Just ahead of the pack, a pale, slack-jawed wraith slammed into Oz and clung to him, screaming, “Stop them! Stop them!”
“Hey,” Oz protested, “let go. I can’t help you if—”
The demons were on them in an instant. Oz crashed to the ground, landing on the ghost, whose fragile skull shattered in an instant. As Oz caught his breath, he got to his knees, then ducked back down as another demon sailed into the air, wings flashing open. One of the white armbands went into combat mode, slashing and swinging, while the shorter of the two—Jacques, obviously—did something magickal, creating some kind of barrier that held for a few seconds as the demons slammed into it. Then it broke down, and the demons tumbled into themselves and rammed forward, borne by sheer momentum.
Again Oz was thrown to the ground.
Immediately he was surrounded by shrieking spirits, so panic-stricken that they flitted back and forth wildly, passing through him, trying to grab hold of anything, screaming in his face. It was like a bunch of drowning people attacking a lifeguard.
“Hey!” he shouted as he struggled to his hands and knees, but they were beyond listening to him. One actually tried to crawl underneath him, like that would help anybody.
With supreme effort, he staggered to his feet and extended his fist, connecting at last with the slimy, bulgy side of the tallest demon as it waded into the pool of terrified dead and began crushing their heads with what might be its mouth. Hard to say. Whatever it was, it did the job. The ghosts exploded.
Oz had hit the demon. He’d felt his blow land. But the thing didn’t even register Oz’s punch, which made Oz angry. He was used to holding his own. Okay, he wasn’t Buffy, but he was a fairly strong guy, for a musician, and Willow liked to feel his arm muscles, so at least he had some, or she was just being nice. But it wasn’t like her to lie, really.
So he tried again, really going for the gusto, and knocked the living hell—so to speak—out of the demon, who stopped, blinked a whole lot of eyes, and took a step backward.
It roared so hard Oz’s teeth rattled.
Then something stepped between Oz and his opponent—Oz felt the pressure—and the demon was hurtled up and into two of his closest personal friends. The three fell over, and while they were down, Oz and—it had to be Angel—advanced on them and punched and kicked for all they were worth.
“You know, we should have told her to make all three of us invisible to everyone else,” Angel’s voice sounded in Oz’s ear. One of the demons was screeching as several of its eyes deflated and black liquid streamed down its front.
“Yeah. Oversight,” Oz agreed, wrinkling his nose in disgust as he kicked at the demon directly in front of him. It didn’t look as damaged as the one Angel had taken on.
“You look terrible,” Angel went on. “You okay?”
“Yeah. Great.”
Then suddenly, a howl erupted from Oz’s throat. He looked down to see the hairs on the backs of his hand sprout and begin to grow. His fingernails became vicious claws.
“Sorry,” he growled.
“We’ll take care of you,” Jacques called to him.
But Oz could no longer understand the words.
* * *
“Now, boy, concentrate,” Hadrius said to Giacomo, as they stood before the pulsing wound in the world. “This is called a lacuna. A breach.”
Giacomo wanted to draw back from the pulsing circle of purple. He was afraid, as he often was during his training sessions. But to admit fear was to invite a beating, and he had not recovered from the most recent one.
He had been with Hadrius a full lunar year—thirteen months—and still he dreamed of his mother and her smiles and her elixirs. He woke in the night with tears on his cheeks and remembered her shrieks of terror and pain, and vowed that such would never happen to anyone he loved, ever again.
What Giacomo Fulcanelli did not realize, as he moved toward the breach with his breath held and his back stiff within the cassock he wore, for his back was crisscrossed with whip marks, was that the price Hadrius paid for power was the ability to love. And that if he stayed in the terrible lord’s service, he would all but lose that ability as well.
Power would become what he worshiped.
And he would admire Hadrius’ hard-heartedness, striving to emulate it. He would be known as a cruel and exacting taskmaster, and his followers would do almost anything to avoid his wrath.
