“See?” Willow said. “Anya and I will find Xander, and then make with the research while you’re gone.”
“I’m planning another heart-to-heart with our prisoner in there,” Spike said, indicating the fairy in the dining room.
Dawn’s voice was wheedling. “And I’ll study history.”
Seeing herself completely outnumbered, Buffy gave in.
* * *
Lying back in the dental chair, Buffy’s mouth was open wider than she ever remembered having to open it, as wide as the mouth of the Tyrloch demon she’d spiked down the throat. She looked up into Dr. Wilson’s intent dark face. “Is iss oing to take ong?” Buffy asked, speaking around the pick and mirror the dentist was using to examine her tooth.
“Patience, child,” Dr. Wilson said. “I’ve got to see what’s goin’ on here first.” She poked and prodded, and Buffy had to force herself not to squirm. Dr. Wilson made a clucking sound and shook her head, making her cornrowed braids swing back and forth. “You’re lucky you didn’t let this go on any longer or we might be doing a root canal here. Sometimes that’s the only way to get rid of the problem. My mom always told me, ‘You take good care of your teeth, they take good care of you.’ Looks to me like you didn’t listen what your teeth were tryin’ to tell you.”
“An you fiss it?”
“ ’Course I can fix it,” the dentist said with a laugh. “Take me an hour, maybe hour and a half.”
Buffy tried to sit up and protest. Dr. Wilson pushed her back down. “We don’t take care of this now, you’ll be back for three, maybe four hours of work—and that won’t be free. You take your choice.”
Buffy forced herself to relax back into the chair. Though still mumbling through Dr. Wilson’s fingers, she tried to sound upbeat and cheerful. “Dus diss invov dwills an udder pointy odjex?”
Dr. Wilson raised one dark eyebrow. “You’re in a dentist’s office. When does that not involve pointy things?” She picked up a syringe with an extremely long needle on it. “You’ll feel a little pinch at first, but soon you’re gonna feel a whole lot better.”
Chapter Twenty-Two
By eight-thirty A.M. it was painfully clear that something had gone wrong for Xander. Far more painful than Anya’s injured wrist. Anya phoned their apartment first, but only the answering machine picked up. Next she opened the yellow pages and found the phone number for the donut shop Xander frequented. The counter girl who answered the telephone had only come on duty at eight A.M. The baker had been in the kitchen since three and had seen nothing. Anya pressed the girl anyway, describing Xander in excruciating detail until she finally offered to have the clerk from the graveyard shift call Anya.
Ten minutes later the phone rang and it was the night clerk. Anya again described her boyfriend and asked if the man had seen him. “Look, lady,” the clerk replied with a sigh, “Sunday morning’s a busy time, what with the churches getting donuts and refreshments for their fellowship hours and what have you. I musta had sixty customers between five and eight o’clock this morning. And that’s not even counting the cops who stop in for coffee and a chat over donuts. I seen plenty of young white guys today come into the shop, and yeah, one of ’em might have been your boyfriend, but that’s all I can say.”
Anya hung up, so distracted by worry that she forgot to thank the man or insincerely wish him a nice day. She sat down on the living-room couch surrounded by the remaining Scoobies, leaned forward with a sigh, and put her head in her hands. This made her bandaged wrist ache, and she was once again reminded of the frailty of these mortal bodies they all wore. “If anything’s happened to Xander—”
“If?” Spike’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “We’re long beyond if, aren’t we, pet? Might as well admit that Lover Boy’s gone missing. Maybe he found some other beautiful ex-demon and ran off with her.” He was in a dark mood after his most recent attempt at fairy interrogation had yielded nothing.
Willow, ever the comforter, moved over beside Anya and put an arm around her. “Don’t worry. We haven’t lost Xander yet.” Anya turned her head slightly to look at the red-haired girl. “Well,” Willow fumbled, “not permanently, anyway. And Xander’s pretty good at taking care of himself. He’s clocked years of field time with the Slayerettes.”
“You’re trying to comfort me,” said Anya. “But you’ve got worry face. Your eyebrows, your forehead. You can’t hide worry face from me.”
