Buffy ran until her body unexpectedly collapsed beneath her. One second, her feet held faithfully to the ground. The next, she found herself tumbling. When she landed, her consciousness swam away and back again, like an afterimage of candle flame suddenly snuffed.
It was dark, of course. So black she could not see her skinned palms in front of her face. Her heart thudded dully against her breastbone. Her knees and elbows shrieked in bright pain. She scrambled off the path into a root-knotted hollow where she listened for sounds of pursuit. Of sounds that Angel had followed this far.
She gingerly touched the flap of skin above her brow where he had flayed into her. It was still bleeding, which was bad. Worse, though, was that until the flow stemmed, Angel had a trail that led him to her no matter how quiet she was.
When she was sure she heard nothing but the far-off sound of water rushing, Buffy resolved to take stock, to get grips, to take hold of what she could. She pressed her cheek against the cold, grimy stone and felt herself floating away again. It was strange, she thought, how time seemed to grow fuzzy in total darkness. It lost shape and meaning when you lacked the ability to measure the lengths of shadows and sunlight.
Buffy had been hanging on by her nails, emotionally-speaking. Now she had skittered over the bleak edge where anger and grief bled together into one nullifying torrent. It leeched the energy from her bones, made her want to lie down and rest until...
No. She lifted her head. She would not just lie down, not when so much rested on her. She needed more than anything to find her way back to the surface. She had to find the others before Thellian and Angel...
Buffy’s eyes filled. The others, she thought grimly. Kennedy, the girls and now William: All of them, dead.
Not dead, she whispered like an inward prayer. Not dead. Not him.
She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. William said he was dead. Her William. Where ever he was, he was no longer here. His absence filled her the way the echoes of the sea fill a shell.
Except part of William was with her, curled up and sleeping inside. Angel had sensed it, and that knowledge made it all the more real. He had heard the beating heart of her child. The child that she had barely begun to acknowledge could exist. Even bigger than that was the immediacy of her instinct to protect what her body already cherished.
That part she understood. Slayers lived by trusting that instinct. Mostly it meant “kill, dismember, destroy.” But it also meant, “defend.”
Buffy twisted her hands into the earthy smelling roots to pull herself to her feet. There was no time for grieving, not now. William knew how it was. She suspected Kennedy had too. It was part of the life of Slayers and defenders. Buffy dragged her reluctant body along through darkness, to Dawn, Willow, Xander and Giles, and to the others around and within who needed her.
~*~
Lorne arrived via taxi to find Willow and Connor huddled outside the under-construction front facade of the Royal London Hotel. Despite the cold, the pair had waited for him before going inside. Connor, still sporting his drawstring shorts and flip-flops, looked like a misplaced frat boy on laundry day. Lorne felt a surge of sympathy for the kid. He knew Connor had been through a lot in his short life, and the ride was far from over.
When Lorne stepped from the cab, Willow went straight away to greet him. Connor hesitated and cast him a suspicious look. Then Lorne remembered: Connor had never seen him in his festive human outerwear. The glamorous glamour courtesy of Willow kept him hidden in non-demon circles. This was nice because he had become attached to a hole-in-the-wall Thai kitchen that would have sliced Lorne into Chop Suey if he’d turned up in his Pylean form to order his favorite dish of gam garee with glass noodles.
After seconds of tense chitchat with Willow, Connor noted the gold beaded Indian shoes, gold pants, matching beaded blazer and red satin shirt that only Lorne could wear.
Connor stepped into conversation.
“Did you...?” he began.
“Hear from your dad?” Lorne finished for him.
Connor shuffled. “I sound like a skipping CD?”
“A little,” Lorne said. “But with good reason. Cause for concern on the rise here. I had a bit of a spell earlier that makes me think something bad has come to pass.”
“Something involving Angel?” Willow asked. Her brows sank into deep furrows of thought. “And something involving Spike,” she said slowly. “Was it... did you see something, when he sang for you?”
“Bing to the girl in red,” Lorne sighed.
Willow walked purposefully around them to the barred front entrance doors. She lay both hands on the tinted glass and muttered a choppy incantation.
“Open,” she commanded. The bar glowed white, then clanged noisily to the ground. The door swung inward without a sound.
“Any idea what we might find on the other side of that door?” she asked.
Lorne could feel his Pylean heart beating in all the wrong places of his body. This was the part of the job he despised. It was what he had run from all those months ago at Wolfram & Hart.
“It’s...” he began, then decided it best not to spare them. “It won’t be pretty.”
~*~
But the interior of the Royal London Hotel was pretty. It gleamed with poshness like a polished pearl. To Connor it was a marvel, especially since he’d last seen the place as a post-seismic shambles.
“So, okay,” Connor said into the echo-y lobby. “Dad has been busy.”
Willow, Lorne and Connor entered with caution, as though a dozen vampire henchmen might leap from behind the bar or charge down the double-staircase and begin a Matrix style confrontation.
“It’s quiet,” Connor said. It was more a question than a statement.
“Always the time when the blonde gets it in the horror flick,” Lorne said. He glanced at them both. “Lucky for us, we’re non-blondes.”
Willow took point position. She flexed her fingers nervously at her sides. She entered the ballroom ahead of the others. Her skin felt goose-bumpy at the utter stillness. It made her mind play second-guessing games. If something ill had happened, she thought, wouldn’t I sense it?
She did sense it. Before glimpsing the reflection of the body in the mirror above the stairs, she felt the hairs on the nape of her neck stirring. Willow froze.
