Buffy The Vampire Slayer - The Lost Slayer - The King Of The Dead

by Christopher Golden (lit)

  THE LOST SLAYER

  Part Three

  King of The Dead

  CHRISTOPHER GOLDEN

  An original novel based on the hit TV series created by Joss Whedon

  Historian's Note: This serial story takes place at the beginning of Buffy's fourth season.

  Previously on Buffy the Vampire Slayer...

  A new breed of vampire arrived in Sunnydale, faster and stronger than others of their kind, and with a kind of magickal energy surging inside them. These are the Kakchiquels, vampire servants of the ancient Mayan demon-god called Camazotz.

  Buffy had recently come to believe that the only way she could be content in her life and still be an effective Slayer was to separate the two halves of her life completely, as though Buffy and the Slayer were two distinct people. That meant trying her best to keep her friends out of her life as the Slayer, to handle those duties all by herself. But having the best of both worlds soon proved more difficult than she had expected.

  Even as she began to learn more about Camazotz and the Kakchiquels, and to attempt to locate the demon-god's lair in Sunnydale, Buffy was visited by the ghost of former Slayer Lucy Hanover, who brought a warning. An entity of the spirit realm, a clairvoyant being called The Prophet, had predicted that Buffy would soon make a mistake that would have catastrophic results. Before she could follow up on Lucy's warning, the search for Camazotz heated up when it was determined that his current lair was probably a ship moored on Sunnydale's coast. Despite Buffy's desire to handle it on her own, Giles insisted that it would be faster to have Willow use magick to locate Camazotz and that they would attack as a group, given the gravity of the threat represented by the Kakchiquels and their master.

  Buffy was supposed to have Willow gather the ingredients necessary for the spell and then the two of them were to meet Giles in Dock town, the run-down section of Sunnydale where the town's shipping industry is concentrated. But when Buffy called Oz's looking for Willow, the young witch was not available. Though she left part of the message, Buffy chose not to tell Oz about the spell, the ingredients, or the planned rendezvous, hoping Willow's absence would cause Giles to abandon the search for the night. She planned then to search for Camazotz on her own.

  But Giles was not deterred. Over her protests, Giles and Buffy went together to the harbormaster's office, hoping to discover some hint of strange goings-on that might indicate which ship Camazotz was using as a lair. Giles insisted she stay in the car.

  The harbormaster turned out to be a vampire in service to Camazotz. While Giles waited and Buffy grew impatient in the car, the harbormaster informed the demon-god of their arrival. Buffy realized things had gone wrong and broke into the harbormaster's office to find her former Watcher in the clutches of that vampire. Then Camazotz and a group of his Kakchiquels appeared, and the Slayer was faced with a terrible choice. If she fought, Giles would probably be killed. If she surrendered, they would both likely die. Knowing that the first rule of slaying is to stay alive, and reasoning that Camazotz would keep Giles alive to use as bait to lure her, she fled the scene.

  Later, as she and her friends tried to determine the location of Camazotz's lair, now desperate to rescue Giles before it was too late, Willow summoned the ghost of Lucy Hanover. The spirit indicated that The Prophet's visions had grown stronger. Fearing that The Prophet's dire predictions may have something to do with her current predicament, Buffy asked Lucy to see if The Prophet would speak to her. When the dark, sinister apparition known as The Prophet did appear, she revealed that Buffy had already made the mistake and that the dark future she had predicted could not be averted. She offered to let Buffy see this future, which she claimed she could do if Buffy let her into her mind.

  But The Prophet was not what she seemed. In truth, she was Zotzilaha, the estranged bride of Camazotz, fleeing from her mate in spirit form and searching for a powerful host body with which to defend herself against her husband. Zotzilaha had come to Sunny­dale to possess the body of the Slayer, and Camazotz had come in pursuit of his errant bride.

  When Zotzilaha touched Buffy, she invaded the Slayer's body and forced Buffy's soul out. Through magick whose nature has yet to be revealed, Zotzilaha pushed Buffy's soul forward in time five years, into the nightmare future about which she had warned the Slayer.

