by Nancy Holder
To the left of the wailing multitude, the local noble family sat on white tatami mats clothed in their formal kimonos adorned with the Fujiwara clan crest. They sat unmoving, like statues, mute and pale with grief. Sanno knew them well. Husband, wife, and son he saw, but not their beautiful daughter, Gemmyo, named after the empress who had reigned some seventy years before.
Of late Sanno had thought of marrying Gemmyo, for should not gods possess all the happiness that mortals do? She was the loveliest maiden in the environs of his mountain, and the most gentle as well. Additionally, she was skilled in music and song. Many nights, he had made the earth tremble violently while dancing to the lively melodies of her koto.
He descended to earth again and walked into the midst of his worshippers, searching both for signs of Gemmyo and for the cause of all this distress.
At the sight of him, the villagers and nobles exchanged glances among themselves. Eyes red, chins quivering, they parted to make him a path as he advanced toward the entrance of the new, oddly fashioned temple.
Within the structure, beneath a canopy decorated with stars and on a bier of red satin lay his beloved. Gemmyo’s eyes were shut as if in repose. She was dressed in a beautiful white kimono decorated with herons. At first glance, one might think that she was asleep, even though her body was stark white. For on occasion, it was not unheard of for women to paint themselves with an ivory sheen.
But at her neck gaped two large wounds, and from these wounds blood had run onto the folds of her gown.
Sanno caught his breath, realizing that she had been foully murdered and by the vilest of demons: a vampire.
His eyes filled with ungovernable rage. The pulse at his neck throbbed with fury. Thunder and lightning crackled and roared across the sky and the clouds quickly gathered. The earth rolled like the back of a dragon disturbed from its slumber.
Sanno whirled on the hapless villagers, who stood in stark terror, and bellowed at them, “Who did this?”
No one spoke.
Sanno stamped his foot against the earth and it cracked.
“Who did this?” he bellowed again.
The villagers remained silent.
Then, as Sanno prepared to shake the earth to pieces beneath their feet, a wizened old man staggered forward. Though it was cold, he wore no shoes and his coat was made of straw. Sanno recognized him as Genji, a poor farmer whose wife was dead and who had no children to serve him in his old age. He had come often to pray at Sanno’s shrine.
The old man feebly raised a hand and said, “Sanno-no-kami, these cowardly villagers are silent because the murderer of Gemmyo has threatened them with death if they name him. But I am very old, and I have prayed often for happiness in my declining years. Now I see that my prayers are answered, for I, and I alone, dare to challenge your enemy. If it means my death to reveal his identity to you, then I shall die happy.”
In the clutches of his anger, Sanno reached for his great, ancient sword and said, “Speak then, Genji, and know that if your courage deserts you, I shall kill you myself.”
The old man shook his head and bowed low several times. “Please, my gracious lord, do not trouble yourself. I’m glad to speak his name aloud. He is Chirayoju.”
At the mention of his name, the other villagers drew back in horror. A few began to weep, others to wail.
“Chirayoju?” Sanno repeated. “I know no tengu by that name.”
Genji said, “He is a vampire who has flown over the sea from the great land of China. And he is a sorcerer who can set fire to our houses with the merest flick of his wrist. He can fan the flames with the smallest exhalation of his breath. And he has promised to do all this if we tell you who he is. For this reason, all fear his wrath. But I shall burn myself to death willingly before I displease you, great Sanno-sama.”
“You foolish old man!” shouted another villager, a young man named Akio. He ran to Genji and struck him down with his fist. “You’ve doomed our whole village!”
“No. You have done so,” Sanno replied to the youth.
The Mountain God stomped violently on the earth, forcing Akio to his knees. Then he raised his sword and brought it down on Akio’s neck, beheading him.
Sanno stomped until no one could stand. He took the heads of those nearest. Then he whirled around and from his hands shot flames of purification onto the body of Gemmyo, so that she might enter Paradise.
