“It’s my lucky jacket,” Victor said defensively.
“At least we’ll be going back to a time period where you’ll still be in style.”
Victor poked Lucien’s shoulder angrily with his index finger. “A time period when I’ll be in style? You look like you raided Lord Byron’s closet. Your clothes just announce, ‘Hey, I’m a vampire, by the way. A dorky one.’”
Lucien waved him off. “We need to meet Gorga.”
“Gorga? You got us a guy named Gorga? That sounds like a cheese or an enemy of Godzilla, not an assassin.”
“Then you should get along perfectly.” Lucien exited, closing the door behind him.
Twenty minutes later, in an alley behind the Bronze, all three vampires met. Monstrous, muscular, and bald, Gorga carried a battle-ax, a crossbow, and a sword sheathed in a belt. Lucien had a feeling Gorga hadn’t quite wrapped his head around the fact that they were targeting the Slayer before she was the Slayer.
“She’s a three-year-old girl, for God’s sake,” Victor told him, disliking Gorga from the start. But Lucien knew that anyone but Jason would have made Victor angry.
Reciting the proper incantations, Lucien opened the time portal. It sucked the three of them inside, whirling them uncontrollably faster and faster, careening into the past and across space.
They tumbled out into the early evening on a suburban street in 1984. The portal winked out of view. Lucien had gotten pretty good at determining where and when it would spit them out. While he wasn’t able to pick a specific hour, he’d become more accurate at figuring out how to land in specific months and years. And for locations he could get within five miles of his target. And now here they were, in 1984 Los Angeles.
Lucien knew it was 1984 because just then a group of teenagers turned the corner. One wore a Michael Jackson Thriller jacket, black parachute pants, and a sequined glove on one hand. One teenager’s hair, styled in a Jheri curl, positively dripped with shiny product. He produced a spray bottle from his jacket and squirted his Jheri with more “activator.” A girl in the group had bleached-blond hair so big that it continually poked her companions in the face and eyes with stiff, hairsprayed tendrils. Her big hoop earrings could have comfortably slept five. Another of the teenagers wore a pastel blue blazer with a coral pink T-shirt underneath. On his feet were white slip-on canvas deck shoes with no socks. Lucien felt the pain deep, deep down.
Victor consulted a map in his back pocket, then replaced it. “Three doors down,” he said. “On the left. Not bad, Lucien. I half expected us to land in Paris, going this far back.” Sometimes, on test runs, they’d spent days just reaching their target location. Other times they hadn’t reached it at all.
Lucien nodded. “I’m getting better.” He didn’t remind Victor of one of the first attempts, which had landed them in a yak herd in Burma for seven hours, knee-deep in dung, with no coats while Lucien tried to read the incantation as the ink ran during a rainstorm.
This was much, much better, Lucien kept telling himself as the teenagers passed and he stifled a shudder.
Victor forged ahead, not waiting for the others. The group of friends snuck looks at Gorga and his collection of medieval weaponry, but the vamps kept quiet. They were under strict instructions this time not to interact or otherwise alter the future. Their sole change would be to kill Buffy when she was a child.
As they neared Buffy’s childhood home, Victor slowed, peeking over a chest-high wooden fence that framed her backyard. He laughed softly. “We’re in luck. She’s outside. Looks like they’re getting ready to cook something on the hibachi. And she’s alone right now.”
They glanced up at the sliding glass door that led into the house. Inside, her parents milled around, cutting vegetables and pieces of meat. In the yard, Buffy played with a badminton birdie, tossing it around while she sat on the grass, giggling softly to herself.
Victor rummaged around in his other pocket and produced a stolen photo of Buffy as a kid. He compared it to the little girl. “It’s definitely her. Make yourself scarce, Lucien. Meet you down the block.”
“Then we can party like it’s 1984,” Gorga put in, shouldering his battle-ax.
Victor narrowed his eyes. “I really don’t think you’re going to need that thing.”
“Split her in two. Split pea soup,” the monstrous giant retorted.
