Buffy the Vampire Slayer 3

by Nancy Holder

  EPILOGUE

  Monday was Mayor Richard Wilkins’s favorite day of the week. And Monday morning was the best time of his favorite day. The offices of city hall positively buzzed with activity and energy. His staff reported for work, well rested from their weekend, optimistic and ready to face the week’s challenges. It was truly the time when all seemed most possible.

  This particular Monday was especially gratifying, as many of his staff members had been out of the office sick toward the end of the previous week. The Mayor himself had only worked a half day on Thursday before heading home with what felt like a bad case of the flu and remaining in bed until Saturday morning. But the Mayor was pleased to see that everyone was attacking their work on this beautiful Monday morning with both gusto and verve.

  There was a knock on his office door so slight that he almost missed it what with closing and refolding the comics section of the morning newspaper.

  That Allan, always so cautious, the Mayor thought to himself. He had often wondered whether or not that was really a good thing. Deference and respect were important. But so was confidence. He made a mental note to recommend Allan for an upcoming Dale Carnegie Leadership Seminar. It would do the young man good.

  “Come in,” Mayor Wilkins said pleasantly. Allan entered the office carrying a number of file folders, undoubtedly for the Mayor’s review. He looked as if whatever he had eaten for breakfast that morning had not agreed with him.

  “Good morning, sir,” Allan said quietly. It was like he knew he had to say it but at the same time wished he could express the sentiment and not be in the same room with his boss.

  “Good morning,” the Mayor replied with a smile. “I’m no psychic, Allan, but I don’t think I need to be one to see those dark stormclouds hanging over your head this morning.”

  The Mayor rose from the chair behind his desk and caught the brief flinch Allan made before retreating as casually as he could back toward the office door, still clutching his file folders.

  Undeterred, the Mayor continued the short walk around to the front of his desk, where he then perched himself and crossed his arms.

  “I know. It’s no fun taking your medicine, but best to just swallow it down and move on. What’s the bad news, Allan?” he asked evenly. “What could possibly spoil such a beautiful spring day?”

  Allan swallowed hard. “Sir, it’s Todd Harter.”

  The Mayor’s eyes darted to Allan’s. He held his assistant’s gaze for a moment, just long enough to be certain that the rest of that sentence was not going to have a happy ending.

  “Go on,” the Mayor said gamely.

  “He … he … he’s dead, sir,” Allan finally finished. The Mayor sat for a moment as Allan studied his face, no doubt anticipating the disappointment with which the Mayor would greet this news.

  The Mayor rose from his desk, paced a few times to and fro before it, then paused to say, “Well, that’s a darn shame.”

  Allan’s relief was so obvious, the Mayor almost thought he might burst into song right then and there.

  Come to think of it, there are ways to make that happen, the Mayor mused. Could be fun for a while.

  “Cause of death?” the Mayor asked, getting back on track.

  “Um, severe”—Allan paused, searching for the right word—“anemia,” he replied.

  “I see,” the Mayor said sadly, then added, “He was such a bright young man, and with a promising future ahead of him.”

  “I have assembled a list of other potential candidates for the position, sir,” Allan added quickly. He then approached the Mayor, holding out his precious file folders.

  The Mayor nodded appreciatively. “Leave them on the desk. I’ll review them later this afternoon,” he said. He was pleased to note that Allan had labeled the folders “Candidate 1,” “Candidate 2,” etc., rather than “Potential Slayer Assassins,” and for that he was grateful. Discretion was a difficult quality to come by in assistants at Allan’s level, and the young man was proving that he possessed that in abundance.

  “Anything else?” the Mayor asked as Allan turned toward the door.

  “Not at the moment, sir,” Allan replied.

  “Very good.”

  Allan had almost made it out when the Mayor added, “Oh, Allan?”

  The young man turned back, as if he knew he had escaped too easily. “Yes, sir?”

  “Did I hear that one of our local vampires decided to turn a child last week?”

  “Uh, I believe so, yes.” Allan nodded.

  “Am I wrong, or is that just not done?” the Mayor asked.

