by Ray Garton
“We came to see how you are,” he rasped out.
“How I am? You mean . . . as in, ‘Hi, how are you?’”
The Big Wheel got closer, louder.
“Giles was worried,” Cordelia said, then turned to Xander. “And I’m getting soaked from this drizzle. Can we go now?”
“Worried?” Buffy asked. “About me? Why?”
“You weren’t exactly happy when you left,” Xander said. “Giles was worried and concerned.”
Another sound joined that of the Big Wheel as it drew closer: wet breathing, like a child with a cold trying to breathe through his nose.
“Look, I don’t have time to talk now,” Buffy said. “Go home. You hear me? It’s dangerous out here. I’m not kidding.”
The plastic wheels grew louder, the wet breathing became a snarl, and Buffy turned toward it as it launched itself out of its wobbly vehicle. Cordelia screamed as a round, childish, bat-like face with a runny nose swallowed up her field of vision.
Buffy’s arm snatched out, her hand closed around the throat, and her body absorbed the impact as she brought the creature to a halt. The toddler’s inhuman eyes glared at her as its tongue peeked out between its fangs.
“Way past your bedtime,” Buffy said as the stake went in. The vampire child shrieked and became a part of the night. The Big Wheel bumped into Cordelia’s leg and she kicked it aside with her foot.
“Look, kids, I’m serious here, okay?” Buffy said with no humor. “Go home. It’s not safe to be out tonight. It’s like it’s getting worse every night.” Her eyes darted all around Xander and Cordelia, looking for the slightest movement as she listened intensely for sounds from behind her. “If Giles wants to worry about anybody, he should worry about you guys.”
Xander frowned. “Hey, what’s going on? Is it that time of the month for the undead, or what?”
Buffy turned around slowly, watching, listening, her expression grim. “From what I’ve seen so far, I’d say they need to switch to decaffeinated. It’s almost like they know something that’s made them pretty sure of themselves.”
“You think they know about the Racketeers?” Xander asked.
“You mean the Rakshasa?”
“What about them?” Cordelia asked.
“Do the vampires know anything about them?” Xander asked again, frustrated.
“Oh,” Buffy said. “I don’t know.”
“No, they don’t.” Angel’s voice came from Buffy’s right.
She turned to see him coming from the darkness of a yard with a For Sale sign on it in front of a house with no curtains hanging in its dark, empty windows. He joined them on the sidewalk.
“Hey,” Angel said.
Xander nodded once, but Cordelia’s face brightened. Buffy watched Cordelia look Angel over as if she were considering bidding on him.
“Hi, Angel,” Cordelia said with a bright smile.
Some people never learn, Buffy thought.
Angel focused on Buffy. “They don’t know anything the way you’re thinking of knowing. But they — we — sense something. A shift of something.”
“What are you —” Buffy stopped and coughed dryly to clear her throat. Every time Angel looked directly into her eyes and spoke to her in that quiet, level voice, her own voice gave out on her like a bad lightbulb. “What are you talking about, Angel? A shift of what?”
He shrugged faintly and his eyes narrowed slightly. “A shift in the balance of power, maybe. Or maybe a shift in you.”
Buffy felt her heart pierced, as if by one of her own stakes. “Are you saying I’ve gained weight?”
“Buffy, I’m being serious,” Angel said.
“You think I’m joking here?” Buffy asked. “What do you mean?”
“Look, Buffy, you’re not focused.”
“What?”
“They do know,” Angel went on. “You’re not focused. You’re spreading yourself thin because of those killings, or maybe because you’ve got personal stuff on your mind. But they sense your distraction and they’re taking advantage of it.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you need to solve your other problems so you can focus on your work.”
Buffy sighed. “I have to do everything around here.” She turned to Xander and Cordelia. “Why are you still here? Why aren’t you on your way home?”
Xander spoke in a mocking, childish voice: “Can we stay up and watch Letterman, Mommy?”
Buffy rolled her eyes. “Do whatever you want. Just do it someplace else, okay? I’ve got vampires to take care of.” She turned and headed back across the street to the cemetery’s entrance.
