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.”