They all turned to look.
And no one looked happy.
“Good Lord,” Rupert blurted. “Ethan, what in God’s name are you doing here?”
Ethan tried yet one more time. “Good?”
As one, everyone in the library continued to stare at him.
He stepped forward. “I mean it. I’m in. On the side of good.”
“Good and greedy, good and ambitious, or good and plenty?” Buffy asked harshly.
“You malign me so,” Ethan protested.
At this, the Slayer stood. “Last I saw you, you were carving tattoos in my back. Or no, wait, you were selling magick candy bars, right? So excuse me if I don’t do backflips at the sight of you.”
He smiled at her. “But you’re such an agile creature.”
“And you’re not welcome here,” Rupert said crisply.
“But I truly am here to help,” Ethan insisted. “And please don’t take offense, but it appears to me that you could use a little help.”
“Batman, Riddler,” Oz said warningly, as if introducing Giles to Ethan for the very first time.
“Oh, what?” Ethan demanded. “You’re all so in control of the situation that you don’t need any help whatsoever? While it’s raining lightning—”
“—and toads,” Buffy said. She looked at Giles. “Well, it did. At least, while we were looking for my moth—” She glanced uncomfortably at Ethan. “—balls.”
He grinned at her. “I beg your pardon?”
There was another protracted silence. Then Buffy sighed and said, “One mistake, one little slip of the spellcasting tongue, and you’re dog meat. Literally.”
“Now, wait just one moment,” Rupert protested. He put down his teacup and glared at Ethan. “You aren’t simply going to trust him,” he began.
“Fine,” Buffy said, then glanced at Ethan. “Tell us why?”
“Why?” Ethan asked, raising his eyebrows.
“Echo,” Buffy replied.
Ethan frowned. “Well, you may not appreciate the . . . art . . . in the things that I do, but it is what I do. Where would I be without a world left to do it in?”
Buffy gave her Watcher a look. “He doesn’t want to die.”
“You have me there.” Rupert clapped his hands together. “Other comments?”
“She has you there,” Oz said.
“All right, Ethan,” Rupert said unhappily. Up went the glasses. “But one mistake. One misstep. One typical Ethan gesture, and you are most undeniably . . .”
He trailed off.
“I believe the fashionable phrase is ‘dog meat,’ ” Oz said helpfully.
* * *
At the east end of Sunnydale, still within the town limits but long past anything that actually passed for “town,” lay the Sunnydale Twin Drive-In. Or what had once been the Twin. One after another, the nostalgic buyers had come along, dedicated to “doing it right” even if that meant making no money at all. Eventually, reality set in. There were people willing to operate the drive-in purely for pleasure, without any profit at all. But so far, nobody had been willing to run the place at a loss.
At least, not in the past eleven years, which was how long the Twin had officially been closed. The land had been sold off half a dozen times since then, to developers with an eye to vast tracts of land without a mall on them. But the property had turned out to be untenable for most developers. Too far out on the edge of town. Too far from just about everything else. Past the desolation that had once been the two-screened drive-in, there were only some thick woods, Route 17, several mom-and-pop stores, and then, when you started to get close to the next town over, an ice rink.
But by then, you were too far away for the drive-in property to be of any use. It was only a matter of time before continuing development made the Twin a piece of prime real estate. But for now, it was nothing but an enormous parking lot surrounded by a rusting chain-link fence, its pavement shattered every few feet by weeds that had forced their way up to fresh air.
Teenagers sneaked in often enough, mostly to drink or have a bonfire in the lot. One of the screens was ruined, half of it having collapsed during a nasty thunderstorm back in ‘95. Most of the speakers had been ripped from their stands, swung about some local kid’s head by their wires, and thrown at the screens or at the little cement projection booth and concession stand that looked like nothing so much as a bomb shelter.
But there hadn’t been any invading teenagers in the past few weeks. Anyone who even came close to the fence had the sudden and irresistible urge to be far, far away from the Sunnydale Twin. It wasn’t any one particular thing, but just an overall feeling that drove them off.
