A few hours into the flight, Alec was occupied with seeing exactly how much scotch he could drink without keeling over from alcohol poisoning so Buffy got up and went to check on some of the others. She came across Willow and Xander watching the in-flight movie. Anya was next to them snoring gently.
“Hey guys,” Buffy whispered quietly. Willow and Xander smiled at her approach and the redhead waved and beckoned.
“Come watch,” she said in a normal speaking voice. Buffy flicked her eyes over to Anya.
“Don’t worry about Ahn, she could sleep through the next apocalypse,” Xander commented, brushing her concerns away with a wave of his hand.
“Careful, we should be due for another one of those any day now,” Buffy predicted direly.
Xander blanched. “Okay, yeah, good point.”
Buffy just chuckled as she settled in amongst her friends, “What are we watching?”
“‘Cruel Intentions,’’ Willow replied.
Buffy scrutinized the screen. “I hate her hair,” she commented.
“That’s Kathryn, the evil bitch queen of the movie,” Willow put in helpfully.
“Well, her hair is a disaster. So what does this movie have going for it?”
“Really impressive cleavage,” Xander put in helpfully.
Buffy laughed and gestured at the screen, “What does she have that I don’t?”
“Way looser morals.”
“So she’s a slut?”
“Evil, manipulative, slut,” Willow put in helpfully.
“Oh, so she’s Cordelia.”
“Ouch!” Willow and Xander both exclaimed simultaneously. Buffy just grinned.
“Oh come on, do you honestly think Cordelia would ever surrender the crown of queen bitch?”
“I think we’d have a better chance of seeing her in a full spread in ‘Playboy’,” Xander replied wryly.
Buffy snorted, “Cordelia taking off her clothes in front of complete strangers for cash. Somehow I can’t picture that.”
“I can,” Xander said with a grin, “And, oh look, I’m picturing it again.”
“Pervert.”
“Prude.”
“Children….?” Willow put in warningly. Buffy and Xander fell silent and watched the movie in peace.
“What are you reading?”
Giles jumped and jerked his head up from his book and squinted a few times in the gloom of the dark plane interior. The bright ray from the top mounted light bounced off the pages of the book causing an almost blinding glare. For a moment, all he could decipher was a shape in the darkness, addressing him. He squinted.
“Son?”
“Who else?” Alec smiled and moved slightly and he came more clearly into focus, “Didn’t mean to startle you.”
“No, it’s all right, I was just going over some material here.”
“Specifically?”
Giles lifted the book so the light now struck the cover of the book as opposed to the pages.
“Ah, the Codex, the one from earlier, you brought it with?”
“It has a small but serviceable amount of information regarding Aztec mythology, which as it turns out pertains to the Order of Teraka.”
Alec gestured with his head towards Dawn, who was curled up in the seat next to his father and looked to be asleep.
“Is she out?”
Dawn proceeded then to emit a tooth-rattling snore. Both men smirked wryly.
“Answers that question,” Alec commented quietly, “So, what have you discovered?”
Giles cleared his throat. “I’m afraid it isn’t a great deal of information. Apparently though, the Order of Teraka is actually a coalition of four families dating back to around the fourteenth century or so.”
“So, we’re talking Pre-Cortes here, Aztecs are still going strong?”
“Correct. Exactly correct in fact. The four founding families of the Order of Teraka were Aztec. More specifically, each family worshipped a different entity who held power in the region.”
“Oh goody, an ‘entity’, that usually translates into ‘demon’.”
“Local gods in this case, though based on some of their behavior the difference may be purely academic. While I have no doubt that some of the claims regarding the sheer scope and scale of Aztec human sacrifice may be exaggerated, I am not so naïve as to believe that they are entirely fictitious.
“Translation: blood gods, fantastic. Any names I’d know?”
Giles pursed his lips in thought, “Perhaps. As I said, the information here is limited but it makes mention of four specific deities: Tlaloc, some kind of water deity. Huitzilopochtli, a god of war and a sun god. Toci: an earth deity also known as ‘the eater of filth’ and ‘the woman of discord’ and finally Tezcatlipoca, a wind god often depicted as a jaguar or a combination of man and jaguar.”
