by Nancy Holder
“Welcome to the Magic Box,” came a girl’s voice. She didn’t sound very enthusiastic. “Let me know if I can help you find something, but we close in, um, twelve minutes.”
Perched halfway up a ladder was the latest in a long run of Magic Box clerks, taking inventory of items on an upper shelf. She was dressed in black pants and a tank top and had purple hair. In one hand she held a clipboard, and in the other some kind of wizened root thing that looked like it had seen better days.
“I just wanted to see if I could post a notice,” Xander said. The sight of purple hair stirred a memory. This had to be the girl Cordelia had mentioned, the girl who’d witnessed weird doings at the Bronze.
The girl sighed and set the items she held aside. She didn’t so much descend the ladder as jump from it. Her booted feet thumped on the Magic Box’s floor. “Gimme,” she said, and took the proffered handbill. She stood near him as she read.
Close-up she was cute. She was older than Xander, but not by more than ten years. Under the pale makeup and dark lipstick, her features were elfin, and he could tell that she kept herself in shape. This had to be Aura’s on-the-scene informant. Just below one shoulder a badge announced her name.
“You’re Amanda?” he half-said, half-asked. He was interested now. As he’d told Cordelia earlier, he was a healthy teenage boy.
Still reading, the clerk grunted in acknowledgment. Unlike almost anyone else he’d spoken to, she seemed determined to read each word on the orange sheet. After what seemed like an eternity she wrinkled her nose and looked up from the page. “I dunno,” she said.
The Goth girl had pretty eyes, he realized. They were hazel and they sparkled, even in the shop’s subdued lighting. Xander was really interested now. She had a certain eerie charm, but without any evidence of the supernatural strings that usually came attached to girls with wrong-colored hair.
“You don’t know whether you’re Amanda?” he joked.
“Yeah, I’m Amanda, and yeah, I’m new,” she said. She was less preoccupied than he’d thought. She tapped the orange sheet. “I don’t know about this,” she said.
“The Magic Box has always been a good friend of Sunny-dale High and the local business community,” Xander said hopefully. “Band candy, yearbook ads, concert announcements, the whole schmear.” He pointed at the window, where sun-faded remnants of older postings lingered.
Amanda was reading the drive-in announcement again. He wondered if she wanted to memorize it.
“Look,” Xander said ingratiatingly. It was time to turn on the famous Harris charm. “This is a good spot. We’re running a horror movie, and with the creepy-crawlies who come in here sometimes—”
Her head came up, as if on a string. Her hazel eyes flashed. He’d said the wrong thing.
“Sometimes,” Xander repeated. “I said ‘sometimes.’ Some of my best friends shop here. Honest.” He paused, trying to make up for lost ground. “Look, I can throw in a couple of passes, if you’d like.”
He showed her the tickets. She plucked them from his fingers and read both sides carefully. Finally, grudgingly, Amanda nodded. “Okay, deal,” she said. “And if the boss complains, it comes down.”
“Fair enough,” Xander said. “More than fair, really.”
It took a few minutes to scrape an old posting of the same approximate size from the window’s glass, but less time to tape his new one in place. While he worked, she set the door’s lock and flipped the door’s sign to SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED. She did it with remarkable speed and had already begun to count the day’s receipts by the time he’d finished.
“You’re done?” she asked, sorting bills. The hint wasn’t very subtle. It was time for Sign-Posting Lad to vanish into the sunset.
“Yeah,” Xander said. He watched her count for a moment. “Busy day?” he asked.
“I thought you were done,” Amanda said. Coins clinked as she sorted them into the appropriate compartments. Clearly, she wasn’t one for small talk.
“Can I ask you a question before I go?” Xander said slowly. He tried to choose his words carefully, but that kind of premeditation didn’t come easily to him, especially not with girls.
“That’s one already,” she said. More coins clinked.
“Have you ever been to the Bronze?” There was a chance she could tell him more about what had happened the previous night.