“Maybe we should look for him,” Willow said. “We could start at the donut shop if you like. I’ll go with you, Anya.”
“Me too,” Dawn said.
“No,” Spike, Anya, and Willow said in unison.
“You promised to study history,” Willow said.
“Buffy agreed to face her mental—not to mention financial—demons in the dentist’s chair. It’s only fair that you remain here and study,” Anya said.
“It’s settled then,” Willow said. “Spike can stay here with Dawn while she studies. Spike, you work on our little, uh, guest. I’ll go with Anya to find Xander. I’ll have to hack into the city plans when we get back.” She rolled her eyes. “The city council just re-encrypted them and put up a new firewall at their Web site.”
Dawn smiled. “So that should take you—what?—an extra ten minutes.”
Willow managed to look simultaneously embarrassed and proud. “Spike will be here in case Xander calls, and he can fill in Giles and Buffy when they get back.”
“And are we sure he went to the donut shop?” Dawn asked.
Anya waved a hand at the coffee table. “Look at his note.”
Willow picked it up. “It just says he went to get breakfast and that he’d be back by seven.”
“No, here, silly,” Anya said, pointing at the bottom of the paper.
Willow’s face wore a quizzical look. “The hugs and kisses? It’s just XOXOX. And then Xander.”
“But look at the Os. They’re little donuts,” Anya said. Everyone bent for a closer look.
“Huh,” Willow said. “Yup, definitely donuts.”
Anya gave them a smug smile. “You know what a sweet tooth Xander has.”
Willow looked wary. “Tooth? No tooth. We have enough teeth today.”
“Xander says I’m his favorite sweet in all the world. Though chocolate runs a close second.”
“Oh, please,” Spike said. “Would you just get on with it and go out and find the man? If I have to listen to any more of this I’ll go into a diabetic coma.”
* * *
Willow and Anya practically ran to the donut shop, scanning for any sign of Xander along the way. There were three customers waiting at the donut counter, none of them Xander. Anya knew even as she questioned them that they couldn’t have seen Xander, since they had just arrived, but desperation made her try anyway. She pulled out a picture of Xander and showed it around, but all of the customers and the counter girl shook their heads.
The two cops having donuts and coffee in the corner had not seen him either, and seemed spectacularly uninterested. Perhaps, as officers in Sunnydale, they had learned to stay calm, no matter the situation. One of them even had the nerve to chuckle. “Jeez, lady. Do you know how many missing persons reports we get? And your boyfriend’s been gone, what, a couple of hours? Gimme a break.” He shook his head.
“Okay,” Willow said in a reasonable voice, trying to calm the hysteria that seemed to be building in Anya. “He’s not here. This is no time to wig out. Where do we look next? Did you try the apartment?”
Anya nodded. “There was no answer. But he could have been taking a shower.”
Willow looked at the woman behind the counter. “Do you still have the number my friend gave you when she called this morning?” Willow showed her the picture of Xander again. “Please call if you see him.” Then she took Anya’s arm and steered her out of the donut shop and down the street.
“That must be it, right?” Anya said, desperately grasping at a simple explanation. They walked faster. “He was sweaty from the fight
last night and decided to go home to take a shower.”
“Maybe,” Willow said, but her voice sounded doubtful.
Anya wracked her mind for a better explanation. “What if he was in the shower and the ants attacked him?” She could hear the ragged edge in her voice. “He doesn’t like bugs. He almost got eaten by one.”
Their steps quickened and soon they were running again. When they reached the apartment, the door was open and Anya burst through it. In the kitchen, a man was bent over looking at something on the floor. “Xander!” she cried, and threw her arms around him. The man stood up and turned abruptly. Anya screamed. “You’re not Xander! Who are you and what have you done with him?”
Willow moved to Anya’s side and tried to calm her. The man backed away and pressed himself against the kitchen counter. “I, uh, think his name is Ernie,” Willow said, pointing to the name patch sewn onto the man’s uniform, right above the picture of a dead roach with a lightning bolt through it. Beneath the picture of the ex-bug were the words Pest-o-Zap.
