Immortal

by Christopher Golden

  Willow and Xander exchanged a glance.

  “My mother’s best friend’s mother died last summer. They sort of grew up together, so my mother had to go. She dragged me. The old lady was buried here,” Cordelia said disgustedly. “Right up over the hill.”

  Willow nodded slowly. “So there’s at least one recent burial.” Suddenly, she blinked and glanced up the hill. “Oz is taking a long time.”

  Xander looked at her, saw that she was alarmed, and felt a little concerned himself. “Let’s find out why,” he said.

  The three of them started up the rise. They made a direct course for the Hart crypt, and when they were within a dozen feet of the thing, Xander slowed, then reached out a hand to indicate that the girls should stop. He pointed at what had stopped him.

  The door to the crypt, a heavy thing of thick iron, stood open five or six inches.

  “You don’t think Oz . . .” Xander began, then let his words trail off.

  They were going to have to check inside. Or at least they would have, had Oz not appeared then, quite suddenly, from the deep shadows alongside the crypt. He poked his head around the corner and waved them on. Silently, he patted the outer wall of the crypt to show that they should stay close to it, just as he was doing.

  Willow followed right behind him, then Xander, and finally Cordelia. When they reached the back of the crypt, Oz leaned forward slightly and peered around the edge. He pulled his head back and motioned for Willow to do the same. When she pulled her head back, Xander didn’t like the look on her face. Not at all.

  But he looked anyway.

  Just down from the crest of the hill upon which the crypt sat, three figures moved through the shadows around a marble headstone with a roaring lion on top. Two of the three had shovels and were quickly unearthing whatever poor soul lay at the bottom of that grave.

  Xander pulled his head back, leaned against the cold stone of the crypt, and sighed.

  “I don’t need to look,” Cordelia whispered.

  “See, this is what makes Sunnydale different from other towns,” Xander said in a harsh, frustrated whisper. “You might get your random grave robbery in Denver or Tucson or Bismarck-freaking-North Dakota. But around here, it’s a spectator sport.”

  “Quiet,” Willow said, barely speaking at all, eyebrows raised for emphasis.

  “Fine, fine,” Xander sighed. “So what now?”

  “We go to the van, find a phone, and leave an anonymous tip for the police,” Cordelia said slowly, as though they might have trouble following her train of thought. “And I never leave my cell phone in my purse again.”

  “But, well, what if they’re gone?” Willow asked. “They’ll get away.”

  “And your plan would be what?” Cordelia snapped, a little too loud perhaps. “A little witchery? Maybe a little axe murder? These are criminals. That’s what the police are for.”

  “Maybe in other towns,” Oz said grimly.

  They all looked at him, but Oz was still looking around the corner at the grave robbers. Finally, he looked back. His eyes passed over Cordelia but lingered on Xander, then finally went to Willow.

  “I vote citizen’s arrest,” Oz told them.

  “That could be fun,” Xander reasoned. “It’s four against three. They have two guys and a girl, we have two guys, a girl, and a bulldog.”

  “If I do the math on that one, Harris, you’re in trouble,” Cordelia snarled.

  “Then I’d say I’m pretty much safe, wouldn’t you?”

  She glared at him but said nothing more.

  “This is just wrong,” Willow whispered, looking around the edge of the crypt. “We have to do something.”

  “Fine,” Xander said. “Let’s do it.”

  As one, Oz, Willow, and Xander moved out from behind the crypt and started down the slope. After a moment, Cordelia sighed and followed. At first, the grave robbers didn’t even notice them.

  “Hey!” Xander shouted. “You never heard of resting in peace?”

  He was feeling pretty pumped up at that moment. Between him and Oz, they’d done more than their share of vamp fighting, not to mention demons. And these were just grave robbers. At the very least, they had to be evenly matched. And it counted that they were the good guys, at least in his mind.

  But then the Asian girl standing behind the headstone looked over at him, and her face changed, became feral, eyes blazing yellow. She bared her fangs.

  “Okay!” Xander said, holding up his hands. “Have a great time, kids. We’ll just be moseying.”

