Blooded

by Christopher Golden

  “Buffy,” she said, taking a breath, “Xander isn’t in school today. And neither is Willow.”

  “Ah ha,” Buffy said slowly. “And you’re thinking what? Xander and Willow have eloped to Las Vegas?”

  “I’m thinking, Miss Slayer, that I left Xander at Willow’s last night because he was all so worried about her, and now they’re missing.”

  Buffy, considered. “Given the fact that we live on the Hellmouth, and that Willow has been acting more like you than herself—”

  “And that Xander and I have been, ah, meeting for breakfast every morning and he would have called if he had to skip . . . breakfast,” Cordelia insisted.

  “Have you considered that maybe he’s mad at you and just blew you off?” Buffy suggested.

  Cordelia rolled her eyes. “Trust me. Xander would not miss one of our . . . breakfast . . . meetings if he had a choice in the matter.” She huffed. “C’mon, Buffy, this is me we’re talking about. I mean, I know I feel like I must have done something horrible in a past life to be so completely unable to control my attractions, but Xander . . . Xander must feel like he’s won the lottery. He wouldn’t just not show.”

  Hard as it was for Buffy to admit it, she did see Cordelia’s point. Xander was, after all, a guy.

  “What did he say when you called him?” Buffy asked, looking down at Cordelia’s cell phone.

  Cordelia looked as if Buffy had shot her. “When I called him? Buffy, excuse me, I do not call boys. They call me.”

  “Except if they’re dead,” Buffy said, letting her irritation show.

  “Ooh.” Cordelia whipped open her cell phone and demon-dialed Xander’s number.

  “I was changing my nail appointment, you know,” she said to Buffy, then blinked and nodded at Buffy. “Hello, Mrs. Harris?” she asked sweetly. “This is Cordelia. What? Cordelia Chase! Xander must have told you about . . . May I speak to Xander? What?” She looked stricken. “The police?”

  “Oh, my God,” Buffy whispered. “What? What?”

  “Okay. Yes, of course. Yes, of course I do. I will. Goodbye.”

  Cordelia whipped the phone shut and grabbed Buffy’s forearm. She had a surprisingly firm grip.

  “Buffy, Xander never came home last night.” Her eyes were actually welling with tears. “His family thinks he might have been abducted or murdered or whatever, you know, with all these missing persons lately.” She pressed her fingertips against her eyelids and choked back a sob. “And if he’s dead, the last thing I told him was to stop moaning.”

  Buffy took that in but moved on. “What about Willow? Call her house, too.” Now Buffy was sorry she hadn’t gone ahead and phoned last night, no matter how late it had been.

  Cordelia handed her the phone. “You. I don’t know her number.”

  Buffy punched it in. Waited. There was no answer. She hit redial, in case someone in the Rosenberg household was using call waiting. There was still nothing, not even the phone machine. She traded stricken glances with Cordelia.

  “Giles,” they said in one voice.

  They raced to the library. “We’ll get him to cover for us,” Buffy said. “We can spend all day off campus without getting busted for anything. He’s got all these amazing hall passes they never tell us students about, Cordelia. Work furlough thingies or something.”

  “I always knew this place was just a well-disguised prison,” Cordelia muttered. She skidded on the tiled floor. “Of course I had to wear heels today.”

  Shoulder to shoulder, Buffy and Cordelia pushed open the double doors to find Giles speaking very seriously to Oz and handing him a large canvas sack that clanked as Oz took it. The two guys looked startled, then both relaxed.

  “Hi, girls,” Oz said. “Just picking up the new and improved Oz-wolf restraint system.” He pointed moonward. “It’s that time of the month.”

  “Oh.” Buffy nodded. “Werewolf time. Understood. Um.” Oz had recently learned that due to a little finger nip from his cousin Jordy, he turned into a werewolf three nights of every month. Willow understood, which was very nice. In fact, all the Scooby Gang understood. It wasn’t his fault, and he never hurt anyone.

  Oz peered at her. “Are you okay? Is everything all right?”

  “Sure.” She smiled and elbowed Cordelia, who lit up like a Christmas tree.