It was black magick.
And this black magick spread over the Sunnydale Twin like a miasma, like the diseases in the mists and the steaming hot afternoons that used to make men sick; it reshaped and reformed the Sunnydale Twin until walls grew and puzzles formed and hedges sprouted and blocks carved themselves into vast warrens. Until the Sunnydale Twin was what people saw if they looked from Route 17.
But if they were inside the Sunnydale Twin, if they were a prisoner there—if they were the mother of the Slayer—then the drive-in was gone. In its place was a terrible maze.
And within it dwelled the lord of the maze, the king of the labyrinth, as it had been set down from the beginning of words and ritual executions: the Minotaur.
A man with the head of a bull. A creature without mercy, so dread that in various countries such as Spain and Portugal, they still sacrificed captive bulls in large arenas manned by symbolic heroes called matadores—killers—to assuage their sense of powerlessness when the minotaur had held sway over them all.
The minotaur was a thirsty creature. An abomination against heaven, it lusted for human flesh. It craved the gore of human tissue across its snout.
“Mrs. Summers?” Brother Claude called softly. “Wake up. We have a surprise for you.”
* * *
Within the Cauldron of Bran the Blessed, Jean-Marc Regnier, the Gatekeeper, held the Spear of Longinus between his liver-spotted hands and wheezed to his mother, “He is winning, Maman. I can feel it. The Cauldron is all that sustains me now. And even that is not enough. I will not be able . . . to use it again. Fulcanelli will prevail . . . and the gates of Hell will open all over the world. The home of the Slayer . . .” He sighed. “It is the fulcrum. It is the central point. If we cannot hold Sunnydale, we are lost.”
Antoinette Regnier, the ghostly mother of the Gatekeeper, who had died over a century before, stroked the lined, fevered brow of her son and closed her eyes against the tears that threatened to fall. In life, she had been bound through a ritual to this place and this house to aid her son. The sands had run out for him so completely; he was barely a shell housing a pulse and a mind. Yet he clung so hard; he waited for the return of his young son, so that the weighty legacy of the Gatekeeper might continue. Poor Jacques.
Poor Jean-Marc.
“Hush, my dear boy,” she whispered. “Conserve your strength. As long as you hold the Spear, you cannot be defeated in battle.”
“But I can still die. It is ending, Mother,” he said desperately. “I’m of no use, and the world is ending.”
* * *
Giles lifted his head.
After his long day at school, he had come to the mansion to check on Jacques and Micaela. The lad had placed wards around the mansion, as had Giles, in his own way; else, Giles would never have left them alone. There really had been nothing else to be done: with no one else to help them, and no one to trust—especially not Ethan, for all his protestations—the best they could hope for was to keep the boy out of sight.
As Giles had been asking Micaela about her day, he had fallen asleep on the sofa.
When he awakened, the shadows were thrown across the room, and a blanket had been gently bunched around his neck.
Across the room, Micaela sat in an overstuffed chair, her knees beneath her chin. She smiled when she saw
him.
He looked at her with sudden clarity.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
She closed her eyes.
She wept.
Giles moved to her, holding her; she cried against his chest, and then she said, “That strengthens me, Rupert, as nothing ever has.”
Chapter 3
BUFFY HELD HER HEAD IN her hands as if it were going to explode. Giles could see how exhausted she was, and this brief rest during the ongoing search for her mother would do little to relieve her. But he could not allow his sympathy to blind him as to their priorities.
“We have to get Jacques back to Boston,” he said tentatively.
The Slayer looked up at him as though she wanted to strike him. Giles wouldn’t have blamed her. But there was nothing to be done about it. As melodramatic as it seemed to his sense of practicality, the fate of the world hung in the balance. Already, they had wasted most of a day. After school, he had gone to check on Micaela and the boy, and to get some rest. Now, not long after dusk, he’d returned with a renewed sense of purpose.
A purpose Buffy seemed to disagree with.
