Ghost Roads

by Christopher Golden

  Xander tapped his shoulder. “Stones against the window. Always a winner.”

  Cordelia rolled her eyes. “You have my cell phone number.”

  “And my e-mail address,” Willow added. She frowned. “You know, we would have saved a lot of time if the Gatekeeper had been jacked in. A guy like that, you think he would be connected to all kinds of UFO sites and things like that. To check for stuff to bind and talk to people like, well, Buffy. Like those three hackers on the X-Files.”

  “We’ll be sure to tell the heir to get a modem,” Xander said solemnly. “When our Slayer brings him home.”

  “Indeed.” Giles smiled grimly. “In fact, I’ll take him down to the computer store myself.”

  “That’ll be useful,” Xander riffed.

  * * *

  After Giles took the three home, he drove to the mansion and stood in the sunken garden. He shuddered in the night air; a frisson of suppressed memory skittered up his spine. Here he had nearly been tortured to death; here he had been tricked into believing that Jenny had come back from the grave for him. It was a wicked, terrible place for Giles.

  And yet, if she needed him to, he would go to Hell itself for Buffy. He was her Watcher; he owed no one greater allegiance. He had no more sacred duty. And yet . . .

  And yet, he hated this place.

  He stood for a moment, remembering, watching. There was no one here but the dead. Not even the dead.

  He turned to go.

  And he was so startled by what he saw that he fell backward, smacking against the ruined fountain in the courtyard.

  The moon loomed on the horizon twenty times its usual size, and it glowed bloodred. Its beams cast a crimson glow over his hands, the water in the fountain, the small white flowers on the deerweed that had sprouted between the cracks in the cement.

  In the distance, thunder rumbled, sucking in all the noise of the night—the rasping of crickets, the query of an owl—and then expelled it in one large sigh.

  The air jittered. It trembled. He could feel the tension on his fingertips, along the nerve endings of his body. It was like a mild electric shock; a psychic might define it as a premonition. It was the most stunning omen he had ever witnessed. A portent of horrible things to come.

  Giles was shaken to the core of his being.

  Something was going to happen soon.

  Giles broke out in a sweat.

  He had to find Buffy. He had to find her fast.

  * * *

  Willow thought she had stayed awake, until she bolted upright in her bed and whispered, “Buffy?” Her heart pounded furiously; for a moment she was afraid she might have a heart attack.

  “I’m too young,” she whispered, catching her breath.

  She leaped out of bed, sending stuffed animals flying, and checked her e-mail. Nothing.

  She lay back down.

  But sleep would not come.

  * * *

  Xander heard someone shuffling around in the kitchen. He figured it was his mom, who had this weird sleepwalking-eating thing. Sometimes she’d sit at the kitchen table and devour a quart of Dreyer’s ice cream, and not even realize. You could talk to her and she wouldn’t remember the conversation. You could get her to sign your report card, no questions asked.

  So, weird as it was, it had its compensations.

  Now, however, he knew it wasn’t his mother.

  Yet something was in the kitchen.

  Steeling himself, Xander crept out of his room and made it down the hall. He took a breath and flicked on the lights.

  Absolutely nothing was out of place. And yet, he had the strong, sure sense that any second, the entire place might blow sky-high. It was like those stories you read about Vietnam, where the guy steps on the land mine and knows that if he steps off, he’s hamburger. So he stands there, not moving, sweating.

  Xander stood there, not moving, sweating.

  Finally he found the breath to whisper, “Something’s happening.”

  * * *

  Cordelia woke up and said, “Maxie, come here.” She stroked her coverlet a couple times, then patted it.

  “Maxie.”

  Then she remembered that her Persian cat, Maxie, had died when she was seven.

  She caught her breath, totally creeped, and thought about calling Xander. She wanted very badly to call Xander.

  Her cell phone, lying on her pillow beside her head, trilled once. She depressed the SEND key and whispered, “Giles?”

  “What the hell is going on?”

  It was Xander.

