Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy Season4 02

by The Lost Slayer 02 Dark Times # Christopher Golden

  “Oh, bloody hell. Right, then, catch her, and bring her to me.” They moved as one, running and loping and scuttling toward her, a pack of wolves and vermin. Buffy stood her ground, lifted the crossbow, and dusted the foremost from twenty-five yards away. She nocked and aimed and released twice more, killing both her targets, before they were too close for the crossbow.

  It clattered to the pavement as they swarmed her, and she pulled the stake she had brought from the rear waistband of her jeans. This was it. Five years of shadow-boxing and private kata, of exercise and anger.

  Buffy began to move. They came at her and she flowed in a dance of death, kicking and thrusting and spinning, using their numbers against them, drawing them close to keep the others away, slaughtering them in a cloud of their own ashen remains. Gunfire erupted and a bullet grazed her shoulder. Warm blood spilled down her back, but it did not slow her. A sword point punctured her side, just below the rib cage, but she was fluid, in motion, and its owner was dead before he could harm her any further. Then Buffy had the sword. The stake was forgotten. The sword flashed and vampires died and she choked on their floating, snowflake flesh, the nuclear fallout of slain undead. It stung her eyes and forced her to hold her breath.

  Another gunshot.

  A bullet through her back.

  A club across the back of her head.

  Buffy staggered. Fell to her knees, the sword wavering in her hands. Spike stood over her, an ax in his hands. “So much for the not killing you thing, eh?” he asked sweetly. Cigarette firmly clenched in his lips, its tip flaring bright, he snarled at her. “Your turn now, Buffy. Let’s see if you dance.”

  The others all stood back, but none of them dared to challenge his action. Dazed from loss of blood, Buffy was still able to make a rough guess that she had killed over a dozen of them. That was good. That was something.

  But it was not going to keep her from breaking the first rule of Slaying. Spike raised the battleax, and Buffy knew she was about to die. The blade gleamed in the moonlight and somewhere nearby, probably from the parking lot at the restaurant, she heard the echo of several people, normal humans, shouting in alarm at the grotesque, macabre tableau being played out in the street. But they were on the other side of the border. There was nothing they could do. The blade fell toward her. The other vampires seemed to pull back even one step farther. There seemed to be more of them now, as though others had arrived, reinforcements. Buffy tried to lift the sword.

  Spike grinned.

  Then his eyes went wide and his lips dropped open and the cigarette fell end over burning end from his mourn. His body jittered a little bit and he dropped the ax and stumbled toward her. Buffy aimed the blade of the sword at him and it sliced right through his abdomen, impaling him.

  “Kill them!” the vampires screamed.

  That woke Buffy up. Kill who?

  She shoved the moaning Spike away from her and struggled to stand. The Kakchiquels closest to her attacked. Though she was wounded, slowed, still she spun and decapitated the nearest one, who exploded into dust. With an elbow, she drove a second back. The third grabbed her from behind, began to choke her, then he too began to jitter madly.

  This time she felt the surge of electricity pass from the vampire and into her. The shock made every muscle in her body contract and ache, made her eyes go wide and her teeth feel like she had just bitten through aluminum foil. The vampire went down at her feet, and Buffy looked up to see a grim-faced man standing before her with a taser gun. A long crescent-shaped scar striped the left side of his face, cutting into the bristly stubble on his chin. His black hair was too long, hanging as a curtain that nearly hid his eyes.

  It had been this man who had saved her.

  “Thank you,” Buffy rasped as she shook off the electrocution. He shocked the fallen vampire again, blue electricity arcing from the weapon into the Kakchiquel on the ground. As he did, this grave, scarred warrior shook the hair back from his face and regarded her with an urgency in his sad eyes.

  “We need to go,” he said.

  Buffy froze, staring at him, not breathing. Joy and grief clashed within her as she recognized the man.

  “Xander,” she whispered. “Oh my God. Xander.”

  “We need to go,” he replied sternly, not even a flicker of a smile. Though she bled now from so many wounds, she stood tall, held the sword up and ready, and nodded at him. “Let’s go, then.”

