Chapter 33:  Scary Monsters

Boston 12:13 am

---

Tara Maclay heard her death nearly an entire second before she saw it.  There was a sting of peppery feedback in her ears and then the monster was just there, looming through the shadows like a ghostly tarantula on long, flickering limbs. 

“Fressius,” she hissed.  A ray of light sailed arrow-like off the tip of the wand, exploding into ribbons of fire across the beast’s black shape.

It kept coming.

“Manners,” the thing whispered.  Its voice was strangely human, but far away and hollow, like someone trapped at the bottom of a deep well.  “A poor way to greet a friend, dove.  Let’s try again, shall we?”

Something inside was screaming at Tara to run, but she held her ground, guessing that panic would only get her murdered faster.  Eyes rolling heavenward, she summoned the Aegis of Orahz P’hule, and a moment later the old demigod’s shield was descending over her like a column of warm, green rain.

The monster wiggled a tentacle at her, nonplussed.  “Pretty.   But we mustn’t waste our time with this bloody Hollywood rubbish, my dear.  There’s so little left.”

With that, it crept closer still, and was revealed shockingly in a shard of light.  Somewhere behind the cobwebs of its dark otherflesh, Tara recognized an all too human face leering back at her.

“Rayne,” she said.

“Correct, sister.  And you must be the witch’s pet.  Heard lots about you, love.”

“Doubt it.”  She felt a nervous energy surging though every blood cell, plowing the road for battle.  “If you heard what I did to those fucking traitors in Santa Fe, I don’t think you’d let me anywhere near your sorry ass.”   

“Yes,” the warlock chirped.  “Vengeful.  Like that other bird.   But you’re much worse, sister.  So unprofessional.”

At this, she raised the wand again, but the man-thing kept coming and coming, undeterred.  Whatever horror Rayne had summoned upon himself was very old, and its power lapped back at her on harrowing waves.  Tara eyed the set of doors at the far end of the cafeteria skeptically.

Twenty yards, she guessed.  She wasn’t much of a runner. 

Buy some time.

“You said you’re a friend.   What did you mean by that?”

Wicked laughter echoed through the hall, like a rock scraping a metal sheet.  “Well it’s relative, isn’t it?" he said.  "Enemy of my enemy, and all that rot.  Unless you had something more in mind.”  A scar-like smile twisted across the old fiend’s face. 

Rayne was nuts, for sure.   But, in some unbelievable, unaccountable way, he also seemed to be telling the truth.  Tara wasn’t sure what was more chilling: that he'd decided to help her, or that he seemed to be enjoying it.  Watching that smile of his, hovering in the folds of a ten thousand year old alien devil, she found her next words difficult to say.

“What do you want?” she managed.

“I want to get you where you’re going, Tara.” 

“And where is that?”

***

“Down,” Harmony snarked.  “Big surprise.”

She was starting to get tired of the whole sich’.  It was bad enough getting roped into this whole Let’s Storm the Un-stormable Castle dealie, but she hadn’t expected that Rupee's big master plan would be to bore them all to death.  Past the quasi-cool lobby, the rest of the building seemed to contain the same dumb hallway copied and pasted a million times, all lit by the kind of long fluorescent planks that always made her skin look way gross.  Not Anya-gross, maybe.  But Oz-gross, at least.

And, oh yeah, Oz.

Big giant help he was turning out to be.  For the last ten minutes, he was either telling her to “shut up” or “go down.”  Hello!  Like, when did this suicide mission turn into a lame-o Sunny-D frat party?  And that crossbow of his was Oooh, Scary.  If Harm was some mega-powered mystical so-and-so like Giles, she’d be so majorly bummed to see a midget with a stick that could shoot out another, smaller stick.

Seriously.

L to the M to the A to the O…

“Whoa,” Oz whispered.  “You see that?”

