Ghoul Trouble

by John Passarella

  Buffy spotted her stake and had it in her hand even as Solitaire climbed to his feet, glass tinkling all around him, looking a little wobbly. His face was cut in many places and it no longer looked completely human. He was sporting a vampface and overly long fangs. They were unlike those of any vampire she had ever seen or staked, even longer and more oddly shaped than the Master’s. Buffy wondered briefly if the expression long in the tooth had come from such creatures as Solitaire. But only briefly. She grabbed him by the top of his vest with her left hand, her right hand poised over his heart, clutching the stake with white knuckles. “When you get back to hell,” Buffy said, “tell them the Slayer sent you.”

  She drove the stake into his chest, deep enough to puncture his ancient, withered heart. Solitaire just laughed.

  Buffy was taken aback. First the invulnerability to the sun, then the apparent immunity to the uninvite spell, and now he was proof against stakes. “How?”

  Solitaire grabbed her shoulders in his strong hands. “I’ll tell you a little secret,” he whispered in her ear. “I’m not a vampire. I just play one on TV.”

  Buffy swung her arms up, then out, breaking free of his grip. She backed up a step or two, but maintained a defensive posture as she watched him tug the stake out of his chest. Dark green blood oozed from the wound.

  “Actually you weren’t even close to my heart. Rather, hearts, I should say. I have six, one on top of the other, along my spine.”

  “What are you?”

  “You’ve only seen my partial transformation,” Solitaire commented. She watched as his skin became green and pebbly, his head overly large. He had fangs top and bottom. The bristly hair was replaced by spiky quills. At the sides of his head, horns appeared and grew long enough to make a bull envious. “I’m something of a demon myself,” he said. “Personally, I can’t stand vampires. Disgusting half-breeds!”

  It all made sense, of course. Angel had never believed in the Day Walker legend and rightly so. A true vampire could not survive the direct rays of the sun. The Day Walker was a myth, a myth created by a demon masquerading as an invulnerable vampire to strike fear into their unbeating hearts. Solitaire might not have the weaknesses of a vampire, but that didn’t mean he was invulnerable. He’s a demon. And demons die. She remembered something else Angel had said, about Solitaire being a warrior caught up in his pride, an oversized ego.

  “You’re nothing but a coward and a fraud,” Buffy taunted.

  “That’s harsh,” Solitaire replied. He took a menacing step toward her and she backed up an equal distance. “But now that you know you can’t stake me, why not be a good little girl and die?”

  “You hide behind a disguise. You attack your opponents when they are most vulnerable because you know you would lose a fair fight.” She pointed to her mother. “You take hostages. If anyone is unworthy, it’s you!”

  “How dare you!” Solitaire’s green skin darkened and his eyes smoldered red, as if hot coals had been banked behind them. He roared and charged her, using his extra weight to bull her backward. Backhand after forehand landed on her face. She was dizzy and felt her legs go rubbery. As battle tactics go, insulting him was probably a bad idea.

  The demon wrapped a clawed hand around her neck, still holding her stake in his other hand. “I believe your own heart is conveniently front and center,” he said. “How’s that for irony? A Slayer impaled on her own wooden stake.” He raised the stake above her heart.

  Joyce Summers had finally worked her gag free. Her voice hoarse, she nonetheless screamed, “Buffy!”

  Her mother’s voice brought Buffy back into focus. She slammed her heel down on Solitaire’s instep. The blow caused him to loosen his hold. It was enough. Buffy curled her fist and struck Solitaire hard in the throat. If he’d had an Adam’s apple, she would have smashed it and crushed his windpipe. Instead he became enraged and doubled over, but not in pain. He charged her, intending to impale her on his prodigious horns. She caught the horns in her hands and held on, thinking they might be his weakness, if she could rip them from his head. But he raised his head, lifting her off her feet and using her body as a battering ram. Her body slammed into the gallery door, plate glass crashing behind her. As Solitaire backed up, she lost her grip on his horns and fell into a pile of broken glass, too tired to stand, too weak to fight. Mostly she was stunned by how quickly the tide of the battle had turned against her.

