Buffy the Vampire Slayer 1

by John Vorholt;Arthur Byron Cover;Alice Henderson

  She lurched out into the street, trying to shout but unable to. She waved her arms, choked, and sputtered. The street lay empty. No cars. No people out walking. Her struggle for life went unseen.

  Victor pulled Jason up from the sidewalk, and they watched as she rushed violently into a parked car and slumped over its hood, gathering strength to continue. But they could hear her rasping, failing breath, could see the warm sticky blood erupting out of her. She staggered forward into the street and fell. One elbow came up, trying to lift her, but her head hit the pavement for the second time. This time she lay still, arms splayed, the last of her blood pumping into the street, where it meandered into rivulets, rejoined in the gutter, and flowed away into the storm drain.

  Buffy Summers was dead.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Standing in the center of the cemetery, the two assassins waited. Victor looked at his watch. Five minutes until the rendezvous. He searched the shadows expectantly for Lucien. He should be here, somewhere, observing at a safe distance. After all, Lucien didn’t want to risk himself. He was the only one who knew how to work the arcane time magicks. And if they had not succeeded in killing Buffy, he would have had to work them again. But they had killed her. They’d killed the Slayer, even if she wasn’t quite the Slayer yet.

  As Victor checked his watch again, Lucien crept out of the shadows. Dressed in a white frilly shirt, black pants, and tall black boots, he looked more like a villain from a gothic novel than a devotee of the Master.

  “We did it,” Victor said to Lucien unnecessarily. After all, the spell caster had seen everything.

  Lucien nodded. “And now we journey back to 1998 and see how we fared.”

  Jason frowned. “But she’s dead. We did it. When we go back, the Master will have ascended safely. Chaos will rule the earth.”

  “Yes, yes,” Lucien replied. “Maybe.” He scowled with one eyebrow up, an expression that made Victor think of a million bad actors he’d seen in his lifetime. And the way he dressed made him look as if he’d just stepped off the cover of a romance novel. He was the Fabio of vampires, no doubt, and Victor couldn’t deny that he knew his stuff.

  Speaking in a language that Victor didn’t recognize, Lucien uttered the words that would open the time portal and transport them back to 1998. At the end of the incantation, a tiny point of light winked into view in the air above them. It swirled, growing and growing in size, sucking in dry leaves, and lifting Lucien’s hair to toss in the wind.

  The spinning portal was ready for the assassins.

  Victor steeled himself for the inevitable seasickness that accompanied the transportation. They all closed their eyes tightly against the brilliant, swirling vortex of light. It descended over them, and Victor felt the pricking of his hair as the portal began to draw him upward. His shirtsleeves tugged up toward the vortex, followed by his chest, and then his waist. He hovered for a moment, arms windmilling as he fell off balance. Then he was sucked violently up and through the whirling bright light, grabbing at Jason as Victor came up beside him. Sheer terror thrilled through Victor’s chest, and he opened his eyes wide. They streamed with tears from the incredible velocity of forward movement. In spite of himself, in spite of centuries of playing tough, he held on to Jason tightly, letting out a piercing shriek as the speed increased. Then, just as abruptly, it stopped, spilling them out onto a parking lot in Sunnydale, 1998.

  A very sunny parking lot.

  Jason’s hair caught on fire immediately, going up in waving tendrils of bright flame. Victor’s hands smoked, his face suddenly bubbling and hot. He burst into a run with Lucien close behind, not caring what direction he headed in, as long as there was cover. Then, a few feet away, he spotted a manhole. Tearing off the cover with vampiric strength, he leaped feetfirst into the cool darkness. With a splash, he landed in fetid water that coursed by his feet. Not caring about the vile stench, Victor dropped and rolled in it, quenching the flames. Lucien landed next to him, splashing eagerly into the water as if they were at a luxurious spa and not a fecal-matter-strewn sewer. Victor rose to his feet and called for Jason through the small round hole above.

  He heard screaming, his friend’s unmistakable voice crying out in agony. Then nothing.

