Blooded

by Christopher Golden

  “For someone whose life has been in jeopardy several times, she’s truly horrible at maintaining any kind of pretense,” Giles whispered.

  “Which is, y’know, a really, really bad thing,” Xander replied with very little conviction.

  They heard the locks ratcheting back. The door swung open and the night watchman appeared, a rather rotund individual in an ill-fitting dark-blue uniform, holding a long nightstick in one hand.

  “Miss, what is it?” he asked with genuine concern.

  “Oh, my God, help me, they’re after me!” Cordelia said desperately, throwing herself at him more as if she were the first customer in line at the Macy’s after-Thanksgiving sale than if her life were in danger. “Please! Two men were chasing me, I think they wanted . . . I don’t know what they wanted, but you’ve got to help me! Really!”

  “We’re dead,” Xander whispered. “This is never going to work. I’ve seen better acting on canceled daytime soaps.”

  Giles turned to regard him with one eyebrow raised.

  “Which I never watch, and only ever saw while I was channel surfing, searching for the college squash . . . um, no, basketball games,” Xander quickly corrected.

  “Whatever we may think of her skills as a thespian, Cordelia’s performance seems to be having the desired effect,” Giles replied quietly.

  Xander watched in awe as the night watchman patted Cordelia’s shoulder. She poured on the boohoo a little too thick, particularly since she had insisted she not be required to actually cry, as tears would ruin her newly applied mascara. Still, the guard seemed to be falling for it.

  “Where’d these lowlifes come after you, darlin’?” the watchman asked.

  “Over . . .” Sniff. “. . . over there,” Cordelia said, and pointed off in the other direction, where a stand of trees separated the museum gate from the lawn.

  Xander rolled his eyes. It was a sure bet the guy would wonder what she’d been doing over in a far dark corner of the grounds to begin with.

  “All right, missy, don’t you worry ’bout a thing,” the middle-aged, potbellied watchman comforted her. “You go on inside now and call the police. I’m gonna have a look around. You lock her up and wait by the door here for me to come back. Don’t let anyone in but ol’ Eddie, you hear?”

  Cordelia whimpered in agreement and allowed Eddie to usher her into the museum, where she promptly slammed and locked the door. Xander stared in disbelief as the watchman started across the lawn as if the Mission: Impossible theme were playing in his head.

  After a moment, he and Giles moved around the corner—Xander very gingerly—and tapped lightly on the door. Cordelia opened up quickly, they ducked in, and then she was twisting and sliding all the locks shut behind her.

  “Well, that buys us about three minutes,” Cordelia said archly. “Now what?”

  “Hmm?” Giles asked, and glanced up innocently, with that I’m-sorry-was-planning-this-caper-supposed-to-be-my-idea? face.

  “Oh, no,” Xander said, wagging his finger at the Watcher. “Uh-uh. There’ll be no hmms, do you understand, Giles? No hmms! Now. What do we do when he comes back?”

  “Oh, well.” Giles nodded, glanced away distractedly. “I suppose Cordelia should merely pretend to be too frightened to open the door. Cordelia, you might tell him he’ll have to wait outside until the police arrive, just so that you can be sure of your safety.”

  “That’s your plan?” Cordy asked. “For me to act like a stupid ditz?”

  “What there is of it, yes.” Giles lifted his chin as if daring them to call it a bad plan.

  “That’s a bad plan,” Xander said. Cordelia looked pleased. “Not that you can’t act like a stupid ditz, Cor. In fact, I’ve seen you do it.”

  Giles blinked, apparently surprised that the old lifting-the-chin-trick hadn’t intimidated them.

  “Yes, well, when you’ve developed a better plan, please do inform me,” he said tartly, and turned to walk deeper into the museum toward the Japanese exhibits.

  “See,” Xander began, as he followed Giles, “my plan would have included making sure we didn’t go to jail, which, in case you didn’t know, is not some kind of modern slang for ‘tropical paradise.’ ” He paused and caught his breath. “Are you getting this, Giles? Jail, bad!”

  “Xander.”

  “Coming!”

  A short time later, they stood staring at the Sword of Sanno.

