by Nancy Holder
“Sounds like someone paid a visit to Lovers’ Lane,” Buffy said, slightly mocking. Her wariness about Joyce’s social life didn’t preclude some teasing.
“It wasn’t like that,” Joyce said sharply. It was, actually, but she wasn’t about to provide her daughter with the details.
“What about the bugs?” Buffy asked. An odd pragmatism was part of her character.
“Bugs?”
“Bugs,” Buffy said, nodding. “Pesky things. They drink blood. Lovers’ Lane plus bright movie screen must have been mosquito heaven. Didn’t you get eaten alive?”
Joyce hadn’t thought about the bugs. Rather than answer, she sipped her iced tea again. It was from a powder, but the fresh lemon she’d added made it better.
Evidently realizing that she wasn’t going to get the answer she wanted, Buffy asked another question. “What about the trouble, then?”
“Trouble?”
Buffy quoted her mother’s own words back to her. “‘Barney says that place has a history of trouble.’”
Joyce shrugged. “I don’t know what he meant, Buffy,” she said a bit sadly. “He didn’t say and I didn’t ask. I’d heard the same kind of thing so many times before. It seems that every street and every institution in this town has a history of trouble.” She paused. “I like Sunnydale, honey, but sometimes I wonder.”
“You’re not going to move us again, are you?” Buffy asked. She looked anxious. “Don’t even think about it!”
“No, of course not,” Joyce said reassuringly. “You’re happy here, aren’t you?”
“I’m fine, Mom,” Buffy said. She took a third helping of the entrée. Joyce wondered again where the girl put it all. “My grades are okay, and I haven’t fallen in with the wrong set.” She grinned, and the expression lit up her face. Her words sounded only slightly forced as she continued. “These days I even hang with Cordelia Chase, the most popular gal in town. I’m with the in crowd, baby!”
“I suppose,” Joyce said. Like most mothers, she had done a little research on her daughter’s friends, both by meeting them and by asking around. Xander, for example, seemed nice enough, a bit clownish; from what she’d heard of his parents, he could use a good friend, and he had one in Buffy. Joyce wasn’t sure that anyone could consider Buffy’s immediate circle the “in crowd,” but they all seemed to be good kids.
The meal stretched on in relative silence after that, interrupted only by sporadic exchanges about the food, and similar niceties. It was only over dessert (gelatin for Joyce, chocolate cake for Buffy) that the subject of school arose again.
“I need to go out for a bit,” Buffy said. The announcement was no surprise. Buffy went out most nights.
“I’d hoped you would stay in tonight, dear,” Joyce said. “I hardly ever see you anymore.”
Buffy pressed on. “Willow wants some help with the computer thingy,” she said. “And then I thought we might go to the Bronze afterward.”
“It’s a school night,” Joyce said. The protest was mild and probably futile, but it had become nearly ritual. Joyce wasn’t sure she liked the Bronze, or approved of the sheer amount of time Buffy spent there.
“Aw, c’mon, Mom,” Buffy said in a lightly mocking tone. She started to clear the table. “All the cool kids will be there!”
Joyce sighed. She felt fresh sympathy for her own mother, and what she must have gone through long years before. Who could really know what kind of lives their children led?
The night was alive. Something was going to happen, Buffy knew, even if she wasn’t precisely sure how she knew. The half-moon hung low in a cloudless sky, and the air was clear and cool for an early autumn night.
Buffy sometimes joked to her friends about her “Slayer-sense.” It was the kind of pop-culture allusion that prompted Xander to nod knowingly and Giles to roll his eyes in mild disgust, but sometimes the joke wasn’t a joke at all. Sometimes she actually seemed to feel a charge in the air, an electric crackle that made her scalp itch like a bad perm, promising imminent menace. She felt it now as she paced the familiar course of her patrol. When the occasional passerby approached, she took pains to conceal her miniature crossbow in the oversize handbag that did double duty as a weapons cache, but her favorite stake never left her hand.
