“How could you?” Oz asked.
“I knew there was something strange about Vyxn,” Buffy said. “I just chalked it up to—”
“Raging male hormones?” Oz asked wryly.
“Unfortunately,” Buffy said.
“Hiding in plain sight,” Angel said.
“What?”
“Vyxn,” he said. “They were clever. Right out in the open. Posters and special engagements, skimpy outfits . . . all so no one would suspect anything but the obvious attraction.”
“I’m worried about Xander,” Buffy said. “Even more so than Willow. He fits the profile for a ghoulish Happy Meal. Maybe we should call Giles. See if he’s found anything that might help us locate them.”
“Worth a try,” Oz said.
A call to the hospital revealed that Giles had checked himself out against medical advice. Buffy tried her mother next, figuring Giles might have left a message for her there. After hanging up the pay phone, she turned to the others. “Giles called. He’s back at his place now.”
“Let’s go,” Oz said.
* * *
“Giles, shouldn’t you still be under a doctor’s care?”
“My stay in hospital was purely precautionary,” Giles said. “Besides, I had exhausted the reference volumes and journals you’d brought me, so I checked myself out. And, quite frankly, there were too many . . . distractions at the hospital for me to continue productive research.”
“Distractions?” Buffy asked.
“Well, there was the matter of the old nurse who actually screamed when she glimpsed the color illustration of the Slighohr demon feeding off the entrails of marooned sailors.”
“Nurses generally aren’t the squeamish sort,” Oz said.
“It was a rather realistic illustration.”
Giles sipped from a cup of Earl Grey tea, mindful of his arm in a cast, with a bandage around his forehead. Each time he needed to turn the pages of the book that currently held his interest, he had to place the cup down on the table first. Watching him, Buffy couldn’t help but feel as if she were letting down everyone who was close to her. Because she was the Slayer, she’d placed her mother at risk, Willow had disappeared right out from under her, then Giles had taken a beating just to get a rise out of her and now Xander had been kidnapped by flesh-eating ghouls. She had never felt so helpless. To take her mind off the sudden, crushing wave of guilt, Buffy turned her attention to business, Slayer business. “Tell me more about these desert ghouls,” she said. “Any reason why they would decide to form a rock band?”
“Creatures who endure centuries or even millennia preying on humankind for sustenance must adapt to human society or become extinct.”
“I’m good with Plan B,” Oz said.
“Historically, these Arabic ghouls preyed on isolated travelers, using a siren’s song, as it were, to lure men to their doom,” Giles said. “Yet as the world population has grown, areas of isolation have decreased. It would appear that these ghouls have reinvented themselves in order to lure their prey. Forced into the light of day and into social surroundings, they have adapted their methods in a manner likely to lure their chosen prey.”
“A sexy girl band to attract male groupies,” Buffy said. “It would appear so,” Giles said. “Yes.”
“So they can hide their true appearance just like—” Her gaze found Angel.
“Vampires,” he finished.
“So what do we do now?”
Giles pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “The band is scheduled to perform one more night, correct?” Oz nodded. “Then, regardless of how agonizing it is, we must wait till after their performance tomorrow night and follow them back to their lair.”
“Why wait?” Buffy said. “I say we crash the party.”
“What if you kill them all? Or one should happen to escape and return to their lair?”
Buffy frowned. “Do we really have any other options?”
“Since you were unable to find any evidence that Vyxn, er, disposed of Xander on the premises, we must hope that they are keeping him alive, somewhere, in a sort of larder.”
“What guarantee do we have that they’ll keep him alive?”
“None, I’m afraid,” Giles admitted. “But we know they prefer raw flesh. If they don’t kill him before their show, he will still be alive after, at least for a while. Safer to follow them than to attempt to capture them without knowing the location of the lair.”
Buffy nodded. “It’s a plan.”
Angel glanced at the clock, then looked to Buffy. “I should get back.”
Before they left, Giles caught Oz’s arm with his good hand. “Oz, it is quite possible that they are holding Willow alive with Xander. You mustn’t give up hope.”
