They sort of just stood there staring at it for a minute, letting it sink all the way in.  The sign stared back at them like a cheerfully stupid and single-minded dog:

WELCOME TO SUNNYDALE

EST. 1909
POPULATION: 2

Xander turned to look at the blue mist, which was just a strip of state highway now, then turned back, and then did both of these things again.  He wondered if that counted as a quadruple-take, and decided that if it was, then it was totally worth it.  The vampire just stood very still, face set like a cowboy in an old shoot’em’up Western.  They had some sort of history, Xander guessed – Spike and the sign.

“Okay,” Xander said, “so this is, what?  The past?”  Spike shook his head slowly, still seeming a little zombie-fied.  Just out of it.  “Then, it’s a trick!”

“Yeah,” Spike agreed.   “Bloody good one, at that.”

“Except... I don’t get it.  Why would Ethan go to all this trouble?”

“Hell if I know.  Said he was some kinda illusionist, yeah?”

“Understatement,” said Xander.  “But yeah.”

They became quiet again, looking out past the sign at their old resurrected stomping grounds, the place where everything began.  It looked about the same as it did in Xander’s dreams and nightmares, its squat landmarks and green, landscaped parks interrupting the desert like a rude houseguest.  It seemed both wrong and mercilessly appropriate at the same time.   He thought again of the job they'd signed up for, and wondered whether either of them had the hard southern cement to actually go through with it.  He heard himself ask the vampire if she was here or not.

“She’s here,” he said, and started marching off towards the lights of the town, his boots making little crunching noises on the packed pebbles and sand that sounded like the end of a very sad song.  Xander took a deep breath and then followed along, the two of them playing off together into the night.

***

“Buffy?”

“What?”

“Buffy!”

“What?!”

“Bloody hell are you doing up there?”

“Just a minute!”  Skaya booted her way though the Technicolor snowdrift of clothes, eyeing a fuchsia camisole suspiciously as she went.   After a few moments of Talmudic debate, she placed it with the others on the bedspread.  Hands on hips, she surveyed the field of candidates one last time.

“Slayer, we are gonna be late!”

It was probably true.  Not that she was in any position to care.  None of this was real, as far as she could tell.  Or, at least, not real enough for a girl to go and lose her marbles over.  And that’s what she told herself as she slipped the winner over her head, smoothing and straightening it in the long dressing mirror like it was the most normal thing in the world to do.  Like she was normal, too; like her past wasn’t any more her own than the face that smiled back at her from the glass now, looking more youthful and hopeful than she’d ever actually felt, even back then.  It would’ve been a cruel hoax if everything wasn’t so...

Nice?

Downstairs, his voice kept ringing out, more royally annoyed than angry.  She grabbed a pair of white Guccis and hit the hallway running, tugging on one and then the other as she went.  By the time she hit the last stair, her heart was thumping out a techno beat in her ears, excited by the insanity of it all.  The vampire was still reclining in the old beige barcalounger; leg slung over one arm, coat flared open like the leathery wings of a bat.   He was trying to look cool, she realized, but not trying too hard.  It was his eyes that gave him away, as usual.  They shot wide and round for a moment, almost like he was alarmed at the sight of her.

“You look,” he said.  “You look…”

“What?”

“You look, uh, ready to go,” he mumbled, and then made a big show of standing up, arranging and rearranging things in his pockets, lighting a smoke, and generally trying to look surly and put upon.  “Bout sodding time, too.  Promised I’d get you there before the big surprise.  ‘Nother five minutes and you’d’ve made a liar outta me, on top of everything else.”

She managed to stifle the grin, decided to stand there blinking at him and pretending to be bored instead.  This was a nasty old trap, she knew, but he fell for it every time.  He goggled at her like a thief at a diamond, dumbstruck as she slowly and luxuriously closed the gap between them.  All of their arms moved involuntarily, curling into place around hips and shoulders.  They stood that way for a long moment, like dancers awaiting the first note of their favorite song.

“It's just, they been plannin’ it for weeks…”

“And you don’t want to disappoint them.  Awwww.”

“No, it’s not…  There’s a cake.”   

