1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37
Barb
"Honey, you already knew she
wasn't happy about it."
Willow made no response. She kept walking along the gravel path, faster
than she should have in a graveyard in the dark. She could hear Tara’s
footsteps behind her as she turned off between a pair of huge old cypresses,
weaving through the tombstones towards the fence. The grounds keepers
seldom penetrated this far. The footpath was faint and the ground uneven,
and what graves lay here among the winter-dead grass were untended, perfect
spots for tradition-minded vampires to bury their fledglings. Restfield
(#5 in the Sunnydale Cavalcade of Death-Related Locations) was a mid-sized
cemetery and one of the oldest in town, which meant it was a tough patrol.
Some of the newer ones,
with their acres of small, tasteful, flat-to-the-ground tombstones to facilitate
the use of riding lawnmowers, could be covered in fifteen minutes or less: stand
in the middle and take a quick look round for disturbed graves and you were
off. Here you had to hunt through a maze of baroque (and often broken) old
headstones and mausoleums. Ironically, it would have been easier had it
not been that this was the cemetery where Spike’s crypt was located: he strongly
discouraged other vampires from horning in on his territory, so any newbie vamps
to be found were invariably far off the beaten path, hidden away in some
secluded corner.
Willow
gripped her stake tightly, feeling the comforting smoothness of the wood against
her palm. Why wood? she'd asked once, in a moment of scientific
curiosity. Why not cold iron or silver or milled polyurethane?
It had taken Tara a moment to realize the question was a serious
one. Because wood's something that was once alive and now is dead,
too. She'd gone on to explain the answers to all the other questions:
Sunlight because they're creatures of darkness. Fire because it's a piece
of the sun. Decapitation because it breaks the cord between head and
heart. All things which would sever the bond between human mind and body
and the demon soul which animated them, and allow you to kill a vampire.
The answers had been
obvious ones to Tara. She insisted that there was a logic to it, a logic
of intuition and emotion. Willow didn't see it; what possible connection
was there between shoving a vampire into the sunlight and driving a stake
through their hearts? But Tara saw all kinds of connections which eluded
Willow. If bad luck followed the casting of a spell, Willow automatically
assumed it was coincidence. Tara, born to a family of witch-women, feared
and despised by her male relatives, and raised in a community steeped in tales
about the evil nature of magic, automatically assumed that the spell was at
fault. When she thought about it, Willow really couldn’t blame her love
for her irrational conviction that every minor spell held the seeds of doom.
"You know how Buffy always
holds everything in,” Tara went on, “and then it boils over at the worst
possible time, in the worst possible way. When you've both calmed down,
maybe you could--"
"I am
calm," Willow said. Anyone else might have believed her. They'd
reached the fence, which was overgrown with climbing vines, queen’s-wreath and
mile-a-minute. The leaves were starting to turn red-bronze in the fall
chill and drop away, leaving the wiry stems behind, coiled tightly around the
iron bars. She stopped and leaned against the fence, burying her face in
the dusty-smelling foliage. Dry, curling leaves collected in her
hair. "I'm just completely on my own here. I know the rest of you
think I did something terrible, bringing Buffy back. The only one who
backed me up was Spike. I couldn’t even have done it without his help, but
as the Slayer goes, so goes Spike, so now he's switched sides."
Tara leaned up against the
wall beside her, folding her arms across her chest. "Maybe that should
tell you something."
Willow's face grew bitter. "What, that he wants to get in Buffy's pants as
badly as she wants to get in his?" At Tara's soft cry of shock Willow's
shoulders slumped and she buried her face in her hands. "I didn't mean
that!" she wailed. "Spike understood why I had to bring her
back! But the moment she is back he's all stuck to her like
Superglue and 'Oooh, I was wrong', it's like they've got this treehouse with a
big NO WILLOWS ALLOWED sign and every time I see them together I'm all 'No fair,
she should be that happy to see me too!' but I know she wants me to apologize
and I CAN'T, I can't lie to her and say I think I was wrong when I wasn't, and
Spike apologizes for all the wrong reasons and gets a pat on the head so there's
all this--this meanness rolling around inside me all tangled up like evil socks
in a clothes dryer! And then I say something rotten to Spike so of course
he goes and hides in Buffy's treehouse and if I had just one person to talk to
who understood it would be ok but the--"
She felt Tara's hands on
her shoulders, heard Tara's voice murmuring something soft and meaningless,
smelled the familiar wool scent of Tara's favorite blue worsted patrolling
sweater. It would be so sweet to sink into the other woman's comforting
embrace, but Tara's sympathy was all a sham, and deep down Tara thought she'd
done a horrible thing too. Still she couldn't resist the urge to butt her
head into the soft scratchy blue doubleknit and cry out all her frustration and
anger. "Sweetie, you're tired, you're scared, you're not thinking
straight. " Tara stroked her hair. "There's nothing happening here
tonight. Let's go find Buffy and tell her we’re going home. I'll fix
you some tomato soup and we can get some sleep and tomorrow we can figure out
how to deal with all this."
