“You mean, like, in the same room?” Xander said, stalling.
“You know what I mean.”
“Oh, that. Well, let me think, um, yeah, there was—several. I mean, and uh, quite a few times—and then there was—she was incredibly—” Give it up. “No, nuh-uh.”
“I know,” she said, stroking his hair with her lovely hand. “I can tell.”
“You can?” Xander didn’t really want to know that his lack of experience was tattooed on his forehead.
“Oh, I like it,” she said. “You might say . . . I need it.”
“Well, needs should, you know—needs should definitely be met as long as they don’t require ointments the next day or—”
Xander cut himself off. He could’ve sworn he heard someone screaming in the distance. “Do you hear—?”
“No.”
“Sounds like someone crying—”
“I don’t hear anything.” She grabbed his hands. Xander swallowed, as he realized that she grabbed them in the exact same way Buffy did in his fantasy during bio class two days earlier. “Your hands are so—hot,” Ms. French said.
But Xander’s ever-more-muddled brain found itself thinking about the Slayer. “Buffy,” he said dreamily. “I love Buffy.” He looked at his glass with foggy vision. “Wow. So that’s a martini, huh?”
“M-hm,” she said, still caressing his hand.
Again Xander heard the yelling, and this time it sounded distinctly like the words, Somebody help me.
“Do you hear—”
“Would you like to touch me with those hands?” Ms. French asked.
Five minutes earlier, Xander would have said he wanted nothing more in the world, but now he couldn’t get his thoughts to come into focus. He looked down at Ms. French’s hands, still stroking his, and tried to concentrate on them. “Your hands are really—serrated?” Suddenly, they weren’t human hands anymore, but some kind of—what? Not human, whatever they were.
Then the hand-that-wasn’t-a-hand became blurry and indistinct. “That martini—I really think I—”
And then he passed out.
Giles had said he had to make one transatlantic phone call, but he actually made several. According to Willow, he was on his fourth call by the time Buffy returned from her abortive attempt to talk to Xander. Apprently, this Carlyle guy had been transferred to a different loony bin. Night had fallen by the time Giles found the right one.
“Frankly, madam,” came the Watcher’s voice from his office, “I haven’t the faintest idea what time it is, nor do I care. Now unlock his cell, unstrap him, and bring him to the telephone immediately, this is a matter of life and death!”
Buffy, having been on the receiving end of Giles’s ire once or twice herself, didn’t envy the woman on the other end of the line.
“Got it,” Willow said. Buffy joined her at the computer. “Coroner’s report, complete with”—she made a face—“yuck, color pictures.”
Willow backed away from the monitor, but Buffy leaned in closer. Being the Slayer made her extremely difficult to gross out. In fact, she preferred the more controlled carnage of a medical examiner’s report. Vampires tended to be a lot messier when they slashed up a body. This was all neat and orderly.
Well, except for the lack of a head. They never did find that.
She compared the marks on what was left of Dr. Gregory’s neck to those in the textbook. “They are teeth marks,” she said triumphantly, “which match perfectly the one insect that nips off its prey’s head.”
“Okay,” Willow said, “I don’t like this.”
“It’s the way they feed: head first. Also, the way they mate. The female bites off the male’s head while they’re—”
“No, no, no!” Willow said, and Buffy belatedly realized that she perhaps shouldn’t have gotten so graphic. “See, Xander is—I like his head, that’s where you find his eyes and his hair, and his adorable smile . . .”
“Whoa, take it easy, Will,” Buffy said, putting her hand on her friend’s shoulder. “Xander is not in any immediate danger. I saw him leave school—he’s probably safe at home right now.”
Xander awakened to find himself surrounded by—straw? He also no longer sat on Ms. French’s couch, but was on a solid, uncomfortable floor in a very dark room. And, he realized, in a cage.
He looked up to see a giant praying mantis.
But that’s impossible, he thought.
Then he remembered Buffy’s words. “Technically, a big bug.”
Oh boy.
“Ms.—French?” he ventured.
