Buffy the Vampire Slayer 1

by John Vorholt;Arthur Byron Cover;Alice Henderson

  Angelus stood between Buffy and the Slayer now. Franco, as she now knew he was called, stood near Marguerite. So nice to finally learn his name just as she was about to dust him.

  “Run to your left!” she told Marguerite. The French Slayer must have definitely understood some English, because she took off in that direction, toward the mouth of the alley. Where was Willow? There was still no sign of the Scoobies.

  Angelus stood his ground, keeping himself between Buffy and the French Slayer.

  “Use your special firearm!” shouted Darla.

  The assassin reached into his pocket. Buffy didn’t like this. Special firearm?

  Franco produced a semiautomatic nine-millimeter from his pocket. This was not good.

  He raised the gun toward Marguerite.

  “I get to kill the other one,” Darla told Franco. “I don’t like her.”

  Buffy charged in the direction of the assassin, and Angelus leaped, cutting her off. He knocked her violently to the ground, and she bucked him off, flipping him to the side.

  She had only a fraction of a second and knew that. In the corner of her eye, Franco took aim at Marguerite.

  A deafening shot cracked and echoed through the alley. A gray blur streaked into view, knocking Marguerite over. A scream pierced the roaring silence following the shot.

  She recognized the voice. It was Giles. He’d been hit.

  As Marguerite struggled to her feet again, fighting against her bindings, Xander ran forward with a knife, cutting through the ropes.

  “Shoot them! Shoot them!” Darla yelled, running forward.

  Buffy jumped to her feet, kicking Angelus in the side before he could rise. Her leg burned with pain.

  Darla reached the assassin. She demanded the gun, but Franco held on to it, too caught up in the fight.

  Angelus rolled to the side, away from Buffy’s reach.

  Buffy ran for Franco and the gun. Angelus dashed for Marguerite. They reached their targets at the same time. Angelus shoved Xander away just as Willow ran into the alley. With a wicked backhand, he knocked her sprawling. Giles, shot in the arm, rose unsteadily to his feet and tried to tackle Angelus. Spinning, the vampire grabbed Giles’s injured arm, sticking his thumb directly into the wound and twisting. He forced Giles to his knees.

  Buffy grabbed at Franco’s gun, struggling with him for control. Darla kicked her hard in the kidneys, but Buffy held on, gritting her teeth through the pain. She didn’t let go. The gun went off once, twice, discharging harmlessly into the drizzling sky.

  Angelus grabbed the weakened French Slayer, spinning her around.

  Buffy kicked Darla to the side, then shoved the assassin into Angelus. He staggered back, releasing Marguerite. She ran to Xander and Willow, bending to help them.

  “Don’t worry about us!” shouted Xander. “Run out of here!”

  “I will not leave you,” she answered in accented English.

  Buffy used the momentum of tackling Angelus to send them spiraling backward, where she, Franco, and Angelus crashed into the opposite alley wall. She sandwiched Angelus between herself and the assassin. Franco’s gun arm was now pinned against the wall, and she could see the very end of the barrel sticking out, shielded almost completely by Angelus’s body.

  “Shoot! Shoot!” Darla shouted again, recovering and racing toward them.

  The assassin angled the gun up toward Marguerite. His finger started to squeeze the trigger.

  Buffy hit the gun barrel with her fist, but it moved only a fraction of a centimeter. Angelus’s bulk was too heavy for it to move much.

  Franco continued to squeeze the trigger. Buffy tried to shove Angelus to the side but, grinning, he wouldn’t move. He used his body as a shield. Buffy couldn’t reach Franco. Darla grabbed her harshly from behind, choking her. She had only a millisecond before the gun fired, killing the Slayer and possibly Xander and Willow, too.

  There was only one thing to do.

  Letting Darla continue to choke her, Buffy pulled out the stake. Everything slowed. Franco’s finger was almost fully depressed on the trigger.

  Buffy thrust the stake into Angelus’s heart. He vaporized, leaving only ashes. The stake continued on in its forward thrust, passing through the falling ashes and piercing the heart of the assassin. Dust exploded outward, showering her, and the gun clattered harmlessly to the ground.

