As soon as she got back to the dorm that night, Buffy vowed to talk to Willow, dispel the weirdness that had been between them since that morning. Meanwhile, she deeply regretted having invited Xander to come on patrol with her.
What the hell was I thinking?
But she knew the real reason she had asked Xander along. With Giles occupied by Olivia, and with the awkwardness she felt with Willow at the moment, Buffy needed someone around to reassure her that she wasn’t just the Slayer.
Though she and Xander had patrolled around the Bronze and through the major cemeteries, Buffy had rushed through it and drifted west toward the ocean. There were some very nice neighborhoods near the beach, but they were not her target. She certainly did not expect to find the tattooed vampires back at The Fish Tank again, but once the major hunting grounds turned up empty she decided to sweep the wharf area again. Xander complained about his feet and about the distance, but not very much. It seemed to Buffy that half the time he only brought it up to give them something to talk about, to remind her that he was there.
If it had been earlier, she probably would have pretended to bail on patrol and walked him home, then come back out by herself. He made her laugh, of course. Xander was always good for that. Made her feel like herself, just another nineteen-year-old girl. But that was only on the surface. Underneath, she worried for him, and felt guilty for having dragged him along just to mark “hanging out with friends” off the checklist in her head.
But it would be okay, she told herself. That pressure was part of balancing her life.
She refused to let Professor Blaylock’s humiliating her, or the research paper that still hung over her head, or even the exam she had in the morning, shatter her focus.
Focus. That was what it was all about.
The temperature had dropped considerably in the hours after dusk, and she shuddered despite the heavy wool jersey she wore over her shirt. Xander turned up the collar of his jacket. Buffy rotated her head and a muscle in her neck popped, releasing some of the tension she felt. The canvas bag over her shoulder was a minor annoyance, but worth it for the crossbow she carried inside it. Xander had a couple of stakes she had given him stuck in the pockets of his dark brown jacket. Together they walked down a deserted sidewalk in a block of run-down apartments that ended with a gas station on the corner.
Across the street from the gas station was a dingy-looking Italian place called Maria’s that Buffy suspected might be Mafia-owned. Next to that was a tattoo parlor, and on the other side of that, the Kat Skratch Club. It was an ugly-looking place with a lot of neon in the window and on the sign, but a layer of grime seemed to sit over the whole thing. A blinking string of letters in the window promised “Live Girls,” which Buffy appreciated, considering the not-so-unrealistic alternative was dead ones. The Kat Skratch had topless dancers 365 days a year, according to a hand-painted sign in one window that they spotted as they crossed the street toward it.
“Maybe we should stop in, rest our feet, grab a . . . mineral water or something?” Xander suggested.
Buffy shot him a doubtful glance and Xander put on his wide-eyed-innocence face and shrugged in return.
“Why’d you bring me?” he asked suddenly.
Buffy was surprised by the earnest expression on his face. She would have asked what he meant by the question, but she didn’t want to play coy woman with him. Just wouldn’t be fair.
“I’m not allowed to miss you?” she asked.
“You’re not allowed, you’re required,” he told her archly. “But there’s more going on. You could’ve asked Willow. Or Giles. Not that I’m anything less than battle-ready at all times. Xander Harris and his fists of fury await the call of combat. But . . . there’s a but. You can feel it in the air. A but. So what’s the but?”
Buffy nodded slowly and sighed. Then she shot him a hard look. “I do miss you, though.”
“Understood.”
“I kind of had a fight with Willow. And, y’know, I’m all about the learning now. Got an exam in the morning and I’m pretty much ready. How often can I say that? But I blew a major deadline in my soc class today and I don’t even know how it happened. I mean, I’m totally on top of things. Except, apparently, this.”
Xander smiled. “You’ve got a jam-packed life, Buffy. It’s gonna get messy sometimes.”
Buffy stared. “I can’t afford to have it get messy anymore, Xander. Sometimes I feel like Buffy’s going to disappear and then there’ll just be the Slayer left.”
