“Yeah,” Buffy murmured. “Boston-bound. We’re overdue on that front, too.”
“Buffy, Angel will be here,” Micaela said. Maybe she didn’t understand the look on Buffy’s face.
Or maybe she did.
“Now, I’ve phoned the Gatehouse to tell them we believe Fulcanelli is dead,” Giles said. “Which, of course, pleased Xander enormously. But the fact remains that he is not actually the Gatekeeper, and should not be doing what he’s doing.”
“My bad,” Buffy murmured. Then she shifted, realizing everyone was looking at her. She picked up her teacup, which was empty.
“Do you want some more?” her mother asked, noticing, and got up, very momlike, to get it. “Giles? Miss Tomasi?”
Giles began to shake his head, but Micaela said, very warmly, “That’s so nice. Let me help you.” Smart one, that Micaela.
That left Giles and Buffy alone.
Buffy said again, “The sun’s almost up.”
“Maybe he’s resting somewhere,” Giles offered. “He knew he couldn’t make it in time, so he holed up.”
She nodded. “Yeah.” She shrugged. “Y’know, I can see why Kendra’s Watcher wouldn’t let her have any friends.”
“She was a good Slayer,” Giles said. There was a moment of silence, during which Buffy painfully recalled cradling the murdered Kendra, dead at Drusilla’s hands. Her blank stare.
“But you’re still the Slayer, Buffy,” Giles continued. “Your specialness, your uniqueness has often been remarked upon by the Council. Which is probably why Ian Williams knew so much about you.” Ian Williams had been one of Fulcanelli’s followers, who had managed to infiltrate the Watchers’ Council and set up Buffy, Angel, and Oz in London to be massacred. In the end, Il Maestro had killed him for failing to do so.
She chuckled slightly. “My uniqueness. You mean the fact that I don’t follow the rules.”
“Yes. Neither of us does. You know, back when I was a rebellious kid, they talked about kicking me out. I wanted desperately for them to do it.”
“Getting kicked out would be nice,” she agreed, sighing.
“But one’s destiny is one’s own. You can’t hand in off.”
“Willow’s parents would definitely agree with you,” Buffy said. “I’m sure when she gets back, they’re going to ground her for life. Unless she gets accepted to Harvard,” she added with mild sarcasm.
He raised his brows. “Oh, she applied there, did she? Good. I was after her about that. Yes, well, as for the other, your mother and I are working on that We’ve been concocting a story about an art exhibition and extra credit . . .” He pushed up his glasses. “I must say, my admiration for your skills in prevarication has grown during this crisis.”
Buffy worked on a translation, came up empty “My skills?”
“You lie very well, when you have to.”
She dimpled. “You’re such a charmer.”
“I’ve been told that, yes.”
She grinned at him and slid her glance in the direction of the kitchen. “Lately?”
Just then, Micaela and Joyce came out of the kitchen. Giles said nothing more, but his cheeks were tinged with pink.
Slayers noticed things like that.
* * *
The ghost roads.
Clad in a flowing black robe, Fulcanelli glided over the landscape in a deep, ebony shadow of such cold and evil that even the dead stayed away. Monsters of the Otherworld, demons from Hell, they all kept their distance. Nothing could penetrate the darkness surrounding him and the Sons of Entropy who traveled with him, and only the fires of Hell could warm it.
And Hell was advancing onto the ghost roads. Though no one could see Fulcanelli, or his men, he alone could see everything that was happening beyond the shadow he had created. Demons and imps burst through several breaches, terrorizing the desperate dead who knew that if Hell came, they would be damned for eternity. The phantoms were running along the roads, faces elongated in terror, wild to reach their final destinations, whatever they might be. The earthbound dead, the confused dead. Some of them had been wandering for centuries. Some had even forgotten who they were, and where they were. They staggered madly along, hopelessly lost.
They would provide fine fodder for Belphegor’s minions, once they crossed over from Hell into this plane of existence.
