by Nancy Holder
Xander’s answer was a silent nod.
“Mysteries of Chainsaw Mansion? Please.” Cordelia grimaced. “Find someone else,” she said. “Someone who’s not a girl.”
“Not even Willow?” Xander said.
“Especially not Willow,” Cordelia said. “But especially, especially not me. I plan to be busy.”
“Busy?” Xander sounded anxious. “Busy with someone? Someone else?”
“Not like that,” Cordelia said, taking pity. “I’ll likely be at the Bronze, watching Aura make a fool of herself again.”
Without being invited or authorized, Xander sat down beside her. Cordelia decided to let it slide; after all, the courtyard was largely deserted. “Aura?” he said. “Fool? Again? It’s sharing time.”
Cordelia took a deep breath. There was that endearing goofiness again. She told Xander about the previous evening. Quickly she recounted her friend’s sudden fascination with the mysterious stranger and how disappointed Aura had been when she returned to the table.
“He disappeared?” Xander asked. He listened to her attentively, which was always gratifying.
“That’s what Aura said,” Cordelia said. She corrected herself. “I mean, that’s what Aura said the Goth girl said. I didn’t see it myself.”
Cordelia’s world had been a reasonably clear-cut place before the weirdness that she associated with Buffy Summers had started to nibble at its edges.
“That can’t be good,” Xander said. “The disappearing thing, I mean.”
“Guys have bailed on Aura before,” Cordelia said. She looked at her watch. Another five minutes had passed.
“Bailed, not disappeared,” Xander pointed out.
“That’s if you trust someone with purple hair to get things right,” Cordelia said tartly.
“A mysterious stranger disappears mysteriously in a town filled with mystery right on top of the Hellmouth? And you say there’s no mystery about it?” Xander teased.
Cordelia rolled her eyes. She knew what his next words would be.
“Have you talked to Buffy about this?” he asked.
“No,” she replied testily.
“I really think—”
“It wasn’t like that,” she said, interrupting. Her tone was sharper now. “I told you, Xander, guys have bailed on Aura before.”
They sat together in a tense moment of silence. She was sure that Xander knew he’d erred. He had to. She’d told him enough times that invoking other girls to her wasn’t a very good idea. Cordelia might get along with Buffy these days, but that didn’t mean she wanted Xander to keep bringing up her name.
“I’ve seen some strangers in my day,” he said finally, in a musing tone.
“I’m sure you have,” she replied.
He surprised her then. “I’m sorry,” he said, changing the subject.
“Huh?” Cordelia asked, genuinely startled by his two words. Xander didn’t apologize very often. Usually he just protested that the world in general and women in particular didn’t make any sense. Then he would either storm off until the smoke settled or stay and try to wisecrack his way out of the situation. Either way, life would go on. It seemed out of character for him to apologize, especially so promptly and for such a minor slight.
“The Buffy thing,” he said again. “I shouldn’t tell you what to do.” He shrugged. “I’m just a typical teenage boy and I make mistakes. I really am sorry.”
Was he sorry that he’d brought up her name? Or was he just sorry that he’d suggested she report to Buffy, like some kind of flunky or minion? Either option seemed equally likely, so Cordelia gave him the benefit of the doubt.
“That’s okay,” she said. “No biggie.”
This time the shared silence was more comfortable. Though still relieved that they didn’t have an audience, Cordelia found she didn’t mind his company. For a second she actually considered going to the stupid drive-in with him.
But only for a second.
“Cordy?” Xander said slowly. “If they changed the school colors, I’d hear about it, wouldn’t I? I mean, I’d know, right?” He sounded even more confused than usual.
She blinked again in surprise. The question came out of nowhere. “They haven’t changed the colors, Xander,” she said with forced patience. “I should know. They just issued new uniforms, for the team and the squad. Why are you so interested in fashion?”
His answer was to point to the far end of the courtyard. A girl lounged in a shadowed fire exit. She seemed to be looking in their direction.
“That’s why,” Xander said.