  He started to back up, and the others with him. Then the female vamp slapped one of the males in the back of the head.

  “Kill them,” she said, sneering.

  The two vampires pulled themselves from the grave, dropped their shovels, and started to sprint after them.

  “I wanted to go home,” Cordelia reminded everyone.

  “Wishing you had,” Xander replied. “And that’s the last time we go with the werewolf ’s plan.”

  Then they were just running. They passed the crypt, and they could hear the vampires calling out, hooting, behind them. Having a grand old time, Xander thought. Meanwhile, we’re screwed. They didn’t really have any vampire-slaying weapons. That wasn’t what the whole grave-robbing investigation was about.

  Or so they’d believed.

  They’d never be able to get back to the van before the vamps caught up with them.

  Six feet past the crypt, Xander stopped, reached out, and grabbed Willow and Cordelia.

  “Turn around!” he snapped.

  “Failing to see that as a better plan,” Oz told him, remarkably calm as always.

  But Willow had already figured out what he wanted to do. She ran toward the open door to the crypt and shoved it with her shoulder. Xander was next to her a second later, and the iron scraped against the granite of the crypt itself. It took Oz’s additional weight, but they got it open enough to slip inside. Willow went first, then Cordelia, then Xander, and finally Oz.

  “Now, that’s a good idea!” Xander heard one of the vampires cry in delight as he and Oz put their full weight into closing the door. “This way, they don’t have to move you after we’ve had dinner.”

  The iron door squealed on the stone beneath, and it caught in the same position it had been in, six inches from closing. Xander stood back and gave it a hard kick, and it scraped a bit further, now open only four inches.

  A vampire’s hand thrust into the opening and grabbed Oz by the hair. He let out a shout of pain and batted at the hand. Xander was too busy trying to shoulder the door shut to help.

  Suddenly, Cordelia slapped a silver crucifix down on the soil-encrusted hand. The vampire outside shrieked and pulled his hand back, his flesh steaming.

  “Obliged,” Oz told her, then gritted his teeth and redoubled his efforts at Xander’s side as they tried to close the door.

  “Don’t leave home without it,” Cordelia said.

  “How ’bout some help, ladies?” Xander asked.

  Willow moved up next to them. Cordelia hesitated, but only for a moment. With the four of them working together, straining, they forced the door closed, iron grinding on granite. The latch caught, and they leaned against the door to catch their breath.

  The vampires slammed against the door from the outside. They tried the handle, but it wouldn’t open. It was locked.

  “Forget it, Niles,” one of them said. “They’re not going anywhere. It’s more important that we bring the body back to the Harbinger.”

  “Girl burned me,” the one called Niles complained in a whiny English accent.

  “You’ll get her another night,” the other replied. “But if you displease the Harbinger, she might feed you to those hatchlings.”

  “Oh, all right, then.”

  Inside the crypt, Xander, Willow, Cordelia, and Oz stared at one another in the almost complete darkness. There was a crack in the ceiling, perhaps earthquake damage from some years earlier, and moonlight leaked i
n from there and from a gap above the iron door. Xander realized that was why it was so hard to close. It must have settled, somehow, and no longer hung right in the frame.

  “Do you think they’re gone?” Willow asked.

  “What did they mean about us not going anywhere?” Cordelia added nervously.

  “Might have something to do with the fact that the door’s locked, and there’s no handle on the inside,” Oz said simply.

  Xander’s eyes widened.

  “Well, sure,” Willow said, trying to be helpful. “Why would you need a handle on the inside? Unless, y’know, you expect the dead to rise and try to leave, which is just . . .”

  She looked at Oz. “We’re trapped, aren’t we?”

  Oz nodded.

  “Oh, wait,” Willow said suddenly. “Maybe at least we can see what we’re dealing with.”

  She reached into her pocket and withdrew a packet of matches. “For spells and stuff,” she explained sheepishly. Then she struck a match, and it flared to life.

  It didn’t last very long. But it was more than long enough for them all to see that, unlike some of the other crypts at Shady Hill, this one was very much full. There were a number of coffins and stone tombs, and some of them had been broken into or cracked open sometime in the past.