  “Oh, Buffy,” her mother cried from across the gallery.

  Buffy looked up at Solitaire. He had walked away for some reason and now he was returning, flicking something between his fingers. The playing card, she realized.

  “Game over, Slayer,” he said.

  Buffy tried to stand, slipped and cut her forearm on a shard of glass.

  Solitaire laughed. “Don’t trouble yourself. I can wring your neck right where you sit. If it’s any comfort, you were a worthy opponent, Buffy the Slayer.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Oz almost thought he was hallucinating when the Vyxn van’s headlights winked on. He hadn’t seen the band climb into the van nor had Cordelia come out to warn them. Nevertheless, the van was pulling out of its parking space. “Showtime,” Oz said and turned the key in the ignition. The starter ground several times but refused to turn over. “C’mon . . .”

  “But where’s Cordelia?” Giles said, craning his head out the open window. Young men were stumbling out of the Bronze, looking tired and confused.

  “Don’t know, but we can’t wait—There she is!”

  Cordelia pushed her way through the first wave of guys to exit the Bronze. The Vyxn van turned right, its headlights sweeping across their windshield, momentarily blinding them.

  Cordelia grabbed the side door of Oz’s van and slid it open. “Sorry,” she said, out of breath. “Some jerk spilled soda all over my dress so I had to—”

  “Cordelia, you must follow us in your car and—”

  “Hey, where’s Buffy?”

  The van’s engine finally turned over, then roared as Oz tapped the accelerator. “Guys, we’re gonna lose them!”

  “Cordelia, there’s no time to explain,” Giles said. “Follow us in your car. Once we find the ghouls’ lair, come back here and wait for Buffy.”

  Cordelia stepped down outside the van. “Follow, find, come back and wait. Hey, no problem.”

  As she ran toward her red sports car, parked several yards behind the van, Angel slid the side door shut and Oz drove out of the parking lot.

  In a state of near panic, Oz thought he’d lost sight of Vyxn’s van. Not that Giles or Angel would have noticed his unease. Unless they looked at his eyes. They darted left to right and back again, checked side- and rearview mirrors, looked in every conceivable direction as he sought any sign of Vyxn’s dark van. For a few agonizing minutes, he was sure that they’d lost the ghouls and with them, any chance of ever finding Willow alive.

  Fortunately, Angel moved forward and leaned over the front seat, his night-adapted vampire eyes scanning rapidly in all directions. Finally, he pointed to the right “There,” he said. “Four traffic lights down. About to turn left”

  Oz looked for a long moment before the van registered and he let out a breath he hadn’t known he was holding. As he sped up to make it through a yellow light, Oz glanced in the sideview mirror and noticed Cordelia’s sports car dart through the intersection just as the light turned red. With a burst of speed, she caught up to him and stayed right on top of his rear bumper.

  Angel craned his neck to look in the direction Buffy had gone. He couldn’t help feeling he should be in Giles’s car with her, but knew she couldn’t risk her mother’s life. Still, if anything happened to her, he’d never be able to forgive himself. And for an immortal vampire, never could be a long time, an unbearably long time. Unless he decided to do some day-walking of his own. Take care of yourself, Buffy, Angel thought. I can’t—I won’t go on without you.

  * * *

  Buffy’s entire plan of attack against Solit
aire had been flawed from the beginning. Solitaire’s manufactured history as a day-walking vampire had been a ruse to strike fear into real vampires. And to fool opponents. She had fought him to the point of exhaustion, just to get into position to stake him. And I did stake him. For all the good it did.

  Even though all her muscles were quivering at or near exhaustion, Buffy struggled to rise, the shattered pieces of plate glass crunching beneath her. Though she was cut in a dozen places and bruised in a dozen more, she’d inflicted as much, if not more, damage to the demon. Unfortunately, he was still standing while she was not.

  Solitaire couldn’t resist gloating. “Just had a marvelous idea,” he said. “Instead of the mother watching her daughter die, why not the other way around? Have the Slayer watch her own mother die moments before her own crushing defeat. A much sweeter victory for me. Don’t you agree, Slayer?”