“And these guys were serious bad news?”
“Some sacrifices honoring them numbered up to five thousand dead in a single day.”
“So that would be ‘yes’.”
“It’s important to note though that they weren’t ‘evil’ as you or I understand it to be. They possessed many different aspects, the ones mentioned here….” he gestured to the book, “…are simply those that came to be most well-known.”
“Yeah well, mass slaughter does have a way of gripping the public mind. Okay so, four blood gods, four mortal families.”
“Yes and apparently these families in particular were especially well known for the brutality of their rites, so much so that a significant population of the Aztec peasant caste, from whom most of the living sacrifices were taken from, rose up and united under the banner of Quetzalcoatl.”
“Hold up, I thought we already discussed him back at the shop and decided he was a bad guy.”
Giles shrugged, “Be that as it may, he apparently opposed these other deities. So it may be that while Quetzalcoatl could be considered a ‘bad guy’, these entities could be in turn considered far worse.”
“So my only choice in this pantheon of gods is ‘bad’ and ‘worse’? No wonder the Aztecs were such cheery folk,” Alec snorted.
“Try to remember son, we’re not dealing with conventional morality, especially not one resembling any kind of Judeo-Christian influence. We’re dealing with a system of beliefs that predates all of that by about two hundred years.”
“It still seems…wrong,” Alec struggled to put the words together in his head. He was having trouble thinking clearly for some reason.
Giles frowned at the tone of his son’s voice and at his rather clumsy choice of words, “Are you all right, Alec?”
“Ugh, yes I’m fine. Just tired. Haven’t been sleeping well.”
Or at all. Alec thought to himself.
“When was the last time you had something to eat? I understand they serve food on this flight.”
“You cannot be serious. Were I not already intensely nauseated from the raw terror that is flying, I got a good whiff of what’s on that tray and I have to say, it contained nothing that resembled ‘food’ as I understand it.”
Giles chuckled a little, “Yes well, try to take care of yourself; you look like you’ve lost weight.”
Alec rolled his eyes behind his sunglasses. “You tell Buffy she’s lost weight, it makes her day. You tell me and it’s a medical emergency. Dad, relax, everything is fine,” he gestured back at the open book on his father’s lap, “You were saying?”
Giles cleared his throat and continued, “At any rate, the insurrection against the four families convinced them to unite into a single article and together, they put down the insurrection and slaughtered all they could capture in tribute to their gods.”
“How pleasant. What then?”
“Well, for a while they ruled openly, and then as emperors became the ruling norm, they ruled behind the scenes as advisors and aide-de-camps.”
“Power behind the throne types, huh?”
“Exactly so.”
“So, when did we go from politico blood cultists to assassins and bounty hunters?”
Giles frowned, “That part is a little vague. What is known is the fact that it was the duty of these four families to go out into the countryside and round up as many people as they could as sacrifices.”
“I got it, in other words, they were always ‘hunting people’ in a way, all that changed was the context: mass death rituals into contract killers and the cultists became bounty hunters.”
“Yes, it’s believed that they turned their interests into things like gold and silver with the arrival of Cortes and the discovery of silver in Mexico in the sixteenth century.”
“What about the name: ‘The Order of Teraka,’ where does that come from?”
Giles shook his head, “It doesn’t say, it’s been theorized that Teraka was a person that brought the four families together and united them under his rule.”
“Does it say whether or not the four families still maintain ties to those ancient blood gods?”
Another shake of the head, “It does not say so directly, but it may be inferred if for no other reason that the Order of Teraka seems able to draw upon demonic forces, such as the Insect Man that Xander and Cordelia encountered, whenever they wish.”
Suddenly Dawn’s chair jerked violently and she sat up with a grunt. She sighed, exasperated and turned up to look at Alec. Her frown of consternation quickly became a smile.
“Hi Alec.”
“Hey petite, what’s the story?” Alec asked, gesturing at her chair.
Dawn’s expression turned momentarily sour, “Some kid behind me keeps kicking my chair. It’s really bugging me.”