Angel walked at her side. “Need a little company?”
“A little company?” Buffy chuckled. “Tonight I could use a whole multinational corporation.”
At home, where Willow should have been studying, she was instead silently traveling the endless highways, biways, and subways of the Internet. Ninety minutes ago, she had typed “Rakshasa” into a search engine, and she’d been busy ever since.
There were countless Web sites that mentioned or made brief reference to the Rakshasa, but few with any of the real information she needed. So she’d gone to a Web site she visited frequently called, Gods, Demons, and Mortals. It was a poorly laid-out site with text that tended to ramble, apparently manned by a single person who referred to himself only as Metaphysical Phil.
Willow had exchanged e-mails with him a couple of times. He was an old hippy who spent most of his time on the road in a motor home with his wife — known only as She, practitioner of a cross between Wicca and some kind of transcendental aerobics — traveling the country in search of things to add to their already enormous collection of supernatural lore, much of which was for sale in Phil’s online store.
Phil once wrote in an e-mail to Willow, “The Internet is like a worldwide Woodstock for all the misfits and outcasts on the planet; only instead of mud we’ve got comfortable seats, and instead of bands we’ve got bandwidth, and instead of sex and drugs, we’ve got . . . well, sex. Sort of.” Willow stayed off the Internet for days after that.
Metaphysical Phil might not know much about creating an attractive and organized Web site, but it turned out he knew a whole lot when it came to the Rakshasa. Willow read from the monitor as she printed.
The text included links that led to more text. She found everything Giles had told her easily enough, but there was much more. The Rakshasa had a king who, like them, was a shapeshifter, but a shapeshifter that was not like them at all. The king of all Rakshasa was named Ravana, and his shapeshifting powers were limitless. He could take the form of a large piece of granite jutting up from the earth, or a storm cloud in the sky, or a tuft of woodsmoke curling upward in the distance. He could create enormous storms at sea and tear a mountain down with his bare hands.
“Not that big a trick if you’ve got twenty hands,” Willow muttered at the screen.
Ravana had ten heads, twenty arms, and twenty eyes that burned like the hottest fires. In the accompanying illustration, his thick neck sprouted a carousel of heads that allowed him to see in all directions at once. The arms extended from all around the upper body, ending in powerful-looking, black-clawed hands.
If he started spinning around, Willow thought, he’d look like some kind of way-creepy carnival ride.
Willow remembered Mila mentioning Ravana, but couldn’t remember in what context until she read further. The stories of Ravana all intertwined with the stories of other Hindu gods, weaving a sprawling tapestry of interconnected tales of vengeance, love, betrayal, death, and sometimes murder among gods and demons.
Ravana gained his power through thousands of years of poverty, self-denial, and meditation. When he’d gathered enough power, he went to Brahma — one-third of the Hindu Trinity and creator, with his daughter Vak, of humankind — and asked for the boon of immortality. Brahma refused at first, but was willing to negotiate. Finally, Brahma decided to grant Ravana protection from all the eleme
nts, which made him, if not immortal, then virtually indestructible. There was one thing, however, from which Ravana did not want to receive protection. Because he felt such contempt for them and thought them to be less significant than the smallest fly humming around him, he left himself vulnerable to human beings.
Being indestructible made Ravana a boastful tyrant, and he expected women to fall at his feet, swept away by the very sight of him. When they did not, he dragged them by the hair to his harem, where they were forced to live only to please Ravana. When she got to Ravana’s encounter with Rama, Willow put her hand to her chest and fingered the small hand-carved Rama beneath her shirt, hanging from a delicate silver chain.
Mila kept coming to mind as Willow read. She did not want to consider even the possibility that Mila was involved somehow with the killings in town, but she couldn’t avoid it. It gave her slight feeling of nausea that made her nose wrinkle and her upper lip curl unpleasantly.
