Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy Season4 02

by The Lost Slayer 02 Dark Times # Christopher Golden

  Anya and Xander had been silent in the backseat, but now Xander shifted forward.

  “Where do you think she’s headed?” he asked.

  Willow shook her head. “I don’t know. If we knew who she is … what she is … but we don’t. And we’ve run out of time for research.”

  “Does it matter where she’s going?” Anya asked. “It’s almost ten o’clock. There can’t be many more buses leaving tonight. The L.A. express, the airport shuttle, and probably one to Las Vegas. There’s always one to Las Vegas. For the gambling and carousing.”

  Slowly, Willow turned to regard her quizzically.

  Anya shrugged. “I’ve left town in a hurry once or twice.”

  “But you came back,” Xander said softly, and slipped an arm around her. As the lampposts above the bus station parking lot came into view ahead, Oz leaned forward and killed the headlights. He braked, and pulled to the curb before turning the engine off.

  “How are we doing this?” he asked.

  Willow took a calming breath, a bit unnerved by her sudden, unwanted promotion to leader-girl. Buffy was supposed to be the boss, Giles the strategist. But they’re not here, she told herself. It’s on you, now.

  Self-conscious, she reached up to gingerly touch the bruise on the side of her face where this not-Buffy had struck her. It hurt far more than had the older, fading bruise where her best friend had accidentally hit her days before. Willow wondered why that was, but thought she knew. This new one ached deeply, all the way down to her heart.

  Another breath, as she forced the coming moments into a semblance of logic in her mind. Lucy Hanover had appeared to them while they were doing research and told them that the thing that had hijacked Buffy’s body had come to rest at the bus station, where she now sat waiting for her bus to arrive.

  “We have to assume that Buffy… that she didn’t take off in the few minutes Lucy’s ghost was with us. If she’s still there, inside the station, I’m going to try the spell from the parking lot, out of sight of the windows. Anya’s going to help. It may be that she’ll sense me trying to drive her out. That’s where you guys come in,” Willow said, glancing from Oz to Xander and back. “If she runs, you have to stop her. Keep her down long enough for me to finish me spell.”

  Xander cleared his throat. “But you said ‘cause you don’t know what this thing is, you’re not even sure it’s going to work. What happens if it doesn’t?”

  Anya smiled at him. “Well, you two will be brutally thrashed, of course. This thing has all of Buffy’s gifts as the Slayer. On the bright side, though, Willow and I will think you both incredibly brave.” Xander did not smile in return. “I’ll try to remember that during the thrashing.” For a moment, the four friends seemed to take a collective breath. Then, as one, they slipped out of the van as quietly as they were able and started off toward the bus station. The parking lot was far too well lit for them to simply walk across it without drawing attention to themselves. A chain link fence ran the entire perimeter.

  Xander was in the lead, and he paused and gestured toward the fence. “We’ll have to go around,” he whispered. “Anybody notice, no buses? That’s a good thing, I think.” The bus station was bordered on this side by a corporate office complex. The drive that led up to the darkened buildings had lights as well, but they were far enough away that the four of them were able to slip along the outside of the chain link fence in relative darkness. They went all the way around to the back of the station, then climbed the fence and dropped down in the parking lot. The rear of the station was plain brick, unbroken by windows, with only a rear exit door Willow thought was likely for maintenance use.

  Out in the open like that, the lights of the lot spotlighting them, she felt exposed and vulnerable. With a bag of items she had collected from her own stash and Giles’s apartment, she sprinted across the lot toward that rear wall. The others followed quickly. As they reached the station, the ghost of Lucy Hanover appeared suddenly among them. In the glaring overhead lights, the phantom of the dead Slayer shimmered, barely there, as though her form had been woven with spiderwebs.

  “She’s still here?” Willow asked.

  “Indeed,” Lucy confirmed. “She awaits within, anxious and angry. I believe that she can feel me watching.”

  Willow stood before the ghost, aware that the others would not come closer. Though they rarely mentioned it, not even Xander, they were always deeply disturbed by Lucy’s presence.