  From one rotted coffin, a skeleton lolled, its skull lying on one side as though its empty sockets were staring at them.

  They were trapped among the dead.

  Chapter Five

  Buffy and Angel were patrolling in the bad part of town, within earshot of the Bronze. Matte shadows coated the maze-like warren of narrow alleys like a coat of cheap primer on a stripped-down chassis. A foul odor of age, neglect, and filth rose from the old warehouses and boarded-up businesses — a failed Vietnamese restaurant, a cobbler’s, and a padlocked, burned-out gas station. In the darkness, rats scurried busily in the garbage and debris, making for a few tense moments when one is looking for jumpoutables.

  Beside a stack of retreads piled against a chain-link fence, Angel stopped and made a strange face.

  “What?” Buffy asked, on alert.

  “Nothing.” He started walking again, turning right to glide through a cramped, smelly, garbage-strewn alley.

  Moving with him, she frowned. “That was not a nothing face.”

  He shrugged as he poked behind a trash can. Sometimes vampires left fresh kills there. It was also an excellent place to find winos, if that was ever important. So far, it had not been.

  “Just wondering how the Bronze books bands,” he said.

  Buffy flashed him an ironic smile. The band tonight would get a D-minus for effort even if they graded on a curve. “You thinking of putting a group together?”

  He smiled faintly at her. “Have you ever heard me sing?”

  “Talent is not a requirement, obviously,” she said, tilting her head in the direction of the very bad music echoing off the graffiti-laden brick. “I think the secret lies in being willing to drive all the way to Sunnydale. We’re not exactly a dot on anybody’s world tour.”

  “And yet.” He shrugged.

  “Some are really good,” she filled in. “Well, we can ask Oz how all that complicated stuff works.” She yawned. “Maybe we should just pack it in. We have seen neither fang nor talon of any vamps tonight.”

  “Yeah.” He sounded eager to go, and Buffy was stung. To her, it was still an event every time they were together, despite that she hid that fact fairly well. When he phoned, his voice made her catch her breath. When he showed, she noticed what he was wearing. Call it neurotic, call it dumb, call it what it is: seeing him gives me a happy, and not seeing him . . . is so very beyond what I can handle.

  “Sorry to waste your evening,” she said through gritted teeth.

  “And I had so much planned,” he said wistfully.

  “Oh.” She aimed for casual, was pretty sure she stuck it like Kerri Strug after a vault.

  “A couple of cereal boxes to read, a few reruns to watch.” His smile told her he had her number. “Maybe we could grab some coffee?”

  Like a date. She tried very hard not to make it a thing. “It’s not like I’ll catch up on homework if I get home at a decent hour.”

  As they headed for the Bronze, Buffy cheered up: no more patrol, and a chance to have a little normal fun. Such moments were precious and few.

  “Hey, got a cig?”

  A short, small woman with curly red hair stepped from the shadows and smiled at Buffy and Angel. Major freckles, Buffy thought, but something didn’t feel right.

  Then she remembered Willow’s latest hack into the police files. This is Pepper Roback.

  The Slayer smiled. “Pepper. How’ve you been?”

  Pepper frowned. Tilted her head sideways. “You didn’t know her,” the redhead said with certainty.

  “Oops, caught me,” Buffy said, shrugging.

  Then she backhanded Pepper across the face, hard. Even as she spun away, Pepper morphed into vamp face. Buffy went after her, Angel right behind her. She lunged at the vamp girl, but Pepper brought up her right arm in an expert block, and Buffy had to wonder if she’d taken self-defense classes when she was alive.

  “How did you know?” Pepper demanded.

  “Talking about yourself in the third person?” Buffy ventured. “Dead giveaway. Also the fact that you’re a genuine missing person. Or were.”

  Pepper dodged a blow from Angel and snuck a lightning punch in at Buffy’s face. The vampire’s fist clipped Buffy’s chin. She brought her leg up into Pepper’s chest and kicked her back, but the vampire didn’t go down. She was a good hand-to-hand fighter.