“Buffy, we must—” he ventured.
“Don’t you think I know that?” Buffy snapped, but her anger was tempered with a tone of desperation that made Giles’s heart ache.
“Buffy, you must know I understand,” he said. “I fear for her as much . . .” But of course that could not be true.
“She’s my mother,” Buffy said sharply. “I can’t leave her.”
Oz sat at the library’s study table several feet away. He’d been double-checking the chains he planned to use that night. Now he looked up at Giles and raised his eyebrows. “There’s also that whole monster thing. Okay, the wolfman was passed out most of the time; preventing slaughter, rule number one. So I didn’t actually observe the monster thing. But from what Angel and Micaela said, we probably couldn’t use the ghost roads even if we wanted to.”
Giles nodded, idly scratched his head. “You have a point. One we’ve addressed before. There is also the added problem of Fulcanelli’s presence here. He wants the boy. He wants Buffy. He wants Micaela. And he was able to use sorcery to prevent you all from reaching the Gatehouse once before. If he could do it again . . .”
Buffy slipped off the library counter and grabbed the light jacket she’d been wearing off the back of a chair.
“It’s settled, then,” she said. “He’s got us backed into a corner and there’s only one way out.
“He wants me. He can have me. But I’m going to make sure it hurts.”
* * *
“Leave him. He is ours,” whispered the lost souls of the ghost roads.
“No he’s not!” Willow yelled. “He’s ours!”
Cordelia was pulling Xander by his hands, his feet and his butt dragging on the hard ground of the ghost road. Willow moved around them as though she were doing a rain dance or something, waving her hands frantically, hoping to startle the spirits who, even now, were pulling at Xander’s clothes and legs.
To Cordelia’s astonishment, it was working.
“You all listen to me! You’re in trouble, and so are we. We’re trying to find a way to put those demons and, y’know, other monster people, back where they belong. Which would be a good thing. For everyone,” Cordelia said breathlessly. “Including you. So back off and leave us alone.”
“He must stay. He is dead.”
“No, he’s not!” Willow screamed.
But despite Cordelia’s raving, and her own denials, they had not been able to find a pulse on Xander. He might very well be dead. Or his pulse might be so faint, so close to stopping, that . . .
Forget it, she thought. I don’t want to think about it.
“Listen to me,” she said. “I’m no witch, but I know a few spells. You guys can cooperate, or I can bind you to the ghost roads, so you can never leave here, never find whatever, y’know, waits for you. Wherever you’re going. Which would suck, right?”
To her astonishment, the old ghost’s eyes went wide and he began to drift back. The others moved away from Xander. Cordelia shuddered with relief and bit her lip. The ghosts moved to join the others in fighting the demons, and Willow hurried to help Cordelia.
The girls each had an arm now, and were pulling as fast as they could, hoping they would reach a breach that would open into the Gatehouse soon. That was the thing about the ghost roads, according to Giles. They knew where you intended to go, and would simply open whenever you passed a breach back into the real world that was near your destination. But there was no way to tell how long a walk it would be.
And they were out of time.
“We’ll be all right,” she told Cordelia. And then she lied again. “He’ll be all right.”
“This is the part where he’d make a stupid joke,” Cordy replied. “I’d want to strangle him, and I’d totally give him the cold shoulder. But now . . . oh, God, Willow, this is worse than anything else Buffy’s gotten us into, ever.”
Willow sighed. Of course Cordelia knew that none of this was Buffy’s fault, but Cordy always blamed the Slayer.
As they dragged Xander, the dead moved out of their way in a gray wave of souls, faces swirling in the mist, and screaming demons in the distance. Xander’s wrist felt cold under her fingers. He was so still.
“Does he feel heavy to you?” Cordelia asked, frantically. “Aren’t you supposed to be heavier when you’re dead? I didn’t think he was this heavy.”
“He was hiding it from you, actually,” Willow replied weakly. “His Twinkie addiction had flared up again. He was gonna go to the Betty Ford, but—”
“Willow!” Cordelia cried, staring at her even as they kept hauling Xander’s still form along.