Double-checking the house again and seeing her parents still inside, Victor vaulted over the fence, landing beside Buffy in the grass. Here was the Slayer, the woman he had feared since he’d come to Sunnydale two years ago. Amazing. As he closed in on her, she looked up at him, her smile fading to a frown. “Who are you?” she asked.
Gorga landed with a heavy thud next to him. He swung the ax up, then paused.
“What’s wrong?” Victor asked.
Gorga looked down at the little girl. He couldn’t kill her. He kept the ax poised but couldn’t bring himself to swing it down.
“You’re not having a change of heart, are you?”
Gorga relented, bringing the ax down gently beside him. He gripped the handle, meeting the little girl’s eyes. “Not because I care,” said the monstrous hulk. “Gorga is no softie. It’s just that she’s only three. How embarrassing is that? How will I describe this kill to the monthly Assassins Club?”
Victor shook his head. “How about, ‘Man, that baby came at me with everything it had, but I still made the kill.’” He grabbed the ax out of Gorga’s hands and swung it high. The ax blade flashed and swung down. With a sickening snick it sliced the little girl in two.
Gorga stood, unblinking. She hadn’t even cried out. The badminton birdie, now spattered with blood, rolled out of her hand and described a small semicircle in the grass before coming to a halt near the hibachi.
Victor straightened up and looked at Gorga, who met his eyes. Then he waved one triumphant fist in the air. “Dangerous kill, man,” Victor told him. Briefly he thought of beheading the vampire giant. Some use he was. But he decided against it. They might need him again. He handed back the ax, then sprinted up over the fence again. Gorga used the gate, opening and closing it silently behind him.
They hurried down the street. Victor heard the sliding door swish open and a woman’s scream so powerful it caused his eardrums to thrum with vibration.
Buffy Summers was dead.
Again.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sunnydale, 1998
Thirty minutes later Lucien, Gorga, and Victor whirled out of the vortex into the quiet of night, crashing into a brick wall next to the Bronze.
Lucien leaped up, hopeful, eyes darting down the alley as if he expected a banner to be strung across the wall declaring, THE MASTER ROSE. ALL WENT WELL. WISH YOU WERE HERE.
But of course they’d have to ask around before they knew if they’d been successful.
Lucien chose the Master’s lair as the first stop. They entered through the back of the mausoleum and started down the tunnels. They’d gone only a hundred feet before the tunnel abruptly ended in a cave-in. They tried the other routes in—a sewer tunnel Victor knew about, then a maintenance tunnel on the far side of town Gorga had used once. But all of them ended in cave-ins.
At Willy’s, Lucien asked around and learned that a tremendous explosion had shaken that part of Sunnydale so vigorously that huge parts of it had collapsed. When one demon clammed up, not wanting to discuss it further, Lucien moved on to the next. Slowly the story came together.
When he probed about the current Slayer, he learned that her Watcher focused primarily on prophecies, and that he’d figured out that the Master could not ascend if he didn’t drink the blood of a Slayer. So the Slayer, who came to Sunnydale specifically to stop the ascension, just sat in her hotel room and didn’t go down to confront the Master at all. One night soon after, she and her Watcher dynamited the whole underground lair, burying the Master completely. One vamp who’d barely escaped witnessed the Master’s skull getting crushed by a falling stalactite.
Lucien assimilated all of this, downing only half of his glass of blood as he sat at the bar. Anger simmered, then exploded. “Damn it! Why the hell isn’t this working?”
Victor shook his head. “Something’s wrong. It’s the time line. It’s as if the Master’s destruction is ordained. We need a prophecy guy.”
Lucien brought his fist down hard onto the bar, then winced from the pain. He knew Victor made sense, but the sheer frustration made him want to smash his glass and give up on the whole thing. But the minute he finished that thought, he knew better. He could never give up. He’d pledged his life to the Master and would not stop until he was resurrected.
But he couldn’t believe this. What a mess of trial and error. So far none of the time jumps had worked. Originally, after several successful trial runs, Lucien had traveled back to 1937. The Master came to Sunnydale that year, intending to open the Hellmouth and invite the old demons to retake the earth. But a violent earthquake shook Sunnydale just as he was finishing his incantation, and he became sealed in a prison of his own making, trapped as the earthquake shifted land and created an impenetrable mystic wall.
