THE XANDER YEARS, Vol. 1

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Giles nodded. “Bodyguard. Interesting.”

  “Legend has it,” Ampata continued, “that he guards the mummy against those who would disturb her.”

  “By slicing them up?” Buffy asked.

  “I would not know that.”

  Giles set the fragment down on the desk. “Yes, well, that’s a very good starting point for our . . . club.” He looked at Buffy.

  It took Buffy a minute to figure out the look, but then she quickly said, “Oh! And, as club president, I have lots to do—lots of stuff. Dull stuff.” She looked at Willow. “Willow, maybe you could—”

  Xander interjected, “Stay with Ampata for the day?” He offered her his arm. “I’d love to.”

  Ampata smiled. “Yes, that will be fun.”

  He led her out the door.

  “Right,” Giles said after an awkward silence. “I’ll continue with the translation. Buffy, you research this bodyguard thing. And, Willow? Willow?”

  Buffy saw that Willow was still staring at the door through which Xander and Ampata had left. “Boy, they really like each other,” she said in a tone that made Buffy’s heart break.

  Xander had never experienced anything quite like this day before. True, he had lusted after various women, from the crush he had on his first-grade teacher all the way through to Buffy. Not to mention Ms. French.

  But today with Ampata was the first time he’d had the opportunity to engage in what his grandfather referred to as the lost art of courting. For the first time in his life, Xander had been given the opportunity to flirt for more than seven and a half seconds without being laughed at. Not only was Ampata enjoying it, she even seemed to be flirting back. The novelty of this experience made Xander’s head spin.

  Ampata went with him to his remaining classes. She gagged her way through the cafeteria food at lunchtime—though she insisted it wasn’t that bad, to Xander’s utter shock. After school ended, he continued the tour of the grounds, ending up at the bleachers. They had the place to themselves, aside from a Go Razorbacks! banner, since the football team had an away game this afternoon.

  As they took seats near the top of the bleachers, Xander reached into his backpack. He had been lecturing Ampata about American food, wanting her to understand that the swill from the cafeteria was not the usual thing. “And this,” he said with a certain amount of drama, “is called a snack food.” He held up a Twinkie.

  “Snack food,” Ampata repeated, sounding a bit dubious.

  “Yeah, it’s a delicious, spongy, golden cake, stuffed with a delightful creamy white substance of goodness. And here’s how you eat it.”

  Then, in a maneuver that had never failed in over ten years to make Willow wince, Xander shoved the entire Twinkie into his mouth.

  Ampata did not wince. She did laugh. Xander liked her laugh.

  “Oh, but now I cannot try it.”

  Holding up his left finger, Xander dipped into his backpack with his right hand. His words barely comprehensible with a mouth full of creamy white substances of goodness, he said, “That’s why you bring two.”

  He whipped out another Twinkie and handed it to her.

  Ampata held it with appropriate reverence. “Here goes.”

  She stuffed it into her mouth whole. Unfortunately, then she started laughing, thus almost spitting the entire thing out.

  “Good, huh?” Xander said, also laughing. “And the exciting part is, they have no ingredients that a human can pronounce. So it doesn’t leave you with that heavy, food feeling in your stomach.”

  Smiling after swallowing her Twinkie, Ampata said, “You are strange.”

  “Girls always tell me that right before they run away,” Xander said, truthfully.

  “I like it.”

  No girl has ever said that, Xander thought with glee. “I like you like it.” He thought back over his words, then added, “Please don’t learn from my English.”

  Again, she laughed. Again, he returned the laugh.

  I could get used to this.

  And again, they were attacked by the large man with the poofy shirt and the big knife.

  “You stole the seal!” the man cried. “Where is it?”

  Xander fell off the bleacher bench and onto his back on the next row down.

  Their attacker leaped down after him and was about to filet Xander with the machete. Running on autopilot, Xander instinctively reached up to grab the man’s forearm in order to block his attack.