Willow shrugged. “Sorry,” she said. “I was trying to help. Y’know, with the bad jokes. I just thought . . .”
She fell silent. Trying again not to think about Xander’s condition.
Then Cordelia let out a yelp, and the two of them were falling backward, pulling Xander down after them. The drop was only about a foot and a half, but they tumbled together out of a breach and ended up in a tangle of limbs.
Willow was first to get to her feet. They stood at the foot of a double-wide staircase in the most incredible marble foyer of one of the most magnificent homes she had ever seen.
“Is this it?” she asked. She stared around in amazement.
Cordelia was tugging at Xander again. “Yes, this is it!” she snapped. “When you’re through being magick-tourist girl, would you give me a hand? The Cauldron’s upstairs in the Gatekeeper’s room.”
Willow went to help her, but both of them were stopped short by an enormous crash of splintering wood as the double doors shattered and a man tumbled through them and slid across the marble. A long stick flew in with him—no, it was a spear of some sort—and the man grabbed at it.
“The Gatekeeper?” Willow asked Cordy.
The man looked horrible, like a corpse himself. His eyes were sunken and his skin hung from his bones. But the magick that crackled up around his body as he rose to his feet . . . and then rose to hover above the ground, was not weak or sagging, not at all.
Cordelia only nodded, staring.
The Gatekeeper took the long spear and broke it over his knee. He took the pieces and broke them again. Then he flicked his hands at the fragments, and they burst into brilliant green flame. Sparks shot off them as if they were fireworks. Both girls jumped.
He moved to the shattered doors and floated through them. Past the destruction, they could see a number of Sons of Entropy acolytes on the front lawn of the house. Then, in a sizzling matrix of magickal energy, the doors re-created themselves right before the girls’ eyes. He hadn’t even registered their presence.
The remains of the spear continued to spark and burn on the marble floor.
“Wow,” Willow whispered.
Cordelia swallowed. “Yeah.”
Willow added, “Looks like the place is
under attack again.”
“Oh, please,” Cordelia sighed. “When isn’t it? Now, come on, I didn’t get his blood all over this outfit for nothing.”
Willow blinked, a bit surprised to hear the usual Cordy tone in such a dire situation. But then she realized it was all a show. All a mask to cover her terror. Which made Willow wonder what kind of mask she was wearing to hide her own fear, especially from herself.
As quickly as they could, they began to drag Xander up the stairs.
* * *
When Brother Zachary first arrived on Beacon Hill, he did not see the Gatekeeper’s house.
“Look harder, Brother,” said the acolyte who had picked him up at the airport. “Are you so far from the source, so far from chaos magick, that you cannot see past the most enormous of glamours?”
Zack looked at him, narrowed his eyes and said, “Shut the hell up, you moron. Who taught you to speak like that?”
The man looked as though he’d been slapped. He opened his mouth to reply, but no sound came out. Instead, they stood there together, two very different men, allied to a single cause. On the narrow street not far from the Massachusetts State House, Brother Zachary frowned and stared at the place where the house was supposed to be.
Then, suddenly, there it was.
It’s an extraordinary bit of magick, he thought. It must have taken decades to perfect. But this house had stood here for centuries, so the Regnier family, the Gatekeeper Dynasty, had had plenty of time. Once it must have been one of the only buildings up here. Now it sat amid two long rows of brownstone apartment buildings that were among the priciest real estate on the East Coast.
The Gatehouse was a vast, rambling mansion that seemed to encompass nearly every architectural period that Zack was familiar with, and a number of which he wasn’t. It had a large front yard—almost unheard of in a city as densely settled as Boston. And yet average people walking by would never see it. They would pass by a row of brownstones and walk right through the shadow of that house without ever knowing it was there. There might be a few extra seconds ticked off on their watch—seconds they would never get back—but for all intents and purposes, the house was invisible from the outside.
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