Then she shook herself. She could not envy him. First, because he was only a boy. Second, and more important, because of the responsibility that lay before him. He was to become the Gatekeeper. He was resting now, yes, but this might be the last opportunity he had to do that for several hundred years. The rest of his life.
The similarity between the boy’s dark destiny and her own daughter’s did not escape Joyce Summers’s notice. She simply tried not to think about it. Instead, she returned to the parlor and set about the familiar tasks of worrying about her daughter and waiting for the phone to ring.
* * *
“This feels so odd,” Buffy observed, as she walked through the cemetery with Giles, Micaela, and Oz. “I mean, usually the patrol thing is done after dark. Plus, y’know, it’s sort of surreal to know that the rest of the world is going on without you, that everybody’s at school, and the bells are ringing, and teachers are giving out homework and tests and . . . we’re all completely screwed when we finally go back to school.”
Oz offered a small shrug. “You get used to it after a while. The surreal part, that is. The screwed thing? When it starts to matter, that’s a bummer.”
Giles raised an eyebrow, and shook his head slightly at the celebrated highest-scoring-student-ever-to-fail-to-graduate.
“Forgive me,” Micaela said softly, “but are we getting near? I only ask because—”
“You feel something,” Oz finished for her. “Yeah. There’s kind of a, I don’t know, current or something. Got my hackles up, too.”
“So to speak,” Giles said.
Oz only nodded.
“Right over here,” Buffy told her, and gestured toward a large crypt perhaps twenty yards away.
“I guess all those empty storefronts and ‘For Sale’ signs are just a fluke. If someone’s living here, quality real estate in this town must be at a premium,” Oz observed.
“Nobody lives here,” Buffy countered, a dark expression crossing her face. “Not anymore.”
“Maybe not the last time you were here,” Micaela corrected. “But that might have changed. It seems likely this crypt has new residents. Or at least, it may be being used as a conduit of sorts for the creatures appearing underground to emerge into Sunnydale.”
“That’s precisely what we’re here to find out,” Giles noted.
He exchanged a meaningful glance with Micaela, and Buffy wondered if there was something really brewing with them. For Giles’s sake, she hoped so. It would be nice to see him fall for someone. Maybe the memory of Jenny Calendar would stop haunting him so much.
“Door’s open,” Oz noted.
They all paused. The heavy iron door to the crypt hung open and to one side, as though it had been torn away. Buffy wasn’t sure if Angel had done that getting away, or if some demon had done it chasing after him. Or later, coming out into the world.
“Y’know, I thought maybe doing this during the day would make it less creepy. But it’s actually more creepy, if that’s possible. Stuff like this shouldn’t happen during the day.”
Together, they entered the crypt. Buffy led the way, with Oz and Micaela behind her and Giles taking up the rear. The dusty gloom of the crypt was disturbed by their passing, and a pulsing purple light from Micaela’s hands threw eerie shadows on the walls. There were several large, marble tombs within, their heavy lids inscribed with the names and the life dates of the deceased. Buffy noticed that one of the lids was new, to replace the one shattered the last time she faced evil within these walls.
At the far side of the crypt, the heavy iron door that led down into the tunnels also stood open. Fortunately, it was undamaged.
“A thought. Cork the bottle, withdraw to examine the big picture,” Oz suggested.
“We’ve got to know what we’re dealing with,” Buffy argued. “If Fulcanelli’s over, who—or what—is running the show?”
“I concur,” Giles said, and glanced at Micaela. “Perhaps you’ll be able to shore up the barricades, so to speak, before it grows any worse.”
Micaela didn’t respond.
Together the four of them descended along a narrow stairwell. It had occurred to Buffy the first time she’d been here to wonder who had built these stairs in the first place. There were electrical tunnels, sewer tunnels, and natural cave formations beneath Sunnydale. There were also portions of the town, including an old church, that had been swallowed by an earthquake nearly a century earlier. But there were additional passages beneath the town, tunnels that someone had built, but not for any obvious reason.