The flames traveled from her body to the canopy of stars, to the rest of the temple in which she lay, to the trees, and to the huts of the villagers. And over the trees and bushes to the garrisoned keep of Gemmyo’s Fujiwara clan.
That day, a thousand people died because of Sanno’s fury.
No longer was he seen as benevolent or kind. No longer was he worshipped.
He was only feared.
CHAPTER NINE
Panting in the backseat of her car, Cordelia pushed Xander away. “Stop moaning,” she ordered, sitting up. She leaned into view of the rearview mirror and fluffed her bangs. “I hate it when you moan.”
“Wh—wh—,” he panted back.
“Because when you moan,” she continued, answering the question he had been unable to ask, “it reminds me that it’s you, okay?”
“Reminds you … oh.” Xander scowled at her. “Isn’t that lovely? So what you’re saying is that when you’re with me, you pretend you’re with someone else.”
When she said nothing, only turned and blinked at him in that blank, yeah-so? expression of hers, he looked at her in complete disgust.
“Okay, fine. I am outta here,” he said. He flailed for the door handle. Cordelia reached around his head, obligingly flicked the handle, pushed open the door, and let him fall half out of the car.
“I am so outta here that I am … really outta here.” He scooted backward the rest of the way and tumbled to the sidewalk. Standing, he regained his footing, if not his dignity, and slammed the car door shut.
“Fine!” Cordelia scrambled back into the driver’s seat and started the car. She peeled out and shot down the street.
“Buckle your seat belt!” Xander bellowed. “You nympho!”
She roared down the street, tires squealing.
Xander stomped to the porch and sat down, pulling his knees beneath his chin. He sighed. Wished he’d brought something to do. Even his homework. Now, there was a novel notion.
He was just about to doze off when he heard light footsteps on the walk. He opened his eyes and sat up.
“Will,” he said happily. “I was worried about you.”
Willow stood with her legs wide apart and her hands on her hips. “Little boy,” she sneered, “you worry for me?”
“Well, sure, Will,” he said slowly. “Um, have you been forgetting to eat again? Because I know the computer can be all fun and everything, but you’re kind of grouchy and perhaps the blood sugar has plummeted? So—”
“Silence!” Willow ordered.
“Willow?” He gave her the Nicholson eyebrow. “Are you trying out for a play or something? Because otherwise, I think this is an act you should drop. You are not exactly making friends and influencing people. We want to help you, if you’ll just let us.”
Willow’s face seemed to change. For a moment she looked very sad and little-girl-lost. He went to her with open arms, fully expecting her to slide into them and finish that cry she’d begun last Monday morning.
“Xander,” she said miserably, coming toward him. She was limping. Her hands went up to her head as if she had a monster hangover. Which she would not, she being Willow.
“Xander, something’s very wro—”
And then she shouted, “No!”
She flew at him, kicking him in the face before he had time to react. Then she landed on top of him and pushed him back, grabbing his hair and slamming his skull against the porch. She made a fist and rammed it into his face. Hit him again. And again. She pummeled him with both fists as he fought to throw her off.
“Wi … Wi …” Blood streame
d down into his throat. He began to choke on it, until the only sound he could make was a desperate gurgle.
“Ah, the scent of life is upon you,” Willow said. She threw back her head and laughed. Then, just as he thought she was going to let him up, she hit him again, very hard.
Fade to black.
Very black.
The familiar squeal of tires. Chirayoju looked up from the boy and listened. The mother of Weeping Willow was about to drive down the street. She would see the form of her daughter crouched over her young friend and she would ask far too many questions.
Chirayoju stood and picked up the body. Hoisting the boy over its head, Chirayoju walked to the side of the porch and unceremoniously dumped him in the bushes. Chirayoju was furious at having been interrupted: The youth was not yet dead. His spirit would be delicious. With its sorcery, Chirayoju fed not on mere blood, but on the essence of life itself.
But not this night.
The car pulled up.
