The Longest Night Vol. 1

by Various

  The only thing wrong with the picture was that this time she couldn’t quite find her favorite afghan to keep away the chill that always nipped at her hands and feet when she overate…

  “Great,” Angel said. “What are you supposed to be? The hell-demon equivalent of Frosty the Snowman?” The quip sounded funny in his head, but coming out of his mouth it was all wrong, so thick and palpable with cold that the words seemed to have actual weight on the air.

  Weight was exactly what the demon-thing in front of him had—the creature was huge and blobby and white. From where Angel stood a few feet away from the hotel’s industrial-size water heater, he could see that the winter demon filled the corner across from the furnace with snow, but there wasn’t anything pristine or pretty about it—instead it was kind of fuzzy and uneven, with a fur covering that was mottled white and gray like the folds of skin on a dirty polar bear that had mutated to gargantuan size. Everything moved in an unpleasant rolling motion as the creature hauled itself forward and came closer; somewhere in that mass was a face, but it, too, had that unsettling shifting thing going; first it seemed to be on the left side, then the right, then somewhere a little south of what might be the beast’s head. The only reason Angel was convinced he was actually seeing a face at all was that there were two predatory, pinprick eyes, bloodred above the circular dark shadow of nose.

  And, of course, the creature had a mouth. Didn’t they always?

  Its mouth was round and toothless. Somehow Angel found that far more frightening than if he’d been facing something with double or even triple rows of razor-edged teeth. A shark he could deal with, he’d at least know what to expect if the thing managed to take a bite out of him. But this…who knew what would happen, or even if anything was supposed to. Creatures that didn’t have teeth usually fed some other way, and the fact that his friends were standing here paralyzed and probably hypothermic went a long way to support his notion that this particular beast was going for the mental menu rather than pure flesh. It probably lived off energy, and getting it was easy—it simply siphoned off its victims’ body heat.

  “Let me go, you overgrown snowball,” he said. His teeth were grinding together in his effort to move. It took a lot of cold to freeze a vampire into immobility, but this thing might actually be able to do it; this was actually starting to scare him. “I’m dead and I don’t give out heat.”

  Something, a parody of a voice, slid through his mind, drawing that same arctic cold through his brain cells.

  Vampiiiiirrrrreeeee…

  “That’s right,” Angel managed. “I’m your classic bloodsucker.” He fought against the hold on his limbs but was only able to shuffle backward a couple of steps. “Dead. Kaput. No heartbeat, no—”

  Alll thingsssss giiiive outtt ennnnergyyyy…

  So he’d been right about what this was—not just heat, but an energy hunt. Okay, he could accept that, but what was the mechanism holding Fred, Wesley, Gunn, and Cordelia down here? Cold would be a factor, sure, but they still should have been able to move at least enough to back out of the furnace room, head back upstairs and out of the creature’s holding range while they regrouped, warmed up, and came up with a better plan. Instead, they’d stepped through the door and literally stopped, and if they weren’t exactly frozen in place, they were well on their way to it.

  He had to snap them back to the present.

  “Time to go,” he said. “And my friends are going with me.” Angel turned, still moving excruciatingly slow, like sap down the side of a tree in rapidly freezing temperatures. But speed didn’t matter right now, at least not as it pertained to him—even if he had to do it one inch at a time, he’d drag the others out of here. He’d start with Wesley—

  Vampiiiiirrrrreeeee…

  The voice inside his skull was cold and silky, like decadent white chocolate ice cream. It stretched on and on and on, and Angel tried in vain to ignore it.

  I haaaavvvvve sssssommmmmethinnnnngg toooo sssshoooooww yoooouuuou….

