Dawn jerked the flywheel again.  The hatch hissed back at her this time, the sound reminding her of a single, suffocated breath.  She did one last equipment check.

Combat Boots?  Check.

Poorly-Fitting, Black Commando Suit?  Check.

Big, Scary Machine Gun You Barely Even Know How To Use?  Check.

Feelings Of Overwhelming Dread In the Face of Impending Doom and Destruction on a Biblical Scale The Likes of Which the World Has Never Known?

Check-and-mate.

She eyed the GPS on her phone again. Frank’s signal was close, but faint.  There seemed to be a strange cloud of interference billowing out from the library now, making all the readings a little wonky.   

As she poked her head up through the aperture, she couldn’t help but feeling like a gopher on a golf course, or some kind of mole.  Everything was just so dark tunnel-ish lately and…

What the?

And the library – of course, why not – was gone.

In its place was what appeared to be a very lush and exotic hothouse.  The columns of books had all been replaced with long rows of flowering fauna and the crests of leafy root crops.  There was a strange and frightening beauty about them, like an artist’s impression of what a garden might look like on a distant planet.  Gone, also, were the floors and staircases and stately wings.  Their conservative angles of stained oak and polished marble had become tracts of dark, rich soil and delicate rock formations sculpted by wind and water and time.  All that was left untouched were the windows.  But even they seemed alien now, broadcasting only the black void of Kennedy’s mysterious spell.

   Dawn was swiveling, slowly and quietly, drinking it all in, when the tree slid heavily into view.  It was a vast and monstrous thing, reaching up through the floor to the very top of the vaulted ceiling like a hand from a giant’s grave.  A peculiar species of fruit dangled from its limbs in a way that reminded Dawn of hundreds of lynched men.

The stillness of the garden was unnerving, a midnight church with the tree as its terrible altar.  It gave her the creeps.  In fact, it was suddenly the last place on Earth she wanted to be.

So, Dawn Summers did the only reasonable thing she could think of.   She took a long, deep breath, and climbed inside.   

***

The palaestra was big.  Darn big, actually.  When Giles said they’d have “room to work,” he wasn’t whistling Dixie.  This was the gym-to-end-all-gyms; a sprawling underground Training Facility of the Gods that put Buffy’s sweaty old workout room to shame.  She tried hard not to let it bug her.

 “Oh, very impressive, Ripper,” Ethan purred, eyeing an arsenal of pointy weapons tacked to a wall.  “Quentin would have been so proud.”

The old Brits began another uneasy staring contest, but Buffy was too preoccupied now to play referee.  “Alright, space you got,” she snapped.  “What else do you need?”

“Time,” Giles fired back, already setting out a series of strange relics across the floor.

Faith looked on doubtfully as Rayne guided Drusilla out to the center of the arena.  The vampire had been whispering soft prayers for the past ten minutes, but as they knelt together on the floor she was silent again, her eerie unblinking eyes drawn to a pile of sharp wooden stakes next to a target range.  Faith turned to Buffy, flashing one of her trademark, jaded smiles.  “What’s goin’ on, buddy?”

Buffy shrugged.  “Spell,” she said.  “Something to help us beat the Uber-Brat army upstairs.”  It wasn’t a lie, exactly, but she could tell Faith wasn’t buying it, still studying her through those street-smart eyes.  She decided to change the subject.  “What was up with you and that shrink’s place, anyway?”

“Little freaks got the drop on us outside some bar.”  Her eyes darted shamefully for a moment.  “Guess you’re not the only one who’s rusty, Bee.”

“Why were you following him?”

“Why weren’t you?” Faith drawled, letting a little of the old acid seep out.  They exchanged an icy glare.  “Frank wanted to keep tabs on him, so I kept tabs on him.  It’s not like we did anything, yo.”

The implication was as obvious as the sneer on the brunette’s face, but Buffy just dropped it this time, bored to tears of playing this old game with her.  She wandered out to center ring, to the place where Ethan was busy wiping Drusilla’s face down with a small, white cloth.

