Chapter 4:  Red Falcon

“Wake up,” she said.

Buffy had been watching for almost an hour before his lips finally moved, dryly puckering the air. It was hard to keep still, not blow her cool. Ten minutes ago, she’d sent Riley and his bullet boys to guard the grounds. She had to do this part alone.

“What… am I… where is,” the Watcher muttered, still fighting through a chemical fog. “Finn?”

She peered out the window and glimpsed Johnson and Ward.  The two soldiers hovered like ghosts at the distant edge of the drive, their gun barrels gleaming red in the sunset. Somewhere writhing through the tall grass was a man named Jason Bakely, a toned and tanned beach boy setting up for a very long, very deadly shot.

Night was falling fast, the way it always seemed to do in the ‘burbs of Rome.  This villa had been a parting gift from the Immortal, and, she hoped, remained one of her few real secrets.  But she wasn’t betting on it.  There was no telling how long it would be before the Council knew the location of its kidnapped king.

“Buffy?”  Giles blinked in slow motion, his face suddenly owlish. “My hands.” He seemed to shrug against the ropes, not so much to loosen them as to make sure that they were real. “What’s happened?”

“Gee.  I was kinda hoping you could tell me.”

“Oh… please, don’t call me that.” Giles looked genuinely embarrassed.

“No.  No I didn’t mean G, like the letter G.” She frowned. “I meant Gee as in ‘Golly gee, why is my dear old Watcher trying to kill me?’”

His brain didn't seem to register the question.  He shook his head groggily. “Where are we?”

“My home. Thought you’d recognize it from the satellite pics.”

This one did the trick, and the man's pale blue eyes sparked up at her. “What in God’s name are you talking about?” She could see his arms stiffen under the pricey duds, testing the ropes for real this time. “Why am I tied up? Why…” He swallowed hard. “You had me drugged. Didn’t you? The yanks at the airport.  Oh, God…”

“God’s not going to help you now Rupert.”  She leaned in close, brought her lips one playful inch from his ear. “To be honest, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t exist.  And I kinda have some first hand experience there.”

Her Slayer blood lurched like a black wave, rallying towards a certain sinister impulse.  Without a second thought, she accommodated it.  Went with the flow.

“Do you know what I can do?” she whispered. “I mean, to a normal person?  Do you know what my hands are capable of doing to regular old human flesh and bone?” Her senses were running on full melt, and she could feel the hairs rise on the back of the man’s neck. “Sure you do, Giles.  You taught me, after all. Right?  You taught me everything I know…”

Her hand curled around the back of his neck.   A sharp thumbnail drew a line across to the center of his throat.  When it got there she pressed the button, and watched the man’s face go the color of old milk.

The ground fell away sharply.  It was as though something large had torn her loose from the world and dropped her in an empty, airless waiting room. This was the hard stuff, the bad stuff.  Somehow, she’d always known it would come to this, or something like it.  Life had a vicious shape, the edges sewn with endings like this one.  Knowing that didn’t help.  The inevitability of betrayal made it all the worse.

But, if nothing else, she would have her satisfaction.  She watched with horrible fascination as the man writhed in her grip.  He felt so frail.  Even more so than she’d imagined.  Holding his throat was like holding a little bird.  Another ounce of pressure, and bye-bye birdie…

“Buffy,” Giles managed at last, his voice a choking monotone. “Buffy.  When was the last time you checked your... email.”

“What?”

“Email,” he sputtered.  “Haven’t.  Been reading it.  Have you?”

She shook her head. He was trying to confuse her, stalling for time.  How lame.  Her left arm shot out, a crashing backhand that sent both Watcher and chair clattering to the floor. She could have broken his jaw if she’d wanted, she thought. Or his neck. But it was too early for that. She wanted him talking.  Wanted him singing.

“Oops, I did it again,” she said.  “Sorry about that, old chap. I guess I don’t know my own strength sometimes.”

She righted the chair, pretended to fuss with the ruff of gray hair. “But you do, don’t you Giles? You know I can break you apart a little bit at a time. That I can make it last for days.”

He laughed. It was the same fly-boy chuckle he used to put on in the old days, in the tightest of spots; the sound that said he was tough - not for what he could do but for what he was prepared to endure, to sacrifice. He knew she was prepared to kill him, and he was letting her know he was prepared to die.

