Buffy the Vampire Slayer 2

by Nancy Holder

  Rather than accept the proffered sugary treat, he gave her a quick rundown on what Buffy had told him about Willow’s research and about their plans for a run to the open-air theater. It was a lot to take in, but Cordelia managed.

  “Well, to be honest, that sounds pretty logical to me,” she said. “I’m not sure about Willow, but Buffy and Angel are the right choice for that kind of thing.” Buffy and Angel had enhanced capabilities, and each could do things that Cordelia even now found amazing.

  “Yeah,” Xander said. “It’s just—I feel so helpless.”

  “I know,” Cordelia said. She’d never seen him like this before. Xander could be irritating and a bit of a buffoon, but he never seemed to lack self-confidence. Clearly, he had hidden depths.

  “What about you?” he asked.

  “Nothing better to do,” she lied, biting into her cherry red candy.

  They sat together in effective silence for another minute or two, Cordelia eating and Xander watching her eat. The air seemed thick with apprehension, apprehension concerning their friends who were in the hospital and those who weren’t.

  Then something remarkable happened. Xander managed a smile. “Cordy,” he said, “I changed my mind. I think I will have some of that.”

  He kissed her, hard, and she kissed him back. He pulled her to him and she pulled too, until they fell back on the bed in a mutual embrace.

  What the heck. It beat necking in a broom closet.

  Traffic was bad; everyone in town seemed to have picked tonight to go to the movies. The road that led out of Sunnydale was heavily trafficked with cars and vans, pickup trucks and SUVs. The procession looked like it included a pretty good sampling of town society, and Buffy had a bad feeling about that. Even now, even with the sun beneath the horizon, the caravan continued. Parking would be at a premium tonight.

  “This is going to take forever,” Angel said. He was seated behind the steering wheel of Giles’s little car, which they had commandeered for the evening. Buffy had called shotgun, leaving the backseat for Willow.

  “Do the best you can,” the Slayer said. Eyeing the seemingly endless procession that stretched before them, she worried that even Angel’s best wouldn’t be good enough.

  “Everyone buckled up?” he asked.

  “I am,” Willow said.

  “Buffy?”

  “Oh, all right,” she said, and pulled the woven belt into place and clicked the buckle shut.

  He grinned wolfishly at her. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Don’t you think you’re being a little—Yow!”

  The next twenty minutes or so were as frightening as any in Buffy’s young life. Angel drove the little car with unrelenting aggression and the skill of someone who could combine superhuman reflexes with lessons learned through decades of experience. Immediately they were darting in and out among the other vehicles. The compact’s engine coughed and stuttered but never failed as Angel called on all of its strength. He snapped the wheel from side to side, exploiting every opportunity to gain even a few car lengths’ distance. He swerved on and off the road, spraying gravel as he used the roadbed shoulder to pass illegally on the right. By the time they’d arrived at the drive-in and Angel had forced his way into the front of the line, Buffy was very nearly carsick.

  The ticket seller was an older man, balding and portly and dressed in black. “It’s free tonight,” he said affably. “But we’re running out of spaces.” He leaned down from the booth opening, as if to say something more. As he did, Buffy realized something odd: He was wearing a priest’s collar.

  That should have been her first clue.

  “Hey,” the man said, “aren’t you Angelus?”

  “Huh?” Angel said, more perplexed than alarmed by the use of his old name.

  “DIE, VAMPIRE!” the ticket-selling priest screamed, stabbing at him with a wooden stake.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I see that we have visitors,” Cagliostro said in tones that were free of his earlier bombast. He sounded eerily calm, even detached, and his voice seemed to come from a distance. “The Slayer and her pet vampire. You really must explain that situation to me, when we have the time.”

  “If you survive,” Giles said. He tested his bonds again, but they remained secure.

  Cagliostro didn’t seem to notice Giles’s actions or his words. Still facing Giles from his own chair near the big projectors, he seemed absolutely unconcerned with any challenge that Giles might offer. His gaze was trained in Giles’s direction but seemed focused on something else entirely. The effect was disconcerting. It was as if he were looking not at the Watcher but through him. The confines of the projection booth were filled by the clatter of the running projector, but his placid tones cut through the noise with remarkable clarity. They were nearly alone in the place; only the nameless gunfighter shared it with them as he tended the equipment.

  “You’ll talk to me later, Rupert,” Cagliostro said. His lips twitched as he used Giles’s first name for the first time, but the hint of a smile faded almost instantly. “There’s much you’ll have to explain to me, once I’ve taken my leave of this remarkable settlement. I’ve long been curious about the inner workings of the Council.”

  Giles said nothing. There was no point. He’d never permit Cagliostro—never permit anyone—to extract such knowledge from him, but displays of defiance would do him no good. Better to allow events to play out and wait for an opportunity.

  “This land must offer great frustrations to a man with a Watcher’s education,” Cagliostro said dreamily. “So much ignorance—”

  “So much vigor,” Giles said in correction. He certainly had issues with the so-called New World—what Americans did to food bordered on the barbarous—but the bonds he’d made here were strong and ran deep. There was no point in countenancing insults.

  “Ignorant cattle,” Cagliostro said, still speaking with a distracted air. “Peasants who don’t know that they are peasants. Like sheep without a shepherd.”

