“I’ll go,” she said. “Alone.”
Giles began to protest, and Buffy saw the look of knowing, self-righteous anger that began to spread across Xander’s face.
“Okay, someone has to stay behind on Hellmouth duty, and that would be Giles,” she said quickly, then looked sternly at Xander. “You and Cordelia and Willow are not going to be able to go off on a jaunt to Europe without getting into all kinds of I-can’t-answer-thats with your parents. I don’t have that problem.”
Then she looked at Oz. “We don’t know how long this will take, and, frankly, you’re a werewolf. Sure, we’ve got a few weeks to go, but again, who knows how long this will take.”
“And Angel . . .”
Nodding, Giles interrupted. “Angel can’t take the risk of flying. Too difficult for him to keep ahead of the sun.”
It was Xander who spoke up first. “You can’t go alone, Buffy.” He pushed back the heavy oak chair, stood up, and walked over to the ceiling-high windows with the enormous drapes that hung down to the floor. He stared out the window.
“It comes down to this.” He paused, then turned to look at all of them. Not for the first time, Buffy saw in his face, in his resolve and the proud jut of his chin, the man that Xander would become.
“Whatever my parents think doesn’t really matter. If we don’t get that kid back, their whole world is going to be turned upside down. Yeah, maybe they live on the Hellmouth, but like everyone else in Sunnydale, they somehow manage to get by without having to acknowledge how crazy that is. But if this Otherworld explodes into ours and we’re overrun with monsters and legends and weird events, that’s a little worse than having their son run off to Europe for a few weeks.”
“Xander, you might not be able to graduate on time,” Buffy warned.
Cordelia snickered. “Oh, please. Graduation? If we can’t get the rugrat back here in time, there won’t be any more school.”
Buffy looked at her and blinked. She was always amazed by Cordelia’s courage, existing as it did in spite of her amazing selfishness. Her courage was more of an afterthought.
“So back to the airport?” Oz asked.
It was the ghost who responded. She floated to the center of the room, nothing but mist from the waist down. From the center of the dining room table, Antoinette Regnier spoke imperiously, and for the first time, above a whisper.
“There is a faster way,” she declared. “A mode of travel not open to all, but available to the Stayer.”
Then the ghost set her sights on Oz. “And to the lycanthrope.
“Only beings touched by the supernatural in some way may travel the ghost roads and live.”
“Ghost roads?” Buffy asked. Though she wasn’t entirely certain she wanted an explanation.
At the high window, Xander cleared his throat. He stood with his hand parting the heavy drapes, staring out at the tall metal fence around the Gatehouse.
“Excuse me, ghost lady,” he said. “Do you have a big Jehovah’s Witness population around here? Lot of people trying to get you to join their religion?”
In an instant, Buffy was at the window beside him. She put a hand on Xander’s shoulder, though whether to steady him or herself she was unsure. Outside the window, dozens of Sons of Entropy acolytes had already scaled the fence and begun working their way across the lawn.
“I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” Buffy said quietly.
* * *
The shift in weather was sudden and extreme. Though the day had dawned with a clear blue sky and a tantalizingly warm pre-spring breeze—for Boston, anyway—atop Beacon Hill clouds began to form almost out of nowhere. Dark and pregnant with moisture, the clouds blotted out the sun within seconds of the moment Brother Julian led a dozen other acolytes onto the grounds of the Gatehouse.
“It knows we’re here,” he called.
“What do you mean ‘it’?” asked Brother Cardiff, who stood a few feet behind him, just inside the fence. “You mean ‘he’ knows, the Gatekeeper knows.”
Brother Julian ignored him. The Englishman was an idiot. The Gatekeeper and his progenitors had spun the web, but the house itself was the real power. It had taken the Sons of Entropy decades to learn what little they had about the house itself. Il Maestro had planned for nearly as long for this moment. The Gatekeeper had been dying, his strength sapped away with each passing hour.