  The vampires were all around them, but they were being driven back by other men and women with taser guns and crossbows. Their numbers were deteriorating even as Buffy followed Xander… this sad, brooding man she had once known… in a run for the invisible border. In the parking lot of the restaurant, she now saw a pair of black sedans and a military troop carrier that had not been there before. Engines roared, headlights flashed, and more cars came racing down from the north, from vampire territory. They slewed sideways and bat-tattooed Kakchiquels with orange, jack-o’-lantern eyes burning, piled out with weapons in hand.

  “Go, go, get the Slayer to safety!” snapped a commanding female voice behind her. Buffy turned, saw the extraction team still fighting, but now withdrawing. The command had come from a woman with long red hair tied in a ponytail. The lithe woman raised her hands, gestured madly in the air, and cried out something in Latin that Buffy did not understand. Three vampires within several feet of her turned to glass and another member of the team shattered them all. Her voice still echoed in Buffy’s mind.

  “Willow,” she whispered to herself.

  “Come on!” Xander snapped, grasping at her arm.

  She shook him free, staring at the back of the extraction team commander. The woman turned, then, and Buffy saw her face. Willow Rosenberg at twenty-four, determined, very much in charge. When she saw Buffy looking at her, she grinned.

  Buffy grinned back.

  But then the newly arrived cadre of Kakchiquels rushed into the fray, and Willow’s attention was back on the fight. One of them was Clownface, white greasepaint ghostly in the dark. Buffy went to go back, to help out, but Xander grabbed her with more strength than she would ever have imagined.

  “No. We’re not here to win. We’re here to get you out.”

  For a long, last moment, Buffy watched. Willow set a pair of vampires on fire simply by touching them. Then she screamed out a name Buffy knew.

  “Oz!”

  From the midst of the melee came a sudden howl that made the hairs on the back of Buffy’s neck stand up. Amidst the vampires, one of the members of the team changed in an instant. In the confusion, Buffy had not noticed him. Now there was no mistaking that it was him. The werewolf raged, its black snout glistening, its ears twitching, teeth gnashing at the air as it charged at the approaching group. Clownface was in the lead and the werewolf rose up on its hind legs, grabbed the vampire, and tore her head off.

  Oz? Buffy thought, horrified by how savage he was. The beast within him had been set loose at Willow’s order, though the moon was not full.

  He began to attack others, using powerful jaws and claws to tear into them, but then Willow shouted for them all to fall back. The extraction team complied instantly. Xander hauled on Buffy’s arm, and then she was running toward the restaurant parking lot, mind spinning, almost blacking out It was all too much for her.

  Then they were at one of the sedans. Xander shoved her into the backseat, then jumped in front and started it up. Through the tinted windows Buffy watched the vampires give chase, but only for a few seconds. The team loaded into the military transport and the other sedan, and the vampires stopped as though they had also been ordered to fall back.

  The passenger door opened and Willow dropped into the seat beside Xander.

  “Spike,” Buffy said. “Did you get him?”

  “He disappeared,” Willow replied. “He’ll always save his own ass first.” Then she glanced at Xander.

  “Move out.”

  He complied instantly, tearing out of the restaurant parking lot with the other
sedan and the troop transport close behind. As they went, Buffy craned her neck to look out the rear window. The vampires who had survived were also retreating. They had climbed into their cars, both those that had been on sentry and the late arrivals, and begun to return the way they had come, as though the carnage had never happened, as though the people in the parking lot had not witnessed something horrible. One car had not moved. It seemed aimed at them, headlights on high beam. They were several hundred yards away now, but Buffy could make out the form of a man standing in front of the car, his body silhouetted by the harsh lights, backlit so that he seemed more like a dark hole in the air than a man, like a thing of darkness painted over the face of the world.

  Whoever he was, he stood calmly and watched them drive away.

  Buffy shivered, there in the car, with these people who had once been her friends but whom she now barely knew. As they rounded a corner and the dark figure slipped out of sight behind them, she thought of the feeling she had had in the projection house at the drive-in. She thought of the crossbow that had been left there, just for her.

  The two spirits that coexisted within her exulted simultaneously. Buffy was free. Yet somehow she felt her fear even more keenly than before, and a terrible dread was born within her.