At first Cordelia thought that he’d been dumb enough to raise the issue of another woman again. Then she realized that he was trying to make another point.
Xander’s finger-point morphed into a hand wave. “Hi, there!” he said a bit more loudly. The girl made no response.
Tall and curvy, she wasn’t a member of the student body; Cordelia was certain of that. She kept tabs on the competition and knew her rivals by sight, even at a distance. The stranger wasn’t a fellow student.
That wasn’t the only thing wrong. The girl wore a cheerleading uniform. It was a cut different from Cordelia’s, passé and unattractive, with a too-long skirt that did nothing for the poor thing’s legs. The style of the jersey was wrong too, but that wasn’t even the worst of it.
“Pink and white?” Cordelia asked, appalled. “Who wears pink and white?”
Xander shrugged. “Mary Kay Academy?” he asked. “Dixie land High? Peppermint Secondary?”
Cordelia sprang to her feet to investigate. She hardly noticed that Xander did the same. This was a matter of competition and territory, serious business for a person with Cordelia’s social prominence.
“Hey! Hey, you!” she called. Her words carried the length of the nearly deserted courtyard and echoed from the surrounding walls. The girl came to sudden attention, startled.
The distance from the retaining wall to the mystery cheerleader was perhaps twenty yards. Cordelia didn’t bother to run, but she strode briskly enough that the distance dwindled rapidly. “I want to talk to you!” she said loudly.
Xander kept pace. “Cordy,” he said at her side, “is this really a good idea? I mean, I like a catfight as much as the next guy—”
“Hush,” she told him. Boys could be so stupid.
Closer now, she could see the other girl better. The pink-and-white outfit wasn’t the least of the stranger’s offenses against good taste. She was blond, like Buffy, but wore her hair in a frizzy cloud that was years out of date and absolutely impractical for cheerleading work. Her makeup was wrong too, florid tones applied without blending or style. Cordelia wasn’t very good with specific dates, but she knew passé when she saw it, and she was seeing it now.
What was the girl thinking?
“Okay, lady,” Cordelia said, a mere ten steps away now. “You and me, we need to—Hey!”
The girl turned. She opened the door and darted through it, entering the school’s interior without a backward glance. The door slammed shut behind her.
Cordelia and Xander quickly followed her inside, but she was nowhere to be seen. The locker-lined halls were empty. Not even distant telltale footsteps could be heard. The strange girl had simply disappeared.
“Well,” Xander said. He looked completely baffled.
“Yeah, well,” Cordelia agreed. Finally, reluctantly, she said what she knew he had to be thinking. “I guess I’d better have that chat with Buffy after all.”
Willow’s room was homier than Buffy’s. Maybe it was because she spent more time at home and gave it a more lived-in look. Maybe it was just because the Rosenbergs had lived at their address in Sunnydale for so long. Tastefully decorated and tidy, this was actually Willow’s home, in a way that the Summers house still wasn’t Buffy’s. The Slayer was still a new girl in town, relatively speaking, but Willow had lived in town all her life. She had roots here, and not in a gross, monster-plant kind of way.
Buffy, perch
ed on the edge of Willow’s neatly made bed, felt utterly out of her league as the other girl’s hands moved along the keyboard of her laptop. They looked like tangoing spiders. Buffy stared at the monitor the same way Xander stared at girls: with complete fascination and focus. The keys seemed barely able to keep up with Willow’s fingertips. Buffy understood just enough of what she was doing to realize that Willow had a genius for manipulating search engines, guessing passwords, and cracking encryption. The Internet world was Willow’s oyster, even if she didn’t eat shellfish.
The computer’s speakers came to life, emitting demonic laughter that then resolved itself into Latin-sounding phrases. Willow had set the volume very low, so that her parents wouldn’t hear, but the effect still startled. The screen, which Buffy could see over her friend’s shoulder, filled with dancing skeletons. They were electric blue against a field of flames.
“I don’t think that’s what we want,” Buffy said warily. “At least, I hope it’s not.”
“I don’t think so either,” Willow said. She studied her find. “What’s ‘German Dungeon Rock’?” she asked. “This guy really, really likes it.”
