Immortal

by Christopher Golden

“I’ve translated most of the prophecy, or at least what wasn’t charred,” he explained, rising to his feet and moving toward them several paces. Giles looked down at Buffy, his expression troubled. “I’ve finally gotten the first bit of information about the nature of the Triumvirate.”

  “And?”

  “I’m not sure what it means, exactly. According to Toscano’s writings, any human to fall beneath the shadow of the demon will be instantly damned to Hell. I don’t know if that’s literal, either the shadow reference or the bit about Hell.”

  “But you think it is,” Angel said.

  Giles nodded. “I need to learn more. If we’re to combat this thing, I’ve got to find out exactly what its powers are, figure out how to stop it before it can spread its evil.”

  Buffy was staring at him.

  “What is it?” Giles asked.

  “You’re giving up,” she said, her tone accusatory. “You’re just assuming we’re not going to be able to stop Veronique, so you’re moving on to Plan B. Not that Plan B is bad, but have a little faith, Giles.”

  He looked directly at her. “I have all the faith in the world in you, Buffy. But I must also go about this logically. We must be prepared for every eventuality, and given the dearth of information we’ve managed to acquire thus far . . .”

  His words trailed off. Then, at length, he inclined his head, glanced away from her. “There’s something else.”

  Buffy only looked at him, heart filling with dread.

  “In addition to the Toscano papers, I’ve also managed to translate some of the other document. It’s the journal of Jacques de Molay.”

  “Which is significant. For some reason.” Buffy raised her eyebrows.

  “He was the master of the Knights Templar in France. It seems he ran afoul of Veronique, and his order was destroyed as a result. However, his journal included a great many helpful bits of information, including the formula for determining the night when all of Veronique’s preparations will go toward performing a specific ritual. A ritual that will bring a true demon, the tripartite thing I told you about, the Triumvirate, to Earth.”

  “Here in Sunnydale, of course,” Buffy sighed.

  “Well, as we’re on the Hellmouth —”

  Angel interrupted. “The barrier between Earth and Hell is weaker here. Yeah, we know. You found a formula to figure out when the stars are aligned so that the ritual can be performed. So what’s our deadline? When’s the big night?”

  Giles glanced away, then looked back, meeting Buffy’s anxious gaze.

  “Tomorrow.”

  For the first few seconds after he’d said the word, she could only stare at him. No words would come, nor could she even draw a breath. Then, finally, a quick intake of air, and she began to shake her head, denying the truth he had just given her.

  “I’m sorry, Buffy, but we must be prepared,” he said, and she heard in his voice how his heart ached for her.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  “No,” she said at last, managing to eke the words out, though she still felt as though she had been somehow disconnected from herself. “No way, Giles. I’m going to be with my mother.”

  She stared him down, daring him to contradict. For a moment, it seemed he might do exactly that. Then he looked away.

  “Yes,” he whispered. “Of course. That’s where you should be. We’ll prepare without you. When your mother comes out of her surgery, once she’s settled in and we all know that she’s well . . .”

  He let his words trail off. Buffy wanted to argue, to tell him to stop pushing. But she knew that he wasn’t pushing at all. He was being realistic. Her first priority had to be her mother, and Giles knew that. But he also knew that when it all hit the fan the next night, when this prophecy about Veronique and the Triumvirate came to pass and they started doing the chicken dance or whatever for this ritual, the Slayer would be needed.

  The thing that pained her the most was that she knew her mother would understand as well. She shouldn’t have to, Buffy thought. But there was nothing she could do.

  As the Slayer, she might be able to save the world, but she sure as hell couldn’t change it.

  Angel came up beside her and softly slid his arm around her waist. She wanted to rage at him as well, to tell him that she didn’t need support, that she was all right. She wasn’t some fragile creature who would fall apart when faced with such dreadful considerations.

  But Buffy knew she couldn’t say that. Because she’d be lying.