“Think I saw some Entenmann’s in the kitchen,” she murmured.  “We could always stay in.  Feed each other.”

The vamp shuddered at the F-word, whispered like a threat in his ear.  She delighted at the idea of him fighting his own body.  Really putting up a hell of a brawl too, she thought, his fingers trying to decide whether to pull her close or retreat, as though she were something that was both precious and on fire.

“No, no,” he finally said.  “Just get in car and behave for once.  Gonna get me good and staked, you keep stallin’.”

She faked a pouty face, did one of those a melodramatic, twirly turns they do on all the cheesy soaps when they're about to make a big exit.  Something was singing in her chest when they sidled out into the Sunnydale night; not arm-in-arm, exactly, but side-by-side, for the first time in years.

Skaya drank in the familiar old scenery as she went, filled with something very close to awe.  The warlock’s little lockbox – this snowglobe world, this whatever-it-was – was less than real, but something more than a dream.   The Sunnydale she remembered was never exactly picturesque, but whatever small measure of beauty the old ‘berg had contained was on blazing display, as though painted by a genius with an especially lush and otherworldly palette.  Even the leaves on the trees were the sort of surreal, flawless green that you’d find on the stems of plastic roses.  This was all just more of Ethan’s lie, maybe, but it was an effortless, glorious lie.  And, little by little, she felt herself giving over to it.  Letting it just be.

Spike plucked open the Desoto’s passenger door, almost gentlemanly about it.  “Come along, pet,” he said, tongue flicking down suggestively.  “I’ll let you work the stick…”

Almost.

***

Buffy’s eyes snapped open, searching immediately for a clock.

10:22 a.m.

She shot bolt upright, managing to stir Giles from what appeared to be an accidental nap.  The Watcher crossed and uncrossed his legs in his chair, trying to decide whether to look nonchalant or determined.  Wordlessly, she sprang from the loveseat, roved in two small, birdlike circles, and then grabbed her jacket from a hook.

“Buffy…”

She kept going, tossing her arms down the sleeves.  Marched into the kitchen where Rayne was strewn across the floor like a broken cookie jar.  Kicked him.  “Get up.”

The warlock’s eyes fluttered to life, squinted at her through a fog of brandy.  “Eh?”

“We’re leaving.  Now.”

She didn’t wait around for him to defrost.  She was through waiting around for anyone, and least of all for him.  Back in the living room, she tossed a blanket over Drusilla, hiding her sleepless doll eyes.  Giles was getting his coat on, apparently in no mood to argue either.  He just plaintively asked her where they were going.

“We’re going to pick up Faith,” she explained.  “Then we're going back to the Council.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so.  We’re not playing this game on Ethan’s turf anymore.”

“Fine,” he said.  “We’ll go back to the Council.  And assuming Mr. Grange doesn’t have us shot on sight, what then?”

She gave him a hard look.  “What then?  Then your drunk college buddy back there is gonna pull my friends out of whatever dumb dimension they’re stuck in.  That’s what then.”  She headed for the door.  “I’ll warm up the car.”

“Buffy, do you think that’s wise?”

“Warming up the car?  Yeah, it’s kinda chilly out there.”

“Buffy,” he said, “I’m sorry I never told you about Willow.”  When she turned to face him, his hands were shoved in his pockets, shoulders slumped in some signal of defeat.   “Or about, well, everything, really.  I just want you to know, there will be no more secrets between us.  But we must let them finish this.”

“We'll find another way,” she said, leaving again.

“And if we can’t?”  There was a familiar timber in his voice that she didn’t much like.  “If we can’t, then everything anyone has ever done will be for naught.  This is no mere end of the world we are talking about.  If they don’t kill her, then the book closes.  Once and for all.”

She let her hand slip from the door.  “No, Giles.  There’s always one last resort, worse come to worst.”

He studied her eyes skeptically.  “And what would that be?”

Buffy shrugged and then strode out into the chill London morning. “You can always kill me,” she called back to him, shivering as she went.