Without the boy, the Gatehouse would be theirs. The boy might still get the magick of his forebears—a possibility Il Maestro was greatly anticipating—but the house would fall beneath their onslaught, and chaos would follow soon after.
That had been the plan.
The Slayer and the Watcher coming to the Gatekeeper’s aid? That possibility had not even been planned for. Now, rather than attacking while the Gatekeeper was at his weakest, and the house’s defenses were almost nonexistent, they had been ordered to move in immediately.
As the last of the acolytes led by Brother Julian cleared the fence—the monstrous house across the yard looking down upon them with furious window-eyes—the clouds moved in and sharp-edged hail the size of fruit began to pummel them from the sky.
“Attack, now!” Brother Julian cried.
Brother Cardiff launched himself forward, even as the ground rumbled and split. Brother Julian leaped over the rift that opened like a sinkhole in the earth before him, and Brother Cardiff helped him to his feet. The others followed suit, save for Brother Stefano, who fell into a sudden sinkhole which closed up again after him. The man’s screams were cut off the instant the earth rolled over his head.
Brother Cardiff ran for the front steps of the house, only proving to Julian what an idiot the man was. Magickal fire crackled as Cardiff slammed into a sorcerous barrier that was part of the house’s defense system. The man screamed, his hands went to his face, and he pulled away strands of melted flesh before crumbling to his knees in shock.
Hail crashed into Julian’s shoulders and scalp, cutting him where it struck. He ignored the pain. Lightning roared down from the sky and burned Brother Luciano where he stood, turning him to little more than bone and cinders in a way naturally occurring lightning never could have. They were dying.
“Enough!” Julian screamed.
Il Maestro had chosen him for this duty for a reason. Now it was time for him to prove his worth, to prove that Il Maestro had made the right decision. This very day, the blood of the Gatekeeper would run over his fingers and he would paint his face with the gore.
Now, though, Julian’s hands erupted with a deep purple flame and he held them in front of him. The barrier that had melted the flesh from Brother Cardiff’s face and chest was illuminated a moment. Julian chanted loudly in Latin and the purple flames seemed to solidify, almost as a weapon in his grasp. With the total focus of his mind, Julian held the crackling magick above his head as though it were a sword, and he brought it down, screaming with rage and the pain such concentration cost him. With a scream of wood and the shattering of glass, the house cried out in agony, and the barrier exploded in a shower of magickal energy that wildly altered everything around it. Brother François turned to stone.
A palm tree, flush with coconuts and drooping fronds, grew up to Julian’s left in mere seconds.
Julian shielded himself, and channeled most of that energy down into the ground, and the earth shook. The magickal field that surrounded the property and kept the Gatehouse invisible to the world around flickered, but remained intact. It was not a defensive barrier, but a mere enchantment, a glamour of convenience. That would be the last thing to fall, or near enough to it.
Without moving any closer, Julian struck again at the breach he had made in the defensive barrier, this time turning the Gatehouse’s own magick against it. The crackling blade of magickal energy he wielded slashed down into the earth. Dirt leaped from the ground in a straight line toward the double front doors of the Gatehouse. The stairs split in two.
The doors to the Gatehouse splintered and exploded inward.
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The Sons of Entropy screamed in triumph.
Brother Malachy ran for the door. He had bragged that he would be the one to take the Gatekeeper’s head, and he brandished a shining dagger in his right hand as he mounted the splintered steps. So arrogant was he that when the Slayer stepped through the shattered doorway with a long, thick shaft of wood that looked to have been the leg of a good-sized dining room table, he lifted one hand and tried to shove her out of his way.
The Slayer shattered Brother Malachy’s arm with a single swing. The next one cracked his skull and left him drooling, hanging over the railing of the shattered stairs. Behind the Slayer, a dark-haired young man Brother Julian recognized from surveillance photos stepped out of the house, a second table leg clutched in his hands.
“No trespassing,” the Slayer snarled, and set her legs wide apart to guard the entrance.
“Yeah,” said the young man. “Beware of Buffy.”
