He stopped himself as he looked into her eyes.
Her eyes looked back.
Right now, he wanted nothing more in the world than to kiss Ampata. And he was fairly sure she wanted the same thing.
They kissed.
It was an amazing kiss.
Then Xander felt like the life was being sucked out of him, and the kiss suddenly became somewhat less amazing . . .
CHAPTER 7
Buffy had been worried when the doorbell rang. She thought it might be Willow deciding to bag the dance and come over to Buffy’s to mope over Xander.
She was rather confused to see Giles on the other side of the door.
“Thank heavens you’re home,” he said and barreled right on in.
As she closed the door behind him, she said, “Yup. Not at the dance. Not with my friends. Not with a life.” Giles seemed unmoved by this attempt at guilt, so she moved on. “What are you doing here? I thought we were going to meet at the museum to find the bodyguard.”
“No, he’s already been found in the school restroom—mummified.”
Buffy frowned. “Okay, I don’t get it. Why would the mummy kill her own bodyguard?”
“Well, I’ve cross-referenced and I’ve looked at the pictograms anew. He was a guard all right, but it was his job to ensure that the mummy didn’t awaken and escape.”
“So Ampata translated wrong?” Makes sense, Buffy thought. She’s just a kid after all.
And yet . . .
“Perhaps,” Giles said.
“Hang on a sec. She was wiggy about the seal from minute one.”
“Yes, I suppose she was,” Giles agreed.
“Her trunks,” Buffy said, and ran upstairs.
Following, Giles said, “I beg your pardon?”
“There was something weird about her luggage,” Buffy said as she went into her room. The suitcase and two trunks were present. Buffy noticed that Ampata had put a padlock on one of the trunks—the one Buffy had been about to open when Xander arrived. “Take a look at the clothes,” she said to Giles.
The Watcher looked through the luggage a bit hesitantly at first, until he realized that all the clothes were of the male variety. “These are certainly all boys’ clothes. Why would a girl pack these?”
Buffy knelt down at the second trunk, broke off the lock with a flick of the wrist, and opened it.
She got a whiff of staleness. And decay. Not surprising, really, considering that the trunk contained a mummified corpse. Latest in a series, collect ’em all.
“How about this one? What kind of girl travels with a mummified corpse and doesn’t even pack lipstick?”
Giles breathed out slowly. “Obviously, Ampata is our mummy.”
“And our murderer. Giles, she’s at the dance with Xander!”
Nodding, Giles said, “We need to get to the Bronze posthaste.”
They ran downstairs and out to Giles’s car. Buffy climbed into the passenger seat as Giles got in on the driver’s side. It took three tries for the car to start, and then it inched along down the road.
Buffy groaned. She could’ve walked faster. “Come on—can’t you put your foot down?”
“It is down,” Giles said testily.
“One of these days, you’re gonna have to get a grown-up car.”
Giles just gave her another one of his looks.
Looking ahead through the windshield, Buffy said, “I should’ve guessed. Remember? Ampata wanted us to hide the seal.”
Giles nodded. “And then she wanted us to destroy it, because—wait.”
After a moment, Buffy prompted, “Waiting.”
“Well, we already know that the seal was used to contain the mummy. If breaking it freed her—”
“Reassembling it will trap her,” Buffy finished. That’s two plans in one day. Not bad for a stuffy old Brit and a perky young Slayer.
“I’ll go to the museum,” Giles said, making a turn that would finally get them to the Bronze. “I’ll drop you off, then I’ll try to piece together the fragments there.”
Nodding, Buffy said, “Okay. I’ll get Xander before he gets smootchie with Mummy Dearest.”
Buffy didn’t even wait for the car to stop before she leaped out, slamming the door shut behind her. Giles drove off toward the museum.
She wasted a full minute explaining to Dave the bouncer why she didn’t have a costume. It seemed that the house rules for the evening were that no one was to be let in unless they represented a particular culture. Eventually, she convinced Dave that she was dressed as a Canadian farmer, and he let her in.
