Ghoul Trouble

by John Passarella

  “We did look before,” Oz said, referring to the night he’d discovered the bone.

  “We were looking for the rest of his—or her—bones,” Willow said. “I was hoping, maybe, we overlooked something dark, like a wallet or something. Anything.” She stood up. “Sorry I wasted your time.”

  “With Willow Rosenberg?” Oz wrapped an arm around her shoulders. “How could I possibly be wasting time?”

  Willow smiled.

  Something skittered along the pavement on the other side of the iron fence. Startled, they both looked past the fence for the source of the sound. Willow sighed as she saw the empty potato chip bag skip, skip, tumble down the sidewalk . . . right past the glint of light. “What’s that?”

  “What?”

  She pointed. “Right near the base of that tree.” It gleamed with reflected light from the street lamps. “Something metallic.”

  “Empty soda can?” Oz said.

  “No,” Willow said. “It’s too small for that.”

  She ran back the way they had come. “Hey! Wait up!” Oz called, worried that, in her single-mindedness, she’d slam into a newly risen vampire looking for his first drink of forever.

  He caught up to her as she reached the entrance to the cemetery. Together they jogged along the fence until they came to the tree opposite the bush where Oz had found the bone. “Where is it . . .?” Willow said, looking around intently. “It’s gone—No! Here!”

  “What is it?”

  She looked at him. “A ring,” she said, turning it in her hands. “A class ring. Sunnydale High. With the razor-back logo and everything. Ooh, look!” She handed it to him.

  “What am I—?”

  She adjusted it to gather the light. “Inside!”

  Oz tilted the thick, gold ring at a slightly different angle. He read the inscription. Just three initials: RJW.

  * * *

  Back at the Bronze, Cordelia was having a hard time keeping Troy focused on their conversation. With his elbow resting on the table and his chin perched on the heel of his palm, his gaze kept drifting from her face to the stage. At first she tried to ignore this lapse in manners, but after Xander had pretended to ignore her one too many times she was starting to get irritated with the entire male gender.

  “So, Troy,” she said, turning his face back toward her. “What’s it really like, starring in a soap opera?”

  “It’s . . . um . . . a little . . . uh,” he stammered. “This band kind of grows on you, doesn’t it?”

  “Like a fungus,” she said. “Remember? You didn’t answer my question.”

  “No . . . I . . . uh, acting in a soap opera, right?”

  “Right.”

  He made a valiant attempt to stay focused on the conversation. “For an actor, it’s a little frustrating because you don’t have a lot of takes to get it right. Viewers see five hours of Wanderlust each week, but it takes eight to ten hours a day of filming to produce those five hours. Even spreading it around between all the actors, it’s still a grueling pace.”

  Now it was Cordelia’s turn to drift. Only she was looking at Xander, a few tables away, bobbing his head in rhythm to the music, oblivious to his surroundings. “Can you believe him?”

  “What—who?”

  “Xander Harris, that’s who!” Cordelia said. She looked at Troy who, unfortunately, took that moment to return his attention to Lupa’s mournful singing. Cordelia brushed his hand out from under his chin. “Is that all it takes for you guys to trance out? Women wearing strips of leather?”

  “In all fairness, they are strategically placed strips of leather.”

  “I don’t find this very amusing.”

  “Neither do I,” Troy said.

  “Then let’s leave.”

  “Now?”

  “Right this instant,” Cordelia said. She grabbed her purse in one arm and Troy by the elbow with her free hand. She made a point of steering them past Xander’s table on the way out. “Good-bye, Xander,” Cordelia said. “I’m leaving. With Troy.”

  Xander blinked a couple times and looked up at her. “Cool,” he said, a little distractedly. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

  She smiled wickedly. “Believe me, that won’t be a problem.”

  A moment after she had stormed off, with Troy willingly in tow, Xander looked toward the door in a moment of clarity. “What just happened?” he asked himself.

  The next moment, Lupa launched into another song and his attention returned to the stage, his budding awareness vanishing before the second verse.

