collegian mists:

'Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

A medley of extemporanea;

And love is a thing that can never go wrong;

And I am Marie of Romania.''

She stared at the door for a long moment, listening to the sound of her own treacherous heart.  Waiting for its orders.

Run, it said.

Chase.

Chapter 31: Boldly They Rode

Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell

- Alfred Lord Tennyson

***

It was close to dawn when Kennedy's troops returned to All Hallows, a band of red sky cresting over London’s horizon like a wave of blood.

She let Rhonda carry the case. 

This was all about professionalism.  Generals didn’t do grunt work.  That’s what the Rhondas of the world were for.  Kennedy needed to play it loose, be ready for anything.  She kept telling herself these things, hardly noticing how she was practically glued to Rhonda’s side, and how her eyes were drawn to the briefcase again and again, like fish on lures.

So much power there.

It got her thinking about “Thunderdome” again, back in the old Sunnydale days.  Buffy and her best buds had tricked them, of course; used them as bait for the Turok-Han.  Every Potential could’ve easily been slaughtered that night, and the Slayer knew it.  But it was the show that mattered.  Buffy needed them to see what strength looked like, and that show of strength was more important than any single one of their lives.  The courage of that calculation still captivated Kennedy, all these years later.

Strength, Kennedy knew, wasn’t the willingness to sacrifice yourself for a cause.  That was just martyrdom; surrender by another name.   The willingness to sacrifice others was much harder.  It required wisdom and toothy grit, and displayed the sort of heroism they never tell you about in storybooks.  In order to write history, you needed to dip your pen in the blood of inferiors. 

This was real morality, stripped of all its fairy tales and fantasies.  This was the morality of Truman, of Hiroshima.  It was this same morality that lurked in the nondescript briefcase, the one gently swinging in Rhonda’s undeserving hand. 

Yes, Plan B was messy.  But the show would be spectacular, and the entire world would be her audience. 

She thought of all the little bureaucratic pissants who tried to sweep the ashes of Sunnydale under the rug, and all those suckups and parasites who pretended L.A. didn’t nose-dive into Hades right before their beady little eyes.   They thought they could put the lid back on Pandora’s box, but their day was quickly drawing to a close.  Tonight, Kennedy would show them her strength, and the world as they knew it would end.

The good doctor Stark was waiting for them in the chapel, still perched catlike on the dead hag’s altar.   Another one of her 'pets' was with her now, its snakelike body entwining the woman’s nudity like ghastly lingerie.  The tableau forged a disturbing symmetry with a bas-relief of the sorceress Lilith etched into wall behind them.  It depicted the witch on her hands and knees, being degraded by some sort of reptilian fiend.

“Welcome back,” Nancy crooned.  “Was startin’ to worry about you, sugar.”

Kennedy took a wary glance around the chamber.  “Where are my soldiers?”

“Soldiers?” she sneered.  “You mean, those smelly ol’ things?  Why, we sent them away of course.”  She jerked her hips once and gasped, suddenly orgasmic.   The monster snaked its catlike head over Nancy’s shoulder, mewling in approval.  “We needed our -unh- privacy –ahh,” she added breathlessly.

Kennedy tried to swallow her disgust.  In the space of a day, Nancy Stark had fallen from madness into something altogether more obscene.  Filled now with the Slayer’s demons, the albino’s new powers manifested themselves in increasingly horrifying ways.  She seemed somehow able to dream things into existence.  It wasn’t magic - not in the Willow Rosenberg school of thought, at least.  Whatever tidbits of mysticism Kennedy had picked up along the way told her that Nancy was breaking some very old rules, if not playing a different game entirely.  “Doctor Stark,” she said, trying to maintain a civil tone, “forgive me for saying so, but I’m not sure this is the best use of your time.” 

 “And why’s that, darlin’?”

“It won’t be long before one of the Council’s seers becomes aware of our presence here.  If we lose the element of surprise-”

The freak tittered and shook, eyes glazing over with ecstasy.  “Oh there’s gonna be a surprise, alright.  Big, big surprise...”

Kennedy suddenly pictured herself leaping to action, and plunging a stake through Nancy’s twisted little heart.  “Then we need to strike today,” she said.  “Preparations must be made.  We need a plan of attack.  We need to be-”

Stark levitated from the altar.  She seemed less human than ever, her white limbs spread like the wings of a ghostly bird.  A black wave shuddered at the edge of her shape, and a moment later her pet monster was dead, its body shriveling and blowing apart like dead leaves.

  “Ready when you are.”

***

They drove in silence across the Massachusetts Avenue Bridge.  The Institute loomed over the far banks of the Charles like a horrible tidal wave.  It was one of the colossal ironies of this world that Tara and Willow had chosen to nest their headquarters so close to their enemies’ heart.  Boston stood as a shining monument to Man’s triumph over Magic, the birthplace of the New Humanist Party that was swept to power in the aftermath of this world’s Hell-A meltdown.  But after their crushing defeat in Chicago, Willow Two had arrived at the conclusion that the best tactic would be to hide their armies in plain sight, a stone’s throw from the person most capable of destroying them. They even rigged the college’s application process to steer the most powerful and promising young mystics their way.  That is, if they didn’t already have their hearts set on Brown.

Formerly Boston University, The Institute was a matter of some controversy in this world.  Commandeered by the New Humanist Party two years ago, the school was converted into a full-time reservoir of “Supernatural Counter-Terrorism.”  Though the politicians dithered and dissembled about what actually went on there, rumors of illegal magical research swirled in the media.  At first there were mass protests, cries of “we can’t stoop to their level” and “we’ll be no better than the terrorists.”  But ultimately, people seemed to come around to the idea that, in order to fight an army of witches and warlocks, a little covert witchcraft here and there might be a necessary evil. 

And that’s where Rupert Giles came in.  Mr. Necessary Evil himself.

“Is it me, or is this plan just a little bit crazy?”  Oz wore the same old hooded expression, but something about his tone said he was deeply spooked.  “I mean, this is Giles we’re talking about here.”

“Dogboy’s right,” said Harmony.  “I mean, we worked really, really hard on training that Loser Army of yours.  And what do we get for it?”     

“Suicide mission,” Anya murmured.

“Right!  Suicide mission.  You know, I got killed once, and trust me when I say not as fun as it sounds.”

“It’ll work,” said Tara.  “It has to.”  She shot Willow a hard look.

They slid noiselessly off the bridge’s black throat and made the slow turn onto Beacon Street.  The old campus gates presented an ominous welcoming committee: a sprawling mesh of barbed fences, checkpoints and guard towers. Tara’s glamour seemed to do the trick as they wove their way through the maze, the guards all smiling and waving them through.  “Welcome to Boston, Mr. President!” one said.  “Can I have your autograph, Ms. Jolie?” asked another.  Cute.

Willow marked the scenery on the way in.  An array of squat hi-tech facilities were scattered around the foot of The Towers like a pyre, their windows staring blankly at them as the car crawled to a stop in an empty parking lot.   She sat staring at the fortress for a long moment, drinking in its long, savage geometries.  Wondering if Harmony, of all people, was right.

Giles.

In many ways, Rupert Giles was the most dangerous opponent imaginable, and the only mortal being to defeat her in personal combat.  The man could work some powerful mojo; a fact Willow had once learned the hard way.  The Watcher had access to many ancient secrets, and was full of all the wily and ruthless intellect that made Houdini a very rich man.   Cunning, dispassionate and brilliant, he was a born illusionist.

But, he was no Artist.  There was no creative spark; none of that raw, congenital instinct which turned tricksters and dabblers into great sorcerers.  His magic was mote purely from books, picked word-for-word from the recipes of real Artists. 

Giles knew the maps of Magick, but Willow Rosenberg knew the territory itself.  She was a native childe. She lived it.  Tonight, the Amateur would show the Master how this game was really played.

"Okay,” she said.  “Showtime.”

***

Rupert kept his watch from atop the atrium’s grand balcony, marveling once more at the majesty of Her design.  The Institute’s central headquarters had been built to specification, a model of modern supernatural engineering.  Her architects had been a diabolical consortium, indeed.  A league of fiends cast out of Hell, they’d mastered the art of defensive magic in order to evade the many terrifying enemies they’d accumulated over the centuries.  Rupert's dealings with them had been a private matter, of course.  Strictly classified. 

No need to frighten the children unduly, he thought.

Willow was close, now.  He considered the dizzying logic at play.  Willow was close, and he knew she was close, and she knew that he knew.  And he, of course, knew that.  He prayed the vicious circle ended there.

The girl was danger incarnate, with an innate mastery of the Dark Arts that seemed to know no bounds.  She had grown quite powerful over the years.   So powerful, in fact, that she’d apparently learned how to slip the bonds of Death itself.  This was a theory he was anxious to put to the test.

Willow no doubt thought she had the upper hand.   Maybe she even knew Ethan was here, skulking through the black bowels of the Institute’s sanctum like some fairy tale monster to make pacts with all his favorite devils.  The warlock was a sly old bastard, to be sure.   But he wasn’t nearly as quick as Rosenberg, nor as cunning as that conniving little succubus, Tara Maclay.   He wouldn’t last five minutes with them, face to face. Rupert found it difficult to imagine anyone who might.  They were too damned fast.

Speed was not the only element at play.  Speed was a game for the young.  It made the earth quake, made legions fly before your righteous wrath.  Speed bore you through the gates of Hell on a glorious blaze of lightning. 

But speed, Rupert had learned, also made you reckless and careless.  Speed was the mother of mistakes.  The Englishmen were old and slow, but they were also cautious and fastidious and precise.  In certain contact sports, age had its benefits.  Or, at least, he prayed it did.  He’d find out soon enough.

It was fait accompli that the Witch had devised some way past the building’s many wondrous defenses.  That much he was certain of.   But the Institute’s traps were not the only arsenal at his disposal.  In life as in chess, sometimes the best defense was a good offense.

She’d likely put the pawns into play first: a Vampire and a Werewolf, of all bloody things.  A wry grin crossed his face.  Was the Mummy on holiday, my dear child? he thought.  These two would be mere distractions, if not cannon fodder. 

The demon Anyanka would present a somewhat more difficult challenge.   The hag blamed Rupert for Xander’s death, every bit as much as she blamed the Slayer.  While the Institute would protect him from her more invidious talents, the monster was still ancient, and still filled with the treacherous strength and knowledge of the damned.  When it came to her, cautious deterrence would be the order of the day.

But the real threats were the witches themselves; that coven of two.  They were deadly enough on their own, but together they were an unholy terror, something to make empires tremble.  If Rupert had any hope of surviving the night, he knew that the oldest rule of all would have to be rigorously applied.

Divide and conquer, old chap.  Divide and conquer.

There was a noise then, howling up from the well of the atrium like flames.   Theirs would be a grand entrance, one for the scrapbooks.  The odor of sulfur and morning dew gusted in his nostrils, a sharp wind from Heaven or Hell or both. 

Aha.  He grinned again, his mistake suddenly blaring back at him in large neon calligraphy. 

The architects, in their fits of mad genius, had bound the Institute to her master’s essence.  While other mortals risked a hundred deaths at her every brick and stone, Rupert Giles was rendered immune to her many deadly charms. 

The price of this immunity was indelible: upon entering each night, he must leave a shard of his immortal soul in escrow for the wraiths who powered the building’s defenses.   It was all very legalistic; a sort of safety deposit on a particularly diabolical lease.  Apparently, the Witch had conducted a bit of under-the-table negotiation, and bribed her way into a sublet.  It seemed terribly unsporting of her.