* * *
“Some of the Sons of Entropy are skilled with magick,” Giles said. “The Gatekeeper will not be able to fend them off completely, not without help. Even we few may not be enough. We are out of our depth. Buffy will give them quite a battle, but she needs someone backing her up who is as hard to kill as she is. Plus, if the Gatekeeper can manage to perform this Ritual of Endowment he suggested, Angel’s presence will be invaluable. After his fashion, he loves her. There is magickal power in that.”
Oz nodded slowly. “I’ll go,” he agreed. “I’m not much good against spells and enchantments anyway. But how will I find my way?” Oz looked at Giles expectantly.
The Watcher could not blame him for being afraid, or for looking to him for answers. Giles usually had the answers, after all, or the ability to find them somehow. But not this time. On this day, the only answers they had came from a dead woman, and somehow, that was less than comforting.
“How did Springheel Jack find his way?” whispered the ghost of Antoinette Regnier. “You focus on your heart’s desire, on the destination you must reach, and you will find your way.”
“Okay,” Oz replied. “But . . . how?”
“The dead will guide you, if you get lost.”
Giles cleared his throat. “No offense intended, madam, but according to all the literature, the dead can be rather untrustworthy.”
“For a human, yes,” the ghost replied. “But the boy is not human, is he, Watcher? They will bear him no ill will, for he is cursed. In many ways, he suffers far more than those of us who may rest if we choose. There is no rest for those bearing the mark of the wolf, bearing the stain of the supernatural.”
“No rest for the wicked,” Oz said, mostly to himself. “It’s a party.”
Then he clapped his hands together, stood up with a smile on his face that astonished Giles—though Oz continually astonished him—and said with great verve, “Let’s get this show on the road.”
“My son is in pain. I shall return,” the ghost said, and then simply evaporated.
“Boy, how’d you like to have her for a mom?” Oz muttered. “Talk about pressure. She makes Willow’s mom look mellow.”
“Yes, well, Willow’s mother is alive, and unaware of the consequences that hang in the balance,” Giles said, though he realized now was not the time for such a discussion.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure her priorities wouldn’t change if she knew about the Hellmouth,” Oz said, bouncing on the balls of his feet ever so slightly. “Well, unless it was an extracurricular activity that could help Willow get into a better school.”
Giles pushed his glasses up on the bridge of his nose, and blinked several times. He realized that Oz was nervous, and sympathized. But they had no time for sensitivity or caution. They needed reinforcements.
“Oz?” Giles asked.
Oz nodded. “Right. I go, grab up Angel, tell Willow to hold the fort, and get back here like Ricochet Rabbit.”
“I’m sorry?” Giles frowned.
“Never mind. American cartoon reference.” Oz moved to the door that Antoinette’s ghost had pointed out to them, and then he paused and turned to Giles. “What about Willow, Giles? I mean, is she really going to be all right back home alone?”
Giles considered lying. After a moment, he said, “I don’t know, Oz. But if we fail here, none of us will be all right.”
Oz’s eyes hardened at that. Giles watched it happen. All the light, all the humor, went out of his eyes, and for a moment Giles thought he could see a glint of the wolf deep down inside.
With a twist of the knob and a hard pull, Oz yanked the door open and stepped inside. Giles stepped around the heavy wooden door, but by the time he looked inside, it was only a small bedroom.
Oz was gone.
* * *
Oz was insane.
Or, at least, in those first few moments, he’d thought he was. There was a vacuum around him, a pure nothing that brought tears to his eyes in an instant. He wept openly, panic making his mind reel as he wished for something to grab hold of, anything to give him a sense of place, of movement, of time . . . of just being.
If this is heaven . . . he thought, but he never finished the idea. There was no telling who might be listening.
No temperature, neither cold nor hot. No sound, not even his own breathing. And at first, when he tried to scream, nothing. No sensation, neither of falling nor of moving, nor of hard surface beneath his feet. The air around him was neither dark nor light, not white or black, but a kind of eternal gray, as if rain were on the way but the storm would never arrive.
