“Oh, gotcha.”
“So why would someone want to steal these two thingies?” Buffy asked.
Willow faced her. “Imagine their power if they were brought together. You could open a hole to the past, climb through, then use the Gem to return to the future.”
Giles looked at her proudly. “Exactly.”
“And you think some beastie here in Sunnydale wants to use it for evil? What if it’s just an eccentric art thief? Or it could be someone collecting them for the purposes of good,” Buffy added hopefully. In reality, she wanted to spend the evening at the Bronze with Angel, instead of doing recon work.
“Buffy, how many times has a rare stolen artifact been brought to Sunnydale for the purpose of cheering up denizens of retirement facilities, or finding homes for sad little puppies?” Giles asked her.
“Oh. Yeah. Good point.” She glanced around to make sure no one overheard. “So where do I start?”
Giles related a news item he’d found earlier in the library. “The police traced the Gem to a warehouse near the Bronze, then lost the trail. Perhaps you could start there? Do a little reconnaissance after school?”
“Bronze. Sounds like a plan,” Buffy told him.
“Wonderful.” Giles stood up. “Now I’m going off campus for lunch.”
“You’re so evil, Giles,” Buffy said, convinced now more than ever that her “mashed potatoes” were actually the excretions of a potato demon. Maybe it was a teeny tiny potato demon, who right now was actually living inside the viscous mound of white mush.
“Yeah,” Xander agreed. “You’re supposed to be one of the good guys, helping us fight the forces of evil.”
“Yes,” Giles said, cocking one eyebrow defiantly. “And I’m about to go fight the forces of evil at a nice little French bistro I noticed on my way to work.”
He turned and left the room, waving good-bye over his shoulder.
Buffy looked down at her mashed potatoes and waited for the potato demon inside to install cable in his little mashed-potato hut.
• • •
Later that afternoon, as soon as dusk hit, Buffy set out. After two and a half hours of creeping through cemeteries, sewers, caverns beneath Sunnydale, and an endless series of warehouses in the Bronze district, Buffy had learned nothing. However, she had overheard more useless vampire gossip than she ever cared to. She dusted most of those she came across after listening in. Who knew the undead could be so boring? Most of them didn’t know any good dirt at all. Especially nothing having to do with a gem or a knife. She even questioned some of them directly when she didn’t overhear anything of interest. At first they were always swaggering and cocky. By the end, they quivered and pleaded. But none of them had heard anything about the stolen artifacts.
So then maybe some kind benefactor was going to use them to save the lives of unfortunate puppies?
Giles was right. No way.
She needed more info.
As she walked down the street in front of the Bronze, she heard a thud, and suddenly quick footsteps closed in on her. She whirled around. Angel stood before her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.” He looked stunning, all darkness and mystery. Play it casual. Don’t let him see that your heart is fluttering out of control. Willow was right. He was gorgeous. Tall, with short, dark brown hair and expressive eyes, he dressed completely in black, with a billowing trench coat. It wavered in the slight evening breeze. He looked the part of a hero, a warrior. And he was one fine kisser.
“Going to the Bronze?” he asked.
“Yeah. Giles had some hunch about these two stolen artifacts, but I’ve dug around everywhere and haven’t found anything remotely related.”
“You mean the Gem of Chargulgaak and the Blade of Madrigon?” Angel asked.
Her mouth almost fell open. She didn’t let it. “Yeah, you heard about those?”
“It’s why I was coming to see you.”
Buffy felt a pang in the pit of her stomach. Oh. And here she thought it might have been just to see her. But he was in warning mode. She saw that now. A deeper furrow on the perpetually brooding brow. A slight downcast of the mouth. “What do you know?”
“A vampire named Lucien brought the two artifacts to Sunnydale. He joined them together to form a unique object, capable of—”
“Traveling through time?”
Angel gave a slight smile. “Yes.”
“And his insidious plot?”
“To travel back in time and kill a Slayer.”
“Why?” Buffy asked. “She’d already be dead.”
“But he wants to murder her before her natural death.”
Now Buffy’s brow furrowed. “What would that accomplish?”
“It would mess up the Slayer lineage. Different Slayers would activate at different times.”
She still didn’t get it. Sounded more like an Ethan Rayne chaos plot.
“Buffy, he wants to keep you from being activated as a Slayer. That way, the Master will rise.”
Her head started to hurt. “He can do that?”
“Yes. If he destroys the natural progression of Slayers, you won’t be the Slayer when the Master rises and opens the Hellmouth.”
“But won’t whoever is the Slayer still stop him?” she asked.
Angel shook his head. “Not necessarily. The alternate Slayer could live in Zimbabwe, for all we know. Or she might not be able to defeat him. It’s a problem, Buffy. You’ve got to stop him.”
“How did you learn this?”
“Oh, the usual. Slinking around sewers. Lurking in warehouses. Keeping my ear to the graveyard dirt.”
“Where is this Lucien?”
“In one of the caverns under Sunnydale, near where the Master was trapped. I tracked one of his lackeys to a fork in the tunnels but lost him afterward.”