But for now, he was still a boy who had lost his witch-mother to the flames and whose survival depended upon pleasing his master, whom, he suspected, was his true father. In the beginning he had assumed that such a bond might afford him a gentler life within the walls of the brooding fortress that was nightly surrounded by mist and raven’s wing. But he grew to realize that Hadrius must be proud of his own; he must have a son who was the coldest and cruelest. And so, whatever affection he might have felt for Giacomo, he would never reveal it to the lonely, terrified boy.
Giacomo was fresh steel, and Hadrius was the hammer.
Together they would forge an ungodly weapon the likes of which the world had never seen.
* * *
Ethan wiped the sweat off his forehead and hoped sincerely that Ripper appreciated the amount of trouble he was enduring in order to stave off the invasion of various and sundry demonic entities into the pastel backdrop of dear old Sunnydale and other points earthbound. The old boy didn’t seem to recall that the casting of spells required an awful lot of energy, and, well, one had to face facts: though he might appear to be a mere lad of, say, thirty-one or -two, Ethan had accumulated a lot of mileage over the years. Whatever proved best for your complexion, darling: some people went to spas; Ethan regularly performed sacrifices to the dark gods. Goats, mostly. Goats were always popular. He supposed he owed the lack of crow’s feet to reeking, bleating goats.
“To order I bow,” he muttered, bending from the waist and facing north.
“To divine harmony I subjugate myself.” He shifted west.
“To balance I kneel.” Kneeling now, eastward.
“To symmetry I abase myself.” And for the final idiocy, south.
Funny thing about magick: sometimes one had to believe, and sometimes all that was necessary was the correct words and the proper rituals. Luckily, this was one instance where belief was not required. Else, the good guys would have been dead ducks by now. Order, harmony, balance, and symmetry: Look them up in your thesaurus under boredom. Ethan actually felt guilty invoking their qualities into the world. There was a reason your heart sped up upon occasion; why, in your sleep, you might startle. It was to remind your body that it was alive. Keep up that wretched thumping and pulsing for too long, and it would forget what it was doing. The same was true of the psyche. Things had to be stirred up now and then; all kinds of things hatched in a brook. Distilled water bred nothing at all.
The only way he got around his uneasiness was to promise himself that once this crisis was averted, he would wreak mischief over Sunnydale such as never had been seen before.
Slightly cheered, he continued.
“I call upon the gods of order, upon the guardians of the north, and of the south, selah! And of the west and the east, blessed be! Bring forth a sphere of order, a formation of calming influence, and let it grow and flourish in this place. Let it spread its power to all places of chaos. Let the chaos weaken, and the sphere become nourished thereon.
“I chant three, three, three.
“I chant seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven, seven!
“And of the perfection of the prime, I call, one!
“As it is, so shall it be.”
As required by the text, Ethan closed his eyes and cleared himself of all inharmonious thoughts. He imagined his mind as a clean, clear crystal, forbidding himself to scoff at the very notion, and then took a deep, cleansing breath. Which was tainted with whiskey, and soon, he prayed, would be tainted with a little more of it.
However, all these damn guardians didn’t have to know about that.
“As it is, so shall it be,” he repeated.
He took another breath, exhaled, and cleared his throat. Thank God that was over with.
He opened his eyes, started, and chuckled.
It had worked.
The mess he’d made of Giles’s precious books had been rectified: the learned tomes, which had once been ranged all over the floor, were now stacked on the study table in the center of the library. Not only that, but as he crossed over to them, he saw that they were arranged in alphabetical order. The chairs were each pushed in, just so.
The pencils beside the checkout counter were lined up like little dead animals, longest to shortest.
Everything was unbelievably, unrelievedly tidy. He was certain that if he checked the library bookshelves, they, too, would be carefully organized and dust-free to boot.
Over the library, a sense of calm and tranquility glowed like a Christmas carol.
