VISITORS

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “Yeah,” Buffy cut in, “and see if maybe we can track the korred’s trail that way.”

  “Excellent!” Giles said. “See if the missing animal reports do provide a trail. But don’t try to catch the korred on your own!”

  “Hey, no problem!” Xander agreed. “Not catching monsters is what I excel at.”

  “Yes, and check the newspapers, to make sure that we haven’t been missing any failed attacks on humans.” Giles shook his head. “I never thought I would be thankful for that ghoulish practice of listing the police blotter in the newspapers . . .”

  “And I get to . . . stand around looking Slayerish again,” Buffy added. “Nice not to have to learn any new lines, no matter what the play.” Buffy polished her nails against the fabric of her top, and sighed dramatically.

  “You will be needed later,” Giles assured her. Buffy saw the look in his eyes, and swallowed hard. He thinks we’ll be hearing about victims soon. Dead-type victims. And not the animal kind, either.

  “Giles,” she murmured, “the college kid with the heart attack. And before, the homeless guy, the one the car hit. You don’t think they’re, well . . .”

  “Failed korred attacks? I don’t know. There is a perfectly mundane explanation for both incidents. But,” he added, glancing down his glasses at her, “I like coincidence no more than do you.”

  Why does it always come down to this? Why can’t we ever catch the bad things and put them away before they hurt anyone? Why is it always . . .

  Why, why why. Stop asking why, Buffy. Because, that’s why.

  “And to go for snacks now,” Xander was saying. “Speaking of which, no offense to the offered munchies, Giles, but I’m feeling the severe need for pizza.”

  A loud grumble, from the vicinity of Buffy’s stomach, seconded that opinion.

  “Yes,” Giles agreed. “Go. But stay together, all of you. Until this thing is caught, I want the, um, buddy system firmly in place.”

  “Can do,” Xander said, putting one arm around Cordelia, the other across Willow’s shoulders. Willow flinched, then slid out from under his grip. Xander continued after only the slightest of pauses, “We’ll be joined at the hip. Practically.”

  “In your dreams, Xander,” Cordelia retorted, shrugging off his arm and leading the way out the door.

  “Oh, but what about Oz?” Willow said suddenly. “I’ve got to warn him, ’cause of his being a, well, you know, and all!”

  Giles tensed. “Oh dear. Yes, I hadn’t thought of that. Ring him up right now and leave a message.”

  Buffy waited till Willow was on the phone and Xander and Cordelia had gone out the door, then scooted closer to her Watcher, murmuring confidentially, “Giles?”

  “Hmmm?” He looked up from clearing away the remainder of their snacks.

  “This korred . . . if it’s attracted to stuff that’s supernatural and whatever . . .” She looked over to where her best friend was obviously speaking to an answering machine. “Is Willow going to be in any danger? I mean, because of her messing around with magic?”

  Giles put down the cup of tea he had just picked up, and took off his glasses, contemplating them as though the answer was written there. “I have already considered that.”

  “And . . . ?” she prompted.

  “Buffy, by now you should know there aren’t always clear answers to questions, particularly those dealing with the supernatural. But no, I do not believe that she will be in any immediate danger. Not at her current level of involvement. At this point, with so much supernatural activity stirring within the Hellmouth, I believe that the korred is focused on your aura, as the Slayer, to the exclusion of everything else.”

  “What about you?” Buffy asked. “I mean, you know way more magic than Will, and . . . well, the connection, the whole Watcher thing . . .”

  Giles smiled, rather ruefully. “I don’t think that I will have that much trouble, unfortunately.”

  “Huh?”

  “From the research I’ve done, the korred is, um, how to say this—it feeds more strongly off those still growing. More energy is generated by adolescent bodies, you see—”

  “What you’re saying is, you’re too old for it.”

  “Well. Yes.”

