Xander parked his car on the street a block down from Foyles. He was in a whistling mood as he walked up the sidewalk to Go Ask Alice. The morning felt brisk and cool and full of possibility. He felt jazzed with the excitement of doing something out of character. Heck, he figured after Maya threw him out of the shop, he might just go jay walk and tread on the grass in Kensington Park.
When he got to the bookstore, Xander found the shop darkened. No big surprise there. He had seen the broken light bulbs himself, and the ceilings were exceptionally high. Without a utility ladder, Maya probably had to learn to navigate the shop by memory.
But there was something else.
Droplets of condensation veined down the front windows. Xander pressed his face to the foggy glass to have a better look. At first, he wondered what kind of reindeer games she might be playing today with her head canted so far back, eyes closed, soft, slim white neck exposed. Something below counter level pulsed softly with undulating bands of watery light.
Xander banged on the window. “Maya?” he called.
No movement within. Clearly, that would not do. Xander went to the door, tried it. Locked. Of course it was. Why would it be unlocked?
Xander pounded again. Sweat beaded on the back of his neck. He had to get in. He felt a flicker of panic. What if he couldn’t get in?
Xander shouldered into the door. It rattled in the frame, but stuck. He turned, surveyed surroundings and found the chalkboard placard. He tested its weight – good, heavy, wood and brass. He neglected to check what was written on it. If he had he would have paused to read it, he would have seen: the lion, the witch and the wardrobe.
Xander closed his eye. He hefted the sign over his head and slammed it full force into the window. The pane caved then splashed into a million shards across the floor. Xander reached through and worked the dead bolt on the other side.
All that noise, yet Maya still sat raptly at her counter.
Xander stepped inside. The odor struck him first. He knew the smell – a basement scent halfway between pickle juice and moldy sponges. A few paces in, Xander saw the ice crystals on Maya’s eyebrows.
“Oh God,” he said. He rushed to her. Jumped the counter. Swept her into his arms. Her body was cold but not lifeless.
“You?” she said. Her lips didn’t move.
“I’ll get you out,” Xander told her.
Maya’s green eyes blinked slowly. “Too... late,” she said.
Xander looked down into the glass globe she gripped with brittle white fingers. The flowing light within moved like the graceful drowning ebbs of the ocean. He knew without really knowing that to stare too long meant bad business for them both.
Maya had bird bones. Made it easy for him to carry her right out from behind the counter. On their way across the store, Maya twisted her neck to look up at his face.
“Xander... idiot,” she said.
“Hey, now. Is that any way to talk to your rescuer?” he said.
She cradled the glass against her. “Trap,” she murmured. “Get it?”
Xander squeezed her cold shoulder. “I’ll get you outside. In the sun, where it’s warm,” he said.
The moment they touched the threshold, the room ripped to shreds.
Xander awoke to fresh agony. His skin felt as though he’d had a full body shot of Novocaine and it was just wearing off. A strange vibrating sound filled his ears, like fingernails scritching over piano wire.
As the room dialed back into focus, he recalled things in snapshot flashes. Dazzling flare. Blazing pain. Followed by... a waiting room?
Xander lifted his head, then regretted it. Muscle seemed to shrink on his bones like a too-tight suit of clothes. At that moment, he knew what an overcooked chicken must feel like.
His memories had been correct. He was in a waiting room, the kind with walls the color dandruff shampoo. He realized that he had curled into an unmanly fetal position on the threadbare carpet. As he craned his head, he beheld a pair of booted feet at the brim of his peripheral vision.
“Did I just get zapped into the Beetlejuice dimension?” he asked.
Booted foot slipped under Xander’s chin. It tilted Xander’s head upward. A face with a bulging, sweaty forehead and protuberant eyes looked down.
“So, the little succubus has snared her another one,” he said in a prissy Lancashire accent.
Xander sat up quickly. He ignored the shrieks of pain protesting in his limbs. He wanted to look this guy eye to eye.
He was small man with thinning hair and eyes of brilliant vermilion. He clicked his yellowed teeth together and said, “Welcome to Alice.”
~*~
William dropkicked the bedroom door, making as much noise as necessary.
Angel leapt from the bed. A second later William arm-barred him to the wall by the throat.
“Why did you do it?” William snarled.
Shaken, Angel said, “Spike, if you’re trying to get on my good side...”
William pressed the point of a stake to Angel’s heart. “I don’t give a damn about your good side,” he said.
Angel’s laugh resonated deep in his chest. He said, “Go ahead. Kill me. That would round out the symmetry rather nicely, wouldn’t it?”
