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Barb
"It can't be that bad," Xander said. He leaned back
against the wall and folded his hands behind his head. "By
definition. So the Balance tips too far towards the good. Oh, the
horror, not."
Spike exhaled a plume of smoke
with a look that said 'If I were Kzinti, my name would be
Speaker-to-Idiots.' "How far are we from the Hellmouth? Two
miles?"
Xander called the grid of
Sunnydale's major streets to mind and did a quick triangulation. They'd
gone underground at the manhole at the intersection west of the apartment
complex, and the burnt-out wreck of Sunnydale High was... "Closer to a
mile and a half." An unpleasant thought struck him. "Or we were
before we got stuck in this...whatever it
is. I have no idea where we
are now."
"Right." Spike rubbed the
side of his nose, as if it itched. "As it happens, yours truly cracked a
few books on Hellmouths back when I was making plans to bring Drusilla here to
take the waters."
Despite Willow’s
insistence that Spike was a closet geek, the idea of him cracking books any more
demanding than 'Lust Kittens of Venus' was something Xander had trouble taking
seriously. "I feel expository dialogue coming on. 'And as you know,
Xander--'"
Spike glared. "Mystical
portal leading to a hell dimension, blah blah, take as given. Point is,
the Hellmouth's aura affects the whole town, and especially these tunnels.
Things happen here, usually bad. The Hellmouth sends out emanations of
chaos and nastiness, attracts the attention of discerning evildoers
everywhere--" he bowed with an ironic flourish. "--and hawks up the occasional
Ascended demon to bugger up the lives of the common throng." He wheeled
about, craning his neck down one of the passages. "D'you hear
that?"
Xander resisted the urge to peer
after him. If there wasn't anything there, it was pointless; if there was
something there and Spike was just now catching it, it was just as pointless,
since Spike's hearing was ten times better than his. "All I hear is the
sound of one vamp yapping. This is Hellmouth 101.
So?"
"So. Doesn't happen too often
that the Balance swings too far in the opposite direction in the vicinity of a
Hellmouth, but I ran across one or two mentions--think it was in Ruprecht's
Alternus Mundi--or was it..." Spike contemplated the arabesques of
cigarette smoke coiling upwards in front of his nose and frowned. "Ah,
bugger it, I can't remember. Had a blue cover, whatever it was. What
it comes down to is this: under the right conditions, a Hellmouth can do a
flip." The vampire picked up his axe and gestured round at the tiled
walls--one, two, three, four. The rust and mold stains were almost gone
now, and the shattered remnants of Spike's earlier temper tantrum had
vanished. The formerly broken section of tile was as pristine as the rest
of the wall. "This look like chaos and nastiness to you? Perfect
symmetry. Everything getting cleaner and newer and better."
Xander's attempt at keeping a straight face lasted
about five seconds. He broke into a snicker. "Oh, come on," he
chortled. "You mean we're now living on a... a Heavenmouth?" He
clasped his hands and rolled his eyes skywards. "Which will spread
sweetness and light and, what, hawk up the occasional televangelist? Even
if you're right, what are we
supposed to be scared of? Random acts of
kindness and non-violence? Do they bring on the comfy
chairs?"
"Harris, will you remove your tiny
withered brain from its protective wrapping and use it for a change?"
Spike didn't sound as if he were joking. He was scratching at one ear,
twitchy and uncomfortable, as if the air around them were becoming something
inimical. "Forget the harps and halos, this is real life. Who's the
closest representative of the forces of goodness and virtue you know?"
"Buffy, I guess, but--oh." The forces of
goodness and virtue around these parts were not exactly reluctant to kick
ass. "Point taken. But we're good guys. Why would they hurt
us? Well, I'm a good guy. I guess you're toast. Wish I could
say it was nice knowing you, but--"
Spike began a restless quartering of the intersection, hands locked behind his
back. "The Slayer's small change, cosmically speaking--yeh, Buffy took on
a hellgod and won, but that's Buffy. There's things out there that could
eat Glory for lunch, things that could send me up in flames with a look."
He met Xander's budding objection with a snort. "And don't get too comfortable
yourself, bricklayer. Remember the Judge?"
"Otherwise known as Xander Harris's finest hour?" Or
maybe second finest; the wrecking ball had been pretty good, too. "Surely
you jest." Spike's eyes went misty with nostalgia and a
wicked grin split his lean face. "If there's one regret in my life it's
that I couldn't be there to see Angelus's face when that bazooka went off."
"Oh, God, it was priceless. I
wish I'd had a camera..." Xander realized that he was matching Spike grin
for grin and forced a frown. Spike's grew a trifle more wicked.
"Keep in mind that at the height of my
career as a master vampire, in the midst of a plot to destroy the world no less,
I wasn't evil enough to pass the big blue bastard's muster." Spike blew a
smoke ring and cocked an eyebrow at him. "Granted I lost points for taking the
destroy-the-world part as a lark that'd never come off, but still. D'you
think you're pure enough in heart to shake hands with his opposite number?"
"I..." Xander swallowed. Every
rotten thing he'd said and done in the last few years leaped up and started
clamoring for attention in the forefront of his mind. Hyena-Xander, shoving
Buffy against the wall. Self-centered teenage asshole Xander, blowing off
Willow's crush on him. Not telling Buffy about the re-souling spell.
Cheating on Cordelia. A hundred exasperated public putdowns of Anya...
"...think panic is in order now."
"Wise decision. Take it from someone who's fought 'em, the forces
of good are vicious sons of bitches." Spike shouldered his axe and started
off down the corridor--no reason, Xander knew; just to be moving, just to be
doing something. Xander watched the vampire's black-clad back
diminishing in the distance for a minute, then grabbed the tranquilizer gun and
broke into a jog to catch up. Better to follow Spike and pretend they were
going somewhere than to sit around in the intersection and pretend it wasn't
freaky when Spike reappeared out of the opposite tunnel in five or ten
minutes. If they ran fast enough, would they see the backs of their own
heads?
The tunnel transformed subtly around
them as they walked. Xander could never pin down a change in the process
of occurring; he'd look away and look back, and something would be
different. The cables were taking on an almost cartoonish regularity in
their loops and coils, as each tile became a perfect glossy square of pearly
white, the light panels in the ceiling distinguishable only by their greater
luminance. The light grew softer, clearer, paler, and they walked in
enveloping radiance.
Xander found his grip
on the stock of the trank gun relaxing, even as he listened for something beyond
the distant tap-tap-tap of falling water and the sound of their own
footsteps. For all the eeriness of the tunnels, there was a certain
comfort in always knowing exactly what the next bend in the road would
bring.