“Please,” said the giant praying mantis in the voice he had fallen in love with, “call me Natalie.”
Oh boy.
Suddenly, a hand grabbed his arm. “Yaaaah!” he cried.
The hand was attached to an arm, which was, in turn, attached to someone in the next cage over. That someone turned out to be: “Blayne?”
Several things were starting to make a sick sort of sense to Xander Harris, primary among them that he was the biggest idiot who ever walked the face of the earth.
“Oh God, oh God, oh God . . .” Blayne was muttering.
“Are you okay?”
“You gotta get me outta here, you gotta—she—she—she gets you and—”
Curiosity warred with revulsion and won. “What? What does she do?”
“Oh God, oh no . . .”
Now that curiosity had won, Xander damn well wanted it satisfied. He reached between the bars and grabbed Blayne by his now-filthy shirt. “Blayne, what does she do?”
“She—she takes you out of the cage and she ties you up. Then she, like, starts moving and throbbing and these eggs come shooting out of her—and then—”
“What? Then what?”
“She mates with you.”
A dream come true under other circumstances, Xander thought. “She—”
“That’s not the worst part,” Blayne said, now on a roll.
“It’s not?”
“Have you seen her teeth? Right while she’s—right in the middle of—I saw her do it!” He pointed at a body in the next cage over from Blayne’s. Like Dr. Gregory’s, it was without benefit of a head. “I don’t want to die like that!”
“Blayne, Blayne, chill. It’s gonna be okay, we’re gonna get out of this.”
“You have a plan?” Blayne asked plaintively. “What is it?”
Reluctant as he was to admit to not being in a superior position to the football jock, Xander lamely said, “Just let me perfect it.”
Blayne didn’t buy it. “Oh God.”
Xander sighed, then decided to try actually forming a plan. Okay, what would Buffy do? He thought a moment, then: She’d bend the bars with her super Slayer strength. Fat lotta good that does me.
Then he looked at the bars to the cage. The metal looked worn in spots. Maybe, just maybe . . .
He pulled at one particularly weak-looking bar for several minutes. Beyond, the giant bug formerly known as Ms. French shuffled around doing whatever it was insects did before mating. Probably doing up her compound eyes just right, Xander thought as he pulled.
Blayne took time away from saying, “Oh God” a lot to finally take notice. “What are you—? Don’t do anything that’ll make her mad.”
Xander ignored Blayne, and finally managed to yank one bar loose.
“Hey, all right,” Blayne said, brightening. “Now I can get out of my cage—into yours.” He frowned. “What’d you do that for?”
Xander held up the bar. “A weapon.”
Blayne looked over at the bug. “I think you’re gonna need it.”
Hiding the bar behind his back, Xander turned to see the bug—That’s right, keep thinking of it as the bug, not Ms. French—ambling toward them. She stopped in front of Blayne’s cage. The pride of the Razorbacks whimpered like a little girl and clambered through the new hole into Xander’s cage.
“He did that! He broke the cage! Take him, not me, take him!”
Way to han
dle the pressure there, Blayne.
The bug then went over to Xander’s cage, where both boys now sat, and pointed at Blayne with her foreleg. Then she pointed at Xander.
Then she pointed at Blayne again.
“What’s she doing?” Xander asked.
“I think it’s eenie, meenie, mynie—”
The foreleg settled on Xander.
Swallowing, Xander finished, “—moe.”
Rupert Giles hadn’t heard Ferris Carlyle’s voice in twenty years, and it appeared that the intervening two decades hadn’t done much for the old boy’s stability.
“I understand, Carlyle. . . . Yes, I’ll take every precaution. . . . Absolutely, it sounds exactly like the creature you described. You were right all along, about everything. . . . Well, no, you weren’t right about your mother coming back as a Pekingese, but . . . Try to rest, old man. . . . Yes. . . . Ta. . . . ’Bye now.”
He hung up the phone with the sensation of having gone crawling in some very unpleasant holes. The old days in Oxford—and afterward—were not memories he chose to revisit often.