  “Fascinating.”

  “What is it, Mr. Spock?”

  Giles sighed and glanced at Xander. He was not without a sense of humor himself, of course, but the boy did choose the oddest times to exercise his peculiar brand of levity.

  “Take a look at this.” Giles pointed at the large sword on the wall. “This is the sword that Willow cut herself on. The Sword of Sanno. There appear to be Oriental characters engraved in the guard.”

  With a pen, he indicated the metal plate that separated the blade from the hilt of the sword. “I wish I knew what these meant.”

  Then he looked a bit closer. The hilt itself was wound with braids of silk in a crisscross pattern that seemed to hold in place several small disks on either side.

  “Look here,” he said, more to himself than to Xander. Absently he listened for Cordelia’s highpitched cries, which would signal the return of Eddie the large watchman, but she was silent. In the silence, he fervently prayed that she had not forgotten her job.

  “What am I looking at?” Xander asked.

  “Well,” Giles said, pointing at the hilt, “notice the silk braiding here, which seems designed to both hold and expose these round plates.”

  “Yeah,” Xander said. “And I notice the same thing on just about all the other swords in here.”

  “Indeed,” Giles admitted. “But those swords are katana or other, similar swords, all from a later period. Something this ancient would never have been treated in this way. It is a style that wasn’t developed until much later. Also, the plates have markings similar to those on the guard.”

  Xander was silent. Giles turned to look at him.

  “I thought you said you didn’t know anything about Japanese history or culture or whatever,” Xander said.

  “Well, I recall very little from my schooling, but I did come to the exhibit. As did you.” Xander just shrugged. “I’ve just finished reading Claire Silver’s journals. In fact, we learned the most fascinating thing on the way over here. It seems that Sanno the Mountain God was also bound inside the sword.”

  “No kidding.” Xander look askance at the weapon. “He’s in there now?”

  “I’m not certain.” Giles looked at him. “But I think so.”

  “Maybe those little disk things were added when he was, um, bound in. Maybe it happened later, so that’s why all that extra stuff is from a later period.”

  “Perhaps,” Giles said. “But if the enchantments were that powerful, Willow’s simply cutting herself should not have been enough to allow Chirayoju to be set free. Though certainly, her blood would have been a partial catalyst, and Buffy did say that her state of mind was rather vulnerable. Still, if there was a binding spell, in fact, more than one, I don’t understand how . . .”

  “Hey, check this out,” Xander said, and moved past Giles to point to the hilt. “It looks like one of the disks is missing. Here.”

  Giles stared at the spot where a disk had been. “Thank you, Xander, I believe you’ve just answered my question.”

  Xander blinked. “I have?”

  “Now I’ve got to figure out how to remove that spirit from Willow and bind it again. We’ll have to lure her here somehow,” he said absently, deep in contemplation.

  “Or we could just take the sword.”

  “No, wait!” Giles cried.

  But it was too late. Xander had already reached for the sword on the wall, grabbed it by the hilt, and lifted it down.

  “We’re—” Xander began to say, but the sentence ended there, and the smile disappeared from his face. His eyes narrowed,
his nostrils flared, he thrust his chest out as though he were trying to impress the girls. He lifted his chin with an arrogant flair, and for a moment Giles thought Xander was mocking him again.

  Then he spoke.

  “Free,” he said.

  But it wasn’t Xander’s voice. Not at all. It was deep and resonant, as though it came from all around the room. It was filled with a power and a pride that made Giles want to drop his eyes to the floor in deference. He fought that urge, and instead stared right at Xander’s face.

  Xander’s face. But Xander Harris was gone.

  “Ahem,” Giles cleared his throat nervously. “Sanno, I presume?”

  Eyes that once were Xander’s locked on Giles’s face, and the Watcher felt his spine melt. If it wasn’t for his memory of Xander’s particularly foolish sense of humor, he might have shrunk from those eyes.

  “I am Sanno, King of the Mountain,” the spirit wearing Xander’s flesh spoke to him. “Where is the vampire?”

  “Well, I’m not quite sure, but you should know that . . .”

