Zaaargul nodded.
“I like the killing option better,” Victor said, the first words he’d spoken since they walked in. “More room for creativity.”
“So we kill some Slayers,” Lucien agreed.
Zaaargul’s skin flushed to an entirely different tone. The greenish parts turned gold, the reddish parts blue. “I suggest you choose the most documented Slayers. The more details you know of their tendencies and schedules, the better you can hunt them. Three or four of them should do the trick.”
“Any idea who those were?” Lucien ventured.
“Not a clue. Not my area. Now,” he said, waving a tentacle distractedly, “if you’ll excuse me, I have others waiting.”
Lucien jumped up. “Of course! Thank you!”
Victor got up too, with a little bow, and they backed toward the door. Something about those eyes … Lucien wanted to get out of there badly. He suddenly felt like a snack.
“And don’t forget,” added Zaaargul, “that you must go back and save Buffy’s life. Twice. You must put the time line right again and then work from there if this is going to be successful.”
Lucien licked his lips nervously. “Of course!”
Victor opened the door. “Say, do you always pick your own numbers, or do you ever do quick pick?”
Lucien couldn’t believe this. If his heart could still beat, it would be skittering around in his chest right now like a kitten high on catnip.
“Quick pick, on occasion,” Zaaargul answered. “Today I’m using the numbers for the date I spawned my daughter.”
“Cool.” Victor left the room, with Lucien treading on his heels. Lucien didn’t relax until they were all the way out of that place, in the cool night air. He looked up at the twinkling stars, glad to be outside. “How will we choose which Slayers to kill?” he asked Victor.
“Simple.” He glanced at his watch. “Three hours to sunrise. We find out where this new Watcher is holing up while they’re in town, break in, and steal his journals.”
“Sounds simple.”
“If he’s not there,” Victor added. “I don’t fancy fighting off the new Slayer tonight.”
“Nor do I,” Lucien put in.
“Let’s do some recon.”
A half hour later they’d tracked down the Watcher’s hotel. Liam Folsworthy, a graduate of Oxford, they were told at Willy’s, was not only an expert on prophecies, but knew a bit of Jeet Kune Do as well. Victor was not enthused. The last thing he wanted was some English Bruce Lee kicking his ass up and down the hotel parking lot.
The hotel room, though, was dark, and Victor wasted no time in bashing in a window after he’d checked the darkness inside for a sleeping form. The Watcher was out. He reached around to unlatch the hotel lock, and they slid inside. It was fortuitous, Victor realized, that the Slayer and Watcher were only visiting. It meant hotel rooms and not houses. They couldn’t have entered Liam’s house without an invitation, but a hotel room was public, and vampires, though without the right to vote, were still the public.
Lucien and Victor quickly moved to the bed, dumping out suitcases and clearing out drawers. In the bathroom, between two folded towels, Victor found the Watcher journals. He grabbed them, and they left without cleaning up. No reason to do that. In a few minutes they’d travel back in time again, and Liam Folsworthy might never be a Watcher after all.
With the Watcher journals tucked under Lucien’s arm, they headed for the caverns beneath Sunnydale, where they would open the vortex once again, this time to save Buffy’s life.
Three days later Lucien prepared for his most dangerous mission yet. He had never traveled so far back in time. He had spent the last few days making much smaller time jumps, but he told Victor to stay behind, not sure of the danger of someone meeting themselves in the past. He went alone, avoiding himself and pausing only to talk to Victor in both situations. In 1984 he’d stopped Victor and Gorga from leaping over the fence to kill toddler Buffy. In 1996 he’d stopped Jason and Victor in the bushes outside the Hemery High gym, before Buffy emerged after tryouts.
This last had the added effect of bringing Jason back from the dead, because Lucien warned Jason about the impending sunlight and told him which direction to run to get to the sewer. Lucien’s effort was successful, and Jason lived. Victor had been in a good mood ever since. Saving Jason had been an unforeseen bonus, and Lucien played it up, making Victor think it had been as important to Lucien as saving Buffy. He didn’t let Victor know it had only occurred to him at the last minute, because frankly, he was a little scared of Victor.
