by Ray Garton
Blood was caked on his lips and chin, and his eyes stared flatly up at the moon.
Footsteps hurried toward her in the dark.
“Buffy!” Giles said with relief. “Are you all right?”
She nodded, but reached around and gingerly touched the back of her head. There was a large knot, but no blood. Her back hurt, and her legs felt stiff. She popped her shoulder back into joint. “I’ll live . . . it just won’t be fun. Not for a little while, anyway.”
“We’re going to have to leave quickly,” Giles said, “or we’ll have a great deal of explaining to do . . . and most likely to people who will laugh in our faces as they apply handcuffs to our wrists.” He turned and looked grimly down at the hellhound on the ground.
Buffy turned to the group and asked, “We got ’em all?”
The others said yes, all at once.
“Unless, um, there are more in the cabin,” Willow said.
“There are only five motorcycles,” Xander said. “I doubt they’d ride double.”
“Yeah, there’s only five, let’s go,” Cordelia said with a hint of an impatient whine in her voice.
“No, Willow’s right,” Giles said. “We need to be sure.”
Buffy leaned down and jerked the stake out of the dead creature on the ground. “I’ll check the cabin,” she said.
She limped a little at first, but recovered quickly, and covered the rest of the distance at a jog. Up the steps, across the porch . . . she stopped at the open door.
Inside, the cabin was a mess, and had a smell to go with it. Apparently, hellhounds had the same bathroom habits as regular hounds . . . none at all. They didn’t use the refrigerator, either, because their leftovers were scattered all over the place. A foot here, a head there . . . it wasn’t a pretty sight. She went through the entire cabin, careful not to step in anything. The place was empty.
Buffy got out of the cabin as quickly as possible, went down the steps, and joined her friends.
“It’s empty,” she said. “Let’s motor.”
Chapter 2
THE NEXT DAY WAS A BUSY ONE FOR GILES. EVER since learning of the cattle that had been eaten just outside Sunnydale, he had dropped everything to learn more about it, certain it was a sign of trouble. The week before had been spent with Buffy and the others ridding Sunnydale of a very ill-tempered voodoo priestess. In the meantime, his other work had gone mostly neglected.
Rupert Giles was Buffy Summers’s Watcher . . . but he was also the librarian at Sunnydale High School. There were returned books that needed to go back in their proper places on the shelves, new books that needed to be processed and placed, overdue notices that needed to be filled out and sent, and a calendar and several notices on the walls that needed to be updated. He didn’t use student volunteers to work in the library; too many of his volumes were a bit irregular. With the undead crawling out of the ground every night and all manner of evils popping up in Sunnydale, it was easy to forget the more mundane responsibilities that rested on one’s shoulders. Life went on . . . even at the Hellmouth.
Xander and Oz were seated in a corner, talking quietly over open textbooks. Giles hadn’t seen Buffy since early that morning, but she would probably be back soon with the others. Quarterly exams were coming up next week, and several students had come in throughout the day, looking for a quiet place to study. Usually the Slayerettes were press-ganged into service in the library, but Buffy and her friends had had little time to study for the tests lately, so he expected them to have their heads buried in books for the rest of the week. Unless, of course, something more urgent came up, something more ominous. At most high schools, one would be hard-pressed to think of something more ominous than quarterly exams, but not so at Sunnydale High.
Cordelia Chase waltzed into the library and stopped at the front desk.
“Hello, Giles,” she said wearily.
“Good afternoon, Cordelia. How are you?”
“You kept me up until the wee hours last night and you can ask that question with a straight face?”
“Well, you realize, of course, that you didn’t have to come with us.”
She released a single abrupt, sharp laugh. “I’m the only sane person in your little traveling monster movie. I’m scared to think what you’d do without me.”