“Not as long as I’m around. That’s what your friends are for.” Xander’s smile disappeared after a moment and he studied her with great seriousness. “Speaking of, what’s up with Willow?”
For a moment Buffy tried to find the words to explain not only her argument with Willow, but her feelings about it. Then she glanced over at the front door of the Kat Skratch Club and saw three men and a woman shoving and laughing as they spilled out onto the sidewalk.
All four of them had bats tattooed across their eyes.
Buffy reached into her bag.
“Hold that thought.”
CHAPTER 3
“Wow, you let girls in the club, too? I wish you’d told me, so I could get a goofy tattoo on my face.”
The four bat-faces glared at Buffy. As they did, their eyes began to flare with orange sparks. The female, cinched and draped in black leather like the others, took a step forward and tilted her head with curiosity, eyeing the Slayer up and down. Buffy had dropped the bag in front of the pawn shop and now held the crossbow in both hands, primed and ready. It was an old-fashioned Chinese model, a repeater, able to shoot six bolts with only a couple of seconds between them.
“What are you supposed to be?” the female asked, an expression of amusement on her face. Her forehead and the corners of her mouth crinkled and Buffy saw that she had caked white makeup on her face, apparently to make a more striking contrast with the black ink of the bat.
Buffy returned her smirk. “Me? Look in a mirror lately?”
One of the males, a broad-shouldered goon with a face like a bulldog and a chain that ran from his right ear to his nostril, snorted with derisive laughter. His electric eyes blazed brighter.
“You don’t know how funny that is,” he rumbled in the same weird accent she had heard the night before. Seemed they all had it.
“Actually, I do.”
That gave them pause. All four of the vampires regarded her a bit more closely. A dog began to howl down along the block and several took up the cry in response.
It was chilling. Buffy shivered, but she smiled to cover it. She had faced evils older than man, demons whose depravity would make the bravest soldier weep, and had come out on top. Four wannabes with face paint weren’t about to rattle her.
Yet in some way, they did. That bat tattoo was part of it. It spoke on an instinctive level to some primal part of her, and a frisson of fear ran through her that she could not blame on howling dogs. But more so, their eyes bothered her, for with that burning energy came her memory of the way the one the night before had sapped her strength. If she had not broken away when she did, she would have been powerless.
Powerless. Nothing frightened her more.
Xander had approached them with her, a good six feet back and over her left shoulder, just where she wanted him. Now she sensed him shifting slightly, perhaps unnerved by the dogs.
“Not sure I like the math here, Buff,” he whispered.
The vampires glanced quickly at him, as one, almost like a pack of dogs. One, whose bat tattoo spread its wings almost all the way around his bald head, licked his lips. Then they grinned and turned their attention back to Buffy, and their faces shifted all at once, their fangs protruding from their mouths, their brows growing thicker and more bestial.
“Nobody likes math, Xander,” she said, almost under her breath. “But we do it. For instance . . . subtraction.”
Buffy lunged.
The vampires rushed her.
“Don’t let them touch you!” she snapped at Xander.
With a grunt deep in her chest, right hand holding the crossbow out to one side, Buffy used her left arm to grab the nearest bat-face around the neck and choke him. With her weight on him, she launched a snap-kick high and hard, and the side of her foot caught the bulldog with the nose chain under his jaw. Bulldog crashed backward into the clown-faced girl and they both went down. When she came down, she was still choking the first one that had attacked her. Buffy twisted him around and flipped him onto the pavement. It was a throw her first Watcher, Merrick, had taught her when she was fifteen years old. That was one of the earliest lessons she’d learned as the Slayer. Go with what works.
“Xander!” she shouted.
Even as she turned to defend herself against the bald one, she caught a glimpse of Xander falling upon the one she’d flipped and dusting him with a stake.
Suddenly, Buffy felt a little better. These guys were faster and stronger than other vamps she’d fought, and they seemed to surge with that weird, phosphorescent energy . . . but if Xander could dust one, how tough could they be?
