by Nancy Holder
“Easy,” Angel said, holding out his hands. “You just seem . . . a little on edge.”
Xander clenched his jaw. “Maybe that’s because your trashy little girlfriend was supposed to meet us here over an hour ago.
“Stood us both up. Willow’s right.”
He jerked his head backward. Angel followed the direction. Willow sat on a stool, a pile of shredded Styrofoam cups in front of her. As Angel watched, she picked up another one and punched holes in it with her fingertips.
“Willow’s right?” Angel repeated carefully.
“Yeah. Buffy doesn’t really care about us. We’re just some stupid Slayer groupies she keeps around in case of emergency. We’re pawns she’d sacrifice in a second if it kept her alive for two.”
“Xander, that’s not true, and you know it,” Angel said, cocking his head and studying the guy who had risked his life time and time again for Buffy. And for whom Buffy had nearly died at least a dozen times. “You two . . . all of you. You’re special to her.”
“Mmm-hmm, right.” Now Xander began ramming his fist into his palm again. “So special she lets you hang around, even though it might cost you your soul.
“Face it, Angelus. She’s just using you, too.”
Angel was taken aback by the hatred in Xander’s tone. He knew they all still had a problem with him, Xander especially, because Xander loved Buffy, as he, Angel, did.
Angel had a complicated past, to say the least. An Irish wastrel changed in 1753 by his sire, Darla, he had become the vampire Angelus, the One with the Angelic Face, and the terror of all Europe. He killed his own family. He drove a beautiful, innocent girl named Drusilla mad by killing everyone she loved as well, then changed her into a vampire when she hid from him in a convent.
Then he had killed a Kalderash Gypsy girl, and her clan had exacted a cruel revenge: they gave him back his soul. As soon as their curse took effect, Angel, still a vampire, remembered every terrible thing he had done as Angelus. Every cruelty he had committed. Every innocent he had slaughtered. The vampires he had created, and loosed upon the world.
And then, not knowing the rest of the curse, he had allowed himself to fall in love with Buffy. On the night of her seventeenth birthday, she had given herself to him with love, in a sweet, blissful moment free of torment — a moment when he did not suffer, did not feel he would be forever unlovable. Because of that moment, his soul had been taken from him once more.
And if he ever knew that joy again, he would lose his soul again.
“Xander,” he said quietly, “did you call her house?”
“No answer. Left a message.”
“Has it occurred to you that Buffy might not have shown bemuse she’s in trouble?”
“Ya think?” Xander retorted, pretending to consider. He tapped his chin. “Naw. She probably just forgot.”
“Xander.” Angel sighed. “Listen to yourself. Something’s going on.”
“What do you want?” Willow demanded, coming up to the two of them.
“Willow.” Angel looked from her to Xander and back again. Her features were set and hard. She looked almost evil. If he didn’t know better, he would think she had been cursed, her soul removed, a demon inhabiting her body.
On the other hand, he didn’t know better.
Without a word, he turned.
“Hey, Dead Boy, where you going?” Xander called after him. “Stay and have a pint of O-positive with us. We’re dying to spend some quality time with you.”
Angel crossed to the pay phone by the bathrooms.
“Hey! I’m talking to you!” Xander bellowed. “Turn around when I’m talking to you!”
Not himself, Angel reminded himself, dialing Buffy’s house.
No answer.
Angel hung up and looked around the room, not at all happy with what he saw.
As before, Jordan pushed against the lower left window of the Sunnydale Art Gallery. As before, it didn’t budge, so he wrapped his jacket around his gloved fist and punched it.
This time, no alarm went off.
He nodded. Willy had done good, locating someone to disconnect the system. Jordan was only sorry he hadn’t gone to the cheeseball before. It had taken a while for it to occur to him.
Thing was, he was forgetful lately. In fact, he was having these blackouts. Hours — chunks of them — were missing from his memory. He woke up with dirt on his clothes. Okay, and blood. The ring Brian Dellasandro had given him in partial payment for the “potion” was gone, too. Now that he knew his very dangerous and very psycho new friends were into all kinds of drugs, he figured they’d been giving him something. Figured he was in big trouble.