“I should think we’d get by somehow,” Giles said with a smirk. “But I must say I’m glad you were there last night, Cordelia.” He gestured toward the corner where Xander and Oz were sitting. “If you’re looking for —”
“I’m not. I’m looking for a book I was supposed to read last month. It’s called The Wedding Member, or, um, The Member . . . um . . .”
“Carson McCullers,” Giles said. “The Member of the Wedding.”
“That’s it! Do you have it?”
“As a matter of fact,” he said as he stepped over to a few stacks of books, “it was just recently returned.” He started running a finger down the spines of the stacked books, looking for the title.
“The Member of the Wedding?”
Giles looked up to see that Xander had joined Cordelia at the desk.
“But I told you, Cordelia,” Xander said, “I’m just not ready to make that kind of commitment.”
“Oh, you’re ready for commitment, all right,” she said. “But I doubt there are any mental institutions that would have you.”
Giles handed the book to her. “Would you like to check it out?”
“Well, maybe,” she said. “It’s not very long. I’m gonna see how much of it I can read here.” She headed for a table.
“If you need any help with the big words, let me know,” Xander said, smiling.
“Xander,” Oz called from the corner. “We doing this?”
Xander turned to Giles and said, “We’re going to quiz each other.”
Giles returned his smile. “Best of luck to you both.” It was not in a Watcher’s job description to become friendly with the friends of his or her Slayer. That was due, in part, to the fact that Slayers typically had few, if any, friends.
But Buffy Summers was not a typical Slayer.
A Watcher’s job is to alert the Slayer to her purpose, then focus the Slayer’s attention and energy on that purpose so intensely that little time is left for a social life. A Slayer’s responsibilities were formidable indeed, and preparation, training, and focus were all that stood between life and death, so normally there wasn’t much time left for outside interests.
But Buffy had somehow managed to do something neither Giles nor the Watcher’s Council expected. Instead of walking away from her normal life to bury herself in her training under his guidance, she had brought some of her life with her, and made him a part of it. It had not been intentional; her friends had stumbled onto the truth about Buffy accidentally. But their willingness to work with her to fight vampires, demons, and other evil creatures had been completely unexpected. Before he knew it, Giles was not just working with a single Slayer, but a Slayer and four . . . well, assistant Slayers. It was unprecedented, and he had no doubt the council disapproved.
Giles had been terribly worried about them at first, afraid they had no idea what they would be dealing with if they chose to help Buffy. Technically, his only responsibility was for his Slayer, but he felt responsible for her friends, too. He was surprised by how quickly they had accepted the nighttime world of evil that would come to make up so much of Buffy’s life. He found their resiliency and good humor refreshing . . . even if that good humor did include some ribbing of Giles’s very British mannerisms and personality. Although he sometimes found them frustrating, even exasperating, there had been times when their presence had been invaluable.
And he enjoyed their company, being a part of their lives; in a line of work made up of darkness and unpredictable sinister forces and the Dewey decimal system, they helped keep things rather light, and even made him feel young. Well . . . at least younger.
Giles picked up a stack of returned books and left the front desk to
put them back on their proper shelves.
Willow stepped into the library, one thumb hooked under her book bag’s shoulder strap, and was surprised by how quiet it was. Like any library, it was always quiet, but more so today than usual. There were no low voices, no stifled laughs, no shuffling chairs or sounds of movement. Even the front desk was abandoned. Farther inside, she heard quiet murmurings, followed the direction of the sound with her eyes, and saw Oz and Xander in the corner, heads down, a book open in front of Oz.
Willow stepped up behind Oz, leaned down, wrapped her arms around his neck, and kissed the top of his head. Oz jerked beneath her, startled.
“Hi, guys,” she said, smiling.
Xander looked up at her, wincing slightly, as if annoyed. “Oh, uh . . . hi, Willow,” he said. He straightened in the chair, stretched, reached back, and massaged his neck.
“We’re quizzing now,” Oz said.
She let go of him and moved around to the side of the table. “Oh. I’m interrupting something?”
