“This is your last chance,” the Captain said. Nothing moved in his blank, gray face to indicate that he had spoken. He had no mouth, no eyes. He was only shadow.
And he was terrifying.
“Join us willingly. Or die.”
Captain Dale’s face was pasty. Sweat ran down his forehead. But he raised his chin and said, “No way.”
She was very sorry she had ever taken this assignment. These two losers were low-rent schemers, but they weren’t drug dealers. Any idiot in the Coast Guard could see that. She figured this assignment was payback for reporting a fellow officer for drinking on the job.
It looked like it was going to be her last.
“You’ve made your choice,” the Captain said. “You’ll serve as an excellent example to your crew. And when you’re dead . . .” The figure gazed up meaningfully at the rows of skeletons dangling from the yards.
Summer gazed at Dale. The man trembled as lines were wound around his wrists and ankles. They meant to keelhaul him. It was a brutal way to die.
“Begin,” the Captain ordered.
Flanked by rotting dead men, Dale was walked to the bow. They made him step onto the sprit, lengthening out the line. Then, as he stood at the very front of the vessel, they jiggled the lines, making him lose his balance. He fell from view and splashed into the water.
“Walk him, boys,” the Captain said.
Suddenly an accordion began to play. It was discordant; the sour notes played along the bones of Summer’s spine and made her teeth ache.
As she watched in horror, about a dozen of the crew turned and slowly began to drag the lines that had been tied around Captain Dale’s arms and legs along either side of the ship toward the stern. They sang a hideous parody of a sea chantey as they inched along.
“Faster, faster,” Andy muttered beside her, and she realized he was holding out hope that Dale was going to make it. He didn’t know there was only one way for this to go down.
After an eternity, the crewmen reached the stern.
“Raise the lines,” the Captain commanded.
Though Summer couldn’t see what happened next, she wept bitterly at the cheer that rose among the dead men.
The Skree was a horrible creature. Its wings were leathery black and thickly veined. Its breath was fetid and its eyes blazed with a hellish glow. But to Oz, who even now was being carried aloft in its deadly talons, none of those things was half as disturbing as its most prominent feature. For the Skree had a human face, and a hideous one at that. Its teeth were sharp but canted at odd angles in its mouth. Its brow and lips protruded and its eyes were too far to the sides of its head, giving new meaning to the words peripheral vision in Oz’s personal dictionary.
But what bothered him most wasn’t just how ugly the thing was. It was just that juxtaposition: human face, monster body. It gave him what his aunt Maureen always called “the willies.” And these were major-league willies.
Oz thought about all these things in the few seconds it took him to recover from the Skree’s attack. He’d been a little disoriented, but now the thing was dragging him off into the sky. He struggled in the thing’s talons as, below, Buffy and Angel shouted for him to jump, to escape, to fight. Then he stopped struggling. It was a long, long drop to the ground. But if he got any higher, he might never get down.
Without another thought, Oz reached up and grabbed hold of the Skree’s feathers and yanked. It screamed just like a human would have, and Oz felt bile rise in his throat. He’d tried to make light of it, even in his own mind, to lessen the horror of it, but the thing was simply awful to look at—perhaps the most unnatural thing he had ever seen.
It dipped a little, in pain, and scowled at him. It screeched angrily and clutched him more tightly. Oz reached up and grabbed a wing and yanked as hard as he could. The Skree shrieked again, then rose up slightly, before dipping into a crazy, seemingly out-of-control dive at the ground.
Oz’s heart beat wildly in his chest. He held his breath without even realizing he was doing so. He’d hoped the winged beast would do something like this, but now that he’d gotten his wish, he wasn’t quite sure what to do next. It would try to kill him by shattering him on the drive below. When he was a werewolf, he was stronger than the average bear, but at the moment, an abrupt meeting with the pavement, or even the lawn in front of 217 Redcliff, would be very bad for his health.
“Let me go!” he shouted, and began beating at the Skree’s chest, then its face. When he crushed its nose, which then squirted blood, the thing’s talons released him, and Oz was in sudden freefall.