  Winter in Sunnydale wasn’t really all that much of a winter. Angel had been in climates a lot colder than this, had spent many a night scrambling to find shelter from the local blizzard, not because it actually bothered him, but because he really wasn’t into the feel of wet clothes against his skin. He also really hated the squishiness of soaked shoes. Now and then it rained in Sunnydale, but even that didn’t happen often; sometimes he missed the snow and the winter and whole feel of the Christmas holiday thing. The soul inside him made him yearn for things like that, and now, tonight…

  Angel remembered this one. Christmastime in Sunnydale not so very long ago, and he had been particularly tormented that year, suffocating in guilt from his past memories of what he had done to others, including his own family members. The images had haunted him and nearly driven him insane; he had been so maddened that he had even considered ending it, had planned to greet the sun in the morning and make the final curtain call to this miserable thing that passed for his existence. But then there’d been…

  Buffy.

  Then.

  And now.

  She walked next to him, saying nothing. Her small hand was tucked neatly into his much larger one, and he could feel its warmth, its life, pulsing against his palm. In fact, he could feel more than that—he could feel her love, that soul-deep emotion she harbored for him in spite of the fact that he was, when it came right down to it, a bloodsucking monster. It radiated all around her like a sort of psychic aura, as though she were a human candle and her emotions the glow from the flame. And around them was that absolutely incredible snowfall, the one neither of them had expected; it filled the air with white, crystalline beauty, softening the edges of a town that could sometimes cut its people down with scythelike sharpness.

  “The turkey will be done by the time we get home,” Buffy said. “Mom and Dawn are taking care of the salad and the vegetables, and you know Mom—she’s like Timer Lady, always big with the organizational skills. Willow and Tara are bringing dessert, and Xander says Anya’s big into appetizers this week—she found some recipe for shrimp-cheese puffs that she’s dying for everyone to try. Riley’s bringing raisin-fruit bread from this Scandinavian bakery he found just outside of downtown, and Spike, true to form, is bringing alcoholic punch. Drusilla told me that every dinner table needs flowers, so she’s bringing three dozen black-red roses.” Buffy’s head turned and she gave him a smile that was so dazzlingly beautiful it made Angel’s heart ache. “Faith doesn’t cook, of course, but she said she and Mayor Wilkins could handle picking up two containers of Cool Whip and a bag of Christmas candy. Everything’s coming together perfectly.” Buffy nodded to herself. “It’s going to be great, Angel.”

  He kept walking, feeling peaceful and self-assured, shrouded in the feeling of being wanted and loved by this young woman. There was a tiny place in his mind, like a mental splinter, that told him the things Buffy had said didn’t make sense; he ignored it because he wanted them to be so, wanted to walk into Buffy’s house and see Joyce Summers choreographing a Christmas dinner extravaganza for people—and creatures—who in any other reality were mortal enemies. His undead existence had never included a true Christmas holiday and now he found that he desperately wanted just that, complete with presents and laughter and frolicking around the Christmas tree. He had thought Buffy was gone from his life, had witnessed firsthand the heartbreak she’d experienced at her mother’s funeral; now he felt like all those bad experiences had happened to someone else, some other vampire named Angelus who’d grown up in a more ruthless and unloving time and followed that existence with his own history of bloodshed.

  He was here now, and Buffy was here now, and they had such grand plans.

  “Let’s stop and go in here,” Buffy said. She tugged him to the side and he followed her without thinking about it, without questioning, climbing a set of wide concrete steps. It wasn’t until he heard the squeal of un-oiled hinges that he realized she’d pushed open the door to a Catholic church
and was leading him inside. He pulled back and she turned to look at him, her eyes clear but puzzled. “What’s wrong, Angel?”

  “Buffy,” he said hesitantly, “you know I can’t go in there. The crosses—”

  She smiled at him and for a moment he lost himself in the vision—she was so beautiful. “Of course you can, Angel. Everything is all right. This is the way it should have been.”

  “Should have been?” he repeated.

  She nodded. “Between you and me, between all of us.”

  Buffy took another step, but he still couldn’t make himself follow. That mind-splinter was back, bigger this time, sinking into his brain far enough to sting. “Let’s…not,” he said. “I’d rather keep walking.”

  “I understand.” She let the doors to the church close behind her and together they descended the steps, careful not to slip in the clean snow that was blanketing everything. “It’s just a beautiful thing, snow in Sunnydale.”