  Chapter 6

  Willow felt frozen in place, there in the darkened parking lot of the Sunnydale bus station. She did not know if Camazotz’s vampire followers had cut the power, or if the outage was simple coincidence, but she knew that in the end it would not really matter. The vampires scrambled across the lot from both sides, fifteen, maybe twenty. They were silent as wraiths. The night air crackled with menace. The half that were nearest to Buffy formed a sort of semicircle around her, even as their master, the bat-god Camazotz, sprang toward her on cloven feet Whatever had possessed Buffy, it was clear that the thing was running from Camazotz. Now that he had found her, the demon thing planned to destroy her himself. Buffy would die so that Camazotz could destroy the entity inhabiting her body. Camazotz moved in to attack her. Buffy blocked his lunge, then shot a hard kick at his midsection that drove the bat-god backward.

  “I came a long way to take the Slayer’s body,” the thing inside Buffy snapped. “Now you’ll see why.” The vampires around her moved in, but Camazotz snarled at them and they moved back. The other cluster of vampires rushed at Willow, Oz, Xander, and Anya, who stood their ground, though they had no weapons at all. Xander and Oz had already been battered around by the Slayer. Even if they were fresh for the fight, and these were normal vampires— which, given their tattooed features and blazing orange eyes, and the way their bodies seemed to spark with energy, they most certainly weren’t—even then the odds would have been against them.

  With a single, muttered word and a wave of her hands, Willow drew upon the heat in the air around her, and a wall of fire suddenly blazed up from the pavement, a barrier of raging flame that gave the predators pause. They seemed, just then, like some species of ancient animal, these creatures who stared across the wall of flames, their flickering fire-eyes purely evil within the pitch black of the bat tattoos on their faces.

  “Way to go, Willow!” Xander cried happily. ‘Torch ‘email!” But she knew she did not have the mastery of magick to be able to do that. She had risked setting herself and her friends on fire with the spell she had just cast. Willow shot a quick glance at Buffy. She was in motion, kicking, punching, parrying blows, but Camazotz had already slashed her and she bled from several wounds.

  No choice. They had no choice at all. Willow turned to her friends. “Run!” she barked.

  “What about Buffy?” Oz asked, where he stood just beside her.

  “We’ll come back for her.”

  With that, Willow turned and ran toward the street side of the parking lot, toward the fence on the other side of which the van was still parked. Oz was right behind her, but Xander and Anya hung back a little, slowed down as Xander was by the beating Buffy had given him. Willow glanced at Oz. “Get to the van. Start it up. Break out the weapons.” He sprinted even faster, and she dropped back to help Anya with Xander. Behind them the fire barrier had diminished and the vampires surged across, still unnervingly silent. Willow wished they would scream or make threats. Quiet as they were, the Kakchiquels made her mouth go dry and her skin prickle with cold fear.

  “Willow, they’re catching up!” Anya snapped, both petulant and afraid. “Some more fire would be nice!”

  But Willow said nothing. It was hard for her to concentrate right now, and she needed focus to do magick. Without the van, without weapons, they would die. Simple as that. Her magick could protect them briefly, but that would not be enough. And even if she could keep them safe until sunrise, what about Buffy?

  “Willow!” Anya shouted.

  “Just run!” Willow replied curtly.

  They were rushing along, Xander’s arms over their shoulders, helping him to stay up and keep moving.

  “Just go!” Xander said. “I’ll catch up!”

  Willow glanced at him, saw everything in his eyes in that one moment, his fear and courage, and his determination. But she knew Anya would not leave him behind, and neither would she. Which was when Xander stopped. He simply planted his feet and pulled himself away from them. Before Willow or Anya could say anything, he had turned to face the Kakchiquels, who were closing in now. One of them, perhaps the hungriest, was far ahead of the others. Xander crouched in a fighting stance. “Come on, then, you son of a—” The vampire leaped on him, drove Xander down hard on the pavement. His head struck the ground with a loud thunk that seemed to echo in the silence. Anya screamed his name. But Willow could not speak, could not scream. She saw them coming, smiling grimly now. Saw the one on top of Xander as it gripped his hair and dropped its fangs toward his throat. No words came up from within her, but something did, a dark anger she could barely control. Her hands twitched, then lashed at the air as though it were the object of her rage. The vampire on top of Xander burst into flame, shrieking in agony at its immolation. Xander’s clothes began to burn and he too cried out in pain as the heat seared his hands and face.