The sound of coins being counted came to an abrupt halt. The purple-haired girl looked up from her work, dark lips parted in an amused grin. Xander knew instantly that he hadn’t spoken carefully enough.
“You’re wasting your time, townie,” she said. “I don’t date kids.”
At the time of its original grand opening decades before, the drive-in had stood at the town’s outermost fringes. Sunnydale had grown since then, but in other directions. Specifically, toward the new state highway and the connector roads to the federal interstate, so the open-air theater still lay outside its border. The distance and relative isolation helped save it from vandals and scavengers. Once the original management had reclaimed its projection and sound systems and stripped the concession stand bare, there simply hadn’t been much left behind to attract visitors.
Angel had been one of the few visitors. His restless nature had led him to explore Sunnydale in some detail since coming there, and he knew the town better than most natives did. Now, in the dead of night, he stood on the hill overlooking the previously abandoned establishment and marveled at how much it had changed in such a short time.
Even at a distance he could tell it was ready to reopen. The parking area was weeded, reterraced, and strewn with fresh gravel. The speaker posts were gone, presumably superseded by broadcast sound. The screen’s refurbished surface gleamed faintly under the autumn moon. A shiny new marquee was positioned near the box office.
“Very nice,” Angel said to no one in particular. Like himself, the place was a reminder of a time gone by, even if its time was not as far past as his own. As an institution the drive-in had enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s, and some years of that tumultuous decade had been very good for Angel. Seeing the drive-in brought a smile to his pale face and made him think of Elvis and early rock and roll. As with most of Angel’s smiles, however, it was faint and faded quickly.
With long, easy strides he made his way down the hill and to the theater’s perimeter. Renovation extended to a hastily erected cyclone fence topped by razor wire, but neither posed any obstacle worth noting. A single leap carried Angel over the barrier, and he set about exploring in earnest.
Yet again the vampire’s keen senses proved useful. He could see perfectly in the moonlit gloom. His touch and hearing were sensitive enough that he had no difficulty picking construction site padlocks or inspecting the newly installed projectors. As far as he could tell, there was nothing particularly sinister about the place. Certainly, there was no trace, however faint, of any kind of werewolf. Even the paperwork he found in the construction shack was in perfect order. Whoever Shadow Amusements, Inc. was, they managed their contractors well.
The phantom memory that Angel had dredged up earlier still pointed this way, but the thought was really an absurd one. The fact that it hadn’t paid off didn’t really surprise him.
The last structure he looked at was secure, relatively speaking. It was the concession stand building, which also housed the operation’s office behind a heavy door with a good lock. Angel needed nearly a minute to pick the locks on both doors, and then he let himself into the sparsely furnished space.
He started with a shelf anchored to the wall above the desk. It held a dozen thick catalogs with elaborate logos on each spine. The light inside the office was too faint for color, but judging from the images that Angel viewed in monochrome, the covers were impressively gaudy. He moved closer to the office’s single window, hoping for enough moonlight to discern any more details.
They were booking catalogs used to arrange movie rentals. Angel flipped through one, uninterested and unimpressed. He was reach
ing for a second catalog when he heard the sound.
Outside, freshly strewn gravel crunched beneath one footstep, then another. Someone was approaching. Hastily he rammed the catalog back into place and cursed himself silently. He’d left the building’s door ajar.
“I know someone’s in there,” said the person, presumably a guard. One of the files in the construction shack included a contract with a local security service. Angel said nothing.
“Let’s do this the nice way,” the man outside said. “I’ve already called the police, and I warn you, I’m armed.”
Angel heard the click-click of a double action revolver’s hammer. That was bad. Bullets couldn’t hurt him, but they stung, and there was always the danger of ricochet. He didn’t particularly want the guard to get hurt just for doing his job.
The vampire considered his options. One was the half-open door, with the armed guard on its far side. The other was the single window. It was old, and heavy beads of rust had welded the metal frame shut. The glass was thick and reinforced with embedded wires. He could break through easily enough.