He pulled his legs around, tucked, and rolled when he landed. He’d be bruised in the morning, but at least he’d make it to morning. Above, the Skree shrieked in fury and swept up on wide, black wings to circle around for another attack. What Oz didn’t get was the lack of reinforcements. Buffy and Angel should have come running when he hit the ground.
“Guys?” Oz asked, and glanced around as he got to his feet, anxiously aware of the circling Skree.
“Oz, behind you!”
His heart trip-hammering again, Oz spun with his fists in the air to see a robed acolyte of the Sons of Entropy rushing toward him from the open door of the mansion at 217 Redcliff. Beyond him, Buffy and Angel were being attacked by several other acolytes who had obviously also come from inside the house.
“On the road with Buffy,” Oz said, ready to defend himself. “Oodles of excitement.”
Angel and Buffy were back to back in the front yard of the aging mansion. The shadows of the night enveloped them, but the Sons of Entropy had no trouble locating them in the dark. Nor did Buffy and Angel have trouble laying hands on the acolytes. The robes were dark, but white symbols glowed on them in some places. It seemed to Buffy as though these goons had two uniforms: business suits and monks’ robes.
But they all had breakable bones.
“I’m getting the idea none of this group are magick-users,” Angel said, his voice a snarl that reflected the angry yellow glow of his eyes and the feral rage she always saw in his vampire face.
Buffy slammed a high kick into the chest of the man in front of her, and heard several ribs crack. He went down hard, having difficulty breathing. The next one to come at Buffy—a slender, dangerous-looking man who moved with great swiftness and the discipline of martial arts—cried out like an infant when Buffy broke his left arm.
“Okay, whoever doesn’t think this was a setup, raise your hand,” she muttered.
“At least these guys aren’t much of a challenge,” Angel noted.
Buffy glanced over to where the Skree had dropped Oz and saw that he, too, was whupping Sons of Entropy butt. Well, okay, one butt. But he was holding his own. Angel was right. They weren’t much of a challenge. Then she caught sight of something moving up in the dark sky and realized she’d almost forgotten about the Skree.
“Maybe they were expecting that thing to be enough to punch all our tickets,” she suggested, then nodded at the descending creature even as she knocked another acolyte unconscious.
“I’ll finish mopping up here,” she said, glancing around at those Sons of Entropy still standing. “Why don’t you go get pterodactyl-lad off our backs.”
Without another word, Angel turned to face the Skree as it dropped toward them. When it got close enough to reach its talons out for Angel, the vampire didn’t move. Instead, he reached out his own hands, grabbed the Skree by the head, and twisted sharply, snapping the thing’s neck instantly. Its own momentum made it tumble awkwardly along the ground for several yards before coming to a stop not far from where Oz was dusting off his pants after subduing one of the Sons of Entropy.
Buffy backhanded an acolyte and stared at Angel. She knew what she must look like, knew the horror that was etched across her face, but she couldn’t help it. The thing was a monster, but it had a human face. And the casual way that he had done it, just stepped in and snapped the thing’s neck . . . just the way the demon within him had killed
Jenny Calendar during the time that his soul had been out of his body.
A tiny chill ran up Buffy’s spine. His gaze met her own, and Angel turned away. She thought he looked ashamed.
Buffy returned her attention to their attackers, but had barely resumed a battle stance before all the Sons of Entropy there on the grounds, conscious and unconscious, began to scream in unison. The scream lasted only seconds—seconds in which Buffy, Angel, and Oz could only stare at them—and then all the acolytes, as well as the corpse of the Skree, spontaneously combusted. Each body became an inferno, eyes withering in their sockets to blackened cinders, flesh cracking and peeling to drift away on the breeze like so much tapped-off cigarette ash.
Moments later, all that remained were black splotches on the slightly overgrown front lawn of the mansion at 217 Redcliff.
It was Oz who broke the silence. “Is it me?” he asked at length. “Or did those guys just burn up?”