Bulldog was furious at having been knocked on his butt. He had just extricated himself from the clown-faced girl, or was trying to. She bumped into him, cost him a half a second. The bald one rushed Buffy then.
Crossbow held firmly in both hands, she fired a bolt into the vampire’s heart, which exploded into dust. The next bolt snapped up into position and she swung the crossbow at Clownface and Bulldog, who froze for just a moment before rabbiting back toward the club. Buffy fired two more bolts before they slammed through the front door of the Kat Skratch, and both of them thunked into Bulldog’s back with a wet, tearing noise. He didn’t even slow down.
“Happens every time,” Xander said as he stepped up beside her. “They see me, they cower in terror and then flee.”
“You’re a pretty imposing presence,” Buffy confirmed. “Really. I think it’s the bowling shirt.”
Scandalized, Xander glanced down at the blue and brown shirt he wore beneath his jacket. “Hey, this is very much in style. And, okay, a bit pungent, but Mom’s a little behind on the laundry, okay?”
“Your mother stopped doing your laundry when you moved into the basement.”
Xander raised an eyebrow. “That explains a lot.”
“So,” Buffy went on. “Four minus two.”
“Equals two. Call me the math whiz. What next?”
Buffy looked at the door to the club. “We keep subtracting.”
“Never thought I’d be happy to hear that, but live girls await. Lead on!”
The inside of the Kat Skratch Club was awash with multicolored lights and roiling with music so loud and jarringly discordant that Buffy doubted it could still be called rock ’n’ roll. For a place dedicated to the consumption of alcohol and the ogling of half-naked women, nobody seemed to be having a very good time. Bikers and fishermen and dockworkers made up most of the male population of the place . . . which pretty much made up the population of the place. There were very few women there who weren’t either onstage or waiting on tables, and Buffy figured most of them were either prostitutes or girls who worked hard at looking like prostitutes.
When she and Xander walked in the bouncer had his back to them, his gaze locked on a girl onstage who wore the remnants of a Catholic-school uniform several sizes too small for her. The bar ran down the entire left wall, and two stages jutted out from the wall on the right. In between there were plenty of tables. Buffy narrowed her gaze against the strobing lights and concentrated enough to cut out most of the music. There was no sign of the vampires, nor any sign that anyone had even noticed them come rushing through.
“Suddenly bump-in-the-night patrol has a whole new meaning,” Xander said, voice tinged with awe.
The bouncer heard him. The burly, bearded guy turned to glare at them and his eyes ticked to the crossbow in Buffy’s hands, then back to her face. “Only way you’re getting in here, girlie, is up on that stage.”
“Not that the idea doesn’t hold some appeal,” Xander told the man, “but you so should not have said that.”
With a violent twinkle in his eye, the bouncer scoffed and moved toward Xander. “Yeah, weasel? And why not?”
At his most charming, Xander grinned. “Mainly ’cause I’m guessing Lloyd’s of London? Not holding an insurance policy on your teeth?”
Just as the burly guy reached for Xander’s throat Buffy grabbed the bouncer by the wrist. He winced in pain, stared at her in surprise, then tried to pull away. Buffy held on. He could not break her grip.
“You’re not going to touch my friend or me. We’re not here to drink. We’ll be in and out before you know it. You shouldn’t have tried to hurt him.”
“You arrogant little—” the bouncer growled, cutting himself off as he threw a punch with his free hand.
Buffy stopped the punch with the stock of her crossbow, then shoved him back, hard. He went down onto the beer-sticky wooden floor without so much as a grunt.
“Five minutes. Then we’re gone like we were never here.”
The bouncer swallowed once and rubbed his wrist. Then he nodded slowly and began to rise, turning back toward the door to the club. A ripple of angry mutterings went through the club, and onstage two of the girls stopped dancing to stare. A couple of bikers got up from a nearby table and loomed menacingly toward them.
