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?"