“Yep,” Buffy concurred. “Pretty thorough job, too. I’m getting the feeling that whoever these morons report to, he doesn’t want them giving us any more information. At least, nothing he hasn’t planned for us to find out.” After a brief pause, she added, “Did I forget to say ‘gross’?”
Oz smiled, fingered a large tear in his jacket, and then glanced at the house. “I guess we should search the place,” he said, without much conviction.
“Search?” Angel repeated, then looked up at the sky. “We’ve only got a couple of hours until dawn. We’re camping here for the day.”
Buffy thought about that a moment, then agreed. “I doubt the owners are going to be back in the immediate future,” she observed.
Once they had settled in—Angel was pleased to discover a very tightly enclosed wine cellar, to which he eventually retreated with a pile of blankets from an upstairs closet—they did end up searching the house. Other than bedding and the clothing of a number of acolytes, they found nothing. No paperwork with any clues, no photographs, no hint whatsoever at where the main headquarters of the Sons of Entropy might be located. Whoever had taken Jacques Regnier was likely the top dog in the group. But there was no record of who that might be, or where he would reside.
At least, not until Buffy ran across a small leather pouch filled with runestones among one of the dead acolytes’ things. Sewn into the lining of the pouch was a Paris address. When Buffy showed it to Oz and Angel, both were more than a bit dubious.
“Y’know, far be it from me to question the motives of, well, the bad guys,” Oz began, “but, well, y’know . . . trap?”
“What choice do we have?” Angel pointed out.
“Then there’s that,” Oz replied, with a nod and a shrug.
“Fine. Paris it is,” Buffy decided. “But first things first. We go to the Watchers’ Council, tell them they’ve got worse security than Macy’s, and find the jerk who set us up for this trap.”
Angel didn’t smile. He barely even glanced at her.
“What is it?” she asked him.
“You’ve got to wonder,” he said calmly. “First of all, they’re probably out of spies, or they would have sent others after you, or Giles. Plus, their security can’t be that bad. There’s got to be one person who started it all, who got the ball rolling by infiltrating the Council in some way. If we can find that person, figure out who it is, maybe we could get some of the answers we need.”
“That’d be nice,” Buffy said bluntly. “But we don’t have the time. There’s an eleven-year-old kid out there we need to find and get home to his father. We need to stay focused.”
Oz handed Angel a pillow, then started moving toward the living room sofa, where he intended to sleep. Before he even began to lie down, he glanced back at them. “The other option being the end of the world,” he said calmly, “I’d have to side with Buffy.”
Beneath the headquarters of the Sons of Entropy, Il Maestro had built a special chamber. The bricks and mortar from which it had been constructed whispered of unholy histories: they had been gathered from the execution sites of innocent martyrs, the dungeons of the Inquisition, the famed torture chambers of the de’ Medicis and the Borgias. The walls were a deep, unending ebony. There were no windows. Candles provided insipid light, and large portions of the room remained in darkness. At the moment, the air was dank and icy. It was a chamber that celebrated misery and despair—and triumph, for Il Maestro would never again know misery and despair.
So he had been promised.
In the center of the chamber, a pentagram had been inscribed with the blood of a dozen virgins who had been tortured slowly to death. Above the pentagram, a portal glowed an unholy indigo, and within it, flecks of hellfire spit and burst. On occasion, shrieks would echo through it—the cries of the damned, followed by the laughter of demons. It was three times as large as when it had first appeared, many years before.
Soon, it would be big enough.
As Il Maestro sank to his knees and chanted, he closed his eyes and waited. Soon the stench of sulfur filled the room. The stones beneath his knees and shins sizzled with heat. Blisters rose on his flesh, but he endured the pain gladly.
He felt the enormous shadow cross his path. Cloaked in the black of the order of the Sons of Entropy, he lowered his forehead to the baking stone floor and murmured, “Welcome, my lord.”
Il Maestro’s guest said without preamble, Where is she?
