by Mel Odom
Jia Li poured carefully. “More lemon?”
“No, thanks,” Willow answered. “I’m fine. How is Lok?”
“I just checked on him a couple minutes ago,” Jia Li answered. “He’s still sleeping.”
“That’s good,” Willow replied. The Rong parents had called over an hour ago to say that the meeting with the attorney was running late. Then there was a late shipment at the docks, caused by some kind of explosion earlier in the day. Evidently, with everything that had happened in Sunnydale the previous night and that morning, no one’s schedule was even close to timely.
Lok had come in that morning, argued with his father for a couple of hours, but hadn’t tried to leave the house. After that he’d fallen into a deep sleep and hadn’t awakened. Sometimes, Jia Li had said, Lok had slept as much as forty-eight hours after being in an agitated state.
One of the boys called from the dining room. Jia Li excused herself and went back to take care of the situation.
You should just tell her you’re trying to find out what happened to her ancestor, Willow chided herself as she brought the window back up. But she knew she couldn’t do that. With the state her friend was currently in, Jia Li would probably not deal very well.
Willow ignored the burning in her eyes and scanned the headlines, wishing Oz would call so she wouldn’t have to worry about him. But how much trouble can Oz and Xander get into? They’re probably just having a pizza at the Bronze.
She had initially entered a search based on the parameters of Mei-Kao Rong’s name, any Rong name— accidental death, death, and murder.
Unfortunately, the writers and editors of the Sunnydale Post hadn’t been really thorough on their editing. Sometimes wrong was spelled rong, adding to the number of hits. And accidents, death, and murder were always prime considerations for stories.
When the current headlines came into view, Willow got excited. MINING TRAGEDY KILLS 37. She tapped the keyboard again, bringing the story into better focus and started reading.
According to the story, a cave-in had occurred in a mine north of Sunnydale on August 13, 1853. The mine had been owned by Sunnydale Mining, a partnership venture formed by prominent members of the city. A list of eighteen family names followed.
Thirty-five of the men had been Chinese laborers hired to do the excavation. Mei-Kao Rong’s name was among them.
“Now you know.”
The hoarse, croaking voice behind her surprised Willow. She turned to find Lok Rong leaning on the couch behind her.
Chapter 18
LOK LOOKED PALE AND HOLLOW- EYED, SO WEAK THAT HE could barely stand. He was still dressed in yesterday’s clothes, wrinkled and stained from his stay in the jail. “Lok!” Jia Li approached Willow quickly, but her face was filled with apprehension. “What are you doing?”
“Spying on your friend,” Lok spat, “who is obviously spying on me.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Jia Li said.
“Take a look at her computer. It has the answers.” Before Willow could prevent it, Lok snatched her laptop away. He opened the computer so it hung straight down, the screen facing his sister so she could read it.
Jia Li glanced at the screen, then at Willow. “I don’t understand.”
“I was doing research on your ancestor,” Willow replied desperately. “I didn’t even know if I would turn anything up. I only now found that.”
Lok pushed the laptop back to Willow. He placed his hands against his temples and screamed out in pain. Saliva flecked his bluish lip. He spoke in Chinese, the words coming so fast Willow guessed that they would be almost incoherent even to someone who spoke the language.
“Lok!” Oi-Ling called from the dining room. Her small face was filled with worry. Tears glimmered in her eyes.
Jia Li tried to go to her brother, but he straight-armed her and knocked her down. For a moment dark malevolence filled his eyes and Willow thought he was going to attack his sister. Willow closed the laptop, prepared to use it as a weapon if she needed to.
Veins stood out on Lok’s neck as he made himself step back. He turned his baleful gaze on Willow. When he spoke, his voice was inhuman, cold as a gust from the grave. “Stay out of this, witch !”
Willow drew back out of range, put the laptop down, and went around the couch to help Jia Li to her feet.
“He doesn’t know what he’s doing,” Jia Li said. “He’s not himself.”