“Glad you think it’s so funny.” That’s when she felt the tears hammering at the rims of her eyelids, tiny traitors trying to escape. “But you will tell me everything, Giles.  That’s no joke.”

“Yes, ahem, yes, of course,” he said.  “What was the question again? Why am I trying to ‘kill you’ is it? Well, dear me, Buffy, ahaha. I suppose I just got bored of saving your bloody life all these years, ahahaha!”

He couldn’t help himself now.  The laughter was bubbling out of him, choking him worse than her hand.   “Besides think of, ahah, think of all the money I’ll ahhhahhah, save on cruh- cruh- credit carhahahahahaheeheehahah!”

She was winding up for another whack when six-feet-two inches of Super Soldier suddenly burst into the room.  Riley stood there for several seconds, majestically stupid, like a big shaggy dog trapped in traffic.

“Uhh” he said, Frankenstein-ish.  “Uhhhhhhhh…..”

Enraged, she perp-walked him out into the corridoio.   “What did we say about knocking?” she hissed.

“Sorry, Buff. I, uh.  Heard a ruckus.”

“Ruckus?”

“Sorry.”  Riley glared at his boots. It was hard to get over how much older he seemed, the sideburns fading sharply to gray over the ear. But he still looked like a gigantic boy when he was embarrassed.

“Uh, it’s called an interrogation,” she hissed.  “There’s gonna be noises.  That’s, like, sort of the point, you know?  Me hit, him make noise.”  Somewhere behind her the Falcon cackled, filling her with the overwhelming urge to change the subject.  “What’s the status out there?”

“Frosty.  Nothing goin’ bump in the night.” He hesitated.  “I mean, it’s possible nothing’s coming, you know. We caused one hell of a traffic jam back there.  And his people… they were weird, but I think they were, you know… human.  Could be immigration picked them up already.  Or, uh, something.”

There was a slight kink in his military posture.  He was holding something back.   “What are you not telling me?”

“It’s nothing. It’s just…” His voice sank to a low, almost conspiratorial whisper. “It’s just, my people aren’t so sure about your theory here, Buff.  Something’s not right. The government’s been aware of the Council's existence for a long time.  They’ve had a man inside, for over a year now.”

Her mind raced, trying to process it.  “What?  You mean, like a spy?”

“Well, a plant, yeah. It’s not what you think, though. Certain… relationships have developed. It’s complex…”

“Then talk slow.”

He was shifting his feet, suddenly as uncomfortable as he was in the old days – in ‘their’ old days, back in the way back, when the game was all about hiding in plain sight, lying and rationalizing the lies.  Same old Sunnydale shuffle, and same old Riley still stunk at that particular game. “Look, I know you don’t want to hear this.  But all my sources are telling me that there’s no way in hell that Giles is dirty.”

“Ah, your sources.    Uh-huh, and you learned all this, what, just now?”

“Conference call” he explained.   “On the ride over. I think I might have ruffled a few feathers with this one.” He cracked a wry smile, despite himself. Getting chewed out by the ‘brass’ still seemed to tickle his usually microscopic funny bone.

“Yeah, well,” she muttered.  “Did you ever think that maybe your little sources might be part of it?”

“They’re part of everything, Buffy.  Doesn’t make them wrong.”

She nodded, absently, chewing on it but trying not to look like she was chewing on it.  “So.   Who’s the spy?”

“Don’t know.  Not my line of country.”

She glared back into the room at Giles. A red line fell from the corner of his mouth. “Find out what you can. But do it outside. I have a workout to finish.”

She waited for Riley to disappear down the hallway, then closed and locked the door behind her.  Giles grinned at the floor.  A cool breeze rustled through an open window like a whispered warning.  Buffy latched it shut.

“Tell me when it hurts,” she said.   

***

The sun was rising, a fat and glowing orb on the horizon. It painted the lazy pan of Viterbo with long red stripes that reminded Buffy of a hazy desert highway. She studied them sullenly.

Somewhere behind her, the man who had been her mentor crawled on the floor, gasping for breath. Strewn around him was the undeniable evidence of his crime. Papers, mostly, bearing his name and his personal mark. He bore it too, now. In a moment of creativity, she had branded his forehead with the Falcon stamp. It stood out like a stark red wound on his flesh.