Figured the only way to save his own life was to do exactly what they wanted until he could clear out.
He crept into the art gallery and walked right over to the case where the attractive blond woman had shown him the “Greco-Roman Urn,” as she had called it. It was the only one in the place, so he figured it had to be the one. About six inches tall, it was shaped kind of like a Chianti wine bottle, only made of brownish-red pottery, with curved black handles on either side and black figures on it. The figures were not so nice — demons chowing down on people, animals devouring each other. Just the kind of thing to float Helen and Julian’s boat.
There was a heavily sealed stopper on top, some kind of disk covered with what might be wax. The woman had explained that they’d been afraid to open the urn for fear it might break. No problemo. He didn’t want to break it, either.
He took a couple shiny necklaces and knocked some stuff over, so it wouldn’t be obvious what the thief had been after. With one more quick glance around in case there was something else worth stealing, he tiptoed back across the room and climbed out the window.
He was just about to saunter casually over to his car when Mark Dellasandro ran up to him.
“This is for Brian!” the kid shouted. Then he hit him with a crowbar.
Jordan Smyth — with a Y — went down for the count.
* * *
The werewolf threw back its head and howled as Julian checked its paw. It was chained to the floor. The water serpent had bitten it hard, but Julian’s healing skills had once again proved excellent.
“Can he fight?” Helen asked. “Or should we kill him now?”
“He can fight,” Julian answered. “He’ll die a glorious death.”
Chapter 6
JORDAN WAS SO AFRAID HE WAS GOING TO throw up. Beside him, Willy the Snitch didn’t look much better off.
They were in the underground cave-rooms beneath the Alibi, facing the music. Helen and Julian were extremely pissed off. At Jordan. So not something he wanted to happen.
After he came to outside the art gallery, his first thought was to get the hell out of Sunnydale. But a black van was parked at the curb and some very creepy guys were walking up to him. They asked for the urn. He told them what had happened. And they’d loaded him in the van, where Willy was already sweating.
Then they’d come here, driving through a Sunnydale Jordan did not recognize. Massive amounts of road rage. People fighting in the middle of the street. It has to have something to do with these guys and their Dark Mother, he’d thought.
“You let someone steal the Urn of Caligula,” Julian hissed at him. “Right out from under you.”
“It was a kid named Mark Dellasandro,” he said. “I saw him.”
“And why would he do that?” Julian grabbed Jordan by the hair, exposing his neck. Then he changed into something that made Jordan wet his pants, literally. A monster. A demon, with gold eyes and long, sharp teeth.
He hissed again and lowered fangs to Jordan’s neck, letting them prick Jordan’s skin.
Jordan couldn’t even scream.
“What have you been up to?” the creature said in a low dangerous voice.
“Nothing,” Jordan said. “Honest.”
“Find it. Bring it back.”
The monster let go of him. Then he casually walked over to a lumpy blanket o
n the floor. He pulled back the blanket. It was a young girl, bound and gagged.
“If you don’t, this will happen to you,” the creature said softly.
As he watched, Jordan found he could scream after all.
He just didn’t think he would ever be able to stop.
The Sunnydale Reservoir was actually an ancient lake, formed from the collapsed cone of a volcano. The Spanish explorers called it Lago del Infierno, or Lake of Hell, and claimed that when they first set eyes upon it, it was burning, with flames shooting “tens of miles into the sky, as if to scorch the wings of the angels themselves.”
Through the centuries, there had been numerous sightings not only of “Sunni,” the sea monster that was supposed to inhabit it, but of scores of other demons and monsters. Giles had a theory that the lake and its volcanic ancestor were the remnants of an earlier Hellmouth and that somehow, this portal into Hell itself had been closed or deactivated and the new one opened. He spent the occasional hour researching Lago del Infierno in hopes of closing the existing Hellmouth in the same way.
