The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book Three - SONS of ENTROPY

by Christopher Golden

  The Slayer was clearly shocked.

  “What the hell?” she blurted.

  He grinned at her. “Were you about to take me to task for abandoning you at the labyrinth?”

  She shook her head. “No. I was about to take you apart.”

  “Ah, well. That doesn’t appear possible for the moment.” He gestured to the door. “I think they’ve probably all gone to sleep. Or something.”

  At that very moment, something rammed against the heavy metal door, almost dislodging the sarcophagus wedged against it.

  Buffy looked questioningly at him as she slammed her body against the sarcophagus. To Ethan’s astonishment, it moved under her weight.

  “Oh?” she asked. “Asleep, you say?”

  “Or not.” He moved quickly away. “I’ll just, um, check outside for strays.”

  “Ethan, you’re such a coward,” she yelled at him.

  The crypt resounded with pounding as something tried to get out. Ethan judged it best not to bother with a clever riposte, and left the crypt.

  The most extraordinary thing happened in that moment. A Wendigo capered across the cemetery, its huge, hairy white body a blur of movement as it darted from headstone to headstone. Then, as if it were a vampire exposed to sunlight, it burst into a flash of light. But instead of burning to cinders, the flash subsided, leaving the Wendigo’s image on the eye like the remnants of a camera’s flash. For a moment its transparent image hovered in the air, and then it disappeared.

  Ethan stood stock-still. Then he clucked his tongue and said, “Very good, Ethan,” and continued on.

  All the while, the pounding in the crypt continued, a sort of counterpoint to his footsteps as he took himself off. He wondered about that; he sincerely did.

  Across town, Giles’s car sat in Angel’s driveway and would not start.

  Neither would Oz’s van.

  Giles got out and walked around to the front of his car, explaining that he knew it better and was thus more likely to repair it quickly.

  Micaela sighed deeply. She didn’t like this.

  Not at all.

  Deep within the buried church that had once housed the vampire called the Master, Belphegor pressed against the breach and felt the thinnest of membranes between it and freedom. Someone had cast a spell that was holding back its minions down here in the fragrant, rotting earth. Above, those who had already managed to go aboveground were being destroyed.

  A pity, since the invaders of this realm numbered ten to one in favor of Hell-spawned demons. The Otherworld was yielding up her population at a much less prodigious rate.

  Hell was coming to this little town of Sunnydale, and to the world.

  For some, the spell would stop them.

  But not for Belphegor.

  It pushed against the membrane. It required just a little more strength, a small amount of power more than it currently possessed. For want of just a little energy, it was still imprisoned in Hell.

  If it had the blood of a powerful being, it would be out: the blood of the Slayer would have been necessary before, when the barriers were still fully formed. But now they were so thin that another might be made to take the Slayer’s place. The blood of a master sorcerer might do. Or, if necessary, even that of one with the potential to master the black arts.

  Fulcanelli’s daughter was such a one.

  Still, the best would be a Slayer.

  Ah, yes, a Slayer.

  It couldn’t help but laugh.

  For a Slayer stood on guard less than a quarter of a kilometer away.

  “My dear,” he whispered, “can you hear me?”

  In the crypt, Buffy froze. Her blood turned to ice in her veins.

  Belphegor was in Sunnydale.

  The banging on the door stopped. Panting, she took a step away.

  “My dear?”

  She breathed in, out, didn’t know what to say. A hundred smart-ass remarks died on her lips. From the part in her hair to her toenails, she was terrified.

  “All will soon be lost, Slayer, and you will die,” it said. “But if you come to me willingly, I will be merciful.”

  “That’s what they always say, and then they pull the trapdoor lever,” she said, fighting to stay calm.

  “It is not a joking matter,” Lord Belphegor insisted. “There is no smile on the face of one who dies in agony.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not planning on dying any time soon.”

  “Mark it well, my dear,” Belphegor told her. “This day is your last.”

  There was a terrible ripping noise far beyond the door. Maybe that was the sound of the demon lord ripping free of the breach, and maybe some demon babe had caught her Morticia Addams dress on a nail.