“See what?”  But when she followed his gaze out to the far end of the hall, there was something there.  It was sticking up out of the floor a few feet in front of an emergency staircase, and it looked sort of like a weird little tree.  She frowned at it.  “Oh.  So.  Okay.”

Before she could think of anything more interesting to say, Oz aimed his Super Macho Stick-Shooter at it and started walking, ninja style.  She followed him in the normal, non-geek way, picking idly at a fang. 

As they got closer, Harmony began to realize that it wasn’t a tree at all.  Reminded her more of a picture in an old biology textbook; the gross kind, where they slice someone down the middle and show you what’s inside.  The thing’s thick pink trunk seemed to have smashed up through the floorboards, and then splintered off into a bramble of ropelike veins.  She could smell something interesting inside.  Oz kept tilting and tilting his head at it, until it looked like it might fall off. 

“Maybe it’s, like, a joke, or something,” she said, not really thinking it was very funny at all.

“This is Giles were talking about here, Harm.  Not… Caesar Romero.”

“Look, don’t get all snippy!  You’re the one who keeps whining 'down, down, we must go down'.  Well, stairs go down.  There’s the stairs.”

He seemed to consider this for a second.  “Alright.  Let’s just go.  If it starts doing anything funny, we haul ass.”

They were maybe ten feet away when it starting doing something funny. 

Well, not funny, really, so much as...

Sexy?

Okay, maybe not the right word for it either.  But something was tingling down in the region of Harmony's belly.  The pink tree was singing something, or humming it.  It was a song Harmony never heard before in her life or after it, but that was so familiar she could’ve sworn she made it up herself, and her skin was suddenly sun-warm, and the warmth filled her with little electric bubbles that tickled every time they popped.

Harmony floated towards it, dreamily.  She was lifted by the bubbles, the tree’s glistening candy form tickling every inch of her body.  Oz and the hall and the war and the whole stupid world seemed to burn away to nothing along its edges. 

The tree was sparking like a third rail when she kissed it, when her fangs glided down into its supple, red bark.   Somewhere nearby, a voice was screaming her name, telling her to stop, stop, but it was already way too late.  The sugary blood was firing into her lips, a steaming jet of rainbows and kittens and birthday presents and glitter. 

Two seconds later, Harmony knew exactly how God tasted (sort of like Skittles, actually; she never would have guessed that).

In the third second, all human language left her.

In the fourth, a thousand memories were washed clean away.  One moment she forgot her name, and in the next, she forgot she had forgotten it.

In a final panic she fought back, atoms spinning furiously along the walls of the her throat in an attempt to trigger an old, well-honed gag reflex.  This effort was more costly then Harmony  the vampire would ever know.  There was a screaming flash of white, the universe blown over with snow and cheering trumpets. 

After that: the honey-sweet nectar kept firing into a bottomless cup, a pair of lips and fangs working without orders, filling and filling but never filling up.

Branches folded around her like arms, drawing her inside the vein.  The lights went out.

Machine Girl Tree Drink. 

Gone.

***

The door had one of those little pictures on it: a stick man walking down some stick stairs.  Looked like as good a plan as any.  Anya was halfway there when she felt the icy presence, a thing alien to this world.   Whatever it was, she decided it wasn’t going to like the welcoming committee much.  She hefted her old gladius, probing the shadows for signs of something fun to stab it with. 

“See, I’m a little overdressed for the whole Slasher Flick marathon,” she announced.  “And, you know.  Got important stuff to do, so, whaddya say we just skip right to the big death scene?”

The door obliged, exploding off its hinges, and a big streak of orange surged out.  Anya pivoted at last possible moment, hewing at a gruesome length of spine.

The flesh parted cleanly, spraying her with whatever gunk the monster used for blood.   Its chittering death wail reminded her of an old song from the 60’s.

The 1560’s, that is.

"Well, that was fast,” she said, tickling the dead thing’s jaw with her blade.  “I mean, not to criticize your performance or anything, but I have had better. Much better.”