“Kinda sorta,” Xander said.
“Boy talk?” she asked with a smile.
Xander shook his head. “Oh, no. We’re committing Beowulf to memory in Spanish.”
Oz said. “Actually, studying.”
“We’re taking turns quizzing each other,” Xander added. “And hard as it may be to believe, we’ve kinda gotten into it. So maybe we could, y’know . . . talk later?”
Willow’s smile fell away. “Oh. Okay.” She tried to put it back on, but it was crooked and a little stiff. “Okay, then, I’ll . . . catch you later, I guess.” As she started back through the library, walking slower than before, Willow was about to sigh when she noticed Cordelia sitting alone at a table, reading a book. “Hi, Cordy,” she said as she passed.
“This sucks,” Cordelia said.
Willow stopped walking. “What?”
“This book.”
Willow looked over her shoulder at the open book and read the title at the top of the page. “Oh, I read that. It was good.”
“It sucks. It takes place in the South, and all the people are so . . . Southern. Why are all books and movies about the South so depressing? Everyone’s either drunk, insane, or sleeping with their parents, or something. It’s like a soap opera, but without the charm.”
“I’d suggest you see the movie, but —”
“There’s a movie?” Cordelia asked excitedly. She pushed her chair back and turned to face Willow. “You mean, I could rent a tape instead of reading this whole thing?”
“Um, I was about to say . . . none of the video stores in town carry it. I checked once a couple weeks ago. I don’t even know if it’s available on tape. But maybe you could —”
“Great!” Cordelia huffed and turned back to her book and hunched forward. “I’m stuck reading this . . . this thing.”
Willow let that sigh out as she walked away from Cordelia and took a seat at one of the computers. She put her bag under the table and logged on to the Internet, where she surfed through a few of her favorite sites, catching the updates.
I should be studying, she thought. Getting ready for exams like everyone else.
But at the moment, Willow did not have a studious bone in her body. Her mind was on other things. First, there was the matter of the motorcycle-riding hellhounds and the possibility that she was responsible for bringing them to Sunnydale. But more immediate was the chill that had fallen over her friends and herself.
Then there was the possibility that she inadvertently had created trouble for them.
A few weeks ago, using the Internet and some of Giles’s books, Willow had pieced together an ancient spell that had once been used for multiple purposes. Among them: to reverse spells that turned one into certain animals, such as dogs, pigs, rodents, that sort of thing . . . and to reverse lycanthropy. Willow didn’t know anyone who’d been turned into a rodent or dog, but lycanthropy — or the condition of transforming into a werewolf every full moon — was another story.
The spell was ancient and had fallen out of use. When she first stumbled onto it in one of Giles’s books, only a fraction of the spell was given. But she kept looking, and looking, until she found the whole thing. She’d thought it was the whole thing, anyway. Looking back now, she wondered if she had used an incomplete version of the spell. It didn’t matter either way at this point, though; she had done it, and it could not be undone.
Willow thought curing Oz of his werewolf condition — something that caused him a good deal of anxiety and depression once a month — would be a wonderful gift, and a gift that only she could give him. So just twenty-four hours from the first of three nights that would put Oz through his painful transformation, Willow cast the spell. She hoped the fact that the coming full moon would be the Blood Moon would enhance the spell’s power.
Not only was the spell not enhanced, it did nothing. She locked Oz up in the book cage in the library the following night. He didn’t like her to see him change, so she always left right away. On that night, though, she only pretended to leave. As she waited in the shadows, his grunts of pain, which sounded human at first, became deeper, throatier until there was nothing human left in the savage sound. Unable to listen any more, she rushed out of the school into the cold night, angry with herself. She’d done something wrong, misread the instructions, misquoted the words, something.
