Dry leaves it was that click in the wind.
“Come along now, you’re a fine little lad,
My daughters will serve you, see you are glad;
My daughters dance all night in a ring.
They’ll cradle and dance you and lullabye sing.”
Father, now look, in the gloom, do you see
The elfin daughters beckon to me?
My son, my son, I see it and say:
Those old willows, they look so gray.
“I love you, beguiled by your beauty I am,
If you are unwilling, I’ll force you to come!”
Father, his fingers grip me, O
The elfin king has hurt me so!
Now struck with horror the father rides fast,
His gasping child in his arm to the last,
Home through thick and thin he sped;
Locked in his arm, the child was dead.
—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Giles pursed his lips. “Frau von Forsch, you’re being a little too oblique, I’m afraid.”
He crossed to his office and picked up his phone, remembering just in time to use his phone card. There had been a number of queries about why a high school librarian had to make so many international calls. Of course, Giles made certain that he paid for them, but nevertheless, the mere fact that he appeared to spend hours chatting with people in places such as Kingston, Macao, and Sydney raised a few school board eyebrows.
So, discretion and all that.
He dialed Germany.
Frau von Forsch answered on the first ring.
“You got something pretty crazy going on over there, ja?” she said.
It was almost 10 P.M. The Faire was due to close in a few minutes. Buffy—wrung out not from cookies, but an awkward and painful conversation on the beach, as if their house were just too small for the issues between mother and daughter—stood with the others. They studied the chain-link fence, which was covered with pieces of wood painted to look like castle blocks.
“Piece of cake,” Buffy said.
With a glance left and right, she tried to vault over the fence, then caught herself as her bones felt like they were being crunched together. She was still thrashed from her battle with the dark faerie. She fell back down, sucked in her breath, and started to try again.
“Hold it,” Oz said. He pushed on the gate. It swung open. He glanced at Buffy, who shrugged.
Buffy led the troops.
As per their plan, they fanned out, Buffy taking the route that most likely led her to the alley where she had last seen Roland. Her best guess was that if the King Richard show was over for the night, the poor guy might have to clean the robe again. Otherwise, she had no idea where to look.
She tiptoed down the row of shops and food stalls, searching for an entrance through to the interior without actually going through a shop.
Then she heard a voice raised in anger, and she crept closer, keeping to the shadows cast by a purple tent decorated with black moons and stars.
“You thick-headed sod! You ungrateful wretch!”
It was King Richard. And that was the noise of a fist hitting flesh.
And that was a groan.
Buffy was about to run through the tent when a hand clasped her elbow. It was Xander.
“You bloody idiot!” Richard shouted.
Willow crept into the tent as Buffy mouthed a protest, then followed her. It was empty. Oz and Xander trailed behind.
At the opposite end, Buffy carefully pulled back the tent flap. Willow audibly gasped.
Roland was on his knees, doubled over and groaning. King Richard stood over him, wielding the same heavy stick Roland had used to beat the dust from his cloak. He struck Roland over the head with it, then across the back.
Again. Again.
Roland cried out and fell forward, bracing himself with his palms.
“Buffy,” Willow whispered, agonized.
Buffy took a step forward.
“Down, girl,” Xander whispered.
Buffy nodded. He was right. She had to choose her moment. But this was terrible to watch.
“When I come back, you’d better have my boots shining,” the king said to Roland. “And if they aren’t, you’ll clean the stables with your tongue.”
He kicked Roland, hard, and the boy rolled over on his side. He didn’t move. Buffy closed her eyes, wondering if he was dead.
As soon as the king left the area, the group threw back the tent flap and raced over to Roland. Buffy clamped her hand around his wrist.
“Oh, my God, he doesn’t have a pulse,” she whispered.
“That’s an unreliable measuring technique,” Willow ventured.
Xander ran and got a blanket and threw it over Roland, who coughed and moaned. Buffy gently patted his cheeks, staring at his mottled skin.