  * * *

  Buffy and Angel walked along a dirt path in Weatherly Park, her gaze returning again and again to the tree line or any row of bushes large enough to conceal a ravenous, card-carrying member of the Hellmouth Society. They came in all shapes and sizes, but most of them were big and ugly and all of them saw humans as prey. Some, as the vampires, wanted human blood. Others, as their current mystery predator or predators, ate of human flesh. The rest generally preferred to snack down on a human soul or two before calling it a night. Buffy could never decide which were the creepiest, but never agonized overly much on the fiendish rankings since her mission was pretty much the same regardless of their inhuman appetites: slay them.

  Slung over her shoulder, in what was probably unwarranted optimism, was her backpack. She was more likely to need Mr. Pointy before she’d have the opportunity to crack a textbook. Fate had made her the Slayer and that role always threatened to take over her life. Yet the thought of having to repeat her senior year while Willow, Oz and Xander, not to mention Cordelia, moved on to bigger and better, or at least different, things was enough to give her more nightmares than the latest soul-sucking demon to enter town. She was determined to squeeze a little joy out of the normal things in life, even if they included the frightening world of college.

  Joy also came in the time she spent alone with Angel, even though their relationship was anything but normal or ordinary, she being a seventeen-year-old high school student and he being a two-hundred-and-forty-odd-year-old vampire who just happened to have a soul and with it, a human conscience. That made all the difference. Sometimes, she could almost pretend that they were normal girlfriend slash boyfriend. Especially on such a cool, breezy night.

  “So they do nothing special for you?” Buffy asked, for about the third time. Of course, she was talking about Vyxn. “No drooling obsession?”

  “No,” Angel said, smiling, “but I‘m beginning to wonder about you.”

  “Who? Me?” Buffy said. “I’m just glad you aren’t all caught up in them like . . .” Like what? Like normal guys? Was Angel’s lack of a response to Vyxn just a reminder that he was not normal boyfriend material?

  “Like who?”

  “Nobody,” Buffy said. “You’re right. I’m obsessing. Next topic.”

  “Okay. You name it.”

  “Well,” Buffy said, “we could talk about how I’m failing three courses and will probably have to repeat my senior year. Or we could talk about these flesh-eaters, which is probably a lot more pleasant subject.” She spun around to face Angel and that’s when she noticed it.

  She stepped off the path.

  “What is it?” Angel asked.

  A row of hedges by the perimeter fence. All neatly trimmed. Basically identical. Except for one. “Look at these hedges,” she said.

  “What about them?”

  “Not all of them,” Buffy said. “This one.”

  One in the middle of the row was different, darker. It would have been a lot more obvious in daylight. At night, it was a subtle difference. The tiny leaves were brown and crumbled in her fingers. She broke off some of the twiglike ends. Angel stepped up beside her and frowned. “It’s dead,” he said.

  “Or at least dying,” Buffy said, crouching down at the base and finding that the dirt around it was loose. As she brushed aside some of the soil, her knuckles rubbed up against a hard surface. She brushed some more, revealing something pale. She rapped her
knuckles against it and looked up at Angel. “Plywood?”

  Angel squatted down beside her and together they worked their fingers under the edge of the plywood and lifted it up, revealing a pit. A skull stared back at her from the hole, a beetle scurrying into an empty eye socket. Startled, she lost her grip and fell back on her rear end with an oomph!

  Angel dropped the plywood and looked at her, concerned. “What was it? What did you see?”

  “Bones,” Buffy said. “A lot of bones.”

  Angel turned back to the exposed plywood, hoisted it up, then shoved it aside to expose the mound of bones. Buffy brushed herself off and joined him. “That’s not all that’s down here,” he said, reaching down through the bones for something dark and long.

  At first, Buffy imagined it was a snake, but snakes rarely came with brass buckles. “A belt?”

  Angel shifted several long bones aside and brought up something else. “A wallet,” he said, flipping it open.

  Buffy looked over his shoulder and said, “Credit card, automobile club card, UC Sunnydale ID. Tony Lima.”

  Angel looked at Buffy in that grim way he had since the first time she had met him three years ago. It was a look designed to make her worry, for her own good. It usually worked. “There’s more,” he said. “A lot more.”