  To Xander’s amazement, this actually worked. But the man was impossibly strong, and Xander was going to lose the grip in a minute unless he did something.

  Then Ampata screamed.

  The bodyguard—if that’s what he truly was—looked over at Ampata for the first time, and then his eyes grew wide. “It is you!” he said, whatever that meant.

  Taking advantage of this distraction, Xander kicked the guy in the stomach. As he went rolling down the remaining bleachers, Xander clambered to an upright position, grabbed his backpack with one hand and Ampata’s arm with the other. “Come on,” he said as he led her back to the school.

  CHAPTER 5

  Buffy sat staring at some pictures in one of Giles’s books. She had a large magnifying glass over it so she could make out the details, in the hopes of finding something similar to what was on the seal fragment.

  She’d spent most of her free period finding absolutely nothing, and she and Willow had returned at lunch to find more absolutely nothing. The third round of nothing was now coming after school. Times like this, she really respected Giles. He did this sort of stuff all the time, and even though he obviously enjoyed it more than she did, it still had to be frustrating. Digging around through endless texts in the fond hope of finding something useful, and not actually finding anything, couldn’t have been exactly what you’d call uplifting.

  Buffy decided she liked her end of Slaying better. Find the target, nail the target. Simple, straightforward.

  Then she noticed something. “Hah!” she cried. Then she looked more closely at it. “Or, possible hah.” She turned the book around to face Willow, who sat opposite her. “Do you think this matches?”

  Willow did not reply. She was, in fact, staring off into space while twirling a stuffed animal. Again. She’d been like this ever since Xander went off with Ampata in the morning. “Hey,” Buffy prompted.

  Suddenly, Willow came out of it. “Oh! Yes, I’m caring about mummies.”

  Again, Buffy’s heart broke. “Ampata’s only staying two weeks.”

  “Yeah,” Willow said bitterly. “And then Xander can find someone else who’s not me to obsess about. At least with you I knew he didn’t have a shot.”

  Buffy bit her lip. It had been difficult for her to turn down Xander’s invitation to the prom, and all his other advances, but she just didn’t feel that way about him. Listen to me, she thought, I’m sounding just like Xander did yesterday. Great little love triangle we’ve got going here, huh?

  As Giles entered and peered at Buffy’s book, Willow put on her brave face and said, “Well, you know, I have a choice. I can spend my life waiting for Xander to go out with every other girl in the world until he notices me, or I can just get on with my life.”

  Buffy smiled. She’d been waiting months to hear these words from Willow. “Good for you.”

  The brave face fell. “Well, I didn’t choose yet.”

  Sighing, Buffy was about to launch into a pep talk, when Giles said, “Good Lord.” Then he looked at Buffy. “Good work.”

  Buffy blinked in pleased surprise. “My work?”

  “Yes. This is most illuminating.” He pointed at the picture in the book, which was, as Buffy had thought, a more detailed rendering of something on the seal. “It seems that Rodney’s killer might be the mummy.”

  Willow leaned forward, looking at the book. “Where does it say that?”

  Giles repositioned the book so that Willow could get a better view. “Here. It implies that the mummy is capable of feeding on the life forc
e of a person. Effectively freeze drying them, you might say. Extraordinary.”

  Buffy leaned back in her chair. “So now we just have to stop the mummy. Which leaves the question, how do we a, find and b, stop the mummy?”

  Straightening up, Giles said, “Well, the answer to that is somewhere still in here. Or in the rest of the seal.”

  Before the conversation could continue, Xander and Ampata came in, all out of breath. “Machete Boy’s back,” Xander said before anybody could say anything, “and there’s gonna be trouble.”

  Xander seemed to be okay, but Ampata looked devastated. Xander explained what happened at the bleachers. As he did so, Giles put on some tea. What is it about Brits that their solution to everything is tea? Buffy wondered, not for the first time.

  When the tea was ready, Giles handed Ampata a mug. “Here you are.”