Alec casually looked behind her. Sure enough, a young boy, maybe eight or so: with porcine features and a general disconsolate look about him.
“One sec,” Alec reassured Dawn. She frowned in confusion as Alec stepped back to address the boy.
“Hello there,” he said in his most amiable tone.
The boy turned his head and looked up at him with all the disdain an eight-year old can manage.
“Go away, my mommy says I don’t have to talk to anyone I don’t want to and that I shouldn’t talk to strangers and you’re a stranger,” he sneered in a very grating tone that only the most spoiled of children can manage. He had a fat face and his cheeks jiggled when he spoke.
Alec gritted his teeth. Though he’d never met the man, the kid reminded him of the late Principal Snyder, whom the others had told him all about.
“Well, that’s good advice,” he admitted, “However, another bit of good advice is to try not to disturb the other people on the plane,” he gestured to the sit in front of him, “These guys up here are my friends and they’re trying to get some rest. If you could not kick the seat, that would be very cool of you.”
“I don’t have to do anything I don’t want to. Mommy says so and you can’t make me!”
That tears it.
“Say Sport, tell me something: where is ‘mommy’ at the moment?”
“She’s gonna pick me up when we get there.”
“Ah I see, well, did she remind you to be careful of the Boogeyman while you’re here, alone in the dark?” he asked quietly.
That seemed to strike a nerve. The kid looked momentarily worried then he stuck out his lower lip in gesture of bovine stubbornness. “My mommy says there’s no such thing as the Boogeyman.”
Leaning close to the young boy’s face, Alec smiled slightly and lowered his shades, just a little. His eyes were swirling pools of darkness and oozy black tears slithered down his face like a thousand tiny spiders crawling down his cheeks.
“She lied.”
The little boy was now white as a sheet and making a soft, gurgling noise in his throat.
“You will shut up and sit still, is that clear?” he whispered in a very low, very dangerous voice.
The boy managed to nod.
“Smart boy,” Alec pushed his shades back up into the bridge of his nose and stepped away from the trembling youth.
“You should be all set now,” Alec reassured Dawn.
Dawn looked at him incredulously, “What did you do?!”
“Just…gave him a little incentive to behave, no big deal.”
Dawn turned to look at Giles the elder, but he had apparently missed the whole thing, engrossed as he was in his book.
“Okay well, thanks Alec, I guess,” Dawn said uncertainly.
Alec smiled warmly, “No worries.”
As Alec walked away, Dawn settled back against the cushions of the seat. Closing her eyes, sleep overcame her but not before something strange happened: for the life of her she thought she heard someone…crying?
Spike washed his hands and dried them with a paper towel. He exhaled hard, unnecessarily for one of his kind: he hated flying like this. Sure he knew that the flight was scheduled to land well before sunrise; that was the whole point of taking a red-eye. But something still gnawed at him.
He opened the door and was startled to see an impishly grinning Slayer standing in front of him.
“Love?” he asked in bewilderment.
Buffy stretched languidly and continued to grin up at him, “You know what I’ve always wondered?”
“What’s that, love?”
“You know that whole ‘Mile-High Club’ thing?” She asked. Spike felt a grin slowly creeping across his face.
“Yuh-huh,” Spike replied.
“I was just wondering: how do they manage things in these tiny little airplane bathrooms?”
Spike grinned and moved out of the way to allow Buffy entrance.
“Oh, let me educate you baby.”
Some time later, Buffy returned to her seat, looking just like the cat that ate the canary and feeling very…satisfied. She casually picked up a magazine from the seat pocket in front of her and flipped through it aimlessly.
Surreptitiously she shot a look over at Willow and Alec, both of them were asleep, leaning their heads against one another and looking completely out of it.
Home free. Buffy thought to herself. She turned and looked back at Spike who was now approaching the seat and looking equally satisfied.
“Your shirt is on inside-out,” Willow commented.
“Damn it!” Buffy cried out, taking a hold of the hem of her shirt and, sure enough, glaring balefully at the exposed label that gave her away.
“Busted,” Spike chortled.
“And you missed a belt loop,” Alec put in just as suddenly.