Willow snuffled. "I don't want to talk to Buffy about anything."
"You've got to see her
sooner or later. We all live in the same house."
“And whose stupid idea was
that?” Her own, of course. Give Buffy an income, however small, and
some help with Dawn, but more importantly, try to turn back the clock to those
first roommate days in college when the two of them had still been close, before
classes and boyfriends and girlfriends and differences and death had driven that
wedge between them, every day a little deeper.
"What's that?"
Willow felt Tara's hands
tense on her shoulders, and the shift of Tara’s body as she looked up, back out
towards the main path. The crunch of footsteps on gravel grew louder--too loud
for a vampire, surely, unless it was a very clumsy one--but there were things
other than vampires out there. Scrubbing her sleeve furiously across her
stinging eyes, Willow straightened up and began readying a spell; nothing fancy,
just a simple fire-starting cantrip. It would be equally effective against
both vampires and humans, and at least marginally painful for about fifty
percent of the demons they'd be likely to run up against. She shifted the
stake to her right hand and groped for Tara's hand with her left.
Tara gave her hand a squeeze and together they crept forward, ducking low under
the bare trailing branches of her namesake tree. The long slender leaves
underfoot didn't rustle at their passing; Tara's gift, not hers. Her
love's hand in hers was at once reassuring and childish, a sweet embarrassment;
it had been months, almost a year, since she'd had to pool her magic with Tara
in order to cast spells. Until the Raising spell had gone wrong, she'd had
power to spare.
They
dropped to their knees behind a moss-grown gravestone (Selma Kingston,
1891-1963, Beloved Wife and Mother) and peered out at the path through the
willow branches. The gravel stood out pale and glowing against the dark
grass. A figure stood in the middle of the path, twenty or so feet
distant, looking back and forth along the length of the walk. In the
mingled light of distant streetlamp and the near-full moon he seemed indubitably
human--a dark-haired, middle-aged man in drab, anonymous clothing, with a face
that might once have been kind. Now every other emotion had been subsumed
in resigned weariness.
Buffy looks like that.
"Do you think he's just
lost?" Willow whispered.
Tara's intent gaze never left the man's face. "Oh, yes..." she
breathed. She shook herself a little and continued in a more
matter-of-fact tone, "He's lost."
Willow rubbed her nose,
wishing she had some Kleenex. Why weren't there any post-sobfest
anti-runny-nose spells? Maybe she could make one up and make a fortune and
pay off Buffy's plumbing bills and everyone would like her again... "We should
go talk to him, or he'll end up as some vamp's chew-toy."
"I think that's the
point. He's out here hoping to get killed." At Willow's horrified
expression Tara shrugged. "Some people strike out. Some of us strike
in."
"There will be no
striking in any direction," Willow said firmly, getting to her feet. Here
was a concrete problem she could deal with. Sort of. At least they
could get the guy out of the cemetery and into some more vamp-free area of town.
"Hello?" she called, scrambling to her feet and brushing grass off the knees of
her leggings.
The man
twitched violently and spun round to face the sound of her voice, his hands
trembling. Not the reaction of someone incredibly dangerous. Willow
edged out from behind the tombstone. "Hey. Mister. It's not
safe out here."
Something had called to the
cold dark thing coiling within him, some silver-sharp pain which pierced it as
the stars pierced the sky overhead--for the most part invisible in the greater
light of the moon and the sleeping town below, but there all the same. It
reeled him towards it on a thousand thousand individual skeins of agony,
threaded on needles of white fire, and when the pull at last abated there they
stood, rising out of the ground all fey and woodsy, crowned in dead leaves with
moonlight spilling from their eyes.
The Witches.
