The Gatekeeper Trilogy, Book One - OUT of the MADHOUSE

by Christopher Golden

  There was just no winning sometimes.

  In truth, she was a little creeped out at being left to essentially hold the fort. She didn’t want the responsibility, really. But she’d deal. She always had. And she’d have Oz to help her. Then there was Angel. Not quite as comforting—she still got a bit creeped out around him at times—but at least he was strong, durable, and really, really hard to kill. Of course, Oz was really hard to kill as well, him being a werewolf and all.

  Willow let her freshly painted piggies dry and watched the clock. She’d planned to see the others off down at the airport, and it was almost time. Buffy and her mom were going to swing by and pick her up.

  She passed her mother in the hallway, but didn’t stop to chat. It would only be more pressure tactics about college or suspicion about her not going to Boston. With a sigh, she trotted down the stairs, blew her father a kiss before he could rise from his chair, and was out the door.

  The streetlights flashed by above the car, casting shifting shadows on the dash and seats. Buffy looked out the passenger window, watching the night. Watching the people, more than anything else. A young guy in gym clothes ran in the opposite direction, headphones covering his ears. He was a honey. A white-haired couple, holding hands like youthful lovers, walked a pair of black poodles. A woman in a dark business suit swung a leather briefcase idly at her side.

  Just people in the night. In the shadows. With no idea what real darkness was like, no idea what real dangers lurked in that dark.

  Unnerved, Buffy turned to face forward and realized that they were almost to Willow’s. Her mother turned left onto a side street. Buffy glanced at her, noted the grim set of her jaw, and wondered again if asking her mother to drive her to the airport had been the wisest course of action. For the others, it was hard to lie and get away with it. Buffy thought that telling her mother the truth was, in a lot of ways, much more difficult.

  The airport was twenty minutes away, and they were already running late. The only saving grace was that the connecting flight out of LAX, the red-eye to Boston, didn’t leave until forty minutes after the puddle jumper arrived in L.A. As long as the plane didn’t take off without them, they’d still be all right.

  Joyce Summers nearly missed the turn onto Willow’s street. When she realized it, and began to back up to make the turn, Joyce cursed under her breath. Again, Buffy glanced at her mother’s face, even as Joyce sighed deeply.

  “Mom?” Buffy asked, all possible questions in that one word.

  Even as she started watching house numbers, Joyce took a breath and said, “Buffy, this is getting so serious. Cordelia was attacked.”

  But Buffy heard a question in her mother’s voice that Joyce had not put into words.

  “I’ll be back, Mom, I promise,” Buffy insisted.

  Joyce nodded. “I know, honey. I do. But it’s just . . . well, you’re leaving again. I can’t pretend I’m happy about it.”

  “Mom, this is a little different, don’t you think? You’re driving me to the airport. It isn’t just me, either. It’s Giles and Cordelia and Xander. Which, you know, should be loads of fun. You have Cordelia’s cell phone number. Plus, it’s for a few days, a week at best. After that, Giles really wouldn’t be able to explain our absence. Someone would check on us.

  “Trust me. We’ll be back. I’ll be back, and soon.”

  Joyce smiled wanly. She began to speak, only to have Buffy cut her off.

  “There’s Willow.”

  “We’re half a block from her house,” Joyce observed. “I hope nothing’s wrong.”

  “You want my guess? Probably nothing out of the ordinary for a teenager barreling toward high school graduation,” Buffy offered.

  “Graduation, what a beautiful word,” Joyce said dreamily. “You don’t know how many times I was afraid you wouldn’t make it.”

  Buffy smiled to herself. No matter what, her mother wanted exactly what Buffy wanted: for her daughter to be a normal teenage girl. The real difference was that Buffy was just a lot more realistic about the possibility of that ever happening.

  As in: none.

  “I’ll be there, Mom,” she said. “I might be late. I might put my gown on inside out, but I’ll be there.”

  “You’d better,” Joyce said, but this time, she didn’t look at her daughter.