At first Lucien thought the matter simple—he would travel back in time and warn the Master not to open the Hellmouth on that particular day. The Master could wait, be successful another day. But when Lucien interrupted the Master before he began the incantations, the great vampire didn’t know Lucien. Lucien remembered with frustration that he hadn’t entered the Master’s service until 1942, when he needed more and more vampires to do tasks for him during his captivity. Lucien explained nonetheless about the earthquake and his subsequent imprisonment. But the Master had not only refused to listen, he was gravely insulted. No mere earthquake, the ancient vampire had reasoned, could trap him down here and disrupt his spell. Lucien obviously just wanted to keep the status quo. He was a coward, afraid of releasing the creatures from the Hellmouth. The Master ignored him and continued the incantations, ordering three vampires to drag Lucien out of the area, for his cries were distracting.
Shortly after Lucien reached the surface, escorted by the vampires into the night, the earthquake began. First a mild shaking shuddered through the earth beneath their feet. Then a more robust wave rolling through the bedrock set gravestones askew and knocked the vampires off their feet. The violent quake lasted a whole minute, then stopped, the rumbling replaced with the crying sirens of fire engines and police cars.
As Lucien wandered the smoldering rubble of devastated Sunnydale, he knew he had to think of a different way to help the Master. Stopping him in that moment, when the Master had traveled so far and researched the perfect incantation to open the Hellmouth, would be impossible. The Master could be stubbornly determined, Lucien knew. And so he quested on, feeling not discouraged but almost self-righteous. The Master may have turned him away in 1937, but Lucien was such a powerful devotee that he would struggle on regardless. His reward would be to see the Master free and the creatures of the Hellmouth overtaking Sunnydale—and then the world.
Now, sitting in Willy’s, Lucien’s mind wandered over these events. Why weren’t his attempts working? Were the events written in stone? The Master’s incarceration in 1937? His death in 1997? This couldn’t be. If it were so, what was Fate’s point in imprisoning him in 1937? Just to keep him trapped for forty years? To teach him a lesson? Why not just kill him in 1937? There must be a way, somehow, for Lucien to alter the events. Maybe he just hadn’t gone back far enough.
Victor was right. They needed a prophecy guy. And Lucien knew just who to see.
Five hours later, Lucien and Victor sat in the waiting room of Zaaargul the Seer. They’d left Gorga at Willy’s, needing a break from him. Victor put down the issue of Celebrity Haircuts he’d been perusing and exhaled impatiently.
“Is this guy even for real?” he asked Lucien. “He’s got three a’s in his first name. That’s such a cheesy ‘creature from beyond’ thing to do.”
“It’s not his first name, it’s his only name.”
“That’s even worse.”
Lucien turned to him, head lowered and threatening. “You got a better idea? Got another prophecy guy in your Rolodex of the Undead?”
Victor nodded. “Yeah, as a matter of fact. I say we kidnap this new Watcher, torture him, and make him figure out why we can’t stop the Master’s death.”
“I wouldn’t want to torture a Watcher,” Lucien said. “Those guys can be brutal. You ever meet the last one?”
“Yes, at the Bronze. And he didn’t seem so tough.”
Lucien shuddered. “That was a front. Believe me. I knew that guy in the seventies in London, and he was one hell of a brutal guy. Ripper, they called him. The kind of guy you don’t want your brood to go near when they’re young. Or old. Believe me, wherever that guy is, we’re damn lucky we’re not stuck with him as the Watcher.”
Victor restlessly picked up an issue of Make-or-Break Looks. The cover lines read “10 Ways to Please Your Demon,” “5 Surefire Makeup Cure-Alls to Cover Your Puffy Tentacles,” and “1501 Two-Minute Hairstyles for the Undead.” Victor flung that aside too. “Oh, come on! This guy’s an evil prophecy reader, right? Well, how come he doesn’t have any good magazines?”
“Because he’s evil.”