“Roland, come on,” she whispered. “We’re getting you out of here.”
“Yeah, and calling the cops,” Xander added angrily.
“No!” Roland rasped, bolting upright. He could barely speak. “No authorities, I beg you.”
Buffy frowned. “But that creep ought to pay—”
“No.” Roland shook his head. “I won’t speak to them.”
Xander looked at Buffy. “This is a conversation that can wait,” he said earnestly. “We’ve got to get him out of here now.”
Buffy nodded her head. She hoisted Roland to his feet and slung his arm around hers. His clothes were little better than rags, but his brown eyes shone with a moist glow that was almost . . . saintly was the word that came to mind, but Buffy decided it was too much, and pushed it away.
“Can you walk?” she asked him.
He nodded.
“Good. Walk fast.”
Draping the blanket around his shoulders, Buffy and her friends hurried him to the exit.
* * *
Oz drove the van in silence, trying with a look to reassure Willow that everything was going to work out all right. But if there was one thing he had learned in the time since he had met this very interesting group, one did much better if one just went with the flow. Another thing he’d learned was that things didn’t always work out all right.
So while Xander and Buffy pelted the poor guy in the backseat with questions, Oz said to Willow, “Devon got a sub for me for the gig.”
“How’d he take your excuse?” she asked.
He shrugged. “Hey, we all have to go to weddings. And I gave him more than a week’s notice.” He slid her a lazy grin, which grew as she blushed.
She was such an amazing girl.
Buffy looked out the window and said, “My mom’s probably asleep. I’ll go on in and explain—”
“No,” Roland said, his eyes wide and terrified. “No one must know where I am. No one.”
“But, Roland,” Buffy began, “there are people who can help you. My mom just had an art exhibit for a group that helps runaways, they have a shelter—”
“No.” He held on to the seat. “If you tell anyone, I’ll run away again.”
Xander said to Buffy, “Your basement.” She wrinkled her nose. “It’s late, and he’s all messed up, and let’s just leave the grown-ups out of this one, okay?”
Still Buffy hesitated.
“Okay,” she said finally. “We’ve got one of those inflatable mattresses for camping. And I’ll get some blankets.”
“Shelter is all I ask,” Roland pleaded.
* * *
Buffy’s mother had left a note that she had gone to Elmwood to supervise the packing of the Cassatt paintings that had been on loan, and would probably spend the night there. Buffy was relieved; that made things simpler. The beach talk rang in her ears. Her mother didn’t want to be excluded anymore. Didn’t she realize that what she was asking for was just going to complicate Buffy’s life?
On the other hand, Buffy thought, her being the Slayer had certainly complicated her mom’s life quite a bit.
When she had made sure Roland was se
ttled in, Buffy went to bed, her mother’s justifiable anxiety competing for attention in her mind with the whole mystery surrounding Roland and these little dark faerie creatures. She tossed and turned and stared at the clock, promising herself that at midnight, she’d go and check on Roland. Now she glanced at the clock one more time. Eleven twenty-one.
Close enough.
She threw back the covers and got up, glancing down at her T-shirt and boxers. This assignment called for a robe.
She was just about to cross to her closet when Angel clambered through her window with incredible speed, lunged at her in full vamp-face and threw her across the bed.
“Uh,” she said, astonished.
“Buffy, close your eyes,” he whispered, yellow eyes burning and intense. “Don’t move.”
“Angel,” she said, starting to sit up. “What?”
He threw himself on top of her, pinning her to the mattress. “Close your eyes,” he growled. “Don’t make a sound. Don’t even breathe.”
A freezing wind whipped through her room. It shrieked as it blew, making her start violently. Reflexively, she tried to bolt out of her bed.
Angel gripped her tightly, his body holding hers in place. One hand was around her wrist. Her other arm was wedged beneath his side.
“It’s the Wild Hunt,” he whispered. “They’re riding through Sunnydale, Buffy. They’re hunting for souls. If you look, they’ll take you.”