Boston, Il Maestro thought, imagining the Gatehouse. Long practiced in traveling the ghost roads, he was very good at moving himself rapidly from place to place upon them. His powers of concentration were formidable; his ability to visualize, unsurpassed, even by Jean-Marc Regnier. For centuries, the Regniers had reacted to crisis after crisis. They had never acted. All their magick was defensive.
Very little of his was.
Like Death himself, Fulcanelli’s cloak billowed and moved as he rushed. With Belphegor’s patience at an end, the hand of death was upon him. His followers sensed his urgency, and responded to it. Since their defeat at the drive-in, they had grown fearful. They, too, needed a victory.
Fulcanelli would see to it that they received one.
At the Gatehouse.
* * *
Ethan Rayne turned a page and glanced over at the cage where they kept the wolf boy. The creature was finally asleep, thanks to a combination of its own ravings and rantings, and Ethan’s well-executed sleep spell. Ethan was deeply grateful for the silence. It had been difficult to concentrate with all the growling.
He was reading up on Belphegor from Giles’s text The Lords of Hell, retrieved from the werewolf’s cage. Drumming his fingers on the library study desk, he turned another page. Big stuff, this. Ethan was used to small mischiefs, pranks really, when compared to what was going on now. End of the world, rule of Hell over all creation, quite something.
But Giles’s text was old and faded, and Ethan had just run into something he found a bit troubling:
The following pages, containing as they do vital spells and occult wisdom, must be perused only by eyes of magick. Other than those will render the material useless and none who gaze upon the words will ever make sense of them again. Therefore, a cautionary note: Go no further, Reader, unless you are to magick born, or you will doom the world to rule by the fearsome Lord Belphegor, Warmonger of Hell.
“To magick born,” Ethan repeated. “Which I don’t suppose I was.” He had learned all the magick he knew, beginning back when he and Ripper ran together. And he wasn’t certain the werewolf qualified either, nor the mutant. Were their conditions considered magickal? He was afraid to find out. For according to what he had just read, if someone who wasn’t qualified read the section in question, they would never discover how to defeat Belphegor.
Then he smiled.
For he knew where to find someone born to magick.
God, he loved being resourceful.
Slamming the book shut, he tipped an imaginary hat in Oz’s direction and said, “Sweet dreams, Mr. Hyde. I’m sure Rupert will be along shortly to collect you.”
He went outside. The lawns of Ripper’s depressingly trendy schoolyard were wet with dew. Songbirds chirruped. Ethan was glad that dawn would come soon. The Sunnydale nights were clogged with more horrors than good old London town had seen in centuries. Ethan was surprised Giles had kept his good looks, what with all he had to do around here to maintain the balance between good and evil.
Ethan tried to feel guilty, but he just couldn’t. It was such a useless emotion.
With the book under his arm, he fished in his pocket for the keys to his rental. At the same moment, a large golden retriever bounded across his path, barking lustily. It was chasing a very small troll, who looked over its shoulder and screamed at the bounding, eager dog.
Ethan frowned. A breach must have opened—they might all be opening, now that the barriers were so thin. He’d better check on the ones the little spellcaster, Willow, had closed, and see if there were any new ones, as well.
But first things first.
He got into his car, and ferried
over to Sunnydale Hospital.
The parking structure was closed off, as was most of the surrounding lot. With a few well-chosen words, Ethan opened the parking barrier to the area marked “Physicians’ Parking Only” and pulled into a space between a Mercedes and a Porsche. American doctors did so very well. Next life, perhaps he would be a brain surgeon.
He got out and locked the car, then strode into the main entrance. This time, the coffee cart was open, and he got himself a double espresso, which the dear clerk carefully poured into a huge paper cup. The small dollop of potent coffee splashed about inside, and Ethan thought to tease the clerk by complaining, “What? This is all I get?” but it was sure to slow things down.
Quite a lot of hospital personnel were about, and he looked for his lovely in scrubs—or one of her friends. For his trouble, he got a few perky looks, and he grinned as he wheeled down the corridors.
How fortunate that the patient he sought had been so badly hurt that she was still here.
He hung in the doorway of Amy Madison’s room and smiled.