Buffy took a deep breath. “Okay. I’m going to call Giles and tell him this. See what he can dig up on the time travel capabilities of this new artifact. In the meantime, will you show me where you lost the minion?”
“Of course.”
She sighed. No Bronze tonight. Just an evil plot to foil. But Angel was with her. Things could be looking up.
As they walked, Buffy leaned a little closer to Angel, taking in his scent. “Which Slayer are they going to kill?”
“I don’t know. The bits and pieces I overheard were never that specific. Mostly just boasting, would-be assassins bragging that they were going to kill a Slayer.”
“So they could choose any Slayer, in any time period in the past?” she asked.
“As long as it’s before you were alive. That’s all they need to do to alter the Slayer lineage.”
“This is pretty insidious.” Briefly she entertained the notion of an alternate future in which she was just a normal girl who could lead a normal life. Someone else would be the Slayer instead of her. She could have a conventional dating life, and her boyfriends might not get killed by rampaging demons at all.
Of course, would she have Angel then? And would she move here to Sunnydale? She would have had no cause to burn down the gym that got her kicked out of her former high school. She would never meet Willow or Xander or Giles. But she’d have fewer bruises.
Then again, she sort of liked saving the world from time to time, and Angel was right. The alternate Slayer might not even live in this country, might not learn about the Master until it was too late. Or worse, she could even get killed by the Master. Buffy did, after all.
Buffy called Giles at his place. She described the newly forged artifact and Lucien’s plot.
“Insidious,” Giles said.
“That’s what I said.”
“I’ll see what I can dig up on this Lucien character. I may end up at the library later for some of my books.”
“Okay, Giles. I’ll come by there after I do a little recon with Angel.”
“Be careful, Buffy. We don’t know anything about this new player. He could be very dangerous.”
Across town, deep under the streets of Sunnydale, Lucien got a paper cut and cursed. He tried folding the incantations again with one hand, bringing his egregiously wounded finger to his mouth.
“Our fearless leader,” Victor remarked to Jason. Jason snickered.
“Shut up!” cried Lucien. He finished folding the papers, straightened his ascot, and smoothed his lapels. He looked like a character straight out of The Importance of Being Earnest, Victor thought. Didn’t he know a Slayer would stake him on sight for being so out of date in his fashions?
Now composed, Lucien handed one copy of the papers to Victor, and one to Jason. “It’s very important you hang on to these,” he told them. “These are the incantations that will transport you back and forth through time.”
“I remember the drill,” Victor said impatiently. How many times had he endlessly traipsed through time while Lucien spoke one incantation after the other, honing their landing spots and times?
“This time it’s different,” Lucien snapped. “It’s going to be dangerous in these places. These Slayers are active and trained. We’re not killing them while they’re still children. All of us may perish. Keep this copy of the incantations in case I am unable to speak them.”
“You mean if you get dusted.”
“Or toasted,” Jason sneered bitterly.
“I’ve told you a million times I was sorry about that!” Lucien said in exasperation. “But yes. In the event of my death, you must continue on. I’ve written the incantations out phonetically. You have your copies, and I have mine.
“Now. First we go to Wales in 60 C.E. I’ve chosen appropriate clothing for all of us so we can blend in. I’ve worked and worked on this spell, so we’re going to land right on the Isle of Anglesey. That was a tough one to calculate. Very tough. It took a lot of hard work.”
Neither Jason nor Victor provided the compliment he was fishing for.
“Right. Let’s change. We leave here in an hour,” Lucien told them.
“You sure we’ll land at night this time?” Jason asked. “I don’t want to risk a repeat of becoming a Tater Tot.”
Lucien threw his arms up in frustration. “You know I can’t promise that. It’s not that exact. I run the risk of daylight too, you know.” He stormed around the cave, fuming. “Why do I have to work with people who don’t appreciate the subtlety of time travel and its alternate future capability? That is what this entire endeavor centers around!”
“We can appreciate the subtleties,” Victor assured him. “We just want to avoid your errors.”
Jason snickered again, and Lucien ordered them out.
As Victor left the cavern room, the incantations crinkling in his pocket, he shook his head sadly. How did he end up with such a wiener as a boss? It was downright dispiriting.
He and Jason meandered to their quarters, two little rooms off the main cavern that Victor had decorated with some stolen antiquities. On his bed rested their outfits. Two woolen tunics, woolen leggings, leather boots that laced up the front, and two heavy woolen capes.
Victor hated wool.
It itched. It was heavy.
Jason followed him in, eyeing the outfits. He picked up the moccasin-like boots. “No way, nohow. I’m not wearing these things.”
“We have to look authentic.”
“I don’t give beans for authentic. I haven’t taken off my lucky combat boots for fifteen years.”
Victor looked down at his friend’s feet. The combat boots, once black, were now worn, the brown leather beneath showing through in a dozen places. Jason had sewn and resewn the soles in place countless times. They smelled only slightly better than a compost heap on fire.
But he knew that Jason’s insistence on wearing them would annoy Lucien, so he encouraged his friend to do so.
In their separate rooms, they dressed quickly, anticipating the hunt. They rejoined each other and checked their knife holsters. Victor had lovingly sharpened and oiled each blade to perfection.