  “No!” shouted Darla, emitting a piercing scream of rage and grief. Xander rushed forward, grabbed the gun, and pointed it at her.

  “That won’t kill me,” she spat venomously, teeth bared in rage.

  “No,” said Marguerite, stepping forward. “But I will.”

  Sizing them up, Darla glared at them with simmering hostility. Then she turned and ran away. Marguerite started after her, her face gray and body trembling from blood loss. She looked on the verge of collapse.

  “No,” Buffy said, stopping her. “I’ll explain this in a minute, but it’s not her time to die.”

  Marguerite stopped, gasping for breath and staring angrily after the receding figure in blue. Then she turned to Buffy. “At least you got the other two,” she said in her excellent English. “They grabbed me while I was sleeping in a shelter.”

  Yes, Buffy thought, at least I got the other two. She stared down at the dust, now drifting away in the evening breeze, mingling with the drizzling rain. It wasn’t Angel’s time to go either. She felt numb, unable to move, and sank to her knees. In an instant, Willow was beside her. “Buffy, what did you do?” she whispered.

  Buffy looked pleadingly into her friend’s eyes. “I didn’t have a choice. …” She let the stake tumble out of her hands, clattering to the stones of the alley.

  She stared at the dust that had been Angelus, her mind searing with an intense disbelief. “Couldn’t you have …,” Willow began, but didn’t finish.

  Buffy sniffed, her eyes welling with tears. “The Slayer would be dead if I’d hesitated even just another second.” As she sank lower, Willow grabbed her arm, pulling her to her feet. Buffy wobbled on unsteady legs.

  A cry of pain and some rather British cursing brought her back to the immediacy of the situation. Giles stood a few feet away, his arm streaming with blood. Willow tore off part of her jacket to stanch the flow while Xander steadied him.

  Buffy rushed to his side. “We need to get you to a doctor.” So much blood was leaking out that she couldn’t see the wound properly.

  “Yes,” he said, “but I’d prefer one from the twenty-first century. Fewer leeches.”

  Willow laughed, then looked at Buffy’s expression and stopped.

  There was no joy left in Buffy’s heart. A silence fell over all of them. Buffy turned back to the drifting dust in the alley, her chin trembling. Willow hugged her.

  Marguerite turned to them, confused. “But wasn’t it good? To destroy both vampires?” she asked.

  After a long pause, when no one else could speak, Giles said quietly, “One of them was different.” He placed a hand on Buffy’s shoulder and said, “Well, let’s at least get Marguerite to an eighteenth-century doctor. We can explain this to her on the way.”

  “And then let’s go home,” Xander said, still clutching the gun.

  “Are you okay?” Willow asked Buffy gently, squeezing her hand.

  Buffy could only shake her head.

  With Marguerite leaning on Buffy, and Giles supported by Willow and Xander, they trudged out of the alley, heading for the house of Marguerite’s doctor, who lived on Rue Vivienne, on the far side of the Palais Royal.

  Fifteen minutes and one painfully jarring hired carriage ride later, they arrived.

  They woke up the doctor, who immediately went to work on Marguerite, treating her for blood loss. He laid her in the guest bed. While he cleaned and bandaged Giles’s wound, Buffy sat at Marguerite’s bedside and explained who she was. Marguerite found it miraculous. Because her English was so good, it made the entire experience simple. In a half hour the doctor appeared at the bedroom door wit
h a rather pale-looking Giles.

  “The bullet passed through the meat of his arm,” he explained in heavily accented English. “Keep it clean, and it should heal.”

  “Good to know,” Giles said.

  “Hey, we match,” Buffy told him. “Both of us were shot on the right side.”

  “Oh, how grand,” he responded in a monotone.

  “Now we go back?” Xander asked.

  “Will Marguerite be okay?” Buffy asked the doctor.

  He nodded. “She has lost much blood, but she will recover in no time. I have been her doctor since she was born, and she has always had a remarkable healing rate.”

  “How about that,” said Xander.