Spike didn't share it; he had stopped
breathing and was gliding along in full hunting mode, his scuffed Docs making no
sound at all on the floor. Xander studied the sweep of black leather in
front of him. Whoever Spike had originally stolen that duster from had been
several sizes larger than Spike was; the vampire swam in the thing, but as the
coat slapped against him, you could still make out the lines of his torso,
tapering sharply from breadth of shoulders to narrow hips.
Made a good target. Xander reached into his
other coat pocket, the one that held the stake he was seldom without, and turned
the length of sharpened oak over and over in his hand. The point would go
right there, in the angle between the spine and the left shoulder blade, right
between the ribs and into the heart. Buffy could drive a stake
effortlessly through bone and muscle from any angle. Xander, merely human,
had to worry about stakes getting stuck between the ribs or glancing off a
shoulder blade.
He imagined the length of
hardwood punching through matte-black leather and the thin layer of black cotton
beneath, through ivory skin and into innards just as wet and red and fragile as
any living human's, until the stake-point penetrated the heart and all dissolved
into dust. He used to do this all the time--with Angel, and later with
Spike--imagine what he'd do if either of them ever gave him the excuse. He
wondered why he'd stopped. He'd gotten out of the habit, over the summer,
led astray by shared patrols and games of pool and arguments over exactly which
Plastic Ono Band album sucked the most. He'd lulled himself into--not
forgetting, but worse, ignoring, the all-important fact that at the end of the
day, Spike was still pretty much a vampire. The whole resurrection thing
had jarred him back to reality, and now...
Now he was just slipping back into casual acceptance of this... this thing in
front of him? Phone ringing as Anya welcomed the first batch of
guests. Spike's North London drawl on the other end of the line "Harris.
Got a line on a Krallock demon. Feel like killing something? I'll
let you use the big gun." As much an overture, in its way, as him
showing up at the crypt with spicy chicken wings. And he'd accepted
it. Fuck. And here he was, following along behind
pretty-much-a-vampire with no real intention to plunge that stake in where
reason and logic said it should have gone years ago. Double fuck.
What was the matter with him? Hanging out with Spike was wrong.
"If you keep playing with it, you'll go
blind." Spike turned on his heel, swift, silent death with ears that could
the heart thudding away in his chest, or the scrape of callused fingers against
wood. "The suspense is killing me faster than you are."
Xander stopped in the middle of the
tunnel, feet braced, holding the gun with the vestige of the professional ease
his stint as Soldier Guy had left him. Step back, dart into the
chamber, aim, cock, pull trigger...it would be easy. You know one of these
babies will take a vampire down. And then the stake . Spike
stood there looking at him, dark brows angled in exasperation, not even slightly
worried. Trusting him. How twisted was that? "You know
something, Spike? Your little fling with Buffy has nothing to do with the
reason I hate your guts."
Spike sighed,
eyes imploring the heavens for patience. "Do tell."
It didn't. Not the way Spike thought. His
crush on Buffy was a thing of the past. All right, he had occasional lusty
thoughts. What guy wouldn't? Maybe if the two of them weren't so
damned obvious about it. Maybe if they didn't touch so often. Maybe if he
didn't have the image of Buffy standing in his foyer with her tongue halfway
down Spike's throat burned onto the back of his eyelids...
Maybe if Buffy can love an out-and-out demon and I can't
handle an ex-demon there's something wrong with me, not her.
Slam that thought back in lockup where it
belonged. "It's real simple. Half a dozen kids I grew up with, ate
lunch with, and got beat up by ended up as snack food for you or Dru or one of
your minions. And a few of 'em came back for a return engagement on the
business end of Buffy's stake. Never hesitated a minute.”
Four-year-old memories came flooding back--how had he forgotten all this?
How had all of them come to tolerate Spike's company? How could two
years' worth of grudging, chip-goaded help possibly make up for a century plus
of cheerful murder? “What the hell makes you so special?" Spike's
face remained impassive, and Xander took a belligerent step forward. "How
come you’re walking around and not Jesse or Andy Runyon or Terry
Lane?”
Spike studied him for a long
minute. “Because life’s got steel-toed boots and delights in applying them
to the family jewels, Harris. You haven’t figured that one out by
now?”
“You gonna claim you're sorry they’re
dead?"
"No." Spike cocked his head to
one side, what looked like real regret time-sharing with wary curiosity in his
eyes. "But sometimes I wish I could be." He scratched absently at
his jaw. "Then I come to my senses. Is there a point to this
conversation besides the one you're fondling?"
There was a point, all right--if he admitted for a second the possibility
of not-enemyhood with Spike, he was betraying real friends. And if
that was bad when he did it, how much worse was it when Buffy, the Slayer
herself, slept with the enemy? Everything seemed so clear down here, in
the pearly glow of the tunnel. Spike was evil. Evil through and
through. There were no shadows here, no greys, just pure, white,
comforting light which showed him that Spike was...
Red in the face? Now that was wrong. "Uh...
Spike... Are you supposed to sunburn indoors?"
Spike touched a startled hand to his cheek and drew it away with a hiss;
the pale marks of his fingertips lingered on his skin for a few seconds before
fading back to unnatural ruddiness. "Balls! Sunlight!" He glanced up
and around; there was no shelter to speak of in the slowly brightening
tunnels. "Enough dicking around. We've got to get out of here."
Xander shook his head again, hard, trying
to shake the fuzz out. His thoughts were all his own, but down here
some thoughts were more equal than others--ways to dispose of Spike sprang
easily to mind. Cooperating with an evil soulless vampire to get out, on
the other hand--he couldn't wrap his brain around the idea; he was blundering
through a spiritual algebra class, all his thoughts blunted and sluggish.
But he was used to that, wasn't he?
Used to being the last one to get it, and getting it anyway, in his own good
time. And no fuzzy-wuzzy feel-good tunnel of love was going to mess with
his head and get away with it, any more than some cut-rate Prince of Darkness
was going to make him play Renfield again. I'll hate Spike on my own
dime, damn it, I don't need any help from you. "Yeah. We
do." He forced the words out with a sense of triumph. We.
Take that, fuzzy goodness! "How?"
Spike flicked his cigarette butt down the corridor, hefted
his axe and grinned, squinting against the too-clear light. "If you can't
find a way out, you bloody well make one." The skin across his cheeks and
the backs of his hands was starting to prickle and burn, just as it had walking
under cloudy daylight skies. Should have been impossible; a vampire's
little sunlight allergy was metaphysical, not physical--no man-made light, no
matter how closely it duplicated full-spectrum sunlight, should have been able
to do the trick. Obviously the lights in this tunnel were no longer
exactly as men had made them.