“The manager let me in,” the man explained hurriedly. “She said it would be all right. I ain’t seen your husband, lady.”
“He . . . he hasn’t been here?” Anya was surprised by the man’s error, but she found she didn’t really want to correct him. “Let’s check around anyway,” she urged. They made a quick, thorough sweep of the apartment, even looking into cupboards and under furniture, but there was no sign that Xander had been there since the evening before. They returned to the kitchen where Ernie was spraying a mist of liquid onto the floor from a pressurized bottle that hung at his side.
“Make them go away,” Anya said, pointing at the ants that were still crawling across the counters and floor. “My . . . Xander doesn’t like bugs. Can you get rid of them? Please kill them all.”
Ernie wiped a hand across his cheek, leaving a greasy smudge on it. “Sure I can kill them. But this is just a bandage here,” he said, pointing to the liquid insecticide. “To really get rid of the problem, you gotta go to the source of the infestation. Could be in the basement, could be in the wall, maybe somewhere outside. May have to look around a bit, but don’t worry, I’ll find it. And when I do,” he gave a little squirt from the bottle of pressurized poison, “they’re dead.”
“Okay. No Xander here. We move on,” Willow told Anya. “Is there . . . is there anyone you can call?”
Anya searched through a kitchen drawer and fished out a piece of paper. “This is a list of some of Xander’s coworkers. Perhaps they’ve seen him.”
Willow nodded. “Definitely worth a try.”
Twenty frustrating minutes of calls yielded no new clues to Xander’s whereabouts. “You think he might have, you know, gone into the sewers or maybe back to Weatherly Park?” Willow asked.
Anya shook her head firmly. “There’s no I in team. Xander wouldn’t go there without us—and certainly not without bringing us breakfast first.”
“Good point,” Willow admitted. “Then I’m guessing there must be some clue along the way between the donut shop and Buffy’s house.”
“Clues,” Anya mused. “Yes, there must be something. All right, let’s go.” She turned swiftly to the exterminator. “Thank you, Ernie. Please feel free to continue in your genocidal efforts with these insects until you’re completely successful.”
With that, she and Willow headed back to the Summers home on Revello Drive.
* * *
They walked back to Buffy’s house on the opposite side of the street from the one they’d taken on the way to the donut shop. They walked slowly this time, looking at every crack in the sidewalk, every fence in front of every house, each bush, patch of grass, tree, and pile of leaves. Anya saw the familiar pink box first, shoved beneath a bush about three feet away from the sidewalk. With her bandaged hand, she grabbed Willow’s wrist and pointed and saw her fellow Scooby swallow hard.
Willow’s forehead tensed and her eyes looked uncertain. “It doesn’t have to mean anything… really, you know, bad….” Her voice trailed off.
The girls knelt together on the grass beside the bush and pulled the box out from underneath. Anya felt something soft beneath her knee and lifted it up to find a piece of smashed cruller.
“Uh-oh,” Willow said. She lifted her left hand from the ground and turned it over to show Anya a wooden cross. Holding her breath, Anya flipped open the box. It was empty except for a few smears of icing and red jelly filling and some topping sprinkles. And one perfectly formed, translucent, black-veined wing.
Anger and fear exploded inside Anya like an emotional hand grenade. “It can’t be. They can’t have Xander. It’s not fair.”
Willow bit her lip. “The other night—you know, when they attacked Dawn and Tara and me—they tried to carry away a puppy . . . and last night they almost got you.” She put a hand on Anya’s still-bandaged wrist. “Now it’s Xander.”
Cold fury surged through Anya’s veins, and she felt a thirst for vengeance stronger than any she had felt since becoming human. “We need to find those fairies,” she said in a subzero voice. “They have Xander. They need to die.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
Buffy and Giles returned to the house just minutes after Willow and Anya had stumbled through the door with the chilling news that Xander had been captured. In spite of her numb tooth and cheek, or perhaps because of it, Buffy suddenly felt ready to take on anything again. She and Giles found Spike, Anya, Willow, and Dawn gathered around the dining-room table, where their captive fairy lay. Willow had her laptop open in front of her, surfing the Web with a look of fierce determination. They had brewed the pot of coffee that Xander had set up, and each of them held a cup, with the exception of Dawn, who had hot chocolate.