He hadn't expected to find
any of them so quickly. Days, he'd thought, days before his path crossed
any of theirs, for all that the world of Sunnydale after dark was a small one,
and all the paths that ran through it twisted into one another. But here
they were. "It's not safe out there," the Red Witch said, and the pain
behind her eyes sang to him. The White Witch hung back. She
knew. She had eyes to see the void within him, where the Red Witch saw
only skin over bones.
"Not
safe anywhere," he said, and it came out a raspy croak because his throat was so
tight with the effort of keeping in the dark. "I thought it would be him,
with the moon in his hair. The thread to pull, the Tower struck by
lightning." That was right, more than right; he'd seen it on the night the
walls of the world came down, the vampire falling, falling, falling from the
Dark Tower, setting even as the Slayer rose with the sun only to fall in her
turn.
The Red Witch looked
confused. Tanner felt a great need to explain to her--it wasn't out of
malice, any of this, and it seemed important to let her know that. "He is
a creature of evil. He's making the swing go too high." That hadn't
come out right. She was still advancing on him, her movements slow and
dreamy, steps in an unfamiliar dance. Tanner backed away. He
couldn’t just cut in. The world was all over strings, and how was he to
know which was the right thread to tug on?
“Are you all right?” the
Red Witch asked.
“I don’t
think so,” he said, nervous. He backed up a few steps, reluctant to leave
the path. The trees loomed up on either side, lithe, restless willows and
hoary cypresses. Trees fit for a place of death. Lovely, dark and
deep, lions and tigers and bears, oh my--could he drop a house on her,
perhaps? He banged into something hard and cold, and looked up. The
monument rose over him in the moonlight, stark, but not pure: the white marble
was tarnished, stained with streaks of black and rust from decades of winter
rains, the angel with the sword upraised in his defense.
“It’s OK. Just come
with us. We can take you--
“Willow, I think he's--"
The Red Witch reached for
him, her pale hands glowing--moonlight, or something else? Words, what
were the words? He couldn’t do anything without the words! His hand
shot out, fingers crooked, and grasped the cold marble shin of the statue.
“Them bones, them bones, them dry bones,” he choked out. Not what he
wanted to say, not at all. “Gonna walk around, now hear the word of
th-the... Lord of the Crossroads, hear me!” With shaking hands he pulled
a bottle from his pocket, ancient little sample-sized bottle of Captain
Morgan’s Jim had found in a dumpster behind the liquor store last week, part of
some junked advertising display. Lizzie’d wanted to drink it but he’d
known it would come handy for more than a thimbleful of oblivion. He
fumbled with the cap and it came off at last, releasing the heady odor of
half-evaporated rum. “You thirsty, I give you drink.” He splashed it
out onto the grave-dirt at his feet and it soaked into the dry ground in
seconds. He flung the bottle at the Witch, who yipped and hopped back.
“What are you doing?” she
shouted.
Tanner ignored
her, caught up in the mangled spell he was crafting. From another pocket
he drew a cellophane packet of crumbling cheese crackers and ripped it open,
scattering crumbs on the damp earth. “You hungry, I give you food.
Come you now, Papa Ghede, take your horse and ride--”
“This was not the plan!”
the eyeless man shouted, dancing on the grass. It died beneath his feet,
leaving a trail of vegetative hieroglyphs behind him. The ground beneath
Tanner’s feet heaved, cracks appearing in the sod. A ghastly smell wafted
upwards and Tanner’s stomach revolted, though he had nothing to rid himself of
and only bile burned its way up his throat and into his mouth. He knew, as
the arm thrust its way up into the night air, that he’d made a mistake, but he
couldn’t think what it was he should have done. The ground buckled, and
the earth cracked open with a sharp metallic retort like a steel girder
snapping.
You one crazy
horse, boy, a deep, inhuman voice said in his ears. But no horse
can carry two rider. Less you throw the one you got, I got to walk.
Tanner fell back on his
ass, whimpering as the thing he’d called shambled up out of the stinking earth,
tall and gaunt and grinning, trailing dirt from the ragged edges of its long
black coat. Its eyes shone like polished obsidian beneath the brim of the
battered top hat, and wads of cotton draggled out from its ears and
nostrils--corpse-wrappings.