He’d tried to trick her.  That much she was sure of.  Talked about Willow, mostly, something about her passing over into the “realm of the pure determination,” whatever that was supposed to mean.  The more she beat on him, the more that story kept shifting. Now she was alive, now she was dead.  Now she seemed to be traveling through time. Buffy mostly ignored his lies, but that last one tore it.  Exactly how gullible did he think she was?

She had to force herself to go easy on him, after that. Giles was a tough old bastard, but with extra emphasis on the ‘old.’  Her uber-ears had picked up a small heart episode, some kind of irregular thumpa-thump in the Watcher’s chest.  Nothing too serious, she thought.  But then again, she was no doctor.

He’d stopped denying everything since then. In fact, he stopped saying anything at all. At one point he wept, but not for long, and not loudly. She thought it was very British of him.

By then, it didn’t matter.  She was on a roll, doing the whole Perry Mason courtroom climax.

The paper trail had begun last March, with yet another a dull assignment in Tuscany. She was supposed to relieve a certain R’okklak demon of a scroll that supposedly was written by the first Watcher.  She remembered thinking this was a pretty lame thing to risk her neck over. The mission brief had mentioned nothing about magic such-and-so’s, or curses or that sort of thing.  It was just paper. Something to hang on a wall.  Like a hunting trophy for old, boring English guys.

The scroll’s language turned out to be a rare dialect of ancient Assyrian.   Not exactly her mother tongue. But just before the R’okklak went to that Great Big R’okklak party in the sky, he’d said something that stuck with her. “Nessun uomo è soddisfatto di guardare per sempre.”

Her Italian was still pretty rough, and the monster’s dialect was weird.   But the words had sent a chilly fingernail rolling up her spine.

No man is content to watch forever.

Before the pickup man from the Council had a chance to swing by, she decided to poke a little further.   Crossing a certain old wall of ice between them, Buffy decided to dump a few photos of the scroll into an email and let Dawn take a whack at it.  It turned out that girl still had her spooky facility for dead languages, but it still took several weeks before she was able to unlock even a few phrases. “It’s some kind of ordered list, I think,” she’d mused in her reply. “It’s weird. Like a set of stereo instructions, or something.”

There was only one line the girl was really sure about. It was written halfway down the page, the fifth instruction:

“In darkness do it. Her blood sets the stone of the eternal house. You are her only witness, and she is yours.”

There were five missions between that day and this one, each errand stranger than the last. For the first four, it felt like she was always fetching something, running through someone’s crappy grocery list. Then last night came the fifth. The fifth mission.

Her blood sets the stone…

There was something Spike had said to her once.  It was late in their endgame against The First Evil, around the time that Giles and Wood were secretly plotting the vampire’s dusty demise.  She had broken away from the group, leaving the Watcher and Anya to work out the boring details of the Chosen Ones’ travel plans.

She remembered standing in the archway to her mother’s old living room, watching Rupert Giles as he tore through a stack of airport schedules and birth certificates. He was so excited.  She could feel it.  And at that precise and terrible moment, she’d realized that it was more than just saving the world to him, now.  He was excited that Buffy was not the only one to Watch.

There had been a familiar smell of whiskey and leather beside her. “Who watches the watchmen?” he cooed. It was just a bit of old, stuffy poetry, but it‘d resonated through her in that moment. His intuition was a razor blade, always the most supernatural thing about him.

And Giles was going to have him murdered. He would take her on a pleasant, fatherly stroll through a graveyard, while her lover was being put down like a dog in a woodshed.

Something growled inside her. She picked up the small knife that had been screaming at her from the windowsill for most of a day.  She was ready.

“Buffy.”  His voice was distant, throaty. She turned to look, arms locked to her chest, masking the dagger. The old man had tried to climb to his knees but couldn’t. Instead he lolled sideways, groaning as his left arm turned under him. She had the dim realization that she had broken it.

It suddenly all seemed so useless to her. She felt herself floating again, back in outer space. The knife was in her hand. It was hard to see. She was crying. She was freezing.

“Buffy. I have to tell you something.”

She floated towards him. None of this felt real - not her anger, not his pain. She was suddenly certain that she was still dead, still buried in a makeshift grave in the woods of southern California.   She didn’t want to hear his confession, but it was too late to do anything else. She kneeled beside him, leaned in close. The knife was sharp.

“I love you,” he wheezed through swollen lips.  Her heart cracked in half.  “Please…please… Willow!”