And brilliant, he thought. 

Alright, my darling, fiendish little girl.  Show me how brilliant you are...

***

They stood together in the well of the lobby, the columns of The Towers looming over them like the sides of mountain trench.  Tara held out the Scepter of Thule like a loaded pistol, her bee-stung lips a quivering hair-trigger as they crept further into the Institute’s womb.

A huge statue rose like a horrifying tree in the center of the hall.  Willow recognized it as a half-human aspect of the Loa tradition; a terrifying figure with serpents for arms that seemed to welcome them into its embrace.  A series of long ramps spiraled out from its base, leading off into the building’s dark, hive-like innards.

“Okay this place looks, like, really big,” Harmony squeaked.  “How’re we supposed to find her?”

“I can feel her,” Willow said.  “She’s somewhere beneath us.”

“Somewhere beneath us, she says.”  Anya flexed her sword arm, eyes jet black in the atrium’s sparse light.  “That’s helpful.”

“It’s a start,” Tara said.  “Besides if Giles is-“

Before she could finish, a sight cut them all dead.  A group of people had appeared about twenty yards away, seemingly out of thin air.  The silhouettes hovered motionless in the shadows, apparently aware of their presence as well.  For a long moment, no one moved a muscle.  Willow could hear their hushed, weirdly familiar voices echoing across the chamber.

“Well,” Anya whispered, “the good news is, there’s five of us and five of them.”

“Maybe we can get in a game of hoops,” Oz muttered back.

Instinctively, Willow took a few steps towards.  One of the figures followed suit, matching her almost step for step, its head craning at her curiously. 

“Luminos” two voices sang out in unison.  A pair of hands ignited, each woman revealing the other with an arc of golden light.  For a thunderstruck second, a pair of matching redheads stood gawking at each other. “Whoa,” they murmured.

“What is it?” came a pair of voices from beyond.

The Willows studied one another suspiciously.  “I don’t know,” said one.

“Some kind of trick,” said the other.

Two Taras jogged forth, threatening one another with their deadly wands.  A mob scene gradually formed around them.   The Ozzes circled one another, scratching their whiskers thoughtfully.  A pair of Anyas exchanged dry insults, while the Hamonies vamped out and kung fu’d.  A dull panic began to seep into the air.  They’d been inside less than two minutes, and things were already going downhill.

The Willows decided to put a stop to it.  “Okay, cut it out you guys,” they said.  Eight sets of bewildered eyes blinked back at them.  

“Listen, this is obviously some kind of spell,” said Willow. 

“A darn good one, too,” muttered the other Willow, practically oozing jealousy.

“The main thing is to stay calm and not go crazy,” said a Tara.  “That’s just what he wants.”

“Yeah, but how are we supposed to know who the real we’s are?” asked an Anya.  “Real us’s.  Whatever.”

“Well, obviously, I’m the real me,” griped one Harmony, her vamp eyes gleaming like lumps of gold.  “I mean, look how fat she is!”

“Bitch!” the other screamed.

“Whore!”

“Skank!”

“Slut!”  They began tearing at each other again, fang-faces gnashing like sharks.  Chaos ensued, a tangle of identical parts alternately trying to separate them and egg them on.  Then, just as the melee neared its breaking point, another party emerged from the shadows.

“Luminos!” sung a third Willow, illuminating the bizarre scrum.

“Damn,” remarked a newly arrived Oz.  “This is getting trippy.”

“Stop!  Everyone stop!”  The Willows were starting to get anxious, now.  Whatever Giles was doing to them, it wasn’t from any playbook they’d ever seen. And, as sucky as it was, they couldn’t help but feel a begrudging admiration.

Learned a few new tricks, have you old man?

The redheads exchanged looks of silent agreement, subtly nominating their Spokes-willow.  “Alright,” she said.  “Here’s the plan.  We have to split up.”

A chorus of opposition rumbled back at her.  “Are you nuts?” an Oz asked.  “Have you, like, never seen a single horror movie in your whole entire life?”

“She’s right,” said a Tara.  “It’s the only way.  Otherwise we could end up with some evil doppelganger stabbing us in the back.”  They all stood for a moment, thinking this over, and scrutinizing each other through lidded eyes.

“Okay. fine,” said the Anyas.  “So how exactly do we do that?”

Before anyone could answer, two more groups arrived, with another four visible the distance.  Suddenly, fresh copies were lurching in from all directions, a bobbing insectile horde of them.  Hysteria kicked in, full throttle.  Random fights broke out as a chorus of identical voices fought to be heard above the rest.  Within moments, the lobby had melted into pure mayhem, an ear-splitting rave full of frightened and angry clones.

A woman started running into the darkness, weaving through a sea of faces that looked suspiciously like her own.  She found a service elevator near the foot of the Loa statue, slapped the down button.  By the time the car arrived, the jumbled voices behind had become a stadium roar.  The Taras began blasting away with their war wands, the reports shattering off the walls like sonic booms.  She ducked into the elevator and pressed “B.”  Closed her eyes.

Stay calm.  Stay calm.  Stay calm.  Stay calm. Stay calm.

It’s just a trick.  It’s just a trick.  It’s just a trick.

Be in yourself.  Be in yourself.

Be in yourself.

B.  For basement.

B for Buffy.  Hopefully.

One by one the voices began to die into the distance.  As the last one vanished, Willow Rosenberg felt a warm red wave ripple through her body.  She opened her eyes.

And she was alone.  

***

Oz sprinted down a long, dark access ramp, selected at random from dozens.  Somewhere behind him, the searing blasts from the Tara Brigade’s Badass Wands of Thule lit up the scenery like the Fourth of July.

Yep.  Too trippy.  Can’t hang.

Eventually, the ramp opened onto a long, dim hallway, lined with what seemed like a hundred doors.  It looked like Freddy Kruger’s wettest dream. 

He was standing there, weighing all of his totally awesome options, when a Harmony suddenly came charging down the ramp after him.

“Hey!” she panted.  “What the hell’s the matter with you?  I was like, screaming at you to slow down.”

Oz eyed her warily.  “Hey Harm.  Are you... you?”

“Well, duh!  Of course I am!”  Harmony shot him a disgusted look.  “That’s what I was trying to tell you idiots back there.  I could totally tell who everybody was.”  Oz just stared at her, uncomprehending.   “Like, vampire senses, hello!  I’m standing there all useful and as usual everybody just ignores me!”

“Ah,” Oz replied, not totally sold on the logic of this.  “Well, are the rest of them still up there?”

“No!” she pouted.  “Not after those psycho Taras started blowing everything up.  You guys all ran in, like, a hundred different directions.”

“And you decided to follow Normal Guy?”

 Harmony chewed on this one for a few seconds.  “Well, I figured we’re both all Creature of the Night-y.  Could come in handy if we find the Slay Slut first, right?  I mean, I know she’s fought, like, tons of vamps and werewolves, but probably not at the same time.”  Satisfied with the wisdom of this statement, she crossed her arms and began to blink at him expectantly.  “So just, you know, do it, already."

“Do what?”

“You know.  Do your thing.   Fuzz out, so we can get this party started.”  

“Okay, like I keep telling you,” Oz said, “it doesn’t work that way, so much.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t just fuzz out,” he explained.  “It only happens at certain times of the month.  Or when I’m under a bunch of major stress.”

She squinted at him.  “Oh.  You mean, like that lame-o Hulk guy?”

Not really, he started to say, then thought better of it.  This sort of conversation could go on forever.  “Yes,” he said.  “Exactly like the Hulk.”  

She rolled her eyes.  “God, you're just full of useful tonight, aren’t you.”  In the next instant, her fangs slid down, game face eerily snapping back into place.  “Well, let’s get motoring, Normal Guy.  Something tells me getting stressed out in this dump won’t be all that hard.”

***

Rayne slid into the shadowy recesses of the reception hall, eyes sharp on his mark.   Ripper wanted the redhead all to himself.  There was some history there, apparently.

Poor Mr. Giles and his baggage, he thought.  That was one of the many disadvantages of playing the game clean.  Everything became so personal.

The blonde witch was left to Rayne, and it was anything but personal.  He didn’t know her, and if all went smoothly he never would.  The girl was already marvelously disoriented, thanks to Ripper’s prank.   Breathing hard, shaking her little stick at every creak and phantom footfall as she trawled for an exit, she reminded him of a fairy tale nymph wandering deeper and deeper into the nightmare forest.

Come along then, darling. The big bad wolf is getting a bit peckish.

“I know you’re here,” she said.  “Whoever you are.  Why don’t you show yourself?”  Her demands echoed off the cavernous walls, never to be answered.  Rayne whispered a few guttural words, and felt the Veil of Dagon descend over him.  His body began to slide effortlessly up the side of one wall, then out across the ceiling until she was directly beneath him.  His arms suddenly felt as heavy as a pair of corpses.  When he reached down toward the girl, they looked like the gnarled black limbs of trees.

Then, mere inches from her throat, they stopped.  Retreated.

Go on, he willed himself.  What are you-

–doing?  You're wasting time, mate.

He frowned and shook his head.  The tentacles of Dagon were squirming around in his brains now, and it was making it a bit hard to stay focused.  This pact was a risky one, he knew.  The demon drove a hard bargain, and if he didn’t kill Tara soon, it would surely consume Ethan in her place.

As the girl whirled around at a shadow, he reached for her again, his deformed limbs surging noiselessly through the darkness.  But this time, the wave of repulsion was even more pungent, slashing at his lungs. 

It wasn’t conscience, of course.  Rayne had pawned that useless trinket many years ago.  And it wasn’t old Dagon either.  If anything he sensed the fiend was even more frustrated than he was, growing hungrier by the second.

Come on, lad.  You have to–

–open the vault.

What?  No.  Why in the bloody hell would I want to do that?

He felt his strange new body slither sideways, moving under its own volition as it tracked Tara through the room.   Rayne tried to think of pleasant things, like the bright sound of her death wails as he tore her body to ribbons.  But somewhere in the back of his mind, a deck of cards was being subtly rearranged.

The vault?  Why–

–didn’t you think of this before?  You can lead them there.  Seal them all in.

Doesn’t make sense. The Slayer–

–is your enemy, of course.  Just like Ripper.  Think he’d ever let you go, love?

The thoughts kept coming, like cold splashes of water.  The Dagon was growling inside his skull, now, anxious for its meal.  But there were suddenly far more pressing matters at hand.   He retreated into a safe pocket of his essence, one of the many he’d arranged for such occasions, and began to chant the Song of Surgat, Keeper of the Keys.

Ia uddu-ya. Ia russuluxi.  Saggtamarania. Atzarachi-ya.

Ia zi dingir neenya kanpa.  Ia kantalamakkya tarra…

***

“…Ia zi dingir neenya kanpa.  Ia kantalamakkya tarra…” 

It’d been about five minutes since Rayne had gone from being his reliably creepy self to full on Exorcist-y.  He was floating three feet off the ground now, his eyes glowing like molten lava.  Giles stood a few skeptical feet away from the warlock, with a look on his face that practically screamed Dear lord, what have I gotten us into now.  And Xander Harris shared that sentiment, big time.

Suddenly, Spike came clattering down the stairs at top speed.

“Right, I’m meant to go so let’s get on with it!”

They all turned to gawk at him.  Even Drusilla was stirred from her holy haze.  The vampire was a total mess: boots jangling loose, SPF 5000 suit flapping halfway open, helmet swinging in one hand like a bowling ball, eyes all sweaty.

Eyes all sweaty?