One of these days, Buffy figured, she’d have to fill the entire system with concrete or something. Keep the undesirable element from setting up shop down there.
Like now, for instance.
They followed the dank underground path, eventually entering some of the town utility tunnels. Their way was lit only by the crackling purple light of Micaela’s meager sorcery. For the most part, they walked in silence. From time to time, Buffy allowed herself a sarcastic comment. Oz would counter with a dry yet telling observation. Giles would raise his eyebrows, maybe clean off his glasses.
It felt like forever. In reality, it was only a few minutes.
“This is it,” Buffy said as they entered a small cavern, littered with bits of existing architecture to indicate that this might have been a building once, when it stood above the ground.
“This is the Master’s lair.”
She felt a firm hand on her shoulder, and Buffy turned to see Giles gazing at her.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
Neither of the others would have noticed it, but there was a great deal more in his manner, in his question, than those simple words. The last time Buffy had been here, at the end of her sophomore year, she had died. Only for a few seconds, of course. But nevertheless, she had been dead. Only Xander’s quick action, giving her CPR, had brought her back.
“It’s empty,” Micaela said.
Buffy wanted to say, “No, there are plenty of ghosts here.” But she kept silent.
“Not empty,” Oz observed, glancing around, his brow furrowed. “Doesn’t anyone else smell that? All of that?”
But none of them did. Only Oz. And it was Oz who began to back up, glancing from side to side with a look of grave concern on his face. He held out a hand to them, beckoning.
“I think we’d all be much better off if we were elsewhere,” he said.
“I’m not sure I . . .” Giles began. Then he stared hard at Oz. “You sense something?”
“In a wolfy, supernatural kind of way?” Buffy prodded.
“That’s not usually the way it works, but . . . there’s something here. Definitely,” Oz replied.
Micaela turned to face the cavern. “Well, then, why don’t we shed a little bit more light on the subject.”
From her hands a blazing purple flare erupted, bathing the cave in violent violet hues. Picking out, in great detail, every crack and crevice. Every fang and claw. Every snarl and slither.
“Dear Lord,” Giles whispered.
They were everywhere. But they were nowhere. Monsters. Nightmares. They were somehow between worlds, frozen, it seemed, just below the surface of the stone or the earth or the metal. Even the puddle of water at the center of the cavern had a face beneath it. A horrifying visage like nothing any of them had seen before, except perhaps in the sketches of the mad.
“Giles, talk to me,” Buffy said.
Just as the thing beneath the water burst forth, thrashing and roaring with fury. The water held for a moment, as if the demon’s head had crowned like the skull of a newborn. Then it crashed through, a savage newborn into this world.
A blood-red newborn, with scales covering its squat body, spikes on the whipping tentacles that served it as arms.
“Micaela,” Buffy said.
That was all. She reached into a black bag she had slung low on one shoulder and retrieved a long machete Giles had dug out from his weapons cache. Micaela held up her hands and
a bright green light danced from her fingers and seemed to trap the thing, momentarily, in a web of power. It froze. Its tentacles no longer whipped murderously from side to side.
Before Giles or Oz could speak, Buffy waded in and brought the machete whistling through the air. The blade cleaved the demon’s head from its body in one furious chop. Buffy felt it catch for a fraction of a second on bone or gristle, and then she was through. For a moment, while Micaela’s magick still held it, the thing’s head did not fall.
When she let the net of sorcery drop, the demon’s head slid unceremoniously to plop into the pool from which it had emerged.
Buffy backed off as the tentacles twitched. They all stood together, looking around at the demons who were in the process of traveling from one world to another. Forcing their way through. The barrier to Hell had not fallen, but they were punching holes in it, finding where it was worn thin, and pushing through.
“Are you guys all pondering what I’m pondering?” Buffy asked.
“If it involves Cheez Whiz and bananas, then no,” Oz replied. “But, okay, if we’re talking strategic retreat, and fixing our major problem before these walls fall completely, then—”
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Micaela agreed.
