Chosen

by Nancy Holder

  Just as thher client had wished.

  Now she sat in shock, unable to comprehend that it had been she who had made this massacre happen. So much blood. So much death.

  “What have I done?” she murmured.

  How had she come to this?

  Sjornjost, 880

  It was a beautiful day in the village of Sjornjost. Aud’s beloved Olaf, he of the red hair and large body, had just returned to their hut, smelling of blood and musk. She set down the bunny she had been cuddling to tend to him, a bit concerned about the odor of blood and musk that hung around him. He had been battling trolls again, and she thrilled as he boasted, “It takes more than a band of minor trolls to bring down the mighty Olaf!”

  He wanted mead more than fussing, and breeding almost as much as mead. She bustled around him, slightly disappointed as he mocked her thoughts of sharing the bounty of her rabbit-breeding program out of simple altruism.

  He mocked her, saying, “Sweet Aud! Your logic is insane and happenstance, like that of a troll. It is no wonder the bar matrons talk of you.”

  “You’ve been to the bar,” she murmured.

  “Oh, Aud,” he said with total condescension. “Forget it and please me now.”

  “I do not like you going there,” she said.

  He shrugged. “It is not my fault they don’t take kindly to you. You’ve always been most aggressive in your not-fitting-in with people. You speak your mind, and you are annoying.” He added, smiling, “It’s one of the things I love most about you.”

  She had to ask. “Was Rannveig there?”

  He scoffed. “Bah! I’ve told you a thousand times: I have no interest in this Rannveig. Her hips are large and load-bearing, like a Baltic woman.”

  He cuddled her and stroked her face. “You are much more to my liking. Your hips are small, like a Baltic woman from a slightly more arid region.”

  “I am sorry,” she said, nestling in as he held her. “I simply love you so much . . . I feel as though I could burst at times. I could not live without you.”

  “You are my perfect Aud. I could never want for another. Fear not, sweet Aud. You will always be my beautiful girl.”

  But he lied.

  How he lied.

  And a fortnight later, she had transformed Olaf into a troll. She watched on as they chased him down, grimly satisfied.

  “Hide your babies and your beadwork!” someone cried.

  Another bellowed, “Hit him with fruits and various meats!”

  “Impressive,” said a voice beside her.

  He was some sort of stately personage, demonic in appearance, and she thanked him faintly as her former beloved, Olaf, raced through the village, trying to tell the others that it was he, Olaf, and not a troll intent on causing havoc.

  “What is that, a Woodlow Transmogrific Spell?” he queried.

  “Thorton’s Hope,” she told him.

  “Thorton’s Hope,” he mused. “But how did you get the troll element?”

  “Eelsbane,” she murmured, still watching Olaf as he contended with the villagers.

  Then they exchanged introductions. He was named D’Hoffryn.

  “I’m the patron of a . . . family of sorts. We’re vengeance demons. I’m sure you’ve heard of us.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” Aud confessed, barely listening to him, distracted and pensive.

  “Oh, well, that’s quite—”

  “Don’t feel bad,” Aud told him. “I don’t talk to people much. I mean, I talk to them, but they don’t talk to me. Except to say, ‘Your questions are irksome’ and ‘Perhaps you should take your furs and your literal interpretations to the other side of the river.’ ” A beat, and then, “I’m sure your group is quite well-known.”

  Then, though she told him she was called Aud, he insisted that her true name was Anyanka.

  Then he invited her to join his family of vengeance demons.

  “What would I have to do?” she asked.

  “What you do best,” he told her. “Help wronged women. Punish evil men . . . but only those that deserve it.”

  “They all deserve it,” she said bitterly.

  U.C. Sunnydale

  They deserved it, she thought now, as she washed the blood off her hands. But there was so much of it. That girl wished for this. I simply complied with her desires.

  In a daze she stumbled out of the frat house.

  It seemed odd that the day would be so bright, that there should be clouds and rain. Then she ran into Willow, who was excited about resuming her studies, and that, too, seemed odd. Willow, who had also killed humans, was happy and enthused about life . . . whereas she, Anya . . .