Watching them, Buffy's thoughts drifted back to the topic of souls: finding them, losing them, selling them, buying them back.  It was still so difficult to imagine what Drusilla might have been like before she’d been turned.  Whatever Giles put back inside her seemed to flicker like a candle on a windowsill, her human voice occasionally wafting up on its plumes of smoke.  She recalled a moment in Rayne’s parlor: Drusilla scrutinizing her reflection in an old silver plate, trying to remember the stranger she saw there.

In his travels Giles had recovered the girl’s crucifix. It was given to Drusilla as a gift on the eve of her ordination, mere hours before her tormentor Angelus paid her one final, bloody visit.   The angels stopped whispering, then, as horrified as anyone else by what she’d become.

As Buffy thought this, the creature glared back at her, swaying like a snake.  The small wicked smile was gone, but there was still something intensely frightening about her.   It seemed neither the soul nor the shrink had managed to heal the monster’s deep, old wounds.

“Poor Slayer,” Drusilla whimpered.  “Why didn’t you see it?  He won’t leave, you know.  So much death down there.”

Ethan eyed the vamp warily as he soaked the cloth and dragged it across one white cheek, careful to take a wide berth around the lips.  “Gives me the willies too,” he admitted.  “She’s damned good at that.”

“She’s had a lot of practice,” Buffy deadpanned.   “Just like you.”

Ethan grinned back at her.  “Come, now, Slayer.  Surely you’ve witnessed far more challenging redemptions then mine.   What makes it so hard for you to believe I’ve changed?”

“I don’t know, Ethan.  Been in my business long enough and you can just smell it on people.”

“Oh well,” he sighed.  “Even if it were true, you think I’d want to bring about the end of reality itself?  Nothing much chaotic about that.  In fact, it sounds bloody dull, if you ask me.”  But his eyes were still glimmering, always sparkling with some dark joke he was just dying to tell.  “I can feel my alternate again,” he said, casually shifting the subject.  “He’s with your Willow now.  Your girl is quite the operator, dove.   They chose her well.”

“What do you mean by that?  Who chose her?”  Another cryptic smile.  The guy was itching for a beatdown, just begging for it, but she managed to keep her cool.  “How much time do we have left, Ethan?”

He glanced down at a watch-less wrist, mocking her.  “Shan’t be long, now.  A few hours, perhaps.  Don’t think we’ll be enjoying the sunset this evening.”

Buffy nodded grimly.  The helplessness was beginning to get to her.

Suicide seemed to be out, sadly.  Whatever monsters Willow had made her pact with, they wanted Buffy murdered, one way or the other.  Giles had agreed to do the deed – swore he would, if it came to that.  But she knew he couldn’t.  He couldn’t do it, and he couldn’t allow it to be done, even with all that was at stake.  It just wasn’t in him.  His face betrayed it all: eyes clicking hungrily at his tools, already conjuring his next big trick.  He was a man fighting two wars at once, and losing both of them.  Buffy thought it was very British of him.

She moved silently across the arena’s dusty clay, noting the bare, scuffing footprints of the combatants as she went.  It looked like they got a lot of use out of the place.  Their dance steps spiraled and overlapped, spooling out a highlight reel of their battles in the Slayer’s mind.

At either end of the place stood a marble statue.  One, she realized, was of Faith, the artist capturing all of the girl’s lidded savagery with a defiant twist of the hip.

Buffy drifted towards the other one.

It felt strange looking up at it.  The scale was way off, at least a third larger than the real Buffy Summers actually was.  Unlike Faith’s sculpted fury, the pose here was oddly serene.  Shoulders relaxed, hands folded gently in front, the girl looked more like someone who was about to burst into a soft and somewhat tragic song than some bloodthirsty warrior queen.  As she studied it, Buffy mused about how they almost never carved statues of living people.  They were monuments to mark old, faded histories, things to stand guard over graves.