Rama, a mortal, was a god incarnate. He was a great hero whose exploits were renowned, and he was happily married to the beautiful Sita. Ravana, an indestructible demon who even had a flying chariot, was never content and always hungered for more of everything. His envy of Rama had long ago turned to a burning hatred after years of fantasizing about how he could reduce Rama to nothing and take all he had. When Ravana heard that Rama had encountered and insulted Ravana’s own sister (who was skanky in ways only the sister of a demon could be), he decided it was time to make his fantasies real.
Ravana kidnapped Sita, dragging her back to Lanka by the hair in his flying chariot. No matter what he did, no matter what form he took or what he said, no matter if he was kind and charming or showed her the storming, shrieking monster he was, Sita resisted him. Given Ravana’s tremendous powers, Willow assumed that meant Sita was pretty damned strong herself.
“You go, girlfriend,” Willow muttered.
Rama went on a long journey and faced many perils to search everywhere for Sita, and it finally ended on the island of Lanka. But to get to Ravana and Sita, Rama first had to pass through a vast forest that was alive with Rakshasa. That last stretch of the journey was a daunting experience, even for Rama, but he got through the forest and confronted Ravana with his bow and arrows. It was a gruesome battle, with a good deal of bloodshed and a lot of disorienting and frightening shapeshifting. Rama’s arrows struck, but were pushed back out by Ravana’s indestructible body. Finally, Rama used an arrow that had been crafted by the god Vishnu and carried his power, thus fulfilling a prophecy that Ravana would be defeated by a mortal.
Of course, that wasn’t the end of Ravana. Nobody ever just died in Hindu mythology; they came back again and again.
“So what’re the Rakshasa doing in Sunnydale?” Willow mumbled to herself. She clicked on a link to an illustration of the Rakshasa.
The confused, dreamlike illustration looked as if the artist had been unable to decide exactly how to draw the creature. It was short and squat, dwarflike, and wore a long cloak that concealed its limbs and body. A lizardlike face peered out from the cloak’s hood. Small but elephantlike earflaps hung from the sides of its overlarge head. Just above each slanted, bloodred eye was a small nub that came to a rounded point; it took a moment for Willow to realize they were horns, like cow horns just beginning to sprout. It almost looked as if the creature were smiling, with the tips of razorlike fangs visible over the lower lip.
Something about the illustration gave Willow an icy chill. She stared at it intensely. She felt almost as if the creature were . . . familiar. That was ridiculous, of course. She knew nothing of Hindu mythology and was sure she had never seen anything like the Rakshasa on the screen before her. But still . . .
The Rakshasa were the minions of Ravana, feverishly devoted to his every whim. They did his bidding without question or hesitation, killed for him, sometimes died for him — and apparently they still managed to find the time to eat a few dogs or a horse now and then.
So, if the Rakshasa are Ravana’s posse, Willow thought, then why isn’t he here with them now?
“Maybe he is,” she replied to herself with a chill down her back.
Willow read through more text, more stories of curses and conquests, and found a list of links to other Ravanarelated Web sites. She clicked on one called Abyss. The link took her directly to a page within the site, rather than going to the main page first. In ornate gold letters at the top of the light-blue page were the words “Resurrecting Ravana.” The black text below was about that very thing — bringing the demon back to life.
Willow felt the slight nervous tremble she felt whenever she found something important. This felt very important. She started the printer, then read from the screen. Her shoulders drooped and she sighed heavily a moment later, when she read that the most important element in raising the Hindu god had been lost.
Nothing could be done without the Ravana statuette. No one knew how old it was or where it had come from, but for something so enigmatic, quite a bit was known about it. The statuette stood a little over two feet tall and was said to be carved from the bones of some of Ravana’s countless victims. It allegedly contained the essence of Ravana, a living force waiting to be reborn. But that rebirth could not be accomplished without the Rakshasa.
Six smaller pieces symbolizing the Rakshasa had to accompany the Ravana statuette. For the resurrection to be completely successful, the Rakshasa had to be summoned first. They moved ahead of their lord and master and prepared for his arrival by sewing seeds of paranoia and suspicion in the immediate area. It was said that their very presence, known or unknown, could have a powerful negative effect on the emotions and behavior of people in the surrounding area. They stirred anger and turned hearts cold. They turned people against one another, turning love into anger, anger into hatred, and finally hatred into murder.