  Anya kicked the vampire down onto the ground and began to beat at Xander’s burning clothes. In an instant the flames were out.

  “Not so quiet now,” Willow said to the blazing Kakchiquel. It glared at her, black tattoo blistering, and then it disintegrated in a puff of embers. The others who ran toward them faltered when they saw this, and Willow turned to face them, hands raised, ready for a fight. She wasn’t exactly sure how she had managed to pinpoint that spell, knew she had nearly killed Xander, and was far from sure she could manage it again.

  But they didn’t know that.

  “Come on, then!” she snapped.

  Which was when the roar of an engine surged through the dark behind them. Headlights washed across them and Oz’s van barreled into the parking lot.

  Anya hustled Xander to the rear doors, opened them, and then helped him in. The Kakchiquels stood there, staring nervously at Willow, but then they began to inch closer.

  “Willow,” Oz’s voice called from behind her. “Down!” She dropped to a crouch on the pavement. Two of the vampires were struck in the chest with crossbow bolts. One dusted, but the other was not hit through the heart and grunted in pain instead, clutching at the wooden bolt in his chest.

  Willow turned and ran for the van. Oz leaned out the driver’s side window with a crossbow and fired again. Anya was in the other window, fitting a bolt into another.

  “Go!” Willow said. “Can we just go, please?”

  Oz pulled back into the van, put it in drive, and swung around just as Willow ran up toward the back. The rear door was open and she dove inside, then pulled it shut behind her. Xander sat, face contorted with pain, leaning against the wall of the van.

  “Hold on,” she told him.

  “Buffy,” he muttered through gritted teeth. “We can’t just leave her.”

  “We’re not,” Willow promised. Then
she called to Oz up front. “Run them down. Get to Buffy.”

  “On it,” Oz replied as he floored the accelerator.

  The van rocked as he slammed into several of the Kakchiquels. Willow moved up between the front seats in time to see them smashed down under the van’s wheels. They attacked the sides, and at least one of them managed to get on top and hold on.

  The van raced toward the bus station and plowed through several of the Kakchiquels who had garnered as spectators around Camazotz’s fight with Buffy.

  They were not dead, but some at least were broken and out of the fight. Oz said her name and Willow’s heart broke. Her boyfriend felt things very deeply, but his expression and tone almost never revealed those feelings. Now, though, with just the two syllables of her name, he communicated all too much. Horror, grief, the desire to protect her from the scene that was playing out before them.

  Willow sagged against the seats, her heart breaking.

  As though they were actors on a stage, pinpointed by the headlights of the van, Camazotz held Buffy two feet off the ground, her feet kicking uselessly beneath her. One of her shoes had come off. While Willow watched, tears beginning to slide down her face, Camazotz pulled Buffy toward him. A long, forked tongue snaked out of the bat-god’s mouth and slipped down inside her throat. It was obscene, an intimate intrusion, a violent attack as vicious as if it had been a blade. The demon’s tongue thrust between Buffy’s lips and she choked and gagged. Her eyes rolled up in her head. Willow and the others saw it all, a grotesque tableau before them. The van shook as more vampires attacked it. The passenger window cracked. The rear doors were dented. Her heart was broken, but an even greater horror threatened to break Willow’s spirit. For she understood with perfect clarity that they were too late. There was nothing left for them to do. The passenger window shattered. Anya screamed as vampires reached in. Oz shot a crossbow bolt at one of them.

  Willow did not even look. Her eyes were still locked on Buffy and Camazotz. Suddenly, the bat-god’s tongue began to slither back, inch after inch pulling out of Buffy’s throat. The dead, scorched wings on Camazotz’s back fluttered obscenely, like the wagging of a dog’s tail. The orange fire that sparked in its eyes and those of its servants now seemed to blaze up all over the thing’s body, as though electricity were passing all through him.