Oh, Lok’s probably himself, Willow reasoned, but it’s probably getting pretty crowded in there. She felt certain that at least one hungry ghost had taken partial possession of Lok.
Lok crossed the room to the front door and fumbled with the doorknob. Then he finally got it open and lurched outside.
“I can’t let him go!” Jia Li cried.
“You can’t stop him,” Willow replied, reaching for her friend. “He’ll just hurt you.”
Jia Li evaded Willow, running for the door.
A snarling, white-hot liquid hiss poured through the room. As Willow watched, frost formed on the decorative mirror by the front door. Like everything else in the living room, butterflies adorned the mirror’s four corners. The butterflies were dyed scarlet, blue, orange and yellow, their delicate wings positioned horizontally to their bodies.
As the frost spread out from the mirror’s center, it touched the four butterflies. Their wings suddenly fluttered as they came to life and sprang from the mirror.
Jia Li screamed and stepped back.
Moving quickly, guessing that zombie butterflies probably weren’t a good thing, Willow grabbed throw pillows from the couch and smashed them. Bilious green paste stained the pillows, smoking at first, then eating holes through the fabric. Willow dropped the pillows to the floor.
Wisps of smoke belled out from the frost-covered mirror. Chinese characters suddenly scrawled in blood spread across the mirror.
“What does it say?” Willow asked.
Jia Li shook her head, backing away. “A warning. Do not interfere.”
In the next instant, the blood-red characters caught fire, scorching across the mirror, leaving a soot residue. Then the mirror exploded, spreading a shiny glass haze over the living room.
Cautiously, Willow walked through the falling shiny haze. It didn’t seem dangerous and she needed to know where Lok had gone. She held her breath till she was outside, just in case. She stepped out beside the goldfish pond and looked down.
Lok ran unsteadily across the restaurant parking area toward a parked motorcycle. He knelt beside it and started cutting wires. Sparks flared and the motorcycle’s engine turned over, almost catching.
“He’s leaving,” Willow said.
“We can’t let him go.” Jia Li stood in the doorway of the house, a cordless phone pressed to her ear.
“I don’t think we’re going to have a choice.” Still, Willow started down the steps. If Buffy was here, she could knock him out or something.
Lok touched the stripped wires again and the motorcycle engine turned over again, catching this time. It warbled a high-pitched keening.
“You have your mother’s car,” Jia Li said, coming up behind Willow. “We can follow him and get help out to him.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Do you have any other ideas?”
“No.” Hesitantly, Willow kept going down the stairs. Her mother’s station wagon was on the other side of the parking lot.
Lok threw a leg over the motorcycle and walked it backward, getting it turned around.
“Hurry, Willow,” Jia Li pleaded. “Whatever has possessed Lok is only going to hurt him.”
Willow remembered the vision she’d seen and silently agreed.
You must go, the voice whispered into her mind. It is too late to stop him at this point. You must do what you can to save him. Things will be much worse if you don’t. Your friends will be hurt. The time to move is now.
Although she didn’t know the source of the voice, Willow believed what it sa
id. She ran, listening to Jia Li call out Oi-Ling’s name.
Willow reached her mother’s car and pulled the driver’s door open. She jammed the key into the ignition, surprised to find she still had her purse, not remembering when she’d picked it up. The car started quickly.
Jia Li slapped a palm against the passenger door glass, slipping into the car immediately after Willow unlocked the door. She spoke quickly into the cordless phone she’d carried from the house.
Willow put the car into gear as Lok roared out of the parking lot. Willow pulled out after him, putting her foot heavily on the accelerator. She didn’t know what Lok would try to do once he saw them following him. The tires shrilled as she pulled out onto the street, cutting off an SUV and getting an irate horn blast in her wake.
“Sorry,” she said, glancing quickly into the mirror, then back at the single taillight of the motorcycle speeding through the traffic ahead.