  The car slowed to a stop and Buffy reached back to unlock the door for Willow. After she’d climbed in the back seat, Mrs. Summers accelerated again, and Buffy saw how relieved to be getting away from her house Willow seemed.

  “Thanks for coming to get me,” Willow said to Buffy’s mother.

  “Any time, Willow,” Joyce replied.

  “Cool,” Buffy said. “Now anytime you want to go out with Oz, my mom can pick you up and just take you over there!”

  Joyce shook her head in amusement. Willow, on the other hand, only managed a particularly lackluster smile.

  At the end of Willow’s street, Angel sat in the driver’s seat of Giles’s battered Citroen and drummed his fingers in syncopated rhythm with a Pearl Jam song on the radio. His musical tastes were broad, though they ran more toward the classical. Still, he could appreciate almost any kind of music. His voice almost a whisper, he sang along.

  Giles had debriefed him on his suspicions regarding the people who were killing Watchers, and apparently hunting Buffy as well. Since the Watcher himself was not going to be in town, he had given Angel the use of his car for the duration of the Boston trip. As they’d discussed, the first thing Angel did with the car was use it to follow Buffy. And, as expected, he hadn’t been the only one.

  The key now was to make sure that Buffy made it to the airport without anyone tailing her. Giles thought it was a good idea for their destination to remain a secret. If they could keep their enemies in the dark while on this trip to Boston, it would make things go a lot more smoothly. It might also give them time to find out exactly who was behind those attacks.

  But as Angel had explained to Giles, there might be other ways.

  Headlights flashed across Angel’s face, bathing him in white brilliance, causing him to look like nothing so much as a walking corpse. Which was, of course, very nearly what he was.

  “Try not to be seen, Brother Taggart,” Lupo said dismissively. Taggart was a good driver and had done an admirable job of tailing the Slayer thus far, but on these small side streets it was almost impossible not to be noticed. Thus far, Taggart seemed perfectly capable of the impossible, having stayed far back from the Slayer’s vehicle and made subtle movements when necessary.

  When the vehicle had slowed so that the Slayer’s companion might enter, Taggart had turned right, made a quick course around the block, and emerged two blocks farther along the road, even as the vehicle carrying the Slayer made a three-point turn in the street and went back along the way it had arrived.

  Taggart was good at his job. He’d served in MI5 for some time and killed people in the Falklands under orders that hadn’t come from his superiors. Lupo enjoyed his company. It was a pleasure to be in the presence of a man to whom life was so pure. So simple. Taggart was a killer. Given the order, he did the job. No fuss. No argument. No guilt.

  Brother Lupo felt that if Il Maestro had had a thousand such men, his plans might have come to fruition decades earlier.

  Instead of now.

  Far ahead, the taillights of the Slayer’s vehicle—one of which glowed white through plastic Taggart had broken so as to identify the vehicle from a distance—turned left at the corner and then were gone.

  “Don’t lose them, Taggart.”

  “Sure and I’m not goin’ to lose them,” he replied in his thickly accented English.

  At the end of the street there was a stop sign. Taggart, not wanting to risk any attention, for those were his orders, made a complete stop at that sign.

  When a fist smashed suddenly through the driver’s window, Brother Lupo shrieked in terror. He felt sick, for he was used to inducing that emotion in others. Before Ta
ggart could react, strong hands dragged him from behind the wheel, arms shredded by the broken glass. Lupo watched the man’s thrashing legs as they disappeared out the open window.

  Then he jumped behind the wheel.

  “Who are you working for?” Angel snarled, yellow eyes glowing in his feral vampire face.

  “Ye want to know anythin’, ye wanker, then ye’ve taken the wrong man. Ye can go to hell for all the good your shiny little teeth’ll do ye with me,” the man said, even as the men inside their car scrambled to get someone else behind the wheel.

  The Lexus the man had been driving lurched forward with a squeal as someone else finally got sufficient control of the car to get it far away from Angel. But the vampire didn’t mind. His job was done. Angel had held them up long enough that they wouldn’t be able to trace Buffy tonight. They’d probably realize she’d gone to the airport eventually, but for now, that was the best plan they had.