She nudged her way past the shattered door frame and into the stairwell.  Peering over the banister, the full stupidity of their plan began to dawn on her.  The Slayer had a poker up her butt as hot as the one up Anya’s.    Or another, less sexually-intriguing metaphor, even.  In an ideal world, the two would’ve just fast-forwarded to the hot blond-on-blond action, and the big dramatic showdown.

But this wasn’t an ideal world, she thought.

Plus it already happened, Anyanka dear.  And she kicked your vengeance-wreaking ass.

She shook off the bad-thoughts and soldiered on.  She was about three flights down when she started to hear the voices.  They were low, wicked whispers at first, interspersed with the giggles.   It was like the sound of evil children at play.  She squinted down into the black belly of a sub basement, more annoyed than anything.

"Pretty weak, Giles,” she said.  “I mean, you know you can’t scare me, right?  I’m… unscare-able.”  More giggling, and the tramping of tiny feet.  She resumed her descent, wondering at the man’s newfound flair for the dramatic.  Normally, Rupert Giles was about as exciting and mysterious as a slice of wheat toast.  This made sense; Watchers weren't typically selected for their sparkling creativity.

Meanwhile, a good sense of theater was pretty much a job requirement for a Vengeance Demon-ing Biz, and the best ones were chock full of it.   Any moron could just go on a boring killing spree.  Just load up the .44 magnum, march into Ye Olde Postal Office and start blasting away.   But true vengeance, like true art, required a bit more style; the sort of sharp, clean poetry that removed all debt and doubt.

There were many creatures out there designed for revenge, a whole Wal-Mart selection of dull-as-dishwater golems and chain-rattling wraiths who could get the job done on the cheap.  But the sort of monster that dwelled inside Anya's human host was from a different tax bracket altogether, the power of a djinn married to the wrath of a spurned goddess.  In fact, there was only one being in all the worlds who rivaled them in artistry and cruelty. And someone would have to be pretty darn crazy to order up one of those.

She shuddered momentarily as an old image wormed its way into her brain.  It was true, mostly: Anya was damn near impossible to scare.  In hundreds of years, there was only monster that had managed to do it.  Other than the bunnies, of course.

Her cousins had been given many names over the years: The Dirae, The Erinýes, The Daughters of the Night.  The Kindly Ones, was perhaps Anya’s favorite.  That one was so twisted, it made a weird kind of sense.

But the English translation was both the least imaginative and the most accurate.  They called them The Furies.  And if you ever ran afoul of one, it meant your life was going to become very, very painful.

And very, very short.

***

London 7:35 am

---

In and out, in and out, in and out.  The walls were black and white and red all over, rising everywhere, sometimes right in front of Andrew's face, smashing the nose and lips. His breath was still coming and going, for some unknown reason.  The monster chasing him kept giggling, the sound echoing everywhere in the nowhere tunnels.

A third smashed nose sent him pinballing into an iron belly the length of a soccer field.  For a moment, it reminded him of the hanger in Romania, when the gun was in his hands.  There was no gun this time, and there was no reason for one because everyone was dead except for him.

"Dude, I thought knives were your thing,” a voice said, and it was Jonathan’s voice, and it sounded so calm and normal that it could’ve been a funny thing to say.  It was close, at his shoulder, really, just suddenly in his ear like when a bee bumps into it.  And when Andrew heard it, he didn't turn or run, but fell to his knees and began to cry.

 This was a surprising thing for him to do on many levels.  Andrew hadn’t cried in a really long time, years and years at this point, and he wasn’t a very good crier to begin with. Didn’t quite have the build for a really hearty, full-bodied sob.

But now it came: smashed red nose running, eyes like two fists, skipping like a scratched record.  The old scene played out again in vivid color.  Andrew saw the knife flashing out, and felt the little push-pull when it broke the skin, felt how Jonathan’s body flinched a half a second too late, like when someone wakes up from a very bad dream.  The world had scribbled all these notes down in her little journal, and no matter what else happened from now until the end of time the notes would never change.  They would never stop being true.