Chapter 7
OUTSIDE BUFFY’S HOUSE, THE SHRIEKING WAS JOINED by the sharp howling and panting of dogs, fierce and predatory. Her window was second story, but the sounds, the very presence of the dogs, seemed to be coming right at her. She stiffened and started to open her eyes, but Angel covered them with his hand.
“The hellhounds,” he said. “They run ahead of the Hunt. Their paws never touch the earth.”
“But . . .”
“Hush. They’ll hear you. They’ll find you.”
She swallowed in the blackness as he kept hold of her, his left hand capturing and holding both her wrists. His other hand was pressed tightly over her eyes. His mouth was pressed against her neck. She knew he could feel the vein throbbing as her heart thundered. She had once said to him, When you kiss me, I want to die. But sometimes, truly, she thought she would die from not being kissed by him.
She shifted beneath him, and Angel shushed her. His chest pressed against hers. She felt the long muscles of his thighs as he forced her to lie still.
She heard horrible laughter, and gibbering, and the mournful dirge of some kind of horn. Angel released his grip on her wrists, taking one hand and holding tightly, as if willing her to stay silent.
There came the scurrying and scratching of dozens of tiny feet, perhaps a hundred. A ripple of disgust ran through her, and Buffy shivered. She was . . . Buffy wasn’t just afraid. She found, to her horror, that she was frozen in terror, wallowing in a kind of helpless panic she had never felt before. It was senseless fear, beyond her own conscious mind.
As if her soul itself were terrified.
The Slayer whimpered.
“Sssh,” Angel urged. “Those were the dark faerie. They must be scouts for the Hunt. Now the Huntsmen are coming.”
Then the room thundered with hoofbeats; the windows and walls and the doors rattled with a gale force. Buffy bit her lower lip to keep from shouting out; it wasn’t her way to cower, and everything in her longed to jump up and face this Wild Hunt.
The hoofbeats came louder, louder still. Buffy braced herself to be trampled. She was shaking with cold; it was as if she had been plunged into a sea of ice.
“Their leader wears the horns of a buck. He’s shaggy and no man can see his face and live,” Angel whispered. “All heads must turn away when the Hunt goes by.”
“Angel . . .”
“Hush, Buffy. My soul is my curse, they can’t take it away,” he said. “But they can take yours.”
The room resounded with howls and thunder and Buffy’s own heartbeat roaring in her ears. Her body ached with cold. Pinned beneath Angel, she could barely breathe.
Then there was another weight on the bed, pressing down, coming close to her foot. She heard Angel gasp.
And then it was gone.
Still, the riders came, maybe passing over her, or through her. She couldn’t see. It was driving her crazy that she couldn’t see.
She heard the whinny of their horses.
The crack of a whip.
Laughter, evil and deep.
She smelled the odor of damp earth, and sweaty animals, and something else she could barely place, as if someone had lit a hundred matchbooks and blown them all out at the same time.
From outside, on the street, she heard an agonized scream.
“Dad! Daddy!” Brian Anderson shouted, as the darkness flared and huge, howling black dogs circled around him. Shock had heard the chaos in the street and run out to see what was happening.
Now he was caught in a whirlwind. Shock turned away from the dogs, shouting again for his father. But what he saw made him scream and throw his hands to his face.
Dark, cloaked shapes on black stallions galloped across the sky. At their head, a looming shadow with an enormous cape made of screaming faces stared at Shock, and his eyes glowed red and evil. His head was helmeted, but hair whipped wildly behind him. Ant ler horns crowned his head, but Shock couldn’t tell if they were part of the helmet, or poked through it, actually growing from the horseman’s head!
Huge black dogs raced ahead, making no sound, until all at once they threw back their heads and howled. Flames shot from their mouths and nostrils.
The horned man pointed straight at Shock.