  * * *

  After watching almost an entire Vyxn show, Xander felt physically drained. Somehow, the four women in the band had seemed to become more energized as one number led into the next. He had always thought putting on a live concert would be exhausting for the band. Yet, Vyxn seemed to revel in the attention. Some people are just born for show business, he guessed.

  When the band thanked everyone after their second encore, Xander was almost too weary to drag himself out of his cushioned seat and head home. He looked around. Most of the other guys looked as sluggish as he felt. Oddly, most of the female Bronze patrons had left. Well, not all that odd, he corrected. If they had come with dates, they were probably as annoyed with them as Cordelia had been with Xander and Troy. Right now, all he wanted to do was stagger home and plop his body down in bed and get some sleep.

  Somebody tapped him on the shoulder.

  Xander turned back toward the stage and stared at the one with the wild red hair. Carnie. He couldn’t believe his good fortune. He attempted to sit up straighter and it was more of a feat than he would have imagined. Then he noticed another one, the one with the long white Mohawk haircut that flowed back into a ponytail. Her name escaped him for a moment and she seemed to realize it.

  “I’m Rave,” she said. She pointed to Carnie. “And this is Carnie.”

  “Listen, you gals are great,” he said, almost stumbling over his words. “Cool band. And I’m not just saying that because you’re—” He was about to say “because you’re half naked.”

  “Because we’re beautiful?” Carnie asked, grinning. She sat down on Xander’s right, her bare thigh almost brushing his trouser leg.

  “Right,” Xander said. “That’s, uh, exactly what I was gonna say. Beauty and, um, talent. Two great things that go well together.”

  “Lupa says you’re a big fan,” Rave said.

  She pulled up a chair and sat on his left. Lots more exposed leg for him to ogle, but he tried to maintain eye contact. “The biggest,” Xander said.

  “That’s why she dedicated ‘Heartbreaker’ to you last night.”

  “That was really . . . really great,” Xander said. I’m so lame, he thought.

  “Would you like,” Carnie said, pausing to wink, “an autograph?”

  “Uh—yes, that’s sure what I would like,” Xander said, mentally kicking himself as he slid a damp cocktail napkin across his small table. Both Rave and Carnie signed their names with a flourish. No last names. “Thanks,” Xander said. “Big time.”

  “You know,” Rave said, scratching her chin with an ornately lacquered fingernail. In the shadow, Xander thought the scratched skin turned a darker shade, but not red. A trick of the light, he decided. “We were wondering about something.”

  “Oh?” Xander said, several wild fantasies beginning to take form.

  “About those girls at your table,” Carnie said.

  “Oh, that, um, you mean Cordelia? The one dragging Fashion Boy around like a puppy dog?”

  Carnie threw an odd look at Rave and said, “The blonde and the one with hair like mine.” She fingered her wild red locks and Xander belatedly realized she meant Willow. But Carnie’s hair was unnaturally red, cherry red, straight from a bottle filled with all man-made ingredients whereas Willow came by her color naturally. “That would be Buffy and Willow. Willow’s the one with, um, red hair.”

  “Buffy and Willow . . .” Rave said, as if testing the names. “We thought they looked familiar. We thought maybe we had met them before.”

  Carnie stood. “No, those names aren’t familiar.”

  Rave also stood, backing away from Xander. “It must have been the light, that’s all.”

  “Well,” Xander said, getting to his feet and tripping over a table leg. “Sorry I couldn’t be more help to you ladies, but, uh, thanks for the autographs. Guess . . . guess I’ll see you some more tomorrow.”

  Carnie smiled broadly and blew him a kiss. “I’m sure you will.”

  Xander backed awkwardly away from them, bumped into a table and spun around, hurrying toward the exit, not sure what had just happened.

  As he bumbled out the door, an odd thought occurred to him about Carnie and Rave. Their complexions had been flawless. Nevertheless, that wasn’t the strange part. They’d been playing energetically under hot stage lights for several hours and somehow—after all that exertion—they hadn’t perspired at all.

