“You’ll balloon,” Cordelia warned her. “A couple nibbles here, a couple there . . .”
“Where?” Xander asked sassily, raising and lowering his brows at her.
“Stop it,” Cordelia said, sighing at Joyce, as if to say, Can you believe this?
Buffy’s mother nodded slowly. “And something got out of the Gatehouse.”
“A whole lot of somethings,” Xander cut in. “See, the heir to the Gatehouse got kidnapped, and if Buffy doesn’t get him back to the Gatehouse before the old man croaks, well, you can probably say good-bye to Family Fun Evening at the Pitch ’n’ Putt.”
“Oh,” Joyce said slowly.
Giles pushed his glasses up. He was tired, and trying to put a word in edgewise was more tiring still. But he owed it to Joyce.
“I must tell you, the world is in grave danger, and Buffy, Angel, and Oz may be its last hope.”
“How new,” Cordelia said.
“How different,” Xander added.
Willow sipped her tea.
“Seriously,” Giles insisted. “And the Hellmouth has been badly compromised. All sorts of terrible things have emerged from it. They’re held at bay thanks only to Willow’s excellent binding spells—” he smiled in Willow’s direction as she sat up straighter and preened a bit—“but I’m not sure how long they’ll last. In short, perhaps it would be best if you got out of Sunnydale for a time.”
Joyce looked shocked. Then she said, “We live here.”
Giles inclined his head. “Fair enough. But Buffy—”
And then it happened.
* * *
There was a low rumbling very like an earthquake. As everyone jumped to their feet and hurried to the doorways in the room—thank goodness for California’s community earthquake preparedness training—the walls of the house began to shimmy, then to shake violently. A crack ran diagonally from the upper left-hand side of the window behind the couch all the way across the opposite side. The coffee table bounced up and over, scattering Xander’s junk food everywhere.
Joyce fell to the floor, bumping her head. The room went pitch black, and for a moment, she thought she was losing consciousness. Then, as her eyes adjusted, the sun shifted behind the curtains, casting an eerie glow over the tense faces in the room.
“Look,” Cordelia said, pointing.
Something dark formed in the floor, a blackness darker than anything Joyce had ever seen. It collected the wan sunlight, and yet she could still make it out on the carpet. It looked like a puddle of shiny tar.
A high, frigid wind whistled through the house, so loud Joyce had to cover her ears. Books and knick-knacks slammed against the wall.
“Willow,” Giles called.
Buffy’s redheaded friend got to her knees and pointed at the puddle as it began to rise into the air.
“Hurry, Will,” Xander said.
“To the gods I give supplication, and all deference, and honor,” Willow said in a loud, booming voice.
The black circle began to rotate so that it now hung vertically in the center of the room. The air around it seemed to shimmer like a pool of water broken by a stone or the movements of life beneath the surface.
“Snap it up!” Cordelia shouted.
Willow raised her other arm. “Pan, hear my plea.”
“What’s happening?” Joyce cried.
“It’s a breach,” Giles explained. “Running might be wise.”
Joyce stayed rooted. “You aren’t running. And neither are they.”
“And therefore, and henceforth, with all the power of the Old Gods, I bind thee!” Willow shouted. She threw back her hair and raised a fist at the puddle.
It contracted like the iris of an eye exposed to brilliant light, and then it disappeared. The wind died down, then stopped. The rumbling ceased.
Xander groaned. “Twelve dollars and sixteen cents’ worth of fat-laden tasty treats down the drain.”
“That was close, Willow,” Cordelia said sternly.
Willow nodded and made a face. “I was caught off guard.”
Buffy’s Watcher smoothed back his hair and pushed up his glasses. It was a habit of his that Joyce now found oddly comforting, a reassurance that she hadn’t just gone completely insane.
“That was a breach,” she guessed. “A portal.” Her heart was pounding so hard she was surprised she wasn’t having a heart attack.
“Yes. What we’ve been trying to explain.” Giles regarded the area where the circle had appeared with obvious apprehension. “Willow successfully bound it.”