The ghost squatted down low and waited for Andrew’s eyes to open again.  When they finally did, Jonathan was smiling a warm and slightly bemused smile.  There was no blood on him now – not in his mouth, not on his clothes – and his skin was glowing the sort of SoCal orange you sometimes got from just walking around without any sunscreen.  He seemed content to just sit there waiting, and when Andrew stopped crying they both just sat there, staring at each other for what felt like a very long time.

Jonathan looked much younger then he would’ve been; even younger than he was the day he died.  In his bright yellow t-shirt striped with skinny blue lines, this could have been old High School Jonathan, and the two of them could've been getting set to argue about where Scotty got his warp engineering degree, or maybe to watch old Who reruns in his mom’s basement.  This was before everything: before Hellhounds and Vampires and Warren, before Katrina and the van and Mexico and the First.  Back then, evil was a totally different thing.  Evil was the varsity football team dishing out wedgies for breakfast and swirlies for lunch.   Evil was a bitchy cheerleader's laughter.

“So,” Jonathan said,  “I guess you know what this is all about, huh?”  Andrew gave his head a quick, jerky nod.  “Well, what do you think I should do?  I mean, how should we start?”

“Are you gonna kill me?”

The phantom snickered.  “Dude!  Does a Sarlaac reproduce by releasing spore clusters into deep space?”

“I… forget?”

Something was happening in the dead boy’s face now, the warmth from before gradually being replaced by something old and terrible.  The smell of rotten steak returned, stronger then ever, and the sound of the world started to drown under a high-pitched whistle, like a teapot on full boil.

“Not the eyes,” Jonathan said, and clicked his teeth.   “You’re gonna need those for awhile.  The hair, maybe.  Ya know, I was always jealous of that hair, man.  So ruffly…”

“Ow!”  Andrew peered at the lock of his own hair suddenly in his hand.  It was an amazing feeling, staring at it, with something like hot helium pumping in the veins on one arm. 

Jonathan hooted at him.  “Do it again, again, again,” he chanted, genuinely excited. 

Before he knew what was happening, Andrew’s hand went back up and ripped loose another clump.  He looked down at it and it was bigger this time. 

He tried to will the arm to stop, but it kept going about its business, as grim and persistent as a nightmare.  Jonathan was becoming giddier by the second, clapping and cheering each time the hand went up for another clump.  By the fifth time, Andrew’s fingers were wet with blood.

He staggered to his feet and fled deeper into the vault, moaning and wailing.  The possessed limb kept yanking and tugging at his scalp the whole way, scattering gleeful hunks like confetti as he went.

“Oh, someone get the popcorn!” Johnathan shrieked, trailing just a few steps behind.  “'Cause this show is friggin’ awesome!” 

Everything seemed to be on fire.  The panic gave way, like a floor falling out from under him.  There was no place to hide this time, and no one to save him.  There was only the Andrew the murderer and Casper the Unfriendly Ghost and the little handfuls of bloody hair.  He felt his fingernails dragging across a patch of raw scalp, and he was sure they were digging for the bone. 

As the pair crossed a path between two bulkheads, Andrew heard a deep rumbling noise.  Something huge leapt out from the shadows, like a vast green wave.  He collapsed in a heap as it whipped past him, Jonathan's puppet strings suddenly clipped.

The next few seconds were very weird, with everything seeming to happen in slow motion.  Andrew twisted sideways in time to see Melvin pounce at Jonathan.

Except, it wasn’t Jonathan anymore, but a creature he’d never seen before. 