Close
enough, though. Was he starting to smoke slightly, or was that just the
remains of his cigarette? Time for some preventive maintenance.
Spike flipped the axe end over end, caught it and jabbed upwards, ducking aside
as the haft smashed through the nearest light panel and shattered the bulb
inside into a thousand razor-edged snowflakes. He repeated the process
with the light panels on either side. "Much better," he breathed as the
final shower of glass heralded the return of relative darkness along a
twenty-foot segment of the tunnel.
Spontaneous combustion forestalled for the time being, Spike shook glittering
fragments of glass off his shoulders and reversed the axe again, swinging it
through a limbering arc. There was something out there in this infinitely
reflected latticework of tunnels, pacing them, spying on them; he could sense
it, just on the edge of his perceptions, a magnetic repulsion. His
opposite number, more or less, probably gritting its teeth, if it had any, over
his presence at this moment. And who better to open the door than
the blokes who built the castle? “We're probably going to have company
soon," he said. "Don't imagine the proprietors will look kindly on me
making a mess."
Xander looked up and down
the tunnel. "I thought we were avoiding the forces of goodness and
virtue?"
"Changed my mind. Who
better to let us out than the blokes who built the place?" Spike ran his
index finger down the axe-blade's notched edge, licked it, savoring the pain and
the taste of his own blood with connoisseur's appreciation. The prospect
of action was cheering. "Not likely we'll attract anything much nicer than
I am nasty, this early in the game. But if we do, you'll just have to put
in a good word." His grin went sharp-fanged and feral, eyes shining
lambent yellow under ridged brows; William the Bloody, not even trying to be
good, not the least little bit.
The
axe-blade whistled through the air and sank into the nearest bundle of
wall-cable with a THOK!, half-severing the whole mass. Another fountain of
sparks exploded outwards, and the tunnel filled with the stink of ozone as
individual strands of cable sprang apart, red and blue and green, hissing and
crackling like an angry hydra. He jumped back, feeling something in his
shirt-pocket thump against his chest. The lights flickered and dimmed for
fifty feet in either direction. "YEAH!" Spike howled, and hauled back for
another strike, lion-gold eyes burning in the manufactured darkness. The
axe-blade flashed again and electrical mayhem ensued. More light panels
died. "Burn me up sight unseen, will you? CREATURE OF SODDING
DARKNESS HERE! YOU WANT ME? COME GET ME!"
"These are the torch-you-with-a-look guys? Is this really a
good idea?" Xander backed nervously down the tunnel.
"One of my plans, and you have to ask?" The
third blow bypassed the cables and smashed into the tile, which exploded into
mother-of-pearl powder under the force of it. The fourth sent chunks of
plaster and concrete flying like shrapnel. Somewhere Xander was yelling at
him to watch it, but Spike was lost in the moment, face a snarling demonic mask
of fury, caught up in the orgasmic rush of destruction. Nothing in the
world existed but to break and tear and ravage, to ruin the dull perfection of
this place--and the only thing missing was best part of all, the sour tang of
fear and the screams of the dying. Harris's racing heart was a siren song,
calling up lush, sensual images of the blade tearing through bone and muscle
like a knife through Camembert, of fangs in flesh and sweet hot blood flowing
and the bastard had never liked him, fine to use old Spike for muscle but God
forbid you let him touch the women and all he'd have to do was lose that last
sliver of self-control and--
--and the
chip, thank God and That Fucking Bitch Walsh, would knock him flat on his
arse. There was a perverse freedom in knowing he could let his worst self
rage and foam and not have to worry about the consequences. Spike put his
back into it and swung again, and the whole wall shuddered and cracked, plaster
and cement falling away in huge flaking slabs and choking the tunnel with
dust. The axe-blade was starting to blunt and deform under the force of
his blows, but Spike was past noticing; the hole in the wall was deep enough to
stick an arm in up to the elbow.
CEASE.
It came from everywhere and nowhere, a
voice like the tolling of bells, like a chord struck on an organ whose pipes
were the winds themselves. Spike froze mid-swing at the sound, hated it
from the first note and longed for it never to fall silent, yearning so mixed
with loathing it made him physically ill, tied knots in his gut and pulled them
tighter with every note. Radiance flooded the tunnel again and he threw a
hand up to guard his eyes, snarling, fighting to regain ascendancy over himself.
It was a whirlwind of eyes, a rush of
wings, a clash of blades, a shining in the air. It slid away from
any attempt to pin it down with words; it was beautiful beyond thought,
and Spike balled up his desolation and fear and longing and stuffed it
down into the sub-basements of his mind. He turned to face the approaching
creature with all his customary bravado, leaning on the handle of his beat-up
axe and smirking into the face of heaven. It spread vast pinions, every
covert a glittering razor, every primary a saber of light. CREATURE OF
DARKNESS, YOU HAVE NO PLACE HERE.
"That's
ducky by me," said Spike. "Why don't you let us out, then?"
"Spiiiike," Xander said, jabbing him
in the ribs with an elbow. He gave the thing a sickly grin.
"Don't pay any attention to my idiot friend here, he's got
Tourette's. It compels him to stupidly insult supernatural creatures way
bigger than he is. If you'll show us the way out I promise to take him
home and put him to bed with a nice bottle of whiskey and--" Aside, to Spike, he
hissed, "What is that thing?"
"Harrier
demon," Spike whispered back, taking the opportunity to feel around under cover
of the duster. What the hell did he have in his pocketses? String,
or... his fingers met glass and metal. Bloody sodding hell, not nothing,
his glasses. After Buffy’d left the crypt this afternoon he’d put them on
to read the footy scores and gnash his teeth over the match report of Man U’s
humiliating loss to West Ham. He must have tucked them into his pocket
after, while constructing an elaborate and impractical scheme to stow away on a
cargo plane to England and eat Jerome Defoe. The second time he’d done
that lately, and he couldn’t afford to be that careless with them; it wasn’t as
if he could pop over to the nearest Lenscrafters and get a new
prescription. Xander was staring at him curiously; Spike stuffed the
spectacles back down in his pocket and affected indifference. “Heard of
'em. Never seen one before."
"If it's
a demon, what's with the 'creature of darkness' line?"
"It's a good demon, nitwit." And unfortunately
well into the incinerate-vampires-with-a-look range. He hadn't
expected anything this powerful. "Working directly for the
Powers--they don't often mingle with the riff-raff."