  “Whatever happens now, we wouldn’t even have gotten a chance to save her without your help,” Willow said. “Thanks.”

  “I wish I could do more,” the specter whispered in her eerie voice.

  “Stand by. You might get your chance. If we can drive her out, it’s going to be up to you to make sure she doesn’t try to invade anyone else.”

  Lucy nodded wordlessly and simply hovered there, the solidity of her form wavering as though the breeze disrupted it. Willow turned to her friends, smiled encouragingly, then set her bag down gently. As she reached in and withdrew the contents of the bag, she glanced up at Oz and Xander.

  “Go around to either side. Just be ready. But don’t pass by the windows. Don’t give her a chance to see you.”

  They complied without another word. Willow was tempted to kiss Oz once before he went, for luck, but he was gone too quickly for her to act on the impulse, and she dared not call him back. Instead, with Anya and the ghost watching over her, she laid out the contents of the bag carefully. A small ampule of white rose oil had made it intact, despite the jostling the bag had taken. Willow daubed a bit of it on her forehead, throat and wrists, then gestured for Anya to do the same. Quickly as she could manage, she took a small cone of black construction paper and set a piece of incense within it, then repeated the process four times. Willow drew a power circle around herself, and a star at its center, then placed the incense at each of the points of the star. With a deep bream, she sat cross-legged at the center of the circle and glanced up at Anya.

  “Go ahead and light them,” she said.

  Anya complied quickly, using long wooden matches to set fire to the paper the incense was in. The tiny blazes flared up quickly, the paper burning, and the incense in each began to smoke.

  “Wormwood,” Lucy Hanover observed.

  “Artemisia,” Willow corrected, using a more modern name for the herb in the incense.

  “What you attempt is dangerous, friend Willow,” Lucy cautioned. “If you do not know the name of the spirit you are trying to draw forth, you may succeed only in drawing it into yourself rather than simply expelling it from your friend.”

  Willow paused.

  “You didn’t tell us that,” Anya said, suddenly alarmed. “We should have used a different spell.”

  “Yeah, with all that extra time we had for research,” Willow replied dryly.

  “But… what if that happens? If this thing comes out of Buffy and into you, nobody else is witchy enough to get it out of you.”

  Willow was touched by the girl’s concern, particularly in light of Anya’s tenure as a demon. But she had no satisfactory answer.

  “If it possesses me, Buffy will go rescue Giles and he’ll figure it out.”

  “Not if he’s dead,” Anya muttered.

  Willow shushed her, closed her eyes to calm herself, inhaled the fumes rising from the artemisia burning all around her. “Infernal power, you who carry disturbance into the universe, you who have intruded upon the flesh of the living, I call you forth.”

  As instructed, Anya scattered powdered lodestone around the circle.

  “Be you exurgent mortui, shade, or demon, leave your somber habitation within living flesh and render yourself back unto the spirit world,” Willow continued. Anya lay a branch of hazelwood upon the pavement, pointing from the magick circle toward the brick wall of the station. The smoke rising from the burning incense seemed to pause in the air, and then to flow as one in a line along the path pointed by the hazel branch.

  “Render y
ourself back unto the spirit world,” Willow repeated. As though it were her will alone and not the power of the spell, she could feel the magick prodding Buffy’s body. In her mind’s eye, she could picture the inside of the bus station as though she were truly seeing it herself.

  The incense smoke is invisible now, but inhabited by the spell Willow had cast, and it works against Buffy’s flesh, into her mouth and nostrils and eardrums, circling like tentacles around the thing that has possessed the Slayer’s body.

  Buffy tenses. Her eyes snap open.

  Outside, under the glare of the lampposts, Willow stiffened at the center of the magick circle.

  “Uh-oh,” she mumbled.

  “Uh-oh?” Anya demanded, alarmed. “What’s uh-oh?” Both of them glanced over to where Lucy Hanover had been observing them, but the ghost was suddenly gone. Willow had known she would be, for in that last moment she had felt Lucy trying to help her push the invasive entity out of Buffy’s body.

