Chapter Fifteen
Revello Drive
“It’s still not working.” Willow looked down at the map of Sunnydale and felt like crying. Here she was, this supposed super-witch and she couldn’t even locate herself. “I’m so sorry, guys.”
“Hey!” Buffy threw an arm around her friend’s shoulders and gave her a quick hug. “This isn’t your fault. The other Willow obviously knows how to block a locator spell. No biggie. She’ll mess up eventually.” Then, put off at Willow’s affronted look, she added, “Well, maybe not. But we’ll find her. We have to so we can go home.”
“Right. You got any ideas about that? Because Liz and I scoured Sunnydale and I didn’t get so much as a whiff of ‘er.” Will stood propped against the wall, his arms crossed and his hip jutting out, anger and impatience emanating around him.
The three interlopers shared a concerned look but nobody answered.
“Great. So essentially what you’re telling me is, you’ve got nothing?”
Buffy nodded. “Pretty much.”
In a subdued example of Spike’s well-known temper tantrums, Will humphed and left the room, presumably off to get rid of the bags under his eyes with some sleep.
Buffy turned and looked indulgently at her vampire. He had similar bags from lack of sleep, but instead he was grinning like the cat that licked the canary to a sensual death and who obviously wanted to do it again. She sighed tiredly before moving over to snuggle against his body on the couch. Willow sat forlornly in an armchair, worrying her hands over her ability to achieve nothing.
“So I guess what we need is a plan,” Buffy suggested, though her voice indicated how much of one she didn’t have to share.
“Yup. One of those would be of the good right about now,” interjected Liz as she entered the room, a bowl of cereal in her hands. She looked up and saw Buffy and Spike all cuddly together and went to sit at the desk chair on the opposite side of the room.
“Okay,” started Willow, finally straightening her spine and taking control. “What would Giles do?”
Buffy looked pole-axed. “Oh my God, Giles. And Dawnie. They won’t know where we are.”
Spike waved his hand carelessly in the air, his response nonchalant and totally lacking any concern. “I’m sure Peaches’ll let him know what’s happened. Once they get through flogging the git, they might even mount up a search party. Can you imagine that? The whole Scooby gang vacationing in downtown Sunnyhell.” The thought obviously tickled him pink as he momentarily disappeared into his own imagination.
“You shouldn’t verbalise thoughts like that on the Hellmouth,” Liz warned through a mouthful of cereal. If there was one thing she was well versed on it was that the oddest things sprung into being because of the Hellmouth’s strange twist on reality. Fact was way stranger than fiction in her backyard and Liz was totally over it.
“You’re right,” Spike conceded without argument. “Back to business then,” he stated crisply, and then preceded everyone into a block of thoughtful yet exasperating silence. Several times Buffy leaned forward, her lips parting as if to impart a sudden thought, but then whatever she’d grasped left her and she slumped back into Spike’s comforting arms. After ten minutes both blondes sighed.
“I’ve got nothing,” admitted Buffy, her cheeks pink. It was humiliating to be the senior slayer in this scenario—having been successful through numerous battles—and she couldn’t think of squat to get them through this.
“I guess this is just one of those ‘on-the-run’ plans then?” Willow asked, a fever of excitement returning some slight colour to her face. If there was one thing that animated the witch it was a challenge, and tracking down her evil double was proving to be a real doozy.
“And don’t we just excel with those?” Buffy wasn’t kidding. The big moments were all with the plans, sure, but the lead up to it was totally by the seat of their pants. The adrenaline rush that got them through immensely dangerous situations that probably should have seen them all ending up in a plot in the ground. Except she’d done that and it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
“Well, I guess it’s pretty pointless to try and formulate a plan to find Willow when she’s currently unlocatable.” Liz sat back, her apathy shifting only enough that an intently staring Spike caught it. It made him smile, and sigh in relief for the Spike of this dimension. Will had an uphill battle as it was—whether he informed her of his talisman connection with her or not—and it would be torture to see the poor bloke suffer through what Spike himself was only now putting behind him. And to tell the truth, if Spike had to witness all the angst of what was him and Buffy all over again he’d be hard pushed not to dust either himself or his double.
“So we wait?” Buffy confirmed, then with a swift nod of her head, “We hope that we catch sight of her before she decides to turn us into toads.”
Willow shuddered. As a plan it was obviously lacking—the whole lack of her doppelganger being magically gagged for one—but with her own magic being spectacularly unsuccessful in this instance, there was absolutely nothing that she could do. Or think of to do. Willow had never felt so vulnerable in her life. Whether she continued to live and breathe was totally in the hands of the one person she should have been able to trust with it. However, putting faith in this world’s Willow to do the right thing was as smart as leaving Andrew in charge of the Watcher’s Council with all the world’s slayers and his limited edition Princess Leia costumes at his disposal. Yeah, ‘smart’ didn’t actually figure into that equation in the slightest.
“At least I can put up a protection field around the house. I doubt she’s strong enough to penetrate that. As long as we all stay here for now, we’ll be fine.” She hoped. Gulping hard, Willow avoided all eyes and withdrew into herself. Being the victim of a witch on the edge might have done wonders in helping her cool her jets when she’d gone through it.
Feeling weak and useless wasn’t much of the fun at all.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
They were all bloody useless.
Will lay on the floor of Liz’s room and felt his face deform in rage. How the fuck were they going to get out of this if both slayers were content to wait for the psycho bitch-witch to come to them?