Giles leaned back against the wall, holding his glasses in one hand and nibbling on the earpiece, while Willow and Anya described what they had found in their hunt for Xander.
Buffy paced while she listened. “And there was no other sign of Xander? Torn clothing, maybe?”
Willow’s eyebrows scrunched into a forehead frown. “Nothing but the empty donut box. And a cross. Definitely no blood or, you know, bodies or anything.”
Giles pursed his lips. “For whatever reason, they’ve most likely taken Xander to their lair.”
Spike got up and went into the kitchen and returned to the head of the dining table with a flyswat-ter. Dawn picked at a nonexistent speck on the table in front of her. “So if we’re sure that the fairies have Xander, how do we find them?”
“Got to get a bit more creative,” Spike said.
The five humans and one vampire gathered into a tight semicircle around Lucket.
“So how do we make him talk?” Dawn asked.
Willow gave her an impish smile. “We tie him down and spank him?” When everybody sent her strange looks, she added, “Xander would have understood that. What, doesn’t anybody here remember their Monty Python?”
“The best part’s Arthur and the Black Knight,” Spike said. “ ‘What are you going to do, bleed on me?’ ”
Anya nodded. “Xander and I like to play Castle Anthrax. Have you ever played Castle Anthrax? I’m usually Zoot. ‘Oh, wicked, bad, naughty Zoot!’ ”
Giles cleared his throat. “Yes, well, the brilliance of British comedy aside, perhaps we should actually get back to questioning the prisoner.”
Buffy nodded. “A wise doctor once told me—okay, it was actually today—that if a problem is bad enough you may have to get to the root of a problem to solve it. We need to figure out where all the fairies are.”
“Ernie the exterminator said it’s important to find the source of the infestation,” Anya said, absently rubbing her bandaged wrist.
The fairy growled unconvincingly and crossed its little arms across its tiny chest. Spike picked up the fly-swatter and slapped it against his palm, making sure that the fairy got a good view.
Buffy cut to the chase. “Your friends took one of our friends. We need information.”
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Anya sat in a chair and pulled it close to the table. “Tell me where my boyfriend is. Where did they take Xander?”
“To his death’d be my guess,” the winged creature scoffed in his mini-mafioso voice. “Should be no surprise to you. We’re exactly what you made us.”
“Wow,” Willow said. “Definitely some serious blame issues happening here. But what does Xander have to do with it?”
Lucket hissed. “After we bit the big one, so to speak, Queen Mabyana swore an oath to every fairy in our troop that if we ever bumped into that vengeance demon or the sorceress again, she’d take revenge on them and any of their friends. Send ’em to sleep with the fishes.”
“And you already killed the sorceress,” Dawn said.
Buffy glanced at Anya. “Sounds like Xander’s the worm on the hook.”
“Let’s get this straight,” Spike said. “Xander’s being held captive as bait, in order to get to Anya. Oh, that’s an original idea, init?”
“These fairies know how to set a trap. We’ll have to be careful.” Buffy hated stating the obvious. Her mind went into overdrive.
Anya stood, almost knocking her chair over. “We can’t just leave Xander there. They’ll kill him.”
Willow spoke up. “I know this will probably sound stupid, but maybe you could just apologize to the fairies and—”
“You’re right,” Anya said. “That does sound stupid.”
Buffy looked apologetically at her red-haired friend. “I have to agree with Anya, Will. We’re a couple of centuries—not to mention countless murders—past the time for apologies.”
Anya picked up a toothpick and waved it menacingly in front of the fairy’s face. “Where did they take Xander?”
Lucket shrugged. “How would I know? I’ve been here pinned to this board practically ever since we met in the park last night.”
Buffy’s hand slammed down on the table next to the fairy and her lips curled back in a dangerous look that was almost a snarl. “Enough with the cute. Just tell us where they would have taken him. Where’s Fairy Central?”
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