  Rave looked at Carnie, raised an eyebrow. “So?”

  Carnie shrugged. “Now we know their names.”

  “Lupa’s not going to be happy with just their names.”

  Carnie waved a hand dismissively. “We can’t just come right out and ask him which one’s the Slayer.”

  “He’d probably spill his guts for Lupa,” Rave said, then laughed at the image she’d conjured inadvertently.

  “Then let Lupa ask the questions,” Carnie said. “Besides, it’s too soon and this place is too public. What if he became suspicious and bolted? Lupa brought us here. She can take the risks.”

  “You’re right,” Rave said. “Did you see them, though? They couldn’t get enough. This is easier than the college crowd.”

  “Maybe we’re just getting better at it,” Carnie said. They both laughed.

  CHAPTER 6

  Joyce Summers placed a glass of orange juice in front of her daughter, cleared her throat and said, “Buffy, I had a call from a Mrs. Burzak at your school yesterday.”

  Buffy dropped her unbitten bran muffin back on the saucer. “The guidance counselor from The Twilight Zone.

  “She’s very concerned about your academic standing,” Joyce said. “She talked about red—”

  “Zones,” Buffy finished. “Red zones, yellow zones. I know all about the zones.”

  “It’s just her—”

  “System,” Buffy said. “I know.”

  “Well, Buffy, I hope you’re taking this seriously,” Joyce said. “You could jeopardize your chances to get into college.”

  “Right, Mom.”

  Joyce sat down, sipped her coffee and took a moment. “Buffy, I know that the—I mean your—”

  “Slaying.”

  “Right,” Joyce said and cleared her throat. “The slaying.” Buffy knew that her mother still wasn’t comfortable with the role fate had chosen for her daughter. At first, her mother had assumed being the Slayer was something Buffy had chosen for herself, like a macabre hobby. But it was more than that and they both knew it Buffy’s role as Slayer would end only when her life ended. Her mother knew that now, at least intellectually. Still, she wanted her daughter to have and experience all the normal things a teenage girl should, including boyfriends, college, career and, eventually,
a family of her own.

  Joyce started over again. “I know that slaying is a part of your life, a part of who you are,” she said. “But you are so much more than that. You have such incredible . . . potential.”

  “My mother,” Buffy said. “My cheerleader.”

  “I just want you to remember that there’s more to life, to your life, than—”

  “—than killing big, ugly, nasty things?”

  “Right,” Joyce said with a quick grin.

  “I know, Mom,” Buffy said. “Believe me, I’m worried about these . . . red zone things, too. I really do want to go to college, Mom.”

  * * *

  Giles turned the high school class ring over in his hand until the initials were visible. “RJW,” Giles said. “I suppose we can rule out coincidence, given the circumstances. Good work, Willow.”

  Willow beamed. “Thank you, Giles. Oz helped, too.”

  “She’s being modest,” Oz said. “Willow of the eagle eye.”

  “Just the same,” Giles said. “I’m relieved Willow didn’t attempt to find this on her own. Willow, how is your paper on the history of Sunnydale progressing?”

  “If I leave out the high mortality rates, missing persons and strange occurrences of, well, it’s—I have lots of three-by-five index cards. That has to be a good, right?”

  Oz nodded supportively.

  Giles frowned. “Very good. I’m sure you’ll do what’s best.”

  The library door swung open as Buffy entered, carrying textbooks in one arm and supporting a duffel bag over her shoulder with the other. Giles smiled, straightened up and realized that he had unconsciously hidden the ring in his fist when he’d heard the door. “Buffy,” Giles called. “Good, you’re here. Willow has identified the victim by matching a missing persons report to a high school class ring she and Oz found just outside the cemetery.”

  “Great,” Buffy said. “But we’re not done yet”

  “What do you—?” Giles started to ask just as Buffy lifted the old duffel bag onto the checkout counter.

  She told them about her previous night’s patrol with Angel in Weatherly Park. “We found a pit filled with more bones, lots of bones . . . and this,” she said and upended the duffel bag, dumping a pile of wallets, wrist-watches, rings and other jewelry on the counter.