The Red Witch didn’t back away. She stood her ground, shouting words
Tanner’d known once, pulling moonlight from the air as the long black arm
reached down for her. Magic crackled around her, arcing like tame
lightning from finger to finger and lashing out at the looming figure
overhead. Her eyes were black as night, black as the open grave, her
clenched teeth white behind drawn lips, her hair leached of color under the pale
moon but possessing still some quality of flame as it licked about her
face. “Ignite!” she screamed as the hands came down to close about her,
long fingers like the roots of trees entangling her in their grasp. The
magic leaped up--
And the
magic died away.
It fizzled
out like cheap fireworks, leaving the witch small and scared and alone in front
of the loa. Tanner, from his refuge at the feet of the stone angel, could
see her eyes, normal now and gone wide and terrified with the sudden knowledge
of her own vulnerability. Above Ghede’s laughter he heard her shrill,
desperate voice babbling the words to half a dozen spells. And there was
no power behind it, none at all, and Ghede laughed. Laughed, and swung her
about in a merry, obscene dance step, singing.
Si koko te gen dan li tap
manje mayi griye,
Se paske
li pa gen dan ki fe l manje zozo kale!
“More rum!” The loa
whirled his unwilling partner aside, almost carelessly, to turn his attention
upon the White Witch.
“Tara!” the Red Witch screamed before all the air was driven from her body as
she hit the ground. She rolled across the ravaged turf, a limp, helpless
ball, to come to a halt against Tanner’s monument, and lay there drawing in
ragged painful breaths and clawing at the stone with both hands, trying to drag
herself upright. “Tara,” she sobbed, but whether the word was a cry for
help or a wail of despair was impossible to say.
“Now!” the eyeless man
howled. “Now, while you have the chance!”
Tanner crawled to his
knees, the moonlight singing in his ears. The Red Witch lay splayed out on
the grass before him, silver tear-tracks streaking her face. Power buzzed
within him, tingling down his arms and through his fingers, his own slight
talent and the cold oily tide of power surging over it. He remembered
now. She was the one who’d shown him this spell was possible, on the night
when the walls came down. “I’m sorry,” he said earnestly. “I’m
really sorry.”
And said the right
words, in the right order, as he plunged his fingers right into her skull.
It was better to get
it all out in the open, Buffy assured herself. Or most of it.
Really. No more festering resentment. Yep, now we have non-festering,
out-of-the-closet resentment instead. Much better. She
ducked under a low-hanging branch and touched the stake shoved into her belt
briefly. She was too wrung out to be angry at this point; everything that
was wrong with her life, starting with the fact that she was living it again,
just kept trudging around and around in her brain, each worry biting at the tail
of the one in front of it. She had to find a job. Was that fresh
earth? Quick check... only gophers. Walk on. Without a degree
she wasn't qualified for anything that paid decently. Let's face it,
not qualified for anything much but slaying vampires anyway, unless someone's in
the market for a really violent aerobics instructor. Willow was mad at
her and jealous of Spike. She was mad at Willow, and...here she was, back
from the dead for a month, walking through a graveyard at midnight, trying to
come to terms with the fact that she felt most alive in the company of a dead
man.
I want
him.
Let's get
that out of the way now, OK? I want Spike. I want to peel that stupid
black shirt off like the skin off a grape. Want to lick him all over like
a vampire popsicle. Want my hands on that body, want those hands on my
body. Want that sweet, cruel, vulnerable, passionate mouth. Oh,
yeah. Lips of Spike. Buffy want.
Spike, lounging on the
couch between her and Dawn and smiling at her sister with a wondering affection
when he thought no one was looking. Spike, talking soaps with her mother
over hot cocoa. Spike, huddled on the sarcophagus, whispering I'd
rather die through lips almost too bruised and swollen to speak.
Spike, eyes alight over the fact that she'd read and liked some old poem.
Spike, giving up his soul a second time for her sake, willing to let Willow's
botched resurrection spell destroy him in order to save her. Spike,
tossing off a snarky quip that left her snickering and trying oh-so-hard not to
show it.
Spike, fangs
tearing into the throat of the guard who'd shot her, even as the chip shocked
him half-senseless and all right, maybe that counted as self-defense but--Spike,
licking blood from his lips with complacent satisfaction afterwards.
Spike, not giving a single solitary damn whether the man had lived or died.