“Guys,” she whispered. She pointed. Not to the mirror, but to the shadow-strewn ballroom floor.
“God, no,” Connor said. He ran to the body, but stopped a few feet short.
Lorne came to stand elbow to elbow with Connor. Willow joined them, reluctantly. She recognized the coat and the boots. She knew it wasn’t Angel’s body that lay there with his throat split open like a science experiment gone wrong. The brutality of it stood out in sharp contrast to the lavish ballroom.
She clapped her hands over her mouth. Her body quaked. Stinging tears filled her eyes.
“Who did this?” Connor asked softly.
Lorne frowned deeply and hated himself. “Angel did it.”
Connor looked helplessly disheveled. He looked at Lorne, trying to decide whether or not he would lie about such a thing.
“The D’Ganti,” he said at last, accepting what he already knew. “My Dad had the blade. Looks like he used it.”
“It’s too much,” Willow said, choking on the words. She stumbled to the arm of the nearest chair and caught herself before collapsing. “It’s just too much. First Kennedy. Now Spike.”
After seconds of almost prayerful silence, Connor added, “Wesley Wyndham-Price. Cordelia Chase.”
Lorne drew a shaky breath. He said, “Charles Gunn. Winifred Burkle...”
“They’re taking us apart, one by one,” Willow said, her tone ragged and bitter. She didn’t try to stop the tears that fell from her face to the collar of her sweater. “How can we hang on? How can we live like this?”
Neither Lorne nor Connor had an answer. The three stood over William’s body. Each lapsed into a spell of personal reverence, in which they stared into a vague middle distance and marked the lives of those lost.
When Willow’s cell phone split the silence, they all jumped. She stepped away from the body as if speaking too near it would be a sign of disrespect.
“Hello?” she asked in a croaky whisper.
“Willow?”
It was Xander.
“Yes. It’s me.”
“You okay?”
“Something awful has happened,” Willow said.
“Uh...” Xander paused. “There too?”
Willow felt a flutter of alarm. Xander was at the hospital. If something bad happened there, it meant Buffy or Giles...
“Xander, what is it? What’s happened?” She didn’t know if she could take his answer.
“I’m here with Giles, but no Buffy,” Xander said.
Willow cast wild glances at Lorne, at Connor, at William’s murdered body. Taking the hint, Lorne and Connor huddled near her.
“Buffy’s gone,” she told them, nearly shouting. “She’s gone?”
“She wouldn’t just leave, Wil,” Xander said.
“Oh God...” Willow felt like the floor was sliding out from under her.
“Willow,” Xander said, “What’s happened there?”
Lorne mouthed to Willow, “Is it Angel?”
She held up her hand. “It’s Spike,” she said. “Angel’s killed him. He’s dead, Xander. I think...”
In the hospital ward, Xander locked eyes with Maya. He said, “Angel has Buffy.”
“You sure?” Maya asked. She was busy unwinding tubes from Giles’ arms, unhooking monitors and various machines.
Xander nodded. “Willow? What do we do?”
“Get Giles. Get back to the Flat. We have to circle our wagons,” Willow said. “Xander, we have to get her back.”
Giles’ hand shot out and gripped Maya’s shoulder.
She yelped and leapt back.
“Xander!” Willow shrieked over the line. “What was that?”
After a handful of muffled seconds, Xander came back to the phone. “It’s Giles. He’s awake. We’ll get back home. And we’ll see you there.”
~*~
Willow snapped her phone closed. “They have Buffy,” she said. She was in motion. She was a blur. “We have to get Spike’s body back to the Flat. I can cast a location spell to find Buffy, and if we’re lucky we can find her before...”
Connor held up a hand. “Hang on. We can’t take the body,” he said. “Not if we’re in a hurry. H-how can we carry him?”
Willow stopped mid step. “We can’t just leave him here. Not after. I mean. He’s like... almost family,” she said. “And we can’t just leave him here.”
“Boy’s right, though,” Lorne said. The corners of his mouth quivered downward. “Best we can do is cover the body and come back for it later.”
Willow warred visibly between smacking them both and taking their advice.
“Here,” Connor said. He strode across the ballroom, vaulted onto the stage and ripped down a jagged section of the velvet curtain. He brought it to her. “This should do,” he said.
Willow took the curtain from his hands.
“We should say something,” she said. She knelt beside his head. “We should say how he tried. How hard he tried.” Tears choked her again. She brushed her fingers along his temple. And the skin did something entirely unexpected. It smudged.
Lorne sucked air through his teeth. Connor took a broad step backward.
“He’s...” Lorne began.
“He’s clay,” Willow said, marveling. “He’s made of clay.”
Connor rubbed his chin. “He looks... remarkably human.”
Willow touched the carpet just under the edge of William’s coat. “No blood,” she whispered. “Wounds like this would bleed.”
Lorne crossed his arms and hugged his elbows. “Yes, unless the assailant’s a blood-sucking vampire,” he stated.
“Uh-uh,” Willow said. “No bite marks. Look,” she went to move William’s head to the side, but remembered the smeary spot and held back.
“What does it mean?” Connor asked.
Willow cupped her hands over her mouth. She stared hard at the gash torn across William’s neck, looking at it now with a scientist’s eyes instead of a friend’s. The skin around it was unbruised. She could find no trace of blood around its edge.
“Knife wound like that,” she said, mostly to herself. “Blood, everywhere.”
“Pools and pools of it,” Lorne added.
“But what does it mean?” Connor asked again.
Willow stood up. “William was not human. He was - is - a golem. So it means he may not be dead,” she said. “It means we need Maya.”
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