  But they had failed. The thing had sensed her, and pushed back.

  “Come on!” Willow snapped.

  Anya was right behind her as they ran around the side of the bus station just in time to see Buffy—or whatever wore her body—slam the door open hard enough that the glass in it shattered. Xander was there, only a few feet away, and he leaped at her. Guilt surged up within Willow, for Xander had been badly injured only days before.

  Still, they had no choice.

  “We have to help him,” Willow said.

  But it was too late. Buffy hit him once, twice, then spun and kicked him hard enough that Xander sailed off the concrete walk and into the parking lot. Oz came running around the front of the station then, but there was nothing he could do. Nothing anyone could have done. Willow had known from the beginning that if her spell failed, they were lost.

  “We’re not going to just let you take her body and leave!” Willow shouted angrily, tears beginning to well up in her eyes.

  The thing that was Buffy froze, turned and looked at her, almost kindly. “I have no choice,” it said.

  “And neither do you. Try to restrain me, and I shall kill you all.” The half-dozen other people who had been inside the bus station stood just inside the panoramic plate glass window now, watching the action unfold. Willow looked from Buffy’s face to the people inside. She could cast a glamour on them later to make them forget. For now, she couldn’t think about what they might see.

  “If I can’t stop you, I can hurt you,” Willow said, wiping at her eyes. She prayed now that pain might drive the thing out.

  With a single gesture, her moderate magickal ability amped up by the adrenaline rushing through her, Willow caused all of the broken glass to levitate off the ground. A flick of her wrist sent the hundreds of pieces scything through the air at Buffy, who dodged what she could, and screamed as the others sliced into her.

  The beast that lived in her now glared at Willow with red-rimmed, furious eyes. “If you had walked away, you would have lived.”

  “That wouldn’t have been living,” Willow said, fighting back the fear that rose up in her then. She felt the presence of her friends around her. “Take her down now, or we’ve lost her forever.” Together, the four of them rushed at Buffy.

  With a loud pop, all the power in the bus station and the parking lot went out. The lot was cast into darkness, the building’s interior dark as pitch. Shouts of alarm came from the travelers inside. Willow and the others all faltered, keeping their distance in a rough circle around Buffy in a bizarre standoff.

  “Will,” Xander began, “did you—”

  “Not me,” she said quickly.

  “Somebody cut the power off,” Anya added.

  Oz moved toward Willow, still keeping his eyes on Buffy, just as they all were. “Or blew the transformer out on the street,” he suggested.

  Inside the bus station, people began to scream. They all glanced over to see blood spattering the plate glass. Motion drew Willow’s attention off to the left, and then all around. A band of vampires swarmed across the parking lot toward them. Others slipped slowly out of the bus station, hands covered with the blood of the dead travelers.

  “No!” Buffy snapped, exasperated. “What have you done?” she sneered at Willow. “He has found me.”

  “Indeed,” came a slithering voice from within the darkened station. “I have.” With the dry whisper of ravaged wings that beat uselessly at the air, a creature Willow knew must be the bat-god Camazotz stepped out into the lot. He pointed at Buffy with a long, tapered claw.

  “She’s mine. Kill the others.”

  Buffy crouched in the darkened interior of an abandoned gas station and peered across the street at Donatello’s Italian Restaurant. The place was all white stucco, glass, and brass, the sort of place where local high school kids might have their prom if their class was small enough. It disturbed her to find that the restaurant was open for business.

  She had broken into the gas station almost twenty minutes earlier and found cobwebs garnering in the darkest corners. The cooler at the front was still packed with soda, and the racks under the cashier’s counter still loaded with candy bars.

  There were no looters in Kakchiquel territory.

  Yet the place was dark, not even the hum of electricity to indicate that it might come alive again. Buffy suspected it might be used to refuel now and again, when the vampires needed it. But like so many other businesses in the region they had laid claim to, its owners had either been murdered or had fled. This close to the edge of things, Buffy suspected the latter.