  He nodded. “Kind of a once-in-a-lifetime event, I think.”

  They kept walking, enjoying the snowfall but never really feeling the cold. Past so many of the familiar old landmarks—Angel had forgotten how much he missed this little town. Sunnydale Mall was draped in festive lights and decorations, a blinking swirl of color that was almost painful to view. On the outskirts of the main entry was a small crowd and a fire truck with its lights flashing; three or four suited-up firemen milled around with the crowd and looked at a fire hydrant from which gushed a steady stream of water. Oddly, none of the firemen seemed inclined to do anything to stop it; instead, they laughed and talked among themselves and the crowd.

  As Angel and Buffy passed, Angel realized that the puddle of water from the hydrant was growing, seeping toward them on the sidewalk and washing away the snowfall’s accumulation. Curious, Angel leaned over and ran his fingers through the quickly accumulating puddle of water. “Wow,” he told Buffy. He held up his fingers for her to see. “It’s warm.”

  She nodded and her expression changed, slipping into a much more thoughtful mode. “Yes,” she said solemnly. “If they’re not careful, it’s going to melt all this snow. Maybe you should help them.”

  Buffy slipped her hand back into his and he shuddered, because this time, the touch of her flesh was as cold as that of a corpse on a December morning…

  Maybe you should help them…

  The thought reverberated in Angel’s mind even as the frigid touch of Buffy’s hand jolted him out of the pseudomemory. But for the feel of her ice-covered fingers, he would have been content to stay in the memory, even knowing in his subconscious just how bizarre the whole thing was. Cold wasn’t something that generally bothered him—being a vampire kind of took the bite out of it—but for Buffy’s touch to be like that, at a time when everything else between them was at near perfection, was wrong on too many levels to count.

  And the nastiness of the here and now was almost enough to make him surrender to the urge to dive back into the false memories.

  Snow had drifted nearly up to Angel’s knees. It enveloped almost everything—washers and dryers, cabinets, his friends. They had to be hurting by now, maybe even frostbitten. The beast was clearly getting stronger, extending its range; Angel could turn his head just enough to see that the blanket of white had moved far beyond the doorway to the laundry room and into the other areas of the basement, driving away the darkness and replacing it with bitter cold and frozen moisture. By now the beast’s custom-made winter was probably working its way up the stairs and into the main lobby, where the puddles of water that Cordelia had first complained about had been its first finger hold.

  Maybe you should help them…

  It took immense effort, but Angel swiveled his head back in the direction of the snow creature. The thing was pulsing about ten feet away, like some sort of huge white whale—inhaling and exhaling rapidly as it fed on the nearby but fast-fading sources of life energy. If it got beyond this room, what then? All of Los Angeles awaited, like a big old human buffet.

  Maybe you should help them…

  Buffy’s words kept turning in Angel’s mind, often enough to be aggravating. Yes, he had to help them, but how?

  He scowled at it. The thing was made of snow—it couldn’t be stabbed or chopped or even blown up. It could probably be melted, but even that was iffy; the furnace seemed to be fighting a losing battle over there. There wasn’t any snow on the appliance or right next to it, but it had sure managed to pile up pretty close, within only five or six inches. The same thing went for the water heater—

  The water heater.

  Angel’s gaze focused on it, then traced its outline to the top, where a half dozen water pipes went in and out of it. Half of them fed cold water in, and these were easy to spot—a thick layer of ice had formed around them and icicles had formed where the heat of the room had melted the snow at the start of all this. But the other three—they were still clear of snow and ice, the heat from the water inside helping each maintain its warmth. The pipes came straight up, then went off in three directions to feed the plumbing throughout the hotel. And one of these was right over Angel’s head.

  The snow beast made a noise that Angel found vaguely disgusting, like an animal belching after eating too much. That made him even angrier than he already was—it was his friends that this creature was “eating” and he just wasn’t going to stand here and watch that happen.