  And maybe it was the sound that the fissure made as it separated the floor beneath her feet, each half of the dirty concrete splitting apart to reveal sulfurous flames that shot up like party noisemakers and singed Buffy’s thighs.

  “Hell is opening,” Belphegor thundered. “Welcome us.”

  Chapter

  12

  AS HIS FOLLOWERS WERE PICKED OFF BY THE FALSE Gatekeeper, Giacomo Fulcanelli smiled grimly and waited for just the right moment to end things. For all the power in that house, it would fall to him this very evening. Its exterior shifted even as he looked at it; a Victorian-style turret on the upper left face of the house simply disappeared, subsumed into the massive structure.

  On the lawn, several of his acolytes screamed. Fulcanelli raised his eyebrows.

  Rank amateurs, he thought.

  Their enemy was not the Gatekeeper. That much he had ascertained only moments after his arrival. He’d traveled the ghost roads, and made his trip even shorter by crossing over, just for a moment, into the Otherworld. He had never done that before, and there had been a chance that he might be trapped, but with the barriers so thin, it was a chance he’d been forced to take.

  After all, if he did not resolve this situation quickly, Lord Belphegor might not have any need of him.

  He couldn’t allow that.

  Not when the battle was so nearly won. Fulcanelli was displeased with the way things had gone thus far. At every step, it seemed he had been betrayed. By the vampires, Spike and Drusilla, by his acolyte Albert, by Claude and Lupo and so many others, and worst of all, by the girl he had raised as his own daughter. The defeats had been far too frequent.

  He had failed to offer up the Slayer’s life to Lord Belphegor. Thus, the barriers between Earth and dimensions that bordered it, specifically Hell and the Otherworld, in this case, remained intact. Belphegor would have eaten his heart already, if not for the fact that Fulcanelli’s constant efforts had thinned the barriers significantly.

  The walls between Hell and the Otherworld and the ghost roads had, for all intents and purposes, fallen. Thus, the demons and monsters of those realms were using the ghost roads to try to gain access to Earth just as their brothers were battering at the walls between worlds.

  It was chaos.

  It was beautiful.

  Belphegor would be pleased. Still, Fulcanelli had not kept up his end of the bargain. Without the Slayer’s blood, his own life was forfeit if Belphegor should breach the veil between Hell and Earth. If the sorcerer didn’t do something about it first. He had to find a way to make it up to his demonic master. Some way to prove his power, and his value.

  Sunnydale had proven a more difficult battlefront than he’d expected. With the treason of some of his most trusted acolytes, the escape of the Slayer’s mother, and the death of the Minotaur, Fulcanelli had sought desperately for a way to please Belphegor.

  And now he’d found it.

  Jean-Marc Regnier, the Gatekeeper, was dead. But somehow this boy Xander, a friend of the Slayer’s, had been invested with the power of the Gatekeeper. The war in Sunnydale was under way, and would be won or lost based upon factors that had nothing to do with whether or not Fulcanelli was present.

  The war in Boston, however, raged on. Somehow, this boy who had be
come the Gatekeeper had managed, thus far, to hold together the house and to help hold back the creatures of the Otherworld trying to break free. It was extraordinary, certainly.

  Fulcanelli smiled.

  It was dark now, and a fire burned on the front lawn that moments earlier had been one of his acolytes.

  It didn’t matter.

  A black panther bounded out the front door and down the steps, past the burning man, and fled out into the Boston night to prey on some unsuspecting civilian.

  Fulcanelli chuckled.

  The Harris boy was doing well. He had managed to fulfill the job of the Gatekeeper. But barely. And thus far, aside from a handful of moderately adept acolytes, some of the last, really, he had been presented with no opposition.

  That was about to change.

  It was all about to change.

  With a whispered prayer to all the demons in Hell, Giacomo Fulcanelli walked toward the entrance of the Gatehouse, intent upon winning the favor of Lord Belphegor once more.