They returned to the rooms beneath the crypt. Lucien was already in a similar outfit. Instantly he sized them up. “What are those?” he asked Jason impatiently, pointing to the boots.
“Those are my lucky combat boots.”
“Well, they aren’t historically accurate.”
“Screw historically accurate,” Jason countered. “They’re my lucky combat boots. You can either live with that or send Gorga.”
Lucien sighed. As much as Jason annoyed him, his intellect was a step above Gorga’s. No. He would use the monstrous vampire only as a last resort, if all of them failed. “Very well,” he said. “It’s time to leave.”
Angel stopped at a fork in the tunnels. “This is where I lost him.”
Buffy bent low, looking for recent scuff marks in the cave floor. There were too many to count. “Looks like Free Burger Wednesday at the Doublemeat Palace. Dozens of people have passed by here. These passages are definitely being used for something.”
They took the left tunnel, walking along a narrow passageway. The cave floor lowered, forcing them to bend as they walked. Buffy felt along the rough stone wall for any sign of a hidden door.
“We’re under the cemetery right now, aren’t we?” she asked Angel.
“Yes. Under the west side.”
His underground geography was a lot better than hers, but then again, she could move around on the surface at all hours. Angel wasn’t so lucky.
The tunnel ended at a large cavernous room. A dozen other passageways led off from there. They backtracked to the fork and took the passage on the right. Again Buffy felt along the narrow cavern walls for a ledge or crack, anything that might pass as a secret door. She found nothing.
They emerged into the large room for a second time. “I can see why you lost him.”
Angel looked up at the ceiling, then around at the various passages snaking off into the distance. “I don’t think he made it as far as this room. I would have seen him, whichever tunnel he took. I ran straight through the left tunnel and emerged here. He was nowhere in sight, and I’d been right behind him.”
“So then back to the search for the secret passageway.” They turned around, facing the tunnel they’d just taken.
Suddenly a bright light flashed out, blinding Buffy. She brought an arm up to shield her eyes. At first she thought it was a powerful flashlight. It played over the cavern walls. Then she spotted a crack in the tunnel wall. The light squeezed through that tiny space. It coursed blue, then silver, dancing in the dust kicked up from their movement.
It pulsed, then vanished.
Buffy raced to the spot, feeling again along the wall. Her fingernails slid into a barely perceptible crack. She traced the line of it down to the ground, then along the floor and up the other side. A small piece of rock slid to one side as her fingers grazed it. With the grinding of rock against rock, a square door scraped inward. The flicker of torchlight illuminated the room beyond.
Buffy entered, Angel behind her.
No one waited in the small room. One of the walls was brick, the others the limestone of the cavern. Tables littered with notes stood along three of the walls. A worn chair sat before one of them, next to a pile of Watcher journals. She leafed through them. Next to the journals lay a piece of thick parchment paper. An inscription was scrawled on it, in some strange language Buffy didn’t recognize. There were numbers, though, and she read those: “60 C.E.”
“Look at this,” she said to Angel.
He joined her, peering at the paper. “Looks like they picked a Slayer. But I don’t know what the inscription says.”
“No,” she said, pocketing it. “But I know someone who will.” She continued her circuit of the room, gathering up any other notes she found. The rest of the material was books, charts, and magickal symbols. She’d have to bring Giles back here.
She stared at the walls, the floor, and the ceiling. Nothing here could have created that play of light on the walls. Magick? she wondered. She moved to the brick wall. “T
his looks like a foundation,” she said, peering up.
“Maybe there’s a mausoleum up there,” Angel agreed.
“The flash of light …” Her voice trailed off.
“Yes?”
“Do you think that was the assassins leaving?”
“You mean in a portal?”
She nodded.
Angel’s face turned grave. “We need to get to Giles.”
CHAPTER SIX
At the library, full research mode was under way. Buffy and Angel strode in, greeting Willow and Xander at the large center table.
“You guys are here late,” Buffy said. She glanced at the clock. Eleven p.m.
Willow gave a slight nod to Giles’s office. “Apparently we don’t need sleep.”
Xander sighed and leaned back in his wooden chair. “Or social lives.” He threw his pencil onto the table, where it rolled to a stop.
Giles emerged from his office.
“What’d you find?” Buffy asked him.
Her Watcher walked with a heavy book in his hand, thumbing through the pages as he moved. “It’s all quite fascinating,” he said. At the center table, he placed the book down, then referred to another one lying open beside it. “Very fascinating.”
“Share, Giles.”
“There is a record of a vampire named Lucien who hails from the fourteen hundreds. He was a master sorcerer, capable of the most advanced incantations. Not only could he perform spells and enchantments, he could create them.”
Buffy pulled out the piece of parchment from her pocket. “Like this?” She handed it to Giles. She told him about the books and charts they’d found in the little room, and about the bright flash of light that could have been a portal.
He studied the note. “Oh, my.”
“What is it?”
“Just a moment …” Reading the note and walking at the same time, Giles climbed the short flight of stairs to the upper stacks. Moments later he emerged again with a large, dusty volume. He read a few pages and returned to the table. “Oh, my.”
“Oh my what, Giles?” Buffy urged him.
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