“Well, good,” Joyce said uneasily, avoiding the area as she moved to pick up the mess on the floor. Giles dropped to his knees to help her, clearing his throat meaningfully as the kids stood by. At once Willow grabbed an overturned bowl and started gathering up the vast array of cheese balls and potato chips. She sighed softly and handed a broken terra-cotta statuette of a donkey to Joyce, who cradled it gently. Perhaps the girl knew that Buffy had bought this for Joyce on Olvera Street, a touristy Mexican shopping district back in Los Angeles, many years ago.
“Well, yes, the thing is,” Giles said, coming up beside her with a double handful of spilled food, “Willow’s done this spell many times all over Sunnydale, and what we’ve discovered of late is that the spells may not be permanent. They are overtaxed, shall we say, and there’s no telling if this breach will reopen. Or if so, when.”
“Oh.” Joyce gazed uneasily at the spot.
“And so, I must restate my suggestion that if you feel you can’t leave Sunnydale, nevertheless you simply must leave this house.”
Joyce frowned at him. “What if Buffy calls?”
“Call forwarding,” Xander said. “We have a guest room.” He looked at the others. “So we tell people they’ve got roaches. They’re fumigating.” He smiled at Joyce. “With bunk beds and a desk lamp shaped like a cowboy boot.”
“Thanks, but I don’t think so.” Joyce gazed down at the donkey. “I need to be here. This is Buffy’s home.”
“Buffy would not want you to be in danger,” Giles said.
“Well, I don’t want her to be in danger, either. But she has to be. And she’s my daughter. So I guess I have to be, too.”
With that, she burst into tears. She couldn’t help herself. She was so terribly, terribly frightened for her daughter.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that, why does she have to do this until she dies?”
“If you please,” Giles said to Buffy’s friends. They stared at each other, then shuffled out of the room.
Then Giles did something for which Joyce was unprepared. He took her into his arms and laid her head on his shoulder.
“Joyce, I know it’s difficult,” he said, and suddenly, they were very alike, she and this man who had shouldered the burden of knowing that Buffy was a Vampire Slayer, and had kept that secret from Joyce for two years. She sometimes hated him for it even though she understood the reason: her ignorance had allowed Buffy to do what she had to without moments like these.
“When I was her age, I thought I might like to be an archaeologist,” she said, her voice muffled against his shoulder.
“Really? I was, for a time,” he said. “But I had something else to do. Something more important.”
“You were called to be Buffy’s Watcher.”
“Even so.”
She pulled away from him. “And I’m her mother. I guess what we want doesn’t really matter. We have to help her.” She took a deep breath. “Help her survive.”
“Yes.” He looked at her steadily. “I wish it weren’t so, but it’s true.”
Tears spilled down her cheeks. “When you have a baby, you have so many hopes and dreams. You never want them to be sad or hurt. Just wrap them in cotton wool and keep them safe forever. I can’t help but feel that I’ve failed her in some way.”
“You haven’t. She loves you so much.” He smiled gently. “She’s always going on about your chocolate chip cookies. I must say, they are quite delicious.”
“I’ll make some tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll have them ready in case she comes home.” Then she finally managed a smile. “And I’ll make a double batch.”
“Triple?” Xander said from the doorway.
Joyce laughed. This boy in his baggy shirts and corduroy pants was such a mixture of man and puppy dog. Then there was Cordelia, always so overdressed in her high-fashion clothes—today’s black-and-gray chiffon dress was no exception—and sweet Willow, in her overalls and sweaters. They were all a combination of seasoned adults who had faced terrors she could scarcely imagine and wide-eyed children learning to deal with the world outside their families and homes.
“Quadruple batch,” Joyce said.
Willow smiled sweetly at her and came to her side as Xander said, “If it helps, Mrs. Summers, we’re all pulling for her. We’ll do anything for Buffy. We’d die for her.”
“Hey,” Cordelia said, then shrugged. “Well, maybe I would consider getting seriously hurt.”
Somehow, amid all the stress and fear, that got them all laughing.
In the little house in Sunnydale. Situated on the mouth of Hell.