"Spike,” Giles sighed.  “It’s not that simple.  Preparations must be made.  This is hardly the time for-”

"Time for you to go, love,” said Ethan.  In the blink of an eye, the slippery freak was standing right next to Xander, casually brushing his hands.

"Pardon?"

"The Vault of Shamesh is open, Ripper.  We must hurry, before I realize what I’m up to.”

The old Brits exchanged a weary look, and then snapped into action.  This was 'phase two', Xander realized.  Now that Bizzaro Rayne was playing for the home team, the warlocks were going to drill some kind of hole between Willow’s dimension and their own.  Which, Xander mused, sounded like one whopper of an O.S.H.A. violation.

Earlier, Rayne had poured out a large circle of dark liquid in the center of the chamber.  Now, as he chanted, it began to glow like silver fire.  Giles fetched a long scepter and a scroll from the retable.

"No!”  Drusilla shrieked, freshly enraged by her less-than-saintly surroundings.  “You’ll break it!  Daddy knows what you’re doing!  Bad, bad, naughty things!”

But Xander was suddenly finding it hard to peel his eyes from the other vampire. The look on his face was unnervingly bleak, like a man drowning out on the open seas.  He remembered that face pretty well; used to stare at it in the mirror every morning, not so long ago.  Their gazes met for a strange moment.

"Where is she?” Xander asked.

Instead of answering, Spike drew closer to the Rayne’s circle.  Ripples of dark, spectral matter were beginning to swim out from its center.  Giles handed the warlock his scepter, and as he chanted the incantation the orb on the end of its long stem began to glow and pulse.  The air in the chamber shifted sharply, turning as thin and cold as a mountaintop's.  Giles began to read from the scroll.

"Bababararara ante maldada!  Bababararara ante gege enene!” 

As he spoke the last word, the dark mists in the circle swirled tornado-like, revealing a howling abyss beneath.  Mysterious wind roared out of the portal like a jet turbine, almost blowing the paperwork from the Watcher’s hands.  Full of horrible curiosity, Xander peered down into its depths.

What he saw there was the kind of Kodak moment that haunts men for the rest of their days.  The hole was like a sun turned inside-out, the absence of light.  The absence of everything.

Something in the back of his mind clicked on, and he suddenly knew what it was.   This was the Now.  It was what Willow was trying to stop, and terrifying was not the word for it.  They hadn’t invented a word for it.

"Ethan,” the Watcher cried, his voice almost lost beneath the portal’s dissonant wail.  “What now?”

Rayne turned to Spike.  “Take this,” he said, tossing him something small and round.  The vampire caught it in one mailed fist, gave it a dubious glance.  “The Talisman of Abraxus,” the warlock explained.  “It’s so we can find you, mate.  Pull you back out, after this sordid business is-"

Before he could finish, the vamp tossed it back.  “Sorry, love," he said.  "Not taking any more candy from strangers.  Occupational hazard.”

He tugged the black helmet on, and its growling electronic voice returned once more, suddenly more fierce and alien under the sound of the Now’s howling maw.  “Besides,” it added.  “Not coming back.”

Spike jumped.

And just like that, he was gone.

Xander shot Giles a stunned look, but the Watcher was already looking past him at something on the stairs, eyes glazed like a funeral greeter's.  Xander took a deep breath and turned to look as well, already knowing what he’d find there.

It only took a glance.

Xander thought, stupidly, he’d seen it all with her.   But he’d never seen her beaten.  She looked back at him with defeated eyes.

Those eyes would be different from now on, he knew, like a final mile of road vanishing from a map.   When you get robbed enough times, one day you just stop holding on to things so tightly.

For years, he’d held open a small place in his heart.  It was hard work, prying that old muscle apart, holding out hope that one day his friends would all crawl back inside.   And when this happened, everything would be warm and new.  They would be a family again.  This was the fantasy that kept him going when the giant flaming shit ball of the real world kept screaming at him to stop.

Okay, where are you goin’ with this, Xan-man?

But, of course, he already knew that too.  A heartbeat later he was moving, snatching the talisman from Ethan’s hand.  “Gimme that,” he said.

He looked at Giles.  He looked at her.

Then he jumped too.

Chapter 32:  Pistols at Dawn

London, 5:16 a.m

---

Leila watched the hazy blades of light dance out from around the skeleton of London Bridge.  This was probably her favorite part of the freak show she'd so recently started calling a life.   As sad as it sounded, a quiet morning of guard duty was just about the only time she felt even quasi-normal these days.  There was something about the way the city looked at dawn that made it easy to pretend that this was all a dream, that she’d dozed off in 9th period French again.  Any minute now, Mademoiselle Richardson would savage her with a bunch of dormez-vous crap, which she would only marginally comprenez.  The bell would save her, and then she’d jet out to the parking lot to hassle Amanda about the Dilemma of the Double Teds, flirt with Bobby “Hot Pickle” LoPiccolo,and raid the mall.  Shoes and boys and summer vacations were all just around the corner.  Guarding a secret British fortress was laughably far-fetched by comparison.  This was just that extra-weird part of the dream, right before you woke up.

As if to prove this, something funny began to happen in the sky.  Somewhere down in the historical district, close to Trinity Square, a plume of black smoke began to rise.  She thought it was a fire, at first, but there was something hypnotic about the way it moved, worming and twisting in slow motion, slowly unfurling like an octopus leg.  Instead of dissipating, the column kept rising, arching high over the Soho skyline like a toxic rainbow.

Then it turned. 

Turned toward her, it seemed, snaking lazily through the early morning glow like something out of a nightmare.  This struck Leila as a pretty un-smoke-like thing to do.

As the seconds passed, her bewilderment quickly hardened into something much, much worse.  By the time Leila realized she was in trouble, the Thing was already there, towering before her like a monstrous black wave.   Without warning, four huge tendrils of fog shot out from its base.  She could make out the shapes of people inside. 

Hundreds of them. 

Leila closed her eyes.

“Wake up now,” she whimpered.  “Wake up now…”

***

What now?

Dawn had just finished getting the runaround from Morrade over in Ecto-Land.  Apparently, they’d lost contact with Polly’s search team “sometime during the night,” and Morrade was blaming it on a technical snafu.  When Dawn demanded a stricter definition of the word “sometime,” another snafu conveniently managed to cut the call off mid-sentence.  She'd have to remember to bring this up at the morning briefing.

But first, she made the long trek to the bathroom, bleary-eyed and staggering like a mummy.  The shower would feel good.  She needed to wash off Yesterday in a bad, bad way.  It was still hard to figure out which was the suckiest part, so she dutifully grabbed her toothbrush, and tried to connect all the horrible dots one more time.

Dot the 1st:  Rupert Giles

Played them all like a concerto.  In retrospect, this wasn’t entirely shocking; the guy had gray matter to spare.  But she’d never guessed how gobsmackingly devious he could really be.  Snooping through the WatcherNet’s programming notes was like cracking open Watergate, Monica-gate, Travel-gate and Every-other-gate rolled into one.  Dawn had seen some kooky schemes in her day, but using mind control to turn yourself into the World’s Lamest Supervillain?  So you can stir up a revolution against yourself?  This was newish.  God only knew what he was up to right now.

Then again, maybe Giles chipped Him too...

Dot the 2nd: Spike

Was alive.  Or, alive-ish:  vampire and whatnot.  Part of her wanted to stick this factoid in the Figure It Out Later file.  Another, more distant part of her wanted to wrap her arms around the monster, filled with disorienting squee.  Neither seemed likely to happen.  Frank, on the other hand, was plenty interested in this development.  She knew the man still kept an ear pressed to the doors of Hell-A, obsessing over each detail of the Devil’s quiet coup there. Frank Grange knew all the major players by heart,  but he never once mentioned the Bleach Boy, of course.  That would be in the neighborhood of Telling Dawn the Freakin’ Truth For Once, breaking one of mankind’s most cherished traditions.  But now that she knew, Frank was all prophecy-this and Shanshu-that.

Well, gee whiz, thanks.

Not everyone was happy to see him.  This was a familiar phenomenon, at least.  Vampires seemed to have that effect on people, and Spike especially.  And the only likely candidate was unreadable to Dawn now, a ghost of a ghost... 

Dot the 3rd:  Buffy Summers

So far, their reunion wasn’t exactly a Very Brady Christmas.  That first glimpse of her on the heli-pad yesterday had been like something out of a dream.  Haggard and bloodstained, she could’ve been coming home from a particularly brutal night of patrol.   But something in her eyes was sparking again, and when she glimpsed it, it filled Dawn with a strange kind of hope.  Hope was not necessarily a good thing, she'd learned.  For one thing, Hope’s life-partner, Crushing Disappointment, was never very far behind...

Dot the 4th: Me

It was also not necessarily a good thing because “Dawn Summers” was not necessarily a good thing.  Much like the Watcher’s master plan, everything the world thought it knew about Dawn was a carefully constructed lie.  Unlike normal people, she had played no consequential role in her own history.  Memories and habits, dreams and desires; for everyone else these had built up naturally, like branches that grow from a tiny seed.  But for Dawn, they were like things welded together on a factory line.  She wasn’t born so much as she was designed.  There was no there there.

Even before Dawn left Buffy to her dark habits and her bad kissing decisions, the truth of this gonged away in her heart.  At first, it didn’t bother her so much.  After all, the whole world was founded on lies.  People lied constantly, to each other and to themselves.  So she took every chance she could to reinvent herself, build a shiny new Lie from the ground up.  While other girls her age were trying to “find themselves,” she only wanted to burn Dawn Summers to ashes, and to sculpt something utterly new to take its place.  Considering what became of her family in the wake of Sunnydale – the drugginess and the despair and the disappearing acts – this was a much easier chore than expected.  Going rogue was supposed to be the finishing touch of this masterpiece; the pièce de résistance that would finally set her free and make her real.  After all these years, she was going beat those monks at their own twisted game…

Hey.

For one hazy second, Dawn's brain tried to comfort her.  TV, it explained.  Had to be the TV.  A commercial for that confusing show, maybe, the one with all those jerks stuck on an island.  It looked a lot like that thing, anyway – that dark, billowing cloud of special-effects-y crap those island jerks were so scared of. 

But, it wasn’t the TV.  There was no TV in the bathroom.  That would be silly.

It was the window.

***

Nancy let the winds sweep her gently down to the courtyard.  Fingers tore the cloud to black ribbons, revealing the final resting place of the dirty old world and the birthplace of a new one.  The Garden stretched out before her once again, like a beautiful promise.  Lines of soldiers raced out on deadly arcs, the black folds of the Now releasing them like rats from a burning barn.  She spared a moment to watch them go about their silly business.

Miss Kennedy led the way in, a train of girls and monsters galloping in her wake.  As she drove her savage wedge into the courtyard, the Council’s defenders began dotting to life in the windows and doorways.  Across the lawn, a horde of lovely little girls erupted from a cafeteria, bleary and pajama-clad.  Kennedy and her bunch struck like snakes.  Nancy watched in quiet fascination as their blades sung down through soft flesh, setting the autumn air ablaze with screams.

Alarms soon joined this red chorus, bleating like slaughtered lambs from the tops of buildings.  Parades of vicious little girls and their soldier boys streamed out upon the grounds to meet their visitors.   Nancy saw a handsome young man in a military topcoat cleaved in half at the waist.  Near the foot of gymnasium, a mob of Kennedy’s gray devils fell upon a girl in hair curlers, tearing her vicera like Christmas wrapping.  Everywhere Nancy turned she saw tools digging through soil, revealing fresh horrors.

