Immortal

by Christopher Golden

  “Dear God, what is this?” Leah cried. “What are they?”

  The other two vampires advanced on Angel, and he prepared to fight them, trying not to be distracted by Leah’s fearful questions. Then he heard a scraping behind him, knew that the other had gotten up, and started to turn. They were all on him at once. Angel lashed out, shattered the cheek of one of them, and the others began to pummel him.

  He went down. Leah screamed at the vampires, trying to drive them away, and he heard a blow, and a cry. He felt the roar building in his chest, and though he did not want her to see him that way, he gave in to the vampire, let his face change to feral. Angel screamed at them, a guttural bellow, and threw them off. He grabbed one and drove it face first into a car window, which shattered.

  Then he ran to Leah’s side. She was on her knees, trying to use the front of a car to drag herself to her feet. Her face was bleeding, and she clutched her chest in pain.

  Angel willed his face to change again, praying she hadn’t seen him.

  “What is it? Are you badly hurt?” he asked.

  “She’ll be dead in a second,” one of the vampires snarled.

  Angel started to turn to face them.

  “No,” said another, a stout bald male with tattoos on his arms.“We cannot afford the time, or any defeat. You know what Veronique said. Leave them. Before they can do anything, it will be too late.”

  Then they were running across the lot toward the hospital. Angel wanted to give chase, but Leah groaned beside him.

  “Leah, hold on,” he said, fearing for her. “I’ll get you into the hospital. Just hold on.”

  He lifted her in his arms, dismayed by how frail she seemed.

  “You . . . know my name,” she rasped. “Have we met?”

  Angel looked in her eyes and saw that she truly did not know him. Even now, in this frightful moment, she had no idea who he was. Once, he had felt that he loved her. She gave him the tiniest bit of hope when he needed it so desperately. And she didn’t even remember his face, though he had not changed at all since they had last met.

  “No,” he said. “You don’t know me.”

  Then he went toward the hospital entrance with her, moving as swiftly as he dared, given her pain.

  The Sea of Crete, 1862

  Angela Martignetti lived by herself on Kefi for nearly four months before the Council of Watchers finally tracked her down. When her new Watcher arrived in the back of a fishing boat to retrieve her, he greeted her without any civility whatsoever. Even his stance was hostile.

  “I am Jason Cromwell,” he said. “Where is the de Molay volume you retrieved from the fire?”

  “In a stable in Tirana,” she replied icily. “It was a choice between the book and my life.”

  Cromwell looked down his nose at her. “Given the way you have disgraced your station, it’s possible you chose poorly.”

  Not a word was spoken on the boat as it sailed back to Athens.

  Though their attitude toward her changed greatly over time — out of necessity — Angela Martignetti never lifted a finger to aid the Council of Watchers again. She had planned to die on Kefi.

  For many years thereafter, she wished that she had.

  Between bites of her meatball sandwich, Willow glanced around the library guiltily and sighed. “I feel like we’re betraying everyone,” she said. “Buffy and her mom are still at the hospital. Xander and Cordy are still missing. Who knows what that Veronique thing is up to tonight?”

  “Really, Willow, I understand your misgivings,” Giles replied. “But we spent half the day searching for Xander and Cordelia. There is nothing we can do to aid Buffy at the moment other than what we have been doing. And the very reason we came back here to the library was so that I could confer with my notes once more to attempt to determine the location of tonight’s ceremony.”

  “Then there’s the eating,” Oz added. “It isn’t guilt-free.”

  “See!” Willow said, exasperated.

  “We must eat if we plan to go on. For the moment, I’m afraid our search for Xander and Cordelia must take a lower priority than locating Veronique and preventing her from performing the ritual that will bring the Triumvirate to Earth. That creature must not escape its Hellish domain and break into our own.

  “In fact, as soon as we are done here, we must go to the hospital and retrieve Buffy. Until now, it has been possible for us to function without her. But to stop this ritual, the Slayer must be with us. Otherwise, there is really no point to saving her mother. By tomorrow morning, all of Sunnydale will be nothing but scorched earth, and the people along with it.”