Chapter 1
JUST AS ANGEL, BUFFY, AND Oz were about to leave the ghost roads, the suffering and pleading and furious wraiths of the dead swarmed around Angel, desperate to be set free. In spite of their translucence, for a brief moment he lost sight of Buffy and Oz. With the ghosts whipping past him, lashing out, hurting him—here on the ghost roads, they had the power to do that—Angel felt his face change. His brow began to protrude and his eyes shifted to feral yellow. His fangs extended, and he hissed at the spirits of the dead.
For the merest fraction of a second, not even an eyeblink, he wondered if this was where his soul waited during those times it had left his body. When his soul returned to him, he had no real memory of any afterlife, but some part of him knew that if his soul had somehow ever reached paradise, the curse on him would have allowed him to retain that memory, in order to torture him even further.
“Angel!”
With a bellow of rage and fear for Buffy’s safety, Angel spun, his eyes searching the ranks of the gossamer dead for something solid. Something flesh and blood.
There. The Slayer.
Intangible and yet brutal claws raked his back. It made no sense. He could hardly fight them, and yet it seemed they would be able to kill him. Kill them all. Buffy included. Or perhaps not Buffy, for as he watched her now, she spun and with a snap of one wrist, she cracked a ghost into pieces and it dissipated in front of her.
Angel’s eyes were wide as he watched her in that tiny moment. She was truly extraordinary. And as he moved to her side, to risk damnation once more with the Slayer, the vampire felt the dread and sorrow of the dead, just a little.
“They’re like smoke!” he snapped. “It’s almost impossible to connect!”
“Focus on one at a time,” Buffy said, her blond hair flying as she spun into a high kick. Her eyes flashed as she glanced quickly at Angel. “I’m all turned around. Where’s the breach? Where did England go?”
Angel stared hard at the face of a spirit that reached out for him. Stared into its eyes. Then he shot out his arm, palm flat out, and crushed its face. Buffy was right, but he could take no pleasure or relief from that. Instead, he merely defended himself, and then gazed around, hoping to see the breach, the shimmering portal through which they had seen the British countryside before the ghostly tide had swept them away.
“There!” he yelled, and pointed to show Buffy the way.
They’d been forced away from the breach, the gray nothing of the ghost road flaring white and the firmness of the path beneath their feet giving way to something more nebulous. Now Angel reached out for Buffy and began forging his way toward the breach again.
“Angel, stop!” Buffy shouted. “We can’t leave!”
A ghost entwined tendrils of nothing in Angel’s hair and snapped his head back, staring into his yellow, blazing eyes.
You must take us with you, take us out of here! We wander here forever, it said, with the voice of the multitude, a chorus of lost spirits. He knew then that these were souls that had been unable to move on to their final rest. But he also knew that whatever happened, the land of the living was not the place for the shades of the dead.
Focused on the ghost’s eyes, Angel slammed both palms against its chest, then crushed its face with a hard-knuckled backhand. He whirled on Buffy, who was in a fierce struggle with several other lost souls.
“We’ve got to get out of here, Buffy,” he snarled. “What’s the . . . ?”
Then he paused, his eyes darting around the misty nothingness, even as his lips moved and he answered his own question. “Oz. Where the hell is Oz?”
“We can’t leave without him!” Buffy shouted.
“Damn it!” Angel roared.
With Buffy at his side, Angel waded through the spirits of the dead off the straight path of the ghost road and into the void of limbo.
* * *
Oz crouched, protecting his face and eyes. He whipped his jacket around like a madman, and though it passed right through the spirits who had hauled him roughly from the path, it seemed to disrupt them. Apparently, if you paid enough attention, it didn’t take much to take on a single one of these specters. The problem was, there wasn’t just one, but an infinite number of them. And they seemed to be diverting him from the path, shoving and scratching and herding him farther and farther from the road.
“Back off!” Oz said furiously. For the first time since the curse of lycanthropy had fallen upon him, he wished that he could force the transformation upon himself. As a werewolf, he’d tear through these things in no time. But he wasn’t a werewolf. Not right now.