"There's good demons?"
Spike gave the Harrier a long-suffering, 'see what I
have to put up with?' look. "Now about letting us off this
roundabout--"
Unimpressed, it shimmered in
the air before them like a heat-mirage in summer, a roiling mist of light and
air and terrible swift swords. Its attention fixed upon Xander for a
moment, examining, evaluating, and discarding in seconds. YOU ARE FOUND
WANTING. YOUR SINS ARE MANY. It paused. BUT
INSIGNIFICANT. Its Argus-eyed regard turned upon Spike. I AM CHARGED
WITH THE ELIMINATION OF SUCH AS YOU. And blades lashed out like lightning
in all directions, searing brilliant tongues of flame.
"...the property was entailed, of
course, and went to the cousin in Leicester, but the will settled five hundred
pounds apiece on each of Letitia's children..."
"Uh huh." Buffy squinched her eyes at the ceiling a few times,
hoping to avert their incipient glazing-over a few seconds longer.
She took another swallow of kiwi-strawberry, which, as an alternative to
listening to Halfrek, was becoming downright palatable. In order to
explain how she'd come to be William's (snarl) intimate friend,
Halfrek felt it necessary to explain in detail the history of their
respective families for three generations back. No matter how juicy,
gossip lost its piquancy when it was a hundred and fifty years out of
date, and this gossip had been on the desiccated side to begin with--so far
Spike's-- William's--family came off as the sort of people who showed up
as background characters in a duller-than-average A&E miniseries.
"...so when the family removed to Hampshire, William's
father married the youngest Cavendish girl, and..."
Another generation down. Maybe they'd get
William conceived before the party was over. Buffy began assembling a cast
list in her head for Middlemarch II: The Revenge of Dorothea.
Spike in a cravat. Mmm. Not bad. She added black
leather boots, a riding crop, and those skin-tight riding breeches to her mental
image and mussed up its hair a little. Mmmmmm... very bad.
On the other side of the coffee table,
Anya shucked the wrapping from another combination waffle iron/grill and added
it to the varicolored paper mountain at her feet. There were two identical
gifts in the pile of opened presents already, and Buffy felt a faint sense of
satisfaction that at least her present hadn't been a re-run. "This is
lovely, though redundant," Anya said, examining Waffle Iron #3. For Anya,
that was the height of tact.
"It does
Belgian," Lorri pointed out.
Anya's eyes
grew damp and her lower lip trembled. "Xander loves Belgian waffles."
Trembly Anya + pissed off Xander
another argument. Buffy tossed her hair out of her eyes. Maybe she
should try to talk to him... Advice to the lovelorn from Buffy Summers,
number one on the doomed relationship hit parade for five years running!
Run, Xander, run!
“...hate My
Little Pony," Sandra said to Tara, who was hanging over the back of the
couch next to Willow. "Horse craziness is all about girls coming to terms
with sex and masculine power, for that you need a horse. Take the
Black Stallion novels--"
"See, this is why
I was destined for the lesbian thing," Willow said. "Horses are just four
hooves waiting to step on your foot."
Tara
pouted. "I loved those books! And 'King of the Wind!'"
Sandra nodded and gestured violently with a
carrot stick. "The whole point is that the Black's a half-wild killer, but
he loves Alex and will do anything for him. Our daughter eats that
up. The toy companies of America take this primal symbol of power and
virility and neuter it, make it into these harmless little pastel eunuchs with
fluffy tails..."
"...so when the
season opened I came up to London and was most displeased to discover William
had let a room in..." Drat. Missed
William's conception altogether. "Buffy, when can we fit you for
your bridesmaid's dress?" Lorri cut across the several lines of
conversation.
It was astonishing how
much a wine cooler or two did to reconcile one to asparagus green. Though
the thought of those ruffles still elicited a shudder of horror. Buffy
selected a Triscuit and topped it with a slice of cheddar. "Um... I'm
probably free Tuesday or Wednesday. Monday we have that, um, thing."
"Ah, yes. The thing. Wednesday
is good," Anya said. She surveyed Buffy with an appraising eye.
"It's a good thing I didn't ask right after you came back. You're gaining
weight and the dress wouldn't have fit by January."
Buffy choked on her cracker. "Thank you, because I so
needed to hear that."
Anya patted her
shoulder with a kindly smile. "Oh, don't worry, you're still way too
skinny."
Sandra paused in railing against
the evils of small pink plastic horses to the prepubescent feminine psyche to
eye Buffy's reed-slim body and raise a skeptical eyebrow. "Please, God,
can I gain weight like that?"
Leaning back
against the sofa cushions and listening to the voices swirl around her, Buffy
could see with Slayer-vision clarity--perhaps it was the kiwi-strawberry going
to her head--a future where this was her life, where there was no mysterious
thing on Monday to interfere with dress fittings, where her conversations would
revolve around diets and children and office gossip and subverting the paradigm
of corporate America. And it wouldn't be perfect and it wouldn't be safe,
because husbands had industrial accidents and mothers died of brain hemorrhages
and sisters got caught shoplifting. Side by side with the
two-point-five-kids-and-white-picket-fence future was another: darker, stranger,
wilder. Herself at thirty, or forty, or fifty, a thin tough woman with
stormy eyes and hard hands, going places and doing things which defied
description, with a lean pale man at her side who looked far too young for
her. No kids, unless Dawn provided some nieces and nephews for her and
Spike to spoil rotten. No marriage, unless heart given for heart counted
for as much or more than legal formality. No easy answers as she grew
older and he didn't. And the only thing that picket fence would be used
for was making stakes.
Door Number One,
Door Number Two. Or you can go for the box behind the curtain...
The building shuddered. Little
shrieks and yips of surprise broke out around the room; pictures rattled
on the wall and dishes clinked and jittered on the tables. In the
contents of every half-full glass and bottle concentric waves shivered in
and out of existence and a few of the women dashed for doorways in the native
Californian's instinctive search for load-bearing masonry. Outside a
grinding rumble culminated in a cannon-loud crack of noise--had one of the other
buildings collapsed?
Buffy was halfway to
the front door before her brain caught up with her reflexes and pointed out that
the noise was far out of proportion to anything such a mild tremor should have
caused. As she threw open the door, the parking lot exploded in a blaze of
white light, bright as midday, shining from a raw crater thirty feet across in
the middle of the landscaping between Xander's building and the next. The
turf was thrown back as if exploded from below and a whole segment of the
adjoining sidewalk and parking lot was a crumpled bank of asphalt and concrete;
the carport over the residents' parking spaces was peeled back upon itself like
the lid of a sardine tin, its supporting posts poking crazily into the floodlit
sky. Several cars had tipped over, wheels spinning helplessly like the
feet of glittering upended beetles. And rising out of the crater...