“Don’t know,” Buffy said. “Don’t want to.” She picked up one of the stuffed animals that were part of Willow’s room decor. She gazed into the stuffed bear’s black button eyes. It seemed like a very long time since she’d had stuffed animals of her own, a long time and a world away. Part of her still missed them, though, especially Mr. Gordo, her beloved stuffed pig.
Willow entered some more commands. The skeletons faded away.
“Did you tell Giles about the nurse?” Willow asked without missing a keystroke, her eyes fixated on the screen. Her computer expertise extended to multitasking proficiency.
“Yeah,” Buffy said. “He didn’t quite believe me.”
“Huh?” Willow said, surprised.
More than one of her previous reports had been met with initial skepticism. Willow and Xander might accept Buffy’s word as gospel. Even Cordelia, when pressed, might grant that the Slayer had a certain subject-matter expertise. But Giles could be a tougher nut to crack. Buffy told Willow how after her visit to the nurse’s station she made a return to the library to tell Giles that Kitty Forman remained comfortably installed in the school administration. The only reasonable conclusion was that Inga had been a ringer and was probably up to no good. Giles said she might have been interviewing or maybe a temp of some sort. He promised to ask Principal Snyder.
“Well, it wasn’t that bad,” Buffy said. “It’s not like she was a giant nurse with fangs or anything.”
“He just wants to explore the Alps with Inga,” Willow said, in a slight echo of her earlier bad accent. She continued typing.
“Ya,” Buffy said, then set aside the toy bear. “Any luck?”
A pinky finger hit enter one final time. One last report filled the screen. Willow shook her head.
“Bubkes,” she said, turning in her chair to face Buffy. “Same as with Giles’s books. No hits of note on ‘Sunnydale’ plus ‘drive-in’ plus various hot-topic terms like ‘mysterious death’ or ‘sacrifice’ or ‘brain weevil.’ Drop ‘drive-in’ from the query string and hundreds of matches come up, running back centuries—”
“Well, the Hellmouth has been here a long time,” Buffy said, interrupting.
“But ‘drive-in’ seems to be what you’d call an exclusionary criterion,” Willow said. The specialized words sounded a trifle odd coming from her; she usually just worked her computer magic without explaining how it worked. “It’s right at the edge of the mouth too. The land might be clean.”
“Huh,” Buffy said, thinking. Outside, the sun had begun to set. She needed to leave soon. “That would be a nice change.”
“Did your mom say anything else about the place?” Willow asked.
“Nope,” Buffy said. “Some friend of hers said the place has a ‘history of trouble.’ Hereabouts that means someone got turned inside out or something.”
“Not this time,” Willow said. “I even accessed the crime reports. Not nothing at all, but nothing of note.” She paused. “You’re worried about Xander?”
“Not worried,” Buffy said. “Concerned, maybe. The boy does have a history.”
That was putting it lightly. For a civilian, even a civilian who ran with the Slayer, Xander had proved to be a lightning rod for trouble. Again and again the amiable teenager found himself up to his neck in the bad stuff, typically through no fault of his own.
Well, through little fault of his own, at least.
“Have you talked?” Willow asked. She closed out her search engines and pulled up a Word doc instead. Homework was pending.
“No,” Buffy said slowly. “I don’t want to unless there’s more to go on. And I don’t want him getting the wrong idea. He’s hell-bent on going to the movies, though.” According to the ubiquitous handbills and Xander’s eager accounts, the next night was the drive-in’s grand reopening.
“You could go with him!” Willow said. “Keep an eye out!”
Buffy shook her head. “C’mon, Willow,” she said. “I’d have to miss patrol. Besides, I don’t want to give him the wrong idea.”
Xander’s attraction to Buffy had long since become a given in her life, and she didn’t stop often to think about it. He was a good guy, and she trusted him with her life. Even so, there didn’t seem to be much point in adding fuel to the fire. Alone with Xander, at the drive-in . . .
“I meant we could both go with him,” Willow said, a bit plaintively. “I don’t mind giving him the wrong idea.”