Oz nodded slightly and said, “Thanks.”
* * *
As Giles’s door opened, Solitaire backed into the shadows and waited. The Slayer was accompanied by her pet vampire—the one she called Angel—and by another young man who was not altogether human, if Solitaire was any judge. But the other was of little concern to him now. It would soon be dawn and the pet vampire would be in a hurry to hide from the sun. Solitaire smiled. Angel would soon have more to worry about than the burning rays of the sun.
* * *
From the sheer boredom of her confinement, Willow had dozed occasionally and uncomfortably on the hardwood floor. Sometimes she would prop her back against the wall, but that position never lasted. She had just dozed off again when she heard the sound of a struggle coming from the outer room. With the door to her room closed, she couldn’t see who was fighting out there. Although her first thought was that someone had come to rescue her, she recognized the possibility that ghouls could have enemies just as dangerous to humans as they were. Especially to humans who were helpless and conveniently chained to a wall. “Who . . . who is it?” she called tentatively.
She sat up straighter, pressing her back to the wall, her chain rattling slightly. A moment later the door was kicked in, shattering the frame near the doorknob. The white-haired Rave and the redheaded Carnie each held an arm of their captive, a young guy who struggled fiercely. Nash squeezed by them and slipped a chain through a wall ring next to Willow’s, while Rave and Carnie dragged the guy into the room. Though Willow couldn’t see his face in the dim light, there was something familiar about his build.
Lupa, the leader of the ghouls, stepped in last. She stood in front of the guy and shouted, “Enough!” She punched him hard in the gut to punctuate her command. As he doubled over in pain, gasping for air, she slapped an old iron collar around his neck. Nash lined up the chain and slipped the post of a large padlock through the chain and the ring built into the collar. It snapped shut with an eerie finality.
“Manacles,” Lupa said to Nash. The ghoul with the spiked collar nodded, left the room and returned with a pair of centuries-old manacles, two big cuffs connected by less than a foot of chain. Carnie and Rave pulled his arms back and held them pinned while Nash locked the cuffs with a long key on an old-fashioned jailer’s key ring.
As they stepped away, the guy fell on his side, still coughing and sputtering from the hard punch Lupa had landed. Finally, Willow saw his face. “Xander?” she whispered. Catching herself, she cleared her throat and said, “I . . . I mean, who is he?”
Xander struggled into a sitting position. “Will? Is that you?”
Still struggling to come to grips with his imprisonment, Xander had only regained consciousness as Rave and Carnie had carried him out of the Vyxn van toward their dilapidated house. As they had maneuvered him through the front door, he was remembering what Lupa looked like when she wasn’t wearing her human disguise. That’s when he had started thrashing, but to no avail. All too soon he had been beaten and chained. The sole bright spot had been finding Willow alive. Yet, for some reason, she was pretending not to know him. “Will? What’s up?”
She refused to look at him. “Sorry. Not knowing you.”
By the mea
ger light of an oil lantern hanging in the outer room, Xander took in their surroundings, hoping to notice some clue to Willow’s odd behavior. They were in a rectangular room, fourteen feet long, maybe ten feet wide and chained to the wall opposite the door, no more than four feet apart from each other. The only light source was a hanging oil lantern in the other room, turned down low. To their right was a double window frame, covered with strips of plywood where the glass should have been. Where the sections met were narrow gaps which would probably allow thin shafts of sunlight to stream through during the day, but night, especially this close to the full moon, provided relatively no ambient light. The walls had been painted an unpleasant shade of green some time ago, with lighter square sections marking the former positions of pictures or mirrors. Down along the baseboard were holes in the wall where power outlets or phone jacks had been. Overhead was a single light fixture, missing a bulb.
Most troubling to Xander was the stench wafting in from the outer room. Years ago he’d found a dead field mouse behind his parents’ sofa a couple days after it had died. Finding the mouse hadn’t been a problem. The strong smell of decay had led him right to it What he smelled in the ghoul’s house was a thousand times worse. Knowing the probable source of that foul odor was making him gag.