  “No matter. I can smell it. Once and for all time, I will destroy it,” Sanno thundered, and began to walk toward the back of the museum, toward a pair of French doors and away from the front, where Cordelia was now trying to hold off Eddie the watchman with her damsel-in-distress routine. In the shock of Xander’s transformation, Giles had missed the watchman’s return.

  “Cordelia, a small change of plans. We’ve got to go!” Giles cried urgently. “Quickly!”

  Giles heard her running down the hall, and turned to see her appear in the doorway. “Well it’s about ti—” she began, but didn’t finish the sentence. Instead, she stood next to Giles and watched Xander, bearing in his right hand a sword Giles could barely have wielded with two, striding toward the French doors.

  “The eternal war ends tonight!” Sanno declared, and crashed through the French doors, setting off numerous ear-shattering alarms.

  Giles thought of Willow. “Yes,” he whispered to himself. “That’s precisely what I’m afraid of.”

  * * *

  “We must hurry,” Giles said at a trot. Cordelia fought to keep up. “We don’t know where Willow is, and if we lose sight of Xander, we may never know. We’ll be too late to do anything.”

  “Okay, yeah, but you aren’t wearing heels!” Cordelia snapped, as she watched the distant figure stride across the museum lawn. In the background, the security alarm had fallen silent. Eddie the watchman must have decided she was a psycho and told the police to go home.

  The figure seemed to shimmer as it walked. It seemed bigger and taller than Xander, and yet, if she squinted, Xander was the only thing there. It was Xander they were following, but it wasn’t.

  She caught up to Giles and glommed on to him, trying like anything to step out of her shoes. With each step they took, her too-high heels sank about two inches into the lawn.

  “Cordelia, please, take those wretched things off!” Giles pleaded.

  “I’m sorry. I just need to stop for one second so I can get them off.” She watched Xander up ahead and felt as if she might cry. “These are Ferragamos! Do you know how much they cost?”

  Giles shook his head impatiently.

  “A lot!” She added, “What’s happened to Xander?”

  “It appears he’s been possessed by the Sword of Sanno, well, actually, by Sanno himself,” Giles said anxiously as he watched the figure thunder away from them.

  “Well, then why is he speaking English?” she asked, confused.

  “I suppose Sanno has accessed all of Xander’s knowledge, including the language center. Xander wouldn’t be used to actually having to form the sounds required for ancient Japanese. Also, it must realize we wouldn’t understand it otherwise. Fascinating, really,” Giles replied.

  “Oh, yeah, that’d be my response too,” she said sarcastically as she yanked off her shoes, “but it’s not. I mean, I know he’s possessed, but how?”

  “Cordelia, I’ll try to explain later. We must hurry!”

  “That’s all I am to you guys,” she said sadly. “The one you’re going to explain everything to later—!”

  “Cordelia, come!” Giles ordered, urging her along.

  “—The one you talk to like she’s a collie!”

  She hurried after him, her precious shoes slung over her shoulder.

  A cold wind kicked up around Giles and Cordelia, gathering in strength and pushing them forward. About twenty feet ahead, Xander turned and smiled at them.

  “I thought to hurry you along,” the booming voice told them. “So that you may witness the destruction of the vampire. It does not yet realize I have freed myself, but when it does—”

  “You freed yourself?” Cordelia shouted at it. “Excuse me, but my boyfr— . . . the guy I . . . Xander Harris freed you, Mr. Santo.”

  “I am Sanno!” the voice thundered. The figure lifted its arms and the wind blew so hard it almost lifted Giles from the earth. “The Mountain King.” It lowered its arms and strutted. “I am the protector of the Land of the Rising Sun!”

  Though she was losing her balance in the bitter gale, Cordelia was not about to capitulate. Giles found her scrappy behavior remarkably refreshing, as opposed to her penchant for superficiality

  “Well, well, um, you aren’t in the Land of the Rising Sun, you’re in the land of Sunnydale,” Cordelia said. “And things are different here. We have our own person who destroys vampires.” She waved him away. “So you can go home now.”

  “Silence!” Sanno bellowed. “Silence, mortal girl! Baka no onna!”