Rubbing his left arm briefly, as though it pained him, he rose and went back into the main part of the library, where Buffy and Willow were waiting.
“So now can you tell us about this beast thing?” Buffy asked.
Giles nodded. “Dr. Ferris Carlyle,” he said, “spent years transcribing a lost, pre-Germanic language. What he discovered he kept to himself—until several teenage boys were murdered in the Cotswolds. Then he went hunting for it.”
“ ‘It’ being—?”
“He calls her a She-Mantis. This type of creature, the Kleptes-Virgo, or virgin thief, appears in many cultures: the Greek Sirens, the Celtic sea-maidens who tore the living flesh from the bones of—”
“Giles,” Buffy interrupted, “while we’re young.”
Sighing, Giles reminded himself yet again of this Slayer’s almost nonexistent attention span. “Well, basically, the She-Mantis assumes the form of a beautiful woman and then lures innocent virgins back to her nest.”
“Virgins? Well, Xander’s not a . . . I mean, he’s probably—”
“Gonna die!” Willow finished as she got up and ran to the phone.
“Okay, okay,” Buffy said covering the awkward pause, “so this thing is breeding. And we have to find it and snuff it. Any tips on the snuffing part?”
“Carlyle recommends cleaving all body parts with a sharp blade.”
“Slice and dice,” Buffy said.
Resisting the urge to say, I believe that’s what I said, Giles instead added, “Whatever you do, it had better be sudden and swift. This beast is extremely dangerous.”
“Well, your buddy Carlyle faced it, and he’s still around.”
“Yes,” Giles said with a nod, “in a straitjacket howling his innards out day and night.”
“Okay, Admiral, way to inspire the troops.”
Giles straightened. “Sorry.” Heaven forfend I attempt to inject some gravity into the discussion.
The sound of the phone slamming down came from the desk. “Xander’s not home,” Willow said, walking over to join them. “He told his mom he was going to his teacher’s house to work on a science project. He didn’t tell her where.”
Of course, Giles thought, remembering his own words. She lures innocent virgins back to her nest.
Buffy said, “See if you can get her address off the substitute rolls.” She turned to Giles. “And you need to record bat sonar, and fast.”
Giles nodded. “Bat sonar, right.” Then, realizing he was missing a vital piece of data, he asked, “What?”
“Bats eat them. A mantis hears sonar, its entire nervous system goes kaplooey.”
Kaplooey, slice and dice—these technical terms will make my head spin, Giles thought. “Where am I going to find—?”
“In the vid library,” Buffy said, pushing Giles in that direction. “There are no books, but it’s still dark and musty, you’ll feel right at home. Go!”
Giles went to his office first to get one of the many handheld tape recorders that had been left behind by his predecessor. Behind him, he heard Buffy say, “I guess I’ll handle the armory,” followed soon after by the sound of his weapons locker opening. Giles found a microtape that he had made some notes on when he first arrived at Sunnydale High and no longer needed, stuck it into the handheld, and then ventured into the video library, where he had to admit he hadn’t gone very often. Neither had the students, as it happened—the collection mostly consisted of educational materials that the faculty would use, including, he soon discovered, one on bats.
There was equipment that could make a sophisticated audio recording of something on videotape, but Giles hadn’t a clue how to operate it, and there wasn’t time in any case. He located the proper tape—noting with sadness that the last person to use the tape, according to the log, was Michael Gregory—and put it in. Once it got round to showing sonar, Giles simply put the handheld to the television speaker and hit play and record.
Ten molar-grinding minutes later, he had recorded what he prayed was enough. He rewound the tape, played enough to hear that it recorded, then noticed that the battery light was flashing. Not wanting the batteries to run dry in the middle of a fight, Giles transferred the tape to another handheld.
He reentered the main part of the library just as the computer printed out a piece of paper for Willow. “Getting the address,” she said.
“Great,” said Buffy, who was placing her packed duffel on the table. “Giles?”
“Recording bat sonar,” he announced while giving Buffy the handheld, “is something soothingly akin to having one’s teeth drilled.”