  “It is … unusual, sir,” Allan replied, choosing his words extremely carefully.

  “Check into it for me, will you?” the Mayor asked pleasantly. “Can’t have the demon population running completely amok on my watch, can we?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Excellent.” The Mayor nodded. “Carry on.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Allan said, then hurried from the office, closing the door quietly behind him.

  Once he was alone again, the Mayor stood for a moment before his desk, considering the file folders. Though he was certain that Allan had assembled a strong list for him, he doubted that the right person combined with the right opportunity was anywhere among them. Slayers were both a blessing and a curse, in the Mayor’s experience. On the one hand, they did keep the vampire population under something resembling control. That was good for the city and, therefore, good for city hall. On the other hand, they were a powerful force for good. The Mayor didn’t mind that, in theory. But as he had carefully laid out his time line for the next twelve months, it had occurred to him that things would be considerably less complicated for him if Sunnydale’s Slayer were to meet her end well before next May, and the next Slayer to be activated come from a place very far from Southern California.

  It was a nice thought. Long-range strategic planning was one of the Mayor’s strong suits, after all. But it was doubtful that he was going to find another human being with Todd’s advantages, the ability to get close to the Slayer for a plausible reason and then betray her when she was at her weakest. If memory served, the Slayer’s eighteenth birthday would be coming up in a few months and her Cruciamentum, her rite of passage trial of strength, might provide another such opportunity, but whatever the Mayor chose to do, he would have to play it very carefully. Above all, he must remain as far from suspicion as it was possible to get until the last hundred days before his Ascension.

  And who knew? Maybe Buffy Summers would find a way to get herself killed well before then with or without his interference. Slayers weren’t known for their longevity. It was an unfortunate occupational hazard. At least the second Slayer, Kendra, who had only come to the Mayor’s attention a few weeks earlier, lived very far from Sunnydale. With a little luck, they might never cross paths.

  Despite Allan’s efforts, the Mayor decided that the files he’d brought him that morning were best kept out of sight. He collected them and crossed to the wall opposite his desk, which was hung with some of the many commendations and certificates he’d received over his many years of public service in Sunnydale. Reaching for a recessed button in the wall, he opened a hidden compartment that displayed memorabilia and commendations of a very different order, though also a memorial of sorts to the many services he had provided to the city in his several hundred years as a resident.

  A number of personal files were kept in this cabinet, along with an impressive display of ceremonial swords, daggers, a few potions too dangerous to leave out, and the odd ancient artifact. One such artifact caught his attention as he placed the file folders in a secret drawer: a shrunken head, a power source for the demon Vrachtung, which was adorned with a necklace of human toes. Vrachtung was one of the Mayor’s oldest acquaintances, and a heck of a card player.

  The Mayor took a moment to look closely at the string of toes and decided that his eyes were not playing tricks on him. The fourth toe from the right end, a toe that hung just b
elow Vrachtung’s tiny Adam’s apple, had withered and blackened sometime in the last few days.

  Who was that?

  The Mayor searched his mind and finally found the memory he was seeking.

  “Polly Snyder,” he said softly to himself.

  Such a nice lady. And a promising demon. I wonder what happened to her.

  The Mayor considered contacting Vrachtung to find out, but decided it could keep until the next biannual conclave. The withered toe told him that poor Polly was no longer living, dead, or undead. In time, that toe would fall from Vrachtung’s necklace and disappear completely.

  Poor dear, the Mayor thought. I wonder if Cecil knows?

  Though Cecil Snyder had first placed himself in the Mayor’s power years earlier with this initial transaction, he had proved over the years to be a faithful lackey. The Mayor no longer worried that his only hold over Snyder had been the knowledge of that old contract. Once he’d pulled the strings necessary to get him appointed as principal of Sunnydale High, he knew that Snyder would always be his to command.

  The Mayor made a quick mental note to send a brief condolence card to Cecil, then closed his secret cabinet and returned to his desk.

  He had a very busy year ahead of him.

  BLOODED

  TO TOM.