  Solitaire lifted a pitted rondel dagger from a wall display and tapped his finger against the point. Hundreds of years old, it was still lethal. He started to turn toward Joyce Summers, who gasped when she realized his intent.

  It’s now or never, Buffy realized. She gritted her teeth and sprang to her feet. “Wait!”

  Solitaire faced her again, smug, as if he expected her to beg. “Wait. For what?”

  “This,” she said and lashed out with a jagged piece of glass she’d palmed, slicing a deep line across his chest drawing more of his dark green blood.

  It startled him more than anything, but only for a moment He lashed out with the dagger and it was all she could do to avoid having her face parted down the middle. The glinting blade whistled millimeters from her nose. While she was still off-balance, Solitaire stepped forward and slammed his palm in her face, shoving her head back hard against the metal doorframe. With the impact, stars exploded inside her skull and she dropped again to the floor. For a moment or two, she was too dazed to move. Her muscles simply refused to respond.

  “Now, where were we?” Solitaire said as he turned away and walked toward Buffy’s mother again.

  The immediate threat to her mother delivered a jolt of adrenaline. Buffy started to climb to her feet again, this time reaching out for support. Her fingers closed around the cool shaft of the double-headed ax supported by the crossed gauntlets of the suit of armor beside the door. She shook off her exhaustion and hoisted the ax up in her arms, like a baseball bat. “Solitaire!”

  “Unbelievable,” Solitaire said, stopping and turning back to her. “A little spunk left?”

  She stepped into the swing and the blur of gleaming metal whistled through the air. At first she thought she’d completely missed him. The startled expression on his face remained frozen there for a second, and another as he slowly toppled forward. Or at least his body toppled forward. The two curved horns on his head were heavily weighted to the rear of his skull. His head slid smoothly backward, rolling down his falling back and bouncing off his heavily muscled calf to wobble around the exhibition room in a half circle, coming to rest under one of the intact display cases. His body hit the floor with a dull thud, the rondel dagger flying free of nerveless fingers to land at Buffy’s feet.

  “In these tense situations, it’s real important to keep your head,” Buffy said to no one in particular. Her mother certainly wasn’t listening. She just stared, jaw hanging in shock and disbelief.

  As Buffy crouched to pick up the dagger, she heard a bubbling sound coming from Solitaire’s body. Within his black clothing and red vest, his green flesh was quickly losing its consistency, like butter melting in a hot saucepan. Solid turned to liquid with a little noxious vapor in the mix. Soon only a pool of green goo remained of his flesh. When the clothing collapsed, a handful of playing cards spilled out of a vest pocket. Farther away, Solitaire’s head had dissolved into another slimy mess. All that was left of his horns were twin mounds of black ash.

  Buffy hurried to her mother’s side, cutting the ropes that bound her arms and legs, then slicing the fallen gag free of her neck. She hugged her mother fiercely. “You okay, Mom?”

  “I’m fine, dear,” she said. “But you—?”

  “Ditto on the fine,” Buffy said. She glanced at the puddle of goo and shook her head. “He thought by attacking my family and my friends that he’d gain an advantage over me. That just made me fight all the harder.”

  “Guess he underestimated you.”

  “Last mistake he’ll ever make,” Buffy said. “Mom, I gotta go. Willow and Xander need—”

  “No need to explain, Buffy.”

  “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “Fine. Now go!”

  “Love you, Mom,” Buffy called as she ran for the shattered door.

  “Love you, too,” Joyce said. “And be careful!”

  But Buffy was already gone.

  * * *

  “Ouch!” Xander shouted. “I think I broke a toe—make that toes.”

  Both his shoes and trousers were coated in plaster dust and bits of lath. He’d been kicking large holes in the wall in an effort to get his hands behind the large board that held their chain hooks. Even though Willow told him she believed the board was secured to beams, he thought it was worth a try. Instead of arguing—since she had no better idea of her own—she had moved as far away as her neck chain would allow. Still, the pluming plaster dust had been enough to give her fits of coughing.