“Let’s roll,” Buffy said.
The three of them headed for the door. As they did, Willow perused the paper she had just liberated from the printer. “According to Ms. French’s personnel records, she was born in 1907. She’s like ninety years old.”
“She is extremely well preserved,” Giles said dryly.
It didn’t take long to find the French residence at 837 Weatherly Drive. Giles parked in front of the house, and Slayer, Watcher, and student piled out.
“What now?” Giles asked as they approached the door. “We can’t just kick the front door down.”
“Yeah, that would be wrong,” Buffy said just as she prepared to kick the front door down.
Before she could, however, the door opened to reveal a wizened old woman wearing a cardigan sweather and thick, plastic glasses. “Hello, dear,” she said. “I thought I heard . . . Are you selling something? Because I’d like to help you out, but you see I’m on a fixed income.”
Buffy said slowly, “I’m looking for Ms. French.”
“I’m Miss French,” the woman said proudly.
“Natalie French,” Buffy clarified, “the substitute biology teacher.”
“Goodness, that’s me,” the old woman said with a warm smile. “I taught for over thirty years. I retired in nineteen seventy-two.”
Suddenly, everything clicked in Giles’s head. Ms. French’s record stating that she was born in 1907 made a good deal more sense.
Buffy, having obviously come to the same conclusion, said, “I can’t believe this. She used Ms. French’s records to get in the school—she could be anywhere.”
“No, dear,” the old woman said, “I’m right here.”
“What do we do now?” Willow asked verging on panic.
“Abject prayer and supplication would spring to mind,” Giles muttered. He had to admit to being stumped. He had assumed the She-Mantis’s insectoid nature to be responsible for what Buffy would have called “the age thing.” The idea of appropriating someone’s identity simply hadn’t occurred to him.
“I saw her walking past this park with her grocery bags,” Buffy said, pointing at the nearby Weatherly Park. “She lives in this neighborhood.”
Willow started moving toward one of the other houses. “I’m gonna start banging on doors.”
“Wait, no,” Buffy said, grabbing her, “we don’t have time for that.”
“We have to do something!” Willow cried, sounding as pained as Giles had ever heard her. He hadn’t realized until that moment just how deep Willow Rosenberg’s feelings for Xander were.
“We will,” Buffy said, hauling her duffel and heading for the street.
She stopped in front of a sewer cover, dropped the duffel, and pulled out a good length of rope. Then she removed the cover with such ease that Giles had to remind himself how heavy those things actually were.
“I won’t be long,” she said, and then disappeared into the sewer.
For several tense millennia—though his watch insisted only three minutes passed—Giles and Willow crouched by the sewer opening. At one point, he called her name, but to no response. He wondered what on earth she was doing.
“Come on, Buffy,” Willow muttered.
Finally, Giles remembered that their one-handed vampire had taken to living in the sewers. Did she intend to use the so-called “claw guy” as an insect Geiger counter?
He heard the sounds of a struggle in the bushes behind him. As he got up to look, Buffy popped out, along with a large, long-haired vampire whose hands had been tied behind his back. Or, rather, hand, singular. “You!” the vampire said, apparently seeing Buffy clearly for the first time.
“Me,” Buffy said with a smile. Then she grabbed him from behind and started pushing him down the sidewalk. “Come on, come on, where is she?”
Giles, following behind with Willow, saw that his suspicions were correct. Vampires could obviously sense the She-Mantis’s true nature. Perhaps because her blood is of no use to them. In any case, Buffy intended to use the vampire to flush her out.
“Which house is it? I know you’re afraid of her, I saw you. Come on, come on!”
They passed one of those tiresome American splitlevels with a white picket fence, and suddenly the vampire tensed.
“What?” Buffy prompted. “What is it? This is the entrance to her house? This is it?”
The vampire said nothing in response, but turned away. Giles then got a glance at the creature’s face and—despite what Buffy had said earlier—was shocked to see fear there.
THE XANDER YEARS, Vol. 1 Page 5