Making a mental note to strangle Dave once the crisis was past, she plowed her way through an international smorgasbord of teenagers. She didn’t see Xander or Ampata, but she did eventually see Willow wearing, of all things, an eskimo suit.
“Where’s Xander?”
“He’s looking for Ampata.”
“We need to find them. Ampata is the mummy.”
Willow’s eyes widened. “Oh.” Then she smiled with a viciousness Buffy wouldn’t have expected from her. “Good.” Then her face fell in much more Willowlike horror. “Xander!”
“Where’d they go?”
“Backstage, I think,” Willow said as the two of them moved off in that direction.
Xander’s experiences with kisses were appallingly limited, but even so, he was pretty sure that this was intense as it got. It really did feel like the life was being sucked out of him.
Then, again, Ampata broke it off. “No!” she cried. “I can’t!”
Xander fell to the floor, completely drained. He’d heard about kisses that could take your breath away, but this was ridiculous.
Ampata knelt down beside him. “Xander, I am so sorry.”
He wanted to ask her what she was sorry for, but he couldn’t work up the energy to form the words.
Suddenly, she stood up and put her hands to her head. “The seal,” she said through clenched teeth, like she was in pain or something.
Then she ran off.
“Ampata . . .” Xander croaked. Then he just lay there. His strength started to come back to him. Slowly.
“Are you okay?”
The voice startled him. He looked up to see Buffy, still in her overalls, and Willow, still in her eskimo suit. I thought Buffy was going to the museum with Giles. . . .
“I think so,” he said slowly in answer to the question. “Boy, that was some kiss.”
“Where’s Ampata?”
Xander had just been about to ask the same question. He tried to bring his thoughts into focus. “She said something about the seal.”
Buffy stood up. “The seal. Giles. Come on!”
The conversation was making less and less sense. “What’s going on?”
“He doesn’t know,” Willow said.
Doesn’t know what? he thought.
“We’ll tell him on the way,” Buffy said as she and Willow helped him up and back out into the main part of the Bronze.
* * *
The princess had sworn she would never come back to this hated place, but she found herself once again at the Treasures of South America exhibit.
When that idiot boy with the braces had broken the seal, she at last attained freedom after five centuries of dying hell. No matter what, she could not allow the seal to be repaired. She would never go back to her former existence. She had a reason to live now.
She had Xander. And she would let nothing take him away from her.
As she approached the exhibit, she heard a familiar voice. “ ‘Inca cosmology unites the Bird-Head with its paler twin.’ ” A pause, then: “Oh, yes—its paler twin.”
It was that archivist, Giles. He was obviously attempting to patch the Seal. Damn him! He reminded her of the high priest. So smug, so superior. Always telling her how noble it was for her to die for Sebancaya. As if he had any idea what it was he asked of me. As if this fool has any idea what he is condemning me to.
She saw him now, kneeling by her tom
b. He was reading from one of his texts. “ ‘The Condor soars, but the prey is in his talons.’ That’s it.”
He then started piecing more of the seal together. The princess could feel its power calling to her.
No!
Her arms and legs had completely withered. Soon her entire body would decay, and then she would be helpless. She summoned her strength and moved to the dais.
“ ‘The spondylus shell evokes Mamacocha, Mother of All the Water.’ Well, that’s it. Just one more piece.”
Reaching with a gnarled hand, she tore the seal from the archivist’s grasp and hurled it away. It shattered, its hold on her broken forever.
With her other hand, she grabbed the archivist by the throat and squeezed. She did not kill him, however. He could not be drained if he was dead.
As she leaned in for the kiss, a voice sounded from behind and below her. “I’ll say one thing for you Incan mummies, you don’t kiss and tell.”
The princess whirled around to see Buffy standing at the entrance. The American girl then leaped up to the platform on which the sarcophagus sat, and landed in a fighting position. The princess was surprised. Buffy had shown no such abilities before.