  Cordelia answered shakily, “I think it’s the end of the world.”

  “I think I missed the announcement,” Xander replied grimly.

  Cordelia didn’t even smile.

  * * *

  In her holding area, Joyce Summers dreamed of a man she had never met, a man who loved her and would take care of her and Buffy. He kissed her once, deeply, and then he whispered, “I will see you in Paradise.”

  Her eyes popped open. She smelled the smoke and the filth, but she knew the dream had been, in some way, very real.

  She did not smile, but she took heart.

  * * *

  Antoinette Regnier looked up at the ceiling, which was crisscrossed with prismatic light, and touched the wrist of her son. His breath came in labored gasps; he wheezed each time deep in his throat. And yet, the ceiling was layered with auras of colored lights.

  Then a shadow fell across the lights and blotted them out, like a piece of black cardboard laid over glitter and lace.

  “Maman, je t’aime,” Jean-marc whispered.

  “My son, what does it mean?” she asked him.

  “That love endures,” he replied. Then, to Antoinette’s horror, he slipped into unconsciousness.

  “Help us,” Antoinette Regnier whispered, but she was not certain to whom she spoke, or prayed.

  Chapter 15

  IT HAD TAKEN DAYS, BUT brother Sima and brother Sergei had managed to circumnavigate the protective field that both defended the Gatehouse and made it invisible to outsiders. While their fellow acolytes made repeated attempts at entering the house, drawing the Gatekeeper’s attention, they had studied every inch of that barrier in search of a weakness.

  They had found none. The Gatekeeper’s magick was strong. However, they had been able to pinpoint the spot on that barrier that was most vulnerable. It was there that they now focused their attention.

  Over the centuries, the city of Boston had been built up around the Gatehouse. On Beacon Hill there wasn’t a square inch that had not been overtaken by those wealthy enough to live in one of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods. From the street the house was invisible. To passersby, it would seem as though the brownstones on either side of the manse stood just a few feet apart from each other. Even to the residents of those buildings, that would seem to be the case.

  It was magick of the highest order, and it must have taken decades to weave. But once you knew the house was there, it was a simple matter to focus on it.

  The twin magicians, Sima and Sergei, had searched the perimeter and found that the rear of the Gatehouse also faced a building. Or, to be more precise, it faced the rear of a building on the next block. It was nearly impossible to reach the Gatehouse from behind.

  Unless you were willing to jump from the adjacent building, which was four stories tall.

  Sergei and Sima were minor magicians, but the twins were quite powerful when they worked together. They could not fly. They could not even levitate. But they could slow their descent.

  Teetering at the edge of the roof behind the Gatehouse, the twins searched each other’s blue eyes for a trace of the fear each of them felt. They reached out to join hands, glanced down at the twenty feet of lawn between this building and the Gatehouse . . . and then they jumped.

  Both men wanted to scream, but neither of them did. They fell in silence, eyes closed, concentrating as best they could and squeezing each other’s hand tightly. For two heartbeats they
plummeted toward the ground like stone. Then they began to slow.

  A moment later they hit the ground, let their knees buckle, then tucked and rolled across the grass. It had been a hard landing, but nothing like what it might have been.

  Both were dressed in dark blue jeans and black T-shirts. Both wore heavy black boots. They were Sons of Entropy, true. But before that, they were brothers. They were family. Slowly and carefully, they approached the rear door that led into the basement and cold cellar of the old house. The Gatekeeper’s magickal barrier rippled the air roughly three feet away from the door.

  “You have it?” Sima asked his brother.

  “Da,” Sergei replied, reaching behind his back to withdraw a long, ornate dagger from a pack attached to his belt.

  It was called the Blade of Dusk, the name derived from a myth which said that the ensorcelled dagger could cut so finely that it could cleave day from night, light from darkness. The Blade of Dusk had been a gift to their grandfather from II Maestro, and the twins had never removed it from their home before this mission.