  “What I wouldn’t give for a sledgehammer right now,” Xander said. He plopped down on the floor and gently tugged his shoe free of his injured foot.

  “As long as you’re wishing,” Willow suggested, “why not just wish for a pair of bolt cutters?”

  “And take the easy way out?” Xander quipped, but was unable to maintain a light-hearted tone. Only one thing weighed heavily on his mind. “We’re running out of time, aren’t we?”

  “Yep,” Willow said, her voice seeming frightened and alone in the darkness.

  “Damn it all!” Xander said and threw his torn shoe, which slammed against the splintered doorframe. The shoe rebounded off the door and came flying back, nearly striking his head. “Okay, I’m enrolling in that anger management class . . . if we ever get out of here.” But the shoe’s impact caused the door to swing open, away from the damaged latch, with a prolonged creaking of its old hinges.

  “At least you got the door open,” Willow said, offering faint encouragement.

  “It was already broken.” Besides, the stench of rotting meat was that much stronger with the door open.

  “Oh, right.”

  “Hey, look,” Xander said, pointing at the table in the other room. “Do you see it?”

  “A table?”

  “On top of the table. Shining.” Xander stood again, leaning forward to get a better look. “Will, that’s—it’s the key ring with keys for our collars. They left the keys right out there.”

  “Why not?” Willow said. “With us chained in here.”

  “If I had a rope I could tie it around a hunk of this plaster and go fishing for the keys,” he said. “Saw it in an old western movie. Or could have been an episode of the ‘Brady Bunch.’ ”

  “Rope,” Willow said. “That would be the thing we keep on a shelf with the sledgehammer and bolt cutters.”

  Xander sighed. “Yep, I got a serious case of the ‘if only’s.’ ”

  “No, wait!” Willow said. “I have an idea. I’ve been practicing. If it’s not too heavy, I might be able to—”

  “What? Willow, it sounds like you have the makings of a plan in that gorgeous head of yours.”

  “Thanks,” Willow said, “but I need quiet”

  “Quiet?”

  “I’ve been practicing. Levitating small objects. Seems like part of my whole Wicca awakening.”

  “Objects?”

  “Well, pencils mostly,” she explained. “But it requires concentration and right now I’m tired and hungry and have a really nasty plaster-dust headache.”

  “Not to mention the prospect of becoming a flesh-eating ghoul by
midnight.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  “Little motivation couldn’t hurt,” Xander said. “And if we don’t get out of here soon, they’re gonna be calling me fillet o’ Xander.”

  “Okay, okay, be quiet now.”

  Xander watched as Willow’s brow furrowed in concentration, her gaze locked on the key ring. One large, bracelet-sized ring had several long, antiquated keys dangling from it. She would only have to move it twelve, maybe fifteen feet to bring it within reach. Looking back and forth from Willow to the key ring, Xander waited and hoped for some sign that Willow might be able to succeed. At first he simply saw the strain of effort in Willow’s face, in her clenched jaw and furrowed brow, in her extended arms, reaching hands and trembling fingers, but the key ring remained motionless. Until finally, the large ring quivered, lifted and leaned toward her, as if tugged by a magnet. But it wasn’t magnetic force, it was telekinetic—and it was working!

  “That’s it, Will!”

  Willow released an explosive breath. “No good.”

  “Sorry,” Xander said. “I—”

  “No, it’s okay,” Willow explained. “I was doing it wrong.”

  “It moved, Will. I saw it.”

  “Can’t hold my breath while I do this,” Willow said. “Takes too long. Can’t maintain concentration that way. Okay, here goes.” She began again, breathing steadily, as she stretched her hand toward the key ring and achieved results in less time than before. The large key ring twitched again, but if Xander had been expecting the key ring to rise into the air and float toward them, he was no less impressed when it began to scrape along the wooden tabletop. All those keys had to be much heavier than a pencil and in Willow’s exhausted condition dragging them was probably the best she could manage. Not that it mattered. All she needed to do was bring the key ring within arm’s reach any way she could.