  “Why is this guy so into us?” Willow asked. “What’s he want?”

  Xander shrugged. “He said, ‘You stole the seal.’ ”

  “Apparently,” Giles said, now holding the seal fragment, “this is more popular than we realized. I just don’t know what we should do with it.”

  For the first time since Xander led her in, Ampata spoke. “Destroy it. If you do not, someone could die.”

  “I’m afraid someone already has,” Giles muttered.

  Alarm bells went off in Buffy’s head but Ampata only said, “You mean the man with the knife killed someone?”

  “No,” Buffy said. “Well, not exactly.”

  “You are not telling me everything,” Ampata said, and once again Buffy found herself thinking that Ampata didn’t know the half of what she said.

  Before anybody else could speak, Xander took Ampata’s hands in his and said, “You’re right, Ampata. And it’s time we do. We’re not in the Archaeology Club. We’re in—”

  More alarm bells went off in Buffy’s head, and Giles pointedly cleared his throat. She couldn’t believe that Xander would be so idiotic as to tell everything to Ampata.

  “We’re in the Crime Club,” Xander said, barely missing a beat, and Buffy allowed herself to exhale. “Which is kinda like the Chess Club, only with crime, and no chess.”

  “Please understand me,” Ampata said, getting up. “That seal nearly got us killed. It must be destroyed!”

  And with that, she turned and ran out of the library.

  “Ampata!” Xander called, and ran after her.

  Willow then followed Xander out.

  And the love triangle just rolls merrilly along, Buffy thought, then considered that triangles didn’t, generally, roll.

  Willow ran out of the library just as Xander found Ampata standing against the wall in the now-deserted hallway. Luckily, very few students stayed after school, except for sporting events, and with the football team away, that just left detention-goers, a few extracurricular activities, and Slayerettes.

  “Ampata, listen to me,” Xander was saying. “Nobody’s going to hurt you. I won’t let them.”

  “Your investigation is dangerous,” she said, and Willow noticed that she was crying. “I do not want that. Just normal life.”

  She turned and went over to the water fountain. Willow came up behind Xander and asked, “Is she okay?”

  “Wigged,” Xander said. “I’m trying to convince her that our lives aren’t just danger and peril around here.”

  Willow resisted the obvious reply and instead said the words that she knew she had to say even though she would rather rip her own lungs out than actually say them. “You should take her to the dance.”

  Xander shot her a look. “That’s a good idea. We’ll all go.”

  “No, I mean just you.”

  “But you were psyched,” Xander said, sounding confused. “And your costume—”

  “I’ll see you there.”

  A moment, then Xander broke into a huge smile. “You know what, Willow? You’re my best friend.”

  With that, he went over to Ampata. Willow waited until she was sure he was out of earshot, then said quietly, “I know.”

  After Ampata, Xander, and Willow each departed the library in succession, Giles turned his attention back to the seal. He was grateful, actually, that he had been left alone with Buffy. She at least seemed to be one step removed from the bizarre mating ritual that was going on among the other three. Raging teenage hormones tended to give him a headache. He had thought that his relationship with computer teacher Jenny Calendar—which was proceeding very nicely—would make him more tolerant of the odd love triangles that seemed to dog Buffy and her friends, but if anything it made him less so.

  “I don’t get it,” Buffy said, and Giles turned his attention back to the seal as she spoke. “Why would the bodyguard have a Jones for a broken piece of rock?”

  “Well, um, perhaps he needs to put it together with the other pieces.”

  “If he has them,” Buffy said. “I mean, we didn’t find them all.”

  Giles considered the point. He also considered their hasty retreat from the Treasures of South America exhibit. “If he didn’t, then they’d still be at the museum.”

  “So maybe we should go there and find them. Odds are, he’ll show up too, right?”

  Nodding, Giles said, “And hopefully, we’ll be ready.” Buffy hadn’t really had a chance to properly face this bodyguard chap. Giles suspected he had no idea what he might be in for if he challenged the Chosen One.