  “You always know just the right spin to put on things,” Willow told him. “If, y’know, you’re trying to terrify me.”

  They ate. Giles continued to read.

  Willow tortured herself wondering if Xander and Cordelia were still alive, and wracked her brain trying to figure out where Veronique might have jailed them, if for some reason she was keeping them alive.

  Suddenly, she had it.

  Jailed them!

  “Oh . . .” She started to speak, and then paused to swallow her food. “They’re in Old Town. That’s got to be it. It’s one of the only places we didn’t search that well, ’cause we thought it was too close to civilization, that they’d be noticed. But I’ll bet they’re holed up in one of the buildings down there, maybe the old police station.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know Sunnydale as well as you two,” Giles said slowly.

  But Oz just nodded. He dropped his foot to the wrappers on the study table and stood up.

  “Let’s go.”

  Cordelia glared expectantly at Xander.

  “What?” he asked, not for the first time.

  “Why are we still alive?” she demanded.

  “You have a problem with this?” he asked. “’Cause, I’ve gotta tell ya, I’m kinda yay life right now. And despite the fact that the last hours or minutes of that pitiful life may be spent having to listen to the Queen of the Shallow Parts of the Nile whine about how being incarcerated in a crumbling building with demons and vampires just plays havoc with her hair . . . I’m still feeling pretty warm and fuzzy about life.”

  Cordelia rolled her eyes. “Are you through?”

  Xander shrugged. “Pretty much.”

  “Why are we still alive?” she asked again.

  Xander slapped himself in the forehead and stared imploringly at the gray ceiling, mutely praying for some kind of help. He received no answer.

  “We’re not the only ones, either,” she said.

  “What was your first clue?” he asked. “The screaming?”

  Indeed, there was screaming. They were in a jail cell in what was obviously the closed-down police station in Old Town. There were vampires here. Lots of them. But so far, they hadn’t taken a bite out of Xander or Cordelia, or, as far as they knew, from any of the other handful of people also in captivity down here.

  Xander was thinking that was a good sign.

  Which was about the time he heard the scraping of the metal door at the end of the hall and then footsteps coming down toward them.

  “Get back from the door,” he whispered to Cordelia. “If they come in, maybe we can rush them.”

  Just as he glanced back out through the bars, there came a snarl, and a vampire lunged at him, thrust its hands between the bars, and grabbed his shirt, hauling him up hard against the metal.

  “Oh, yeah,” the vampire whispered. “That’s gonna work.”

  “Or not,” Xander said reasonably. “If you have a better plan, feel free to speak up.”

  It took a moment, what with the snarling in his face and the fangs and such, but Xander realized he recognized the vamp in front of him.

  “Wait, I know you,” he said.

  “Oh, great, you’re just buds now?” Cordelia sighed. “Always the schmooze-hound. Gotta know someone everywhere we go.”

  “You’re Konstantin, right?” Xander asked, badly faking an ami
able smile. “I’m Xander.”

  “I’m hunggrreeeee!” Konstantin screamed into Xander’s face, yanking him hard against the bars again and again.

  Then Konstantin let him go, and Xander stumbled back, grabbing onto Cordelia. “Please to meet you, hungry,” he said meekly.

  Konstantin stepped back a bit, into the shadows of the darkened corridor.

  “And if Veronique does not return with blood soon,” he growled ferociously. “Then I will have yours, no matter what punishment may come.”

  Buffy walked across the parking lot toward the grass beyond. It wasn’t a really long walk from the hospital back to school — which is where she figured she’d meet up with Giles, Willow, and Oz — but it certainly felt far away.

  Valley Fever. What the hell is that? Sounds like something only soap opera characters could get.

  Her mother was still sick. Buffy wanted to stay. But she also knew that at midnight, she had somewhere to be.

  “Yeah, great,” she muttered to herself. “Got a date with a demon.”