Of course, this part hardly concerned her.  She left them to it, floating past the carnage, above it, held aloft on fine black string.  At the foot of the cathedral, a young goddess in a warm-up suit took a potshot at her with a rifle.  The girl was beautiful, with crystal blue eyes and lips as red as a valentine.  Nancy fell upon her like an owl, raking her face open with a small swipe of her hand.

“God,” said the princess, blinded by blood.

Soon, Nancy thought.

***

London, 5:18 a.m

---

Andrew Wells ran for his life, lungs puffing out air faster than he could pull it back in.  He kept looking for an exit sign or a ladder or a stairwell or something.  But the wide hallways all looked the same, all black with slashes of red light like open wounds.    He paused at one intersection, his heart pounding away at the walls of his chest.  He looked back and forth and back again, but it was no use.  He didn’t have a clue where he was going.

“Oh, sure you do, little buddy,” purred a familiar voice.

A smell like old food stung the air, and Andrew felt something inside his legs turn to pudding.

“You know exactly where you’re going."

The air went in, and didn’t come back out.   Something was moving in a well of shadows next to a bulkhead, and cold fingers forced Andrew to look at it.

The monster took its time.  It inched through the blades of scarlet light, revealing bright ropes of raw meat and sinew.  Time slowed down, became a crawling nightmare of moments.  Andrew began to cry.

 “Shhhh,” Warren whispered, a tortured, lipless hole straining to make the sound.  “Hey, don’t be like that, man.  Thought you’d be happy to see me.”

The face was almost recognizable.  Willow had left just enough.  Wet bands of exposed muscle painted a rough sketch of what was once there.

“Please.”  Andrew’s fingers scrambled to his breast pocket, working on old, weird orders.  Poking and patting and smoothing.

“What’s the matter doughboy?” the corpse teased.  “Looking for your precious little pills?  Yeah, like that’s gonna do any good.”

Not real.  You’re not real.

“Am too!”  Warren was close enough to touch now.   The smell became overpowering, a butcher shop full of rotten steak.  “Real pissed-off.  I mean you don’t call, you don’t write.  Beginning to think you were ashamed of me or something...” 

When Andrew didn’t answer, the ghost tilted towards his ear, as though to tell a secret.  Fresh blood pooled along its jawline, trickling off like drops from a leaking faucet.  “So!  You ready to go or what?”

I can’t.

Not down there.  Not yet.

Warren shooed him with a bloody hand.  “Oh, dude!  Not there!”  The corpse seemed almost giddy, its tongue licking down at his wet chin.   “I mean, well, not right this second.  This isn’t a porno, man!  Wouldn’t be much fun if we just skipped ahead to the money shot.  We got a lot of catching up to do first.”

The smell of death was everywhere, all over him.  Andrew’s fingers were still moving, searching.

Please...

“Besides, John-Boy wants to give you a good head start."  Warren gazed at the ceiling as though in deep thought.  "How'd he put it?  Oh yeah, ‘I want him to teach the walls to scream.’”  He took a long, dramatic breathe, savoring the idea.  “Little freak’s got a way with words, doncha think?”

Andrew forced his eyes open.  He gazed into the boy’s dead, leering eyes, and saw a freezing desert there.  It suddenly dawned on him that today was the last day of his life.

“Well?  What’re you waiting for, Andy?  On your mark.  Get set…”

But the Summoner was already gone.  He ran and ran into the darkness, feeling it close around his heart like a fist.

Like a promise. 

***

The Slayer lay sleeping, curled like a cat on Rayne’s settee.  The body, it seemed, had finally surrendered, but the writhing knots of her brow told Rupert Giles that the mind was still waging war.  It occurred to him once more that the demons within were more challenging than the ones of this world.  And, much as he would’ve liked to, he’d never taught her to fight the former.

Ethan was still celebrating his victory.  He lurched to and fro, full of swagger and brandy, loudly declaring his unholy new credentials to whichever haggard remnants of his audience were still listening.  What he said was even true, to some degree.  Rupert had known many powerful sorcerers in his day, and had seen workings both majestic and terrifying.  But, not more than two hours ago, Ethan Rayne tore a hole straight through the fabric of reality itself.  The monstrous strength of this made the hairs rise on the Watcher's arms, and once again he was starting to question the wisdom of their alliance.

“’There wass’iz  pull, Ripper,” he explained for perhaps the tenth time.  “Like.  Like a‘normous hand bursting from muh chest, pullin’ at the corner of the world with all s’might.  Simply muh-marvelous, mate…” 

Rupert gave him a harried nod, checked his watch again.  Through the window, the sun was beginning to crack the sky.  The vampire Drusilla was tucked safely in the shadow of a grand piano, either sleeping or pretending to.  As the spell of the WatcherNet drifted further and further to sea, so too did his dealings with the vampire float further ashore. 

Finding her had been a most delicate foxhunt.  He’d moved the pieces subtly, employed a network of underground sources that spanned from Belfast to Ankara.  It was maddeningly slow process, rife with faulty tips and false starts.  When the word came that she’d finally surfaced on the streets of Prague, Rupert was only marginally convinced.  Nevertheless, he’d shuttled off that very evening.

His carry-on luggage was more or less packed as one might for a very short and very bland holiday, save for two articles of interest.  One was a brief manuscript pilfered from the Vatican’s vault of archives, a treasure trove of secrets never intended to see the light of day.  The other a nondescript white crucifix, on loan from the private collection of one Edward Alexander Crowely, with a certain small inscription scratched into the back by a blade.  A third, even more curious item would arrive via less conventional means, and would be waiting for him at a penthouse suite cattycorner to the Czech National Bank.

Rupert finally caught up with the murderess in the catacombs underneath St. Vitus, prowling the tombs of her erstwhile contemporaries.  This setting was no coincidence, of course.  The monster’s dark visions drove her at the lash, forcing the gradual intersection of chance and choice that would lead inevitably to their strange, shared fate. 

If Rupert had his way, the events that transpired down there in the quiet hallows would be taken directly to his grave.  When he’d finished his dark deed, The Plan was almost immediately born.  In all honesty, he couldn’t wait to scrub the memory of his dealings with Drusilla from his brain.

But now, staring at the lost little girl chained under the piano, it washed over him again in sultry waves, both drowning him and baptizing his resolve.  Since he knew he was quite likely damned to Hell, Rupert was more determined than ever that it wouldn’t be for naught.  Drusilla and Ethan were, in many ways, the perfect allies to play out this bitter endgame.  Who better to rend apart the mad designs of angels?

The Slayer stirred as he thought this, troubled by invisible storms.  Xander and Spike were gone, swept to a far corner of the chess board to trap and eliminate the enemy Queen.  Such bold gambits usually required a sacrifice, he knew.  Buffy Summers knew this rule as well.  She would awaken, eventually, to once again tally her losses and carry on the fight.  They had chosen well, with her.  Perhaps too well.

Rupert wandered to the window, drawn by the red bands on the horizon that would soon harden to blue.  In one way or another, today would be the end of a world.   He could only hope it would be the right one.

***

Boston, 12:07 a.m

---

This is it. 

No more excuses.  No gobshite from the usual suspects.  No more bloody Hell-A, nor the barking mad hypocrisies of  its amply forehead-ed potentate.  No more mincing around in the shadows like him, either, pretending to be a fairy story hero.  And no more quiet moments alone in the Hills, reflecting on the invisible claws of the Devil’s own Repo Man.  On that clean and cold surgery that removed your vagabond spark.

No more dreams of her eyes, thank Bloody God.  No more picturing how green they sometimes seemed to be, like stolen emeralds set in snowbanks.  No lying awake for hours upon hours, haunted by echoes and wondering at the strange and fearful sensation of empty arms.

No more sodding delusions, mate.  From now on, its the land of the Real for you. 

And It’s right here in front of you, stretching for black miles.  For eternity.  Because Rayne bollixed it.

'Cause you been here before.

At the bottom is the mirror.  The nightmare sun, ringed by spiders.  This time you’ll stop fighting, and give yourself over to it.  Fourth time.

Fourth times a charm.

This is it.  This is the-

“Ow!”  He thudded heavily off a stone staircase.  The portal had shat him out in mid-air, about fifteen feet up.  Wagging his head, dizzy from both the journey and it’s abrupt end, Spike took a moment to marvel at the fact that he was wagging anything at all.  Three feet to the left or right, and he’d be embedded in the brickwork like some ghastly patch of ivy.

No time for what-ifs, love.  Kittens are all on the table now, and you still got one last hand left to pla-

“OW!”  The thing crashed down like a meteorite, sending both him and it tumbling down the steps in a painful knot.  And when Spike looked to see what it was, he almost bloody lost it.

“Xander, you pillock!” he roared.  “What in soddin’ hell did you do?!”

The boy labored slowly to his feet, his lone, barmy eye gleaming like a dagger in the torchlight.  “Something I will surely regret, any second now.”  He held out Rayne’s bauble.  “You forgot something.”

Spike felt the old poison well up inside.  “Wanker!   What part of one-way ticket didn't you get?  Was I speaking in bloody tongues?!”  A rock concert of echoes howled all around them, the microphone in the helmet setting the bloody world on fire. 

“Hey could you speak up?” Xander hissed.  “I think there’s a few Himalayan sherpas who couldn’t hear you.”

Taking the bastard’s point, Spike tugged off the mask.  The air that pooled in his nostrils was clammy and still, and he knew immediately that they were someplace well underground.

“Of all the sodding-” he started to say.  It felt like there was no end to these jokes, and none of them were remotely funny.  For a long time Spike thought he'd dearly like to meet the jester, and to bite the living fuck out of him.  But for one bright moment, standing at the precipice, it all seemed so much simpler than that.  One last twist of the knife and there would be an ending, of sorts; a tart coda to a very long and miserable poem.

Xander, as usual looked to be mostly oblivious.  Spike knew it from the beginning, back in fair old Sunny-D.  There was too much humanity in the lad for this line of work.  “Just keep out of my way,” he warned.  “Last thing I need is you goin’ and getting yourself hacked to bits on my watch.”

“I’m deeply moved.” 

“I mean it, you tit.  You’re all thumbs and elbows.”

“Hey, any other random body parts you want to throw in there?”

Spike glowered back.  This was a kink in the plan, for sure.  Much as he despised the boy, he didn’t want Xander to see this end bit play out.  The thought occurred that he might have a few delusions left after all.  “Keep your bloody trinket,” he said.  “Maybe your pal Rayne’ll come through, an’ maybe he won’t.  Or maybe you’ll burst into merry flames.  Just keep it away from me, yeah?”

They stood there for a long moment in the chill, surveying their options.  There appeared, at the moment, to be only two.  “Well,” the boy sighed, “whaddya think, o' Prince of Dorkness?   Up or down?”

He gave the air another sniff.  There didn’t seem to be a thing at all alive in it.  “Down.”

“And this is based on?”

“Experience,” Spike muttered, not missing a beat.  “It’s bloody well always down…”

Chapter 33:  Scary Monsters

Boston 12:13 am

---

Tara Maclay heard her death nearly an entire second before she saw it.  There was a sting of peppery feedback in her ears and then the monster was just there, looming through the shadows like a ghostly tarantula on long, flickering limbs. 

“Fressius,” she hissed.  A ray of light sailed arrow-like off the tip of the wand, exploding into ribbons of fire across the beast’s black shape.

It kept coming.

“Manners,” the thing whispered.  Its voice was strangely human, but far away and hollow, like someone trapped at the bottom of a deep well.  “A poor way to greet a friend, dove.  Let’s try again, shall we?”