They had returned to a Sunnydale in which Buffy Summers was the active Slayer and the Master was dead.
But that was a temporary situation, Lucien knew.
He’d pored over the Watcher journals, surprised at all the detail, not just about the Slayers, but about many vampires, too, including Darla, Angelus, and the Master himself. After many sleepless days of study, Lucien at last narrowed down his search to four of the most documented Slayers: a Celtic warrior Slayer who lived during the Roman occupation of Britain; a Sumerian Slayer living in 2700 B.C.E.; an American Civil War Slayer; and an aristocratic Slayer who’d survived the French Revolution.
He’d selected teams of assassins, including Jason and Victor, to tackle these time periods. The assassins received period dress and lessons on how to act, talk, and blend in. He didn’t want them getting staked for standing out. They had to infiltrate each time period, find the Slayer, and destroy her.
When they were all finished, the Slayer lineage would be so off that Buffy would never be activated. Instead, the Slayer in her time period might not even journey to Sunnydale. And if she did, they could all band together to kill her. This way the Master could rise, instead of his bones being ground to dust.
Unfolding the incantations before him, Lucien checked them over and over. He’d made three copies. One for himself, one for Victor, and one that he would leave with Gorga in case they all failed. He checked again on the artifact. It was still there. Now he just needed to gather Victor and Jason, and they could jump back in time to kill the Celtic Slayer in 60 C.E.
CHAPTER FIVE
Buffy Summers was not dead.
But she did feel like she was. She’d dragged in from patrolling at four a.m. the night before, and she’d had trouble sleeping because of a painfully bruised shoulder. Buffy was the lucky Chosen One, the one girl in all the world with the power to fight vampires and other creatures of darkness. This usually meant long hours hunting around cemeteries, but occasionally it meant long hours hanging out at the Bronze, their local nightspot, hunting for vampires. Buffy greatly preferred the latter. Occasionally it even meant smooching with Angel, her vampiric love, in a graveyard. That might sound strange, a Slayer in love with a vampire, but Angel was different. He had a soul. Other vamps didn’t, which made them free of conscience to do any evil thing they wanted. And they took full advantage of that. But Angel had pissed off the wrong gypsies by murdering one of their daughters, and they’d cursed him. His soul had returned to his body, and now he lived in eternal anguish over the terrible things the vampire demon had done in his soul’s absence. He was always brooding and tormented, though occasionally he took a break to engage with Buffy in those graveyard smoochies.
But now Buffy sat in English class, slumping forward in her desk, able to stay awake only because of the semiconstant rain of paper pellets flicked at her by her best friend, Willow Rosenberg.
Her head began to sink down.
“Buffy!” her friend whispered sharply. “She’s coming this way!”
Buffy snapped awake, ready to stake vamps, and instead saw something far more terrifying. Mrs. Niedermeyer stood at the head of her row, thumbing through a stack of handouts. “Today’s quiz,” Mrs. Niedermeyer said, “is on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. I hope you all read your assignment this week. This covers the basic themes and plot points of the book. And if you rented the film instead of reading it, be wa
rned that there are enough differences to cause you to get an F on this quiz.”
Rented the film? That would have been a good idea. Less Cliffs-Notey, more entertainment value. But Buffy hadn’t even thought of that. Tess of the D’Urbervilles? She thought she’d heard of it before. Vaguely recalled being handed a copy of it a few weeks ago and signing for it. She even remember seeing the book recently—probably beneath her bed—yes, that was it, under her new pair of boots. Or had she left it at Angel’s?
Either way, she hadn’t read it.
She hadn’t even cracked it open.
The quiz landed on her desk, and Mrs. Niedermeyer turned to inflict her reign of terror on the next row of seats. Buffy looked down at the test. Thomas Hardy. Did he have anything to do with the Hardy Boys? She’d seen a few episodes of that old show on cable recently, starring hottie Parker Stevenson. Then she saw the date of the book’s publication: 1891. This was definitely something different.