***

Kennedy marched fists-first into the  Women's Studies Center, clanging apart the heavy double doors with a sweep of her arms.  Along the rotunda’s red placental wall, an array of portraits gazed down at her approvingly: Joan D’Arc and Lucy Webb and Madonna.

The others followed her inside, the sounds of the raging battle outside vanishing sharply as the doors clanked shut.  Rhonda was still carrying the small metal case, and nothing else.  Kennedy had asked the girl to guard it with her life, and watching her now – her steely-eyed cadence as she crossed the hall, long arm keeping a straight line to the earth – she believed that Rhonda would. 

There were four of them; Rhonda Brown, Anna May Wilcox, Paulina Mireaux, and Big Bridget Forsythe.   Bridget was the enforcer; a tall bruising southpaw from Fulton County, Kentucky.  She was the only one Kennedy really trusted to handle herself in a brawl with Lehane or Summers, if it came to that.  More importantly, she’d keep the other girls in line, in case anyone started having second thoughts. 

Of course, if everything went smoothly, it would never come to that.  Kennedy zeroed in on the old daguerreotype of Susan B: still dominating the head of the chamber with her dowdy white frock and her librarian’s icewater eyes.   Frowning, Kennedy felt along the seam where the picture frame met the wall, fingers inching up until they found the hard plastic oval with the trigger in the center.  A moment later, the room whirred to life, huge rail-driven partitions lifting and separating to reveal the secret passage into what the Council called their “Ecto Containment Unit.”

Ghost Jail, Kennedy mused.  It seemed like the best spot to plant it, and the last place anyone would ever look.  Nancy Stark included.

“Mireaux?” she asked.  “What do you see?”

The geek fanned her little, booping gadget in the air a couple of times.  “I'm getting some weird readings, sir,” she whispered, sounding just a little spooked.  “Don’t know what to make of them, really…”

“I do,” Bridget grunted, unsheathing her broadsword.  “Soufflé.”

Kennedy grinned.  “Alright, ladies, you know what to do.  I’ll see you topside at 1300 hours.”  She watched them march single file into the titanium guts of the complex.  When their faces vanished behind a silver elevator door, she lingered a few moments longer, unsure why.   It finally dawned on her that she was waiting for the pang of remorse to hit. 

When it didn’t, she just turned and sauntered back out onto the green campus lawn.  The symphony of battle returned, sounding somewhat less than real under Nancy Stark’s eerie black sky.

Kennedy would head to Operations, now, while Nancy was off playing her enigmatic games.  As soon as Rhonda and the girls armed the nuke, Kennedy would set the timer remotely and head down into the tunnels.  Rupert had built a vast network down there; a spiderweb of high speed rail with access points all over London metropolitan and beyond.  She'd sabotage the switching station before she left, cutting off power to all but one car.  She’d ride that one to Maidstone and from there to Canterbury, and then on to Calais.   She’d watch the show from the banks of the channel with a flute of champagne, drinking to the birth of a New World Order. 

It was sure to be a grand show, too; a fire to end all fires.  They couldn’t just bury this one like they did Sunnydale.  But it was going to be a lot of fun to see them try.

And watch them squirm.  

***

Frank Grange crept slowly down the row.  His old legs were cramping a little, but mostly holding up.  Down on the ground floor, another scream rang out.  Just a scream, this time.  No yelp of return-fire, no shrill cries for help.  He thought it might’ve been Lt. Torres.  Although Frank never figured the young hotshot for a screamer, he was running out of voices to identify.

Kennedy’s monsters continued to shuffle around in the passageways.  Frank caught little glimpses of them here and there, but never the full picture.  About forty feet ahead, he spotted a leg as thick as a tree trunk pierce the junction, and caught the red gleam from a row of fangs.

He pulled the only heat he had – a gold plated Desert Eagle semi-automatic.  The gun was given to him as a gift on his 50th birthday, many moons ago.  He took steady aim, but the beast moved on, lurching out of sight.  It was either oblivious to him or pretending to be.