  Slayer she might be, and in the face of the hordes of darkness she would stand without fear and do what her duty to herself and her family and her friends and her world demanded. But she was also just a girl. Not even really an adult yet. She’d begun to think she was, and the irony of that was not lost on her. Buffy had started to think she was all grown up. After all, with the things she’d seen, the horrors she’d been up against . . . if that hadn’t made her an adult, she hadn’t known what would.

  Now she knew she’d been fooling herself.

  In a part of her she did not want to examine at all, she knew that what would truly make her an adult was the moment when her mother was no longer there to watch over her, to care, to worry, even when Buffy herself didn’t want her to.

  When she really started to understand death, she wouldn’t be a child anymore. Not merely the knowledge of death; she had acquired that long ago, when she herself had died, though only for a few moments before Xander revived her. This was different. People died all the time, she’d seen it too often. But now death threatened to tear violently away from her a huge part of her world. Her mother’s strength had been invaluable to Buffy time and time again. The bond they shared as mother and daughter, the memories they had lived together, would be sharp, painful things if they were splintered by death.

  If, Buffy thought. But it isn’t if, it’s when.

  “How can I fight this?” she whispered to herself.

  Angel pulled her more tightly to him, and she let him, comforted by his presence.

  She didn’t cry again, though. And she wouldn’t. She promised herself in that moment that she would not cry over her mother’s illness again, not unless the unthinkable happened.

  As soon as she made herself that vow, though, Buffy feared that she would break it.

  If she dies, Buffy thought, holding Angel tight as she allowed herself to really consider it for the first time. If she dies, the world might as well end. It just won’t matter anymore.

  Giles had been silently watching her, mute witness to her pain. But now he moved toward them and reached out to her, and Buffy let go of Angel, and she and Giles embraced each other tightly. It was unlike them, and very awkward in its way. But she needed him so desperately, in a manner very different from the way she needed Angel or Willow. They stood by her, and always would. Buffy knew that. But Giles . . . Giles watched over her. Looked out for her as best he could.

  Buffy needed that now.

  “There’s nothing more to be done tonight,” Giles told her. “Go home. Get some rest. Tomorrow you be with Joyce. We’ll all try to come by as we’re able.”

  Buffy withdrew from him. Looked into the Watcher’s eyes. “And I’ll be back here by dark.”

  Giles nodded.

  Together, she and Angel walked toward the double doors. As she pushed through, Buffy turned and looked back at Giles, who was once again examining the charred pages of the journal of Peter Toscano.

  “Hey,” she said, and Giles looked up. “You get some sleep, too, okay?”

  “Thank you, Buffy,” he replied. “Just another twenty minutes or so, and I’ll be off.”

  Buffy smiled thinly and gave a small nod. But as she and Angel left, she knew that Giles was lying, both to her and to himself. He had deciphered most of the prophecy and much of de Molay’s journal, but if there were some other clue in those charred pages to how they might destroy the Triumvirate, he was determined to find it.

  He would fall asleep over the study table,
or at his desk, as he did too frequently.

  The light of dawn would wake him.

  And then he would begin again.

  “I can’t believe we’re out here by ourselves,” Cordelia sniffed.

  “Yeah,” Xander agreed. “Sort of spooky, huh? Guess you feel like cuddling up so I can protect you now, right?”

  She scowled at him. “In your dreams.”

  Xander nodded reasonably. “Your point would be?”

  “My point would be I’d rather plead with the dentist for rusty tools and no novocaine.” Cordelia sneered.

  She always was good at sneering, Xander thought.

  They stood in the middle of Crestwood Cemetery, a quarter of a mile from the college of the same name. It was also the name of the entire neighborhood, and Xander figured whoever this Crestwood guy had been, he’d had major identity issues if he’d had to go and paste his name all over everything.

  “I don’t know what you’re worried about,” he told Cordelia. “I mean, we’re not actually supposed to slay anything, right? We look, we find, we use the cell phone to call Giles, he brings the cavalry. We go home and share a nice, long Jell-O bath.”

  Cordelia answered that one with a glare.