She felt bitter tears well up.  The past five years – this strange, second chance that Willow stole for her – began to flash by in grim clips.  They weren’t all misery.  There had been awakenings and glorious battles, revelations and redemptions and reunions.  But the sum total was still lacking, the world still stuck in the red.  There were the specific losses, but also less obvious ones.  There were her own wasted, zombie years, trapped in the spells of dragons and forgetfulness.  There were the girls themselves, the Chosen Ones, twisted by strength into monsters of a different kind.  Not just Kennedy and her crew, but all of them, and everywhere.  Willow knew.  She could see it happening in slow motion, the world trembling at their approach.  And she fled in horror.

They’d asked Buffy, standing at the broken jaw of Hell, “What do we do now?”  But she never answered them, because she didn’t know.  It wasn’t what she was good at.  It wasn't what she was Chosen to do.

Death is your gift.         

And that was it.  That’s when it occurred to her, and she cursed herself for not putting it all together sooner.  It was so simple.  She felt the words climb out of her, meaning something at last.

Death is YOUR gift. 

***

Barbie was headed over again, sending out that old pensive and weepy vibe.   There were times Faith just couldn’t stand this routine.

Like she’s the only one around here with pathos? she thought.

But, when she got close it was different.  They’d had their little Body Language Wars over the years, but there was something new, almost peaceful, about her this time.  “I need to ask you something,” she whispered.  “Can I trust you?”

Faith gave her a long, probing look, and then nodded.

“I’m going up there,” Buffy said.

“Well great.  Let’s saddle up.”

 “I’m going up there alone.”

There was an icy ring to the word that Faith didn’t much like.  “Geez, Bee.  There’s confidence and then there’s just plain crazy.  I mean, the odds are bad enough as it is, don’cha think?”

“I’m not going up to fight them,” the blonde replied.  “I’m going up there to put an end to all this.”

The way she said it.  Man.   “Oh, don’t you fucking dare,” Faith warned.  “Look, I’m not gonna pretend I know the full, half-time score around here, or where Willow and the Brothers Grim are, or exactly what the Hell they’re up to.  But you gotta give ‘em some time to-”

“We don’t have it,” Buffy said, still so goddamned calm about it.  Then she glanced over at the warlock, her eyes glazing over with poison.  “And I don’t trust him.  And you shouldn’t either, Faith.  I need you to stay here and watch him.  Make sure he brings them all back.”

“Buffy-“

“No.”  The word was final, like Superchick’s little foot stamping down.  “It needs to be you, from now on.  The one true Slayer.”  The blonde’s eyes filled with something warm and weird, then; it was something Faith had quietly yearned to see for a long-ass time.  “And you are," she added.  "You’ve earned it.”

Faith stood awestruck for a moment, feeling a cold knife sliding into her gut.  “This is stupid,” she said.  “Man, they’re gonna fucking kill you.”

“I know they will,” said Buffy.  “That’s the plan.” 

***

Xander didn’t love this plan.  It was a bad plan, full of many, many holes.  A swiss cheese plan, at best.  It also happened to be a Spike plan, and was therefore doomed to raise the bar on the Miserable Failure High Jump.   Back in ye olden days, the vamp’s schemes had made every Scooby-Doo villain seem like Lex Luthor.

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for you meddling kids...

Xander told himself this over and over as he navigated the slim gravel path alongside the factory’s loading docks, following the stupid plan to the tee.  He climbed the rusted gangway and took a short stroll to the shift gate station, nerves jangling at every tiny creak or rustle along the way.  Just past the gate, a row of cobwebbed punch clocks glared back at him, daring him to kick off one final nightshift.  He blew past them and headed straight to the barricaded entrance of the old machine shop.

Any moment, he was assured, OtherSpike would pick up the scent.   Xander prepared for this eventuality by sweating a lot, and checking his watch over and over.  It was times like these where he almost understood the whole allure of cigarettes.  Smoking was something to do while you waited around for something bad to happen.