“Yeah!” Willow exclaimed at her laptop. “That’s what we’ve got! They’re here already!”
What started out small after the arrival of the Rakshasa grew into chaos, which was precisely the goal. Ravana stepped with ease into that environment of hatred and murder, and in his presence, it grew. Ravana’s new rule spread out around him with the help of the Rakshasa, and before long, Ravana’s new kingdom would be complete, built on the blood and bones of the human race.
“But what’s the point of ruling if you’re just gonna trash the place?” Willow asked herself at a whisper. The next line she read served as somewhat of an answer to her question:
“Ravana rules in chaos, but it is his own chaos.”
Willow waited for the printer to finish. Her hands were trembling again. She’d been right the first time; the information she’d found was important. It meant — at least, to Willow — that someone was trying to resurrect Ravana . . . if they hadn’t already. They’d gotten at least halfway through the process, because the Rakshasa were active in the town already.
Was it possible that Mila had something to do with it? That she was involved? She understood why Buffy was so certain that Mila was the source of the problem. It was so obvious, such a natural conclusion to reach, but Willow couldn’t believe it. Even when she tried, she could not buy it. Giles had said it was only a possibility, but even that was too much for Willow to accept. She tried to see their side, and she could see it, but it didn’t alter the gut-level trust she had in Mila.
Willow pulled the chain out from beneath her shirt and looked at the tiny figure of Rama that Mila had given her. Was her blind certainty a sign that Buffy was right? Had Mila done something to her? Cast some kind of spell on her? And did it have anything to do with the little stone Rama? If so, then why Rama? He was benevolent, beloved, a hero, a godlike man, the guy who got all the prettiest and most popular girls. If Mila were going to do something bad to her, why would she use the star quarterback of Hinduism to accomplish it? It didn’t make sense.
There was always the chance, of course, that Mila knew absolutely nothing about the whole thing, and would laugh hysterically if Willow
told her.
The Ravana statuette and accompanying six Rakshasa pieces had passed from hand to hand over the centuries. They had been owned by royalty and stolen by common thieves; people had killed and died for them, and they left a path of blood and madness wherever they were. There were periods of decades when no account could be made of the Ravanna statuette’s whereabouts, and then it would turn up in a prestigious museum or in the hands of some prominent collector. It was last seen in a museum in London, from which it had been stolen, around the turn of the century. It had not been seen since.
Someone had found it, though. And for some reason, they had brought it to Sunnydale. Willow clicked on a link to a picture of the statuette. It was a copy of an old black-and-white photo that had yellowed and creased and lost a corner. Little detail could be made out, but what was obviously the statuette stood with three Rakshasa on each side, all seven figures dark and grainy, as if hiding in the shadows.
As if waiting.
She felt a chill on her neck and shoulders and broke out in gooseflesh.
Willow needed to take what she’d found to Giles. But she couldn’t do that until she’d put her own mind at ease about Mila. If Willow was able to stumble over some doubts, then she would be irresponsible not to consider it a possibility, at least. But she felt confident enough to ask Mila to her face. Even though it was late, Willow decided to get a telephone directory and find Promila Daruwalla’s address, then go knock on her door.
If her new friend was trying to resurrect an ancient Hindu demon that was going to spread mayhem and chaos from Sunnydale to the four corners of the globe, Willow wanted to find it out for herself.
Chapter 13
BUFFY AND ANGEL APPROACHED A CONVENIENCE STORE. Angel waited outside while Buffy went in. Inside, the store was like a flourescent bath with awful music. A boombox behind the counter played the deafening white noise of some skater band that probably had a sick name. The clerk sat slumped on a stool, head hanging forward over an open magazine on the counter. There was a dark-haired guy wearing a long black coat in the corner hunched over a pinball machine, his whole body jerking as he hit the bumpers. The machine’s backboard was entirely made up of a demon’s red, horned, grinning face. Each time a player lost a ball, the demon’s eyes glowed green and the mouth opened and closed repeatedly as a deep, hellish laugh made the whole pinball machine tremble.