  Sergei gripped the dagger in his left hand. Sima wrapped his fingers around his brother’s on the hilt. Together, they moved the Blade of Dusk toward the magickal barrier, at precisely the spot where the door appeared on the Gatehouse.

  They began to cut. They were slow and methodical about it, and the dagger cut cleanly—so cleanly, in fact, that the Gatekeeper would never realize that his sanctum had been violated. That was the purpose of Sima and Sergei’s presence here. The magick brought to bear on the house previously had been far more powerful than this, but it had been like a battering ram, drawing the Gatekeeper’s attention, and his wrath. Though he was ailing, his magick was still powerful. And they faced more than his own magick; they faced the power invested into the Gatehouse by the Regnier line for hundreds of years. The house itself defied them.

  But not this time. This was an attack so precise, so minute, that the Gatehouse itself would not notice, nor the Gatekeeper. At that very moment, he was being drawn into action to repel an attack on the front of the house, an attack that was meant to draw attention from Sima and Sergei and their Blade of Dusk.

  The blade cut. The barrier was sliced open cleanly. Sima was able to slip his hand through and draw the barrier aside as though it were a velvet curtain. A moment later, Sergei followed. Almost immediately, the barrier began to knit itself anew behind them, but it did not matter. The twins had another use in mind for the Blade of Dusk.

  Soon the Gatekeeper would be dead, and the Gatehouse would belong to the Sons of Entropy. At last.

  The back door of the house was not even locked. Sima turned the knob and pushed it open, and Sergei stared at him with wide eyes a moment before stepping over the threshold and into the basement of the Gatehouse.

  “He has placed too much faith in magick,” Sima whispered as he followed his brother into the house.

  The door slammed behind them with a resounding crack. Its three deadbolts slid into place themselves. The twins glanced anxiously at each other and spun around, their eyes sweeping the sterile room, taking in the stone foundation and the walls of old shelving and wine racks. Sergei waved the Blade of Dusk in front of him wildly, slashing at the air.

  From the darkened steps, a voice.

  “Too much faith in magick?” it asked, repeating Sima’s own words.

  Blue light flared around the figure, fighting back the darkness of the cellar and revealing the Gatekeeper. His entire body rippled with energy and he seemed to float above the ground, bathed in that ethereal, electric blue.

  “Perhaps I have,” the Gatekeeper said. “But then, so have you.”

  Jean-Marc Regnier reached out a hand and blue electricity crackled from it, tendrils leaping across the room and snatching the Blade of Dusk from Sergei’s hand. As Sima watched, the dagger seemed to dance in that magickal light as it carved his brother’s body and cut out his heart.

  Sergei’s corpse hit the stone floor with a wet slap, and Sima screamed in grief and terror as his brother’s blood began to flow. He turned his wide-eyed stare to the Gatekeeper.

  Blue fire blazed up around the Gatekeeper, his body bathed in it, and he roared at Sima like a ravenous lion.

  “Go!” he screamed. “Run! Tell your black-hearted master that the Gatekeeper lives—no, thrives! And that I will cut out the heart of any man who dares invade my home!”

  The light winked out, draping the cellar in darkness again. Sima scrambled for the back door, his soles slipping in his brother’s blood. He found the door, threw the locks, and ran out onto the back lawn, through the protective barrier around the house. Terrified, he made his way around to the front, where he knew he would receive only the disgusted looks of his superiors, if not some physical censure for his failure.

  He didn’t care. As long as he didn’t have to go back inside that house.

  * * *

  On the cellar steps, Jean-Marc Regnier reached up with a quivering hand and threw on the lights. He was as old as he had ever been. His skin drooped on his bones, his hair was falling out, his vision was nearly gone.

  The Sons of Entropy had thought him on the brink of death. While that was not true, it was not far from the truth. Only more and more frequent immersions in the Cauldron of Bran the Blessed kept him from dying.

  With the Blade of Dusk grasped firmly in his left hand—yet another trinket for his collection—Jean-Marc began to crawl painfully up the cellar steps. His mother would have filled the Cauldron with warm water.