In the valley below, there were tangerine and avocado groves, and grazing lands for cows and sheep. The farmers who owned the groves, cows, and sheep complained that the dam built on the southern rim of the lake was unsafe. In fact, a number of sizable cracks had been patched in the concrete in the fifties, and could be seen from Route 17, which was a distance away.
But nothing ever came of their complaints. The dam stood.
What nobody seemed to know was that the dam leaked. In fact, water trickled through gashes at the base of the dam at a fairly good clip. It should have been measurable. It probably was. And the proper authorities bought off, no doubt. Or threatened into silence . . .
Mark Dellasandro, cowering in the manzanita bushes that were flourishing in the runoff at the base, knew he should tell someone about the leaks. They were pretty bad. If the dam burst, the valley would be flooded. People would die.
But he couldn’t tell anybody. There were people all over the reservoir calling his name, searching for him, promising that when they found him, they were going to make him pay for a murder he hadn’t committed.
Tears ran down his cheeks as he huddled, completely alone, totally without friends. Brian had always looked out for him, taken care of him. You had a brother like that, you had gold. And now Brian was in a coma, and their parents were dead, and oh, God, this had to be a nightmare. It couldn’t be real. He was going to wake up and discover it had all been a terrible dream.
Only it is real, he told himself. And no one is going to bail you out. These people want to kill you.
Maybe they should kill you.
Maybe you deserve it . . .
“I think I see him!” someone shouted, and Mark cringed, trying to make himself smaller among the scratchy bushes.
“Brian, help,” he whispered. “Someone, anyone, help.”
Then the skies opened up and it began to rain. Clouds rushed in over the moon, cloaking Mark in blessed darkness.
The rain fell in heavy, cold sheets. Mark couldn’t even see his hands clasped around his knees. He allowed himself one deep, ragged sigh. For the moment, he was safe.
He pulled out the little pottery bottle and examined it.
Buffy finally got to the reservoir just as the rain started. The place was swarming with big, burly, off-duty police officers and Sunnydale High football players. So many big guys to catch one little guy. Buffy pitied Mark Dellasandro. Unless he had done what he was accused of.
Then she pitied his soul.
She knew what Hell was like.
“You, there, girl!” someone yelled at her. A yellow flashlight beam strobed through the rain and a chubby man in a raincoat stenciled Bitterman said, “Raincoats and weapons are being issued in the shed.”
Weapons?
Buffy said, “Thanks. Where’s the shed?”
“Back the way you came,” the voice said.
That she doubted, since she had snuck like Rambo down the hillside, staring down at the reservoir before she had approached. But she nodded at the man named Bitterman and pretended to head off in a new direction.
Instead, she darted into the closest building to get out of the rain while she tried to figure out what to do next.
It was the bathroom. There were some splatters on the concrete around the base of the stainless steel sink. In the dim light, they looked like brown paint.
Or dried blood, Buffy thought, bending down.
“Look! There he is!” someone shouted outside.
Uh-oh. Buffy straightened and dashed back outside.
The crowd was stampeding toward the dam. Buffy was caught up in the crowd. There must have been two hundred people, cold, white-blue lightning lighting up the eagerness on their faces.
Bloodlust, Buffy thought with a shiver. She had seen it on the faces of demons and vampires; once raised, they would do anything to slake it. She had seen vampires so thirsty they had impaled themselves trying to get to her. Starving demons who must have known, somehow, that attacking a Slayer was not the ticket to long life, but who couldn’t help themselves as they charged her.
Now she had seen it on the faces of human beings. It made monsters of them all.
A man rammed into her from the side, raised his brows, and said to her, “I’ve got a rope. We find that kid, he’s dead.”
“We should call the police,” Buffy insisted.
He grinned at her. “Honey, I am the police. I’m a detective with the Sunnydale Police Department. We’re all here.”
The whole town’s gone crazy, Buffy thought. It’s finally happened. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
“Then you know about being innocent until proven guilty,” Buffy insisted.
He winked at her. “That’s one for the civics books.”