Then those five bloodthirsty hellhounds had come to Sunnydale. A lump of guilt quickly formed in the pit of Willow’s stomach. Instead of curing Oz’s lycanthropy, her spell had summoned a pack of hellhounds to town! She didn’t want to tell Giles what she had done, but she had no choice. He was always trying to get her to slow down on the magic and wanted her to clear everything with him first, to practice it under his supervision. He wasn’t going to like the fact that she’d performed such an ancient spell on her own, especially when she wasn’t exactly sure if she was working with the whole spell. But every time she approached Giles, he was too busy to talk.
Willow felt a little better after they’d staked all five of the hellhounds. At least they wouldn’t be moving on to other towns to wreak havoc. But she still felt angry that the spell had not cured Oz and felt the need to discuss it with Giles. After all, maybe she was wrong about the spell going awry. Maybe it just did nothing. Giles would most likely know. But she didn’t want to risk being told, “Sorry, not now, Willow,” or, “Can we talk later, please?” She’d been hearing that sort of thing a lot lately, and not just from Giles. That was the other thing that had been occupying her thoughts lately.
Normally, with exams just around the corner, she and Oz would be studying for them together. Buffy and Xander and Cordelia would be coming to her for help in preparing for the tests, too. Buffy — who usually panicked in the face of important tests — had gained some confidence after her high SAT scores, but she still was no ace student and normally would be asking Willow for study tips, or even asking to study with her. Instead, Oz was studying with Xander, Cordelia was preparing for the exams alone, and Willow had no idea what Buffy was doing.
It wasn’t just the studying, though. It felt as though they hardly even talked to her anymore. The only time she seemed to have any interaction with her friends at all was when some evil raised its ugly head — like the hellhounds on wheels — and they needed her to dig something up on the Internet or work on a potion or spell. Outside of that, they seemed to be unaware she existed. Like Giles, they were always too busy or preoccupied to talk or do anything after school. Even Oz, her boyfriend, seemed distant when they were together, as if his mind were somewhere else, or there were other things he’d rather be doing.
It had happened gradually over the last week and seemed to get worse . . . a noticeable coldness among her and her friends, and an even chillier one between her and Buffy. Willow wanted to talk to them about it, but what good would that do if they didn’t hear her, or didn’t have time to listen? While she sensed no malice from most of her friends, Willow wasn’t sure what she sensed from
Buffy. Sometimes — and she hated even thinking about it — she felt afraid of Buffy. And she had no idea why.
On top of all that, she’d been immersing herself in learning as much as possible about magic. Wondering if perhaps things might go back to normal with her friends if she made herself useful, Willow had decided to speed up her education in the magic arts, all on her own, and see if it made a difference.
The recent distance that had grown between Willow and her friends had been bothering her so much, she’d been having recurring nightmares about it. She thought the nightmares were about that, anyway. She couldn’t remember the details, but she awoke from each one with an odd mixture of feelings: she felt upset, as if she’d just seen something horrible and infuriating, and at the same time, she felt strangely satisfied, as if something, some outside force, had suddenly and seamlessly solved her problem. She’d had a difficult time getting back to sleep afterward, and she hoped the nightmare, whatever it was, didn’t recur.
Willow pulled her eyes from the screen and slumped in her chair with her head down, releasing a long sigh when she heard light footsteps. She lifted her head to see Giles walking from the back of the library toward the front desk. She got up and hurried over to the desk. She reached it seconds before Giles and was smiling when he arrived.
“Hello, Giles,” she said.
“Good afternoon, Willow.” He went behind the desk and began sorting through a stack of books, making two more stacks as he separated them. Occasionally, he stopped to look at a spine and murmur to himself.
“Um, Giles . . . do you think we could, um . . . maybe talk?”
He said nothing for a moment, focused on the books. Then he started and turned to her. “I’m sorry, Willow. Did you say something?”
Before Willow could repeat the question, Buffy burst into the library and ran to the front desk, stumbling to a stop. Her blond hair was windblown and she carried about her some of the fresh air from outside. She was out of breath and her eyes were wide beneath a frown.