  And it was close, indeed. Donatello’s was perhaps two hundred yards up the road, and the taint of the undead had not yet fallen upon it. Creepy and strange, she thought. Parker had said the vampires’

  expansion had been methodical, but tins brought it home to her more than anything else. As Buffy watched, late dinner customers emerged from within the restaurant. Even across the distance, a seemingly unbridgeable gulf between them, she could hear the echo of their laughter like a cold blade knifing into her gut.

  Though she had somehow managed to combine the two personas within her, the two spirits, the two Buffys … there was no denying that there were indeed two. To the older Slayer, who had spent so long as a prisoner, that glimpse of normalcy was the first hint of happiness she had seen in more than five years. To the younger Buffy, it was a painful reminder of all she had lost by being thrust into this dark, malevolent future.

  It drew her with a magnetic allure. Her heart ached to be across the invisible barrier that marked the border of Kakchiquel territory. The temptation to simply run for it was enormous. But she had told the Watcher on the phone that she would wait for the extraction team he promised to send, and she knew it was sensible to do just that. Particularly given the half-dozen cars parked on either side of the road between the abandoned gas station and Donatello’s.

  Though she could not really see into the interior of those ominously silent vehicles, cigarette embers burned inside three of them, and there were at least a dozen vampires that stood sentry around the cars, watching for her. Even a conservative bit of mathematics gave them more than twenty against her one, and she suspected that if she tried to cut around the intersection by diverting behind buildings and into a neighborhood, they would have scouts on the lookout for her there.

  It didn’t matter. They had heard the phone conversation. They knew she was coming here. Knew that the opposition was coming to bring her out.

  At some point.

  Another hour passed and Buffy’s patience crumbled. Carefully, she slipped out of the darkness of the gas station and ran in a crouch to the silent gas pumps. It had brought her only a dozen yards closer to her goal, but that was something. In a minute or two, she was going to take the crossbow and makeshift stakes out of the canvas bag in her hand and walk right down the middle of the street toward the restaurant.

  When the momentum that was tugging at her, the yearning to be free, could not be put off for one more s
econd, she stepped out from behind the pumps and began to sprint They were slow. She had counted to nine in her head before the shouting began, before the car doors opened and more vampires leaped out. She had been too conservative. There were enough that she could not count them with a simple glance, and she was going to have to fight them hand to hand. All of them.

  Should have waited for the extraction team, Buffy thought. But it was too late, and she cursed herself for her impatience. She had been through too much to have it end now over a stupid mistake, her own impatience and arrogance. Not the first time they’ve gotten me into trouble, she thought, as her younger self recalled her conflict with Willow and Giles only days before, and yet also many years before. Days, years, were one and the same. No, not the first time. But maybe the last.

  On the other side of the street, the driver’s door of the last of the cars opened and Spike stepped out. A lit cigarette dangled from his mouth. His face was misshapen, the countenance of the vampire within him, and in contrast to the furious rage of the others who scurried around preparing to fight her, he walked calmly away from the car, his jacket flapping behind him.

  The others had swords, axes, some even had guns in spite of the vampires’ usual distaste for such things. Spike was empty-handed. Dead, face as pale as his bleached-white hair, he seemed to drift along the street toward her like the scythe of the Reaper himself, gliding toward her. Spike raised a hand and the rest of them froze, waiting for his command. He took a long drag from the cigarette and then flicked the ash away.

  “You killed her.” Spike did not even look at her as he spoke. A bitter taste in her mouth, Buffy felt a hate rise up in her as powerful as any she had ever known. She remained silent, glaring at him until at last Spike turned to meet her gaze.

  “She was dancing when she died,” Buffy told him. A smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. “I thought you’d like to know.”

  Spike took another long drag, then glanced at a clutch of vampires to his right. “Kill her.”

  “But we’re not supposed to …” one of the creatures replied hesitantly. “I mean—”