  “Besides,” he went on, “it’s not like we’re actually going to run into any vampires. They’ve been pretty much steering clear of us lately, right? They’re trying their best not to be seen, never mind dusted. And of the dozen cemeteries in this town, what are the chances we’ll be in the same one they are, even for a couple of minutes?”

  She rounded on him, nailing him with a withering look. “Did we or did we not come here because of all the cemeteries in town, this was the only one they hadn’t hit more than once?”

  “Well —”

  “And we figured that gave us better odds of finding some vampires?”

  “Well —”

  Cordelia lifted her chin, rolling her eyes in disgust. “Or do you honestly think that even if I were this fretting damsel in distress you seem determined to make me out to be, you could ever possibly be the knight in shining armor?”

  Xander cocked his head angrily. Now he was miffed. “Hi-ho, there, Trigger,” he snapped. “First off, if you’re not fretting, I don’t know what else to call it without cuss words. And second, I have been your knight in silly armor plenty of times, or don’t you remember my saving your precious bacon in the past?”

  “Please,” Cordelia drawled. “In an Archie Comics world, Xander, you’ll always be Jughead.”

  Then she walked off, leaving him desperately trying to come up with an Archie-related comeback and failing miserably. In the end, he could only set off after her, muttering under his breath. Moments later, as he caught up to her, an odd sound caught his attention.

  The sound of shovels in soil. And it was coming from straight ahead.

  “Hold it,” he whispered, grabbing Cordelia’s arm.

  “What?” she said, a bit too loud.

  The shoveling stopped. Xander grabbed her arm and pulled her down behind a large marble grave marker. In place of the shoveling, he now heard voices, though they were a bit too low and far away for him to make out exactly what was being said.

  He pointed to her bag, making wide-eyed expressions with his face. She looked at him as if he was insane as he tried to mime putting a phone to his ear. Cordelia only responded with similar crazy gestures and threw up her hands. Exasperated, he grabbed her bag and reached in, digging around until he had the phone.

  Xander punched the memory button, and then dialed *12. On the other end of the line, in the library of Sunnydale High School, the phone began to ring. Xander looked at Cordelia and gave the thumbs-up sign.

  Just as the first vampire snarled at them, lunging over the top of the marble marker.

  Xander cried out and rolled out of the path of its attack. But he dropped the phone to the soft cemetery earth as he did so. Cordelia shrieked, more because of her phone than the vampire.

  But then there were more of them.

  Almost before they knew what was happening, Xander and Cordelia were surrounded.

  They didn’t stand a chance.

  In the library, Giles’s eyelids fluttered up, and he went groggily to the phone.

  “Hello?”

  At first, he couldn’t make out the odd sounds on the other end. There were grunts and the sound of flesh on flesh, and he wondered if it were some sort of obscene prank.

  Then he heard a girl begin to scream, and he knew it was Cordelia. He knew that she and Xander were searching for some sign of Veronique and her clan, but he had no way to know exactly where she was calling from.

  There was quite a bit of screaming.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It had still been dark when Buffy reached Sunnydale Hospital. Roused from sleep and informed by the hospital social worker that her mother’s surgery had been rescheduled at the last minute for reasons Buffy couldn’t begin to understand, she had thought at first that she was dreaming. She dressed and left the house bleary from lack of sleep but jittery from the adrenaline rushing through her bloodstream. She was trembling and terribly alert.

  As she walked through the hospital’s entrance doors, she noted a scattering of cars in the lot. The parking structure looked nearly empty. Not a lot of operations today, she thought. Or else they get to show up later than me.

  Her interior tension level was reaching the boiling point. Get it together, she chided herself. Not for anything did she want to make her mother comfort her or calm her down. Joyce had more than enough on her own plate to deal with.

  The lobby was eerily quiet. But there were the ever-present little old ladies behind the information console. A man was staring at the Weather Channel, and a little girl beside him was playing with a teddy bear. A young woman with a chestnut ponytail walked beside a man in scrubs who was pushing a wheelchair. Her face was grim and set. An old man sprawled in the wheelchair, his head bobbing, his eyes half closed. His mouth lolled open. He looked as if he were a thousand years old. He looked as if he were already dead.