Something inside was screaming at Tara to run, but she held her ground, guessing that panic would only get her murdered faster.  Eyes rolling heavenward, she summoned the Aegis of Orahz P’hule, and a moment later the old demigod’s shield was descending over her like a column of warm, green rain.

The monster wiggled a tentacle at her, nonplussed.  “Pretty.   But we mustn’t waste our time with this bloody Hollywood rubbish, my dear.  There’s so little left.”

With that, it crept closer still, and was revealed shockingly in a shard of light.  Somewhere behind the cobwebs of its dark otherflesh, Tara recognized an all too human face leering back at her.

“Rayne,” she said.

“Correct, sister.  And you must be the witch’s pet.  Heard lots about you, love.”

“Doubt it.”  She felt a nervous energy surging though every blood cell, plowing the road for battle.  “If you heard what I did to those fucking traitors in Santa Fe, I don’t think you’d let me anywhere near your sorry ass.”   

“Yes,” the warlock chirped.  “Vengeful.  Like that other bird.   But you’re much worse, sister.  So unprofessional.”

At this, she raised the wand again, but the man-thing kept coming and coming, undeterred.  Whatever horror Rayne had summoned upon himself was very old, and its power lapped back at her on harrowing waves.  Tara eyed the set of doors at the far end of the cafeteria skeptically.

Twenty yards, she guessed.  She wasn’t much of a runner. 

Buy some time.

“You said you’re a friend.   What did you mean by that?”

Wicked laughter echoed through the hall, like a rock scraping a metal sheet.  “Well it’s relative, isn’t it?" he said.  "Enemy of my enemy, and all that rot.  Unless you had something more in mind.”  A scar-like smile twisted across the old fiend’s face. 

Rayne was nuts, for sure.   But, in some unbelievable, unaccountable way, he also seemed to be telling the truth.  Tara wasn’t sure what was more chilling: that he'd decided to help her, or that he seemed to be enjoying it.  Watching that smile of his, hovering in the folds of a ten thousand year old alien devil, she found her next words difficult to say.

“What do you want?” she managed.

“I want to get you where you’re going, Tara.” 

“And where is that?”

***

“Down,” Harmony snarked.  “Big surprise.”

She was starting to get tired of the whole sich’.  It was bad enough getting roped into this whole Let’s Storm the Un-stormable Castle dealie, but she hadn’t expected that Rupee's big master plan would be to bore them all to death.  Past the quasi-cool lobby, the rest of the building seemed to contain the same dumb hallway copied and pasted a million times, all lit by the kind of long fluorescent planks that always made her skin look way gross.  Not Anya-gross, maybe.  But Oz-gross, at least.

And, oh yeah, Oz.

Big giant help he was turning out to be.  For the last ten minutes, he was either telling her to “shut up” or “go down.”  Hello!  Like, when did this suicide mission turn into a lame-o Sunny-D frat party?  And that crossbow of his was Oooh, Scary.  If Harm was some mega-powered mystical so-and-so like Giles, she’d be so majorly bummed to see a midget with a stick that could shoot out another, smaller stick.

Seriously.

L to the M to the A to the O…

“Whoa,” Oz whispered.  “You see that?”

“See what?”  But when she followed his gaze out to the far end of the hall, there was something there.  It was sticking up out of the floor a few feet in front of an emergency staircase, and it looked sort of like a weird little tree.  She frowned at it.  “Oh.  So.  Okay.”

Before she could think of anything more interesting to say, Oz aimed his Super Macho Stick-Shooter at it and started walking, ninja style.  She followed him in the normal, non-geek way, picking idly at a fang. 

As they got closer, Harmony began to realize that it wasn’t a tree at all.  Reminded her more of a picture in an old biology textbook; the gross kind, where they slice someone down the middle and show you what’s inside.  The thing’s thick pink trunk seemed to have smashed up through the floorboards, and then splintered off into a bramble of ropelike veins.  She could smell something interesting inside.  Oz kept tilting and tilting his head at it, until it looked like it might fall off. 

“Maybe it’s, like, a joke, or something,” she said, not really thinking it was very funny at all.

“This is Giles were talking about here, Harm.  Not… Caesar Romero.”

“Look, don’t get all snippy!  You’re the one who keeps whining 'down, down, we must go down'.  Well, stairs go down.  There’s the stairs.”

He seemed to consider this for a second.  “Alright.  Let’s just go.  If it starts doing anything funny, we haul ass.”

They were maybe ten feet away when it starting doing something funny. 

Well, not funny, really, so much as...

Sexy?

Okay, maybe not the right word for it either.  But something was tingling down in the region of Harmony's belly.  The pink tree was singing something, or humming it.  It was a song Harmony never heard before in her life or after it, but that was so familiar she could’ve sworn she made it up herself, and her skin was suddenly sun-warm, and the warmth filled her with little electric bubbles that tickled every time they popped.

Harmony floated towards it, dreamily.  She was lifted by the bubbles, the tree’s glistening candy form tickling every inch of her body.  Oz and the hall and the war and the whole stupid world seemed to burn away to nothing along its edges. 

The tree was sparking like a third rail when she kissed it, when her fangs glided down into its supple, red bark.   Somewhere nearby, a voice was screaming her name, telling her to stop, stop, but it was already way too late.  The sugary blood was firing into her lips, a steaming jet of rainbows and kittens and birthday presents and glitter. 

Two seconds later, Harmony knew exactly how God tasted (sort of like Skittles, actually; she never would have guessed that).

In the third second, all human language left her.

In the fourth, a thousand memories were washed clean away.  One moment she forgot her name, and in the next, she forgot she had forgotten it.

In a final panic she fought back, atoms spinning furiously along the walls of the her throat in an attempt to trigger an old, well-honed gag reflex.  This effort was more costly then Harmony  the vampire would ever know.  There was a screaming flash of white, the universe blown over with snow and cheering trumpets. 

After that: the honey-sweet nectar kept firing into a bottomless cup, a pair of lips and fangs working without orders, filling and filling but never filling up.

Branches folded around her like arms, drawing her inside the vein.  The lights went out.

Machine Girl Tree Drink. 

Gone.

***

The door had one of those little pictures on it: a stick man walking down some stick stairs.  Looked like as good a plan as any.  Anya was halfway there when she felt the icy presence, a thing alien to this world.   Whatever it was, she decided it wasn’t going to like the welcoming committee much.  She hefted her old gladius, probing the shadows for signs of something fun to stab it with. 

“See, I’m a little overdressed for the whole Slasher Flick marathon,” she announced.  “And, you know.  Got important stuff to do, so, whaddya say we just skip right to the big death scene?”

The door obliged, exploding off its hinges, and a big streak of orange surged out.  Anya pivoted at last possible moment, hewing at a gruesome length of spine.

The flesh parted cleanly, spraying her with whatever gunk the monster used for blood.   Its chittering death wail reminded her of an old song from the 60’s.

The 1560’s, that is.

"Well, that was fast,” she said, tickling the dead thing’s jaw with her blade.  “I mean, not to criticize your performance or anything, but I have had better. Much better.”

She nudged her way past the shattered door frame and into the stairwell.  Peering over the banister, the full stupidity of their plan began to dawn on her.  The Slayer had a poker up her butt as hot as the one up Anya’s.    Or another, less sexually-intriguing metaphor, even.  In an ideal world, the two would’ve just fast-forwarded to the hot blond-on-blond action, and the big dramatic showdown.

But this wasn’t an ideal world, she thought.

Plus it already happened, Anyanka dear.  And she kicked your vengeance-wreaking ass.

She shook off the bad-thoughts and soldiered on.  She was about three flights down when she started to hear the voices.  They were low, wicked whispers at first, interspersed with the giggles.   It was like the sound of evil children at play.  She squinted down into the black belly of a sub basement, more annoyed than anything.

"Pretty weak, Giles,” she said.  “I mean, you know you can’t scare me, right?  I’m… unscare-able.”  More giggling, and the tramping of tiny feet.  She resumed her descent, wondering at the man’s newfound flair for the dramatic.  Normally, Rupert Giles was about as exciting and mysterious as a slice of wheat toast.  This made sense; Watchers weren't typically selected for their sparkling creativity.

Meanwhile, a good sense of theater was pretty much a job requirement for a Vengeance Demon-ing Biz, and the best ones were chock full of it.   Any moron could just go on a boring killing spree.  Just load up the .44 magnum, march into Ye Olde Postal Office and start blasting away.   But true vengeance, like true art, required a bit more style; the sort of sharp, clean poetry that removed all debt and doubt.

There were many creatures out there designed for revenge, a whole Wal-Mart selection of dull-as-dishwater golems and chain-rattling wraiths who could get the job done on the cheap.  But the sort of monster that dwelled inside Anya's human host was from a different tax bracket altogether, the power of a djinn married to the wrath of a spurned goddess.  In fact, there was only one being in all the worlds who rivaled them in artistry and cruelty. And someone would have to be pretty darn crazy to order up one of those.

She shuddered momentarily as an old image wormed its way into her brain.  It was true, mostly: Anya was damn near impossible to scare.  In hundreds of years, there was only monster that had managed to do it.  Other than the bunnies, of course.

Her cousins had been given many names over the years: The Dirae, The Erinýes, The Daughters of the Night.  The Kindly Ones, was perhaps Anya’s favorite.  That one was so twisted, it made a weird kind of sense.

But the English translation was both the least imaginative and the most accurate.  They called them The Furies.  And if you ever ran afoul of one, it meant your life was going to become very, very painful.

And very, very short.

***

London 7:35 am

---

In and out, in and out, in and out.  The walls were black and white and red all over, rising everywhere, sometimes right in front of Andrew's face, smashing the nose and lips. His breath was still coming and going, for some unknown reason.  The monster chasing him kept giggling, the sound echoing everywhere in the nowhere tunnels.

A third smashed nose sent him pinballing into an iron belly the length of a soccer field.  For a moment, it reminded him of the hanger in Romania, when the gun was in his hands.  There was no gun this time, and there was no reason for one because everyone was dead except for him.

"Dude, I thought knives were your thing,” a voice said, and it was Jonathan’s voice, and it sounded so calm and normal that it could’ve been a funny thing to say.  It was close, at his shoulder, really, just suddenly in his ear like when a bee bumps into it.  And when Andrew heard it, he didn't turn or run, but fell to his knees and began to cry.

 This was a surprising thing for him to do on many levels.  Andrew hadn’t cried in a really long time, years and years at this point, and he wasn’t a very good crier to begin with. Didn’t quite have the build for a really hearty, full-bodied sob.

But now it came: smashed red nose running, eyes like two fists, skipping like a scratched record.  The old scene played out again in vivid color.  Andrew saw the knife flashing out, and felt the little push-pull when it broke the skin, felt how Jonathan’s body flinched a half a second too late, like when someone wakes up from a very bad dream.  The world had scribbled all these notes down in her little journal, and no matter what else happened from now until the end of time the notes would never change.  They would never stop being true.

The ghost squatted down low and waited for Andrew’s eyes to open again.  When they finally did, Jonathan was smiling a warm and slightly bemused smile.  There was no blood on him now – not in his mouth, not on his clothes – and his skin was glowing the sort of SoCal orange you sometimes got from just walking around without any sunscreen.  He seemed content to just sit there waiting, and when Andrew stopped crying they both just sat there, staring at each other for what felt like a very long time.