  Before it was too late.

  “Why doesn’t he do something?” Cordelia shouted across the huge marble foyer of the Gatehouse. The white-haired old man with the withered left hand just stood there with some kind of force field around him.

  “Oh, thanks for giving him the idea, Cordy,” Xander muttered, as the man started walking quite calmly toward the front of the house.

  “Try Giles again,” Xander added anxiously.

  Willow ran to grab the phone, but even as she dialed, she figured it was useless. All their calls had been blocked. There was no way to tell the home team what was going on here. They probably thought this wizard guy was still back there.

  Cordelia said to her hero, “Xander, just let him have it.”

  Xander faltered. He’d seemed more at ease, more confident, since he was infused with the power and knowledge of the Gatekeeper. Now he seemed like the old Xander again.

  “Let him have what?” he cried.

  “It!” Cordelia shouted at him, barely under control herself.

  They were all terrified of this man. Willow could see that. Even the ghost woman who hovered only a few feet away. And she was already dead. When people who were already dead were afraid, okay, maybe it was time for that golden parachute.

  Problem was, Xander couldn’t retire. Not and have any world left to retire to. Not unless Buffy and Giles had something up their sleeves back in Sunnydale that they hadn’t told anyone about. Which would be nice, especially since they didn’t know the sitch. So that was more like wishful thinking as far as Willow was concerned.

  Nope. Until they knew different, they had to assume that it all rested on Xander’s shoulders.

  And Willow had always thought he had kind of skinny shoulders.

  Fulcanelli could see the panic on the boy’s face as he walked steadily toward the steps. Rather than smiling, however, his face contorted with sudden disgust. Pleasing as victory was, this way of getting it was wrong. It was not supposed to happen this way. He had spent centuries battling the Regnier family, long before there was even a Gatekeeper. First Richard, and later Henri, and Jean-Marc. He had destroyed each of them, in a way, and scarred them as often and as deeply as possible.

  They were the greatest of his enemies, and as such, their destruction had afforded him the utmost pleasure. Now he was poised to take away the greatest accomplishment the Regnier family had ever achieved, and not a single Regnier was present to appreciate the indignity of it.

  It was wrong.

  But Fulcanelli didn’t have the luxury of worrying overmuch about such things. The end of the world would soon be at hand. If he wanted to be saved from the agonies of Hell, he would need to prove himself once more.

  At the front steps of the Gatehouse, three more acolytes made a final, fatal attempt to gain entrance. The ground erupted around them, swallowing two of them whole. The third was electrified by a bolt of blue light that streaked from the Harris boy’s hands and jolted him where he stood. He sizzled, and then seemed to wink out of existence like the image on a television as it is turned off.

  The teenage boy playing Gatekeeper looked as though he might be physically ill.

  There were nine acolytes left alive here in Boston. As one, they swept toward the front of the house. A suicidal assault, and one they would not even have dared attempt if their master hadn’t been present.

  “Stop!” Fulcanelli shouted.

  The nine men froze. They turned to regard him, fear on some of their faces, and hope on others. These few were so far down the chain of command that he recognized only a handful of faces, and those he could not put names to.

  “Go,” he said, waving his hands.

  “Maestro?” one of them asked, a Russian man who stepped forward from the group.

  “Leave!” Fulcanelli boomed. “You’re doing nothing here but embarrassing me. Stay another second and I’ll kill you myself!”

  He thought they might argue, or at least ask what would happen if they left. They had been made promises after all. They were to be the kings of chaos, or at least, that’s what he had told them. But faced with the horror of what had happened to the others they had arrived with, and given a few seconds to consider it, they did what he’d expected of them.

  They fled.

  Fulcanelli watched them go, considered destroying them as they ran from the premises, and then thought better of it. They were resources, and until the day was done, until the world had ended or his life had, he wanted to conserve what little he had left by way of resources.

  Instead, he turned to look up at the dark-haired young man who stood in the open door of the Gatehouse.

  “I know who you are!” cried the boy, this new, faux Gatekeeper.