Angel heard the door behind him start to swing open. He gripped the window’s sash firmly. Metal shrieked as the corrosion of decades tore free. The opening was barely big enough to admit him, but he squeezed through, grimacing as his jacket caught a jagged edge and tore.
His feet had hardly cleared the window frame when the guard fired. Thunder roared and the night was lit brightly for a split second. Rock dust flew as a bullet buried itself in the parking lot’s gravel.
A moment later the guard’s head extended cautiously from the open window. He looked from side to side, then drew back. When he spoke again, it was in clear, businesslike tones. Angel could hear him perfectly from his hiding place.
“Ralph, this is Murray again,” the guard said. Angel couldn’t see inside the office, but it was easy to guess that the other man had a cell phone. “Yeah, Murray at the site. It’s not an emergency. Looks like there was a break-in, but the perp is long gone.” He paused. “Okay, I won’t call them ‘perps’ anymore.” He paused again, then lied. “No, I didn’t fire my gun,” he said. “I know better than that.”
Finally Murray spoke again. He sounded both apologetic and exasperated. “Yeah, Ralph, yeah. I know false alarms are a pain. I’ll come by tomorrow to help with the paperwork. Right, first thing.”
There came a click as he closed his phone, breaking the connection. The guard poked his head out the window again and looked from side to side a second time.
“Huh,” he said softly, speaking to himself. “No footprints at all. This place must be haunted.”
Angel, watching him from the rooftop above, thought otherwise.
CHAPTER FIVE
Buffy sat slumped beneath the chestnut tree on the school campus. The day was very young, with only the earliest of early-bird students reporting for duty, but Buffy’s eyes were already heavy-lidded and bloodshot. She leaned back against the tree’s trunk, the open history book in her lap nearly forgotten. Next to her on the dew-damp grass was an unopened pint of orange juice and three chewy granola bars. She was too tired to eat.
“Good heavens, Buffy,” Giles said with concern in his voice as he approached her. “You look dreadful.”
“No wonder you’re a bachelor,” she said. Even her voice was colored with fatigue. “With patter like that, I mean.”
“That’s not what I meant,” the master librarian said. Dropping his briefcase, he squatted beside her. She could tell that he didn’t want to get grass stains on his tweed trousers. “Were you out all night?” he asked, plainly concerned.
She nodded. “Pretty much,” she said, closing her history book. “Went home, did the dinner thing with Mom, pretended to go to bed. Slipped out later to go on patrol.”
Giles nodded. It was a story he’d heard before.
“One thing led to another,” Buffy continued. “By the time I realized the night was gone, the night was, well, gone. Went home, changed, and raided the fridge.” She forced a smile. “And here I am, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.”
Giles picked up the orange juice carton and opened it. “Here,” he said, “drink.”
“In a minute,” she said. “I want to tell you—”
“Drink,” Giles said again. “Your stamina is remarkable and so is your dedication. Neither will suffer if you tend to your blood sugar.”
Buffy drank. The OJ was still cool, and it admittedly felt good coursing down her throat. Almost immediately the world became a brighter place. “Um,” she said. “Good.”
Giles nodded. “Now,” he said, “tell me what happened.”
“That’s just it, Giles,” Buffy said. “Nothing happened.”
He looked at her blankly. “Nothing?”
“Nothing at all,” she said. “The night was dead. Not even a teensy-tiny vampire to be seen. I lugged twenty pounds of pointy weapons for nothing.”
“You tarried on patrol all night because nothing happened?” Giles asked. Concern began to give way to annoyance. “Buffy, as I said, I admire your sense of duty, but—”
“You weren’t out there, Giles,” Buffy said. She looked in the direction of the parking lot. The first real wave of students began arriving. Xander might be among their number, she realized, and she tucked the granola bars safely into her pocket. “It felt like the whole world was holding its breath.”