Emotions extreme and from every directions were tying him in knots. On the one hand he wanted to shake Liz till her teeth rattled and her sense made a shocking comeback, but on the other he was terrified out of his mind that Red was going to fly in on her broomstick and banish them all to the pits of Hell. Why the fuck had he waited so long in coming here? Was his fear stronger than his commonsense these days?
Will growled angrily and rolled over, mashing the pillow beneath his cheek with a tense fist. He’d been listening to them all gasbagging downstairs like a seniors group for too many hours to count and he was sick of it. The inaction, the talking in circles—it was driving him out of his skull. The witch had had plenty of time to find a base of operations and to recoup any power she’d expended during her escape and Will just knew they were all waiting for the penny to drop. They should be back out there, right in it, looking for her till the last second before sun was up again. Instead, they cowered behind another witch’s brazen attempts to counter herself. He’d be bloody buggered if he was going to be here when this dimension’s Willow arranged for the sky to fall on the house and flatten them all.
Be fucked if he was going to let Liz offer herself as an apathetic sacrifice to Red’s demented cause.
A chilling realisation had his eyes widening and his gut clenching in horror. They’d all been operating under the assumption that the witch was friendless—that she’d attempted all her plots to kill Liz completely on her own. Where did she get her information? How did she know about each and every ugly that came traipsing across the Sunnydale line, sending Buf…Liz into the line of fire almost on a nightly basis?
Fuck they were stupid. She obviously had to get her knowledge from somewhere. There was someone in this pissant town that still knew Red, and thus someone she’d probably chance contacting before turning them into fish food became her priority. A bitch like her would need to feel secure before she launched an all out offensive against her enemies, not to mention she loved this world she was attempting to tyrannise. She was going to work out how to kill Buffy, Spike and her doppelganger without sucking her own world into the realm of extinct dimensions.
Will winced. Christ they were screwed.
Sleep was out of the question now. He had a lead and he couldn’t let his body rest when his brain was on overdrive. Tossing the thin blanket Liz had unwillingly allowed him onto the bed, Will bounced to his feet and reached for his coat. The security of the soft leather was sorely needed—now more than ever—and it was with relief that he tugged on his boots and shrugged on his coat, allowing the Big Bad to fill his senses and give him the strength he needed to get them all out of this.
His body felt too heavy, weighed down by responsibility and fault. He should have arrived in Sunnyhell months ago and forced Liz away from the place. Risked a broken nose and a possible dusting by telling her who he really was but gotten her out of there. In an existence that had seen far more than anything had the right to, Will could admit one thing to himself, and as lonely and small as it made him feel, it also burned him up with warmth. Liz was the only thing that mattered anymore. Everything else he’d had over the years was gone—taken or withdrawn like he’d been a very bad boy. He’d grown to live with it. Accepted it as his due. Until he’d been given hope in the form of a jewel that he kept zealously in his pocket. His motivation may have been twisted in the beginning, but he’d quickly learned to value the chance he’d been given. Being evil had never been enough when it mattered and on the edge of everything was the accusation that he’d always been trying; it had never been natural. He’d killed slayers because Angelus was frightened of them. He’d slaughtered pregnant women because it was Darla’s favoured delicacy. He’d been as wicked as his Princess had required for him to stay favoured at her side. The very second he’d made an error of judgement—and only Drusilla would see saving her life as being a mistake—he was out on his ear, with the burns and lacerations to prove it. So yeah, maybe it was time to stop existing for others and try to do something different with his life.
Maybe it was time to be good.
With his stomach curling around that revelation, Will opened the bedroom window and glanced up at the stars. He was willing to bet that Dru was looking at them this very second, wailing over the distinct loss of her childe. The silly bint had always told him he was made for something special—now it was time for him to discover what.
A final glance over his shoulder at the closed door was all he needed to push him out of the house. They were still bellyachin’ downstairs and the witch was loose in the town. If he didn’t take pains to snuff her out, who the hell would?
He leapt to the ground silently and slipped into the shadows.
~ * ~ * ~ * ~
“You know we’ve been going about this all wrong,” Spike announced matter-of-factly while he slipped his hands behind his head, his eyelids sore as they stubbornly stayed open.
Silence greeted the statement and he sighed.
“We’ve been completely focused on the witch. Well, she’s been Queen of this town for how long? I doubt she works totally alone. There has to be someone here that she would have run to. Asked for help. Someone in this bloody town knows of Willow Rosenberg and her bid for total bloody control of the minions.” His tone betrayed his exasperation inspired by the hours of talking over their non-plan and helping to reassure the Willow-in-residence that she wasn’t being blamed for anything that this dimension’s Willow had going.
Enlightenment threatened and Spike gloried in having some direction finally. Until Liz opened her mouth and betrayed how completely unaware she’d been of the woman she’d allowed to take over her home.
“There’s phone calls sometimes, but I don’t recognise the voice. Some guy, sort of stilted and commanderish but respectful as well.” She shrugged, already apologising for being useless at sorting out the mystery and Spike rolled his eyes. This girl was like his resurrected Buffy, though she’d not had the benefit of a stint in heaven to make her so lifeless.
“Only one git I know who talks like he’s got a stake up his arse,” Spike prodded, then grinned as recognition made his girl’s and Willow’s eyes gleam in excitement.
The relief was tangible as they shouted the name together.
“Riley!”
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