“All is calm, all is bright,” Ethan sang in a whisper. He wasn’t at all surprised that the spell had worked.
Otherwise, what was the point of devoting one’s life to the occult arts?
“All right, Rupert,” he said, nodding with satisfaction. “Let’s see if this did the trick where it really matters.”
He picked up the phone and rang Giles up.
“Giles here,” he said, in a very tense voice. The old boy also sounded a little tired. Maybe he’d finally bedded that beautiful woman. Micaela. Or was he still ever the gallant?
Foolish Rupert. Never knew how to make the most of an opportunity.
“Yes, Ripper, it’s Ethan,” Ethan announced. “Any sign of order up by you?”
“You performed the ritual?” Giles asked.
“Indeed I did. And?”
“Nothing as yet. That is, I see nothing unusual.”
Ethan was miffed. “Then tell me, please, dear boy, that it’s because you’re standing in the abode of a neat freak.”
“Hardly,” Rupert replied.
“Humph. Well, I’ll take a look round, see what I see. I can report that the library is awash in order. It’s positively stultifying. Order, order, everywhere, and I think I’ll drink some more whiskey.”
He reached over to the checkout desk and poured himself a bit of a cuppa. Drank it down.
Waited for the delicious little burn and felt nothing.
“Bloody hell,” he said. He inspected his glass. Empty. Poured another two fingers’ worth and swallowed it in one gulp.
Absolutely nothing.
Drunkenness was off the menu, it seemed. Not orderly.
He smiled slowly. When you thought about it, neither was aging. Or dying.
This spell just might be the fountain of youth. And the key to eternal life.
If you could stand the aftereffects of monotony it brought with it. Perhaps later, a little tinkering with the recipe would be in order. In order. Ethan smiled to himself at the play on words.
“Are you still there?” Rupert queried. “We’re going back to the cemetery.”
“Oh, yes, I’m here. But I’ll ring off for now. I’ll go a-hunting to see what I’ve wrought.”
“Very good. Ethan?”
“Yes, darling?”
“Behave yourself.”
Ethan closed his eyes and pressed his hand over his heart. “Of course I will.”
He picked up the whiskey bottle and raised it high. “Here’s to glorious, tedious order,” he proclaimed, spreading wide his hands.
“As it is, so shall it be.”
* * *
That afternoon, during the last school period of the day, every student taking a test received a perfect score. Perhaps at another school, this would be a cause for alarm, but at Sunnydale, it was initially explained away by the administration, and then test papers were altered to allow for discrepancies and F’s. The students, who at first had thought the entire affair was some kind of joke, accepted the paper-thin explanation that a number of answer keys had been mixed up, and those who received failing grades meekly accepted them.
Which was the sort of thing that made them failures in the first place.
Ethan sat in the teachers’ lounge and listened to the stories, though: no one sent to the principal’s office. No drug deals in the basement. Perfect attendance throughout the entire school. Not one single person in the nurse’s office.
“It’s scary,” a buxom instructor of physical education said to Ethan.
“Indeed.” He shivered theatrically.
She raised an eyebrow and smiled at him. “What class are you subbing for again?” she asked.
“Mr. Giles is out sick,” he replied.
“Oh.” She looked mildly confused. “I didn’t realize there was such a thing as substitute librarians.”
He leaned forward and said conspiratorially. “Oh, no one could fill Rupert’s galoshes, do you know what I mean?”
She dimpled. “He is kind of cute.” And sighed. “You know about Miss Calendar, don’t you? They used to date. She was murdered.”
“No.” He covered his mouth.
It was remarkable how fast the perfection of the day was lost to small-minded gossip, but there it was.
Ethan marveled.
The hits just kept on coming:
At the hospital, every single terminal medical case of any sort went into spontaneous remission.
There were no car accidents.
There were no accidents of any kind. The ER was devoid of customers.