Oz closed his eyes tightly and screamed into the abyss, tears streaming down his cheeks.
He knew this was it. This was part of the limbo that Giles had talked about, the gray world connecting Earth to Heaven, Hell, and the Otherworld. This was the ghost road. Or, at least, it was supposed to be.
The ghost road.
And as suddenly as he’d had the thought, he felt it beneath his feet.
He heard his labored breathing.
He opened his eyes.
The ghost road stretched out before him, conjured from somewhere within him or somewhere nearby, he didn’t know. But it was solid, and that was all that really mattered to him. The gray air was thick and he could not see very far, though there were no obstructions to his vision. The road beneath his feet was hard and rutted like a dirt path, yet it looked more like chalk or crumbling concrete.
Now, from somewhere, he heard music. Distant music, with a static crackle that reminded him of a poorly tuned radio. Impossible, of course, yet there it was.
He could see nothing but the road, and the gray absence of life around him. No wandering souls, no rotting corpses. Oz had been uncertain what to expect from these ghost roads, but he had steeled himself for the worst. Or what he’d thought was the worst. In reality, those first moments of nothing had terrified him more than anything he’d come up against since he’d become involved with Willow and, by extension, with Buffy.
It was something the Slayer could not fight. Could not destroy.
Oz felt certain that what he had felt, in those drifting moments, was nothing less than death itself. Perhaps it had taken a moment for death to reassert itself, to realize it had no hold over him. It didn’t matter. Whatever happened to him now in this cold, hideous limbo, as long as he knew that he was alive, he would be all right.
Oz began to walk.
* * *
Inside Giles’s apartment, Willow pored over books she hadn’t dared to open at the library, hoping to find stronger enchantments and bindings to place over the Hellmouth, and over Sunnydale as a whole. She had tried desperately to use magick to locate the actual breaches, but it was something she had not been able to master. Perhaps the Gatekeeper had been more naturally adept, had some kind of sixth sense. So a more general sort of protection would have to do, from Willow’s point of view.
Still, though Angel had spent the previous night doing little more than fighting and killing things that shouldn’t be walking the earth, he agr
eed with Willow that the wards seemed to be having an effect. Very few new creatures were appearing.
Giles’s ancient radio was tuned to an old-time jazz station, and Willow didn’t dare move the dial. It was so distant, she was afraid that she might never be able to find it again, and Giles would be crushed. Instead, she had found that the music delighted her. Rather than impeding her ability to focus, it calmed her considerably and allowed her mind to rely on intuition she might never otherwise have paid any attention to.
She wouldn’t be giving away her CD collection just yet, but this ancient jazz music had promise.
* * *
Oz felt as though he had been walking for eons. Though he was not sleepy, and his legs were not tired, his mind was exhausted. So tempting, the urge to simply lie down and close his eyes. The ground was hard, but if he strayed from the road to that gray nothing, perhaps he might find a comfortable place to rest.
What? Oz shook his head. That was not the voice of his heart, the inner mind speaking to him. Those thoughts had come from elsewhere. Outside his mind. Outside of him.
Leave him be, the lost one.
“Who’s there?” he shouted, head whipping about as he searched the void for life. Just the dread nothing around him, lulling him into surrender. Gray and endless.
Lost. The voice had said he was lost.
“Please!” he cried. “I can’t be lost. Maybe you don’t care what happens in the . . . other world now. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you. But I think that if my friends fail, your world may be destroyed as well. Whatever it is you have here, it’s ordered. It’s all arranged by . . . by someone.
“If I don’t make it, all that order could be destroyed. There’d be nothing left but . . .”
All around him, the gray dissolved into white, blinding light. The road beneath his feet shifted like the sand, and that too was white and burning. Oz shielded his eyes, blinked several times, but already the light was beginning to fade. He blinked, a rainbow on his retinas the first real color he’d seen since he had come to the ghost road . . . when? Hours ago. At least. Maybe days.
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