  “Good.” She noted his reaction and backtracked. “I mean . . . fewer people I have to worry about, the better. I’m going to take this thing down, Giles. Somehow. And soon. Because I am getting really, really tired of waiting to get tagged. Someone’s got to explain to that annoying little giggler that ’90s women do not take kindly to being stalked all across town.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Principal Snyder, of course, had been against “turning a bastion of learning into a commercial venue.” That meant, as far as Buffy could tell, that he hated the idea of anyone using his name to have any fun. But he had been overruled for once by the school board, who had decided that anything that brought music—any kind of music—into teenage lives was a good thing. By now, banners advertising the Battle of the Bands had been hung across just about every doorway in Sunnydale High.

  Of course, since most of them were crepe paper, they were already beginning to look pretty tacky. As Buffy and Giles walked together, he was nearly trapped in a garish yellow loop of sagging crepe paper. Giles delicately backed out of it without tearing so much as an inch of the banner, and Buffy stifled what would have been a really inappropriate laugh.

  Inappropriate basically because of what he’d told her just before walking into the banner.

  “So, you think that homeless guy they found maybe had been attacked by the korred, after all?” she asked.

  “Perhaps.” Dignity recovered, he walked on, Buffy beside him. “Magic takes a great deal of energy, just as athletic activity does, and in order to replace that energy the korred must feed. And the other victim, that unfortunate college student, did mention something about a dance.”

  “Hey, you didn’t tell me that!”

  “Er . . . no.” Giles glanced sideways at Buffy. “Quite frankly, though, I was surprised that it had been able to hold out this long merely on the occasional squirrel or stray dog.”

  A flash of irritation shot through her. “But you didn’t see fit to share that surprise with me?”

  “Would it have sped our research along any faster?”

  “No,” Buffy had to admit. “We’re pretty much moving under urgent, already. But, still! This is no time for you to turn into not-sharing-stuff guy, okay?”

  “Agreed. In the future, I will inform you of every anomaly or fluctuation in the otherwise normal practices of the Hellmouth, so that you, too, may earn gray hairs worrying over what they might mean.”

  “Okay, you’re doing the sarcasm thing again. Don’t. People will start thinking you have a sense of humor, and then we’ll really never get them out of the library.”

  “What on earth is Willow doing?” Giles asked, stopping in midstride.

  Buffy followed his gaze down into the courtyard. Sure enough, there was Willow, accosting students and faculty alike as they walked by, and thrusting pieces of paper in their faces. The look on the redhead’s face was a combination of surprised satisfaction when someone took and read the paper, and terrified disbelief that she was actually being so bold.

  “True love is a force more powerful than anything else, Giles,” Buffy said, summing up the situation in one glance. “Oz must have asked her to hand out flyers for the Battle, to get more warm bodies into the Bronze tonight. With how bad most of our school bands are, a home team advantage would naturally go to the Dingoes.”

  “Strategy. Very impressive.”

  “Hey, Oz may be the überslacker sometimes, but he takes the music seriously. Music and Willow. He’s a guy with priorities.”

  Just then, a particularly obnoxious teen tossed the flyer back into Willow’s face, and the girl looked as though she had been slapped, both angry and upset at the same time.

  “Whoops. Looks like it’s time for some positive reinforceme
nt,” Buffy said. “With Will, when she gets upset you never know if she’s going to bolt, or turn ’em into a frog.”

  “Frogs,” Giles murmured uneasily, following the Slayer down the stairs. “There are no spell books in the library that deal with frogs. Are there?”

  “Oh! Hey! Have a flyer. Battle of the Bands tonight at the Bronze. Over half-a-dozen bands will be playing for one low cover fee, including our own Dingoes—”

  “Hey. Will. Calm down, it’s me. I’ve already agreed to be cheering squad, remember?”

  “Oh.” Willow blinked, mentally cycling herself down a few notches. “Sorry. I just blurt and don’t think, so it all gets out without me stumbling over anything. Did you see me? I was good, wasn’t I? Handing them out, and everything.”

  Buffy turned to look accusingly at Giles, who shook his head. “I didn’t let her anywhere near the caffeine this morning,” he said. “Ah, Willow, if you have quite finished your tour of duty as publicity shill . . .”

  “Sure. Here.”