  Almost too good. Buffy hadn’t done the research on Pepper, but it seemed amazing to her that this woman, even with the demon now in the corporeal driver’s seat, knew anything substantial about physical combat.

  On the other hand, she’d have to wonder later. Now was clearly not the time.

  Angel went after the vampire, but Pepper eluded him, then struck him a fast blow to the face. In the moment of his reaction, she grabbed Angel and slammed him against the alley wall. Buffy snapped another hard kick up into Pepper’s chest, toppling her backward toward a recovering Angel, who grabbed her from behind.

  Pepper hissed and said something in a foreign language — there were so many — and Angel reacted slightly.

  “It’s French,” he announced.

  “There goes graduation,” Buffy shot back, since she was taking French and hadn’t understood a word.

  “Medieval French,” he added.

  The vampire turned her head and tried to bite Angel in the face. He held her away from himself, his own face morphing, and growled deep in his throat.

  “Slayer,” the vampire said to Buffy. “I despise your kind. You had your little victory the other night, and I told you there would be a next time. You’d do well to keep out of my way.”

  Buffy took that in, but she didn’t let it deflect her attention. “Sorry,” she said. “I can’t place you. It’s just that we dust so many. After a while, you guys all look alike. Look, Pepper, let’s just get this over with, and you can stop hanging out, peeping in windows, scaring the highlights out of your old roomie’s little sis, ’kay?”

  “Daylights,” Angel corrected.

  “Have you seen Damara’s hair?” Buffy asked, not taking her eyes off the vampire. “Come on, Pepper, I don’t have all night.”

  “Slayers! Always so sure of yourselves. Well, I will see you rot, just as I have seen others of your line molder in their graves.”

  Pepper snarled and leaped at her. Confused — after all, this woman was human until a couple of nights earlier — Buffy tried to defend herself, but the vampire feinted a blow toward her face, then ducked in for a swift uppercut to her gut. Buffy staggered back, surprised at the skill this little female vamp showed.

  “Not bad, Pepper,” she grunted, trying to catch her breath.

  “Stop calling me that,” the vampire snarled. “I am Veronique
! You should know the name of she who will take your life.”

  Buffy bent down and picked up a broken piece of wood off the ground. The vampire saw what she was doing and laughed.

  “Save your energy, Slayer. I’ve already prepared a new host,” she said.

  “Yeah, well,” Buffy said, trying to figure out what was going on before she killed the vampire. She kept the stake at the ready, and she and Angel began to move around, trapping between them what she now thought of as the schizo vampire.

  A shriek pierced the air. “Oh, my God!” shouted a man. Then a thirtyish couple was running up the alley toward them.

  “Help!” cried the woman.

  In that moment of chaos, when Angel turned toward them, Pepper lunged for him, drove him off his feet, and then raced down the alley in the opposite direction and was lost to the shadows in an instant.

  “What the hell’s going on around here?” the man said, his voice revealing his panic.

  Buffy hesitated, but only for a second. “That woman just attacked us.”

  “There’s a dead girl back up that way,” the guy told them as the woman clung to him, whispering pleas to God and to her boyfriend that they just get out of there.

  “We’ll . . . we’ll go call the police,” she said. “Can you stay until they arrive?”

  Buffy looked at Angel, who had morphed back to his human face the moment he’d seen the couple approaching.

  “We’ll stay,” he said.

  When the couple had gone, Buffy and Angel hurried down the alley in search of a corpse. The dim fuchsia buzz of a neon sign advertised the “Sunnydale Pawn Shop CASH OR CREDIT MONEY ORDERS WATER BILLS.” In the glare, a woman with extremely bleached blond hair lay sprawled on her back, eyes staring glassily at the sky.

  Her skin was whiter than her hair. There was a deep wound directly over her carotid artery.

  “Pepper’s been busy,” Angel said gravely.

  Buffy nodded. She picked up another piece of wood, just in case. It was quite possible this dead woman would come back as a vampire. Unfortunately, when was a good question nobody but Angel and Buffy knew to ask.