Lupa stood before Willow and him, Rave and Carnie flanking her, while Nash stayed in back leaning against the doorframe. “He’s says you two are close,” Lupa said to Willow.
“No—not at all,” Willow said quickly. “He’s a complete stranger. We’ve never met.”
“That’s strange,” Lupa replied. “Because he described you two as ‘best buds.’ ”
Xander looked back and forth between them. “What’s going on, Will? Instructions enclosed or what?”
“It’s simple,” Willow whispered urgently. “You don’t know me.”
“What? I’ve known you practically my whole life, we—”
“Sounds like we have our man,” Carnie said.
“What have you done to Willow?” Xander yelled. “What’s going on!”
“Oh, we just needed to find Willow’s best friend for a little ceremony we will perform during the new moon which, I might add, just happens to be tomorrow night.”
Even though Xander had been knocked around quite a bit, he had the distinct impression he’d just shown his hangman the proper way to tie a noose. “I’m not real big on ceremonies.”
Willow said, “Trust me, Xander, you don’t want to know.”
“It’s kind of a blah-blah-blah, boring old bloodletting ceremony, right up until the end,” Carnie explained. “But that’s the exciting part. You see, right at the end, Willow here gets to eat the living flesh of her best friend and become a sister ghoul.”
Xander’s eyes had progressively widened. “Willow? Become one of the Spice Ghouls? Never! Right, Will?”
Willow was quiet, head down, chin against her chest.
“Willow? Mind backing me up here? Remember that whole ‘human beings do not eat their own kind’ thing we joke about in the cafeteria on Sloppy Joe Tuesdays?”
Willow looked up at the ghouls, not Xander. “I won’t do it.”
Lupa crouched down in front of her. “Don’t be so sure about that, little girl. When the alternatives are so much worse, you will do whatever we tell you.”
Willow spat in her face. Lupa only blinked. “It’s just a matter of time. Less than twenty-four hours, actually.”
Xander hurled himself at Lupa. If he’d had enough slack in the chain or if his hands hadn’t been manacled behind his back, he might have reached her, done some damage. Instead, straining against his chain, he slipped and fell sideways. Lupa walked over to him and kicked him hard in the stomach.
“You do want the whole twenty-four hours, don’t you?” Lupa said. While he retched and gasped for air, a line of spittle stretching from his mouth to the floor, she crouched down beside him and spoke in a caressing whisper. “Listen to me, Xander. There’s no hope.” And for a brief moment, he believed her, utterly, as if the statement bore the weight of his own, real desolation. He trembled uncontrollably in the wake of icy despair. “That’s better,” Lupa commented, standing again.
“We have two of them now,” Rave remarked. “Do you think the Slayer will show?”
“Oh, she’ll show,” Lupa said. “I’ll make sure of that. Even if we have to leave a trail of breadcrumbs.”
“What do you want with Buffy?” Willow asked Lupa. It was much too late to pretend she didn’t know her friends.
“What do I want with the Slayer?” Lupa’s skin turned its natural, mottled green. She bared her uneven rows of fangs and slowly made a clawed fist, as if squeezing something she held in her hand. “Oh, just a few bites of her still beating heart should do it. But that’s a ceremony of a different color altogether.”
Carnie laughed wickedly. “Still, a two-for-one would be kinda special.”
Nash chuckled. “A Slayer special, I say.”
Xander was curled up on the floor, still in too much pain to speak as the ghouls left the room. They pulled the door closed, but the busted doorframe no longer held it secure. As it creaked open, a pale shaft of light widened across the floor, keeping them from total darkness. He could hear them laughing out there, even as he groaned.
Willow sidled over to Xander and saw, in the dim light, the lump on his forehead. “Xander—are you okay? Relatively speaking, that is.”
“It—it freaked me out, what she said,” Xander said. “Like that time on my bike and that car barely missed me. I couldn’t stop shaking.”
“It’s gone now? The feeling, I mean.”