  “Everything is super-duper,” Cordelia assured him.

  “I hope Willow gets over that stomach virus soon,” he said, and started to leave.

  “Wait,” Buffy said urgently, grabbing his arm, then let go of him and cleared her throat. “You spoke to her?”

  “Got an e-mail. See ya.”

  Clank, clank, clank, he was out the door.

  “If she’s sending e-mail, maybe she’s okay,” Cordelia said, at the same time that Buffy ran up to Giles and said, “You’ve got to cover for us. Xander and Willow are missing.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” he began, a worried expression on his face, “but what—”

  “I’ll drive,” Cordelia said. “I’m the obvious choice.”

  “Since you have the car, and a license, and y’know, know how . . . I’ll go along with that,” Buffy said. “Pit stop at my locker for my Slayage stuff.”

  They whirled and left. Behind them Giles called, “Yes, all right. But what’s going on?”

  “Please don’t kill me,” Buffy murmured as they shot around the corner and headed down the straightaway toward Willow’s house.

  “You sound just like Xander,” Cordelia said. “Only, I can understand it from him. He’s lived in Sunnydale all his life. Home of the five, count them, five, major traffic intersections. But you’ve lived in L.A.”

  “Just jumpy, I guess,” Buffy said. “And more aware that it’s possible to die at an early age.”

  “Here we are.”

  Cordelia slammed on the brakes just as Buffy, having been warned, rolled herself forward like you do when your 747’s going down. Cordelia sighed, irritated, but flew out of the car and chittered toward the walk in her very high heels.

  Buffy, in knee boots, met her there, then stopped Cordelia from leaping onto the porch.

  “We don’t know who or what is in there,” she whispered. “No one answered the phone.”

  “Oh, right.” Cordelia was wide-eyed, excited and scared at the same time.

  “Let’s look around first,” Buffy said quietly. “I’ll go left and you—”

  “I’ll go left, too,” Cordelia said firmly.

  “All right. Stay behind me.”

  Buffy hefted her Slayer’s bag, making sure she had both a stake and a cross within easy reach. It was the middle of the day, of course, but you never knew what you were going to run into in Sunnydale. She scrutinized the lawn as they tiptoed silently over it, seeing nothing that would cause any alarm.

  They came to a cluster of bushes. Buffy parted the nearest one. Nothing. She moved to the next one and crept around it.

  On the other side Xander lay, his face mottled and bruised, as still and white as death.

  “Oh, my God!” Cordelia shrieked.

  The front door burst open and Buffy whipped around, stake in hand, ready for a fight.

  Instead, she saw Willow’s mom in her chenille bathrobe, her eyes ringed as if she hadn’t had any sleep.

  “Buffy, what’s wrong?” she cried.

  “Mrs. Rosenberg, go call 911. It’s Xander.”

  “He’s dead,” Cordelia wailed, throwing herself across Xander’s still form. “Oh, my God!”

  Mrs. Rosenberg started to go toward Xander, but Buffy took her firmly by the arm and led her into the kitchen. She took the portable out of its charger and punched in 911. “Where’s Willow?” she asked.

  “She took off,” Mrs. Rosenberg said anxiously. “I’ve been hoping and praying for a call, but . . .”

  “I called here about half an hour ago,” Buffy said.

  “Emergency services,” the operator said.

  “There’s been an accident,” Buffy announce
d. “Please send an ambulance.” She handed the phone to Willow’s mom to give out the particulars of her address. Buffy was so freaked out that she couldn’t remember Willow’s house number.

  Then she flew down the hall and into Willow’s room while Mrs. Rosenberg dashed outside to check on Xander.

  As Mrs. Rosenberg had said, the room was empty. The bed was unmade, and Willow’s stuffed animals lay in clumps on the floor. In twisted, headless clumps, Buffy noticed, as she bent and examined one of them, a tiny white unicorn. A pencil had been driven through its chest.

  Her hair stood on end. Her face was hot. Willow, what’s happened to you? she asked silently.

  Then the computer announced, “You have mail.” Buffy stood and walked to it. She clicked on Willow’s mailbox. It was from Oz.