Or maybe he just don’t consider you a threat, old man.   The notion stung a little, but given the circumstances he wasn’t going to sit around sniveling about it.  It wasn’t like those ugly bastards were the only game in town, anyway.  Nancy Stark was in there with them, too.  The little psycho made one hell of an entrance; poor Mr. Giles’ pretty six figure window had exploded like it was hit with a claymore mine.

The thought of having a few claymores handy almost had Frank salivating.   Instead, he was hunkered down at the edge of the Classical Literature wing, clutching his little pea-shooter and trying to keep what was left of his old legs awake.   It suddenly felt like one hell of a dumb way to go out.  He'd always pictured something a little more exciting.  Maybe riding a horse or something.

Stark was talking again.  Frank tilted one ear towards the sound, trying to trace her ghostly echoes back to their source.  “And the moon gazed on my midnight labors,” she said, her voice vibrating with fake earnestness.   “While, with unrelaxed and breathless eagerness, I pursued nature to her hiding-places...” 

Gritting his teeth, Frank thumbed off the gun’s safety and poked his head around a corner.  Past an squat island of card catalogs, he saw the silhouette of a girl suspended in air.  Her arms and legs were splayed out in a gruesome X, held in place by a rope made from a red twine of muscle and vein.  Mindy, or Cindy, was her name.

Frank thought of the Summers girl again and cursed himself.  He recounted his last orders, and suddenly wished he'd just told her to run, instead; to get as far away from here as she could, as fast as she fucking could, and to never look back.  After all, it was Frank who dragged her into this mess to begin with.  And now that it was all falling to ripe shit, it felt like he'd stuck the poor girl with the bill, too

Worst of all, he was going to die here.  That was bad for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that he wouldn’t ever know how it turned out, and whether Dawn made it or not.  If only he was a little younger, he mused, maybe he would’ve stood a chance.  Twenty or thirty years ago, Frank Grange was a force to be reckoned with.  Now, gazing up into the dead girl’s face, looking at a pair of eyes that were round with frozen horror, he thought about how the years just seemed to get away from him, and how life just seemed to whittle you down and whittle you down until all that was left was a salty snack for the vultures.

Be that as it may, he figured he might as well soldier it out.  Get it over with.  Hell, maybe he’d even get lucky, and drag a few chunks of the good Doctor Stark down to hell with him.

She was still talking, voice just above a whisper, teasing him with another quotation, from 'Proust' or some goddamned bullshit.  Trying to scare him, Frank figured, and it was almost working.  The woman always had a gift for that sort of thing.  Damn near everyone was spooked by Stark, back in the day.  It was her eyes, as much as anything; as pink and innocent as a newborn’s thumbs, but somehow terrible, and much older than their years. 

Frank prowled out towards the island.  He scanned each row for those little pink peepers of hers as he went, itching to sink a .44 caliber bullet between them and sincerely doubting she’d give him the chance.  The air in the library was freezing, but up in the rafters, the fans kept churning away for no apparent reason, drawing strange shadows that broke like waves over the tops of the bookshelves and across the polished concrete floors.

When he got to where the girl was hung up, he reached for her throat automatically, already knowing there was no pulse there but doing it anyway.

Aw, the hell with it. 

“Okay, darling,” he growled.  “Here I am.  You need an engraved invitation or what?”

It happened fast.  Out of the corner of one eye, he caught a glimmer of white smoke.  Then, it was Frank trying to pivot and feeling his damn leg go, just go, the left ankle crumbling apart like drywall at the hinge.  He hit the ground hard and heard a cry that he barely recognized as his own.

Nancy followed him down, giggling the whole way.  Her eyes were different now.  Full of dead stars and insects and a godawful light. 

Frank felt the gun go off three or four times in his hand and then it was gone and when he looked down he noticed his hand was gone too.

And the only thing he could think of, as she went to work on him and as his life spilled out in brown, slippery gallons, was: ‘Who is going to type it?’

Who is going to type the goddamned thing?

***

When the elevator arrived down on Ten Minus, the office door was already wide open.

That was Never a good sign, the man had learned.  You see, closed could mean a lot of different things.  Hardcore brooding and moping session.  Workout with one of Ormoch the Auditor's "negotiators."  Anguished, melodramatic phone call to You Know Who.  Turned into a puppet.  All kinds of shit.