“C’mon, Will,” Buffy said. “Those things don’t work that way.”
“Don’t worry about it, then,” Willow said reluctantly. She toyed with the mouse. “He’ll be fine without me—um, without us.” She had known Xander Harris all her life. Although the two girls rarely talked about it, Buffy was quite aware that Willow had a bit of a crush on her childhood chum. “He’s tough. I’d be more fretful about this Inga character.”
“Huh?” Buffy asked. Her weapons bag sat on the floor next to her sensibly shod feet. She picked it up and glanced at the contents. She was carrying more blades than usual tonight. Better safe than sorry.
“Mysterious stranger plus missing book,” Willow pointed out. “That can’t be good news.”
“Willow, she’s a nurse,” Buffy said, tossing her hair for emphasis.
“Nurses have needles!”
“I’ve got some kind of a werewolf to worry about. Werewolves are bad news,” Buffy said. “If this even is a werewolf.”
“I guess so,” Willow said. “But I’ve met a scary nurse or two in my day, and there’s still the missing book thing.”
“Giles has plenty of books,” Buffy said. She knew that Willow was right, but her mind was already on patrol. The nurse impostor was a mystery but not a pressing problem, at least not right now.
“Did you know Giles belongs to the Grimoire of the Month Club?”
“Can’t say it surprises me,” Buffy said. She shouldered her bag. “The wolves will be howling soon.”
“I hope you’re wrong about that,” Willow said.
Buffy hoped so too.
Xander was working the blocks that flanked the east side of Main Street. It was a reasonably well-off and trafficked section of town, where franchises of national retail chains rubbed shoulders with locally owned restaurants, galleries, and shops. This was pretty far from Xander’s usual haunts—no fast-food joints here—but today it worked well for him. Many of the men and women standing sentry behind cash registers were local entrepreneurs, ready to lend a sympathetic ear to his pitch.
“Thanks a million, Mr. Tate,” he said to the man behind the soda fountain ice cream counter. “I really appreciate it.”
“Hey, what’s good for local business is good for me,” Tate said. He was heavyset and completely bald. A spotless white apron was stretched tight across his sizeable stomach. He’d manned the old-fashioned soda fountain for as long a
s Xander could remember. “You’ll have to make your own space, though,” Tate said.
Xander took hasty inventory of the community bulletin board. The cork tiles were layered thick with postings. Moving quickly, he peeled away a dozen outdated band announcements, sales brochures, and missing-pet announcements. He wondered briefly if people in other towns lost as many dogs and cats, or if it was just part of life on the Hellmouth. Then he shook his head. There were happier things to think about.
Once he’d cleared enough space, and a healthy margin beyond, he positioned one of his handbills and stapled it in place. He wadded up the discarded documents and dropped them in a wastebasket.
“There,” he said, making a great show of clapping his hands together as if to clean them. “A job well done is its own reward.”
“Yeah, well, good luck to you all,” Tate said as he wiped down the already immaculate countertop. “Most people use the Internet instead these days.”
“Well, you know, that luck might be better if you’d let me leave a stack of these,” Xander coaxed. He fanned the remaining handbills.
Tate shook his head. His soda shop was an old one, and he was quite experienced at saying no to teenagers. “You clear the space, you post, one post per event. No handouts. Them’s the rules.”
“Right you are, Mr. Tate!” Xander said. He didn’t press the issue; he didn’t want the owner to change his mind. Instead, he thanked the proprietor again and exited, the door’s bell ringing as he re-emerged into the late afternoon sun.
It was time to start strategizing, he realized. So far he’d just been going door to door, but it was late enough in the day that at least some local operations would close their doors soon. It made sense to select the most likely options, in terms of both friendly management and likely clientele. Six doors down was a familiar storefront that promised both.
“Of course!” Xander said softly.
A moment later another door swung shut behind him, and another old-fashioned bell chimed. He took a deep breath, drawing in not the sweet goodness of ice cream and syrup, but something richer. Herbs and spices and incense filled the air.