It was like a woman but not a woman.  She had writhing snakes for hair, and her eye sockets gushed blood like a pair of open faucets.  The body seemed to emit a sickly glow, full of blue Christmas lights.  The two monsters danced around each other for a long moment, feinting and circling like boxers.  Then, without a word, the female turned and sprinted out across the deck.  Melvin chased after her like a giant cat, loping on all fours as they both disappeared back into the darkness. 

Bit by bit the whistling teapot sound slowly disappeared, fading back into the chattering grind of the generators. 

For a few seconds, Andrew fought to stay awake.  It wasn’t much of a fight.

***

Frank Grange stalked along the path that connected the dormitories to the library, flanked by a squad of his best men.  With Lehane and Summers missing in action, a girl named Flo – No shit! – Nightingale had hung back to hold the Slayers' swiftly crumbling front lines.  Rupert’s hag squad had managed to slow their enemy down a little, but Frank hoped they were just stalling for time until they could get their act together and break out the serious firepower.

Or, rather, if they could get their act together.  Something about those girls scared the holy piss out of Frank, and not in a good way.

For the moment, Kennedy’s sneak attack still looked one raging hell of a success.  This wasn’t the first time the Agency had been caught with its panties down, but it was maybe the worst.  He was trying his damnedest not to be impressed.

Then, just as they reached the library’s manicured lawn, that plan went tits-up too.  The sky darkened in an eerie way, a dome of black glass gliding across the London sky.   He watched in dull horror as the last sliver of the cityscape vanished behind it, like a tomb sealing shut.   Oddly enough, it left behind some memory of light in its wake; a ghost of the sun that covered everything with a moonish glow.  Grange eyed this development resentfully.  Whatever it was Kennedy and her Cause had brought along for the ride, it was no minor league mojo.

The squad hustled into the library at the quickstep, Grange huffing and puffing just a bit more than he would’ve liked to at his age.  The angles of the place looked weird in the gray glow that poured though the windows.  He heard the voices of the Council's Wiccans drift down from the second landing on lilting waves.  Grange ordered Sergeant Duncan to go on and secure the perimeter, and then he puffed up the stairs to pow-wow with the gals, filled with a feeling like dread.  He knew he was quite a bit better at dealing with the Crystal Ball crowd than Maggie Walsh, but these broads were just excruciating.  It was like talking to someone who was deaf, and Chinese.

And as high as goddamned kite.

“Oh-em-gee! Oh-em-gee!” screeched Mindy.  Or Cindy.

“Like, right?” agreed Whatsername.  The blond one.  “I mean, dubba-you tee eff?”

“Nix on the Heliofaust pocus,” said Crystal, googling furiously on a thin sliver laptop.  “Wiki says it’s the ‘tardness.”

“Yubya Exalta?”

“Ell-em-eff-ayy-oh!  Fail!  That’s even ‘tarder.”

“You’re ‘tarder!”

“Ess-tee-eff-yoo, noob!”

“Whatever!”

“Whatever whatever!”

“Alright, that’s enough outta you,” Grange barked.  He felt his blood pressure spiking again.  On top of everything else going on, all their mumbo jumbo was going to give him a damn stroke.  “Status report, people.  In English.”

“Uh, bad,” Crystal said.  “Tried a sleeping charm, but it was an epic fail.”

“Everything’s an epic fail,” whined Mindy/Cindy.  “I’m telling you, it’s that dome-thingy up there.  It’s doing a whole Short Circuit City on our mystical wi-fi, dude.”

“What the hell is it?!”  Frank shouted, at no one in particular.

Crystal shook her head sullenly.  “It’s not magic, whatever it is.  Eye-emm-oh, it’s some kind of next gen tech.  Like, not iPod poo poo, but, like, real Futurama, Terminator poo poo.”

“Well, can we break through the goddamned thing or not?” 

“I-Dee-Kay, General.   Wouldn’t rec trying to walk through, unless you want a super cheap funeral.”

“Feels like the source is mobile,” added Blondie.  “Something is projecting it.  Or someone.”