  “I will be fine now, thanks to all of you.”

  Buffy exchanged a secret smile with Marguerite and squeezed her hand.

  They left, walking out to a back alley behind the doctor’s house. Buffy remembered the incantations she’d stolen from Franco and pulled them out. She unfolded them, hoping there wouldn’t be more time periods. There weren’t. Franco held only the spell for 1792.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” Giles said.

  Willow spoke up. “That may be the end of the enchantments, but what about the artifact itself? We still don’t know where it is.”

  Giles grunted in thought. “My guess is that it lies somewhere in the room Buffy discovered. I don’t think Lucien would have let it too far out of his reach.”

  “But, Giles, Angel and I searched that room. It wasn’t in there.”

  “Then it must be hidden.”

  “Oooh, I sense a trip involving metal detectors!” Xander chimed in.

  Buffy glanced over at him. “Knock yourself out.”

  “That’s Giles’s job,” Xander countered.

  Giles shook his head in misery. “Very funny, Xander.”

  “I thought so.” Xander looked at the stone buildings rising around them. “Are we ready? I’ve seen enough back alleys of Paris to last me a lifetime.”

  Giles spoke the incantation, and Buffy’s heart filled with mixed emotions. She was finally returning to her own time for good. They’d foiled Lucien’s plot. But Angel would not be there.

  The portal opened, whisking them through dazzling light, dumping them out in 1998 Sunnydale.

  But it wasn’t the same Sunnydale they’d left.

  The portal spat them out into hell itself. The air reeked of guttering fires and rotting flesh. Burned-out cars littered the empty streets. It was night, and vampires roamed in droves, trolling the streets for victims. They closed in when they saw Buffy and the others.

  In the sky swooped huge, winged creatures breathing fire. One dropped a half-eaten corpse, which landed with a dull thud next to Buffy. She rose shakily to her feet.

  This chaos, this hell, could only mean one thing.

  The Master had risen.

  And he’d opened the Hellmouth.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  As the vampires closed in, more than Buffy could possibly count, more than a hundred, maybe more than two hundred, she turned to Giles.

  “Speak the incantation!” she shouted to him.

  He still lay on the ground, groggy from the portal travel. Slowly he lifted his head, taking in the approaching throngs of hungry vampires. “What?”

  “Send us back! Send us back!”

  “Oh, gods,” he breathed when he saw the red sky, the fires, the creatures jeering and closing in on them.

  “Speak it!” shouted Xander.

  Willow crawled over to Giles and pulled the incantation out of his pocket.

  “What went wrong?” Giles said, his voice small.

  “Say it!” Willow told him. She pressed the incantation into his hand.

  He lifted the paper and read the incantation. The portal winked into view, sucking them up into the air. Three vampires dove in after them.

  They landed with a thud on a cobbled street, with the familiar cries of “Vive la nation!” ringing up around them. Buffy struggled to her feet, pulling out the stake. While the vampires stumbled around, unused to the nausea of portal travel, she staked them quickly, one after another.

  Then she helped the others to their feet, looking around to get her bearings.

  They’d landed on the other side of the Place de la Révolution. In the distance, she saw two other portals opening in the sky, and figures pouring out of them.

  Giles gripped her shoulder, steadying himself, wincing against the pain. He saw the other portals too. “That’s us,” he said.

  “What?”

  “That’s us arriving, the first time. One portal for us, one portal for the assassins.”

  “This makes my brain hurt,” she said.

  “What are you going to do?” Willow asked her.

  “I know what went wrong. I killed Angelus.”

  “You changed the time line,” Xander said.

  “Yes. Angel was the one who discovered Lucien’s plot. He was the one who held Lucien prisoner while we stopped the assassins. With him dying here in 1792, he wasn’t present for any of those things. The Master rose.”

  “What are you planning?” Giles asked.

  “I’ve got to save Angel’s life.” She turned in the direction of the now dissipating portals in the distance. “I have to tell myself not to stake him. You guys wait here, out of sight.”

  Xander grabbed her arm. “No.”