After about ten minutes of this, he gave up and decided to find a sneaky way inside.  Then they could skip ahead to the whole Interdimensional Meet-Cute portion of the plan.  Spike was pretty jumpy about this part.  He was so totally convinced his clone would bite the holy hell out of him that it made Xander wonder if stuff had ever really been settled between them, or if it ever would be.

Anyway, he thought the bloodsucker was giving himself way too much credit.  After all, in all those Sunnydale nights and through all his foiled plots, Spike the Master Vampire hadn’t so much as nicked Xander with his littlest fang.  And while this probably had more to do with luck than anything else, the words of the late, great Field Marshal Archibald Percival Wavell still echoed through Xander’s Sergeant-Rocked soul: "A bold man can be lucky, but no man can be lucky unless he is bold."

It was in this spirit that Xander found himself investigating the place, poking for wounds.  Near a pile of old steel drums, there was a sort of curvy ladder that lead up to a steel rampart, like the kind of thing you’d see on a battleship.  Xander climbed it and then started walking in a square around the brick castle that housed the factory floor.  The few windows were blacked-out with spraypaint, so he couldn’t see inside without making smash-y sounds.

He looked around some more, and found a big processing unit on the building’s northeast corner.   He’d seen similar models on job sites; huge industrial hulks that branched into a network of ducts and filters, supposedly making the air more breathable for the worker bees inside.   Probably not high up on the list of vampire priorities, he mused.

He started taking the thing apart, using the dagger as an improvised screw-gie.  As he gradually pried his way past the layers of steel plate and mesh filters, he realized he could hear music. It funneled up through the hollows of the air ducts, the old aluminum angles making it sound vaguely underwater.  He didn’t recognize the song at first, but it was one of those tunes that was annoyingly familiar.  Not top-twenty stuff, maybe, but the kind where you hear it and immediately think, "Oh hey, it's that song." 

The processor’s last panel came off with little metallic pop, and then he was peering down into the heart and guts of the old place, the song now fully surfaced and swooning back at him like a prom ballad.

They were down on center stage, as usual.  Arms wrapped around each other, swaying to the beat of some other song that only the two of them could hear.  Xander watched in silence for a moment, awestruck by the resemblance.  After all the junk Rayne said about alternate universes, he’d half-expected them to have wacky haircuts or moustaches.  But it was just them down there, as plain as day.  Anyone could see that.  What sucked was that it always seemed to be Xander Harris who did.

"You’re the one who sees everything, right?"

Xander was busy checking out a little ramp – and contemplating the odds of hopping down onto it –  when the jig was suddenly up.  He saw the vampire stiffen visibly in her arms, those supernaturally flared nostrils of his finally kicking in.   The Slayer followed his gaze up into the rafters and then out across to Xander’s perch.

Then, they were all just looking at each other, statue-still.  Despite the music, for the second time in as many days Xander felt there was some silence that needed breaking.

“Hi there!” he shouted.  “So, somebody want to help me down or what?”

***

All eyes were on Andrew as he strode – majestically, one might say – into the chamber of perilous doom, a breezy smile playing across his lips.  The strapping enemy leader produced a long machete, and a look upon her face that said she was anxious to find it a new home.

“Please, please,” Andrew softly chided. “Put that silly thing away.  Before someone gets hurt.”

The girls exchanged a confused look, blown completely off guard.  He seized the opportunity, calling back over his shoulder.

“It’s okay.  There’s only four,” he cried, and then turned to face them again.  “Don’t worry.  I told them you’d surrender quietly.  Avoid any unpleasantness.”

“What’s he talking about, Bridget?” asked the one called Rhonda.  She and her booklet-reading buddy were still hunched over the briefcase, frozen like deer in headlights.

Andrew tossed his head back, haughty laughter spilling out of him like Chech‘tluth from a shattered Klingon ceremonial goblet.  “Oh, my poor, silly girl!  Haven't you heard?”  He closed the distance as menacingly as he could muster.  Which was pretty darn menacingly.  “Hello?!  Your little revolution?   Over.   Finished.  Kaput-ski.”

