by Various
AS JENNY KNELT TO UNLOCK THE TRUNK, SHE COULD FEEL THE EVIL OF THE MASTER.
It was like a bone-chilling ache. The stench of something rotten pervaded the air.
This place has been defiled, she thought.
“So much evil,” Willow whispered.
“Of the bad,” Xander added softy. “I can feel it now, too.”
Jenny opened the trunk. With sickening dread, she peered in. The arms were folded in on themselves. The hands were positioned palms up. Finger bones had separated and were nestled on either side of the skull like huge, macabre earrings.
Then the Master’s left hand shot straight up and wrapped itself around her throat.
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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It was a modern picture: Girl in a water-stained dress surrounded by friends in a loose, roving pack. Cars held at bay by the presence of people spilling into the streets on their way to and from the dance that marked some unfathomable human ritual. And in the folds of wind, dispersing as the night waned, the dust that had been a small army of vampires.
Then again, in war, the losers rarely had a choice of how they left the battlefield.
The girl paused for just a moment — not enough to break stride. She glanced at a small boy walking with his father, out far past his bedtime. Glanced, and passed, although on closer inspection, the tall man beside the boy wouldn’t have passed for anyone’s father on a day that wasn’t Halloween. He wore dark robes that seemed to reach for dust-heavy wind, as if to grasp the dead and contain them.
Still, it was a tense moment; although the man didn’t worry at all, the boy held his breath, figuratively speaking, until the girl’s attention was caught by the words of the oldest friend present. By about two hundred years. She shook her head slightly and picked up her step to catch up with the friends that had moved on while she hesitated, father and son — such as they were — forgotten.
“I told you, Anointed One,” the older man said quietly. “Unless she knows what she is looking for — exactly what she’s looking for — the spell I’ve cast prevents our detection.”
“She looked this way, anyway.”
The robed man frowned. “And did not see.”
“I don’t understand,” the boy said at last, staring at her back, at the way the folds of fabric skirted the surface of concrete and asphalt. “The prophecy . . . she beat it.”
“There is no way to defeat prophecy; it is a simple statement of fact.”
The boy raised a brow. “You haven’t tried reading it lately.”
“I’m not a reader, I’m a writer.” The man looked at the boy for a moment. “You have great power, Anointed One, but perhaps your reading skills were not as well honed as they might have been.” He raised his head; the night had diminished the passing figures until only a white dress could be clearly seen in the distance. “The prophecy was correct. The Slayer did die.”
“I know dead when I see it. That’s not it.”
“Ah, I forget. You cannot see.” He lowered his head for a moment, lifting his hands and spreading them slowly, as if his palms were touching a glass wall. Then he blew into the air, and his breath came out in fine mist, as if it were suddenly very, very cold. That mist touched the flat air beneath his palms, and frost, swirling and glowing, thinned out between the man, the boy, and the Slayer.
She was glowing.
At her back, like some bizarre shadow, some outcropping of malignant light trailed after her, arms moving slightly out of sync with hers, long, angular fingers reached for her hair . . . or perhaps the back of her neck.
“What does it mean?”
“Anointed One, she walked the edge between life and death. She crossed it. Something pulled her back, but . . . there is a vacuum that surrounds her. Any normal mortal would not have had the strength to return to the living. See?”
The Slayer turned again, and for a moment, her face was as clear as . . . glass. The light that had followed her pawed at her face; she frowned. The creature that had once been Angelus spoke to her and she lifted a hand, looking through the invisible attacker; the light retreated.
“She struggles with death. There is a possibility that she will still lose.”
“And if she loses?”
“Death will take her back. But she is not aware of the struggle.”
“Make her aware of it.”
“It can be done.”
“Good.”
“But I require the blood of one who had physical contact with her on the night of her death.”
“Any of them,” the small vampire said, pointing.
“I’m not a fool. Take one of them, and we will all meet the Master’s fate.”
Collin frowned for a moment, and then offered his companion the sunny expression of a boy eight or nine years old. He held out his hand to his companion in silence.
Just as he had when he led Buffy to the Master.
“How many deaths have you seen, Anointed One?”
The small vampire shrugged. “Not enough.”
But the demon mage was no longer listening.