Jonathan looked much younger then he would’ve been; even younger than he was the day he died.  In his bright yellow t-shirt striped with skinny blue lines, this could have been old High School Jonathan, and the two of them could've been getting set to argue about where Scotty got his warp engineering degree, or maybe to watch old Who reruns in his mom’s basement.  This was before everything: before Hellhounds and Vampires and Warren, before Katrina and the van and Mexico and the First.  Back then, evil was a totally different thing.  Evil was the varsity football team dishing out wedgies for breakfast and swirlies for lunch.   Evil was a bitchy cheerleader's laughter.

“So,” Jonathan said,  “I guess you know what this is all about, huh?”  Andrew gave his head a quick, jerky nod.  “Well, what do you think I should do?  I mean, how should we start?”

“Are you gonna kill me?”

The phantom snickered.  “Dude!  Does a Sarlaac reproduce by releasing spore clusters into deep space?”

“I… forget?”

Something was happening in the dead boy’s face now, the warmth from before gradually being replaced by something old and terrible.  The smell of rotten steak returned, stronger then ever, and the sound of the world started to drown under a high-pitched whistle, like a teapot on full boil.

“Not the eyes,” Jonathan said, and clicked his teeth.   “You’re gonna need those for awhile.  The hair, maybe.  Ya know, I was always jealous of that hair, man.  So ruffly…”

“Ow!”  Andrew peered at the lock of his own hair suddenly in his hand.  It was an amazing feeling, staring at it, with something like hot helium pumping in the veins on one arm. 

Jonathan hooted at him.  “Do it again, again, again,” he chanted, genuinely excited. 

Before he knew what was happening, Andrew’s hand went back up and ripped loose another clump.  He looked down at it and it was bigger this time. 

He tried to will the arm to stop, but it kept going about its business, as grim and persistent as a nightmare.  Jonathan was becoming giddier by the second, clapping and cheering each time the hand went up for another clump.  By the fifth time, Andrew’s fingers were wet with blood.

He staggered to his feet and fled deeper into the vault, moaning and wailing.  The possessed limb kept yanking and tugging at his scalp the whole way, scattering gleeful hunks like confetti as he went.

“Oh, someone get the popcorn!” Johnathan shrieked, trailing just a few steps behind.  “'Cause this show is friggin’ awesome!” 

Everything seemed to be on fire.  The panic gave way, like a floor falling out from under him.  There was no place to hide this time, and no one to save him.  There was only the Andrew the murderer and Casper the Unfriendly Ghost and the little handfuls of bloody hair.  He felt his fingernails dragging across a patch of raw scalp, and he was sure they were digging for the bone. 

As the pair crossed a path between two bulkheads, Andrew heard a deep rumbling noise.  Something huge leapt out from the shadows, like a vast green wave.  He collapsed in a heap as it whipped past him, Jonathan's puppet strings suddenly clipped.

The next few seconds were very weird, with everything seeming to happen in slow motion.  Andrew twisted sideways in time to see Melvin pounce at Jonathan.

Except, it wasn’t Jonathan anymore, but a creature he’d never seen before. 

It was like a woman but not a woman.  She had writhing snakes for hair, and her eye sockets gushed blood like a pair of open faucets.  The body seemed to emit a sickly glow, full of blue Christmas lights.  The two monsters danced around each other for a long moment, feinting and circling like boxers.  Then, without a word, the female turned and sprinted out across the deck.  Melvin chased after her like a giant cat, loping on all fours as they both disappeared back into the darkness. 

Bit by bit the whistling teapot sound slowly disappeared, fading back into the chattering grind of the generators. 

For a few seconds, Andrew fought to stay awake.  It wasn’t much of a fight.

***

Frank Grange stalked along the path that connected the dormitories to the library, flanked by a squad of his best men.  With Lehane and Summers missing in action, a girl named Flo – No shit! – Nightingale had hung back to hold the Slayers' swiftly crumbling front lines.  Rupert’s hag squad had managed to slow their enemy down a little, but Frank hoped they were just stalling for time until they could get their act together and break out the serious firepower.

Or, rather, if they could get their act together.  Something about those girls scared the holy piss out of Frank, and not in a good way.

For the moment, Kennedy’s sneak attack still looked one raging hell of a success.  This wasn’t the first time the Agency had been caught with its panties down, but it was maybe the worst.  He was trying his damnedest not to be impressed.

Then, just as they reached the library’s manicured lawn, that plan went tits-up too.  The sky darkened in an eerie way, a dome of black glass gliding across the London sky.   He watched in dull horror as the last sliver of the cityscape vanished behind it, like a tomb sealing shut.   Oddly enough, it left behind some memory of light in its wake; a ghost of the sun that covered everything with a moonish glow.  Grange eyed this development resentfully.  Whatever it was Kennedy and her Cause had brought along for the ride, it was no minor league mojo.

The squad hustled into the library at the quickstep, Grange huffing and puffing just a bit more than he would’ve liked to at his age.  The angles of the place looked weird in the gray glow that poured though the windows.  He heard the voices of the Council's Wiccans drift down from the second landing on lilting waves.  Grange ordered Sergeant Duncan to go on and secure the perimeter, and then he puffed up the stairs to pow-wow with the gals, filled with a feeling like dread.  He knew he was quite a bit better at dealing with the Crystal Ball crowd than Maggie Walsh, but these broads were just excruciating.  It was like talking to someone who was deaf, and Chinese.

And as high as goddamned kite.

“Oh-em-gee! Oh-em-gee!” screeched Mindy.  Or Cindy.

“Like, right?” agreed Whatsername.  The blond one.  “I mean, dubba-you tee eff?”

“Nix on the Heliofaust pocus,” said Crystal, googling furiously on a thin sliver laptop.  “Wiki says it’s the ‘tardness.”

“Yubya Exalta?”

“Ell-em-eff-ayy-oh!  Fail!  That’s even ‘tarder.”

“You’re ‘tarder!”

“Ess-tee-eff-yoo, noob!”

“Whatever!”

“Whatever whatever!”

“Alright, that’s enough outta you,” Grange barked.  He felt his blood pressure spiking again.  On top of everything else going on, all their mumbo jumbo was going to give him a damn stroke.  “Status report, people.  In English.”

“Uh, bad,” Crystal said.  “Tried a sleeping charm, but it was an epic fail.”

“Everything’s an epic fail,” whined Mindy/Cindy.  “I’m telling you, it’s that dome-thingy up there.  It’s doing a whole Short Circuit City on our mystical wi-fi, dude.”

“What the hell is it?!”  Frank shouted, at no one in particular.

Crystal shook her head sullenly.  “It’s not magic, whatever it is.  Eye-emm-oh, it’s some kind of next gen tech.  Like, not iPod poo poo, but, like, real Futurama, Terminator poo poo.”

“Well, can we break through the goddamned thing or not?” 

“I-Dee-Kay, General.   Wouldn’t rec trying to walk through, unless you want a super cheap funeral.”

“Feels like the source is mobile,” added Blondie.  “Something is projecting it.  Or someone.”

“Okay, that’s a start," he said.  "So, where’s it coming from?”

The girl exchanged a few vague nods and then huddled around their Seer’s stone, whispering what sounded like a little ditty.  Frank squinted down across the yard while they worked their mojo.  Dots of color screamed across the campus boulevard, framed by the blackest black he’d ever seen.  Dawn had estimated Kennedy’s numbers at about three hundred strong, but suddenly that felt like a very lowball figure.  Factor in those Chakau Ri’ bastards, and this fight was beginning to look like a one-sided slaughter.  His mind wandered to Waterloo, to Gettysburg.  He allowed the notion to creep into his brain that fighting them here could be a mistake, that maybe a calculated retreat was in order.  When all was said and done, George Washington wasn’t much of a field general, but the sonofabitch sure as hell knew how to run away…

“Uh oh,” said Mindy.

“Not good,” said Crystal.

“What now?”  Frank asked.  The witches peered back at him sheepishly, the color drained from their face.  “Did you get a fix?”

“Yuh huh.”

“Well, where is it coming from?”

“There.”

Grange followed the girl’s finger back across the atrium.  Out through the southern wall’s long clerestory window, a figure floated in mid-air.  She was almost spectral in her nudity, as white as a pearl.  There was a long distance between them, but it could’ve been thirty miles and Frank Grange still would’ve recognized the little monster.  She was looking right at him.

Smiling.

***

Dawn fiddled with the headset again.  The hiss of the static had been dropping in and out for a few minutes now, and as she crossed the threshold into Sector H, it vanished completely.  “Grange, Frank,” she enunciated, and the auto-dialer bleeped to life.  There was a long tone, and then the old soldier’s voice started barking out.

“Summers,” he said, “what’s your position?”

“I’m down on H.  Headed for the Library.”

“The hell you are,” he said.  “You’re gonna rendezvous with Commander Singer at the command center, that’s what you’re doing.”  Normally, there was something comforting about Frank’s salt and gravel drawl.  Hardly anything ever seemed to shake the guy.  Hardly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”  There was a long pause, and something like a sigh.  “Vi will be waiting for you at the A5 gate.  As soon as we can get a secure channel up an’ runnin’, I want you to organize an full evacuation through the tunnels.  Seems like that black junk don’t reach down there, for whatever reason.  Get as many out as you can, and then haul ass for Ipswich.”  Another pause, and the now familiar sound of soldiers shouting code words nearby.  “You’re in charge now, buckaroo.  Happy trails.”

Dawn swallowed hard, realizing something.  “And what are you going to do?”

Another long, grim silence.  “Whatever we can.”

“Frank, I…”

In the background, she thought she could hear some screams, and the chill sound of glass breaking.  “Get going, now,” he said, and then he began to say something else that Dawn would never hear, because that’s when the line cut dead.

***

Boston, 12:28 a.m

---

There was something familiar about the place.  The high arched ceilings were scorched black, and tattooed with all manner of sigils and charms.  A thought occurred to Willow that she'd dreamed of this place once before, back in her real world and real life.  When she spotted the chiseled relief of the Masonic moon she was suddenly sure of this.  Its strange face glowered back at her, as if to chastise her for any lingering doubts.  Fate had carried her here.

Or, that’s what Giles wanted her to think.  Perhaps the old mystic was toying with her mind.

Don’t go there, girl, she thought.  Once she started down that road, Willow knew there was no going back.  She had to trust her instincts.  They were the sharpest weapons she had, and this world’s Giles seemed to be a far more dangerous opponent then she could have imagined.

Not to mention her other opponent.  The one she came to bury.

As Willow forged ahead, she felt her body grow cold and clammy.  She was thinning her own oxygen intake, forcing the flesh to be quiet enough for her soul to contact her scattered allies.  There was a soft rustling somewhere out in the shadows, like leaves and whispers drifting on a wind of static.  She listened for a while, letting her mind roll on the gusts.

A name blew past, like an old and unwelcome lover.

Osiris.

Of all the gin joints, in all the world, why did I have to necromance into yours?

It was unnerving, that memory.  For so many years it was all ‘Goddess this’ and ‘Goddess that’  and ‘Blessed Fucking Be.’  And for what?  So she could wind up prostrating herself before the baby bro of Isis, anointing herself in a cup of…

Not in the land of helping.  It’s not like you have time to waste on this stuff, Lil’ Miss Uber Witch. 

Heck, it’s not like you even have ‘time’ at all.  Where and when the Hades are you anyway?  Somewhere Boston-y?  In some timeline that might-not-exist-soon because of some other timeline that might-not-exist-soon?        

The Now was messing with her radar.  It was closing in by the nanosecond, leaving behind only vague fingerprints.  Willow did know one trick to get around this, and she somehow failed to talk herself out of trying it.