* * *
“Gatekeeper!” came the shout from the center of the weird black cloud that suddenly appeared in the middle of the Gatehouse lawn. Around it, the Sons of Entropy began cheering and whooping. Xander raised his eyes questioningly and looked at Antoinette.
“Let me guess,” he said. “Publishers Clearing House.”
“Oh, no,” Antoinette murmured, and then she did something very wild: she turned solid. Her hands went around Xander’s biceps and she held on to him as she swayed like she was about to pass out. “No, it can’t be.”
“Um. Okay. So we’re not rich. Let’s try again. Siegfried and Roy?”
Antoinette let go of him and buried her face in her hands. “Jacques,” she whispered.
“Jacques? Which is a good thing,” Cordelia ventured, looking at Xander and Willow. “Right?”
Willow shrugged.
Then Antoinette Regnier resumed her ghostly form and raised her face. Whoa. Talk about wigged. This lady’s hair would turn gray if it hadn’t already.
“It is our old enemy. It is Fulcanelli,” she said. “He has come at last.”
“Wait a minute,” Xander cut in. “Giles said he was dead.”
“So, not true. Not a good thing,” Cordelia said. She moved her shoulders. “But it’s okay. Xander can deal.”
“Xander can?” Xander asked. He took a deep breath. “This is the main bad guy, right? Everything else has been the lackluster half-time show, during which the rest of America hit the fridge or flushed. And I’m the pinch hitter. Which is the wrong sport, sure, but I was always into figure skating, myself.
“So. This guy is like, who? Katerina Witt? Who was that really bad girl, the one who tried to take out that other skater, Tonya—”
As if on cue, the Gatehouse burst into flames. As Xander closed his eyes and concentrated, flames erupted in each one of the thousands of rooms contained within the house. And in each of those rooms, the magickal barriers that bound the creatures of the Otherworld—the stuff of myths and legends—began to fall. The Gatehouse’s captives were escaping both into the house and onto the ghost roads.
The burning house thundered with the shrieks of wild, unthinking beasts, the cheers of evil beings released from their imprisonment. Monsters rammed the walls in frenzied terror as the flames lapped at their bodies, causing huge sections of the house to crumble into mountains of rubble.
The curtains around the window where the four had stood billowed with orange flames as Willow and Cordelia glommed on to Xander and he eased them away.
“Yow.” Xander looked at Antoinette. “Houston, do we ever have a problem.”
“All is lost,” she said.
“No way,” Cordelia said, frowning. “My man is the Gatekeeper. He’ll fix everything.” She lifted a brow. “Right, Xander?”
“You don’t get it. I may have the tools, and the knowledge, but not the skill, y’know. It’s like being given the fastest race car in the world for your driver’s ed test! I’ve gotta learn fast.”
“Or we’ve gotta get Jacques back here, so he can take over,” Willow added quickly.
“I’m not certain that is even possible at this point,” Antoinette told them.
“So, wait, I may be Gatekeeper forever?” Xander asked, suddenly frantic. “Y’know, it’s cool for a while, but I can’t keep this up indefinitely.”
“Men. Always with the excuses,” Cordelia sniffed.
The glass in the window shattered.
Xander cried, “Hit the dirt!”
He threw himself onto both Willow and Cordy, slamming them against the floor, as a barrage of blue flames and strange black objects rocketed into the room and exploded near the blazing ceiling. The floor was burning, and both girls shrieked with pain. He leaped off them and pointed at their smoldering clothes, putting out the flames.
Then he wheeled to face the window. Fire and energy poured from his hands in a torrent as he returned fire. He didn’t know how he did it; he didn’t even think about doing it. It just happened.
Then he attended to the house, quenching the flames and healing it all at once, strengthening the barriers around the imprisoned creatures.
Then he staggered backward, and might have fallen if Cordelia and Willow hadn’t caught him.
“This is not looking so good,” he said dully. His forehead was dripping with sweat and he was so tired he felt like he was floating into little pieces around the room.
“It has barely begun,” Antoinette announced.