The one named Bridget gritted her teeth defiantly.  “Bullshit!” she snarled, shaking the machete like a bandleader’s baton.  “The little freak is lying.”

“Oh, I’m afraid not, my felonious friend,” Andrew lilted.  “Your dread queen Kennedy lies slain.  Buffy Summers engaged her sword to sword, and – much like Ugluk at the edge of the Fangorn Forest – your dark mistress was finally brought low.”

A shell-shocked moment passed.  Andrew felt an itch behind his ear.  Scratched it.

“It was all pretty dramatic,” he added.

The one they called Mireaux chimed in. “I don’t believe it,” she said.  “It can’t be.”

“Ah, but it is,” said Andrew.  “Your fleet is lost!  And your friends on the Endor moon will not survive.”

“Alright, that's enough,” Bridget grunted.  “Wilcox.  Kill the geek.”

Anna May approached him cautiously, sliding a sword out of its sheath.  She was less than ten feet away when Andrew stretched out his arms – like the wings of a mighty bat! – one eyebrow arching mischievously skyward.

There came a tumult of voices, rumbling up from the shadows of the tunnel like a storm from the horizon.  They crisscrossed and overlapped, the sound of an entire regiment of Slayers of the Vampyres closing in.

Then, one particularly familiar and convincing voice rang out above the rest. “What’s going on up there?” it asked.

“Everything is fine, Buffy,” Andrew rejoined.  “Just thought I’d try a bit of diplomacy, first.”

“Screw that man,” hollered back a gruff voice that kinda-sorta sounded like Xander Harris.  “They had their chance!”  This drew a chorus of dark approvals from the warrior band, like a platoon of ravenous deer closing in on their prey.

Anna May’s face turned ashen white, her sword clattering to the floor.  “Andrew, it’s me.”   He gave her a cursory glance, eyes narrowing to slits.  “Don’t you remember me?  We worked together.  In Cleveland.  In Rome!”

Rhonda and Mireaux were both standing now, looking like deer about to bolt over an electrified fence.  Andrew struck a less menacing pose, his voice falling to a conspiratorial whisper.  “Look,” he said, “I’ve seen enough blood for one day, okay?  That’s why I came ahead.  I, too, know the seduction of The Darkness.  But they wouldn’t understand.  They… couldn’t understand.”

“This is crazy,” said Rhonda.  “What are you saying?   They’re coming to execute us?”

Andrew stared into the distance, haunted by a totally fake image stuck in his brain.  “They’ve been moving from place to place, like Terminators and T3’s.  Just hacking girls down where they stand.  Some of them they were begging for mercy.  'Mercy'...”

As if in response, the army behind him started chanting a terrible war song.  A sea of tiny lights began to poke through the darkness, coupled with the clapping patter of footsteps (which was a really, really nice touch, he thought).

“Damn this ravenous bloodlust,” Andrew cursed.  “Damn it all to Hell!”

And that’s when Big Bad Bridget finally blinked.  She dropped the knife.  “Okay!  Okay, we give up!" she shouted back into the darkness.  "Y'all hear that?  We surrender!”

“Get ready to pay, bitch!” a voice shouted back.  The mob was getting closer now, coming in at full gallop.

Andrew’s eyes filled with a quiet, stoic resolve.  “I’m sorry,” he intoned.  “If I could stop them, I would.  But I’m afraid even my powers have their limits…”

Anna May fell to her knees, crying now.  She grasped at his sleeve.  “Andrew.  Please, don’t let them kill me!”

Andrew clutched his forehead, consumed with an inner torment that burned hotter than a thousand suns.  “Okay fine!” he cried.  “Gawd.  I mean... maybe, I can buy you some time.  But we must make haste, and you must do exactly what I say.”

He started scooping the weapons from the floor, stacking them in a little pile under a small steel outcropping.  “Quickly, quickly,” he said, snapping his fingers.  “Weapons, communicators, uniforms.  All of it.”

They just stared back at him.  Like deer. 

Andrew sighed.  “Hello!  You’re on the run now, people!  You don’t want to be caught out there with anything that could identify you as a Child of the Fallen.”