He worked for a moment, trading silence for the cadence of stilted chant, trading chant for the motion of hand over the stone surface of a small altar. Then he paused and gestured to Collin. He had tried to choose a working area that would be convenient, but in the end, Collin — as if he were a mortal child — was forced to pull a chair over to the altar’s side so he could better see what was happening.
“Watch carefully. Timing is everything.”
The stone bubbled where the mage passed hands over it, becoming molten, and then becoming a still, slick liquid with an unusual sheen. A very familiar face came into focus as they watched.
She really was a very pretty girl.
The young woman who Rupert Giles had, by dint of birth and twist of fortune, been given to train, stood in the middle of his flat, lost in thought. It seldom happened. Although she stood in the light cast by long windows, her face was shadowed, her chin lowered.
“Buffy, have you been listening to a word I’ve said?”
“Yes?” She looked up from the flat, old book in her hands with a guilty start. Giles walked across the room and very carefully closed the book. It was one of several that he had been forced to relocate to his personal quarters while the school library underwent extensive renovations.
“That would be the right answer, if it happened to contain any truth. If you’re worried about the Hellmouth, it’s closed. The vampires were only drawn to the school because of the Master and the Hellmouth. There has been no sign whatsoever of vampire activity since that night. I must again point out that you were quite thorough.
“You needn’t worry about your absence.”
“I am not worried. What makes you think I’m worried?”
“For a start, that’s probably the third book I’ve seen you open all school year.”
“So?”
“It’s in Latin.”
“Latin?”
“And it’s upside down.”
“Oh.”
“Buffy, I realize that it’s been a . . . difficult year. The worst of it is over. The Hellmouth has been closed, thanks to your efforts here. You deserve . . . well, you deserve a vacation, inasmuch as traveling to a city that defined the words ‘road rage’ can be a vacation.”
“Now. Watch.” The man’s hands moved over the altar.
She took a piece of paper out of her pocket. “This is my father’s phone number. If anything goes wrong —”
“What could possibly go wrong?” He held the folded piece of paper out to her.
She looked at it pointedly. “You want a list? I could spend my entire vacation making one, and I got a C in English this term for ‘poor use of imagination.’ ”
“Uh, yes, well. Maybe I will keep this. As a precaution.”
“Good. I have to get going. Dad’s going to pick me up at home. It’ll be our first summer together. I mean, since their divorce.” Her smile stretched, thinned and disappeared. “You know, there’s a whole lot of silence going on here. Help me out a bit, Giles.”
“Uh, yes, well. I’m certain that you’ll have a wonderful summer doing whatever it is young girls do.”
“I bet you got a lot of A’s for effort when you were my age. If you were ever my age. Don’t get killed while I’m gone.” She held out her hand.
After a slight hesitation, he took it. “Buffy —”
Giles.
He lay on the ground, right fist still clenched, left leg clearly broken; the front of his jacket shredded, dull tweed brightened by blood that had not yet dried and stiffened. There was so much of it.
But worse: his glasses were cracked, and beneath the fine vein of forked lines she could see his eyes, devoid of disapproval, surprise, or the subtleties of very British anger. His left hand lay in shadow; it seemed that he had been reaching for something.
“Giles!”
“Buffy?”
“Giles?”
“Buffy! Are you all right?”
“I . . . I’m fine.”
He frowned, his brows bunching slightly as he raised them. “Is something wrong with your hand?”
She was cradling it as if it were burned. “No. I . . . I have to go now.”
The lights were off; the hum of neon was absent; the sound of hungry young musicians wouldn’t be heard for hours yet. But the Bronze had a life of its own, even outside of normal hours.
A slim girl with long, pale hair stood in its shadows.
Angel recognized her at once. He knew a lot about living in shadows, and he didn’t miss much that happened in them. “Buffy?”
She looked up at the sound of his voice. “Angel.”
“I got here as soon as I could.”
“Well . . . I’m glad the place was open. I think the management is doing the once-a-decade post-dance fumigation.” She looked down again. “I wasn’t sure you could make it. It’s . . . it’s morning.” She walked over to the bar, turned her back toward it, rested her shoulder blades against its edge. Neither the Slayer nor the vampire spoke, and the silence was almost as pointed as any of Buffy’s other weapons.