A tombstone cracked
under the force of her kick. Buffy want was one thing. Buffy get was
something else. Her eyes swept the rows of moonlit graves as she stalked
along the cemetery fence, one with the shadows, searching for something she
could take out all her frustration on, something she could hunt, something she
could slay. Irony sucks. She'd forgiven Spike his trespasses,
but she couldn't afford to forget them. He’d killed tens of thousands of
people in his century-plus of existence, and for all the astonishing things he'd
done in the past year, she still had no idea what would happen on the day that
the chip in his skull ceased to function and he was once again free to attack
humans. Sometimes she could believe that he felt something akin to
regret for what he was, even if remorse for what he’d done was beyond him, but
was that enough?
The
scary thing was, the ethical tangle wasn’t bothering her half as much as the
emotional tangle--the fact that he was, potentially, a remorseless killer never
left her thoughts, but it was taking a definite second place to the fact that he
was Spike, and he loved her. She’d be the thing that gutter slime scraped
off the bottom of its shoes if she took advantage of that love just to get her
rocks off. She liked him too much to do that to him and how sick was it
that she liked someone who was only a step or two away from seeing human beings
as take-out, and if you liked someone and wanted them at the same time, was that
love, and if so, why didn't it feel like either the swoony delirium she'd felt
for Angel or the safe, comfortable thing she'd felt for Riley and why the HELL
wasn't there anything for her to beat up tonight?
The scream caught her
off-guard, but she was in motion before it died away. About time.
Buffy sped through
the cemetery, ducking branches and dodging
headstones as they loomed up out
of the darkness. The noise had come from the eastern side of the lot, in
the direction Willow and Tara had gone. There was very little Willow
couldn't handle, and she was more worried that whatever it was would be reduced
to its component molecules long before she got there than anything else.
The run was exhilarating in itself, the steady rhythm of her breathing in
counterpoint against her footfalls on the uneven ground. She heard another
scream--definitely Willow--and a ghost of unease coalesced in her breast,
pounding along with her heart.
Instead of
dodging the next tombstone, she took it in stride, kicking off the top and
leaping upwards to the roof of the nearest mausoleum. Dry leaves scattered
beneath her feet as she landed on the summit. She straightened and
shielded her eyes from the city glow and moonlight with one palm, surveying the
panorama spread out on all sides, rank upon irregular rank of headstones
meandering off into the darkness beneath the bordering willows.
The figure threading
its way nimbly through the headstones was human, and wasn’t--a young woman with
long tawny hair who had to be Tara, but who moved as she’d never seen Tara
moving, in a jerking, bawdy parody of a dance. She was singing in no
language Buffy knew, though a few words here and there sounded vaguely French,
pirouetting about a large marble statue. Two more dark figures crouched in
the grass at its base. A shadow followed Tara as she moved, its movements
her movements, its laughter her laughter, something larger than human and not
quite there. Look straight on and there was nothing but Tara, but
in the corners of her vision Buffy caught glimpses of a long black coat, a tall
top hat, an ebony face that was somehow oddly familiar. Tara paused her
dance as Buffy watched, looking up as if sensing her presence, and a huge grin
split her face. “Hey now! I hungry, thirsty--you bring me rum,
ti-blanc? You bring me cigars? Kill me a rooster?” The voice was
deep and rich and inhuman and reminded her of... someone.
“Tara?” Buffy jumped down
from the mausoleum and advanced on the other girl cautiously. “Tara, is
that you?” Tara danced lightly away, a lascivious grin lighting her face.
“Oh ho, rooster’s not the
cock you want, hm?” She wiggled her hips suggestively. “You want
advice, ti-blanc? You want luck? You want ask questions of Papa
Ghede? You want this horse again? You follow the rules, you got to
feed me. Bring me my rum, by damn!”
Buffy looked from Tara to
the crumpled heap which was Willow and the cowering stranger beside her.
She was at the statue in three furious strides, hauling the man up by his collar
and shaking him. “What’s wrong with her?” she yelled. “What did you
do? Turn it off!”
“I--I--” the man stammered, clearly terrified. “She’s being ridden by the
loa. Ghede.” Buffy stared at him. “I don’t know how it
happened!” he gasped. “I’m not... not that powerful. I didn’t even
invoke Legba to open the gates to the spirit world--this shouldn’t have
happened. Something called him here. Not me. Not me!”
He wouldn’t look her in the
eyes, and kept staring at his hands in horror and loathing--he was lying, she
was sure about that, but how much and about what she had no idea. “Who’s
this Ghede when he’s at home? Is he dangerous?”