They exchanged harried glances, like deer in a grassy meadow.  Then, one by one they snapped into action, peeling their uniforms away and tossing them onto the heap.

“Now go!” he cried.  “Shoo!  Take the northeast passage, as far as it will go.  It will lead you back to the surface near Wartherling Square.”  He closed one fist and then opened it, his fingers fluttering like deer flying free from their cages into a cloudless sky.  “And, from there, to your… New… Lives.”

A heartbeat later they took off, scurrying into the tunnels like scantily clad, super-powered deer into an ominous wood.

When the last of their footfalls faded into absence, Melvin inched his hideous bulk into the room.  “Holy crap!” he barked.  “I can’t believe it!”

“What?” Andrew smirked back at him.  “That it worked?”

“No!” he howled.  “That you got those chicks to take their clothes off!”

“Oh, that.”  He batted his hand humbly. “That was nothing, really.”

“Come on.  That was seriously badass!  You are a player, dude.”

There was something new and strange in the demon’s voice.  It wasn’t happiness, exactly, but he did seem genuinely excited about something for once.   “You weren’t so bad yourself,” Andrew noted.  “I mean you could, like, be in movies.  And you didn’t even have to eat anyone’s skin!”

The fiend stiffened proudly.  “Well, I’ve had to listen to you jerks for thirty thousand years or so.  You pick stuff up.  Makes it easier to torment you while we’re sucking out your spleens.”

“But it felt good, right?”  Andrew asked hopefully.  “I mean, the whole, doing good deeds part?”

Melvin seemed to dwell on this one for a few seconds, but then he just waving a tentacle dismissively.  “Nah,” he sighed.  “I mean, it was pretty awesome scaring the crap outta them and whatnot.  But Little Miss Furious is still doing her tap dance down there.“

“Oh,” Andrew said, mildly disappointed.  “Well, these things can take time.  Redemption is a long and winding journey, you see.”  He squinted, searching for the right words.  “It's kind of like warp core engineering.  You don’t just leap straight to warp nine out of the gate.  There’s warp one and warp two.  Warp three.  Warp four, warp five-”

“Alright, alright,” the Hellbeast groaned.  “Don’t start with that crap again.”

“Right, sorry.”

Suddenly, there was a beeping noise.  Down in the little pile of clothes, a tiny red light was blinking on one of the girls’ radios.  Andrew tapped the TALK-button, and a familiar voice growled out of the speaker.  “Forsythe, we’re going to have to speed things up a bit,” said Kennedy.  “How long until it’s armed?”

“Dear, sweet Kennedy,” Andrew snarked.  “Sorry, but I’m afraid Miss Forsythe is no longer among us.”

“Who is this?”

“Only a man!” he bellowed.  “A man who just defeated your pulchritudinous pawns.  A man who – as we speak – is zeroing in on the enemy queen herself.“

“Wells?!”

“Astute as always, my pugnacious princess!”  Andrew dangled the communicator a few inches from his lips, like a bunch of ripe and delicious grapes.  “However, your nefarious plot has just been foiled.  Your legions are scattered and desperate.  Soon you will feel the rough hand of justice closing around your throat, like a… hand.  Soon you–”

“Andrew,” the voice cut in, fallen to a dry and lethal whisper.

He froze.  Listened expectantly.  “Yeah?”

“When I find you,” she said, “I’m gonna fucking kill you.”

Then she hung up.

***

Tara raised the wand for a second shot, aiming right for the old man’s heart.  In the next moment, it was spinning out of her hand.  She watched helplessly as it clapped against the wall and snapped into two neat pieces.

“That,” said Rupert, “was rude.”

Anya charged, sword flashing.  She got within five feet and then she lashed out, sending the blade cleaving down with a monstrous force.  As it struck, the Watcher’s form seemed to shatter into ribbons of purple smoke.  The cloud slid past the vexed demon like a river around a rock and then reformed behind her, hardening back into the man’s familiar shape.