“Soon,” Il Maestro promised, opening his eyes. But as always, his guest had retreated to the shadows. Il Maestro had never actually seen the dark lord he served. “I will have her soon.”
She walked the ghost road. You could have taken her then.
Il Maestro swallowed hard. He was waiting to hear if his followers had achieved their purpose with the help of the Skree.
“She was stronger than I anticipated,” Il Maestro confessed. He quickly held up a hand. “Which means her death will bring us all that much more power when it occurs.”
There was silence. Then the demon said, True. There was glee in his voice. Pleasure.
Il Maestro allowed a single sigh of relief to escape.
Our hour draws near, the Dark One told him. With the death of a Slayer, we will open all the floodgates of Hell and I shall walk the earth once more.
“And I alone shall be spared,” Il Maestro said nervously. “I and my dearest daughter.”
The demon narrowed his eyes. You treasure her.
Il Maestro lowered his head. “Indeed, lord, I do.”
That imbues her with great power also.
“No,” Il Maestro said, thinking to explain. “Since she grew up in the world outside, I chose to limit her access to the energy that I—and you, my lord—so easily shape and dominate. She is aware of the vastness of the dark forces, of course. But in fact, she’s rather untried—”
That is an oversight that can be quickly remedied.
Il Maestro shifted his weight. He wanted badly to rise, but he would not until the great demon gave him leave. “Yes, but—”
There are signs and portents we cannot ignore. Our time to act is nigh. Within this fortnight, we must have a sacrifice that will cause the walls of Hell to tumble. And if not the Slayer, then this girl you love so much.
“No!” Il Maestro cried, shocked.
Yes. If you cannot procure the Chosen One, your beloved daughter will take the Slayer’s place.
Il Maestro lifted his arms in supplication, oblivious to the heat and the pain. “Lord, please. Not my daughter. I beg you. All of my acolytes believe they will be kings when the barrier to Otherworld falls and all the monsters of chaos roam the Earth. They do not realize that with the death of the Gatekeeper and the sacrifice of the Slayer, the walls of Hell will crumble as well. They love me, give themselves wholly to me, and I, Master, I give them to you.
“All I ask is that you spare Micaela, that I live with her in your kingdom.”
Our bargain was for your life, not for hers.
“She had yet to come into my life when I struck that barg
ain,” Il Maestro whispered.
As I said. The demon chuckled cruelly. She is so very powerful indeed.
Chapter 3
WILLOW STOOD ON THE SIDEWALK IN FRONT OF HER house, impatiently checking her watch. Though she felt two sets of glaring eyes burning into her shoulder blades, she dared not turn around, dared not reveal her anxiety. They would be there, at a window or at the door, watching her. She shuddered.
Cordelia’s car screeched around the corner, incontrovertible evidence of her dubious driving skills, despite her constant denials. The little sports car sped up the well-manicured suburban street, and not a few lights popped on in windows up and down the street. It was after nine o’clock. The Rosenbergs’ neighbors generally liked all life to have gone into hibernation by then.
Not tonight, Willow thought, and smiled slightly to herself as Cordelia brought the car to a jerking halt at the curb. Willow reached for the door handle but paused as her mother’s voice drifted down from the house.
“Don’t stay out too late, honey. Think about what your father said.”
Willow sighed and turned to wave amiably to her mom. She knew her parents meant well, but they were being so pushy and intrusive on the whole postgraduation issue that Willow was starting to get frustrated, almost resentful of them. She didn’t like feeling that way. Of course, she figured it didn’t help that she had to lie to them all the time. Like tonight, for instance.
“I will,” she called to her mother.
Then she pulled open the passenger door and dropped into the low seat of the car. Cordelia looked perfect as usual, in charcoal gray pants and a blue silk shirt so stylish that Willow firmly believed she’d look silly in it. Cordelia didn’t look silly at all.
“Love the outfit,” Willow told her as she pulled the door shut. “But aren’t you a little overdressed for monster patrol?”
The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Two - GHOST ROADS Page 6