  She turned on him, impatient. “What, you’re going to try to stop me? I know you’re jealous, Xander, but this is the fate of the world we’re talking about.”

  Xander looked stung. “It’s not that,” he said, hurt in his voice. “It’s paradox.”

  “A pair of what?”

  “You shouldn’t meet yourself. The entire universe could implode. At least, that’s what they always say on Doctor Who, even though he frequently met himself. Of course, that was in different incarnations, and—”

  She raised an eyebrow. “Xander. Point.”

  “Right. Don’t meet yourself. Avoid yourself. You have to think of another way.” He turned to the others. “None of us can run into ourselves. The entire space-time continuum could collapse.”

  “Been reading Einstein?” Giles asked suspiciously.

  “No. But I haven’t watched The Terminator and Back to the Future for nothing.”

  “Of course.” Giles rolled his eyes.

  “Hey, don’t take it lightly. You guys need to listen to me on this.”

  “Okay,” Buffy said. “Then what?”

  “What if you send Angelus a note warning him not to go to the alley?” Willow asked.

  Buffy liked the idea.

  “You already know what pub he’s at,” she continued. “It took us hours to find it. You could go now and beat yourself there. If he’s not there yet, he will be shortly. You could leave a note for him at the pub.”

  “I don’t like the risk that he might not get it,” Buffy said.

  “Then wait for him to get there. We’ll all stay out of sight, somewhere safe, while you go.”

  Buffy looked at Giles, at the sweat beading on his brow. He was in no condition to travel. “Okay. You guys stay here and watch over Giles. I’ll go straight to that pub and send Angelus a message.”

  “Glad you have your notebook?” Giles asked.

  “Yes, teacher, I’m glad I brought my notebook to class for once.”

  Giles smiled in self-satisfaction. Then he winced in pain.

  “Wait,” Buffy realized. “Why don’t I just wait at the pub and stake the assassin when he shows up? Then we’ll never have that confrontation in the alley with Darla and Angelus.”

  “No, Buffy,” Xander said adamantly. “Then our other selves will never find the assassin, and we’ll keep looking and looking. Eventually we might give up, but that wouldn’t be for days, and then we’d be altering events again. Imagine if we jumped in here and never found the assassin. Wouldn’t you just assume he was lying in wait?”

  “Yes,” she agreed. “So t
hen we tell ourselves not to chase the assassin, to just go home.”

  “Now we’re back to meeting ourselves again,” Xander pointed out.

  “Oh. Right. I could give us all a note instead,” she offered.

  Xander shook his head. “There are too many variables. When dealing with time travel, the best thing to do is make things simple. We know that we already successfully stop the assassins and save Marguerite’s life. Now we need to do the simplest thing to ensure that Angel lives.” He brought a hand to his forehead and added, “I can’t believe I just said that.”

  Buffy ignored the remark. “Back to the original plan, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, then. I’m off.” Around the corner, the crowd roared with malicious glee, and Buffy knew they were executing that family. She fought the urge to help. She’d seen firsthand how bad things could be if the original time line were altered. “I’ll be back,” she told them, then ran, leaving them behind.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  In the alley outside the pub, Buffy snuck a peek through the shuttered window. Angelus sat at a table alone, sipping blood from a glass mug. Perfect. She tore a sheet from her notebook again and wrote:

  Angelus. If you value your life, do not go with Darla to any fight in an alley tonight. Make up an excuse. This is serious.

  Signed,

  A friend

  Once again, she folded it into a paper plane and let it sail through the front pub door. It jabbed him in the back, and he turned, scooping it up off the floor. He read it, then immediately spun and scanned the pub. She ducked back outside. He had to take it seriously. Please take it seriously.

  She hid behind some wooden crates outside the door and waited.

  In a few minutes he emerged, glancing up and down the alley. He read the note again. He took out a pocket watch, glanced at the time, and replaced it.

  Buffy crouched, tense.

  Two minutes later Darla arrived.

  She kissed him. “How shall we entertain ourselves tonight, my love?”

  He hesitated. “I’m feeling a bit sleepy,” he said in his Irish brogue. “Must have been someone I ate.”