  Victor turned to Lucien and cursed. “The day? You brought us back in the friggin’ day?”

  Lucien stood up on wobbly legs, brushing strands of something black and glistening off his once pristine shirt. “I didn’t know …,” he said pitifully.

  “What the hell? Don’t you know your own ass from your arcane spells?”

  Lucien said nothing, only stared on miserably.

  “Are you really that clueless? What if we’d been transported right into daylight before we even killed Buffy? What if there’d been no cover?”

  Lucien shook his head. “It was a risk. There’s really no way to tell when it will be sunny and when it will be night.”

  “It was a risk?” Anger fumed inside Victor. “You didn’t tell me or Jason anything about it!” He punched the curved sewer wall, then immediately wished he hadn’t, as pain coursed up his arm. He liked Jason. They’d been pals since the Revolutionary War. Now he was dust.

  “No one gambles with me like that!” Victor shouted.

  Scowling, he chose an underground course to Lucien’s lair and set off, feet splashing in the vile gray water. He didn’t care how powerful Lucien was. He’d lost his best friend and almost become a toaster pastry.

  Behind him, he could hear Lucien tromping in the water, quiet and thinking.

  In less than ten minutes, they reached the lair.

  Only it was completely different.

  Where tables once stood, covered in books, maps, calculations, historical research, and candelabra, now rested a lush canopy bed full of velvet draperies and piled with soft pillows. A few pillar candles resting on pedestal tables gleamed in the confines of the cavern, creating shifting shadows on the wall.

  “What the hell?” Victor asked.

  “Something’s not right,” Lucien agreed. He moved forward, striding around the room and looking for clues.

  For a moment Victor wondered if they’d walked into the wrong chamber. But he was sure it was this one. The cave formations were familiar, but nothing else was.

  “We need to go topside, find out what’s been going on,” Lucien explained. “I expected the future to be a little different when we returned, so this could just be par for the course.”

  Victor was less hopeful. This all felt wrong.

  Just as they turned to leave, a tall, attractive vampire strode into the room. He knew her—recognized her as one of the girls who was friends with Buffy. But she was a vampire now, brow creased and raised, fangs glistening.

  “Ever hear of knocking?” she asked, frowning.

  “Uh …,” Lucien began, then trailed off.

  “Pardon us,” Victor stepped in. “We are new in town, and wondered if you could fill us in on what’s been going on in Sunnydale the last couple of years?”

  The attractive brunette vampire placed one impatient hand on her hip. “The last couple of years?” she quipped. “Why don’t you take your skanky butts over to the library and do some research or something? You smell like a sewage treatment plant. And what are you doing in my place, anyway?”

  Lucien trembled with impatience. “Has the Master risen?” he blurted out, all eagerness and no style. Victor couldn’t believe he followed this guy. But if it meant putting the Master back in power, he was willing.

  “The Master?” She furrowed her brow. “You guys really have been out of town. He was killed right after he ascended.”

  “By the Slayer?”

  “Well, yeah, of course.” After a moment she added, “Well, not really. You know, a former Slayer.”

  Lucien frowned in confusion.

  The vampire shook her head, obviously pitying the sadness that was Victor and Lucien. “Clueless and styleless,” she said. “It’s bad enough I have to live in some stinky old c
ave because my parents’ house has skylights all over the place. But I hardly think I have to chat about the weather with creeps like you.” The other hand came to her hip, and she fixed them with a scowl.

  “Please,” said Lucien. “Please explain.”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t heard of the Slayer and what happened to her?”

  Lucien shook his head.

  “Kafara. She came to Sunnydale to fight the Master, only her presence allowed him to ascend. He drank her blood and escaped. But some other vamps found her near death and turned her. Man, is she one mean vamp. I wouldn’t want to cross her, and she’s the only one you’ll ever hear me say that about.” She smoothed back an errant strand of brown hair and looked down at her nails. “Anyway, she dusted the Master that first night. Rose to power herself. Sunnydale’s been great ever since. I used to think vamps were so gross, but I like being one.”