Spike laughed, a little confused at first, then he looked down.
“Oh…sod,” he growled.
“You’re a bad man,” Alec added.
“The both of you: completely without any shred of decency,” Willow followed up.
“All right, all right Miss Moral Superiority, get your shots in now,” Buffy said acidly.
“Oh no, I plan on milking this out for all it’s worth, we’re talking months of ridicule here,” Willow replied with a grin.
“Fantastic,” Buffy grumbled, then she nudged her brother, “I thought you were asleep.”
Alec sighed and shook his head, “Even if I could sleep for the numbing terror I am currently enduring, it’s still too bloody bright in here for me to get any shut eye.”
Buffy looked around incredulously, the cabin of the airplane was nearly pitch black, lit only by the track lighting along the floor, directing people to the emergency exits.
“You’re kidding right? Let me see those shades,” Buffy demanded with an outstretched hand.
Alec sighed and took off his glasses, keep his eyes shielded. Buffy put them on and gaped. She passed her hand in front of her eyes back and forth, bringing it right up to her nose.
“Bro, I can’t even see my own hand with these things on and you’re telling me it’s too bright?”
“And noisy, did I mention noisy?”
“What you mean nois-“ Buffy began to ask before noticing that her brother was sending her a very pointed, annoyed look.
“You’re a jerk,” she replied stiffly, tossing the glasses into his lab.
He laughed gently and replaced them on his face, “Love you too.”
“And life goes on,” Willow summarized, earning a pair of rolled eyes from her friends.
Xander woke up a few hours later in his seat with a muted groan of pain: these seats were killing his shoulder. He looked down; Anya was resting her head on his shoulder and snoring away contentedly. Xander smiled and placed a kiss on her head and then gently lifted her head up off his shoulder and rested it against the side of the plane. As he did so, he examined his new hand: it had darker skin than his other hand, small bits of black hair grew up from the top and knuckles and there were deep lines in it. It looked like the hand of someone much older than him.
Sure hope the spell eventually does something about this or else I’m going to look really weird, he thought to himself.
He made his way to the bathroom, attended to nature’s call, and washed his hands, looking at himself in the mirror. He needed a shave, badly and he continued to rub his shoulder.
“Man, these seats are really bad for you,” he muttered as he turned around and lifted his shirt looking in the mirror.
He froze, “What the hell?”
Five small splotches stained his back. The looked like bruises or burns and they hurt to the touch. What he had mistaken for acne or warts now looked like something else entirely: like black boils or something.
“Okay, not good. Not good,” Xander considered his options; he’d seen the way people were treating Alec, like he was some kind of freak, because of injuries and various maladies and he knew he didn’t want to do that. So he’d take care of this on his own.
First though he’d have to get rid of these things. He reached behind his back and dug his nails into the first one, trying to burst it. There was a moment of resistance and then a sudden release.
And Xander cried out in agony as his shoulder and his fingers began to burn. He brought his finger tips back around and stared at them in shock: they were coated in a yellow, foamy pus-like substance and it stank like death and was currently dissolving his finger.
He quickly gripped the faucet knob and turned it own, getting his finger under the water as fast as he could. Where his finger touched the metal of the sink, it corroded. The pain in his finger slowly eased though the pain in his shoulder was still quite intense. He grabbed a bunch of paper towels and pressed them to his shoulder. They quickly disintegrated but they seemed to help a little. Five handfuls of industrial strength paper towels later, the pain subsided. Xander heaved a sigh of relief and sat down heavily on the toilet lid.
“Oh man, what am I going to do?”
He got up, nervously, and looked at his shoulder in the mirror.
There were now four black welts and fifth large, angry red and black wound where the one he had torn open had been. Red streaks originated from the wound like cracks in the pavement giving it a thoroughly unhealthy appearance.
“Okay, not going to do that again. Just gonna patch this up and everything is going to be fine.”
As Xander finished cleaning himself up, he repeated this over and over out loud and eventually, he almost believed it.
Almost.
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Author's Chapter Notes:
Hope you guys enjoy this chapter! Please R&R :)