  I’M SORRY THERE ARE NO MONKEYS.

  —C. G.

  TO THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER,

  KENNETH PAUL JONES, AND THE HAPPY

  MEMORIES OF OUR YEARS IN JAPAN.

  —N. H.

  The authors would like to thank: our agents, Lori Perkins and Howard Morhaim, and Howard’s assistant, Lindsay Sagnette; also, our editor at Archway/Minstrel, Lisa Clancy, and her assistant, Elizabeth Shiflett. Our gratitude to Caroline Kallas, Joss Whedon, and the entire cast and crew of Buffy. Thanks to our patient and supportive spouses, Connie and Wayne, and to our children, Nicholas and Daniel Golden, and Belle Holder, who remind us daily what it’s all about.

  PROLOGUE

  The front row of the old Majestic Theatre was filled with corpses. Glassy-eyed, their throats ripped out, the dead had the best seats in the house.

  But the final curtain had yet to fall, and as far as Buffy Summers was concerned, until it did, there was no telling how the show would end.

  Time for a little improv, she thought.

  She’d have been way more confident about the whole scene if not for the fact that she was without a clue as to what the hairy, loudmouthed, badly-in-need-of-Weight-Watchers vampire—who called himself King Lear, of all things—had done with Xander and Cordelia.

  A single spotlight shone down from the balcony on the heavy red velvet curtain that hung across the stage. The Majestic was ancient, but still beautiful despite its state of disrepair. Kind of like Mrs. Paolillo, who had subbed as Buffy’s English teacher for three days the week before. Dust spun in the beam of the spot, and the rest of the theater was dark.

  Amazingly, the Majestic had existed as a venue for musicals and stage plays until two or three years earlier and had never been transformed into a movie theater.

  “I … well, I do suppose you realize that this is a trap?” Giles whispered behind her.

  Buffy rolled her eyes. “Come on, Giles, give me some credit,” she said, sighing. “I may not like being the Chosen One, but I’ve been Little Miss Vampire Slayer long enough to know when I’m being set up.”

  “Yes, um, quite right then,” Giles mumbled. “It’s only that …”

  “Only that there are four majorly ravenous bloodsuckers in the balcony above our heads?” Buffy whispered.

  “That would be it, yes,” Giles replied. “Remind me again why I persist in joining you on these excursions. You do seem fully capable of handling them on your own.”

  Buffy reached into her Slayer’s bag and handed Giles a large wooden crucifix and a long, tapered stake.

  “One hundred people surveyed, top five answers on the board,” Buffy quipped. “Number one answer: Giles has no social life!”

  Despite the tension that filled the darkened aisles of the theater, Buffy had a half smile on her face as she turned to look at Giles. He sputtered, cocking his head the way he did when he wanted to look as though he were majorly offended. Rupert Giles was her mentor. As her Watcher, he was responsible for the Slayer’s training and general well-being. As her friend, he had to put up with all kinds of teasing. Starting with the fact that he was Sunnydale’s high school librarian—so totally the honey-magnet occupation of all time—as well as a bit of a stiff.

  But Giles was her uptight Englishman, and Buffy wasn’t about to let anything happen to him. Which meant that in about two seconds she was going to have to knock him on his woolen-clad behind yet again.

  “Giles, down!” Buffy snapped.

  Her smile disappeared as the Slayer went into action. She was all business as she stepped forward, bumped Giles with a hip to send him stumbling into a row of wood-and-metal folding seats, and held a sharpened stake above her head.

  It was rainin’ vampires.

  The first one came down on her stake. He weighed close to two hundred pounds, and she started to buckle under his falling corpse. She’d planned to fall, roll, spring up again. But she didn’t need to bother. The second the stake pierced his heart, the vamp exploded in a shower of ashes. Two others came down at the same time, and one of them tagged her arm, grabbing the fabric of her blouse as he landed. A button popped at her neck and her sleeve tore.

  “Ooh!” she grunted. “You are not my friend.”