  . . . lied to Willow about what she had been doing in the frat house.

  “I have a new boyfriend,” she told the Wicca. “We just had lots and lots of sex.”

  “Oh, okay,” Willow said. But it was not okay. She saw blood on Anya’s hand, and the vengeance demon was acting so strangely.

  After Anya walked off, Willow went to the frat house.

  She was stunned. There was blood everywhere—on the walls, on the floor. It had been a slaughter. A massacre.

  Then she heard a high-pitched whimper from another room, and hurried to investigate. It was coming from a closet. Inside, Willow found a young woman curled up into ball. She was rocking and crying. Blood smeared her clothes, and she was weeping hysterically, “I take it back. I take it back. I take it back.”

  She realized Willow was there and said, “ ’S gonna be a party. Everyone’s gonna be there. Everyone’s bringing a date. But it was just me. And he broke up with me in front of them. I was a game.

  “They laughed and they laughed and I yelled, ‘Just once, I wish you could feel what it’s like to have your hearts ripped out. Just once, I wish.’ ” She sobbed. “And it came.”

  “Okay,” Willow said, rising, bringing the girl with her. “Come on, what came? What did this?”

  “A spider.”

  Demonic, Willow realized, as she asked carefully, “Where did it go?”

  The other girl’s eyes went wide and glazed. Willow whipped around, looking up, just as an enormous spider demon launched itself at her.

  “Protégé!” Willow shouted, which meant, “Shield!”

  A magic force shield appeared just as the spider crashed into it. It ricocheted off the force field and smashed against the wall.

  Then it reared back again, giving Willow a better look at it. It was a black widow from hell, about the size of a large Rottweiler. It attacked again. Willow kept the shield up with great effort, feeling the magics churn and swirl inside her, gathering force, beginning to take over.

  The spider attacked again and bounced off again . . . this time through a window.

  “For God’s sake, shut your whimpering mouth,” she snapped at the frightened girl.

  She heard the coldness and the evilness in her own voice and broke her own concentration. As the shield disappeared, she said to the girl, “I’m sorry.”

  * * *

  Buffy the Vampire Slayer spun slowly, lazily, in her office chair at Sunnydale High, a cup of pencils on her forehead. There wasn’t much else to do—no troubled students wandering in looking for advice from some-one who was young and with-it and possessed no strand of mom hair.

  When the phone rang, it startled her. Pencils came crashing down as she grabbed the phone.

  “Hello? Willow?” she said by way of greeting, for it was the Wicca on the other end of the line. “Is everything all right?”

  It wasn’t.

  Willow told her about some horrible spider demon that was ripping out people’s hearts. She had come across it while on campus. It had eviscerated an entire fraternity, then bounded away, probably to commit more unsavory fatalities.

  That message delivered, she made a halfhearted offer to help deal with it, but Buffy knew Willow was tired out and still trying to figure out how to use her magics now that she was no longer veiny and brunette.

  S
o Buffy said, “Don’t worry I’ll get Xander. . . . Wow, ripped out their hearts, my God. . . . Hey, did you get that physics class you wanted?”

  * * *

  It was horrible being mad, and bloody good to talk to Buffy about it. She listened patiently as he tried to put his mind jumble into words:

  “I don’t trust what I see anymore. I don’t know how to explain it, exactly. It’s like I’ve been seeing things. Dru used to see things, you know? She’d always be staring up at the sky, watching cherubs burn or the heavens bleed or some nonsense. I used to stare at her and think she’d gone completely sack of hammers.”

  He sighed heavily, remembering happier days. “But she’d see the sky when we were inside and it’d make her so happy. She’d see showers. She’d see stars. Now I see . . . her,” he confessed, his voice catching.

  “Spike,” she began.

  “I’m in trouble, Buffy.” He looked away, afraid of what was inside his mind, afraid of her scorn.

  “I can help you,” Buffy said.

  Her generosity was almost too much to bear. “I could never ask. Not after . . .”