  Buffy flashed, Why bother keeping him going? and felt horribly ashamed of herself. She cleared her throat as she realized that she was staring.

  Buffy crossed to the elevators and pressed the button. After about half a minute, the doors opened. A woman in a business suit carrying a briefcase smiled and swept out. Her beeper trilled, and she sighed and unhooked it from the waistband of her skirt. She squinted at the number and sighed again.

  The ride was extremely short. The doors opened, and Buffy took a huge gulp of air. Her throat was killing her, and she was bone-weary. She wished she’d had some advance warning that the surgery was going to be moved up like this.

  And then what? The Slayer could have gone to bed early?

  She stepped out into a corridor much busier than the downstairs lobby. People in scrubs pushed carts of machinery. A young man in a long white coat frowned as his beeper trilled. Two men in suits strolled past, each carrying a briefcase.

  The nurses’ area was dead center in the middle of all the activity. Two of them were seated behind computer monitors, one busily entering data from a set of charts at her right elbow.

  “Good morning,” said the other nurse, a young blonde, smiling helpfully at Buffy.

  “Hi,” Buffy rasped. “I’m Buffy Summers. My mom’s in for a . . . a thoracotomy.”

  “Her name?” the nurse said, typing Buffy’s last name in. “Oh. Here it is. Joyce Summers. Oh. Dr. Coleman’s on the case.” She looked impressed.

  The other nurse, this one significantly older, looked up from the pile of charts and glanced at the younger nurse’s screen. “Equivocal mass,” she said. “So you want to code in C1. Cancer.”

  Buffy’s stomach clenched. “They don’t know what it is. That’s why they’re doing the surgery.”

  “It’s just procedure.” The older nurse leaned slightly in front of the younger one. “We have to put something down.”

  “It’
s okay,” the younger nurse said. “It’s just the way we have to do it.”

  “No.” Buffy shook her head. “It is not okay. She has not been diagnosed with cancer.”

  “Now, honey,” the blond nurse began. “It’s okay.”

  Buffy placed her hand on the desk. “Think about it. A single mom, with a preexisting condition of cancer? What if her business folds and we need to get different insurance?”

  “Oh.” The younger nurse looked confused. The older one glared at Buffy, which shocked Buffy. I’m here because my mom is sick, and she’s treating me like a criminal. Buffy glared back.

  “If you were qualified to determine that my mother has cancer,” Buffy said to her in a low, seething voice, “you’d be performing her surgery.”

  The woman narrowed her eyes at Buffy. “I’m an R.N., and I’ve been with this health-care system for fifteen years, and —”

  “Well, this is a hospital, not a health-care system, and you aren’t an M.D.,” Buffy shot back. “Do we need to get your supervisor?”

  The nurse narrowed her eyes. “I am the supervisor. And I suggest you talk to Dr. Martinez and Dr. Coleman about the diagnosis, if you’re having so much trouble accepting it.”

  The blond nurse murmured, “We can update the chart once we have more information, Miss Summers. And I’ll be sure to take care of it,” she added, her cheeks reddening as the other nurse aimed her venomous glare her way. “Your mother’s in prep. It’s just down the hall.” She pointed. “Would you like someone to show you how to get there?”

  “No. I’ll figure it out,” Buffy said frostily. Then she reminded herself that this woman had been nice to her and was probably going to get in trouble for it. So she made herself smile briefly and said, “Thanks.”

  “I know it’s scary,” the nurse began. Then the older one cleared her throat, and the younger one fell silent. Still, she smiled sadly at Buffy.

  Buffy made her way in the direction the nurse had indicated. She heard someone crying. Footsteps squeaked on the shiny linoleum floor.

  It was still dark out.

  Very dark.

  It was nearly dawn when Oz and Willow dashed into the library. Giles looked pasty-faced, even for him. It would have been improper for him to call Willow so late at night, but he had been able to reach Oz by phone. Giles had asked him to e-mail Willow and then get to the library. He had also suggested they hurry.