“Okay, that’s a start," he said.  "So, where’s it coming from?”

The girl exchanged a few vague nods and then huddled around their Seer’s stone, whispering what sounded like a little ditty.  Frank squinted down across the yard while they worked their mojo.  Dots of color screamed across the campus boulevard, framed by the blackest black he’d ever seen.  Dawn had estimated Kennedy’s numbers at about three hundred strong, but suddenly that felt like a very lowball figure.  Factor in those Chakau Ri’ bastards, and this fight was beginning to look like a one-sided slaughter.  His mind wandered to Waterloo, to Gettysburg.  He allowed the notion to creep into his brain that fighting them here could be a mistake, that maybe a calculated retreat was in order.  When all was said and done, George Washington wasn’t much of a field general, but the sonofabitch sure as hell knew how to run away…

“Uh oh,” said Mindy.

“Not good,” said Crystal.

“What now?”  Frank asked.  The witches peered back at him sheepishly, the color drained from their face.  “Did you get a fix?”

“Yuh huh.”

“Well, where is it coming from?”

“There.”

Grange followed the girl’s finger back across the atrium.  Out through the southern wall’s long clerestory window, a figure floated in mid-air.  She was almost spectral in her nudity, as white as a pearl.  There was a long distance between them, but it could’ve been thirty miles and Frank Grange still would’ve recognized the little monster.  She was looking right at him.

Smiling.

***

Dawn fiddled with the headset again.  The hiss of the static had been dropping in and out for a few minutes now, and as she crossed the threshold into Sector H, it vanished completely.  “Grange, Frank,” she enunciated, and the auto-dialer bleeped to life.  There was a long tone, and then the old soldier’s voice started barking out.

“Summers,” he said, “what’s your position?”

“I’m down on H.  Headed for the Library.”

“The hell you are,” he said.  “You’re gonna rendezvous with Commander Singer at the command center, that’s what you’re doing.”  Normally, there was something comforting about Frank’s salt and gravel drawl.  Hardly anything ever seemed to shake the guy.  Hardly.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”  There was a long pause, and something like a sigh.  “Vi will be waiting for you at the A5 gate.  As soon as we can get a secure channel up an’ runnin’, I want you to organize an full evacuation through the tunnels.  Seems like that black junk don’t reach down there, for whatever reason.  Get as many out as you can, and then haul ass for Ipswich.”  Another pause, and the now familiar sound of soldiers shouting code words nearby.  “You’re in charge now, buckaroo.  Happy trails.”

Dawn swallowed hard, realizing something.  “And what are you going to do?”

Another long, grim silence.  “Whatever we can.”

“Frank, I…”

In the background, she thought she could hear some screams, and the chill sound of glass breaking.  “Get going, now,” he said, and then he began to say something else that Dawn would never hear, because that’s when the line cut dead.

***

Boston, 12:28 a.m

---

There was something familiar about the place.  The high arched ceilings were scorched black, and tattooed with all manner of sigils and charms.  A thought occurred to Willow that she'd dreamed of this place once before, back in her real world and real life.  When she spotted the chiseled relief of the Masonic moon she was suddenly sure of this.  Its strange face glowered back at her, as if to chastise her for any lingering doubts.  Fate had carried her here.

Or, that’s what Giles wanted her to think.  Perhaps the old mystic was toying with her mind.

Don’t go there, girl, she thought.  Once she started down that road, Willow knew there was no going back.  She had to trust her instincts.  They were the sharpest weapons she had, and this world’s Giles seemed to be a far more dangerous opponent then she could have imagined.

Not to mention her other opponent.  The one she came to bury.

As Willow forged ahead, she felt her body grow cold and clammy.  She was thinning her own oxygen intake, forcing the flesh to be quiet enough for her soul to contact her scattered allies.  There was a soft rustling somewhere out in the shadows, like leaves and whispers drifting on a wind of static.  She listened for a while, letting her mind roll on the gusts.