  Before Buffy could react, Willow had shoved the remaining flyers into her hands. Buffy promptly shoved them into the hands of Jonathan, a classmate, who gave her a wild-eyed glance. At her glare, he scurried off. “Job done,” Buffy said.

  “Ah, yes,” Giles cut in hastily. “Willow, I found an anomaly in the police records that might be of interest to us. Apparently a car struck and injured a homeless man two nights ago—a man who staggered into the driver’s path as though drunk or deathly ill.”

  “Uh, Giles,” Buffy said, “that isn’t exactly news.”

  “Unfortunately, no. But what is unusual is that, as far as I could tell without having access to the full medical records, the man was neither drunk nor ill, merely . . . weary.”

  Willow blinked. “Then you do think the korred . . .”

  “We can’t be sure. Not without more facts. A korred typically kills what it attacks. Of course, it is possible that he escaped, or was released when the korred found his energy lacking in some way. But, Willow—”

  “Got it. You want me to get that full medical report on the homeless man and on the drugged college kid, to compare damage done, maybe get a better idea of how the korred works. Computer research. Cool!”

  Giles and Buffy exchanged glances. “She scares me sometimes,” Buffy said in a confiding tone.

  “Well. Ordinarily I would be loathe to encourage you in your more, ah, illicit habits with that machine. But—”

  “Giles, you are about to get majorly research geeky, aren’t you?”

  “—this is an unparalleled opportunity to do field work in an area which has—” Then what Buffy had just said registered. “Yes. Well. That is . . .”

  “Never mind!” Willow said brightly. “I’ll get right on it.”

  As she eagerly hurried off, Giles soberly agreed with Buffy, “Terrifying. Now, as to our plan for tonight . . .”

  * * *

  Buffy reached around the vampire trying to put the big hickey on her, grabbed the scruff of his neck, and pulled him forward over her head. He landed with a reassuringly solid thud on the pavement, and then turned into even more reassuring gray dust when she followed through with a stake to the heart.

  “I’d give that one a 7.5,” she decided. “Points lost for actually letting him get his grubby paws on me. Which would make tonight’s average . . . 27.6. And they said I couldn’t handle basic math.”

  Smiling grimly, she pocketed the stake and checked her watch, then looked around, realizing for the first time that she had come to a part of town that was relatively new to her.

  “Lovely. Another tourist must-see location. This would be the perfect place for a crazed psycho killer to jump out at me now,” Buffy muttered to herself. “Like in one of those stupid movies. One of those where the guys says, ‘Hey, you go check the basement alone.’ And the girl’s too dumb to carry a flashlight. A working flashlight.”

  Well . . . she didn’t carry one, either. But.

  And the fact was, it was the kind of spooky, mist-filled night filmmakers love. Prime psycho territory.

  “Only psycho killers know better than to come anywhere near Sunnydale. Unless they happen to be psycho killers who are vampires, in which case they’re Drusilla. Who is so not my problem anymore.”

  It was always a bad sign when she started to talk to herself on patrol. At the moment, even Cordelia would have been welcome company. Just a couple of random vampires, too new to give her much of a fight. The severe boredom they were giving her was mixed, though, with a sense that someone, somewhere was laughing its head off at her.

  The korred. She’d bet her last dollar on it. Assuming, that was, that I have a dollar to bet.

  Was that a sound? Buffy whirled—and a wild something roared up in her face! She lunged blindly—

  Idiot. Just an owl. Lucky for you.

  She’d startled her fellow late-night hunter into taking off in a rush, almost in her face. Once Buffy’s heartbeat had gotten back down to normal, she managed a casual shrug and kept going. Another night, another walk, another couple of vamps staked. Just another typical day at the office. At least there still was no sign of the Midnight Giggler actually showing up. Yet.

  “Whoa. Activity. And not of the fun sort, either.”

  Lights up ahead—yeah, her ability to tell flashing-light types apart was coming in handy. That was definitely a police car. Lights flashing, right, but no siren . . . yeah, and that blocky shape was an ambulance next to it, just outside the cemetery gates.