Her rounds included many of Sunnydale’s known psychic hot spots: the empty warehouse that often sheltered a nest of vampires, the deconsecrated church that was headquarters for a coven of devil worshippers, and the seedy strip of taverns rumored to cater to the paranormal crowd. The list went on and on, and Buffy inspected each locus without incident.
She was in the cemetery when something finally happened. Between crypt and neighboring tree, something moved toward her with smooth, liquid grace. She saw it from the corner of one eye and instinctively spun, raising her crossbow.
“Oh,” Buffy said. “It’s you.”
“Hey,” Angel said. His voice was soft, and he lifted his hands in mock surrender. He was dressed in his habitual black, slacks and shirt and leather jacket, and his handsome features were fair under the half-moon’s pale light.
“Hey, yourself,” Buffy said, looking at him, still wary. She felt as if little elves with sandpaper shoes were dancing on her nerves. Something was still wrong.
“What’s up, Buffy?” the vampire asked. He sounded concerned. His hands remained raised.
“Not lots,” Buffy said. “Helped Willow with some homework, or tried to. Told Mom I was going to the Bronze, but I decided that this would be lots more fun than hanging with my peers and scoping out the music scene.” She gave him a wry half smile. Being the Slayer meant lying to her mother fairly often, and she didn’t entirely enjoy that part of the job.
“Um,” Angel said hesitantly. “Okay.”
“How about you?” she asked lightly. “What’s up?”
“Well, your crossbow is, for one thing,” Angel said. The weapon’s bolt was trained precisely at his stilled heart.
“Oh!” Buffy said, chagrined. She lowered the weapon with hasty embarrassment. “Reflex action and all that,” she continued. “You know, patrol, tombstones, mysterious stranger—”
Immediately she wished she could take back the words. Whatever Angel was, he was no stranger. They’d been through too much together for her to ever call him that.
He was mysterious, though. There were endless mysteries in his eyes.
“Yeah,” Angel said. “But reflex usually doesn’t go on this long. Look at you. You’re still on edge.”
He was right. Though she’d lowered the crossbow to her side, her trigger finger remained curled around the weapon’s release, as if of its own accord. Buffy’s muscles were prepared for instant action. It was classic fight-or-flight stuff, not the kind of response she typically felt in Angel’s presence.
“Something’s in the air,” she said. “Something’s going to happen, I think. Don’t know what.”
“You think?” Angel smiled. He was hundreds of years old, she knew, but the expression made his eternally youthful features seem positively boyish.
“Yeah.”
“Buffy, you’re the Slayer. You live on top of the Hellmouth. Something’s always happening,” Angel said.
“Good point,” she said. She forced herself to relax, at least incrementally. She even smiled. “Walk with me for a while, then.”
Somewhere in the distance a dog howled. At least, Buffy thought it was a dog. She hoped it was just a dog. Buffy’s nights on patrol were exercises in contradiction. Night after night she went out looking for trouble, hoping she wouldn’t find it.
There were times, though, when life seemed normal. This was one, and she didn’t want it to change. Walking through a cool autumn night with a good-looking guy, her footfalls matching rhythm with his, talking about their days and lives—what could be more normal than that?
She was a child of ancient prophecy, likely to live a short life with a brutal end. The most interesting guy in her life was a creature of the night, a vampire
with a heart that could love but did not beat, prisoner of a curse.
Oh yeah, there was that. But did any of it really matter?
Right now, alone with Angel in the moonlight, Buffy didn’t think so. Her eyes continued to search the shadows, but bit by bit the worst of the tension oozed away as she told Angel about her day. He made her feel secure and safe simply with his presence.
“Detonated a frog?” he asked. She knew that he’d seen much worse—they both had—but he was polite enough to make an expression of amused distaste. “Well, boys will be boys.”
Buffy nodded. “Except I don’t think it was a boy who did it,” she said.
“What else happened?” he asked as they approached one of the cemetery’s aboveground crypts. Some family had failed to keep pace with the groundskeeping fees, and the tomb had fallen into a state of mild disrepair. The brass hardware was weathered and dull, and clinging ivy half-covered one wall.
“Else?” Buffy asked. “Must there always be an else?”
“There’s always something else,” he said lightly.