Open, on the other hand, could only mean one kind of shit.  So, the man straightened his lapel collars, tipped a nod at Gladys, put on his best Cool Dude Face, and strolled right on inside.

“About time,” Angel snapped, barely bothering to look up.

There was a slim file in the old bloodsucker’s hand.  He'd never known Angel to be much of a paperwork junky, so it was fairly obvious what it was.  Had to be that same crazy ass report that had been haunting the man ever since he left Central. 

The vamp caught the glint of recognition in his eyes, and pounced on it.  “How long have you known about… this?”

"Thirteen hours.  Twelve if you don't count the nap I took on the ride up.”

Angel ran his fingers through his hair.  Every little motion he made was rickety.  The rumpled navy suit he wore looked about three days late for a trip to the dry cleaners.  The bastard had been drinking, too.  A half-kicked quart of double malt scotch sat unbuttoned on his desk blotter, alongside two tumblers and a tall glass of something red.

The vampire reloaded on the whiskey and gestured towards an empty chair.  A long moment passed that way, the two of them sitting around like it was the old days.  The man was tempted to ask for a glass, but it was either a bit too late or way, way too early for his taste.  With his travel schedule lately, it was hard to remember which.

He checked his watch again: 2:31 a.m.

Damn, he thought.  So, what time does it make it over there? 

Before he could finish doing the math, Angel started in with the obvious.  “We really got caught with our pants down on this one, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, man.  We really did.”

“How does something like… this… go down, and Hell doesn’t know about it?”

“Dude, you think they ain’t asking themselves the very same question?”  He eyed the whiskey again, all golden and full of tart warmth.  “Heads are rolling down in Crisis Management.  And I mean that, man.  I just came from there.  Literally rollin’ around on the floor.  Almost slipped and broke my ass.”

Angel seemed to deliberate on something for a moment, eyes shifting clock-like under that bedhead hairdo of his -- the one that still looked about eight years too young for him, eternal life or not.

“Any word on,” he started to ask.  And then trailed the hell off.

If the situation was different, and if so much hadn’t changed between them, the man might’ve cracked a smile.  “No, not yet," he said.  "To tell you the truth, it’s a little crazy down there right now.  This Now shit has got em’ all good and spooked.  It’s like rats leaving a sinking ship.  ‘Cept the ship already sunk, know what I mean?”

“You really believe that?”

Giving in to a sudden instinct, the man grabbed the bottle and tilted it, enjoying the sound of the yellow poison sloshing into the tumbler, like a musical note sliding up an octave.  To his new ears, everything sounded musical, symphonic.  This was one of the unadvertised perks.

“I believe,” he said, raising the glass, “whatever the bastards want me to believe.  You know that.”   Angel nodded grimly at this fact, and the man thought he saw something like sadness cross the monster's face.  “But,” he added, “we’ll play this out however you want.  The partners have put me at your complete disposal.  And considering this is probably our Going Out of Business Sale, they’re giving you full license here.”

Angel nodded, squinting down at the report again.  The old gears were spinning.  “My play, huh?”

“Your play.”

Silence.  Then, he hit the intercom.  “Gladys?”

“Yes, Mr. Angel?”

“Have Marty gas up the jet.  Tell him to be ready to fly in twenty minutes or it’s his butt on a stick.”

The vampire flicked off the mic.   And that was all there was to it.  There didn’t seem to be much left to say, so the two of them just sat there drinking and studying the walls.  Inside the hour, they’d be flying off to Jolly Old, either to save the world or to watch it end, blinking out of existence forever.

Not with a bang, but a whimper, the man mused, the whiskey simmering on the walls of his throat.  He tried and tried to care about this notion, but it was impossible these days, like a butterfly trying to crawl back inside the cocoon and become a caterpillar.  The best he could manage was a wry little chuckle.

“Let me ask you something,” Angel said.  “Was it worth it?”

“What?  Selling it, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

“Probably not,” said the man who used to be Charles Gunn, and kicked up his heels.  “But then again, it’s gotta be better than giving the shit away for free.”