In a huge, faceless rush, everything flew at Shock. Dogs leaped on him, jaws snapping, worrying at his hands and face as if his flesh were pieces of leather. Then the little creatures he had seen in the forest leaped from the backs of the dogs and the saddles of the hunters and flew at him, tearing at him, savaging him as he sank to his knees.
Around him, the wind screamed, the dogs’ burning breaths flared like comets. Then the riders came for him, lances raised in huge hands wrapped in black leather gloves. One whipped a net over his head, threw it—
“No!” Shock screamed, covering his head. He was thrown back against the pavement, then lifted into the air like a doll, caught inside the net, thrown roughly across a saddle. He tried to raise his head. A hard blow slammed against the back of his neck.
“Brian!” his father called from far away.
“Daddy,” Shock—not Shock, Brian, Brian Evan Anderson was his real name. He was Brian and his father was Jamie Anderson, a policeman, and while Brian had been gone, his mom had died—Brian, who had wanted to be someone else so very badly, because he had had no idea how much his parents loved him. Because he had had no idea how to love himself.
Brian, who had seen a dead man crawl out of the ground. Brian, whose hair now turned completely white, raised one hand feebly, thinking, If my father can touch me, he can save me.
“Daddy,” he whispered, and then he went limp.
Jamie Anderson heard the receding hoofbeats, heard his son cry his name, saw just the shapes of the horses in the darkness and then the riders were gone. He fell to his knees and threw his arms wide as the sounds of the horses and the baying of the hounds disappeared in the darkness.
“No! Please no!” he shouted. “Not now!”
Buffy’s head ached. Her body was straining to move, to act.
The screaming outside stopped abruptly.
The howling of the wind subsided. The scurrying and scrabbling sounds grew faint. The hoofbeats, fainter still.
Then there was nothing.
It was over.
Angel exhaled against Buffy’s neck. He said, “I have to go. It’s almost dawn. But don’t leave your room until first light. Until then, they can come back.”
He released her and moved away, and Buffy was sorry.
Angel crossed quietly to her window and peered out.
“I heard someone screaming,” she said, sitting up. “I mean, besides all the supernatural-type screaming.”
“I did, too. I don’t know who it was, but it probably means they were taken,” Angel told her, still scanning the street. “By the way, that friend of Giles’s, the cop? His son showed up.”
“Oh, that’s good!” she cried.
“Hush!” He whirled on her. “He and his son went to see Giles at the library. Giles tried to call you, to tell you what they pieced together. He left me a message, and I tried to call him back. I’d remembered one of the legends about the wee folk: some of the myths say that they ride with the Hunt. Since I’d heard the horn the other night . . . I was afraid you’d look and the Hunt would take you.”
“Roland,” Buffy said suddenly, and started for her door. “There’s this runaway kid in my basement. I’ve got to check on him.”
“No, Buffy!” Angel whirled around. “You’ve got to lie low until first light. Their nets are open. They’re still out there hunting.”
“But he’s down there. He won’t know all this stuff.”
“No!” Angel threw her back down and held her there. “You can’t help him now. There’s a good chance they’ve taken him already.”
“Oh, no.” Her eyes widened. “Maybe he would have been safer where he was. Angel, what if I’ve let them take him?”
“You didn’t know. Nobody did.” He regarded her seriously. “Giles sent me to warn you. I was all over Sunnydale looking for you.”
“I went back to the Faire,” she said, and flared at his look of disapproval. “Hey. I’m the Slayer. I don’t exactly leave a trail of breadcrumbs wherever I go.”
“I know.” He touched her cheek. “Once it gets light, go to Giles. He’ll explain everything to you. Everything we’ve figured out, anyway.”
“Seeing as it’s a school day, I’ll be at school,” she said dryly.
He managed a smile. “I have to go, Buffy. It’ll be dawn soon.”
She nodded. “Go.”
“Don’t check on your friend until first light,” he said again.
CHILD of the HUNT Page 12