  “And the Hellmouth?” Lucien asked, pressing her for more.

  “Closed. When the Master died. But that’s okay. If the world had been overrun by beasties, there’d be less for us to eat, right?”

  Victor smiled at her. “What’s your name?”

  “Cordelia,” she answered. “But don’t think you can wear it out. Don’t ever come here again.”

  “Of course,” Victor murmured. “Have you ever heard of Buffy Summers?”

  “Who?” Her expression was blank.

  “No one.”

  Lucien punched his palm with a fist. “Then why did it go so wrong?”

  Reaching to take his arm, Victor said, “We’re going, Lucien.”

  “But …”

  “We’re going,” he said more firmly, leading Lucien out of the cave.

  Darkness crept over them again as they returned to the sewer tunnels. “I didn’t count on that!” Lucien cursed. “I thought we’d just have to kill Buffy. I thought no other Slayer would be able to destroy the Master.”

  “And no other Slayer did. She was a vamp when she dusted him.”

  Lucien turned on Victor in the darkness and struck him hard across the mouth. “Don’t say ‘dusted’ when referring to the Master. He was too important for such reckless terms.”

  Victor brought his hand quickly to his mouth, tasted blood there. His eyes narrowed, anger simmering inside him. Half of him wanted to pummel Lucien into the sewer brick right then. Lucien had struck him, he’d killed Jason, and they’d been unsuccessful. But he stilled himself, forcing calm to spread over his limbs.

  “What went wrong?” he said through clenched teeth.

  Lucien shook his head. “Maybe we need to go farther back. Kill Buffy when she’s just a kid. That will activate a different Slayer. And perhaps that one will be ineffective.”

  “Perhaps? I don’t like the idea of jumping back into daylight for a ‘perhaps.’”

  “Maybe not,” Lucien answered, “but we’re going to. And we need to find another assassin.”

  At that offhand comment, Victor raised his hand to strike Lucien hard, hard enough to rattle his teeth. But he restrained himself. Jason had been his friend for two hundred years, and Lucien treated him as if he could replace him by walking into an assassin mart and picking someone off the shelf. “We won’t be able to replace Jason,” he said instead of hitting him. “You lost one of the best assassins you could have gotten.”

  “Yeah, I noticed back there,” Lucien retorted, and Victor remembered how Buffy had disabled Jason with a kick. But that didn’t give Lucien the right to that dig. Every assassin had his off days. This time Victor did strike Lucien, hard across the face, an open-handed slap meant to humiliate the cocky spell caster. It worked.

  Lucien roared with rage and shoved ineffectively at Victor in the confines of the sewer tunnel. Victor evaded his blows and sprinted down the length of the tunnel, outpacing him. “Looks like we have to start all over again!” he yelled back.

  He heard Lucien’s footsteps slow to a stop. “No,” came his voice in the darkness. “I kept a backup of all my research. We only need to get it out of lockup and gather the next team.”

  “And what about the unique artifact? Where is it?”

  Lucien’s face contorted in anger. “Damn!”

  This did not sound good to Victor. The artifact was what made it all work. When Lucien joined the artifact with his incantations, they could travel through time. Lucien had forged the artifact himself, fashioning it from two different unique relics rumored throughout the ages to hold the power of time travel. It had taken him considerable time just to locate and acquire the relics, and he had traveled as far as Tibet in his search. Once both relics were found, he had incanted and melted and wound the two pieces together to make the Wand of Wells, as Lucien called it. At first Victor thought he meant “wells” as in ancient, sacred places of worship. But it had actually been a tribute to H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine. The wand itself was gorgeous—it gleamed silver along its jewel-encrusted length, and at one end a silver clawed hand held a luminous blue stone the size of a house cat. It wasn’t exactly tiny. Not something you could put in your pocket. Of course, they couldn’t have carried it with them anyway.