She shed her mind, quickly and silently, peeling back pieces of her psyche to reveal the colorless thing inside.  As the cool air pinged off her skin, a familiar wave of diodes began to course through her astral body, sending and receiving millions of signals per second.  Slowly, the long, spidery fingers of the Witch crept out into the ether, probing for souls.

Buffy and Giles were very close.   And they weren’t the only ones.  Willow could feel Tara and Anya slipping though the fog, on their way as well.  Oz was more remote, in some sort of blurry trouble.  Harmony was already gone, coldly swept from the chessboard. 

She kept probing, a strange presence troubling her brow.  There were two others in the Institute as well.  They were the closest of all, but somehow the most difficult to see.  Willow watched their male shapes click along a stone path.  It felt as though they were an inevitable part of this world but somehow completely alien to it.  A blue cloud loomed before them, like a door with the lock broken off.  They were headed straight for it, determined to pass through.  She strained to conjure their faces. They weren't from here.  They were…

It was crazy.  Aura-boggling.  And it as much as it couldn’t possibly be true, that’s exactly how true it was.

Words trickled in from her back-brain.  Something she’d typed in an email, what felt like a hundred years ago but was much, much sooner: ‘Spike is on his way.  Your Spike, that is.“

"Oh,” she started, eyes firing wide open.  “Oh Goddess.”    

What have they done?   

***

“Steady, now,” the vampire groused.  “Don’t go bungling in like Captain Bloody Pickett.”

Xander felt his Irish getting up.  And he wasn’t even Irish.  “First of all,” he said, “Pickett was a General, you red-coated…”

“What?”

“Uh...”  Xander frowned.  Spike shot him a look like he was something in a Petri dish.  “Sorry.  Guess I kinda got hung up on the whole red thing.  You know.  Red.  Blood.  You, uh, used to wear a coat.  Anyway, you were saying?”

“Saying,” Spike muttered.  He seemed distracted, those gleaming eyes of his burnt down to husks.  “Saying, she’s in there.  Sayin' I can feel it.”

They stared into the blue fog again.  There seemed to be some sort of light inside, and gauzy shapes moving behind its folds.   It was hard to make out what they were doing.   Spike drifted towards them, becoming somehow less solid as he did, his bleached corpse hair almost transparent in the undulating glow.   A moment later Xander was following him, Rayne’s strange talisman clenched in a shaking fist.  He thought of frying pans and fires and…

And what? Xander mused.

What was worse than fire?

He watched anxiously as the mist enclosed over William the Bloody and drank him out of view.  Before he could think better of it, it was drinking Xander too, the world freezing to silver ice as they crossed some nameless threshold.  Right before they did, Xander thought he heard just a hair wisp of a voice, trailing backwards into infinity.  It sounded a heckuva lot like Tara Maclay, but by then it was a too late to contemplate that wacky notion. 

The last thought Xander had – before the rest of them, for the rest of his life – was that, at this point in the game, he was basically ready for anything.

And he was almost right.

They sort of just stood there staring at it for a minute, letting it sink all the way in.  The sign stared back at them like a cheerfully stupid and single-minded dog:

WELCOME TO SUNNYDALE

EST. 1909
POPULATION: 2

Xander turned to look at the blue mist, which was just a strip of state highway now, then turned back, and then did both of these things again.  He wondered if that counted as a quadruple-take, and decided that if it was, then it was totally worth it.  The vampire just stood very still, face set like a cowboy in an old shoot’em’up Western.  They had some sort of history, Xander guessed – Spike and the sign.

“Okay,” Xander said, “so this is, what?  The past?”  Spike shook his head slowly, still seeming a little zombie-fied.  Just out of it.  “Then, it’s a trick!”

“Yeah,” Spike agreed.   “Bloody good one, at that.”

“Except... I don’t get it.  Why would Ethan go to all this trouble?”

“Hell if I know.  Said he was some kinda illusionist, yeah?”

“Understatement,” said Xander.  “But yeah.”

They became quiet again, looking out past the sign at their old resurrected stomping grounds, the place where everything began.  It looked about the same as it did in Xander’s dreams and nightmares, its squat landmarks and green, landscaped parks interrupting the desert like a rude houseguest.  It seemed both wrong and mercilessly appropriate at the same time.   He thought again of the job they'd signed up for, and wondered whether either of them had the hard southern cement to actually go through with it.  He heard himself ask the vampire if she was here or not.

“She’s here,” he said, and started marching off towards the lights of the town, his boots making little crunching noises on the packed pebbles and sand that sounded like the end of a very sad song.  Xander took a deep breath and then followed along, the two of them playing off together into the night.

***

“Buffy?”

“What?”

“Buffy!”

“What?!”

“Bloody hell are you doing up there?”

“Just a minute!”  Skaya booted her way though the Technicolor snowdrift of clothes, eyeing a fuchsia camisole suspiciously as she went.   After a few moments of Talmudic debate, she placed it with the others on the bedspread.  Hands on hips, she surveyed the field of candidates one last time.

“Slayer, we are gonna be late!”

It was probably true.  Not that she was in any position to care.  None of this was real, as far as she could tell.  Or, at least, not real enough for a girl to go and lose her marbles over.  And that’s what she told herself as she slipped the winner over her head, smoothing and straightening it in the long dressing mirror like it was the most normal thing in the world to do.  Like she was normal, too; like her past wasn’t any more her own than the face that smiled back at her from the glass now, looking more youthful and hopeful than she’d ever actually felt, even back then.  It would’ve been a cruel hoax if everything wasn’t so...

Nice?

Downstairs, his voice kept ringing out, more royally annoyed than angry.  She grabbed a pair of white Guccis and hit the hallway running, tugging on one and then the other as she went.  By the time she hit the last stair, her heart was thumping out a techno beat in her ears, excited by the insanity of it all.  The vampire was still reclining in the old beige barcalounger; leg slung over one arm, coat flared open like the leathery wings of a bat.   He was trying to look cool, she realized, but not trying too hard.  It was his eyes that gave him away, as usual.  They shot wide and round for a moment, almost like he was alarmed at the sight of her.

“You look,” he said.  “You look…”

“What?”

“You look, uh, ready to go,” he mumbled, and then made a big show of standing up, arranging and rearranging things in his pockets, lighting a smoke, and generally trying to look surly and put upon.  “Bout sodding time, too.  Promised I’d get you there before the big surprise.  ‘Nother five minutes and you’d’ve made a liar outta me, on top of everything else.”

She managed to stifle the grin, decided to stand there blinking at him and pretending to be bored instead.  This was a nasty old trap, she knew, but he fell for it every time.  He goggled at her like a thief at a diamond, dumbstruck as she slowly and luxuriously closed the gap between them.  All of their arms moved involuntarily, curling into place around hips and shoulders.  They stood that way for a long moment, like dancers awaiting the first note of their favorite song.

“It's just, they been plannin’ it for weeks…”

“And you don’t want to disappoint them.  Awwww.”

“No, it’s not…  There’s a cake.”   

“Think I saw some Entenmann’s in the kitchen,” she murmured.  “We could always stay in.  Feed each other.”

The vamp shuddered at the F-word, whispered like a threat in his ear.  She delighted at the idea of him fighting his own body.  Really putting up a hell of a brawl too, she thought, his fingers trying to decide whether to pull her close or retreat, as though she were something that was both precious and on fire.

“No, no,” he finally said.  “Just get in car and behave for once.  Gonna get me good and staked, you keep stallin’.”

She faked a pouty face, did one of those a melodramatic, twirly turns they do on all the cheesy soaps when they're about to make a big exit.  Something was singing in her chest when they sidled out into the Sunnydale night; not arm-in-arm, exactly, but side-by-side, for the first time in years.

Skaya drank in the familiar old scenery as she went, filled with something very close to awe.  The warlock’s little lockbox – this snowglobe world, this whatever-it-was – was less than real, but something more than a dream.   The Sunnydale she remembered was never exactly picturesque, but whatever small measure of beauty the old ‘berg had contained was on blazing display, as though painted by a genius with an especially lush and otherworldly palette.  Even the leaves on the trees were the sort of surreal, flawless green that you’d find on the stems of plastic roses.  This was all just more of Ethan’s lie, maybe, but it was an effortless, glorious lie.  And, little by little, she felt herself giving over to it.  Letting it just be.

Spike plucked open the Desoto’s passenger door, almost gentlemanly about it.  “Come along, pet,” he said, tongue flicking down suggestively.  “I’ll let you work the stick…”

Almost.

***

Buffy’s eyes snapped open, searching immediately for a clock.

10:22 a.m.

She shot bolt upright, managing to stir Giles from what appeared to be an accidental nap.  The Watcher crossed and uncrossed his legs in his chair, trying to decide whether to look nonchalant or determined.  Wordlessly, she sprang from the loveseat, roved in two small, birdlike circles, and then grabbed her jacket from a hook.

“Buffy…”

She kept going, tossing her arms down the sleeves.  Marched into the kitchen where Rayne was strewn across the floor like a broken cookie jar.  Kicked him.  “Get up.”

The warlock’s eyes fluttered to life, squinted at her through a fog of brandy.  “Eh?”

“We’re leaving.  Now.”

She didn’t wait around for him to defrost.  She was through waiting around for anyone, and least of all for him.  Back in the living room, she tossed a blanket over Drusilla, hiding her sleepless doll eyes.  Giles was getting his coat on, apparently in no mood to argue either.  He just plaintively asked her where they were going.

“We’re going to pick up Faith,” she explained.  “Then we're going back to the Council.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.  We’re not playing this game on Ethan’s turf anymore.”

“Fine,” he said.  “We’ll go back to the Council.  And assuming Mr. Grange doesn’t have us shot on sight, what then?”

She gave him a hard look.  “What then?  Then your drunk college buddy back there is gonna pull my friends out of whatever dumb dimension they’re stuck in.  That’s what then.”  She headed for the door.  “I’ll warm up the car.”

“Buffy, do you think that’s wise?”

“Warming up the car?  Yeah, it’s kinda chilly out there.”

“Buffy,” he said, “I’m sorry I never told you about Willow.”  When she turned to face him, his hands were shoved in his pockets, shoulders slumped in some signal of defeat.   “Or about, well, everything, really.  I just want you to know, there will be no more secrets between us.  But we must let them finish this.”

“We'll find another way,” she said, leaving again.

“And if we can’t?”  There was a familiar timber in his voice that she didn’t much like.  “If we can’t, then everything anyone has ever done will be for naught.  This is no mere end of the world we are talking about.  If they don’t kill her, then the book closes.  Once and for all.”

She let her hand slip from the door.  “No, Giles.  There’s always one last resort, worse come to worst.”

He studied her eyes skeptically.  “And what would that be?”

Buffy shrugged and then strode out into the chill London morning. “You can always kill me,” she called back to him, shivering as she went.

***

Kennedy marched fists-first into the  Women's Studies Center, clanging apart the heavy double doors with a sweep of her arms.  Along the rotunda’s red placental wall, an array of portraits gazed down at her approvingly: Joan D’Arc and Lucy Webb and Madonna.

The others followed her inside, the sounds of the raging battle outside vanishing sharply as the doors clanked shut.  Rhonda was still carrying the small metal case, and nothing else.  Kennedy had asked the girl to guard it with her life, and watching her now – her steely-eyed cadence as she crossed the hall, long arm keeping a straight line to the earth – she believed that Rhonda would. 