“Will,” Buffy whispered to her friend. She gave Willow the best help! face she could muster, bringing her eyebrows up, frowning slightly.
“It’s simple,” Willow whispered back. “Just write down the most depressing answers you can think of. They’re bound to be right.”
“Okay.” Buffy thought. She scanned the questions:
1. When Tess is forced to baptize her own dying infant, where does she ultimately bury the body?
2. When Tess confesses her unfortunate past to her new husband Angel, he leaves her behind, unforgiven, and moves to what country?
3. When Alec returns for Tess’s hand in marriage, what does he use to bribe and coerce her into being his consort?
4. When Tess receives word that her mother is dying, which family member unexpectedly dies instead?
5. What crime does Tess resort to in order to ultimately escape from Alec?
Buffy blinked, taking in the story line, reading the rest of the questions. She got the full gist of this book from the quiz alone. Even with a love interest named Angel, which she could certainly appreciate, it sounded like the most depressing book she’d never read. Dying infants, lonely burials in neglected corners of graveyards, women forced to be with men they despised and hated, family members dying unexpectedly, families turned out into the street with nowhere to go, a woman neglected and then driven to murder. What was this guy’s damage? The author clearly needed a side of depression with his morning depression.
She glanced over at Willow, eyes wide in disbelief.
“This is pretty bad,” admitted Willow in a whisper. “His novel The Mayor of Casterbridge is downright cheery in comparison. It opens with the main character selling his wife and baby at a country carnival, and things generally get worse after that.”
“Sounds uplifting. I’ll get right to reading that one.” Buffy glanced up at Mrs. Niedermeyer, who sat at her desk, busy grading homework.
She went back to the quiz.
Following Willow’s advice, she wrote down the most depressing answers she could think of, getting quite creative at times, including making Tess into a homeless, impoverished seller of wilted violets. It seemed to fit right in.
The bell rang, and they all filed forward, placing their tests on Mrs. Niedermeyer’s desk. She smiled at them all as they passed by. Buffy felt the hot burning of classic I Didn’t Do My Homework Syndrome as she walked up. She plunked her test down on the pile and hurriedly left the room.
“So how was slayage last night?” Willow asked, falling in beside her. The Slayer was supposed to have a secret profession, but she wouldn’t have lasted as long as she had without the help of her friends.
“Pretty uneventful. Maybe four vamps total.”
“Any other vamps show up?” Willow shot her a meaningful look.
“Maybe,” Buffy answered, immediately swept away in Angelness.
“Sounds like it was a good night.”
Xander Harris appeared behind them, placing his arms over their shoulders. “What sounds like it was a good night?” he asked.
“Buffy saw Angel last night. There were smoochies.”
“Buff—the guy’s dead. I just don’t get it,” Xander said, disgusted. She knew he was actually jealous. He’d been crushing on her since they met.
“Yeah, Buffy, what would you see in someone so gorgeous, gallant, and mysterious?” Willow asked.
“You know, Will, I just don’t know.” Xander was a goofy kind of guy, sort of awkward and a little fashion-challenged. But he was a good person, and he made her laugh. He and Willow had been best friends since they were kids. Willow often reminisced of happy times watching Xander do the Snoopy dance, which he apparently still did upon request. However, Buffy had yet to make such a request.
Since her arrival at Sunnydale High, Willow and Xander had become her best friends. Her Watcher, Rupert Giles, had initially been dismayed that her two new friends knew her secret identity as the Slayer. But they had bailed her out more times than she could count, and Xander had even saved her life once. Buffy shuddered involuntarily every time she thought about it. She’d gone to fight the Master, one of the most ancient and powerful vampires ever to exist. At the time he was trapped in the caves beneath Sunnydale. Despite a prophecy that she would die in the fight, Buffy had challenged him. He killed her. Bit her, drank her blood, then tossed her facedown into a standing pool of water. Her blood gave him the power to break free of his imprisonment, and he rose to the surface. Buffy had drowned. If it hadn’t been for Xander and his CPR skills, she would have stayed dead.