  “Tell me!” Angel snapped, and shook the man, who was dangerous looking by human standards. Angel wasn’t concerned.

  “Now, or I rip your throat out!” Angel demanded.

  Tires squealed. Angel glanced up in time to see the Lexus, which he’d thought long gone, barreling toward him. The headlights blinded him a moment, and the red-faced thug he’d been throttling used the distraction to lash out with bone-crushing force, trying to break Angel’s hold on him.

  It did little more than piss him off.

  Angel backhanded the thug across the face. The Lexus careened toward them both. With a mighty shove, Angel threw the thug clear and then dove in the opposite direction, hoping the moment’s indecision would buy a precious second, enough time so that the driver would be unable to hit either one of them.

  Tires blackened tar with a horrible rubber scream. Angel leaped to his feet as a thin, olive-skinned man leaned out the passenger window of the Lexus with a pistol in his hand.

  “Taggart!” the olive-skinned man screamed.

  The thug Angel had pulled from the car sprang to his feet just across the street and began sprinting for the car. Angel snarled and ran after him. He was only barely aware of the pistol, of the danger of getting shot. He’d been shot before. The only thing that mattered was getting answers—finding out who these bastards were who wanted Buffy dead.

  Buffy dead.

  Angel was not going to let that happen.

  He caught up with the one they’d called Taggart, grabbed him by the back of his collar, then spun him around, one hand gripping the man’s neck and squeezing his throat mercilessly.

  “Talk to me, you son of a—”

  The gunman in the car squeezed the trigger, the pistol barked once, and Taggart’s forehead exploded, spattering gore and gray matter all over Angel’s face.

  The tires on the sedan smoked as the car peeled away.

  Angel only stood there, furious and frozen with astonishment. They did it on purpose, he thought. Killed their own man, just to keep him from talking to me. Sometimes he wondered if humans weren’t, in their own way, worse than vampires. The demons who inhabited vampires were, after all, created to be evil.

  Humans had a choice.

  Angel was about to let Taggart drop to the pavement when he paused, stricken by the scent of fresh blood. On his clothes. On his face. His lips. It was everywhere, and Angel felt the hunger come over him in a way it had not for some time. He stared at Taggart’s destroyed face, and then at the rough flesh of the man’s throat.

  Somewhere nearby, a police siren began its keening wail.

  With a growl of self-loathing, Angel let Taggart’s corpse fall to the pavement with a wet slap. He drew his sleeve across his face, wiping the blood away, and then he sprinted for Giles’s car.

  “Buffy, we really must go,” Giles implored. “That’s the final call for our flight.”

  The small airport was far from busy. The airline employee who had announced final boarding was staring at them, as if anyone could look intimidating in that silly blue uniform. Buffy nodded to Giles without responding. They were all there, all but Angel. Oz and Willow and Buffy’s mother had all come to see them off, and Cordelia and Xander stood just behind Giles, attempting to get Buffy to hurry.

  “I don’t want to go on that little plane,” she told Willow, who smiled and raised her eyebrows as if to say, “tough luck.” “Thanks so much for your sympathy,” Buffy told her.

  This time they both smiled.

  “If you want to make your connection in L.A., you’d better hurry,” Joyce Summers said.

  Buffy glanced up at her mother in surprise. Joyce hadn’t talked much since they’d arrived at the airport, and seemed to hold herself at a distance from the rest of them quite purposefully. They looked at each other now, mother and daughter, and a kind of tacit communication passed between them. In a moment of intense clarity, Buffy imagined that it was the same silent message fathers had given sons for millennia as they sent them off to war. I love you. Be careful Come back to me.

  Buffy stepped forward with a rush of unexpected emotion and embraced her mother, kissing her cheek.

  “I love you,” she whispered.

  “Willow, if you have any questions at all . . .” Giles began.