"What is--?" Willow was right behind
her. "Oh my--Buffy, is that a demon?"
Buffy licked her suddenly-dry lips, staring down at the incandescent
creature below. "I don't know." Small dark figures swam across the
bright background. "But whatever it is, there's people--"
Anya shouldered her way through the door, shoving
Willow and Buffy aside. She stood on the landing with fingers
pressed to lips. "Xander!"
"Anya! Wait!" Buffy cried, grabbing for her arm, but Anya was
gone, racing down the steps and out into the parking lot. Buffy
sprang after her, shouting "Come on, Will!" over her shoulder and taking
the clattering stairs three at a time.
A wing of light arced across Spike's midriff, shearing
through cloth and leather and flesh, the sword-blades of its primaries stained
with dark blood when they swept away. The vampire dropped to a crouch, flinging
the tails of his duster up and over his head as his flesh began to scorch in the
intensity of the blaze. Xander charged forwards with a yell, whirling the
trank gun overhead, straight into the face--well, the front, at least--of their
opponent. It hadn't expected that, and instead of parrying reared up and
back, trying to avoid hurting him. Whirlwind supernatural energies met
earth and stone, colliding with the low ceiling, and the tunnel rocked with the
basso rumble of earth tearing apart. Tiles fell in a blinding ceramic rain
and half the roof vaporized. Screams and the blaring of half a dozen car
alarms floated down through the hole in the sky.
If the falling ceiling didn’t bury him, he was going to choke to
death. Xander stumbled blindly for a minute, totally lost. A
sunburnt face loomed out of the dust and Spike's cold hard fingers circled his
wrist, yanking him forward through the falling rubble. "Listen whelp, if I
give you a toss up, can you catch hold up there?"
Xander shoved lank dark locks of hair out of his eyes and looked up;
tattered indigo sky framed in fractal black had replaced gently glowing
tile. "I have no idea." The air crackled as the Harrier surged
towards them. "Find out, now!"
Spike
immediately shifted his grip to Xander's belt and coat-collar. Xander had
the stomach-churning sensation of being lifted off the ground like a
kitten. With a grunt of effort Spike heaved him overhead and tossed him
into the air, and Xander was sailing over the Harrier demon's head, or top, or
whatever, seeing his spread-eagled, flailing self reflected in dozens of
astonished crystalline eyes. He slammed face-first into the sloping rim of
the crater, sliding downwards in a small landslide of earth and gravel and
catching himself with a few desperate frog-kicks at the rubble.
He clawed his way over the rim and turned around in time to
see Spike take a running leap straight at the Harrier. It might look like
someone had blown the CGI budget, but the blades it was slicing and dicing and
trying to make Julienne vampire with were real enough. His burnt lips
skinned back over his fangs in a savage snarl, Spike brought the axe down and
the dulled blade sank home, cleaving translucent eyes that bled rays of light
into the dust-laden air. Spike hauled himself up along the haft of the
axe, the toes of his boots jabbing for purchase among the joints of wings which
flickered in and out of existence like the ghosts of bad cable reception.
He stood for one precarious moment balanced on shifting air; then his lean body
uncoiled, all the power in the muscles of calf and thigh released at once.
Fifteen feet straight up he shot, his outstretched arms straining for the
sky. At the apex of his leap one hand grasped a projecting shelf of broken
asphalt, fingers raking gouges in the crumbling tar.
Out of the roiling mass of dust and grit the Harrier
rose, a sunrise in the depths of midnight. It shook the axe free, its
wound closing even as they watched, and soared upwards in glory. A fury of
blades whirled upwards, and Spike, bathed in its painful light, jerked both
knees up to his chest barely in time to escape losing a foot.
Xander belly-flopped over the edge as far as he could
reach and clamped his hand around Spike's wrist. The normally-cool flesh
was radiating heat from the burns he'd sustained, and it must have hurt like
hell, but Spike didn't flinch. The asphalt outcropping disintegrated under
the pressure of Spike’s fingers and his full weight came down on Xander’s arm
and shoulder with a bone-wrenching jerk. For a small eternity Xander held
a hundred and sixty pounds of dead weight vampire one-handed, dangling over the
lip of the new-made pit. Then he heaved upwards, panting with effort;
Spike’s free hand found another ledge, and he was up and over the rim.
Spike lurched to his feet and the two of them stood swaying on the precipice,
clutching one another's shoulders as if that'd make a difference if the whole
edge dropped out from under them.
Spike
favored Xander with his smarmiest grin. “Awwww. Harris is my bestest
pal.”
“So do you actually want to end
up a big pile of dust?” The Harrier spun up out of the crater, a tornado
of sunlit razor plumage. "I think you got it mad," Xander observed.
"You think?" Spike swiped his sleeve across his
nose--on second glance, maybe he wasn't as badly burned as Xander'd
thought, not too much worse than the sunburn he'd gotten showing off last
week. All to the good; watching charred vampire bits flake off
wasn't high on his big fun agenda. Xander looked around; half a
dozen car alarms were still blatting a maddening symphony in the background, set
off by the noise and tremor, and people were pouring out of the complexes to see
what was going on. There were several overturned cars in the parking lot,
one of which, a small dark blue Tiercel, was teetering precariously on the very
edge of the crater. He felt a most unheroic relief at the thought that his
car was parked at the other end of the lot.
With a thunder of wings the creature was out of the hole and
after them. Spike toppled backwards, dragging Xander with him. Both
of them scrambled away from the pit on hands and knees before lurching to their
feet. Xander spun round in place, looking for a weapon. Rocks.
There had to be something a step up from rocks.
"Xander!" Anya's voice, a terrified screech over the car
alarms. "Are you all right?"
The Harrier halted, mantling its multitude of wings, a raptor sighting new
prey. It didn't attack at once, as if Anya confused its
senses. It hovered in place, undecided between two targets, the wind
of its passage kicking up a flurry of dust and debris. CHILD OF
ARASHMAHAR? it asked, its voice the crackle of windblown flame. Anya
froze, mesmerized by the creature as it hovered over the parking lot, but
new determination filled her dark eyes and she started towards Xander
again.
"Oh, bollocks!"
Spike was off like a flash, tearing off round the rim of the crater in the
opposite direction, to what purpose Xander couldn't tell--saving his own skin,
maybe; with his departure the terror of wings and eyes swooped down upon Anya,
whirling blades leaving trails of fire on the air.