“Sit,” Buffy said impassively, as she raised the crossbow to chest level. She would never have shot them with it, of course, but they didn’t know that.
They both glanced at the bouncer, then sat down.
“Come on,” she said, and then she started weaving through tables, past glaring, thick-necked laborers. Xander muttered something as he followed her, but Buffy paid no attention. They had taken too much time at the door. The vampires were nowhere in sight. That meant either the rest rooms or some other room in the rear. Buffy figured they’d head for a back door, if there was one. She headed for the heavy wooden door at the far end of the bar. None of the lights reached that far, so most of the patrons wouldn’t even have noticed the door.
The music kept pummeling the room, the girls started dancing again, and before Buffy and Xander had even reached the door, everyone’s attention was back on the girls or their drinks. Buffy held the crossbow at the ready and set herself in a fighting stance, muscles tensed.
“Xander, get the door.”
All seriousness now, no trace of amusement on his face, Xander edged up beside her, reached down to turn the knob and shove the door open, then dropped back. Buffy surged forward into what appeared to be a dingy dressing room for the dancers. Lockers and mirrors abounded, but the room was poorly lit. Not so dark, however, that she could not see them.
Bulldog. Clownface. Four . . . no, five others.
Buffy froze just inside the door, blocking Xander’s entrance.
“What is it?” he asked anxiously.
“More math.” She reached back and handed Xander a stake. He took it. Then Buffy grabbed the door and slammed it shut behind her, leaving him out in the club. Xander shouted her name and she called back to him to stay put.
If there were other vamps out in the club, she doubted they would reveal themselves. But if they did, Xander had the stake. Meanwhile, she had room to work.
The vampires moved in almost total silence across the room, seeming to uncoil from the darkness like serpents. Clownface and Bulldog hung back while the others moved closer. In the near darkness, the orange fire of their jack-o’-lantern eyes set into the black inks of the tattoos that were etched across their faces was unsettling.
They began to chant something, all at once and all together, in a language Buffy did not recognize. It was in a kind of deep undervoice almost as though they were whispering it to themselves. The chanting slipped under her skin immediately, eerie fingers trailing along her spine and raising goosebumps on her arms. Buffy felt her eyes flutter and the lids grow heavy.
; With a surge of anger and adrenaline, she shook it off.
“You think I’m that easy?” she asked dismissively.
Xander called her name again and pushed open the door behind her. In a single motion, Buffy spun and slammed it shut, knocking him back out into the barroom, then turned to face the vampires, just as they swarmed her.
Her finger tightened on the trigger of the crossbow. A bolt flew, punched through the heart of the vampire closest to her, and he exploded in a blast of hot ash. Another bolt ratcheted into place but another vampire, a thin white scar slicing through the markings on his face, lunged for her throat, his long tongue slaking out over his fangs. Talons reached for her. She knew she could not let them get a grip on her. With a backhand, Buffy slammed her left fist up under his jaw and caught the vampire’s tongue between his teeth.
He screamed in pain and staggered back, clearing Buffy enough room to aim at a third and fire again. The vamp’s eyes went wide as the bolt slammed into his ribcage and then through his heart. A second later he was dusted.
“Too quiet,” Buffy chided the remaining bloodsuckers. “Vampire mimes, is that it? Let’s have heaps of arrogant swagger. You guys love arrogant swagger.”
They said nothing. There were still five of them, but Buffy saw Clownface grab Bulldog’s arm and hold him back as the other three came for her again, trying to corner her. Buffy had one last bolt in the repeating crossbow. She swung the weapon up just as they all attacked. This time she was not fast enough. The crossbow was batted from her hand with a blow hard enough to make her right hand numb. It clattered to the floor and Buffy heard the wood crack.
“Hey!” she snapped.
One of the vampires pushed the others out of the way, greedy to get at her, and wrapped his talons around her throat, choking off her words and her air. The thing slammed her into a mirror and a rain of shattered glass cascaded across the floor.
Prophecies Page 4