Dropping the archivist’s unconscious form into the tomb, the princess said, “Looks like you’ve been keeping some secrets from me. You’re not a normal girl.”
Buffy snorted. “Oh, and you are?” And then she whirled and kicked at the princess twice, then followed it with a punch.
Anyone else would have been felled by these blows, but the princess was stronger than that, even in her weakened state. She grabbed Buffy’s wrist in midpunch and flipped her around to the edge of the sarcophagus.
The girl is powerful. She should last me for days, the princess thought as she leaned in to kiss Buffy.
But Buffy was more difficult prey than the archivist. She head-butted the princess, sending her reeling. Buffy followed that with another kick, which the princess ducked.
Buffy charged, and again the princess was able to turn her attack against her and toss her into the sarcophagus. Then she closed the lid.
She and the archivist would keep. The princess needed to feed before she could take Buffy on again. She could feel the strength flowing out of her. She had to find another victim.
Turning a corner, she crashed into Willow, no longer wearing the outfit of the people to the north. Forcing her weakening fingers to work, she clasped one hand around a now-terrified Willow’s throat. “This won’t hurt.”
“Let her go!” said the voice the princess did not want to hear.
She turned to see Xander. No, my love, please, I did not want you to see me like this!
“If you’re gonna kiss anybody, it should be me,” Xander said.
The princess could feel the tears welling in her eyes. “Xander, we can be together, just let me have this one.”
“That’s never gonna happen.”
The feeling was leaving her arms and legs. Soon they would be useless unless she could feed.
“I must do it,” she said urgently. “I must do it now, or it is the end. For me and for us.” She moved in on Willow.
“No!” Xander cried, and leaped between them, throwing Willow aside. The princess did not have the arm strength to resist. The weakness had crept up to her torso now. She barely had the ability to put her hands on Xander’s shoulders.
He looked into her eyes. Those same eyes that gazed upon her with love less than an hour ago now stared at her with anger. “You want life, you’re gonna have to take mine. Can you do that?”
Fear gripped the princess. The seal had kept her preserved, but she had destroyed the seal and killed the Guardian. The instruments of the curse were removed, and the only pracitioners of Sebancaya’s will were centuries dead.
If she died now, she would die forever.
She could not face that. She had finally tasted life, and she would not, could not let it go.
Not even for Xander.
“Yes,” she said hungrily, leaning in with the last of her strength to kiss him for one final time.
Then she heard the sound of the sarcophagus lid being thrown to the floor. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Buffy leaping toward her.
The princess no longer had even the strength to turn her head to face Buffy.
Buffy grabbed her by the shoulders and tore her away from Xander.
The last thing the princess saw were her arms, which had been ripped from their sockets, still clinging to dear, sweet Xander.
The last thing she felt was the impact against the floor.
Then, oblivion.
Xander hadn’t slept well that night. The rather gross image of Ampata’s disembodied arms still clinging to his shoulders even as the rest of her shattered into a thousand pieces after Buffy threw her to the floor simply wouldn’t go away.
The next morning, he and Buffy walked through the quad before homeroom. Buffy was sipping on a soda. She silently offered him a sip, which he just as silently declined.
Xander’s great desire to not talk warred with his instinctive need to constantly talk, and the latter finally won out. “I’m really the Fun Talking Guy today, huh? Sorry.”
“That’s okay,” Buffy said. “We don’t have to talk.”
Sighing, Xander said, “I just—” He cut himself off, not sure if he should say what he wanted to say. Then, Why not? What do I have to lose?
“Present company excluded,” he said, “I have the worst taste in women of anyone in the world, ever.”
“Ampata wasn’t evil,” Buffy said. “At least not to begin with. And I do think she cared about you.”
“Yeah, but I think the whole sucking-the-life-out-of-people thing would’ve been a strain on the relationship.”