“Honey?” Mrs. Rosenberg said as she got out of the car. “What are you doing here? I thought you had a tutoring session with Buffy.”
“It ended early,” Chirayoju answered. “I wasn’t feeling all that hot and Buffy said she was coming down with something too. Xander gave me a ride,” it assured Willow’s mother, who was looking concerned.
“I’ve been kind of nervous ever since you were attacked,” the woman admitted.
Yes, ever since your daughter was attacked, you have allowed me to take her over and use her. You will allow me to kill her. You Western mothers and fathers, with your blindness and self-interest, allowing your children to wander the streets like orphans. Is it a wonder that they are all so weak and foolish? That I have pickings here the like of which I never saw in ancient China and Japan, where the parents were more careful?
It took every ounce of Chirayoju’s strength not to burst into laughter and crack the woman’s spine in two, then drink the life, the spirit, from her paralyzed and dying body. But it needed shelter from the coming dawn, and the sanctuary it had found elsewhere was a distance away. More importantly, it had become apparent that all the girl’s friends were vampire hunters—and the lovely blond maiden was their leader—and it saw no point in revealing itself to them at this moment. Or perhaps at any moment. So when the woman came up to it, put her hand on the forehead of its host, and said, “You feel hot. Come on inside, sweetie,” it meekly obeyed.
As soon as the door is shut, it promised itself, she dies.
Such a puny body could be easily hidden.
“Okay. One more time,” Buffy said to Giles. Angel, glancing through a book that featured various incantations against “vampyres and other creatures most abhorrent,” set it down and listened.
She held out her hand. “Vampires.” Held out her other hand. “Demons.” Juggled. “Demonic possession.”
“Yes. Quite right,” Giles said. He looked proud of Buffy. Angel knew the feeling. Buffy was the one thing in his life he could point to with unmitigated pride.
Then Buffy made a face and juggled again. “But vampiric possession? Oh, Giles, I don’t know.”
“How else can one explain what you saw?” Giles asked. He looked to Angel as if for backup. Angel shrugged. He was just about as perplexed as Buffy.
“None of this sounds at all familiar to me,” he had to admit, flicking the pages of the book as if the answers lay there. “I’ve never come across anything like it. As far as I know, vampires can’t possess the living.”
“However,” Giles mused, “one could argue that vampirism is a form of demonic possession. Vampires are basically soulless human corpses with demons residing within.” He had the grace to clear his throat and say, “Present company excepted.”
“I’ll go along with that,” Angel conceded. “But the demons who inhabit vampires can’t jump from body to body, or influence another person the way other demons can. There was that vessel thing with the Master, but that was just a vicarious way for him to feed.”
“Well, I’m very sorry I didn’t pay closer attention to your concerns about Willow,” Giles said to Buffy. “Clearly, something quite serious is happening to her and—”
Buffy shifted uneasily. “I don’t know what I saw. I thought it looked like Willow, but maybe it wasn’t. I only saw it for an instant. Maybe I thought I saw her because I’m so worried about her.” She gazed at the phone. “I’d like to call and check on her, but her mother would kill her. And then mine would kill me.”
“It’s been a very long day … and night, for all of us. Perhaps it’s best that we wait until the morning,” Giles agreed. “I’m certain Willow will be at school, and all will come clear.” His half-smile was only half-reassuring.
“Come on, I’ll walk you home,” Angel said, taking Buffy’s hand.
“Okay,” she said, with her quick, eager smile that sometimes cut him to the quick.
Once outside the school, Angel took Buffy in his arms and kissed her long and hard. He couldn’t believe that of all the mortal girls there were in this world, he had fallen in love with the Slayer. And knowing that she loved him too made his strange and lonely existence more bearable. He was an outcast among vampires, yet still one of them, and sometimes her love was all that sustained him. That, and his vow to rid the earth of his brother and sister abhorrent creatures of the night.
He smiled down at her as she peered up at him with her huge blue eyes. She had no idea what dark thoughts were running through his mind.