  Hope you feel better. Drink lots of liquids and take a lot of vitamin C, he had written. P.S. Luv ya.

  So they were still in the puppy phase, not having progressed to the more committed conjugation of the verb, which was, I love you.

  Next to the computer was a little dried-up bush. Buffy picked it up and examined it. It looked vaguely familiar, but she couldn’t place where she’d seen something like it before.

  Beside it lay a foreign coin. No. It was the disk Willow had accidentally knocked off the big Japanese sword on the wall. And beside that, a little green flower made of folded paper. Buffy stared at it a moment. Her heart pounding, she unfolded it.

  A siren blared outside. Red and blue lights strobed through the venetian blinds. The ambulance had arrived.

  Buffy put the disk and the tree in her Slayer’s bag. As she moved from the room, she unfolded the note. It read, I’m sorry.

  “The paramedics are here,” Mrs. Rosenberg called. “They’d like to speak to you, Buffy.”

  Without speaking she nodded and dropped the note into her bag as well. She would show them to Giles.

  Walking back down the hall, she stumbled and fell against the wall. She was trembling from head to toe, terrified for her friends. Tears streamed down her face. If she lost them, if she lost any of them because of who and what she was, she would never forgive herself. Ever.

  Which is the burden Angel carries, she realized sharply. He had not only lost loved ones, he had killed them himself, and done it with a song in his heart, as he had once told her.

  She shivered, pitying him beyond words.

  Then she ran to the ambulance, following Xander’s gurney. He was strapped to the cot. Blood and liquids dripped into his right arm, and there was an oxygen mask covering his face.

  “I’m going with,” Cordelia insisted, scrambling into the ambulance.

  “Me, too,” Buffy said.

  Cordy sighed. “All right, I’m not leaving my car here, so we’ll drive.”

  This ride in Cordelia’s car was significantly different. Not that Cordelia was any more cautious or skilled than before. But this time, Buffy said nothing. She was preoccupied with her fear. Fear that Xander could die, though it now seemed he would be all right with a transfusion and a few days’ bed rest. Fear that Willow might already be dead. All of it because she had not focused on finding the vampire that was organizing a new wave of horrors that swept across Sunnydale.

  And now seemed to be focused on Buffy and her friends.

  But there was another fear building inside Buffy. One that she wanted very much to push away, to ignore. Instead, it started to overwhelm her with its logic. Fear that she had seen Willow the night before, in the cemetery, silhouetted in moonlight. And now Willow was gone, and the note she had left behind was an apology. For what? Buffy thought she knew, and her suspicions made her sick and afraid.

  Vampiric possession. It had seemed just a theory last night. Now it seemed one of the most horrifying possibilities she had ever encountered.

  * * *

  Despite technological advances that would have made futurists such as H. G. Wells and George Orwell faint with amazement, the world’s scientific community hadn’t been able to make an international phone line which didn’t have that hollow, tinny quality that Giles found so annoying. It had taken him several phone calls to finally track down the phone number he was looking for, and when he finally did, he hesitated to use it.

  In Sunnydale, it was just about noontime. But in Tokyo, Japan, it was already five o’clock the following morning. He didn’t relish the idea of waking a seventy-three-year-old man at the crack of dawn. But, then, he didn’t have much choice, and even less time to quibble over social courtesies.

  After he’d dialed the number, Giles was pleased to hear it ringing clear on the other end. Hollow and tinny, yes, but at least without that horrible echo that sometimes accompanies international long distance and makes real conversation almost impossible.

  There was a click, the sound of the phone being picked up on the other end. “Mushimushi?”

  “Ohayo gozaimasu,” Giles said, in the little Japanese he had learned for this call. “America kara, Giles desu . . .”

  “Ah, the esteemed Professor Giles,” the man replied in perfect English. “This is Kobo. It is an honor to speak with you. Your Japanese is excellent, but if you would be so kind, I would enjoy taking this opportunity to practice my English.”