He thought about the real Ampata Gutierrez, whose no doubt anticipated trip to America ended in a smelly bus depot at the hands of a long-dead mummy. He thought about the bodyguard, who simply tried to do his job. He even thought about Rodney Munson, who had been Scuzzy Punk Poster Boy for ten years running. None of them, not even Rodney, deserved what happened to them.
“She was gyped,” Buffy then said. “She was just a girl and she had her life taken away from her. I remember how I felt when I heard the prophecy that I was gonna die. I wasn’t exactly obsessed with doing the right thing.”
“Yeah, but you did. You gave up your life.”
Buffy smiled. “I had you to bring me back.”
Xander returned the smile. Maybe nothing would come of his feelings for Buffy, but right now, he could deal with that. It was worth it, for the moment, just to have her there.
They continued walking in companionable silence.
TONIGHT, PART 3
In retrospect, of course, those were innocent times—at least by comparison. After all, Angel and Buffy seemed to be doing well, as did Giles and Ms. Calendar. Willow even found someone: Oz, the guitar player from Dingoes Ate My Baby.
Xander had been more than a little dubious about Oz. Sure, he took a bullet for Willow when one of the Tarakan assassins shot at Buffy in a crowded hallway, but still, Xander had been concerned. However, when Oz learned the truth about Sunnydale—after Buffy staked a vampire right in front of him—he seemed fairly mellow about it.
And then, of course, there was the fact that Oz was a werewolf . . .
However, the arrival of those Tarakan assassins led to another significant change in Xander’s life.
It all started when Xander and Cordelia had gone to Buffy’s place early one morning. The Slayer had gone missing and not checked in. Spike and Drusilla had hired the Tarakan assassins, three supernatural bounty hunters. Buffy and Angel had taken care of one, and then Buffy had disappeared. They would later learn that Angel had been kidnapped by Spike and Dru, and Buffy had taken refuge from the assassins in Angel’s apartment.
While Xander searched the empty house, Cordelia let in a door-to-door makeup salesman. Unfortunately, he turned out to be one of the assassins: a creature
made entirely out of worms.
The pair of them managed to hide in the basement, duct-taping the door shut to keep the worms out.
Stuck in a basement with Cordelia Chase would never have been at the top of Xander’s list of favorite things to do. Cordelia apparently felt the same way. They spent the entire time arguing.
“I can’t believe I’m stuck here spending what are probably my last moments on earth with you!” Cordelia had said.
“I hope these are my last moments! Three more seconds of you, and I’m gonna—”
“You’re gonna what? Coward!”
“Moron!”
“I hate you!”
“I hate you!”
Over twelve years, Xander and Cordelia had played plenty of scenes with this dialogue, but never before with this passion. Their arguing had always been of the dry-zinger variety—an insult here, a tossed-off witticism there.
This was the first time there was any major emotion in it.
After exchanging vows of undying hatred with Cordelia, Xander’s blood was rushing, his heart was pounding, and he was filled with a deep, powerful, intellectual loathing—
And a much deeper, much more powerful urge to kiss her.
He reached for her just as she reached for him.
Unlike his kiss with Ampata, which was draining, this kiss with Cordelia seemed to feed on itself and grow more intense with each passing second. It was as if they’d both taken the vitriol and frustration they’d built up over their time trapped in the basement and thrown it all into one spit-swap.
After a dozen eternities, they broke the kiss.
“We so need to get out of here,” Xander said emphatically, and Cordelia heartily agreed.
They managed to escape thanks to some quick thinking and liberal use of a garden hose. Eventually, the Tarakan assassins were dispatched, Angel was rescued, and Spike and Drusilla got a large church organ dropped on their heads. All in all, a happy ending.
Except for this one niggling problem. Cordy and Xander both agreed that what happened in the basement was a mistake. They did not agree on whose fault it was. In fact, they argued over that very subject for almost a full minute—right up until the point where they started kissing again.
THE XANDER YEARS, Vol. 1 Page 11