It was almost ten, according to the clock on the wall over the Bronze’s pool table. Angel stood.
“I’m going to look for Buffy,” he said.
He was at the exit to the Bronze when the manager, Nick Daniels, said to his assistant, Claire Bellamy, “Jack just called. Mark Dellasandro’s been spotted at the reservoir. There’s a lynch mob after him.”
Angel smiled grimly. He knew exactly where Buffy was.
He hurried into the night, his black duster trailing behind him like the wings of a giant, ebony bat.
“Wow,” Cordelia breathed, as she walked into the Bronze. She stood at the doorway, surveying the scene, and froze in utter shock.
On the stage, the band was destroying their instruments. There were at least half a dozen fights going on, and the air was filled with the crash of breaking glass. The floor was littered with smashed coffee cups, and dotted with blood.
About ten feet away from her, there was a guy on the floor. Someone was straddling him with one fist raised.
It was Xander.
She grabbed his fist and held it. “What are you doing?” she demanded, then looked down at the guy on the floor. It was Luke Engstrom, the Razorbacks’ place kicker. “Oh, my God, Xander, don’t hurt him! We need him for the playoffs.”
Xander whirled around and said, “Hey, let go of me.” His face stayed hard, angry, cruel.
“I’ll teach you to mess with my teammate,” someone yelled, then barreled toward Xander. It was Chess Wiater, one of Sunnydale High’s running backs.
Then Wiater slammed into Cordelia and sent her sprawling.
For a few moments she saw red dots. And then she saw stars.
“Hey,” Xander protested, as shadows moved around him. The room spun as the rage inside him wound down like a worn-out battery. He smelled something spicy. Flowery.
“Relax. I’m an off-duty nurse,” said a woman’s deep, throaty voice next to his ear. “I’ll take care of you. You need immediate medical attention. Inhale again.”
“Cordelia,” he managed, as the scent filled his nose once more.
“Taken care of,” she assured him.
* * *
; It wasn’t exactly a crowd that gathered. Willow wasn’t even certain that gathering had much to do with it; more like the craziness that was overtaking the Bronze was swallowing them up.
But she was more than up to the task. The nearness of so many sweating bodies irritated her and she elbowed her way through them, giving anybody who didn’t move fast enough a sharp jab.
Then she ran into a hard chest, and something spilled on her, a red-colored drink that smelled like a garden. “Hey,” she growled, and looked up.
The owner was one of the most incredible-looking guys she had ever seen. He was at least as old as Angel — well, as Angel in people years, not vampire years — but where Angel was tall, dark, and handsome, this man was honey blond, with a trim beard that was not exactly a goatee, and his eyes were a very interesting green. He was grinning down at her in a pleasant, easy way.
“I beg your pardon,” he said. He had a British accent like Giles. He wore a black leather jacket, leather pants, and a white T-shirt.
“Hey,” she said, flustered, and as she stared up at him, then glanced down at the blossom of red on her sweater, her bad mood seemed to dissipate. She blinked, feeling refreshed, as if she had just awakened from a nice, long nap.
“Your friend appears to have been hurt,” he said, moving aside to reveal Xander sprawled out on the floor. His eyes were closed.
“Xander!” she cried, diving to his side.
“I’m a trained medical professional,” the man offered. “I can take care of him.”
Willow shook her head. “Um, sorry, but, well, Xander is no stranger to the hospital.” She twisted her hands and looked around for a familiar face.
“I can treat him.”
“No,” Willow said, crinkling her forehead and putting on her resolve face.
The man raised an eyebrow. “You’re a feisty little thing, aren’t you? I’m most impressed. You’ll do well.”
“Something wrong?” Nick Daniels stood beside Willow and faced the man.
“I’m just trying to help. That young man launched himself at this young man.” He pointed to Chess Wiater, who was sitting crosslegged on the floor and groaning.
“Damn kids,” Daniels muttered. He turned to Willow. “Go tell Claire to call the police. I’ll see what’s going on here.”