  A sudden scream slashed through the night. Buffy stopped, stood completely still, and listened to the sounds coming to her on the wind, trying to pinpoint the direction of the scream. She couldn’t, but she started slowly back toward the hospital, her every muscle tensed.

  There were things she had to do, but she couldn’t just walk away from a scream.

  Moments later, she heard the sounds of a struggle, and she started to run along a row of cars. She heard talking, saw several figures dodging among cars, moving toward the hospital. Then she spotted Angel carrying Dr. Coleman in his arms. She called out to him, but he seemed not to hear her.

  Buffy ran to him.

  “Angel,” she said, coming up beside him. “What’s going on?”

  “Vampires. Veronique’s, I think. They’re infiltrating the hospital. Leah saw them, and they attacked her to silence her. I think she’s having a heart attack.”

  Buffy heard the strain in his voice, his fear for Dr. Coleman, and she sympathized. But there were so many other priorities at the moment.

  “Get her inside,” she said. “I’ve got to figure out what they . . . wait! You don’t think they’re after my mother?”

  “For what purpose?” he asked as they hustled toward the entrance. “No, the ritual is tonight. They’ve been hiding from you, and they’re not here for trouble now.”

  “Then why are they here?”

  Angel glanced at her. “Maybe for blood? They weren’t expecting trouble, so maybe they were going to go after the stored supply. That’s third floor.”

  “How do you —” Buffy cut herself off. “All right,” she said with a nod. “Meet me up there. My mother’s room is on the third floor. And if they already know they’ve got trouble, that things aren’t going to go as smoothly as they think, maybe they’re going to try to grab some fresh stuff after all.”

  The moment they went inside the doors, with Angel calling out for a gurney and a doctor, they separated. Buffy ignored the elevators, just as she expected the vampires would have done, and headed for the stairs. Just inside the door on the ground floor, there was a guard.

  Not a human one, of course. That would have been too convenient.

  The vampire lunged at her, but Buffy brought her foot around in an arc and kicked him hard in the side of the head. He went tumbling down the stairs toward the basement, and she didn’t even bother going after him. Instead, she pulled out a stake and started up the stairs two at a time.

  As she emerged onto the third floor, she heard shouting and the shatter of glass. She slammed the door open and stood in the corridor, looking in both directions.

  In the midst of the chaos was a female vampire Buffy knew must be Veronique. She was very tall and muscular, with short black hair and tattoos. She looked dangerous, nothing like the other bodies the immortal vampire had taken. This one seemed more suited to Veronique’s arrogance. Still, that wasn’t the giveaway. There was just something in the way she carried herself that Buffy recognized now, no matter what body she was in. And, of course, she was screaming orders at her followers.

  “Damn you fools!” she roared. “Quick and quiet. Those were my commands. You have jeopardized the Ritual, and for that some of you will surely pay. But not tonight!”

  “You know, it didn’t hit me till just now,” Buffy told her, “but you kinda remind me of my second-grade teacher.”

  Veronique snapped her head around to glare at Buffy. “Slayer,” she growled, her voice low. “Why must you always interfere? It was true, what you said long ago. It is an eternal war.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Buffy told her. “Must’ve been my evil twin. Oh, wait, that’s Willow with the evil twin.”

  Veronique bristled and attacked. “You mock me, girl? Even after all this, you don’t fear me? I will teach you fear.”

  Buffy held the stake out to one side and readied herself. When Veronique lunged, she dodged to one side and grabbed the vampire by her hair. She yanked back Veronique’s head and raised her stake.

  “See, there’s that resemblance to Mrs. MacWhirter again.”

  She brought the stake down.

  “Buffy?”

  It was her mother’s voice. Buffy turned, slightly, wavering, to see Joyce standing in the doorway to her room, looking pale and weak and impossibly vulnerable.

  “Get back in your —”

  Veronique roared and snapped her head forward, slamming her skull into Buffy’s. The Slayer staggered backward, and then shook it off, facing Veronique again.

  “Mistress?” called a vampire who was coming up the hall behind her.