  With every last bit of stubbornness and strength he had, Angel willed his arm to move.

  He got it up and over his head and managed to close his fingers around the hot water pipe. Heat burned against his hand, lessening the numbness—a good thing, because while he’d gotten that far, Angel didn’t think he had it in him to actually pull downward. The warmth at least let him fold his fingers tighter, and if he couldn’t exactly pull, he could drop.

  Angel bent his knees and let the weight of his body crash to the floor.

  Clutched firmly in his grip, the pipe came down with him, adding a scream of metal and a welcoming hiss of steam as the pressure broke in the hotel’s water system. Hot water jetted from the jagged end of the pipe in Angel’s hand, spewing in all directions. Something like a roar filled the room, a garbled version of that earlier mental kiss that had floated so easily through Angel’s mind. There was nothing gentle or soothing about it now; the beast was bellowing inside his head—

  STTTTOOOOPPPPPPPPP

  —until Angel thought his brain was going to explode out the back of his skull. The heated water from the pipe hit the ice and the snow, and sent mist and warm fog everywhere, which made the winter demon shriek louder, and this time there wasn’t anything at all recognizable about the sound—

  ARRRRRRRRRGBHGHGHGHGHGHGHHGHG

  The screeching cut off in mid-syllable and water—warm and welcome—splashed his face. Angel blinked, then squinted, not realizing until then that he’d had his eyes squeezed shut. He was covered in wet and for a brilliant, panic-filled second he had the notion it was holy water and he was going to start boiling from the outside in. Then it sunk in that he was okay, just a little washed-over, and the pipe he still clutched in his now-thawed hand was spraying the laundry room with life-giving warmth. So much warmth, in fact, that directly in front of him was a rapidly melting pile of white goo that had once been the arctic monster; Angel wasn’t sure, but as he stared at it from beneath water-logged eyelashes, he thought he saw the thing’s red eyes throb a final time before dulling and disappearing altogether.

  He heard groaning behind him. When he turned, Angel saw his four friends finally starting to move again, forcing their limbs into action to reestablish circulation. Poor Wesley—his lips were quite blue, a startling contrast against his pale skin. The others didn’t look much better, and as they helped each other stumble back upstairs, Angel gave the flooding laundry room a final spraying with hot, hot water, hoping it would chase away the lingering cold.

  The last of the night’s stars were hanging over the L.A. skyline by the time they w
ere all huddled in robes and sweatpants and sweaters, dry and recovering in the lobby.

  “Man, that was a cold way to end the day,” Gunn said.

  “Not funny.” Cordelia sent him a sharp look. “We all nearly froze to death.”

  Gunn raised an eyebrow. “Who said I was joking?”

  “Yes,” Wesley mused. “And all because the creature was able to deceive us with our own memories.”

  “Not really ours,” Fred corrected gently. “They were fabricated.”

  “True,” Wesley agreed. The five of them had shared their experiences, although Angel didn’t know if there were pieces of the ‘what might have been’ that each was keeping private. “I think we each had an empty spot, ora…wanting inside us that this demon was able to latch onto and manipulate.”

  “Nasty thing,” Fred muttered, although her gaze remained a little far away.

  “It was so pretty,” Cordelia said softly. “Was it what could have been, or what should have been?”

  “Does it matter?” Angel asked. Once he’d washed away the last traces of the snow beast, he’d come upstairs and changed into dry clothes, recovering much faster than the others. “I think the point is what Fred said—it was fantasy. What we saw was all fine and dandy, but it wasn’t real. We need to stay grounded in reality and appreciate what we have now.”

  Gunn’s eyes widened. “Yeah? And that’s what, exactly?”

  “Each other,” Fred said suddenly. Then she blushed. “I mean—”

  “That’s exactly what she means,” Cordelia said firmly. “Sure, what I saw was almost everything I’ve ever wanted. But the almost part? That was you guys. You’re my family now. The past wasn’t so great for any of us.” Her gaze raked them all. “If you ask me, I’m pretty happy with the here and now.”