* * *
Angel’s back was aflame as he crashed into the sunken garden of his mansion and doused himself in the fountain. Luckily, the last gray shadows of night sheltered him the rest of the way into the house.
“Angel!” Buffy cried, leaping to her feet. The teacup she had been holding shattered on the floor as she put her arms around him and held him briefly. Then, as if she remembered who he was and that she shouldn’t do that, she pulled away. “You’re hurt.”
He touched his face and felt the scratches and bruises.
“I . . . needed to pick up something to . . . some sustenance. I didn’t think I was going to make it back here on time,” he told her, “so I decided to bunk down in the Master’s lair.”
“The what?” Buffy’s mother, Joyce, said.
Buffy turned to her. “My first big enemy here,” she informed Joyce. “Ruined church. Underground.”
Joyce blinked. “I thought that was an urban legend.”
“Buffy,” Angel said, “I ran into a bunch of demons down there. I think they got out of Hell via the ghost roads, and I think there’s going to be more of them.”
Angel winced with the pain, reminding himself that soon it would be gone. As a vampire, Angel healed quickly and well.
“That would make sense,” Giles noted. “Xander is doing the best he can, but the dimensional barriers are already badly damaged. As the walls get thinner and weaker, and the monsters and demons begin to mass on the other side, they would by nature squeeze through at the weakest points. The Master’s old lair would be among the weakest.”
Buffy sighed. “Oh, wonderful.”
Chapter 10
THE PHONE RANG. ANGEL PICKED it up and said, “Hello. Hello?”
He shook his head at Joyce and shrugged. “Just static.” He punched *69. “Caller ID blocked. Well, their loss.”
His tone was casual, but Joyce detected an edge to his voice.
She sat across from Angel in the large parlor of his extraordinary home. He sat in the shadows, and she couldn’t really see him. He had offered her every comfort, shown her a room where she might sleep if she desired. Given her tea and scones and the run of the kitchen. Of course, she’d have to go out to buy anything more substantial, since the cupboard was pretty much bare. Angel didn’t have to eat. When he did, it was usually to be social, or to enjoy the flavors he had once coveted.
All of that he’d explained to her in friendly
conversation.
Friendly conversation during which they both pretended it wasn’t awkward for them to be together. She knew everything, now, about Buffy and Angel. Or, at least, as much of everything as she could bring herself to hear. But none of that was the primary reason for the awkwardness of their situation.
No, the real reason was sleeping in a room not far away. The real reason was an eleven-year-old boy sound asleep, chest rising and falling with each breath. Joyce was exhausted, yes. And she didn’t relish the idea of running off with Buffy before she’d had a chance to shower and rest and, well, recover a bit.
But she wasn’t about to do any of that. Not just now. Because the real reason she was there, the reason nobody wanted to talk about, particularly not Angel, was that none of them had been comfortable with the idea of leaving that boy asleep in a bed in that mansion with only a vampire for company.
Buffy’s faith in Angel notwithstanding, it was something that went unspoken. Someone else would stay with Jacques. Someone human. And since Ethan Rayne had, Joyce was told, disappeared for the moment, and was at any rate even lower on the trustworthiness scale than Angel, Micaela was much needed to help Buffy and Giles with the current crisis. That left Joyce.
“Do you need to sleep?” she asked Angel.
“I’m all right,” he replied.
Which wasn’t really an answer. But it would have to do. Joyce, on the other hand, needed desperately to sleep. But to sleep in the presence of a vampire, even Angel . . . she just couldn’t bring herself to entertain the thought.
She watched Angel’s face. He met her gaze, smiled gently, understanding. Joyce looked away. After a moment she rose.
“I’m going to look in on the boy,” she said.
“Call if you need me,” Angel replied, also rising. “I have some things to attend to around the house.”
He disappeared into the shadowy reaches of the unlit corridor, and Joyce shivered. Outside, the sun shone down. But here, it was black as night.
She opened the door to the room where Jacques lay sleeping soundly. The boy slumbered on, and Joyce felt a moment of envy. He had been through an ordeal not unlike her own, and now he had the chance to recover from it. To rest.
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