  With a point of his fire, Cordelia was slammed to the ground and pinned there. She began to shriek and struggle, near tears.

  Giles knelt on one knee and bowed. “Oh, great and magical warlord, gomenasai. Forgive the female,” he said carefully. “She is very young and ignorant. She acts out of fear for the boy whose body you inhabit, knowing what is to come.”

  He hissed at Cordelia, “Apologize!”

  “I’m sorry,” she said meekly.

  Sanno said, “Very well.”

  Immediately the wind stopped blowing. Blinking, Cordelia brushed her bangs from her eyes, waited a beat, then clumsily got to her feet. She looked drained.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  Sanno turned and strutted away.

  Cordelia raced over to Giles. “ ‘What is to come’? I don’t know what is to come. Do you?”

  Giles gestured to the retreating figure. “Oh, my dear girl.” He sighed. “I’m afraid he’s going to fight Chirayoju.”

  Cordelia stared at Xander, and then at Giles. She said, “What? But that’s Willow.”

  Giles sighed harder. “Precisely.”

  She cocked her head. “Willow and Xander are going to duke it out?”

  “And other things. I imagine some magic will be involved.” Gently he took her wrist. “Come along now. We must keep up.”

  “Magic?” she repeated, stumbling after him. “Why will there be magic?”

  “Isn’t there always?” he asked, trying to make a joke. But it wasn’t at all funny.

  “How do we know when one of them wins?”

  He didn’t want to answer her, but she shook him hard. “Giles!”

  “Oh, well.” He halted and looked at her sadly. “I suppose when one of them . . . loses.” He swallowed, hating to say the words. “That is to say, when one of them dies.”

  CHAPTER 16

  The ruined Sunnydale Friendship Garden was not the weirdest thing Buffy had ever seen, but it was close. It was enormous, which both surprised and worried her: why hadn’t she ever seen it before? She’d lived in Sunnydale an entire year and she’d been sure she’d seen all its seven wonders—but this beat all of them by a mile.

  The garden was sunk into the ground. She stood on the ridge above it and looked down on the skeletal trees and rotted hump-backed bridges as she scanned the area in the gray twilight. She flicked on her flashlight. The yellow beam flickered over
stone lanterns and little red temple-things—pagodas, came the word, although she had no idea how she knew a thing like that when she couldn’t even remember origami—and in the distance a large, darkened building made of wood with a gently curved tile roof. Wow. When this place was built, it had represented a lot of high hopes. And money.

  Buffy looked up. The sun was peeking just above the horizon, dimming the landscape. Buffy heard no sounds, not even the chirping of crickets. That in itself was enough to give her the creeps.

  But what she saw coming out of the building made her knees turn to water.

  Willow was dressed in an elaborate Chinese robe and, over that, some kind of upper-body metal armor. She carried a spear, maybe a long sword, and she glanced up, apparently not noticing Buffy, then strode back into the building.

  A light flickered in one of the open windows, as if from a candle.

  Buffy swallowed hard and began to walk down a set of stone steps toward the building. Every sense was on alert; her gaze darted left, right, as she tried very hard to look casual and unafraid.

  To her right was a deep indentation that looked as though it might have been a pond or pool at one time. A wooden bridge rose over it, the center portion smashed, probably by vandals.

  Buffy walked through the silent garden.

  Then she thought she heard weeping.

  She quickened her pace as she approached the building. The weeping came from inside. It could only be Willow. Or so Buffy hoped.

  There was a small wooden porch attached to the building. Carefully, aware that the wood could give way at any moment, Buffy stepped onto it and peered inside.

  In the center of the bare, wood-floored room, Willow wept all alone, the tears splashing down her face. With a large, jade-green candle set in an ornate red candle holder before her, she was seated on a scarlet pillow, staring at the spear she had been carrying. On the floor nearby was a sword, a traditional Japanese katana, and Buffy didn’t even want to know where or how Willow had come by all of these things.

  Not that she had time to think about it. Not while Willow was pointing the sharp tip of a spear directly at her own heart.

  “Willow, no!” Buffy screamed, running toward her.