"NO!" Xander screamed, the harsh panicked sound of a man
losing something vital. He forgot Spike, forgot the fact that this thing
could turn him into shish kebab, forgot everything except the fact that it was
bearing down on Anya. He broke into a stumbling run around the edge of the
pit, jumping chunks of sidewalk. Anya screamed as well, fear and anger
striking sparks in her voice, and flung a ragged fist-sized hunk of asphalt at
the oncoming Harrier. It hit a sword blade and bounced off.
"Keep away from her!" he yelled,
painfully aware of his complete inability to back up his threat. He
skidded to a halt, interposing himself between Anya and the Harrier. A
quarter of the way around the pit, he caught a glimpse of Willow, her hair an
unmistakable blaze of red in the parking lot floodlights. She floated up
to perch on the bed of an overturned Ford Rambler and stood there like a
general surveying a battlefield, then flung her arms skyward and began a
chant. The words squirmed away from his head when he tried to remember
them. Violet lightning began to gather about her outstretched hands, snap
crackle pop.
If it wasn't willing to
hurt him, and he could just play human shield for long enough... Willow'd
come through.
I HAVE NO WISH TO HARM
YOU, the Harrier hissed in the dry wail of Santa Ana winds, feinting right
and left with razor-tipped wings.
"Well, then, don't!" Xander wondered if he could get behind a car
or something, but all the vehicles were on the other side of the
crater. A bush, then, or a lamp post--anything besides thin air.
IT IS MY DUTY TO SLAY CREATURES OF EVIL.
"Harming her is harming me, you Electrical Parade
reject!" Xander pulled Anya into a protective hug and she burrowed into
his shoulder, sobbing. "And she's not a demon!"
NO. YET HER ESSENCE CONTAINS VAST DARKNESS.
Essence? "Ahn, what’s it's talking
about?" Was that her soul? They never talked about that trickiest of
subjects if they could help it; easier just to assume that human form came with
a human soul included.
The
Harrier shimmied back and forth, restless and, to Xander’s possibly biased
perceptions, pissed off. THERE IS IMBALANCE HERE.
CONFUSION.
"Sodom and Gomorrah,
rains of frogs, Slayers and vampires living together, yeah, yeah!
What's that got to do with Anya?"
HAVE YOU NOT TOLD HIM, CHILD OF ARASHMAHAR?
Anya moaned, and Xander looked wildly from her to the Harrier.
"Told me what? Anya, what--"
Her head drooped, and then Anya straightened, pulling away from him and
straightening her jacket. She looked the Harrier in the eyes, fear
replaced with resignation. "It can tell," she said, her voice
shaking only a little.
"Tell what?"
"What I am." Anya began putting her
hair in order, unnaturally composed. "What I've always been.
Well, not always, but for the last thousand years, give or take a decade."
Xander stared at her. Anya:
straightforward to the point of rudeness. Able to rattle off the histories
of a dozen major demon clans in excruciating detail and completely in the dark
about the social relevance of Star Wars. Rapaciously
intelligent about subjects that interested her, a financial whiz and cutthroat
business woman, beautiful, sexy, desperately in love with him... and human,
absolutely, positively human.
Except
that she'd started out with no more concern for the welfare of non-Xander
humans than Spike had for non-Buffy humans, ans still wasn't exactly a
font of charity. And she looked back as fondly on her days of meting
out destruction as Spike did. And... "You don't have a soul,"
he whispered.
"I do too!" Anya shot
back, unnatural calm giving way to familiar and reassuring brusqueness.
She stamped one well-shod foot. "I was born human, you know! I
have a perfectly good soul, it's just--complicated. When D'Hoffryn
recruits us to be vengeance demons we're... converted. Given the demonic
aspect, and the powers, and the pendant to control them. And cleansed
of..." She gave a fidgety twist of one hand. "Distractions."
"Distractions?"
"You know." Anya folded her arms defensively
across her chest. "Empathy. All that tiresome feeling sorry
for people. We wouldn't be any good as vengeance demons if we got
half-way through a wish and started feeling sorry for the victim, would
we? I became a demon when I was seventeen, and..." A spot of
hectic red appeared on each cheek, but she kept her head high and defiant.
"I never un-became one. I gave myself human form to grant Cordelia's wish,
and when my pendant was destroyed I got stuck this way, but it didn’t change who
I was inside. I've always been Anyanka--if D'Hoffryn would ever give me a
new pendant, the big meanie."
The Harrier demon flickered from side to side; Xander suspected that had it not
been beneath its dignity, (and had it possessed a visible mouth) the thing would
have been smirking and saying I told you so! Xander drew a deep gulping
breath. “Anya’s not evil. No matter what else she may be, she’s not
evil. She helps people now.”
“I never
was evil,” Anya said, irritated. “More amoral. Most demons
are. Honestly, with the exception of species like vampires who give the
rest of us a bad name, the whole ‘demon equals evil’ thing is overdone.”
She gave the Harrier a nervous smile. “As you should know, uh, sir, being
a good demon yourself. Not to mention that I’m all contaminated again with
feelings about people I really have no reason to feel about...”
YOU HAVE CAUSED GREAT SUFFERING. YOUR DEATH IS
JUSTICE. Its myriad eyes turned to Xander. I HAVE NO WISH TO HARM
YOU, BUT IF I MUST DO SO TO DESTROY THIS CREATURE, I SHALL.
Xander wondered if this was one of those
dreams you woke up from to discover you were still dreaming. Here he was,
standing in a parking lot, having just saved a vampire's ass and trying to keep
his ex-demon fiancé from being touched by an angel, or as near to one as he was
probably ever going to see. All his worst fears confirmed. All that
was left was to look down and discover he wasn’t wearing any pants. And
there was Anya gazing at him with brown-velvet eyes no different than they had
been this morning, when they woke up together. Eyes brimming with tears
and anger. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he choked out.
She shook her head. “You would have left me.”
It was just a flat statement of fact, and
it got him right in the gut. Xander turned back to the
Harrier.
YOU KNOW WHAT SHE
IS. WILL YOU STAND ASIDE?
Xander
stared at the ground, stared at the toes of his boots, stared at his
hands. At last he looked up. "Sometimes," he said, sounding far too
reasonable in his own ears, "You just get to a place in life where you have to
make a radical re-evaluation of the whole good-bad demon-human thing and let me
see if I can explain this... I understand Ahn’s a demon. And...” He
folded his arms and stood foursquare in front of Anya, who looked at him with
dawning hope. “I DON'T CARE!"