  “Hey look at us,” Buffy said with a smile. “We came up with a plan. A good plan.”

  “Right. We can meet there tonight after it closes.”

  The smile fell. “No! Bad plan! I have other plans. Dance plans.”

  The Watcher fixed her with one of the gazes he’d spent years developing, but which only sporadically worked on this particular Slayer.

  Buffy leaned back in her chair and sulked. “Canceled plans.”

  Giles allowed himself a small smile of triumph.

  The princess had managed to calm herself down, mainly due to the presence of dear Alexander. With him, she almost felt safe.

  Almost.

  Still, she lived in constant fear, both of the Guardian of the Seal, and of the Seal itself. She knew that she could never have the normal life she so desperately craved as long as there was a hope of restoring the seal, and as long as the Guardian lived.

  But she had to do everything she could to make that life work. This world was glorious, full of so much more than her home in Peru, thousands of miles and five centuries away. She could make a life here.

  Sebancaya willing, she could make that life with Xander.

  “Okay,” Xander said as they walked down the hallway, “I have something to tell you, and it’s kind of a secret. And it’s a little bit scary.”

  Worried, the princess gave Xander a concerned look.

  “I like you,” he said, “a lot.”

  The princess had to keep from laughing. That would have been an unkind response. But after all that had happened, she had expected his use of scary to mean something else.

  He continued: “And I want you to go with me to the dance.”

  She smiled, content. She had been hoping all day for him to ask her this. “Why was that so scary?”

  “Well, because you never know if a girl is going to say yes, or if she’s going to laugh in your face and pull out your still-beating heart and crush it into the ground with her heel.”

  The princess remembered from previous conversations that Xander had had poor luck in his relationships with other girls. Just now, she found that impossible to credit.

  “Then you are very courageous,” she said with mock seriousness. “Can I tell you a secret?” He nodded, and she said, “I like you, too.”

  “Really?” He sounded genuinely surprised.

  “Really,” she said, trying to sound as reassuring as she possibly could.

  “That’s great! Really?”

  Laughing, she repeated, “Really.”

  “That’s great,” he said again.
“You’re not a praying mantis, are you?”

  The princess blinked. That was not exactly what she expected him to say.

  “Sorry,” he added quickly, “someone else.”

  Setting this aside as another one of the obscure references that littered Xander’s conversations, the princess caught sight of her destination. Smiling coyly, she said, “I will return to you.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Where you cannot follow,” she said ominously.

  With that, she opened the door to the girls’ rest-room.

  “I’ll wait outside,” Xander said.

  She went in, eventually winding up at the mirror to comb her hair. She gazed upon her reflection and smiled. She looked happy. She looked content. Good. One should look how one feels.

  But she also was starting to look pale. No, she thought. The two lives she took should have been enough to last her. She looked at her hands to see that the skin was becoming less smooth.

  No! It’s not fair! She did not want to take any more lives, but she didn’t want to go back to that hellish existence in the sarcophagus. She wanted to live.

  She looked up at her reflection in the mirror again—to see the Guardian standing behind her.

  The princess whirled around to face him and spoke in a very old language. “I beg you, do not kill me.”

  The Guardian replied in the same tongue. “You are already dead. For five hundred years.”

  “But it was not fair,” she pleaded. “I was innocent.”

  “The people you kill now so that you may live, they are innocent.”

  The princess winced. “Please. I am in love.”

  She surprised herself with her words, but as soon as she spoke them, she knew they were true. She loved Alexander Harris. For all her life, she had been treated with the odd kind of reverence reserved for religious icons. She wasn’t a human being, she was the sacrifice. Xander was the first one to treat her like an actual person, and she would always love him for that.

  The Guardian came closer. “You are the Chosen One. You must die. You have no choice.”

  The princess looked down and saw that her hands grew more wrinkled. She would need to feed on someone, and soon.