He was on the verge of unconsciousness. Maybe worse. At that moment, Buffy saw something soft happen in his eyes. She recognized it immediately, and melted.

(no this is the man who will kill this is the man who will kill this is the man…)

Shut up for a second!

For the first time in twenty four hours, her brain began to call the shots. A sudden impulse came over her. She ran to her sleeping computer, hammered the space bar to wake it up.   It was true. She hadn’t checked her email in more than a week. She was sick of it, frankly. Ninety percent was junk, Chinese medicine and African banking. If someone really needed her, there were a dozen ways they could find her.

Wasn’t there?

The program fired up slowly, a blue loading bar inching forward like a caterpillar. Then the mail started pouring in at an alarming rate; one million, two hundred and forty seven messages loading up one at a time. The electronic letters flipped down the screen like lottery numbers, each iteration more insistent then the last. It all had a mesmerizing rhythm, the poetry of prayer:

FROM: wrosenberg@ebreakfast.com
RE: SPIKE
(…)
FROM: wrosenberg@saymyname.com
RE: SPIKE
(…)
FROM: wrosenberg@colddriptrips.com
RE: SPIKE
(…)

The room spun. Or, maybe she did. The frozen feeling had given way to something like delirium.  The computer kept churning out nonsense emails from and about dead people.

What happened to us, she thought. Where did we go?

She dropped the knife. Three things happened:

At the corner of her vision, she saw a flash.

A male voice yelled out something harsh over the sound of machine gun fire.

Less than ten feet behind her, a window shattered.

***

The bloody suit was chafing again.

He moved low and fast along the tree line, hovering just outside their cone of vision. There seemed to be five of them, but he’d seen these yanks in action before. They always had at least two invisible men, hidden far away in the tall grass, or huddled in the trunk of a distant car. And those blokes were usually the best shots.

Don’t be a poof.

Snaking through the brambles, he paused at the foot of the estate’s long grassy garden. The villa stood at the top of a fairly steep hill; a marvelous defensive post. Smart girl, he thought. Most people didn’t give her that sort of credit. But being a bit on the dim side himself, he’d always admired the Slayer's ability to put together a plan. In that spirit, he’d decided to pull back on the throttle a bit and try to work out some clever, devious method of getting inside.

So far, all he could come up with was to just make a bloody break for it. The suit was fairly flexible but it did slow him down a bit. He’d probably catch a few bullets, nothing too serious.

Get on with it, Nancy!

He hesitated. It was the first time in a long time - ever, maybe – but, in hindsight, it had probably saved his bloody neck. Up on his haunches, ready to sprint to the goal line, he paused to consider what he was about to do, how he was about to betray every oath he’d made to himself since the Buggers That Be drop-kicked him back onto this loony bin of a world. So, he was quite busy cursing his own stupidity and cowardice when the shot of lightening hit. There was a warm flash, and suddenly the yard itself became a very, very busy place.

In all his years, he’d never seen anything quite like it. Mostly, magic was so bloody theatrical. The big tricks were usually accompanied by a hash of dreary incantations, and wind and great, swirling clouds of smoke. But this was something else entirely. No fanfare, no hullabaloo. In a blink, an entire soddin’ brigade of Slayers had simply winked into existence all over his ex-lover’s front lawn.

They marched up the hill with an immediate, military precision, the ones nearest to him shouting out the orders. There seemed to be a thirty of them or so, all young sweet things decked out in the latest fashions from the pages of Guns N’ Ammo magazine. Looked like a damned coming out party for MI-5.

The yanks were mostly stunned. One of them, a young kipper with a bony brown face, wasn’t. He did a classic tuck-and-run towards an auto parked high up the drive, peppering the lasses with a hot clip of lead as he went. A line of them fell at once, maybe four or five. In the next instant, twice as many were right on top of the poor lad, hacking away like he was rough bit of steak.

After that it was a like a damned feeding frenzy. The Invisible Men were taking their delicately random pot shots, but when he saw a pack of six girls tear off in the direction of the lake, he figured those fellows wouldn’t be long for the world either. Up at the villa, he glimpsed a tall Abbo bird with an axe smashing out a picture window. He couldn’t see the boy, Finn, anywhere. It was getting hot in the suit. He started running.

Damn you, Slayer.

Who’ve you gone and pissed off now?