  “She knows how to reach us, Giles. You only told her twenty-seven thousand times,” Cordelia huffed. “Now, please, I just want to get this over with as quickly as possible. God, who ever heard of flying coach?”

  “Um, the ninety-nine percent of the airplane-riding population who can’t afford first class?” Xander offered.

  Cordelia stared at him. “It must be nice to have an answer for everything,” she sniffed.

  “Actually, it is.”

  They continued to bicker. Giles sighed, picked up his bag, and walked toward the open door to the gangway. Cordelia and Xander picked up their things as well.

  “Xand?” Willow asked.

  Xander turned to face her, and she hugged him quickly, obviously quite aware that both of their significant others were looking on.

  “Be careful,” she said.

  “Hey,” Xander said, softening, “you too. We’re going on a field trip. You’re here with the spookables.” He glanced up at Oz. “Hey, Wolf Boy, watch out for her, all right?”

  Oz only smiled, which didn’t surprise Buffy at all. He wasn’t the type to have his fur ruffled by Xander’s presumption.

  “Come on!” Cordelia demanded, and pulled Xander after her.

  “You kids have fun, now,” Oz called after them.

  Then Willow stood before Buffy again, and the two girls shared a long, wordless moment. Finally they embraced. With Willow’s arms around her, Buffy could not help but reflect upon all that had been happening the past week, and even before that. They were speeding uncontrollably toward the end of life as they knew it. Graduation. Everything would change then, and the thought of it had been wearing on them all.

  Buffy had seen it in the way Willow hugged Xander, as if she were preparing to say good-bye. Even now.

  “Bye,” Willow whispered.

  “Yeah,” Buffy agreed, then gave Willow one last squeeze before breaking off the embrace.

  “Bye.”

  On the plane, Buffy noticed that Giles seemed quite a bit preoccupied. Though Xander tried his best to lighten the mood, the Watcher frequently slipped away, his eyes drifting off to focus on some impossibly distant site, far beyond the walls of the plane. Buffy sat next to Giles, and Cordelia sat with Xander in the row behind them. After a time, Xander and Cordy began talking softly to each other. Glancing at Giles again, Buffy began to grow concerned.

  “Houston Control to Giles,” she said at length. When he did not respond, Buffy poked his bicep. “Giles.”

  “Hmm?” With a furrowing of his brow, he turned to look at her.

  “Okay, I know you were out sick the day they taught Small Talk 101, but you’re really starting to worry me. Are you sure you should have left the hospital so soon?” Buffy asked, genuinely concerned.

  “It
isn’t that,” Giles said dismissively, and looked out the window at the darkness.

  “Then what is it?”

  For a moment, Giles did not respond. Only stared out the window. After several moments had passed, he took a short breath and turned to face Buffy once more.

  “It’s a bit silly, actually,” he said, but his face and his voice were sad, rather than amused. “You see, the Watcher I met in New York, Miss Tomasi . . .”

  “That Micaela chick?”

  Giles smiled wanly. “Yes. That Micaela chick. I didn’t know her very long, but I grew quite fond of her in that time. Now, with her disappearance . . . well, there are several possibilities, and none of them are very appealing.”

  Buffy lay the side of her head against her seat, looking at Giles with understanding, but trying not to show what she truly felt. After the murder of Jenny Calendar, the woman Giles had loved, Buffy was concerned that he might be too wounded to be interested in anyone else. And now, here was someone who might have piqued that interest if she’d stuck around long enough.

  “She might have just gotten called away on other Council business. If this Pallamary guy was a plant, who’s to say if he would even know where she was supposed to have gone?” Buffy offered.

  Giles raised his eyebrows. “It’s a nice thought. But it seems to me that either she was in league with our enemies from the outset, or they’ve killed her, just as they have several other Watchers of late.”

  Now he turned to look out the window, and Buffy tried not to look too closely at his troubled reflection in the glass.

  “I’m not sure which of those options would be more distressing.”

  Boston, October, 1666

  AND SO, HAD HE LEFT HELL BEHIND, TO STAND TRIUMphant upon these distant shores?