  All he had to do was make it up to the second floor, and into that warm, healing bath. And he was confident that he would make it.

  This time.

  * * *

  Over the long years since the Florentine Villa had been violently taken from the Regnier family, the vast subcellar had been used for many dark purposes: torture chamber, prison, slaughterhouse. On this night, it had become all three.

  II Maestro smiled thinly, to show his acolytes his confidence. But it was a sham, or very near it. Only these few had been allowed to descend for the ritual, thirteen of his most trusted acolytes. For none of them knew the true extent of his plan. Like the fools in Vienna, however, they would soon begin to guess. And those here in the cellar—those who heard the voice of his dark lord Belphegor—anonymous to them, as he had ordered—and the promises that II Maestro made to the demon—would know after this ritual that he worshiped more than chaos. He worshiped Hell itself.

  “I thirst,” his demon master hissed from beyond the putrid colored swirls of light that pulsed within the breach that had opened in the room. “Another life, my servant. Thirteen blades for thirteen innocents. Give me the life that I crave.”

  Several of the acolytes seemed to grow anxious at this demand. II Maestro would not hear of it. This ritual would serve several purposes for him, not the least of which was to lend him some of Belphegor’s power. But it would also appease the demon, at least for a short time, so that his acolytes in America could draw the Slayer back into their clutches.

  Only the Slayer’s blood would stop Belphegor from taking Micaela’s. II Maestro did not want his daughter to die. It had occurred to him briefly that if she did, indeed, end up a sacrifice to the demon, he might be to blame. But only briefly. What the demon demanded, he would have.

  Several of the gathered acolytes brought the next victim to the altar. He was a young boy, perhaps fifteen. He was disoriented because of the elixir Brother Edwin had mixed for them, but when the boy saw the altar, and the acolytes gathered in their ceremonial robes, and the daggers . . . he started to scream.

  The screaming continued as they chained him to the altar.

  II Maestro raised a hand and motioned for Brother François to take his turn. To raise his dagger. This was only the second of the night’s sacrifices, and it was taking too long. Brother François looked at the writhing boy and then glanced uneasily at II Maestro. He narrowed his eyes and glared at the acolyte, and Brother François reacted as
though he had been struck.

  Tentatively, he moved toward the altar and raised his left hand, which held the ornate dagger. He gripped the hilt with both hands and lifted it above the struggling boy’s chest.

  Brother François raised the dagger a bit higher, closed his eyes a moment, and then forced himself to open them again. The way the screaming boy was moving, he would never find the young man’s heart without focusing his attention.

  “In chaos’ name,” he said softly.

  Eyes on the boy’s chest, Brother François swung the dagger down.

  Just about then, there was the sharp clink of something clattering to the floor.

  “Stop!” II Maestro commanded.

  With a silent breath of prayer, François aborted his attack. He glanced up at II Maestro for instructions, but his master was not paying attention to him. Instead, the white-haired man had laid his head back and closed his eyes. His arms were held out at his sides.

  Almost by reflex, Brother François said, “Maestro?”

  The white-haired sorcerer’s eyes opened. With a broad smile, he glanced around at the gathered acolytes.

  “What is it, slave of my heart?” whispered the horrid voice from the breach.

  The voice of chaos, they had been told. But François knew the voice of a demon when he heard it.

  II Maestro laughed. “My wondrous dark master,” he intoned. “Our enemies have been delivered unto us. And now . . .”

  He raised his hands and uttered a single word of Latin, and suddenly a dozen torches at distant locations on the walls of the subcellar ignited simultaneously. Firelight bathed the room.

  “The Slayer stands revealed,” II Maestro said.

  * * *

  “Damn!” Buffy snapped. There was a hole in her pocket, and her rose quartz had fallen through it to the ground.

  The jig was most definitely up.

  Behind the nasty-looking breach, the dark thing on the other side began to laugh. The sound alone made Buffy want to throw up. For some reason, whatever it was couldn’t come through. She wanted it to stay that way.