by Nancy Holder
Xander shook his head. “Woman has a one-track mind,” he said. “Fortunately, it’s the same track I’m on, so no complaints.”
“I didn’t think there’d be any,” Buffy replied. She hugged him and kept going.
“You be careful, sweetie,” her mother insisted.
“I will be,” Buffy promised. “No unnecessary risks. And Angel will be watching my back. You know we’re a good team.” She hugged Joyce Summers hard, and Joyce returned it with a grip that Buffy thought her mother would never release. When she finally did let go, tears rimmed her eyes.
Tara was already halfway to a trance state, staring at the candle from which Buffy would light the stick. Buffy smiled at her but didn’t want to interrupt. Anyway, she knew she’d see Tara en route. Tara seemed to notice her anyway. “Blessed be,” she whispered softly.
“Thanks,” Buffy said.
Giles came next. “I know you’ll be careful,” he said soberly. “So I won’t bother to nag you. Just remember what you’ve learned, what I’ve, um, taught you and what you’ve picked up on your own. You’re the best I’ve known and from what I’ve read, in the Watchers Council histories, maybe the best there has been.”
“I’ve been in some pretty tight spots before,” she said. Her voice caught. He really cares about me. “Piece of cake.”
“Indeed.” He smiled. It was a difficult, brave smile, and she loved him for it.
“Thank you, Giles,” Buffy said. She hugged him, too. When she pulled away, he was blinking behind his glasses.
She turned to Riley.
“I wish I could go with you,” he said.
“I know. But that Russian girl, Alina, said humans couldn’t do it.”
“You’re human.”
“I’m a Slayer,” Buffy argued. “That makes me something different. I’ll be okay.”
“I know you will,” Riley said. “I’d just rather be there to make sure.”
“Someone’s got to stay here and kick monster butt,” she said. “Until we get the doors closed, they’re just going to keep coming through.”
“I’ll be kicking,” Riley assured her. “Count on it.”
“I always count on you, Riley Finn.” She touched his face. “It’s good to know you’re countworthy.”
He smiled his wide, open smile. She took his hands in hers. “Try not to worry about me,” she whispered.
He kept smiling, but she saw the fear there. “I know how tough you are, better than anyone.”
“Yeah,” she said. She leaned into him, wrapping her arms around his middle and turning her face up. He bent slightly and brought his lips to hers. He tasted like home. She didn’t want to break the kiss, but she did. It was time, she knew.
When she turned away from Riley, this time it was she blinking back tears.
Tara had already begun to chant quietly.
Buffy knew what she had to do. She went to the table, picked up the stick, and held it to the candle that burned there. When it had a steady flame at its tip, she took it to the other candles that were arranged around the circle. She began to light them, one by one by one.
Willow and Doña Pilar had worked together enough over the past few days that they knew how to communicate nonverbally—even, as in this case, when they weren’t in the same place.
Willow felt a mental tug, and turned—at least, she felt like she was turning—to see Doña Pilar standing beside her. But it wasn’t really Doña Pilar, except in the astral plane sense of her. The woman’s spirit, for lack of a better name, was semitransparent, and through her Willow could see a red wall. She looked at her own hand, and through that as well. She and Doña Pilar seemed to stand in a small red room, illuminated by a sourceless red glow. After another moment, Tara, or a semi-Tara, joined them there. The three of them joined noncorporeal hands in a circle, and their chanting—which each of them did, barely audibly, in their physical bodies at Cordelia’s apartment, Giles’s bungalow, and the de la Natividad estate—became louder and more forceful.
In Cordelia’s living room, Angel felt a breeze. He looked at the door, then the window. Both were shut tight.
It’s happening, then, he thought.
The hairs on his body tingled, as if there were a powerful electric charge nearby. He watched Alina, sitting in front of the Reality Tracer, its electrodes hooked up to various parts of her. She concentrated on it, turning a dial on it in minute increments, but mostly, it seemed, she was funneling her will through it in some way he didn’t quite understand.
No one watched Doña Pilar, alone in her tiny kitchen. She gazed into a flickering candle as she sat at the ancient wooden table. The breezes that buffeted her body went unfelt, as her total concentration was far away with Willow and Tara.
In Giles’s living room, several people felt the winds, but no one wanted to say anything. Buffy had lit all the candles in the circle and stepped into its exact center. Tara stood before her, chanting, but somehow her chant had taken on a kind of echo, as if other voices had joined her in an unnatural harmony.
Buffy herself felt nothing. She stood in the circle, listening to Tara’s chant, which sounded like nonsense syllables. But the sounds drew her back into her meditation, where she saw the door she had imagined before. It was painted red, fading in spots, scuffed beneath the lock where keys scraped it. People pushing it open with the toes of their shoes had worn the foot of it. Rust pocked the tarnished copper hinges. She knew the door she saw wasn’t the real door, that what should be opening before her there in Giles’s house was a golden, shimmering portal like she had seen on Santa Ysabel Street. But it stood for that door, and that was what counted.
As she watched, it began to swing open.
Angel’s door of riveted steel irised open like a camera shutter. Alina and Willow had assured him that when he stepped through, he’d find Buffy nearby. He was counting on that—she didn’t have as much of an idea of what to expect on the other side as he did, and he didn’t know squat. He wanted to be able to guide her, at least get her started, on what they had to accomplish over there. Not far from the forefront of his mind was the danger that Alina had warned of—he didn’t want Buffy to be caught unaware.
When the door opened, he stepped toward it.
In Sunnydale, Buffy did the same.
Her door had opened all the way, and from the other side a bright yellow light spilled through. It had the warm sunny quality of a summer’s day, but a hint of coldness in the center of it tickled her spine. She took a deep breath. Hesitated for only a fraction of a second.
She stepped through the door.
“Godspeed,” Giles murmured, as Buffy disappeared.
The circle disappeared. There was a collective sigh.
No one moved, except Giles, who picked up the Slayer’s favorite crossbow and a quiver of bolts.
Without another word to anyone, he marched out of the house.
The first monster he saw, he shot and killed.
And the second.
And the third.
I will keep killing them until she comes back, he thought.
Buffy, do come back.
Be well. Be safe.
And come back.
To be continued . . .
About the Author
Nancy Holder is a writer and a mom. She and Jeff Mariotte have written seven book-length projects together, including two ( Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide, Vol. 2, and the upcoming guide to Angel ) with Jeff’s wife, Maryelizabeth Hart. They are all still speaking to each other.
Jeff Mariotte is a novelist, comic book writer, comic book editor, and occasional bookseller who has forgotten the meaning of the phrase “spare time.”
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