“Why, Angel? Don’t get dodgy,” William said.
“Why what? I have done quite a lot of things.”
William dug his forearm deeper into Angel’s throat, cutting off his speech.
“You poncy, arrogant, self-centered, pointy-haired bastard,” William said. “You bloody well know what. Your sodding precious prophecy. Why did you sign it away? What could you...”
“O-o-o-h,” Angel said. “The Prophecy. That’s why you’re here.”
William released Angel. “Yes. That. Why the hell else?”
Angel scrubbed the raw skin on his neck. He ambled over to his mini-bar.
“Drink?” Angel asked.
“No,” William answered blandly.
Angel took out a bottle and poured a tumbler full.
“It’s touching, really.” Angel said. “I didn’t know you cared.”
“I don’t,” William said. “But you signing away your destiny affects more than you and me.”
Angel swirled the blood in his glass. He said, “Let me ask you something, Spike. When we pulled our little coup in LA, how long was Wolfram & Hart out of commission?”
William used the sharp end of the stake to scratch his head. “I dunno,” he said. “Weeks?”
“Twenty-two hours,” Angel said. He drained his cup and refilled.
William breathed out a heavy sigh. “That’s it?”
“Maybe even less. And that was just one branch in the great Tree of Evil,” Angel said. He stared down into his crystal cup. After a long pause, he said, “I have a plan, Spike. It does not include you.”
William glared. “Oh, right then. Pay no attention to the man behind the bleeding curtain. And just what is your secret master plan this time? Gonna paperwork 'em to death?”
“It’s not like that,” Angel said.
“The Prophecy, Angel,” William said, adopting his self-righteous impatience. “You signed it away. Is there any way you can get it back? You are in Land of the Loophole with the whole evil law firm at your fingers.”
“I didn’t sign it away,” Angel said, simply.
William shook his head, confounded. “Come again?” he said.
“I signed away hope,” Angel said. His voice broke on the last word, but he did his best to cover it. “I can still fulfill the Shanshu. Whatever part I play, I either die forever or remain as I am. A vampire with a soul. I will never again be a man.”
Angel brought his eyes to meet William’s. William dropped to the edge of Angel’s bed. After a moment of stillness, William said, “You are playing a game you cannot win.”
“I’m not playing to win,” Angel said. He downed the second cup of blood.
William swallowed hard. “Angel...” he said.
Angel went on, “But I did not sell my humanity for less than a day’s downtime for the bad guys. They have their claws in a rat full of cyanide. All I have to do is hang on long enough...”
“Thellian,” William stated, flatly.
Angel tripped over his words, clearly not expecting the mad swerve in conversation. “Who?”
“You know him,” William said.
“Right. Thellian. I know of him,” Angel said. “We’ve met.”
“Buffy is looking for...”
“She’ll never find him,” Angel cut in. “He’s buried. After two millennia on this earth, he’s learned to keep a low profile.”
“But you could find him,” William said. He narrowed his eyes.
“Just like you found me,” Angel countered.
William scoffed. “You’re a creature of habit, Angel. I could track you even without nifty vampire senses.” He took a moment then to take in his surroundings. Bed had a lived-in look and slept-in feel. Mini-bar stocked with blood. Heavy brocade curtains in a masculine forest green. “You’ve done quite a bit of restoration to the place.”
“I am at the helm of a near omniscient global super power,” Angel said.
William dug his hands into the pockets of his coat. “You’re in real deep, aren’t you?” he said.
Angel’s expression looked impassive as ever. He said, “You should go.”
“Check. Mate,” William said. As he left, he glanced back at the damage he caused the doorframe. When he was gone, Angel bowed forward, nearly brushing the mini-bar with his forehead. The mark on his chest, which itched almost constantly now, began a slow dull aching throb.
Without raising his head, Angel reached for the phone. He dialed the number by touch, then placed the receiver to his ear.
A woman answered. Her youthful sounding voice had the smoothness of vanilla ice cream.
“I need to speak with Thellian,” Angel said.
“Yes,” she said. “Just one moment.”
When Thellian answered, Angel said, “We have a problem.”
And for a handful of seconds Angel wished that he had let William the Bloody finish him off when he had the chance.
~*~
Maya floundered on the sidewalk outside the shop. Instantly, she flung herself against the door. Her breath caught. Worn boards covered the windows and doors, as though Go Ask Alice had been out of business for years.
It had, of course. She knew that.