A handful of Anya's party guests had followed her out to
the parking lot and were milling about in confusion. Spike didn't
see Halfrek among them; no surprise there, as the gang from Arashmahar
generally buggered off at the first sign of trouble. As Spike
reached the Tiercel, someone else finally noticed the movements behind the
tinted windows that his far-sighted predator's eyes had picked up on at
once. An unfamiliar woman's voice shouted, "Lorri, call 911, there's
someone stuck in this car! It's going to fall in!"
Ignoring the onlookers, Spike leaped atop
the car and crouched beside the driver's door like some exceptionally
athletic gargoyle, studying the interior through the window. The
door-handle had jammed; pulling at it, he knew from experience, would just rip
it off. He needed leverage. Spike balled up a fist in his
duster and sent it smashing through the glass, which dissolved in pea-size
fragments, then grabbed the window-frame in both hands and pulled. The
door shot open with a crash, torn half off its hinges, and Spike ducked head and
shoulders inside. Inside was a small dark woman; she'd somehow slipped
free of the shoulder harness when the car tipped over, and was hanging
half-suspended from the seatbelt, her knees jammed into the steering
wheel. He could smell blood, but it was scarcely noticeable over the scent
of his own; not enough to indicate serious injury. In the distance he
heard the wail of approaching sirens. Best hurry before Sunnydale’s finest
showed up to complicate matters.
At the
sight of Spike coming through the window she began struggling to get away,
flopping like a gaffed fish. Spike tried grabbing an ankle, to no
avail. "Quit wriggling, you stupid bint, you're being
rescued!" The woman's only response was a terrified scream and an
attempt to claw through the back of the seat. Spike realized
belatedly that he was still in game face and switched back to human
features. It didn't seem to help; the woman kicked him in the chest,
drawing an answering stab of pain from the cut across his belly.
"OW! Bloody--if you don't be still so I can get you out of here, I'm going
to knock you senseless, sod the headache!"
A familiar and welcome scent tickled his nose through the tang of hot metal and
dust, and a second later Buffy dropped down past him through the open
window and began undoing the tangle of seatbelts. "Ma'am, calm
down! You're going to be all right! Your knight in shining armor act
leaves something to be desired," she observed as Spike bent the steering
wheel out of their way a tad. "Maybe more of a Wil Smith vibe, less of
a Jack Nicholson?"
The car creaked and
wobbled under their added weight. Spike shifted as much of his weight as
he could forward, and the unnerving teetering stilled for the moment. "New
to the hero business, love--I'm still working on my theme song. Here, pass
her up."
They handed the dazed woman (she
kept staring at Spike and shaking her head, and he had to exert a great deal of
willpower to keep from flashing her a little fang just to see her jump) off to
one of the newly-arrived paramedics and hopped down off the Tiercel. Spike
watched them lead her away, eyes hooded, an indefinable yet strangely familiar
emotion teasing round the corners of his heart. He wasn’t sure he wanted
to pin it down; it reeked of something he didn’t want to face head-on yet.
Buffy glanced up at him, a little smile curling the corners of her mouth.
"The George Hamilton look? Not working."
"Ta ever so. I'll pawn the tanning bed."
"What're we looking at?"
From teasing to General Buffy, all
terse and commandery, demanding a report from her second-in-command.
Spike glanced across the pit; Xander was still playing dodge 'em with the winged
wonder. "Harrier demon. They're warriors of light--don't usually
muck around with us vamps; it'd be like shooting flies with a cannon. They
get sent after things like your late unlamented Mayor."
"Then why's it after Anya?"
Spike shook his head. "Buggered if I know.
'Less it can tell she used to be a demon; they can sniff out the wicked like
bloodhounds, and vengeance demons are a bloody sight more powerful than a mere
vampire. D'Hoffryn's girls can only grant wishes according to the rules,
and Harriers are keen on rules--but the collateral damage from a few
badly-phrased wishes alone would set that shiny bastard off. Our Anya was
a vengeance demon for a long, long time."
"Well, she's not now." Buffy looked grim. "How do
we stop it?"
A bark of laughter escaped
him. "Got a bazooka handy?"
Buffy
chewed on her lower lip. "If it's one of the good guys, we can talk
to it. It's got to listen. We just need to get its
attention."
"Mmm. Suppose
beaning it with an axe wasn't conducive to negotiations, then."
Buffy’s jaw dropped. "Why did you--?”
Spike opened his mouth, realized he was
about to say Because it bloody near broke my only pair of glasses,
that’s why! and was overcome with the dire conviction that this, in
conjunction with whatever Halfrek had already told her about the general
pathetic wankerdom of his breathing days, would undoubtedly mean the end of his
and Buffy’s short but eventful relationship in a fit of hysterical
laughter. “It hit me first.”
“Oh. Then I
wouldn't hang around the mailbox waiting for a letter from the Nobel committee,
no." Buffy looked around, then pointed to the collapsed carport, a
crumpled length of fiberglass and steel draped across the hoods of half-a-dozen
assorted cars. "Attention-getting device."
Spike grinned at her. "On it, love." Buffy
crouched down, wrapped her arms around the base of the support beam and
pulled, her face contorted with effort. Spike took hold of the scalloped
edge if the roof where the two pieces were bolted together and
ripped. Rivets popped and sun-weakened fiberglass snapped, and the
whole thing tore free with a crash. Spike shoved the roof section
away, and it landed with a crash, doing serious damage to the roof of the
Geo Metro in the nearest parking space. No loss there; the owner
should thank him for forcing them to get a real car.
In a trice they wrestled the support
pole free of its moorings. They had a weapon, twelve feet of twisted
metal, one end terminating in a club of cement where they'd torn it free
of the pavement. Unwieldy as hell, but big enough to make the
Harrier sit up and notice without putting them within slashing reach. He
hefted the pole to shoulder height and Buffy looked at him, her nose adorably
smudged, her teeth bared in a fighting grin. "Charge!"
Xander pulled Anya out of the way of
another slashing appendage as Spike and Buffy barreled towards them at full and
terrifying speed. The pole was a bitch and a half to run with,
over-balanced at the club-end and inconveniently shaped to grip, but the two of
them never missed a step, flying over the uneven ground as if they'd practiced
it for weeks. "DUCK!" Spike bellowed, and Xander dropped flat with Anya
beneath him. Vampire and Slayer leaped over their heads in unison and
rammed the club-end of the rebar into the center of the whirlwind. Half a
dozen blades struck sparks rebounding off the metal, and their combined strength
and momentum slammed the Harrier back a good twenty feet, spinning above the
center of the crater like a psychotic buzzsaw.