They all turned to go. Except for Giles. He stared at the walls, and Buffy reached out to grab his hand.
“Rupert,” Micaela said.
“Giles, come on,” Buffy urged.
“Angel fought several of these things,” Giles noted. “It’s likely they’re coming through at a relatively consistent rate, and yet, we haven’t seen them in Sunnydale yet. Not really.”
“So what happened to the ones who have already come through?” Oz asked.
“Precisely,” Giles replied.
“They may be waiting for dark,” Micaela suggested.
At that, there was a loud roar from a tunnel across the cavern. In the darkness, something slithered. Something else walked with cloven hooves. Wings fluttered. From the shadows, things began to emerge.
“Y’know, Giles, the problem with questions like yours?” Buffy said angrily. “I always hate the answers.”
“Running,” Oz informed them.
But by then, they all were.
“You said it was a strategic retreat,” Buffy snapped at Oz.
“Which, loosely translated . . . running,” he told her.
The demons were on their trail, the appalling sounds of Hell’s minions echoing up the tunnels after them. Still, somehow, they made it to the stairs and up into the crypt. When Buffy turned and slammed the heavy iron door, something screamed, a talon was shorn off and dropped to the floor of the crypt, still writhing on its own. Oz stamped on it until it stopped.
Giles, Buffy, and Micaela put their shoulders to the door. There was a place for a chain and a lock. But the chain and lock were gone.
“Oz, help,” Buffy said.
And Oz was there. Helping as much as he could. Which, since he was relatively small when not a werewolf, wasn’t that much. He didn’t have a lot of weight to throw against the door.
Which was what they needed.
“Hold it!” Buffy shouted.
She leaped away, jumped over one of the heavy marble tombs that lined the crypt. The Slayer put her back against the marble and her feet against the wall of the crypt, and she pushed with every ounce of her strength.
Nothing happened.
Buffy allowed herself two breaths.
“They’re coming through!” Giles snapped. “Micaela, can you seal the door?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” she said. “Nothing . . . not what I’ve studied. And there are so many, I can’t . . . I can’t concentrate.”
“Can you push them back, just for a second?” Buffy called.
After a second of silence, she heard a huge, cacophonous roar. Then Micaela shouted, “Yes!” and Buffy knew she’d done it. It would buy them only a few breaths of peace.
“Help me!” she shouted.
And they were there. Giles and Oz were by her side, their backs set against the marble. With all their might, they pushed. And the tomb moved. It slid toward the door. Oz stayed low, and Giles and Buffy stood and bent to the job, moving the huge marble sarcophagus.
“This is too easy,” Oz said.
“Speak for yourself,” Micaela replied.
Buffy looked up and saw her face, red with effort, sweat dripping down her forehead. She was standing in the middle of the crypt, doing nothing. But apparently doing something after all.
“Micaela?” Giles asked.
“This, I think I can do,” she said.
The first tomb slammed against the iron door just as the demons began to pound on the other side. Then Giles was up, not helping anymore.
“We’re not done here, Giles,” Buffy said.
He turned to look at them, flustered. “I’m sorry, all of you. But we’ve got to look at the big picture. If memory serves, there may be an enchantment—a very powerful enchantment but of limited range, you understand—that could buy us the time we need to attend to the ‘big picture’ the way it ought to be handled.
“The way we ought to have handled it already.”
Buffy flinched. He was talking about her reluctance to deal with the crisis at hand before rescuing her mother. She knew he meant nothing by it, but it still hurt. Buffy knew that she had been selfish, that putting her mother’s safety ahead of the fate of the world was nothing short of abhorrent. But she would do it again if it came to that.
“Go,” Micaela said.
“We’ll handle it here, Giles,” Buffy said. “You go do your thing, and we’ll muzzle the Hellmouth.”
For a moment Giles looked at her oddly, processing the humor. Then he smiled wanly and was gone, heading off toward school at a trot. Buffy, Micaela, and Oz continued the process of blocking the iron door as best they could.