Jia Li twisted in the seat and kept saying hello into the cordless phone, but it was obvious they’d exceeded the instrument’s range. Frustrated, she screamed—just a little, Willow noticed—and switched the handset off, placing it between the seats.
“Do you have a cell phone?” Jia Li asked.
“On my birthday wish list,” Willow replied. Lok whipped in and out of the traffic, which thankfully, was pretty light for this time of night. Willow followed suit, having to whip a little slower with the station wagon. But then, people had a tendency to get out of the way when they saw her coming.
“I called Ngan,” Jia Li said, watching the traffic and only now reaching for her seat belt. “She’s one of the night hostesses at the restaurant. She’ll stay with Oi-Ling and the boys until my parents get back or we return.”
Willow nodded. “That was quick thinking.”
“I couldn’t get hold of my parents.” Jia Li glanced at Willow. “I’m really scared.”
“Me too,” Willow said. She pulled hard to the right, going up on the curb for a brief instant to avoid a car waiting to turn left. The station wagon rumbled up and down. There goes the front-end alignment. I’ll never get to drive the car again. She prayed that the car would hold together and that she didn’t kill anybody and that she didn’t get a ticket. Getting stopped by a policeman wouldn’t be so bad if there wasn’t a ticket involved.
“Maybe we can call from wherever Lok goes.”
“Sure,” Willow answered, but the image of the cave in the vision haunted her. Personally, she didn’t think they were going to end up anywhere near a phone.
“When I was younger,” Giles said, closing the last book he’d been searching through and sliding it back onto the table, “I used to think I would never grow weary of looking at demons.”
Across the table in the school library, Cordelia just looked at him and shook her head. “Eeww! Now there’s a positively horrible thought. I came down here to help you and I don’t really care to reminisce about things that at one time lived down Demon Lane.”
Giles looked at Cordelia. “Why is it exactly that you did come to help me?”
Cordelia looked at him. “Because you asked.”
“If you’ll forgive me for saying so, but you’re not generally this generous, Cordelia.”
She rolled her eyes up at him.
“I meant that in the kindest way possible,” Giles offered.
“I kind of noticed everything else that was going on last night, too.”
Giles nodded, but continued looking at her. “Since you’ve . . . broken off your involvement with Xander, I’d noticed some reticence on your part to involve yourself in these . . . things.”
“There are other things in life than demon-hunting.”
“One would suppose.”
Cordelia took a breath and let it out. “Look, Giles, if it will make you happy, I’ll tell you.”
“Happiness doesn’t always go along with curiosity.”
“Whatever.” Cordelia looked at the book in front of her. “Things are not so great at my house right now. I wanted to be somewhere other than there. And I didn’t particularly want to be somewhere where I had to be Cordelia Chase, Social Butterfly.”
Social Butterfly wasn’t exactly how Giles would have termed Cordelia’s involvement with the student body— not even with the ones she pretended to like. But he understood the sentiments.
“I just didn’t know I was going to have to be Answer Girl tonight,” Cordelia said.
“You’re right. I’m sorry about prying.”
“No, you’re not. You’re a Watcher. Watcher’s watch . . . and they pry.”
“I am sorry,” Giles said.
“It’s okay.” Cordelia flipped pages in the book she was checking. “Plus there’s graduation coming up. If the world suddenly ended, which it could do if Buffy and her little group of wannabes didn’t figure out what to do, then I’d have wasted all that effort on the senior pictures and figuring out how I was going to dress for the graduation, right?”
“Right.” Giles glanced at the time and found it was just after eight o’clock. No one had checked in yet, so he chose to view that as a good thing. He reached for another book and blew dust from the cover. It was Taukut’s De-ranged Demonology Demystified. Primarily the book covered the social stratification of Urgotian demons that had once been bred and raised on farms in an alternate reality, then claimed their own freedom through a bloody, centuries-long revolution. Hence, De-ranged. It had been years since Giles had referenced it, but he was getting truly desperate.