  They weren’t rushing, which was always a bad sign. But not a vamp attack. She hoped. Had the korred . . . ?

  “Should I . . . ?” She stood in the shadows, watching the activity, torn by rare indecision.

  “Nope. If it was a vamp attack, there’s nothing I can do now. Giles will know if I need to stake someone before they take up the undead nonlifestyle tomorrow.”

  Besides, if she went over there, she was going to have to answer some really awkward questions, such as what a teenage girl was doing out wandering in the cemetery alone at night.

  “Sorry, whoever you were,” Buffy said softly, and went her way.

  “Hey,” Willow greeted Buffy when they met outside school the next morning. “You look tired. Bad night?”

  “There’ve been better.” She shrugged casually, shifting her books to the other arm. “Been lots worse.”

  “I hear you. I was up almost until midnight, working on a program that’s due tomorrow. But it was really interesting—come on, we’ve got time before class, I’ll show you.”

  “Sure. Why not?” The hacker’s computer programs were always good for making her feel like a total knownothing. “Besides, I’ve got to check in so Giles knows that I made it to school safely.”

  “Hey.” Willow pushed the library doors open, and stopped in shock. “No Librarian Posse. We’ve got our home back!”

  “The day is young,” Buffy said, refusing to get her hopes up.

  As they took over their usual table before any student teacher could sneak in and steal it from them, Willow flashed Buffy a nervous little grin. “So? How did it go?”

  “I don’t know. I mean, I saw the cops and an ambulance—”

  “Buffy. I meant the test. You know? The math makeup? The one you had to wheedle and beg for?”

  “Oh. Not too bad. Who knows? I might even have passed this time.”

  “Cool!” Willow hesitated a moment, then asked, “But did you hear any details about what happened last night? I mean, you must have been pretty close. Did you see anything?”

  “Uh, like what? What else?”

  “They found a body there, just outside—”

  “The cemetery gates. Will, I know that part. Who was it?”

  “Some guy with a weird name. Um, Bear-something. Nightbear. Morgan Nightbear. Big guy, ponytail? One of the custodial crew, the one they send up on the ladder to fix windows? I guess he worked part-time for the county, too, ’cause they say he was there repairing a
broken door, or something.”

  The name sounded vaguely familiar. “Geez, wait . . . recent graduate, right? A couple of years ahead of us?”

  “That’s right. He dropped out of college, came back to town.” Willow paused. “Imagine wanting to work in a cemetery—oh. I didn’t mean—”

  “I don’t want to work there, Will. It just . . . happens. Hey, but he wasn’t much older than us! And if he’d just been hired, they would have given him a physical, right?”

  “I guess.” Her friend tilted her head, clearly wondering where Buffy was going with that thought.

  “So it probably wasn’t one of our few and far between natural deaths, was it?” Buffy asked with growing dismay. And she hadn’t done her sweep of the cemetery last night. Maybe if she had . . .

  “Coronary failure,” Giles replied from behind them.

  Buffy sank back in her chair, weirdly relieved, until the impact of that sank in.

  “Oh. You mean . . .”

  “Heart attack? He’s escalated,” Willow said, nodding, her eyes wide.

  Xander and Cordelia entered just in time to hear that.

  “So, this guy they found last night was danced to death?” Xander asked. “Weird. Even for the Hellmouth, that’s weird.”

  “Gross,” Cordelia proclaimed. “So, what happens now?”

  Giles pushed his glasses more firmly in place. “Escalate our efforts as well. Um, Buffy, we shall have to up your patrols. I’m afraid that dinner with your mother—”

  “Is off the schedule. I can deal with that. Mom’ll deal. She’s got that whole people-dying-not-good-for-the-digestion thing, anyway.”

  “Is this your idea of a jest?”

  The sudden, faintly accented voice made everyone start.

  Giles recovered first. “Panner.”

  “Of course, Panner.” The observer stalked fiercely forward. Like, Buffy thought, an angry teacher. “What do you think you are doing?” Panner snapped. “Eh? What?”