But in her mind, Buffy saw an image of that cavern below, where demons were slowly emerging from their own dimension into this one. And she knew that no matter what they blocked the way with, it wouldn’t be enough. Nowhere near enough.
And, of course, there were plenty of other ways out of that underground warren.
“Faster,” Buffy said, shivering a little, though the sun shone through into the dusty crypt.
It was barely noon.
* * *
Ethan Rayne sat at the desk in Giles’s small office, sipping whiskey from one of the cups from the antique tea service that had sat on top of a squat bookcase. There were books strewn all around the room. Books stacked on top of the desk. Several of them were open on the desk, and he’d had the temerity to tear pages out of another. He knew old Ripper would have his knickers in a twist over that one, but he hadn’t time to seek out the copy machine.
He’d managed to shake the beautiful young witch, Amy Madison, out of a deep sleep, in order for her to read the selection about Belphegor in The Lords of Hell. Only one born to magick could read the pages, but Ethan copied down every word as she read it aloud to him. Only then did he let the injured girl go back to healing sleep.
The nurses never saw Ethan. He didn’t let them. And when he’d returned to the library, it had been a relatively simple matter to cast a glamour over the glass of the door to Rupert’s office, so that anyone looking inside would see the office as it had been before Ethan entered. Empty. Neat. A bit stuffy.
He’d even taped a small note to the counter out in the library proper. “Back in 5 minutes,” it read. The weasel of a principal had come in at one point. Ethan had watched him stomping angrily about the place through the window in Giles’s office door. The man had even come to peer into the office, but he’d seemed to be looking right through Ethan.
The glamour was working just fine.
Now, as Ethan took another shot of whiskey—horrid stuff he’d acquired at a liquor store near the hospital—he frowned. He’d read Amy’s translation dozens of times. Most of it, he understood. But there were several thi
ngs that still puzzled him.
When he’d called up Belphegor for their little chat—and even now, Ethan was still a bit irked with the demon for being so dismissive of him—he’d called the Hell lord by many of his names: Lord of the Vile Flesh, Wanderer of the Wastelands, Master of the Secret Passages, and so on. But there were others here. Dozens of others, in fact. A boring grocery list of references to the same blasted demon. Most of them were gibberish, or hinted at some of the abilities Belphegor could brag about.
But there were passages Ethan just didn’t understand.
Born from the bowels of the Old Ones;
The Lord of the Vile Flesh;
His heart a whisper of shadow;
He watches the world of man with human eye;
The eyes of man, the darkest passage;
The path he must follow, the world which he covets;
Belphegor, scion of worlds old and new;
Wanderer in Darkness, shying from infernal flame;
Yet the dawn of man shall not burn his eyes;
Yet the sword of man shall not cut him down;
For man’s only weapon must be himself.
Yeah. That was pretty damned confusing. “Man’s only weapon must be himself” Ethan thought. What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean? And the old man certainly doesn’t have human eyes.
From outside in the library he heard the sound of the double doors swinging closed. With a quick glance over his shoulder, Ethan folded up the pages of young Amy’s recitation and slipped them inside one of Rupert’s books.
He looked up just as the Watcher opened the office door.
The look on Rupert’s face was priceless.
“Hello, Ripper,” Ethan said, and grinned.
The Watcher’s eyes narrowed. His nostrils flared. His eyes roved across the books strewn around the office, moved to the volumes open on his desk, then settled back on Ethan.
“These are my things,” he said coldly.
Ethan shrugged. “Sure, but, y’know, one for the team and all, eh, old man? A spot of research is all.”
Rupert moved farther into the room. There was an edge to everything about him now, a change in the very air of the office. Ethan tensed. There had always been a dark side to Rupert Giles, no matter what face he put on it later. He was the Watcher, now, all right and proper. But he was capable of anger and violence of great magnitude. Had been, even before his lady love had her neck snapped by the Slayer’s dead boyfriend. Even before said boyfriend had tortured poor Ripper until he was half a moment shy of mad.
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