Giles stood up, feeling the stiffness in his knees and lower back. He palmed his empty cup. “Could I get you more tea?”
“Ugh,” Cordelia responded.
Giles retreated to the small office he kept inside the library and poured. “With all this time we’ve invested in this, you’d think we’d have turned up something by now.”
“You should have kept Buffy here, as well as her friends. We could have gone through a lot more books than these.”
“Buffy’s on patrol.”
“Some get-out-of-jail-free card.”
Giles resumed his seat, letting his mind wander. It didn’t wander far, trekking through various remembrances of the demons he’d been researching. “There is an angle we haven’t pursued.”
Cordelia looked at him. “What?”
“The young woman Xander encountered.”
Cordelia frowned. “What about her?”
“I wonder if it would be any easier to pin her down. She had a definite interest in the Black Wind demons. Perhaps if we found her, or what group she was with, we might know more about the demons we’re currently facing.”
“She’s seen Xander and he’s put the moves on her,” Cordelia said. “We’ll probably never hear from her again.”
That’s pretty mean-spirited, Giles thought, then wondered if Cordelia was really that bitter or was dealing with her own sense of loss. He cleaned his glasses and sipped his tea. “This morning, Xander brought me an item that the young lady had dropped.”
“The little trinket he was showing out in the hallway this morning?”
“It was a necklace, actually, that the young lady was wearing that night. The yin/yang symbol. Very old, possibly hundreds of years.”
“They say some of the garbage we’re throwing away now is going to exist in landfills for hundreds of years. Is that ever going to make it more than garbage?”
“The stones,” Giles mused, choosing to ignore the sarcastic comment. “The stones were blue and white. Now that I think about it, blue was also used to symbolize water and death.” Something was at the edge of the Watcher’s mind, something he couldn’t quite grasp. “Let’s take a moment and see what we can turn up in this venue, shall we?”
“Xander!”
Struggling with sleep, not wanting to wake up, Xander tried to roll over on his side but couldn’t for some reason.
“Xander!”
“Hey, hey,” Xander mumbled. “Just five more minutes, okay? My head feels like it’
s going to bust open.”
“Xander! Wake up now or you may never get another chance.”
This time Xander recognized the voice as Oz’s, and there was no way Oz should be in his bedroom. A guy’s room was his castle, after all. He opened his eyes slowly, taking in the uneven stone walls around him. He was lying on a cold, stone floor and grit was digging into the side of his face.
“Are you awake?” Oz asked.
“God, I hope not,” Xander replied. “This had better be some kind of nightmare I’m going to wake up from any second now.” He blinked his eyes. Even though the light was dim, it hurt his eyes, making the headache even worse. And it tasted like something had died at the back of his throat.
“Not a nightmare,” Oz replied, and his voice echoed just a little, giving an indication of how big the place was that they were in.
Cautiously, wondering if anything was broken, Xander rolled over on his back. When he flopped down so hard, he realized that might have been a mistake because there was no guaranteeing that he would be able to roll back onto his side. His hands were still bound behind his back and his ankles were tied together. “Are you still tied up?”
“What do you think?”
“Okay, just checking. Wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing out on anything.” Even though the area was dim, he clearly saw the irregular stone ceiling at least twenty feet above. It looked artificial, though, because he could see where power tools had scored the stone. Two batterypowered camping lanterns sat on the two desks in the main area. Large and small rectangles of paper covered the walls. He leaned his head forward, feeling like he was ripping the back of his skull out and shoving his ribs through his side. He breathed painfully. “Do you know where we are?”
“No. But I’m thinking this isn’t a tidy little hole in the shire.”
“Captured by hobbits,” Xander groaned. “Now there’s a cheery thought. If we wait long enough, maybe the White Rabbit will put in an appearance and send us home.” He laid his head back and hit a stone wall.