  Buffy launched a kick at the vampire’s jaw that snapped its head back hard. She followed with a roundhouse kick at its solar plexus. The other one came at her from the side, and she ducked and used the vamp’s own momentum to send him flying into the seats. The one who had ripped her blouse came after her again, snarling.

  Buffy snarled back. She blocked his attack and drove the stake up through the vampire’s ribs and into its heart.

  “That was silk,” she snapped, and turned her back on him even before he turned to dust.

  A few rows up the aisle, Giles cracked his heavy cross across the head of the vampire Buffy had thrown into the seats. As she watched, her mentor staked the vamp in fine style for a guy who was fortysomething going on seventysomething and, well, not the Slayer. Still, Giles knew his stuff. Knew enough to teach Buffy more than the average red-blooded American high school girl ever needed to know about fighting vampires, demons, and the forces of darkness.

  But, hey, who wanted to be average, anyway?

  Well, actually, Buffy did. But they’d been over that so many times.

  “You seem a bit rusty, Buffy,” Giles said, straightening his tie. “Which leads me to wonder if I’ve been too lenient of late.”

  “Am I the only one who’s noticed you’re still breathing?” Buffy asked.

  “Hmm?” Giles said, focusing on Buffy again. He did have a tendency to get distracted. “Of course not. And I do thank you for that, very much indeed. It’s simply that I’m concerned that against a more powerful vampire, your technique might require—”

  “Giles,” Buffy said.

  He prattled on. “—a bit more of a—”

  “Giles!” Buffy shouted.

  She ran for him, but too late. Another vampire had leaped out from the balcony above them and fallen on him. Buffy felt her adrenaline surge as she considered the horrible idea that something awful might actually happen to somebody close to her. It had happened before.

  Fortunately, Giles was quicker on the uptake than his absentmindedness seemed to indicate. He fell under the weight of the vampire, but even as Buffy reached for the bloodsucker, the vampire did that extremely rewarding dust-detonation thing. Giles had managed to turn the broken end of his large wooden crucifix up, and the vampire had impaled himself on it.

  “You did remember that I said there were four of them up there, didn’t you?” Buffy asked as she helped Giles to his feet.

  “Hmm? Oh, yes,” Giles replied as he wipe
d the dead-again ash from his glasses. “Just a bit distracted is all.”

  “Maybe you should work on your technique,” Buffy said.

  “Yes, well, you do have a point,” he conceded. “But perhaps we should concentrate on finding Xander and Cordelia before this Lear fellow decides they’ve outlived their usefulness as bait,” Giles replied.

  Buffy grimaced, eyebrows knitted. She was plenty focused; nothing was more important than getting Xander and Cordy out of there safely. That’s why she and Giles had split up from Willow and Angel to begin with. But she was nervous and angry, and sarcasm helped her with both feelings.

  “Haven’t you ever heard of whistling in the dark?” she asked.

  With a sudden, metallic whoosh, the curtains began to draw open. Buffy and Giles moved quickly down the aisle toward the stage. The Slayer was careful not to pay too much attention to the not-so-grateful dead in the first row, right in front of the orchestra pit. She’d seen more corpses than a serial killer, but it never got any easier.

  “Why am I always the life of the party?” she whispered to herself, and grimaced at her silent answer. Because I’m always the only one still alive!

  There was a second curtain at the back of the stage. Buffy figured the layout of the Majestic was a lot more complicated than the auditorium at Sunnydale High, where they’d held their talentless show. But even that stage had four or five curtains. It looked like they were going to have to go onstage, maybe take the spotlight, even, if they wanted to find out what Lear had done with Xander and Cordelia.

  On the other hand, it wasn’t as if the huge bad dude didn’t know they were there. Which gave her an idea.

  “What are you waiting for, Lear?” she shouted. “The audience is here!”

  Giles stared at her like she was, well, her, and Buffy had to admit that though she enjoyed taunting pompous vampires who looked like Santa’s evil twin, doing so when said obese, bloodsucking actor-guy was holding some of your friends hostage was generally a not so specially good idea. But she’d figured with an ego like Lear’s …