The man’s chin jerked up,
and he looked at her as if she were insane. “Of course he’s
dangerous! But if you treat him right there’s...You need to get some
offerings. Food, candy, alcohol--not much, Ghede’s a nasty drunk and you
don’t want to meet his Baron Samedi aspect--kill a chicken in his honor,
something! Then he’ll answer your questions and dismount. He knows
everything the dead know. Otherwise--”
“What?”
The man swiped the lank
dark hair from his forehead, shivering in her grasp. “I don’t know.
Ghede’s not malevolent... usually. But he’s unpredictable. He could
ride her till she drops. He could get bored and leave. He could walk
her in front of a bus. So you need to hurry--”
“Willow,” Buffy
interrupted. “How badly is she hurt?”
“Red Witch,” the man
whispered, his eyes going curiously blank. He shook himself. “I
don’t know. She fell.”
Buffy stood there, rigid, then let go the
stranger’s collar. He fell back with a little yelp and sprawled in the
grass. “Keep her here,” she said, her voice as flat and deadly as she
could make it. “I’ll be right back.”
It took five minutes,
maybe, for her to race across the cemetery and bang perfunctorily on the door of
Spike’s crypt before kicking it in. She knew the moment she went in that
he wasn’t here; the electric sense of his presence was missing and the place
felt empty. She began a methodical search of the upper level, and
eventually found what she was looking for in a crate next to the
mini-fridge--the bottles of Jack Daniels Spike had picked up at Willy’s the
previous night, still in their brown paper bags. After a moment’s
hesitation she grabbed one, tucked it under her arm, and tore out of the crypt
at top speed.
When she got
back to the angel monument, the strange man was gone, and Willow had pulled
herself up to a sitting position and was leaning back against the pedestal of
the statue, giggling at nothing, her eyes deep empty pools you could dive into
and get lost in. No one else was in sight and for a cold horrid moment
Buffy thought Tara was gone too.
“Boo!” Tara yelled in that
not-Tara voice, jumping out from behind the statue.
Willow began
clapping. “‘Ray!” she cried. “Round and round and round and round!”
Buffy ripped the brown
paper wrapper off the bottle and held it out. “Here! Here’s your
offering! Now get out of Tara and leave!”
The inhuman laughter rang
out again. “How you think I appreciate a sacrifice, ti-blanc?”
Tara’s hand shot out and snatched the bottle. She worried the top off and
tipped it back, swallowing greedily, with loud gulping and smacking
noises. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeyah! It not rum, but it do.” She twirled
off into another dance step. “My houngan done run off, but he a sorry
piece of shit anyway.” Tara flopped to the ground cross-legged and took
another swig of whiskey, grinning widely and running the tip of her tongue over
her teeth, a strangely familiar gesture. “You got three questions,
ti-blanc.”
“The cat asked
for a pair of russet leather boots,” Willow informed her, her elfin face
grave. Buffy shot an anguished look at Willow, then rounded on Tara-Ghede
again.
“What’s wrong with
her?”
The bone-shivering
chuckle again. “You already know the answer, ma petite. Her
ti-bon-ange sicker than hell. She crazy.”
How unfair was it that she
couldn’t punch that smug face in without hurting Tara? Buffy ground her
teeth. “How can we fix what’s wrong with her?”
“You can’t. Last
question, ti-blanc. Make it good.”
Her mind went blank, and
the world held still. Ghede knows everything the dead know.
“Can I trust Spike?”
Tara-Ghede threw back her
head and laughed. “As much as you trust any man, and as little. You
say frog, he jump. But you have to say frog.”
“And what if I’m not around
to say frog? What if I say frog and he decides I meant toad? What
if--it’s bad enough I’ve got to be the Slayer and Dawn’s mom and the Summers’
family breadwinner! I can’t be Spike’s conscience too!”
The dark, liquid eyes, full
of wicked humor, blinked as the grin spread across Tara’s face once more.
“You got no choice there, ti-blanc. You already are.” She squinted
down the neck of the whiskey bottle. “I give you one piece free advice:
you been asking the wrong questions. Not ‘What’s wrong with her,’ but
‘Why’s it wrong?’ Not ‘How we fix her?’ but “How can she be fix?’
And not ‘Can I trust him?’ but ‘If he do whatever I want, what I want him to
do?’”
“But--”
The bottle fell from Tara’s
hands as she keeled over sideways, limp as an abandoned puppet. It hit the
grass and rolled, spraying pungent amber liquid in its wake. Willow
started back with a wail of alarm, waving one hand blindly in Tara’s
direction. “No, no, Great Pan is dead!”