Xander nodded, almost afraid to confirm it out loud. “I’ll live,” he said. “At least up until the part where the ghouls kill me. That’s me talking, by the way.”
“I can tell the difference,” Willow said with a brief nod. “Quite a mess we’ve gotten ourselves into.”
He struggled to a sitting position, careful of his tender stomach and his cramped arms as he leaned back against the wall. “Next Slayerette meeting, you can bet I’m demanding hazard pay. Now answer a question for me.”
“What?”
“What is that sound?”
“My stomach,” Willow said, slightly embarrassed. “It’s growling.”
His eyes widened. “Growling?”
“I’m really hungry,” she said.
“Hungry like ‘I’ll have a second piece of pie.’ Right? Not hungry as in, ‘Ooh, my best friend’s lookin’ kinda tasty tonight.’ ”
“I could probably eat the whole pie.”
“Okay . . . ’cause, for a second there, you know, you had me worried. Now, let’s see . . .” Xander twisted his arms behind his back to get a hand in his trouser pocket.
“What are you doing?”
“Well, if I’m not mistaken, there should be several ounces of chocolate goodness in my left front pocket.”
“Xander, if you have chocolate in your pants I’ll love you forever!”
Xander quirked an eyebrow. “Okay, not the strangest pick-up line I’ve heard, but—” He finally managed to tug a chocolate bar out of his pocket. He held it out to Willow between his index and middle fingers. “Might be a little mushy.”
“I don’t care.” She ripped off the wrapper. After popping several squares into her mouth, she mumbled, “Oh—you probably want some too.”
“No, no, enjoy,” Xander said. “I had something earlier. Besides, the important thing here is to keep your belly full and non-grumbly.”
Willow paused with only a square or two of chocolate left. “What are we gonna do, Xander? I’m worried.”
“You’re worried? I’m scheduled to be the chef’s special tomorrow.” Xander’s tone was light, to put her at ease, but his false bravado was a thin veneer. He was more worried than he cared to admit.
“They can’t make me eat you, Xander.”
“They are supernatural fiends,” Xander said. “We don’t know what they can make
either one of us do.”
“We have to figure out a way to warn Buffy.”
“Yeah, Will,” Xander said grimly. “If we can’t get out of these collars and chains, Buffy may be the only one who can help us out of this mess.”
CHAPTER 11
Buffy couldn’t help her friends or herself.
She felt utterly useless.
Sitting in her bed, back propped against a couple pillows, she stared at the telephone messages her mother had taped to her bedroom door, right at eye level, so Buffy would be sure to see them. She held them in her hand now. Both from Mrs. Burzak, whose not-so-secret identity was Commando Counselor. The first message expressed deep concern with Buffy’s absence from her yellow and red zone classes, while the second reminded her that she had important exams tomorrow in two of those classes, yellow calculus and red history. Fail those classes and she would probably fail the year.
Problem was, tomorrow was already here, the exams only several hours away. With Willow and then Xander disappearing, it had been hard to even think about studying. She was running out of time and options if she intended to help her friends or herself. Giles had kept insisting to Oz and her, “There’s nothing you can do for Willow and Xander until after Vyxn’s show. So rest and be ready.” Her Watcher made sense, as usual. Still, she hated the waiting, if not quite as much as the aimless searching. The truly maddening had been replaced by the completely frustrating. We know who the ghouls are now, she thought, and we have a plan. Unfortunately, part of the plan was . . . waiting.
She heaved a sigh and pushed away a sloppy pile of notebooks filled with her own ballpoint hieroglyphics. Too restless to sleep, Buffy flipped through the mind-numbing pages of her textbooks. Her hopes of salvaging a high school diploma seemed an exercise in futility at this point. If she hadn’t gleaned enough from her studies of the past several days . . . well, summer school was always an option.
By the time the birds had gotten fairly vocal about the possibilities of the new day, she had dozed off, textbooks strewn across her bed sheets. Even though her alarm that morning seemed unusually abrasive and unwelcome, she fought off a compelling urge to slap the snooze button.
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