There were four of them; Rhonda Brown, Anna May Wilcox, Paulina Mireaux, and Big Bridget Forsythe.   Bridget was the enforcer; a tall bruising southpaw from Fulton County, Kentucky.  She was the only one Kennedy really trusted to handle herself in a brawl with Lehane or Summers, if it came to that.  More importantly, she’d keep the other girls in line, in case anyone started having second thoughts. 

Of course, if everything went smoothly, it would never come to that.  Kennedy zeroed in on the old daguerreotype of Susan B: still dominating the head of the chamber with her dowdy white frock and her librarian’s icewater eyes.   Frowning, Kennedy felt along the seam where the picture frame met the wall, fingers inching up until they found the hard plastic oval with the trigger in the center.  A moment later, the room whirred to life, huge rail-driven partitions lifting and separating to reveal the secret passage into what the Council called their “Ecto Containment Unit.”

Ghost Jail, Kennedy mused.  It seemed like the best spot to plant it, and the last place anyone would ever look.  Nancy Stark included.

“Mireaux?” she asked.  “What do you see?”

The geek fanned her little, booping gadget in the air a couple of times.  “I'm getting some weird readings, sir,” she whispered, sounding just a little spooked.  “Don’t know what to make of them, really…”

“I do,” Bridget grunted, unsheathing her broadsword.  “Soufflé.”

Kennedy grinned.  “Alright, ladies, you know what to do.  I’ll see you topside at 1300 hours.”  She watched them march single file into the titanium guts of the complex.  When their faces vanished behind a silver elevator door, she lingered a few moments longer, unsure why.   It finally dawned on her that she was waiting for the pang of remorse to hit. 

When it didn’t, she just turned and sauntered back out onto the green campus lawn.  The symphony of battle returned, sounding somewhat less than real under Nancy Stark’s eerie black sky.

Kennedy would head to Operations, now, while Nancy was off playing her enigmatic games.  As soon as Rhonda and the girls armed the nuke, Kennedy would set the timer remotely and head down into the tunnels.  Rupert had built a vast network down there; a spiderweb of high speed rail with access points all over London metropolitan and beyond.  She'd sabotage the switching station before she left, cutting off power to all but one car.  She’d ride that one to Maidstone and from there to Canterbury, and then on to Calais.   She’d watch the show from the banks of the channel with a flute of champagne, drinking to the birth of a New World Order. 

It was sure to be a grand show, too; a fire to end all fires.  They couldn’t just bury this one like they did Sunnydale.  But it was going to be a lot of fun to see them try.

And watch them squirm.  

***

Frank Grange crept slowly down the row.  His old legs were cramping a little, but mostly holding up.  Down on the ground floor, another scream rang out.  Just a scream, this time.  No yelp of return-fire, no shrill cries for help.  He thought it might’ve been Lt. Torres.  Although Frank never figured the young hotshot for a screamer, he was running out of voices to identify.

Kennedy’s monsters continued to shuffle around in the passageways.  Frank caught little glimpses of them here and there, but never the full picture.  About forty feet ahead, he spotted a leg as thick as a tree trunk pierce the junction, and caught the red gleam from a row of fangs.

He pulled the only heat he had – a gold plated Desert Eagle semi-automatic.  The gun was given to him as a gift on his 50th birthday, many moons ago.  He took steady aim, but the beast moved on, lurching out of sight.  It was either oblivious to him or pretending to be.

Or maybe he just don’t consider you a threat, old man.   The notion stung a little, but given the circumstances he wasn’t going to sit around sniveling about it.  It wasn’t like those ugly bastards were the only game in town, anyway.  Nancy Stark was in there with them, too.  The little psycho made one hell of an entrance; poor Mr. Giles’ pretty six figure window had exploded like it was hit with a claymore mine.

The thought of having a few claymores handy almost had Frank salivating.   Instead, he was hunkered down at the edge of the Classical Literature wing, clutching his little pea-shooter and trying to keep what was left of his old legs awake.   It suddenly felt like one hell of a dumb way to go out.  He'd always pictured something a little more exciting.  Maybe riding a horse or something.

Stark was talking again.  Frank tilted one ear towards the sound, trying to trace her ghostly echoes back to their source.  “And the moon gazed on my midnight labors,” she said, her voice vibrating with fake earnestness.   “While, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places...” 

Gritting his teeth, Frank thumbed off the gun’s safety and poked his head around a corner.  Past an squat island of card catalogs, he saw the silhouette of a girl suspended in air.  Her arms and legs were splayed out in a gruesome X, held in place by a rope made from a red twine of muscle and vein.  Mindy, or Cindy, was her name.

Frank thought of the Summers girl again and cursed himself.  He recounted his last orders, and suddenly wished he'd just told her to run, instead; to get as far away from here as she could, as fast as she fucking could, and to never look back.  After all, it was Frank who dragged her into this mess to begin with.  And now that it was all falling to ripe shit, it felt like he'd stuck the poor girl with the bill, too

Worst of all, he was going to die here.  That was bad for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that he wouldn’t ever know how it turned out, and whether Dawn made it or not.  If only he was a little younger, he mused, maybe he would’ve stood a chance.  Twenty or thirty years ago, Frank Grange was a force to be reckoned with.  Now, gazing up into the dead girl’s face, looking at a pair of eyes that were round with frozen horror, he thought about how the years just seemed to get away from him, and how life just seemed to whittle you down and whittle you down until all that was left was a salty snack for the vultures.

Be that as it may, he figured he might as well soldier it out.  Get it over with.  Hell, maybe he’d even get lucky, and drag a few chunks of the good Doctor Stark down to hell with him.

She was still talking, voice just above a whisper, teasing him with another quotation, from 'Proust' or some goddamned bullshit.  Trying to scare him, Frank figured, and it was almost working.  The woman always had a gift for that sort of thing.  Damn near everyone was spooked by Stark, back in the day.  It was her eyes, as much as anything; as pink and innocent as a newborn’s thumbs, but somehow terrible, and much older than their years. 

Frank prowled out towards the island.  He scanned each row for those little pink peepers of hers as he went, itching to sink a .44 caliber bullet between them and sincerely doubting she’d give him the chance.  The air in the library was freezing, but up in the rafters, the fans kept churning away for no apparent reason, drawing strange shadows that broke like waves over the tops of the bookshelves and across the polished concrete floors.

When he got to where the girl was hung up, he reached for her throat automatically, already knowing there was no pulse there but doing it anyway.

Aw, the hell with it. 

“Okay, darling,” he growled.  “Here I am.  You need an engraved invitation or what?”

It happened fast.  Out of the corner of one eye, he caught a glimmer of white smoke.  Then, it was Frank trying to pivot and feeling his damn leg go, just go, the left ankle crumbling apart like drywall at the hinge.  He hit the ground hard and heard a cry that he barely recognized as his own.

Nancy followed him down, giggling the whole way.  Her eyes were different now.  Full of dead stars and insects and a godawful light. 

Frank felt the gun go off three or four times in his hand and then it was gone and when he looked down he noticed his hand was gone too.

And the only thing he could think of, as she went to work on him and as his life spilled out in brown, slippery gallons, was: ‘Who is going to type it?’

Who is going to type the goddamned thing?

***

When the elevator arrived down on Ten Minus, the office door was already wide open.

That was Never a good sign, the man had learned.  You see, closed could mean a lot of different things.  Hardcore brooding and moping session.  Workout with one of Ormoch the Auditor's "negotiators."  Anguished, melodramatic phone call to You Know Who.  Turned into a puppet.  All kinds of shit.

Open, on the other hand, could only mean one kind of shit.  So, the man straightened his lapel collars, tipped a nod at Gladys, put on his best Cool Dude Face, and strolled right on inside.

“About time,” Angel snapped, barely bothering to look up.

There was a slim file in the old bloodsucker’s hand.  He'd never known Angel to be much of a paperwork junky, so it was fairly obvious what it was.  Had to be that same crazy ass report that had been haunting the man ever since he left Central. 

The vamp caught the glint of recognition in his eyes, and pounced on it.  “How long have you known about… this?”

"Thirteen hours.  Twelve if you don't count the nap I took on the ride up.”

Angel ran his fingers through his hair.  Every little motion he made was rickety.  The rumpled navy suit he wore looked about three days late for a trip to the dry cleaners.  The bastard had been drinking, too.  A half-kicked quart of double malt scotch sat unbuttoned on his desk blotter, alongside two tumblers and a tall glass of something red.

The vampire reloaded on the whiskey and gestured towards an empty chair.  A long moment passed that way, the two of them sitting around like it was the old days.  The man was tempted to ask for a glass, but it was either a bit too late or way, way too early for his taste.  With his travel schedule lately, it was hard to remember which.

He checked his watch again: 2:31 a.m.

Damn, he thought.  So, what time does it make it over there? 

Before he could finish doing the math, Angel started in with the obvious.  “We really got caught with our pants down on this one, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, man.  We really did.”

“How does something like… this… go down, and Hell doesn’t know about it?”

“Dude, you think they ain’t asking themselves the very same question?”  He eyed the whiskey again, all golden and full of tart warmth.  “Heads are rolling down in Crisis Management.  And I mean that, man.  I just came from there.  Literally rollin’ around on the floor.  Almost slipped and broke my ass.”

Angel seemed to deliberate on something for a moment, eyes shifting clock-like under that bedhead hairdo of his -- the one that still looked about eight years too young for him, eternal life or not.

“Any word on,” he started to ask.  And then trailed the hell off.

If the situation was different, and if so much hadn’t changed between them, the man might’ve cracked a smile.  “No, not yet," he said.  "To tell you the truth, it’s a little crazy down there right now.  This Now shit has got em’ all good and spooked.  It’s like rats leaving a sinking ship.  ‘Cept the ship already sunk, know what I mean?”

“You really believe that?”

Giving in to a sudden instinct, the man grabbed the bottle and tilted it, enjoying the sound of the yellow poison sloshing into the tumbler, like a musical note sliding up an octave.  To his new ears, everything sounded musical, symphonic.  This was one of the unadvertised perks.

“I believe,” he said, raising the glass, “whatever the bastards want me to believe.  You know that.”   Angel nodded grimly at this fact, and the man thought he saw something like sadness cross the monster's face.  “But,” he added, “we’ll play this out however you want.  The partners have put me at your complete disposal.  And considering this is probably our Going Out of Business Sale, they’re giving you full license here.”

Angel nodded, squinting down at the report again.  The old gears were spinning.  “My play, huh?”

“Your play.”

Silence.  Then, he hit the intercom.  “Gladys?”

“Yes, Mr. Angel?”

“Have Marty gas up the jet.  Tell him to be ready to fly in twenty minutes or it’s his butt on a stick.”

The vampire flicked off the mic.   And that was all there was to it.  There didn’t seem to be much left to say, so the two of them just sat there drinking and studying the walls.  Inside the hour, they’d be flying off to Jolly Old, either to save the world or to watch it end, blinking out of existence forever.

Not with a bang, but a whimper, the man mused, the whiskey simmering on the walls of his throat.  He tried and tried to care about this notion, but it was impossible these days, like a butterfly trying to crawl back inside the cocoon and become a caterpillar.  The best he could manage was a wry little chuckle.

“Let me ask you something,” Angel said.  “Was it worth it?”

“What?  Selling it, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably not,” said the man who used to be Charles Gunn, and kicked up his heels.  “But then again, it’s gotta be better than giving the shit away for free.”

Chapter 35:  Paving the Road

Well they say the sky's the limit
and to me that's really true,
but my friends you have seen nothin'.
Just wait 'til I get through because…
I’m bad.
I’m bad.
You know it.

- Michael Jackson

***