Instead, because of her friends, she had lived and killed the Master.
His plans to open the Hellmouth, the evil portal that lay beneath Sunnydale, had been thwarted.
They had won.
So Giles didn’t know what he was talking about when he warned her about her friends knowing. She wouldn’t be here if they were in the dark, because there were a lot of other things in the dark that wanted her dead.
Of course, Giles would continue being annoyed by how many people knew she slayed vamps. At least her mom didn’t know. Buffy wouldn’t want her worrying about her daughter staying out all night, staking vamps, beheading demons, and generally getting all manner of supernatural goo on her new sweaters.
They reached the end of the hall and walked into the cafeteria.
“Anything interesting happen last night, aside from the usual vamp slayage?” Willow asked.
“You mean demony stuff?” Buffy asked.
“Yeah.”
“Nope. Nothing like that. Just the usual. Fight, dust, brush off the clothes.”
They filed through the cafeteria line, and Buffy got some mashed potatoes and so-called gravy, which looked more like slime from a mucous demon than anything edible. “And this is why I keep the world safe,” she told Xander. He’d selected the too-perfectly-square chicken patty that for some reason was gray.
“It’s a noble job,” he answered.
They chose a table and sat down. Willow had somehow conquered the lunch line and emerged with a rather fresh-looking tossed salad.
“Hey!” Buffy said. “How did you pull that off?”
“I bribed the cafeteria lady.”
“With what?” Buffy asked.
“Told her I’d help her with her homework.”
“She’s not in high school,” Xander pointed out. “She works for the high school.”
Willow took a bite of the crisp lettuce. “Night school,” she said around the mouthful. “She’s studying to be a dental hygienist.”
Maybe she feels bad about all the teeth the school food is ruining through malnutrition,” Xander guessed.
“Probably,” Buffy said, picking at her mashed potatoes with a spork.
“Good morning, all!” called a chipper English voice. Rupert Giles approached the table and pulled out a bright orange plastic chair. He sat down, the chair legs screeching on the floor as he drew the seat closer. “Oh, sorry.”
It was a normal day.
“Hi, Giles,�
�� chorused the other three.
Buffy smiled at him. “Hey, Giles. What’s up?”
“I’m not sure,” he said, placing the books on the table. As usual, he wore head-to-foot tweed, gray today. Giles was the school librarian, so he could pull off the look. He adjusted the wire-framed glasses on his nose and spoke quietly. “Something’s going on. Apparently there have been some very interesting thefts of priceless artifacts. The police have tracked the thief to Sunnydale, though they haven’t caught him.”
“What artifacts?” asked Buffy.
“Well,” Giles said, looking around to be sure no one listened, “I’ve been researching just that all morning. Both artifacts are reputed to have similar powers.”
When he fell silent, Buffy prompted him. “What kind of powers?”
“Time travel.”
“What?” chorused Willow and Xander.
“Time travel,” Giles repeated. “The first artifact was the Blade of Madrigon, reportedly able to slice holes in the fabric of time and space.”
“Holes you can crawl through?” asked Xander.
“Yes. Holes to the past. But supposedly you cannot climb back through once you’ve crossed over.”
“Not very handy,” said Xander.
“And the other one?” Buffy asked.
“Ah, yes. The other one is the Gem of Chargulgaak.”
“The Gem of Whosamawhatsis?” asked Xander.
“Chargulgaak. Throughout the centuries, it was rumored to transport people forward from the past to the present.”
“Sounds like the noise you make when drinking expired milk,” Xander said. “So you’d activate this Gem of Garglegok and poof, there would be Einstein? Or poof, you’d have Mozart standing in your living room?”
Giles regarded him sternly. “Well, perhaps not as easy as ‘poof,’ but in essence, yes. A person long dead could be brought to the future.”
“Wouldn’t they stink if they’re long dead?” asked Xander.
“No, Xander,” Giles said impatiently. “You would bring them forward from a time when they were still alive.”
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