  “Go!” Veronique snapped, without turning. “Take the others, take the blood, and get back to the nest. I will deal with this.”

  “But Harbinger—”

  “Go!” Veronique screamed, and launched herself at Buffy. The vampire obeyed. They all did, running for the stairs at the other end of the corridor.

  Buffy tried to dodge again, bringing the stake up at the ready. Veronique feinted and then punched Buffy, hard, in the side of the face. Rattled, Buffy staggered, and Veronique knocked the stake from her hand.

  “You’re too arrogant for your own good, Slayer,” Veronique hissed, smiling. “Perhaps there will be another after you, but after tonight, it won’t matter. Not at all. The stars have told the tale. By dawn, this place will be only the first foothold of my masters on Earth.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” Buffy snapped, and leaped up into a roundhouse kick.

  At the precise moment that Veronique ducked past her. Buffy started to come down, thrown because her target was no longer in front of her. Veronique grabbed her around the neck and flipped her into a glass partition. It shattered, and Buffy crashed down on the broken shards of glass. She staggered to her feet, bleeding from a dozen tiny cuts.

  “That’s the point you’re missing, Slayer,” Veronique said. “You don’t have anything to say about it at all.”

  She moved on Buffy. The Slayer brought her left arm up to block. Veronique was expecting it, grabbed Buffy’s arm, and spun around behind her, striking her a hard blow across the back of the neck. Buffy went down on her knees.

  Veronique bent over her. “I’ve fought you enough, girl. You’ve killed me too many times. I’ve studied you; I’ve paid attention. I know your style now. Every time you make a move, I’ll already have guessed what it’s going to be.”

  Buffy’s instinct was to thrust her legs out behind her, to sweep Veronique off her feet. It was the smartest move, as it would give her a chance to rise, to regain her balance. But she couldn’t do that. It was what Veronique would have expected.

  She drove her head back as hard as she could, slamming the back of her skull against Veronique’s nose, shattering it. She felt the vampire’s blood on her scalp as she rose and rammed her elbow behind her.

  But Veronique was ready for it. She grabbed Buffy by the elbow and twined the fingers of her other hand in B
uffy’s hair. Then Veronique drove her down the corridor and slammed her headfirst into a wall. Buffy tasted blood, and this time, she knew it was her own.

  “Get away from her, you bitch!”

  Buffy blinked into full consciousness to see her mother, haggard, in a hospital gown, facing off against Veronique with only a small crucifix that she had packed with her things for her surgery.

  Veronique hissed.

  Then she laughed. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Soon, it will all be done. Another few hours, Slayer. Enjoy them.”

  With that, the immortal vampire turned and ran down the corridor, following the path her blood children had taken. Almost the instant that she disappeared beyond that door, the elevator pinged and the doors slid wide, and Angel stepped in with security guards and orderlies behind him.

  “Buffy!” he cried in alarm.

  Angel and her mother were both crouched by her. Buffy tasted her own blood again, and it enraged her. She used the sleeve of her shirt to wipe the blood from her face. A security guard tried to ask her what had happened, and Joyce shooed the man away.

  “Buffy, just wait for a doctor,” her mother was saying. “You’ll be all right.”

  “I don’t need a doctor,” Buffy insisted.

  She dragged herself to her feet, despite the protests of her mother and the man she loved.

  “Buffy, maybe —” Angel began.

  “Maybe nothing,” she snapped. Then she spun to face the security guards. “Hey. You. This woman over here is my mother. Those freaks who were just in here, they have a grudge against her for something. They might be back. You keep someone on her room until dawn. After that, they’ll have left town.”

  The guard frowned and looked at her. “Miss, I don’t know who you are, but I can’t just take all this on your say-so,” he began.

  Angel started toward him, but Buffy grabbed his shoulder and forced him to be still. She moved forward and stared up into the eyes of the much taller guard. She didn’t stand on tiptoe. She didn’t have to. It was more like he shrank.

  “What’s your name?” she snarled.

  “Al Scott.”