“Oh, Xander got a job,” she said brightly. “He’s a gopher at the drive-in.”
“The drive-in?” Angel asked.
The last thing she wanted to do right now was talk to him about another guy. She wondered if he felt the same. This close, she could tell that he wasn’t breathing. Vampires didn’t have to, except for speech.
And it didn’t matter that his heart wasn’t beating either. Hers was working hard enough for both of them.
“It’s a long story,” Buffy said. She paused midstep and turned to look at him. There was an old oak next to the tomb, and the moonlight shining down through the tree’s branches did interesting things to Angel’s face. She leaned closer and gazed into his eyes.
“Feeling better now?” Angel asked.
Buffy nodded. “Much,” she said. She made a dismissive gesture. “Meemies all gone.”
“Maybe you just need to switch to decaf,” he said.
“Maybe,” she said. “Or perhaps I need something else.” Angel’s skin felt cool when she placed her hands on his cheeks, but it warmed quickly. She pulled his face closer to hers, her lips parting. It was a perfect moment, and she didn’t want anything to spoil it.
Then, with a snarl, something rudely did.
Inside the Bronze the night was alive. The air was scented with fog and sweat, and throbbed with the beat of the band. The ensemble du noir was a plucky band of traditionalists, performing under the cryptic acronym TDQYDJP. A helpful placard explained that the abbreviation stood for “The Don’t Quit Your Day Job Players.” The group played mostly cover tunes—plain vanilla rock—but they played loud enough and well enough to satisfy the scores of teens crowded onto the club’s worn dance floor. Kids were dancing and bouncing and gyrating with force sufficient enough to send tremors through the place’s infrastructure, but Cordelia was not one of them. She was in the Bronze tonight not to dance, but to hold court.
She had secured a good table on the main level, situated to provide a good vantage point but far enough away from the stage that she could hear herself speak. She’d permitted the other members of her personal troika, Harmony and Aura, to join her. They sat on either side of her like mismatched bookends, hanging on her every word. Together, the three passed judgment on the band, their drinks, the other Bronze patrons, and anything else that piqued their interest.
Sitting in judgment had long been one of Cordelia’s preferred pastimes. Someone had to do it, after all, and she couldn’t imagine anyone better qualified. She had the upbringing and refinement to assess the poor fools that swarmed through her life, and it would have been a shame not to share her insights. Harmony and Aura had similarly good taste (though not as highly developed, of course), and they made good companions on her judicial bench. For years the three of them had moved through life together, in study halls and in classrooms, in restaurants and on the playing field, telling the world the way it was supposed to be. In recent months, since her growing involvement with Buffy and the others, the pastime’s charm had started fading, but it was far from gone.
“Look, Cordy,” Harmony said. She was a pretty blonde, much blonder than Buffy, and she tended to echo Cordelia’s every observation. It was seldom that she made one of her own. “Look at the guy with three chins. Purple-hair there is going to shoot him down!”
Cordy followed Harmony’s gaze. The Bronze didn’t allow stage-diving, but the more hard-core members of the audience still tended to congregate near the stage’s lip. There, only a few feet from the TDQYDJP’s booming woofer, a portly gent who had unwisely shaved his head was saying something to a Goth chick with purple hair.
Cordelia didn’t much like Goth chicks. She could see the value of making a statement, but surely there were better ones to make. And that amount of makeup had to be murder on the skin. Plus, her outings with Buffy and the Scoobies had made her wary of dark-clad creatures with the wrong color hair.
“How long do you give him?” Aura asked. She had dark bronze skin and black hair, and she generally showed a bit more initiative than Harmony. She was at least as blasé, however. Even before Cordelia, Aura had stumbled briefly into the occult war that had chosen Sunnydale as its battlefield, when she discovered the body of one of that war’s victims.
“Seven seconds,” Cordelia said, without pausing to consider. She’d been playing this game for a long time.
“. . . six, five, four, three, two . . . ,” Harmony and Aura chanted in perfect unison.
Precisely on “zero” the purple-haired girl’s hand came up in a short, fast arc. When her hand stopped, the drink she held splashed in the bald guy’s face. A security goon, drawn by the disturbance, approached to escort them both away from the stage.