The words came to her without conscious thought, but they rang with absolute truth, even in her own ears. Once more the night air had been filled with an electric charge, but this time there had been no incident. For nearly seven hours she had patrolled the haunts and byways of Sunnydale, her nerves humming and her entire body tensed for action that never came. She was exhausted now, more tired than mere lack of sleep could have made her. Buffy felt like a sprinter who’d spent the entire meet on the starting line, without ever having a chance to run.
Giles stood and offered his hand. She waved him aside and rose in a single fluid motion, as if her body were a wave that had decided to flow uphill. It was Buffy’s nerves that felt the worst of the night’s fatigue, not her body.
“And Angel?” Giles asked. “Did he make an appearance?”
She shook her head. Her relationship with the vampire was one of trust and even love, but it was not without its mysteries. “No show,” Buffy said. She tried not to sound wistful. “Business of his own, I guess. Happens sometimes.”
They walked together toward the school entrance. Sitting had been a mistake; moving made her feel better. So did the companionship. The orange juice had probably helped too. She began to feel hungry and patted the granola bars in her pocket.
“You were supposed to contact me last night,” Giles said in mild reproof. “Before patrol, I mean.”
“Ouchie,” she said. “I’m sorry. I forgot.” She didn’t tell him that she had visited Willow and researched the drive-in. Bad enough that she’d slighted him; it would make things worse to tell him that the effort she had undertaken instead had been fruitless. “Any luck in the home library?”
He gave a brief nod. “Possibly,” he said. “Do you know what an excursus is, Buffy?”
“Something that used to be a curse?” she asked.
They were inside the school now, and the hallway was slowly filling with students. None seemed to give the mismatched pair a second glance. Even now, Buffy wasn’t exactly Miss Popular, and his official role as school librarian often made Giles the next best thing to an invisible man.
He tut-tutted softly. “No, no,” he said. “It’s not an occult term but an academic one. It’s a lengthy discussion of a specific topic, appended to another, larger work. Often they’re published separately, after the ‘parent’ book.”
“A super-footnote,” Buffy said. “A footnote from the doomed planet Krypton.”
He gave no sign of having heard her. “I keep certain excursuses at home, even when the parent volume resides in the collection here. They’re very rare, very fragile, and�
��”
“And you don’t want me spilling any orange juice on them,” Buffy said. She paused in midstride. They were at the library entrance, which meant it was time for her to report to homeroom. Classes could be cut, if the procedure were executed right, but missing homeroom meant being marked absent, and she’d missed too many days already.
“Just so,” Giles said. “I think they may be useful in the matter of the mis-shelved book.”
“The missing book, you mean,” Buffy said. She still had her doubts about that Inga character.
“The missing book,” Giles said patiently. He made the three words sound like a great concession. “We should speak of it at length.”
“I now call this meeting of the Secret Justice Club to order,” Xander said. He stood at the head of the long table, hands at his hips, and drew himself up to his full height as he eyed the three seated girls. It was a very dramatic pose, and a good match for his portentous tone. “Thank you for convening here, in our secret citadel of justice, on such short notice.”
Seated beside Willow, Buffy looked at him with hooded eyes. She was far more durable and resilient than even an Olympic athlete, but even so, fatigue from the long, stressful night left her irritable. Her friend’s clowning wasn’t helping things either. “Xander—,” she started to say.
He gestured with one hand, waving her input aside. “No, no, Slayer Lass,” he said with mock condescension. “I realize we all have hectic schedules, and I appreciate you all making time in your lives—”
“Put a sock in it, Xander,” Cordelia said, speaking even more sharply than Buffy. She drummed perfectly manicured nails on the table’s polished top. Whichever social event the gathering had taken her from, she wanted to get back to it even more than Buffy wanted to rest.
Xander flinched at the words. He looked at her, as he had at Buffy, but he didn’t wave her words aside. He seemed confused and paralyzed by indecision, like a deer in headlights.