SLAYER? The massive composure in its voice wavered for an
instant. Had they wounded it? Considering how easily it had shrugged
off the axe, that didn’t seem likely; they’d done the equivalent of knocking the
breath out of it, no more. YOU OPPOSE ME?
Buffy crouched on a concrete slab, teetering on the edge of the pit, her
face washed of detail by the Harrier’s actinic light. "I won't let you
hurt Spike and Anya!"
I AM WHAT YOU
ARE. A WARRIOR OF LIGHT. THEY ARE... WHAT WE ARE BOUND TO
DESTROY--YOUNGER SISTER, YOU BETRAY YOUR HERITAGE AND YOUR PURPOSE.
"Better that than betray my friends!"
Buffy’s voice shook with outrage.
Two
of the women who'd followed Anya down--Lorri and Sandra--joined Xander in
shielding her. Spike gave the two of them an irritated look. Sod it
all, they would have to be helpful; he was going to have to revise his list of
people he wouldn’t kill if the chip came out again. Lorri waved her cell
phone at the Harrier angrily. "Leave her alone! What's she done to
you?"
IF IT IS YOUR CHOICE TO ALLY YOURSELF
WITH CREATURES OF DARKNESS... The dispassionate, beautiful voice rang with
genuine regret. THEN I HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO...
"Now just a bleeding minute, you've got it backwards!" Spike
took an indignant step forward. It was one thing for the Harrier to go
after him, or even Anya, quite another for it to slang Buffy. "The
creatures of darkness are allied with her!"
“Exactly!” Buffy’s chin jutted. “They’re helping
me. You don’t need to hurt them.”
The Harrier hovered there, fizzling to itself like a Guy
Fawkes bonfire that hadn’t quite come off. YOU ALLY YOURSELF WITH HER FOR
SELFISH REASONS? it asked, sounding almost hopeful, as if this would give it a
comfortable out.
"Right," Spike said,
plumbing new depths of sarcasm. "Completely, utterly selfish. Makes
a big difference to my hapless victims.” He tapped his skull with a
forefinger. “The batteries go south tomorrow, and I happen on a tasty
morsel in some alley during my midnight stroll--" He bared his fangs and
adopted a menacing crouch. "Grr, argh!" He whipped round and cowered
away from himself, wringing his hands. "Eek! Please don't eat me,
you ruggedly handsome creature of the night, you!" Spike drew himself
upright and struck a noble pose. "It’s your lucky day, little lady!
Happens I'm off eating people; it upsets the missus. On your way!"
Another volte face. "You mean you're not letting me go out of devotion to
good for its own sake? You nasty vampire, get right back here and open a
vein this minute!"
FACETIOUSNESS DOES NOT
ADVANCE YOUR ARGUMENT.
“Yeh, well, it keeps
me amused.”
YOU LEFT YOUR COMPANION TO SAVE
ANOTHER. WHY?
“Bloody hell, I don’t
know! Because...” Because why? He hadn’t thought about it,
he’d just done it. Man U’s tragic defeat by West Ham (honestly now, West
Ham?) sending him barmy? Some kind of conditioned reflex? “Because
it’s the... the thing the Slayer’d want me to do.”
The searchlight intensity of the Harrier’s regard sliced
scalpel-sharp through heart and mind, weighing all it found on scales infinitely
precise. Weirdly insignificant moments drifted up from the vaults of
memory: Dragging Dru away from the Crawford Street mansion, feeling a twinge
of concern--He’s going to kill her . (Then he shrugged it off,
and beat it out of town.) Pouring out his sorrows to Joyce, and leaping
to her defense when Angel startled her . (Then Buffy showed up and
things went downhill.) Xander, standing in front of the
ghost-infested Lowell House, asking Who’s with me?I am .= (Then
he talked himself out of it.) Lisa, in the park, flinging her arms
around him and sobbing in relief...
There was a note of surprise in the Harrier's voice when it spoke
again. CREATURE OF DARKNESS, YOU ARE... TAINTED. IMPURE.
Whatever primal awe had struck him at
the Harrier's appearance was wearing off fast. "I can't bloody well please
any of you lot, can I?" Spike snapped. What did it matter what this
jumped-up Christmas tree topper thought of him? “Not bad enough here, not
good enough there--blow me a tune I don't know, Gabriel.” Not as if he'd
expected a pat on the head from a representative of the Powers, any more than
he'd expected Harris to jump for joy at the news Buffy was giving him a tumble,
and it didn't sting either, not a bit. What had he expected, wide-eyed
astonishment and 'Well, Spike old man, aren’t you extraordinary? Evil as
the day is long, but doesn’t the white hat look dashing?'
It paused, almost... uncertain? INTERESTING. The
Harrier stood quiescent for a moment, considering, then swelled like a startled
cat, shedding sunbeams. It gave vent to a long-drawn hiss. IF THE
SLAYER CLAIMS YOU AS AN ALLY, THEN THE SOURCE OF THE IMBALANCE THAT DREW ME
HERE--
Behind them, from her vantage point
on the Rambler, Willow's chant reached its climax. Raw black-violet flame
arced across the alarm-filled air. A multi-hued, inhuman scream rose from
the Harrier demon, and all its light and flame turned in upon itself, imploding
in darkness. With a wail of agony it turned tail and dove back into the
tunnels, trailing streamers of glowing fluid that writhed in the air for minutes
before fading away. Willow sat down on the fender of the Rambler with a thump
and a small grin. "Don't know my own strength.”
Spike eyed Willow. Witch’d never said a truer
word. “Guess we didn’t need the bazooka after all.”
Buffy dropped her end of their improvised lance and
bent over the edge of the pit. “Wills--that was amazing, but it was about
to--we almost found out--we were talking to it!”
Willow looked puzzled. “Yeah, I saw. Good job
keeping it occupied, guys!"
Buffy’s lips thinned in frustration, and she
leaned into Spike’s side. Spike wrapped an arm and the somewhat tattered
remnants of his duster around Buffy’s shoulders as a couple of police officers
came trotting up bearing rolls of yellow tape, and together they allowed Sunnydale’s
finest to shoo them away. One by one, behind them, the car alarms fell
silent. As they made their way across the parking lot, Buffy shook her head
and looked back at the pit. There was no sign of the Harrier. Softly
enough that only Spike’s ears could pick the words up against the ragged chorus
of police radios, she whispered, “Oh, this isn’t gonna look good on the permanent
record.”
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