  Giles smiled to himself, despite the gravity of the situation. He had never spoken to Kobo before, but he knew the man by reputation. And his response fulfilled Giles’s expectations completely. For Giles’s Japanese, what little of the language he knew, was horrible. Kobo had offered to speak English not because he wanted practice—he was obviously fluent—but because he wanted to save Giles the embarrassment of speaking Japanese so very badly.

  The Japanese culture was so completely different from American culture—or any Western culture for that matter, including his own—that at times it was difficult for Giles to remember just how different. The Japanese would never address a subject directly when it could be gotten to by a more circuitous route. And certainly, they would never embarrass someone else, or even allow them to embarrass themselves, for fear of humiliating themselves, or losing face, as they called it.

  Kobo was a traditionalist. Giles would have to tread carefully in this conversation in order not to offend the old man. However, he did feel that he possessed a certain advantage in that he was British, more reserved than an American, and, one hoped, less brash and impatient. At least, that was how he had been when he’d arrived in Sunnydale.

  But when one spent the majority of one’s time in the company not only of Americans, but Southern Californians, and to add to that, Southern Californian adolescents, one could no longer assume that one’s cultural reflexes remained intact. After all, even the sarcastic young Xander had referred to him recently as “one happ’nin’ dude.” And only with a certain amount of irony . . .

  “Thank you, sensei,” he said, using the Japanese word for “teacher,” the highest title of honor there was in that language beyond prostrating oneself before the gods and the Emperor. Besides, it was an accurate title: Kobo was a professor at Tokyo University.

  “Please forgive me for waking you at this unconscionable hour, but I am in the midst of a rather urgent matter and I had hoped you might be able to illuminate certain areas where my own records and research are lacking.”

  There was silence for several moments at the other end. If it hadn’t been for the crackle and hiss of the open line, Giles would have thought he’d lost the connection. When the Great Teacher spoke at last, his words came as a great surprise.

  “I knew your grandmother,” the old Japanese man said.

  “My . . .”

  “She was the greatest Watcher I ever knew,” Kobo-sensei continued.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Giles said, slightly taken aback. “She spoke very highly of you as well, sensei. In fact, she often said that everything that she knew she learned from you.”

  “Ah, no, it was she who was the teacher, Professor Giles. Your grandmother was already a Watcher when I knew her,” Kobo replied.
“I would be honored to be of whatever humble assistance I can.”

  Giles pushed up his glasses and leaned on his elbow as he gestured to the piles of books on his desk, despite knowing the man couldn’t see him.

  “Well, to be honest, I have had little time to even begin my own research on the matter at hand. At the moment, I’m still attempting to put together a hypothesis from which to begin.”

  Giles told the retired Watcher all that had happened in Sunnydale thus far, including the behavior of the vampires that had been stalking Buffy, as well as the events at the museum, and Willow’s, and now Xander’s, disappearance. As he hadn’t heard from Buffy since she and Cordelia had left, he had to assume something was going on. Given Buffy’s position as Slayer, and their geographic location in the Hellmouth, it was a safe assumption.

  “If you know anything about this Sanno deity, it might be helpful,” Giles mentioned. “I am a bit confused, however, because I’ve found no references to vampires at all in Japanese legend.”

  “Excuse me, please, Giles-sensei. Though I am certain your research was exhaustive, I can only suggest that the texts you consulted were unfortunately incomplete. The truth is that there are few, if any, Japanese vampires in Japanese legend,” the old man said, his voice crackling over the line. “In our stories, vampires are usually portrayed as Chinese, due to the historical rivalry between our two nations.”

  “I see,” Giles said carefully, not wishing to force the professor to rehash any painful past history of his nation.

  “In fact, most of them probably were Chinese in antiquity. China was a more advanced nation, where the undead were more likely to be discovered and effectively hunted. Japan must have seemed fertile territory at the time.”

  “An excellent point,” Giles allowed.

  “You honor me.” The old man cleared his throat. “As for Sanno, if he is the Mountain King from the legends I am familiar with, I know him as Oyamagui no kami. I’m sure he has other names. It’s an old legend, and not one that is often repeated. Though I do seem to recall . . .”

  The old man paused a moment before continuing. “Excuse me, please, but are the collected Watchers’ Journals available to you, Professor Giles?”