  The soul of Buffy-at-nineteen was merged with the soul of her older, future self. In that dark future, Buffy found herself in captivity. Years before, the Kak­chiquels had captured her and chosen not to kill her so as to avoid the rise of a new Slayer.

  Buffy eventually escaped and found that vampires now controlled all of Sunnydale and its surrounding environs, their influence spreading with every passing day. She made her way south out of Sunnydale, where she linked up with representatives of the Council of Watchers. The Council has set up a base and a large force of operatives whose mission it is to thwart the reign of the vampire king she has heard rumors about. Among those operatives are her old friends, Willow, Xander, and Oz, all of whom have been changed by the hard years since they last saw Buffy.

  Willow then revealed the most horrifying truth of all about this terrible future.

  The king of the vampires is Rupert Giles.

  Chapter 1

  Drusilla’s dead.

  Spike roared through downtown Sunnydale in a silver Camaro with blacked-out windows. Dawn had come hours ago, and the sun glared down upon the wind-shield, streamed in through the small splotches that had not been painted black. He had to see to drive, after all.

  Behind the black aviator sunglasses he wore to keep the sun off his eyes, tears streaked his face. His jaw was clenched tight, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. Though he would usually have something on the radio, all was silent in the car. No music. Not even the sound of breathing. Not from him, for after all, wasn't he a dead man?

  Yes, of course he was. Yet somehow he had never felt quite so dead as he did this awful morning.

  The Slayer. That little bitch.

  But it had not been only the Slayer's fault, had it? No, not at all. When Giles had split them up, sending Dru with one team and him with another, he ought to have balked, but he did not. Giles was the king, wasn't he? He hadn't steered them wrong yet.

  Till now. Now he'd steered them all kinds of wrong.

  Bastard.

  There were big plans. Spike wanted to be a part of it. But now Drusilla was dead and everything they had worked for with Giles was in jeopardy. For millennia, vampires had dreamed big but acted small, never able to agree on anything long enough to get it together, to pull off a scheme bigger than a simple slaughter. Rupert Giles was different. Using the addictive blood of the bat-god, Camazotz, to ensure loyalty among the Kakchiquels, he wanted nothing less than the world. Unlike so many vampires and demons, he had achieved the level of patience that immortality afforded him. What he had in mind would take time to do right. He would wait.

  But now this thing with the Slayer. What the hell is this all about?

  Images of Drusilla sifted like kaleidoscope images through his mind. He could hear her mad little laugh, re­member what she looked like naked and spattered with blood, recall the scent of her, like freshly pressed an­tique lace with just a hint of lilac.

  Fresh tears sprang to his eyes and he let them stripe his cheeks like war paint. They dripped onto his black leather jacket and he let them dry there, a sort of offer­ing to the ghost of his dead love.

  If only vampires had ghosts.

  Spike drove out of downtown, haunted as an empty circus tent, awaiting the mad revelry
that night always brought. The Kakchiquels kept the residents of Sunny­dale about for their own amusement. Blood slaves. Sex slaves. Torture victims. Yet for every human they killed, two more would drift into town on the current of whis­pered gossip and the desire to discover the truth, to sub­ject themselves to the rule of the vampires. These humans would do anything to be tasted, to be bled, to have a Kakchiquel lover, and if having their guts strewn across the sidewalk downtown or their heads rammed onto a fence post at the edge of Hammersmith Park was a moment by moment possibility, that was a small price to pay.

  Then there were the original Sunnydale residents, the people who hadn't had the courage to run away. Most of them cowered in their homes, even now, or operated their businesses with the permission of the dead who slept while the sun was high. Those were the ones Spike understood the least and disliked the most.

  Cowards.

  In silence, he drove to City Hall. It was warm inside the car and though it didn't really bother him, there was something wrong with that today. His chest felt hollow, as if a slender surgical blade had somehow been slipped into him and his heart carved out, cold and dead but still saturated with other people's blood. With Drusilla's death, he had become a shell of himself, a mask with no face beneath it.

  How can it be warm?