  The way the magick worked was that the Wand of Wells always had to stay behind on a time jump. It served as a marker to the year from which the travelers departed. Without it, they could return to the Stone Age, or worse yet, to a time when the sun had gone supernova and there was no Earth at all. To ensure that it wouldn’t get misplaced or stolen, they had bricked it up inside a wall in one of the crypts of the Sunnydale Cemetery. As long as it existed when they left a year, it would still be there when they returned, guiding them back to the correct year. It existed in a time bubble of its own. Even if they changed the past, the artifact would still be there in the alternate version of 1998. Even if the wall they’d bricked it up inside didn’t exist anymore, the Wand of Wells would still be there, on that exact spot.

  But while it was great at returning them to the right date and year, it wasn’t so hot at returning them to the right location and time of day, as the previous sunlight incident had proven. They’d departed from Lucien’s underground lair, but had returned two blocks away on the surface.

  During their test runs, they frequently had to backtrack to the artifact’s location. At least it would be there. It always was.

  “Let’s backtrack to the crypt,” Lucien said. “This time we’ll kill Buffy when she’s a little girl.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Armed with backup copies of research, Lucien peeked at the artifact he’d constructed, preparing to open the portal. The Wand of Wells was still there, bricked up inside the crypt wall. They always checked for it, every time they readied to travel back in time. If it wasn’t there, they wouldn’t be able to return to 1998. Seeing it gleam inside its dark hole, Lucien replaced the loose brick, sealing it inside once more.

  It had taken him months of constant work, with almost no sleep, to build the artifact and imbue it with arcane powers. At first he didn’t even think it would be possible. But the more obsessed he became, and the more he read about time magick, the more determined he grew.

  The Master, he knew, simply had to rise again. And though Buffy may have sent him plummeting down onto a sharp protrusion of wood and broken his bones to powder with a hammer, there was still a chance.

  All Lucien had to do was travel back in time and kill Buffy so that she was not the active Slayer at the time of the Master’s ascension. Only Buffy, he believed firmly, could have defeated the Master. Another Slayer in her place would not have the fortitude, the necessary skills. At least he hoped not. Unless she turned into an evil, power-hungry vampire. But they were about to erase this alternate future altogether.

  He left the secret room, making certain it sealed behind him. Then he navigated down a narrow tunnel and entered his sleeping room. Just as he shut the door behind him, he heard shuffling in the corridor outside and pressed against the door, listening. His biggest fear was the Slayer discovering what he was up to
before he had the chance to go back in time and kill her. He quickly breathed a sigh of relief, almost laughed. It couldn’t be Buffy outside. They’d killed her. Her life had come to an end at the ripe age of fourteen, and if there was a Slayer out there, lurking outside his door, it certainly wouldn’t be her. Not that he didn’t feel that deep-down twinge of fear at the thought of another Slayer. It was just that he’d seen Buffy in action and knew she was practically undefeatable.

  The shuffling grew louder. Then came a tapping at his door. He swung it open to reveal Victor standing on the other side, cleaning his throwing knife with a cloth. “Ready?” he asked, looking up from his task.

  Lucien nodded. He’d just returned from Willy’s, where he’d recruited the meanest-looking vamp of all the patrons for this little excursion. The goal this time was 1984. Buffy would be only three years old. Easy pickings. This would hopefully undo the mess he’d made and restore the Master again. He had given strict instructions to the Master’s closest followers to keep them from turning any Slayer the Master killed this time around.

  His warning had met with strange glances and humoring nods. Most of them didn’t understand the power of time travel. They didn’t even think it was possible. For them, this change in events, in which the Master was murdered by a vampiric ex-Slayer, appeared to be as it had always been. But for Lucien and Victor, because they’d been the ones traveling through time, events had changed around them, and they could still recall how the time line originally flowed. They were, in essence, in an alternate 1998, one that Lucien now hoped to alter even more.

  “Where’s the other assassin?” Victor asked, resheathing his knife. Lucien tried not to notice his clothes. Victor dressed the part of uncivilized ruffian. His leather jacket, at least two decades old, was scored in a dozen places from scuffles and fights. Before he could help himself, Lucien snarked, “Do you always have to dress so … low?”