She murmured, “Angel, I’m so confused.”
“Why?” He trailed his fingers through her hair.
“It’s just that …” She shrugged and laid her head against his chest. “Well, like with Willow, She’s been acting like such a b … bad person, bad, and so cranky and all. So then we get attacked by vampires and I decide I see her with them.”
“You might have.”
“No. In my heart, I know Willow’s not possessed. She’s just scared. I can’t believe I would even think such a thing. But then, it’s like my mom and me.”
“She thinks you’re possessed?” Angel said, amused. He suspected he knew what was coming.
Buffy did not disappoint.
“It seems like half my life, my mom is saying, ‘Buffy, this just isn’t like you.’ Whenever I’ve done something to disappoint her. But if it wasn’t like me, I wouldn’t have done it. I couldn’t have done it.” She tilted her head back and gazed up at him. “Do you know what I mean?”
He let his smile fade so she wouldn’t think he was laughing at her, but his heart went out to her. There was nothing he could do to spare her from growing up.
“I think so,” he replied.
“Look at Xander and Cordelia,” she went on. “Talk about possessed. They can’t even explain why they do what they do.” She shuddered. “I mean, it’s just so weird.”
Chuckling, he nodded. Xander and Cordelia had surprised him, too. But when he thought about it, the spark had always been there. The way they bantered, throwing barbs at each other. Hotheaded and passionate, both of them.
Yes, it made sense.
“It was a lot easier when I was your age,” he told her. “When people did the unexpected, we said they were possessed and left it at that.” He moved his shoulders. “Actually, we didn’t leave it at that. We usually burned them at the stake or hanged them. Or, on a good day, we committed them to asylums.”
He cupped her chin. “A strong-willed girl like you would have been labeled a witch. We’d definitely have burned you.”
“‘C’mon, baby, light my fire,’” she quipped, but he could tell he had unnerved her.
He knew that sometimes she forgot how old he was—242 to her 17. It was easy to forget because when he had been turned into a creature of the night, he had been near her age. The decades had not aged his physical appearance at all.
Some of the mortal women he had known through the years had considered that a blessing … and begged him to change them at the height of their beaut
y. That he had not done, once his soul was restored to him. Not one could have fathomed the curse he would have laid upon their shoulders had he done so.
“Your mother sees all that’s best in you,” Angel told Buffy as he traced the hollow of her cheek. She, too, was a beauty, but like many truly astonishing women, she didn’t see it. “Your face is the mirror of her love for you. When she looks at you and sees a flaw, a part of her blames herself for failing you in some way.”
He cupped her chin and raised her face toward his. “That’s why she’s so hard on you, Buffy. Because she loves you so much.”
“I’m her mirror?” Buffy asked tentatively. She thought that over. “Her cracked mirror,” she snorted.
“No. Clear as glass,” he said. “Pure.”
She shook her head. “Not me.”
“Yes. You.”
“But what about you, Angel?” She was changing the subject. He let her. “You don’t have a reflection.”
“When I look at you, I do.”
He kissed her, tentatively at first, then with more passion. She answered back, and he held her tightly. With all his heart, he wanted to be what Buffy wanted him to be. He wanted to be exactly what she needed. But he was a vampire, a half-demon, with a human soul warring against the darkness within every moment of every day.
And he blamed himself fully for the many times he had failed her in the past. If there was any way he could undo what he had done …
“Angel,” Buffy whispered, “I love you.”
“I love you, too, Buffy.”
“I want—,” she began, but he stilled her voice with a finger across her lips.
“Let me walk you home now,” he said gently.
They strolled arm in arm, like a girl and a guy going home from a date.
In Willow’s room, Chirayoju got ready for bed and listened to the boy’s slowing heartbeat in the bushes outside the house. The youth would very likely be dead before dawn. If not, Chirayoju knew it would have another chance at the boy. Xander. He cared for Weeping Willow, and it would be the death of him.