“Vanos,” he thundered.  A web of blue electricity sizzled out from his palm, and Anya fell screaming to her knees.

By the time he turned to deal with Tara again, she was already moving, sculpting an arrow from a nearby patch of air.  It leapt from her finger a second too late, Giles sweeping it aside with a grunt.  But Tara was running hot now.  She kept slinging them out one after the other like ropes of silk, until the Watcher finally began to wither under the assault.  He countered with a shaft of red vapor that ripped through the witch like a jagged knife.  She staggered backwards into a wall, fighting for breath.  

The monster that used to be Rayne shambled forth like a gruesome crab. “Yes, it’s all very interesting,” he said, his bone-dry British tenor backed by a chorus of chattering locusts.  “You were right about her, mate.  Such a clever girl.”

 “Rayne!” Giles shouted.  “You’re not being very helpful!”

“Wasn’t talking to you, old boy,” the warlock replied.  “And besides, being helpful isn’t the same as helping.”

The creature reared up on its haunches, revealing an underbelly of black stalks and venom sacs.  When it pounced, the sound of the locusts rose to a deafening roar.

The pair tangled into an angry knot, man indistinguishable from monster as they fought.  Tara could make out something like a diseased tentacle coil around the Watcher’s throat.  His eyes were still black with the Power, looking almost insectile in the room’s strange light.  He started speaking, spitting the words through his teeth.  Moments later his skin began to glow and shift, like liquid fire.

“Oh Ripper,” Ethan purred, locking in his death grip.  “Fighting to the bitter end.  Quentin would be proud.  But we must stop the White One, old chap.  Before her garden takes root.”

The fire on Rupert’s skin flashed orange for an instant, sending tendrils of light slashing into his enemy’s dark otherflesh.  Rayne’s ghostly face screamed as the spell went about its work, filling the monster’s veins with boiling mercury.  Within seconds, both Rayne and his creature were gone, crumbling apart into hunks of smoking ash.  A blood like bubbling tar blossomed out beneath their wreckage.

Through the fog, Tara could see the Watcher reeling backwards, visibly drained from the effort.  She ran to where Willow had fallen and dragged her to a safer distance.  The redhead’s eyes were closed.  She was speaking, but not to Tara.  

“You have to hurry,” she was saying.

***

There’s not much time.  He’s going to kill us all.  You have to hurry.

Oz was hurrying.  Knees pumping, lungs burning.  The whole nine.  Rupert’s secret basement was like a rat’s maze, except instead of white plywood and cheese-y it was all black stone and killer warlock-y.

Let me inside your mind, Willow whispered.  Let me guide you.

"You are inside my mind,” Oz said out loud.  “I mean, am I missing something here?"

Let go of the wheel, Daniel.  You know how to do it.

Daniel Osbourne closed his eyes, and began taking long, deep, tantric breaths.  It was kinda tough getting there, given the circumstances, but eventually he could hear the old Vedic hymn rolling in from the horizon like a fog.   How’s that? he thought.

Better.

A moment later he was running again.  Except now it was more like he was just zooming along on cruise control, a train on invisible rails.  It was almost peaceful, a Zen holiday from a world of near constant fucked-upness.

Willow dragged his Sutra sleigh from one corridor to the next, until finally the sanctum slid into view.  It was a pretty crazy scene; The Watcher hovering twenty feet in the air, Will and Anya and Tara craning up at him like wolves at a moon.

He was almost to the archway when he saw Rupert’s jaw drop open, snake-wide.  Black mist fired out of it like a volcano blast.   The debris from it slowly descended over his friends, curling around their bodies in a way that was almost tender.  Willow spotted him from across the room, their eyes locking for one strange second.  She opened her mouth to say something.  But it was too late.

Oz watched in horror as Tara melted into a pink puddle.  As Anya screamed and was set aflame.  As Willow turned to sand and blew sideways and crumbled apart.

And then they were dead.  All of them.  All gone.

An old knife twisted in his heart.

Something dangerous began to growl.