Now she was outside, in an odd kind of bright rainy sunshine that filled the autumn air. Maya swallowed down the terror in her throat. Perspiration soaked her thin yellow dress. Not perspiration, she remembered. She had nearly frozen to death. And Xander...
Maya cupped the looking glass with both hands. She licked her parched lips and croaked, “Show me Xander.”
Swirls of gray and blue appeared, like a storm on a moonless night. No sign of Xander at all.
A tear slipped from the corner of her eye. “No, Freddie,” she whispered. “Oh, no.”
Maya collapsed against the door, almost blind with fright. The hour was all wrong. Somehow it was late afternoon already. The going-home crowd would hit the pavement soon. The press of all those people bursting forth like seeds from a pod terrified her to paralysis.
She closed her eyes. She fought to still the panic in her blood.
The looking glass weighed heavily in her hands. Maya peered into it. The thought struck her like a cloudburst. Suddenly, she knew what she had to do.
“Show me Xander’s house,” she said.
The particles eddied together to form the image of the front step of a cozy little flat.
She uttered a tremulous sigh of relief.
“Now,” she said, more determined. “Show me how to find it.”
~*~
Willow spent the morning carefully unrolling the twenty-one scrolls Giles brought up from Boadicea’s tomb. The quickie Kennedy intimacy had done the trick to restoring Willow’s focus. It was nice, being in the good with Kennedy again. Seemed sometimes that they had left the fun behind them in Rio de Janeiro. There was probably a lounge song about that very thing.
After unfurling each scroll, Willow discovered that they were in splendid condition considering the length of time they were interred underground. Twenty of the cases were simple, leather bound affairs. The final case was carved from sandalwood and inlaid with twining silver filigrees. All of them contained crisp sheets of fine white vellum, a meter long by half a meter wide.
She removed each scroll with Scully-like precision, carefully noting the direction in which each scroll was loaded into the case, how they were rolled and the order in which she opened them. Even with the forensic analysis, Willow could scarcely contain her Galilean curiosity.
The most intriguing part, of course, was the text written on each scroll. Not so much the text itself, which she could no more read than Xander could comprehend applied calculus, but the way it was written. Passages scribed in sharp indigo letters scrawled at odd angles across each scroll, filling in almost every centimeter of space. Cerulean lines of varying widths curved and snaked around the passages in bold swirling patterns. As Willow spread them out across the dining room table, three deep and seven wide, she knew only one truth: This was a job for Giles.
Or, at the very least, the combined efforts of the Scooby gang.
Since she lacked the aforementioned, Willow cozied up to the notion of a long day of up-to-her-elbows-in-texts hard work. However, by lunchtime she had yet to decode even one of the passages. Willow had exhausted all of the reference language texts she had on hand at the Flat. She considered magical means for translation, maybe a spoken word spell or a librio veritas. They took a lot of time to prepare, she knew, and by the time she had all the components together Dawn would be home from school.
Frustrated, Willow sat back in Giles’ cushy chair. The arm caught the corner of a scroll. She swiveled back, accidentally tugging the page forward. Before she could catch it, the scroll slipped with a swish over the table edge.
“Bad scroll,” Willow said. She picked it up, delicately as to not wrinkle it. As she did so, she noticed a miniscule mark in the top right corner on the back of the sheet. Willow brought it close to her face to examine it. A trill of excitement coursed through her.
“I know that mark,” she whispered to herself. Willow scanned the pages assembled on the table. She rolled back the right side of another one. Sure enough, another mark. Another familiar mark.
A grin traced the corners of her mouth. Willow ran. She took the stairs two at a time. Her green notebook was in her desk drawer. She frantically flipped it to the page on which Dawn had traced the symbols from the Temple of the Sisters. Breathless, she counted them.
“Twenty-one,” she said. She laughed to herself. “I don’t believe it.”
Willow raced back downstairs, clutching the notebook under her arm like a schoolgirl late for morning classes. She checked the back of every scroll. Each bore a mark corresponding to the symbols Dawn had drawn.
With the notebook open in Giles’ chair, Willow ordered the scrolls according to the arrangement in Dawn’s depiction of the altar. And, as Willow suspected, the central page – the one from ornate case – carried the mark of the Pleiades.
A pattern emerged. The scrawlings and lines matched up to form a triskelion circle. Each leg of the triskele held another symbol. One was distinctly rose-like. The second, topmost symbol was a kind of stylized tree. The last bore the image of an ornate triangle. The text flowed around the borders of the circle like the twining tributaries of a river.
Willow covered her mouth with her hands.
“Go me!” she said. “I think I figured it out. Except, now I need to figure out what ‘it’ is.”
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