“There’s trouble in paradise,” Cordelia said as Harmony and Aura laughed. They sounded like magpies in stereo.
The three of them carried on like that for an hour or so, but Cordelia was bored by the twenty-minute mark. She turned down three invitations to dance and accepted one, but when the guy wanted to do more than that, she ditched him and returned to the table. During the break between sets, the band’s percussionist approached and invited all of them backstage. Harmony and Aura agreed eagerly, only to backtrack when they heard Cordelia decline. The band was a good act and they made good music, but Mrs. Chase’s little girl wasn’t going anywhere with rockers who hadn’t at least made the Billboard Top 100.
“Hel-lo,” Aura said as Cordelia bade the TDQYDJP emissary good-bye. “There’s a fresh face in town.”
Threading his way through the milling crowd on the dance floor was someone Cordelia had never seen before. Tall and Mediterranean dark, he was handsome in an insolently casual way, with heavy-lidded dark eyes and black hair styled in an elaborate pompadour. He wore old-style biker’s leathers, festooned with buckles and straps, and he moved with the grace of a jungle cat.
As Cordelia watched, it hit her that the stranger was hot. No, he was Hot, and he knew it.
“Yum,” Aura said softly.
“Yum, indeed,” Cordelia agreed. There was no denying it. Oddly, though, she found herself only slightly intrigued by the newcomer. One reason was what she coined “the Xander situation”; the other was something else.
Cordelia recalled when another leather-clad stranger, tall and dark and handsome, had drifted into the Bronze late one rockin’ night. She had all but thrown herself at him, only to draw back in chagrin when he’d brushed her aside. That stranger proved to be a vampire, specifically Buffy’s associate, Angel, and the experience had reaffirmed one of Cordelia’s long-held beliefs: better to let the guys do the chasing. She turned to Aura, intending to grant the other girl the benefit of her experienced wisdom. But she was just in time for a rear view as Aura disappeared into the crowd.
Cordelia sniffed. Some people didn’t understand basic courtesy.
• • •
The beast leaped down onto Buffy and Angel from the crypt�
�s slanted roof, driving them both to the ground with the force of his fall. The creature snarled as he struck, lashing out with cruel claws. Slayer and vampire alike rolled desperately, barely avoiding the raking swipes. Buffy’s weapons bag went flying.
Angel was right, she realized, drawing a stake from her jeans pocket. Something else always happened.
She scrambled back to her feet, but Angel acted faster. Even as the beast turned to lunge at him, the vampire struck, stabbing the creature with a savage, spearlike strike. He drove the fist of his right hand into his assailant’s solar plexus, making the beast double over in pain. The exchange took only a split second, but it gave Buffy a chance to assess the situation.
Their adversary seemed to be some kind of a werewolf, but like none that she’d seen in any of Giles’s books. He had a human frame and build but moved in a low, bestial slouch that made his full size difficult to gauge accurately. He had a man’s hands, but they were overgrown with thick fur and had hooked, talonlike claws. Human eyes that were clouded with rage stared out from his face, and his features, like his hands, were layered in fur. White froth, liquid and foamy, drooled from a mouth of ragged teeth.
Absurdly, the creature wore denim trousers and a varsity jacket—not in Sunnydale High’s red and gold but in colors that Buffy didn’t recognize.
“And I thought the penguin was weird,” Buffy said softly.
Her words drew the wolf-man’s attention. With a low growl he crouched, then sprang. His outstretched hands raced for Buffy’s throat.
“Buffy!” Angel said.
She didn’t need the warning. She’d already braced herself, her favorite stake poised. When the wolf-man slammed into her, she brought the weapon up, fast and hard. The impact of the beast’s lunge was enough to topple her, but not to ruin her aim. The pointed piece of wood stabbed deep into the wolf-man’s chest.
Buffy had encountered many varieties of monster since commencing her career as the Slayer. Whether vampire, demon, or zombie, they each had their modes of attack, their specific strengths and weaknesses. One thing, though, was reasonably constant. Heart strikes almost always killed.