  “It’s different. You’re different.”

  Spike said again, “I could never ask.”

  “Spike, it’s me,” she said clearly, obviously in her own right mind, since, well, she knew that much. “It’s you and it’s me, and we’ll get through this.”

  He scratched behind his ear, still nervous, not even daring to hope.

  “Never . . .”

  “We’ll get through this,” she insisted. Her eyes were clear and steady. She meant it.

  And just when he had begun to relax . . . and to hope . . . Buffy walked up. The real one, in a different blouse and wearing a bit of a scowl—that was how he knew she was real, and that the one he had been speaking to was a figment of his addled brain.

  He began to lose it, realizing that the Buffy who had been kind to him, the one who had offered him support, was part of his madness.

  Should’ve known it, shouldn’t have trusted it, shouldn’t’ve . . .

  “Spike,” the real Buffy said with asperity. “This basement is killing you. This is the Hellmouth. There is something bad down here, possibly everything bad.”

  He shut her out, struggling to hold on, to bear it . . . “Can’t hear you. Can’t hear you.”

  She said coldly, “You have a soul? Fine. Show me.”

  He retorted, “Scream montresor all you like, pet.”

  “Get up and get out of this basement,” she demanded.

  Filled with self-loathing, and self-pity, truly nearly at the end, he looked up at his love and revealed to her the sum total of his nadir: “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

  * * *

  Willow hung up, fully aware that she had successfully managed to avoid telling Buffy about Anya. With determination, she headed for Anya’s apartment . . . and heard her on the other side of the closed door, debriefing with her demon buddy, Halfrek.

  “There was just so much screaming. So much blood. I had forgotten how much damage a Grimslaw demon could do,” she admitted. “I didn’t think it would hit me like this.”

  Halfrek’s reply was warm and supportive, but the words she spoke sickened Willow. “Oh, sweetie. This is perfectly normal. It’s a reflex. You’ll get over it in time. Trust me.”

  She’s talking about becoming used to the carnage again. Deadening everything inside Anya that could stop her from killing more people . . .

  Willow barged in, straight-backed and angry. “Get out,” she ordered Halfrek.

  Halfrek was affronted. “Lemon Drop, if you think I’m gonna—”

  “Get out,” she said again.

  The two vengeance demons obviously sensed that she meant business. After a nod from Anya, Halfrek teleported away, leaving Anya alone with Willow.

  Willow cut to the chase. “Anya, you have to stop this.”

  Anya picked up her and Halfrek’s tea cups from the coffee table and took them into the kitchen. “Do you know what they did to her? Do you?”

  Willow would not be distracted. “Anya, listen to me. You’re in trouble. You know it. I’m here to help you.”

  Anya actually chuckled. “Well, that’s great, Willow. Flayed anybody lately? Have you? How quickly they forget.”

  “I haven’t forgotten one second of it,” Willow replied evenly.

  “I am a vengeance demon,” Anya reminded her. “They got what they deserved.” But it was clear from her expression that she wasn’t sure of that.

  Not sure at all.

  * * *

  Buffy and Xander went spider hunting. It left a boy heart-free in the woods and gooey, sticky, icky webbing in the trees, but they weren’t sure where it was, exactly. The treetops above them were rustling; and they both went on alert.

  Then a gooey piece of webbing shot down on Xander’s shoulder. Xander dove out of the way . . . and the horned monster-spider came crashing down on Buffy, knocked her onto her back, and pushed out its inner mouth, fanged and sharp-toothed and hideous. It was trying to bite Buffy’s face, but she managed to push it off. It bounded away.

  “You okay?” she asked Xander, who nodded.

  “Buffy, where’d it go?” he asked, as she stared up at the tree. “I think we need more swords.”

  She watched the foliage moving. “Uh-huh.”

  “I say we go home, pick up more swords, and some sort of spidery demon protection amulet. We come back, and—”

  She hurled her battle axe up into the treetop. The spider plummeted, her axe in its thorax.