  Spike was certain that he ought to feel cold, and so he turned the air conditioner up as high as it would go and relished the stiffness in his fingers as his body tempera­ture began to dip even lower.

  Spike pulled into the underground garage beneath City Hall and parked in the spot reserved for him. He was ice now, a brittle, hollow sculpture of frozen pain shaped like a man. At some point his tears had stopped and now as he stepped out of the car, jacket cascading behind him, there was only his grief to mark Drusilla's passing.

  From a pocket inside his jacket he pulled out a white plastic key card. At the door that led into the complex he slid the card into a slot and a light burned green. The door clicked and he pushed it open and entered the war­ren of corridors beneath City Hall. There were tunnels from there that would lead to the basement of the court-house, the police station, even the town library.

  Spike clutched the key card and strode along one of those tunnels, the scrunch of leather the only sound to accompany him. At a junction in the corridor, he turned left and walked to a bank of elevators, where his key card was needed to call an elevator down.

  He stepped in and pressed the button for the third floor, then waited as the elevator glided upward. In the corner there was a security camera. Spike was a shadow of himself, a kind of ghost in his own right, and as he glared at the security camera from behind his dark sun­glasses, he wondered if the guards in the monitor booth

  could see the change in him. He wondered if they saw him coming, and shuddered.

  He hoped that they did.

  The elevator shushed to a halt and the doors slid open. A pair of burly Kakchiquels stood blocking his exit, their eyes crackling with energy, their tattooed faces im­passive. Spike was not at all surprised to see them.

  "You are not expected until dusk," one of the Kakchiquels said, voice emotionless.

  "The master does not need you until then," added the other.

  Spike cocked his head to one side, regarding them through the tinted glasses. He slipped his key card into his pocket. The elevator doors began to close and he punched the button to open them again.

  "Yeah. He mentioned that. Wanted me to take a little time, cool off a bit, right?" Spike nodded, but then stopped abruptly. "Bugger that."

  With one swift motion he reached out, grabbed the one on the left by a clump of hair, and hauled him for­ward, driving his knee up into the Kakchiquel's crotch. The vampire doubled over and Spike yanked him into the elevator, then stepped off. The other Kakchiquel was ready for him, or at least thought he was. Spike took one blow to the temple that knocked his sunglasses spinning through the air, then grabbed the vampire by the face and squeezed, breaking his jaw and fracturing his cheekbones. He knew his own eyes flickered with the blazing power of Camazotz, just as his enemy's did.

  With a low snarl, Spike rammed the vampire back

  against the wall, then grabbed his hair in a tight fist and shoved the guard's head through the emergency glass covering a fire extinguisher. Broken glass sliced his hand but Spike barely felt it as he snapped the heavy fire extinguisher from its moorings and began slamming it into the Kakchiquel's skull until it was mashed to pulp and splintered bone.

  The guard dusted.

  A ding sounded behind him and Spike turned to see the elevator doors opening again, the guard he'd kneed standing inside. With a twist of his arm, he swung the extinguisher again and shattered the guard's nose. Spike struck him again and again, beating him down, then pressed all the numbers on the elevator before stepping off. The elevator moved down, taking the bloody, crip­pled Kakchiquel with it.

  Spike did not smile. He no longer had anything to smile about. No one with whom to share the exhilara­tion of a good fight, a good kill. Instead he picked up the black glasses from the floor and slipped them back on. He reached into his coat, took out a box of cigarettes and a metal lighter, and fired one up.

  He strode down the hall and around a corner that led him to the huge double doors of the courtroom. There an­other pair of Kakchiquels were standing guard, and they snapped instantly to attention, ready to stop him.

  Spike took a drag on the cigarette, blew out the air, and gazed at them coolly from behind his shades, where he hid the telltale spark of power that bound him to these other creatures.

  "I know, I know," he said. "You're supposed to stop me, yeah? Bloody hell, mates, have at it then. But think about it this way. Mood I'm in right now, you'll have to kill me to stop me. If you can. And if you do, well, he's gonna miss me, isn't he? Then he'll kill you blokes sure as I'm standing here. His lordship is fickle like that. On the other hand, you stand aside and he'll punish you, sure, but you'll live."