Buffy dove forward, ending
up on her knees before Tara, clutching her shoulders with both hands. Tara
moaned, leaning her forehead against Buffy’s shoulder and holding her stomach
with both hands--hopefully not in anticipation of a mini-Ghede bursting out of
it, Buffy thought. Tara looked up, her face pale and glistening with sweat
in the moonlight, though the night was getting chilly, and made a painful
gulping noise. “Buffy?” Her voice was her own again, but she sounded
weak and sick and very, very confused. “I think... I think I’m going to
be...” And then she was, jackknifing forward as half a bottle of whiskey
and whatever she’d had for dinner came up in one violent heave.
Willow started sobbing,
crawling across the grass towards her lover. Buffy tried to simultaneously
leap back out of the way and not let Tara fall, ending up in an awkward,
arm’s-length position of support. She began edging to one side, still on
her knees. “Ew, ew, ew... Tara, it’s OK, you just drank too much. Or
he drank too much, or, or something. Willow--” Willow batted at
Tara’s shoulder with one hand and whimpered something about sugar cubes.
Buffy freed one arm. “Sit down, please, I can’t--”
“I’m OK,” Tara
croaked. “I think. I don’t remember... there was this... this
thing, this big, big thing... my head hurts.” Her eyes
widened. “Willow. Oh, gods, Willow--can you hear me?”
“In the dry times of year,
in the leaves of regret, I know a hawk from a handsaw.” Willow poked the
remains of Tara’s dinner with one finger and wrinkled her nose in disgust.
“Stinky.” She slumped, losing all interest in Tara, and began twisting a
strand of her hair round her finger, tighter and tighter. Buffy sat back
on her heels and pressed both hands to her forehead, feeling overwhelmed.
“We’ve got to get her
somewhere safe,” Tara said, hauling herself upright against the marble angel and
getting unsteadily to her feet. She held out a trembling hand to her
partner. “Willow... come on, Willow...” Her voice broke. Not
all of the moisture on her cheeks was sweat. “You’re going to be OK,
honey, we’ll find some way to make you better, just like you made me
better...” She looked over at Buffy, her eyes all to human now, and full
of agony. “What are we going to do?”
Buffy ran a hand down her
face. “Um. Crypt. It’s not far to Spike’s crypt. He
wasn’t there when I went to get the whiskey... oh, fabulous, we managed to kill
the whole bottle. Somehow I think ‘I had to give it to a raunchy cemetery
god’ isn’t going to make him very happy.” She got up, avoiding the
aftermath of Tara’s sick fit, and picked Willow up bodily. “OK. No
panicking. If whatever happened to her is what happened to Willy,
it’ll wear off.” I hope. “We go to the crypt. We clean
up as much as we can. We keep an eye on Willow. What did happen to
her?”
Tara hugged herself
tightly for a moment, head bowed, eyes squeezed shut against the sight of
Willow’s slack face. Then she sighed and looked up, retreating into her
shell of calm reserve. “I’m not sure. We were patrolling, and we
heard that guy coming. He seemed really out of it. Willow tried to
talk him into letting us take him out of the cemetery, and he... called
something. Some kind of power. Willow tried to fight it, and then it
just... I can’t remember anything after that.”
“He called it Ghede.”
Tara frowned.
“Ghede? That’s familiar... oh! I remember! We had that in my
Cultural Anthropology course last semester. It’s Haitian. He’s one
of the Rada loa, a pretty important one, I think. Guardian of the
cemetery. He’s also, um, associated with sex.”
Buffy rolled her
eyes. “Great, like I need sex and death tied up in my subconscious any
more than they already are.”
“I don’t know much more
than that about it. Voudoun’s way out of my field. I always thought
it was a weird combo in class,” Tara mused. “On one hand he’s this
dangerous scary death guy you go to for advice, and on the other he’s this
chaotic trickster who likes to smoke and drink and make lewd jokes and have a
good time. And he’s a protector of children.”
Buffy shrugged.
“Doesn’t sound all that weird to me. Though he gives sucky advice.
No way worth half a bottle of bourbon.”
Tara stroked Willow’s
forehead. After a while she said thoughtfully, “No, I guess it wouldn’t
seem weird, to you.”
Buffy
still hadn’t figured out what Tara meant by that by the time they reached the
crypt.
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | 32 | 33 | 34 | 35 | 36 | 37