“Oh, yeah. See your point.”
“And listen,” Lucien added. “Don’t insult him or anything, okay? I’ve heard things. I don’t know if they’re true, but I’ve heard things.”
“What kinds of things?”
“Head-squished, dragged-to-the-bottom-of-the-ocean-to-rot-for-all-eternity, toothpick-in-the-eyeball kinds of things.”
Victor shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
A few minutes later the receptionist, a gaunt vampire who looked like she hadn’t eaten in a week, showed them in to see Zaaargul.
She closed the door behind them, and they stood before a massive mahogany desk with a green study lamp. Zaaargul sat at the desk, a bulky, vaguely octopus-looking creature with too many tentacles to count, and huge, luminous golden eyes with curved, horizontal pupils.
In one tentacle he held a quill pen, with which he filled in ovals on a lottery ticket.
“Hello,” Lucien said.
One golden eye swiveled in its protruding socket, and a tentacle emerged from beneath the desk and motioned them forward.
Quietly they took the two chairs sitting before the desk. The unnerving suggestion to take the chairs came silently, unbidden into Lucien’s head. He’d heard that Dracula could do that, but Dracula had a lot fewer tentacles and wasn’t nearly as disturbing to behold. Next to the ticket an ancient tome lay open, its leather binding decaying, parchment pages stained and worn.
Several moments ticked by painfully. “I can tell you more of my situation, and then we can come back for the solution,” Lucien offered, anxious to get out of there as soon as possible.
“Look. You do the waiting in my waiting room, not in here.” He placed the quill pen back in its silver holder with one delicate tentacle. “I figured it out on your way here.”
Lucien looked amazed. “From the little I told you on the phone—”
“Please don’t interrupt. My time is valuable.” From a small silver tray, Zaaargul plucked a slice of Gruyère from an array of cheeses and brought it to his beak, nibbling daintily. “A Slayer named Buffy Summers,” he continued, “is prophecied to kill the Master toward the close of the twentieth century.”
“Yes, and we killed her. Twice. I’ll bet you’ve never even heard of her. Have you?” he added less certainly.
Zaaargul held up an impatient tentacle. “I assumed she was the destroyed Slayer you spoke of on the phone. Because you have now disrupted the flow of normal events, the prophecy is still trying to fulfill itself, using whatever Slayer is in her place, because she should be the natural Slayer during these years. In the unaltered time line, Buffy was born and should have become the Slayer. Her Watcher should have found her and trained her at an early age, so that she would be ready
to become the Slayer when she was activated.”
Lucien leaned forward across the desk. “But she was different. Her Watcher didn’t find her until she was in her early teens. She lacked much of the usual training and discipline.”
Zaaargul lowered his large, meaty unibrow over his yellow eyes. “That is not important now. Because Buffy was born a potential Slayer, and because all the other Slayers before her died just when they happened to die, she was activated at the perfect time to be the Slayer when the Master ascended.” Zaaargul paused, opening a drawer and taking out a handful of sunflower seeds, which he munched down, shell and all.
Disgusting, thought Lucien.
“Therefore, if you want to disrupt this prophecy, your only chance is to disrupt the lineage of the Slayers. Take action in the past to ensure that Slayers are activated at different times. Therefore, when it comes to the years in which Buffy Summers is alive, she may never be activated at all. The prophecy of her killing the Master goes out of whack, and the Master goes free.”
Zaaargul closed the heavy tome in front of him, then used several rear tentacles, much longer than his front few, to reshelve the volume carefully behind him on a massive bookshelf. He blinked, his large yellow eyes glistening and nearly hypnotic. Lucien flashed back to a time when he had stood in front of an octopus tank at the Monterey Bay Aquarium for hours, convinced that the creature held him in his power. Those glistening golden eyes were the same then. …
Lucien shook his head and was unnerved to see Zaaargul make the barest hint of a smile. A smug smile. Darn mind-control cephalopods. Lucien reined in his thoughts, considered what he’d learned. “So you’re saying that I need to go back in time and either kill a few Slayers, or preserve their lives beyond the years they lived?”
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