  * * *

  The spider’s talons had cut deep red marks in Buffy’s back and arm. But what Willow told them about the spider’s creator—Anya—upon her arrival home cut even deeper.

  Xander was livid as he said to Willow, “How could you not have told me?”

  But Buffy got it. She understood Willow’s reticence and her reluctance to deal with it even now.

  “She didn’t tell us for a reason,” Buffy explained to Xander. “She didn’t tell us because she knows what I have to do.” As Xander looked from Willow to Buffy, the Slayer said, “I have to kill Anya.”

  She added quickly, “She’s not the Anya you knew, Xander. She’s a demon.”

  “That doesn’t mean you have to kill her,” Xander insisted. He added angrily, “Took you all of ten seconds to decide to kill one of your best friends.”

  “The thought that it might come to this has occurred to me before.” She paused, then added, “It’s occurred to you too.”

  She had him there. Hadn’t he said exactly that to Anya on Worm Boy night?

  “This isn’t new ground for us,” he pointed out. “When our friends go all crazy and start killing people, we help them.”

  “Willow was different,” Buffy shot back. “She’s a human. Anya’s a demon.”

  “And you’re the Slayer,” he said bitterly. “You have no idea what she’s going through.”

  Buffy stood up. “I don’t care what she’s going through!”

  “No. Of course not. You think we haven’t seen all this before? The part where you just cut us all out? Just step away from everything human and act like you’re the law. If you knew what I felt—”

  “I killed Angel!” she yelled at him. “Do you even remember that? I would have given up everything I had to be with . . . I loved him more than I will ever love anything in this life. And I put a sword through his heart because I had to.

  “Do you remember cheering me on?” she continued shouting. “Both of you? Do you remember giving me Willow’s message? ‘Kick his ass’?”

  Willow frowned. “I never said that.”

  “At some point someone has to draw the line, and that is always going to be me,” Buffy continued heatedly. “You get down on me for cutting myself off, but in the end the Slayer is always cut off. There’s no mystical guidebook. No all-knowing council. Human rules don’t apply. There’s only me. I am the law.”

  Xander left. And B
uffy armed herself.

  She looked to Willow to come with her, but Willow shook her head.

  * * *

  After the Slayer left, Willow summoned up D’Hoffryn. The demon appeared . . . and took time out from their meeting to compliment her on the flaying of Warren.

  Willow would not be deflected. She said to him, “We need to talk about Anya.”

  * * *

  I started the Russian Revolution without blinking, Anya thought vaguely as she touched the blood splatters on the walls of the frat house. Men on fire rushed past me and I chatted on about the rise of the State with Hallie. She was so impressed with me. Those were such glory days . . .

  Then Xander was there, Xander who had, essentially, ripped her own heart out of her own chest . . . to warn her that the Slayer was coming.

  Of course she is. Sooner or later, it was going to come to this.

  Then there she was, the Slayer, barking at Xander to get out of her way. He wouldn’t.

  So Anya backhanded him and got him out of the way.

  They began to fight. It was fairly even. Anya thought she might even have a slight upper hand. In fact she was fairly certain of it, as she threw Buffy to the floor.

  Slayer’s not such a great fighter after all, Anya thought. Maybe her heart’s not really in this . . . ha, ha . . .

  Then Buffy got to her feet and said, “Anya, I’m sorry.”

  Anya scoffed. “You’re apologizing to me? What fight are you watching?”

  That was when Buffy pressed her against the wall and rammed her sword through Anya’s heart.

  * * *

  Life with Xander . . . it’s a song again, a wonderful musical . . . I am singing about marrying him. . . .

  “Mrs. Xander Harris . . .”

  Anyanka.

  My two identities. Without them, I may as well be . . .

  . . . dead . . .

  * * *

  Anyanka revived, pulling the sword from her chest. It hurt, but she was still back in the game.

  “You know it takes more than that to kill a vengeance demon,” she remonstrated the Slayer.

  “Oh, I’m just getting started,” Buffy retorted.

  They resumed their battle, Xander gallantly intervening, getting in the way and then—