So it said on the telly in the teachers’ lounge, where he pretended to be reading some nonsense handbook about cross-referencing while he gave the sphere of order time to work.
Ethan was dying—ha ha—to go to Restfield Cemetery to see if the buried corpses ceased to rot.
But it was his job to ensure that the spell was working on the little problem in the Master’s former lair, and so at the end of the day he hied himself up off the couch, politely declined the physical education instructor’s invitation to join her for coffee, and meandered in a straight line (order working its wonders upon him, as well) over to the cemetery.
There he ran into none other than the exquisite Miss Summers, who was seated on the floor of the crypt checking her blond tresses for split ends.
“Hello, Buffy,” he said, standing in the doorway of the crypt with his hands raised, rather as if she were a sheriff who had ordered him to reach for the sky. His experience with this young lady was that she thrashed first and asked questions later, and he didn’t want to investigate the possibility that punches delivered by the Slayer might actually still hurt.
“Where’s Giles?” he added.
“Ethan.” The venom with which she spoke his name was awe-inspiring. “What are you doing here?”
“Had any action lately?” he queried. When she blinked at him, he hastily added, “Of a demonic sort? I mean, has anyone tried to get out?”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “You want to know why?”
He decided it would be more efficient to tell her the truth. Or perhaps the guardians of order had decided that.
“Your Watcher bade me do a spell,” he said. “I have established a sphere of influence. It’s spreading out-ward. It’s like carbon monoxide—odorless and colorless but it packs quite a wallop.”
“Influence,” she repeated.
“Exactly so. Of order. The opposite of chaos. Or entropy.” He looked at her. “Are you following me?”
“Oh, whatever.” She stood and opened and closed her hands, which Ethan found somewhat discomfiting.
And he was right to feel that way.
The punch came out of nowhere.
But it didn’t hurt. He didn’t fall over.
The Slayer was clearly shocked.
“What the hell?” she blurted.
He grinned at her. “Were you about to take me to task for abandoning you at the labyrinth?”
She shook her head. “No. I was about to take you apart.”
“Ah, well. That doesn’
t appear possible for the moment.” He gestured to the door. “I think they’ve probably all gone to sleep. Or something.”
At that very moment, something rammed against the heavy metal door, almost dislodging the sarcophagus wedged against it.
Buffy looked questioningly at him as she slammed her body against the sarcophagus. To Ethan’s astonishment, it moved under her weight.
“Oh?” she asked. “Asleep, you say?”
“Or not.” He moved quickly away. “I’ll just, um, check outside for strays.”
“Ethan, you’re such a coward,” she yelled at him.
The crypt resounded with pounding as something tried to get out. Ethan judged it best not to bother with a clever riposte, and left the crypt.
The most extraordinary thing happened in that moment. A Wendigo capered across the cemetery, its huge, hairy white body a blur of movement as it darted from headstone to headstone. Then, as if it were a vampire exposed to sunlight, it burst into a flash of light. But instead of burning to cinders, the flash subsided, leaving the Wendigo’s image on the eye like the remnants of a camera’s flash. For a moment its transparent image hovered in the air, and then it disappeared.
Ethan stood stock-still. Then he clucked his tongue and said, “Very good, Ethan,” and continued on.
All the while, the pounding in the crypt continued, a sort of counterpoint to his footsteps as he took himself off. He wondered about that; he sincerely did.
Across town, Giles’s car sat in Angel’s driveway and would not start.
Neither would Oz’s van.
Giles got out and walked around to the front of his car, explaining that he knew it better and was thus more likely to repair it quickly.
Micaela sighed deeply. She didn’t like this.
Not at all.
* * *
Deep within the buried church that had once housed the vampire called the Master, Belphegor pressed against the breach and felt the thinnest of membranes between it and freedom. Someone had cast a spell that was holding back its minions down here in the fragrant, rotting earth. Above, those who had already managed to go aboveground were being destroyed.
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