“Why did you —”
“I’m leaving —”
They stopped; the words echoed and stilled. “I can see we’re going for awkward here.” She put her hand into her pocket; Angel could hear the crinkle of paper before she pulled her hand out. Empty.
“Leaving for —”
“I wanted to say —”
They stopped again. “We should have taken a number at the door,” Buffy said at last. “You want to go first, or should I?”
He didn’t answer.
She looked away. “I’m leaving Sunnydale for the summer. I wanted to . . . to say good-bye.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why are you leaving?”
“You might have noticed that I live with my mother. My father’s in L.A. They worked this thing out between them like civilized adults — civilized adults who couldn’t stand to live under the same roof. Mom puts up with the weirdness of my life for the school year, Dad gets it when other parents are supposed to be relaxing. It keeps me in the family. Sort of like built-in summer camp.
“And that was probably more than you wanted to know.”
“Buffy —”
“So now tell me more than I want to know. Tell me anything at all about you. Tell me that you used to have pimples and a terrible complexion before you . . .”
“Died?”
Silence.
“Why did you pick here?” they said, in perfect unison.
Angel answered after another awkward pause. “Because this was the place,” he said softly.
“The place?”
“The place I killed Darla.” He took a step toward her, and then another; she took a step away from the bar, and then stood her ground, her gaze caught by his, in the shadows. “For you.”
“For me . . .”
“Was that more than you wanted to know?”
“I . . . don’t know.” She reached out, slowly, to touch the side of his face —
— and then she was standing in a smelly, dank street as Angel, arm around his friend’s shoulder, walked right past her. The strong stench of alcohol was almost welcome, the rest of the street smelled so bad. She turned to follow Angel, and then stopped as she saw someone in the distance beyond him.
Someone in a dress straight out of a museum, with its fitted bodice and a skirt that could only be rounded in that unnatural feminine circle with multiple hoops. The stranger stood, with perfect poise and complete confidence, in an alley that was only barely lit by torches from a nearby tavern. Buffy knew her.
Darla.
At her back, Buffy could hear the rickety sounds of wheels over cobbled stone; she turned; saw shadows and mist.
It was cold. Buffy was cold.
“Angel?”
Something was wrong with him. He was speaking, but she couldn’t quite make out what he said because his voice sounded so wrong. And his clothes . . .
It took
a moment before she realized what it was. A Slayer knows a vampire in the same way she knows how to breathe; instinctively. And this Angel wasn’t a vampire.
But the woman in the alley was. He walked toward her, leaving behind first his friend and then everything he’d thought he’d known.
Darla was elegant; one of the most beautiful women that Buffy had ever seen. He was mesmerized — and why wouldn’t he be? She opened her mouth to warn him, but her throat was dry; no sound came out.
Angel . . .
He closed his eyes as Darla smiled.
He died.
And then he was on his way to being undead, his lips against the curve of her flawless skin, his head cradled in the infinitely strong and unnaturally gentle hands of his sire.
Buffy had never seen a vampire in the making before. It was worse than accidentally stumbling into a bedroom in active use.
She cried out, pulled back, broke free —
And stood in the Bronze, clutching her hand, eyes wide. Certain of one thing: He had wanted Darla.
“Buffy?”
“I’ll — I have to go. My father’s going to be at my house any minute.”
He reached out; she stiffened; he let his hand fall. They walked into separate shadows.
“Buffy, where have you been? Your father’s going to be here any minute —” Joyce Summers came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron as if the word frazzled had been coined only for her personal use.
“Mom, I know when Dad’s coming. I packed last night, remember? Eight o’clock? You were standing over my shoulder handing me underwear and socks?”
“I just — I want you to be on time. I want things to get off to a perfect start for you.”
“You worry about you, okay? I can take care of myself.”
“I know, dear,” her mother said, with a soft smile. “Did you bring the suitcase down?”
“Mom —”
“I’m sorry. I know. It’s just . . .” She smiled in that brightly forced way that wasn’t all that cheerful. “I think we’ve made a really good start this year. I know it was hard, leaving all your friends behind, going to a new school, dealing with things. I think you’ve done well. I think we’ve both done well. And I’m going to miss you. There.” She lifted a hand as her daughter started to speak. “I know I promised I wouldn’t say it, but it’s true. I’ve never spent eight weeks without you before.”