  Fulcanelli laughed. “Yes, young fool. And I know who you are not! You could save yourself a great deal of suffering, you realize, if you were to simply walk away. Leave the house and everything in it to me. I give you your life. Your friends as well. You can all go.”

  Xander’s eyes went wide. He glanced around at Willow and Cordelia. Cordy looked at him hopefully, but Willow only frowned, chewing her lower lip.

  “I’ll do what I can to help,” she said.

  That was all the answer Xander needed, and really, he hadn’t even needed that. He knew what hung in the balance here.

  Xander looked at the old man. Deceptively old. He felt the house around him, felt it breathing, felt the power of the Gatehouse and the magick and knowledge of the Gatekeepers within him. Sorcerous energy crackled around his fingers and thrummed in his every muscle. His face felt flushed and his skin itched as though he had a sunburn.

  It was power. Power like he’d never even dreamed about.

  But he wasn’t the Gatekeeper, and he never would be. He was Xander Harris, from Sunnydale, California. And he was here with his girlfriend and his best friend, both of whom now looked to him for heroics and strength in a way that they never had before.

  He was just Xander.

  But that would have to be enough.

  “Xander!” Willow screamed, her hands contorting even as she started to babble, trying to weave some kind of protection spell, he figured.

  Willow was valiant, but she would be too late. She was only a minor spellcaster, and Xander had barely a moment to react. Fulcanelli must have sensed his resolve, he reasoned, for the sorcerer was on the attack. Tendrils of a sickly orange magickal light sparked out at him, at the house itself. The stairs crumbled beneath his feet and Xander hopped backward across the threshold.

  A tendril of magick touched his face, and Xander shouted.

  Then the pain was gone. Almost by instinct, he had erected a circle of protection around himself, buzzing with a purple light that reminded him of the bug zapper in his parents’ backyard. Blinking, stunned that he wasn’t dead, Xander rose quickly and glanced around. He stretched out his arms and spread the protective field to include Willow and Cordelia, even as Willow herself continued to chant spells, doing all she could to back
him up.

  He didn’t bother with Antoinette Regnier. As a ghost, she was already dead.

  Then he sneered angrily and stepped up to the open door again.

  He saw Fulcanelli’s white eyebrows rise at the sight of him, and Xander smiled. Tougher than I look, old man, he thought. He raised both hands, palm up, as though he had been born to perform magick. In his left hand, a sphere of white energy began to form. A kind of mist leaked off it, filling the room like steam in a shower. In his right hand, magick swirled, and then solidified. It looked almost real there, in his hand, but it was pure sorcery.

  A sword.

  Fulcanelli took three steps toward the house.

  “Come, then, boy,” Il Maestro said darkly. “Come and die, and then all of Hell will be my reward.”

  Cordelia and Willow, safe behind the protective shield he’d given them, moved farther back toward the massive, double-wide stairs. Willow looked frustrated, and Xander knew why. She wanted so badly to help, and there was nothing she could do. The ghost of Antoinette Regnier hung in the air by Xander, silently lending him her strength and belief, just as Cordy and Willow did.

  Xander was completely still. “You want Hell? You can have it, you evil son of a . . .”

  He hurled the sphere of white, steaming light with his right hand. It struck Fulcanelli full in the face, and the sorcerer made no attempt at all to stop it. When it struck his flesh, it burst and spread white fire across his features. Fulcanelli screamed. His face seemed to melt and his features to run in gobs of blazing fat down onto his chest.

  For a moment, Xander froze. He’d done it. And it had been easy. Fulcanelli was one of the most powerful sorcerers in the history of the world, and just like that, he’d . . .

  “Xander, my God!” Cordelia cried.

  “What is it?” Willow asked, horrified.

  Well, Xander thought, maybe not just like that.

  Fulcanelli had stopped screaming. He reached up with his good right hand and peeled away the ravaged flesh that had once been his face. Beneath it, his face was inhuman, yellow as parchment and hard as bone, pitted and run through with stiff, leathery folds.