A name blew past, like an old and unwelcome lover.

Osiris.

Of all the gin joints, in all the world, why did I have to necromance into yours?

It was unnerving, that memory.  For so many years it was all ‘Goddess this’ and ‘Goddess that’  and ‘Blessed Fucking Be.’  And for what?  So she could wind up prostrating herself before the baby bro of Isis, anointing herself in a cup of…

Not in the land of helping.  It’s not like you have time to waste on this stuff, Lil’ Miss Uber Witch. 

Heck, it’s not like you even have ‘time’ at all.  Where and when the Hades are you anyway?  Somewhere Boston-y?  In some timeline that might-not-exist-soon because of some other timeline that might-not-exist-soon?        

The Now was messing with her radar.  It was closing in by the nanosecond, leaving behind only vague fingerprints.  Willow did know one trick to get around this, and she somehow failed to talk herself out of trying it.

She shed her mind, quickly and silently, peeling back pieces of her psyche to reveal the colorless thing inside.  As the cool air pinged off her skin, a familiar wave of diodes began to course through her astral body, sending and receiving millions of signals per second.  Slowly, the long, spidery fingers of the Witch crept out into the ether, probing for souls.

Buffy and Giles were very close.   And they weren’t the only ones.  Willow could feel Tara and Anya slipping though the fog, on their way as well.  Oz was more remote, in some sort of blurry trouble.  Harmony was already gone, coldly swept from the chessboard. 

She kept probing, a strange presence troubling her brow.  There were two others in the Institute as well.  They were the closest of all, but somehow the most difficult to see.  Willow watched their male shapes click along a stone path.  It felt as though they were an inevitable part of this world but somehow completely alien to it.  A blue cloud loomed before them, like a door with the lock broken off.  They were headed straight for it, determined to pass through.  She strained to conjure their faces. They weren't from here.  They were…

It was crazy.  Aura-boggling.  And it as much as it couldn’t possibly be true, that’s exactly how true it was.

Words trickled in from her back-brain.  Something she’d typed in an email, what felt like a hundred years ago but was much, much sooner: ‘Spike is on his way.  Your Spike, that is.“

"Oh,” she started, eyes firing wide open.  “Oh Goddess.”    

What have they done?   

***

“Steady, now,” the vampire groused.  “Don’t go bungling in like Captain Bloody Pickett.”

Xander felt his Irish getting up.  And he wasn’t even Irish.  “First of all,” he said, “Pickett was a General, you red-coated…”

“What?”

“Uh...”  Xander frowned.  Spike shot him a look like he was something in a Petri dish.  “Sorry.  Guess I kinda got hung up on the whole red thing.  You know.  Red.  Blood.  You, uh, used to wear a coat.  Anyway, you were saying?”

“Saying,” Spike muttered.  He seemed distracted, those gleaming eyes of his burnt down to husks.  “Saying, she’s in there.  Sayin' I can feel it.”

They stared into the blue fog again.  There seemed to be some sort of light inside, and gauzy shapes moving behind its folds.   It was hard to make out what they were doing.   Spike drifted towards them, becoming somehow less solid as he did, his bleached corpse hair almost transparent in the undulating glow.   A moment later Xander was following him, Rayne’s strange talisman clenched in a shaking fist.  He thought of frying pans and fires and…

And what? Xander mused.

What was worse than fire?

He watched anxiously as the mist enclosed over William the Bloody and drank him out of view.  Before he could think better of it, it was drinking Xander too, the world freezing to silver ice as they crossed some nameless threshold.  Right before they did, Xander thought he heard just a hair wisp of a voice, trailing backwards into infinity.  It sounded a heckuva lot like Tara Maclay, but by then it was a too late to contemplate that wacky notion. 

The last thought Xander had – before the rest of them, for the rest of his life – was that, at this point in the game, he was basically ready for anything.

And he was almost right.