  Spike took a long drag on the cigarette, blew rings of smoke into the air and barely even glanced at the two Kakchiquels as they exchanged a nervous glance. After a moment, they actually opened the large double doors for him.

  He winked at the larger one and went into the court­room.

  The rows of seats were filled with vampires, eyes crackling with orange fire, black bats seared into the ten­der flesh of their faces. Spike found that there were fewer and fewer familiar faces as the months went by. Giles sent those he trusted out on errands of vital impor­tance. They were part of the plan. But he had always kept Spike and Drusilla close at hand, either because he felt he needed them or because he didn't trust them, or both.

  The lights were dim in the huge room and the only noise was the shifting of the Kakchiquels in their seats as Spike entered. They were a motley collection of vam­pires, from those who had been servants of Camazotz when the bat-god had come to Sunnydale, to existing vampires like Spike himself who had been recruited by Giles, to new creatures made only recently.

  Giles sat on the dais—where the judge would have presided, if there were any judges left in Sunnydale. His eyes glowed only very dimly. His graying hair was combed neatly back and a soft, benevolent smile turned up the corners of his mouth. He wore a thin green V-neck sweater with a white tee shirt underneath. To those who had known him as a human being, only the fact that his glasses were missing would have shattered the illusion that he had not changed at all.

  Brilliant, kind hearted, self-effacing. That had been Giles the man, the Watcher. It was a face he wore still, though no one knew what sort of pleasure he derived from the facade.

  Of all the vampires in the chamber, only one other be­sides Spike was standing. He was a dark-skinned leech whose ritual tattoo had been seared into his face with white ink instead of black. The bat-scar was the color of milk and it set him apart from all the others. Giles called him Jax. Spike did not know if he had any other name. He had simply appeared one day, a creature sired by Giles and
then suckled by Camazotz as was their tradi­tion. But Jax had quickly become far more than simply another recruit. He was Giles's right hand.

  Spike hated him.

  Jax glanced once at Spike, a small smile flickering across his features, then he gestured at a female vampire in the front row.

  "Valerie? I believe your report is next."

  "I don't think so," Spike snapped as he strode up the aisle toward the judge's bench.

  Hushed mutterings filled the room.

  "Spike. You're half a day early. You have a private au­dience scheduled at dusk today."

  "Bollocks," Spike replied happily.

  He walked right up to Jax. No one tried to stop him. Jax moved to block his way, hate simmering in the other vampire's gaze. Spike took another drag on his cigarette, plucked the butt from his mouth between two fingers, and pressed its burning, ashen end into the middle of Jax's forehead. The leech snarled in pain and anger, his features contorting into the bestial face of the vampire.

  Spike decked him.

  He stood before the bench and glared up at Giles, whose eyebrows shot up with curiosity Spike found in­sulting.

  "She's dead," Spike said, voice a rasp. "You might as well have struck a match to her yourself, you bastard. What are you playing at with this Slayer? You could've had her a dozen times since she got out."

  For a moment, just the tiniest flicker, the mask slipped. A shadow of menace seemed to fall across Giles's features. The smile gave way to a lip-curling snarl. His nostrils flared and the orange fire in his eyes became tiny embers. Then it passed and the kindly, al­most paternal smile returned to his features.

  Giles leaned toward him and gazed down from the judge's bench. "Go. Sit. Valerie is next. When she's done, we'll talk about what went wrong last night, and what we've all lost."

  As though Spike had suddenly disappeared from the room, Giles gestured for Valerie to come forward. Jax rubbed at the burned spot on the white brand on his face, but he, too, gave his attention to the Kakchiquel girl. It infuriated Spike to be ignored like that, but he supposed it beat having Giles order a room filled with vampires to kill him. Still, Spike did not sit as Giles had instructed. He might take orders from the big boss, the king, but he was still his own man. He had a legend of his own to maintain. Giles knew that... he constantly used Spike's status as an object of fear to his advantage.