He could hear nothing but the rustling of the spirits, like the sound of someone slipping beneath their bedsheets, or the soft shush of a woman’s stockings as she walks by. His eyes were almost twilight blind, everything around him washed out by the wan, gray light of the Otherworld that was all the illumination available on the ghost road. Only the spirits were visible to him. He could see no sign of Angel or Buffy.
Nor of the ghost road itself. The path that would take him back to the breach. The spirits dragged at him, pushed and prodded, scratched deeply—and yet he didn’t bleed. They were moving him somewhere, and wherever it was, Oz knew he didn’t want to go there.
“No offense,” he muttered, “but I’ve never been much of a joiner.”
With no sense at all of where the ghost road might lie, he had only one choice. It seemed obvious that they were trying to move him away from the others. Oz determined to change course, to move in a direction exactly opposite the one the ghosts were trying to force him into.
Normally, he was a laid-back guy.
Laid back wasn’t going to work this time.
With a twist of his arm, Oz swung his denim jacket so that it wrapped around his right hand. He lashed out, concentrating just enough to connect with a nearby spirit that looked particularly nasty. The spook seemed to shatter. In that same moment, Oz ran toward it. Through it. He shivered with a chill that was colder than anything he had ever felt. It made him want to stop, to lie down in the nothing ether and let the cold take him. But no matter how cold it was, how frozen he might feel, he knew there would be heat again. Knew there would be warmth.
With a tremendous effort, he surged through a scattered crowd of ghosts. They reached for him, scratched his face and arms and back, tried to turn him around in the opposite direction. They wanted to stop him. And Oz figured that, like a lot of authority figures he’d known in his life, if they wanted to stop him from doing it, it was probably something worth doing. In this case, something that could save him from being lost here forever.
“Well, all right,” Oz muttered, and nodded to himself.
Then the ghosts swept in, wispy as the fog itself, but tangible enough to grab him and hold him. There were too many of them, and they dragged him down into the misty depths of limbo.
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Oz choked on the thick spirit mist that surrounded him and managed one word before his voice was taken from him. He said, “Willow.”
* * *
Buffy saw Oz just as the ghosts dragged him down. Though the air, or what passed for air here, was thick and filmy, and distance could not be judged accurately, Oz seemed to be only a short way off the path.
Next to her, Angel asked, “Did you see?” The tension in his voice was almost too much for her. Angel was overwhelmed, Buffy knew, by the ghost roads and what they represented. Here were the spirits of the dead—some on their way to their final rest, some so restless that they would walk these roads forever. Buffy knew that he had to have wondered—just as she had wondered—how many of his victims walked here, so abruptly torn from their lives that they might never be able to move on.
Buffy turned and gazed into his eyes. She reached out and grabbed his hands with both of hers. “We’re going to be all right,” she promised. “Watch my back. I’m going after him.”
“No!” Angel snapped.
Buffy stared at him. “We don’t have any choice. If we lose Oz now, we might never get him back.”
And Willow would never forgive me, she thought, without a trace of humor. She didn’t give voice to that fear, however.
Angel cursed aloud, his vampiric features contorting even further into a snarl of frustration and fear. His eyes seemed to glow, even in the colorless world of the ghost roads. With a grunt, he shrugged out of his heavy duster and grabbed Buffy’s wrist.
“Don’t untie this,” he said, as he knotted one sleeve around her wrist. “And don’t let it get untied.”
With spirits whipping around, lunging in for an attack, only to be rebuffed, Angel wrapped the bottom edge of his coat around his own wrist and held on to it with both hands. He sat on the path and gazed up at Buffy.
She shivered as he looked at her, for he looked like little more than a wraith himself. When he’d sat down on the path, the limbo mists had moved in, and now they wreathed Angel’s head as though he himself were a ghost. Only those blazing yellow eyes gave him away.
“If you have to go any farther than the length of this coat,” Angel said, staring into her eyes, “then we leave. The world is hanging in the balance, Buffy. I don’t want to leave Oz behind either, but if we don’t find the heir, it’ll just mean he was the first one to go, and the rest of us won’t last much longer.”
Ghost Roads Page 2