  That was the second time he’d used animals as a metaphor. Were they simply the first insults that came to mind, or had the alchemist inadvertently revealed something of himself? Did he think of people as a means of sustenance? That thought, coupled with his host’s longevity, hinted at an unpleasant possibility.

  “There’s something of the vampire in you, isn’t there?” Giles asked.

  Cagliostro actually laughed at that. “Quite the contrary,” he said. “Rather, there is something of me in at least some vam—Uh!”

  He flinched. As Giles watched, fascinated, Cagliostro slumped slightly. The smooth composure of his features broke again, and an expression of pain flickered across his face, almost too quickly to be seen. He bit his lower lip and murmured, “Well struck, Slayer. First blood.”

  He was speaking of Buffy, Giles realized—perhaps even to her.

  How could that be?

  Angel was fast but not quite fast enough. He gave a gasp of pain as the stake penetrated his chest. His evasive maneuver hadn’t failed completely, though: The spear of wood stabbed into him just below the collarbone and into the joint of his shoulder. It missed his heart entirely.

  Buffy’s speed served them both even better. She drew the boka and swung it in a short arc that passed through the priestly ticket seller’s wrist. The hand that had held the stake separated instantly, and the remainder of their adversary vanished nearly as fast.

  “Th-thanks,” Angel said. He pulled the wooden stake from his shoulder with a wet tearing noise. “Took me by surprise.”

  “You okay?” Buffy asked.

  “I’ll live,” Angel said. He moved his injured joint tentatively. “Hurts,” he said. “Hurts, but it works.”

  “End of the line. Everyone out,” Buffy snapped, kicking open her door. “Now!”

  “We can’t just leave the car—,” Willow started to say.

  “Now!” Buffy said. Her earlier misgivings about Willow’s presence belatedly reasserted themselves, but what was do
ne, was done. The here and now were what mattered.

  Horns honked as they scrambled from the car, and other drivers shouted, making their displeasure known. The line behind them was long and couldn’t move now, with the path blocked. That was to the good, Buffy decided. According to Angel and Xander both, this was the establishment’s only entryway. That meant there’d be fewer bystanders to worry about.

  Not that there weren’t plenty, she thought as she viewed the entirety of the drive-in for the first time. With the parking area lit by the screen’s reflected radiance, Buffy could see the place was nearly full. There were scores of vehicles—perhaps hundreds. No one went to the movies alone; if there were even two people in each car . . .

  “We’ve got to get moving,” she said. She pointed to a distant building, squat and low. A beam of light spilled from one window. “There. I’m thinking, the projection booth. If we’re talking magick movies, that’s where we need to be.”

  She took the lead, in part because of her own anxiety and in part to give Angel a moment to recover. Moving quickly, they followed her along an improvised path that snaked between parked cars. Boka in one hand, a simple machete in the other, she did her best to use the terrain to her advantage, darting between parked cars to block prying eyes, however briefly.

  The priest’s greeting still rang in her ears. For the vampire it had been a threat; to her it had meant something else, or two somethings.

  They’d come to the right place. If ever she’d doubted that, she was certain now.

  And Cagliostro was ready for them.

  “Coffee?” Barney asked. He offered his thermos, and when Joyce nodded, he topped off her cup.

  Now that they’d arrived at the open-air theater, Joyce felt a little silly for having accepted his invitation. These were hardly the kind of movies for a grown woman to watch. Her tastes ran more to love stories and art films, but she couldn’t image them running in a place like this.

  And if she felt silly, it wasn’t a bad feeling. Being silly reminded her of being young. There was an electric excitement in the air that helped her momentarily forget that she was a middle-aged woman out on a lark with a man who was more of a friendly acquaintance than anything else.

  “I remember this one,” Barney said as the image of a grizzled, world-weary man in western garb filled the screen.

  Joyce did too. She’d seen Reach for the Sky—and Die! with Buffy’s father on its first run, in a conventional theater, back when the world was younger. She’d been younger too, of course, but her memory wasn’t gone yet. She reviewed the handbill. Black letters on orange were hard to read in the reflected light, but she managed. “It’s not on the list,” she said, puzzled.

  “Coming attractions,” Barney said, staring raptly at the screen’s display. “Man, this was so—Hey!”

  The gunfighter was gone. In a convulsive wrench, its image had given way to something else. Cheap-sounding music, made up mostly of chimes and woodwinds, spilled from the car speakers, and the title frame of a movie appeared on the screen. It was for some kind of martial arts film, Joyce realized, annoyed. Movies ran on twinned projectors, she knew, switching off between them as films ended. Someone had botched the changeover and transitioned from the previews to the main program.

  “We can rent it sometime, if you want,” she told Barney, trying to console him. “The western, I mean. It might be fun to see at home.”

  • • •

  “Well struck, Slayer. First blood,” Cagliostro said.

  Even as Cagliostro’s brief expression of discomfort faded, the gunfighter moved to act as Giles watched carefully. One leathery hand grasped a lever extending from the first projector, and one booted foot came down on a pedal connected to the other. Hand and foot acted simultaneously, and the pitch of projector motors abruptly shifted. One unit was shutting down, Giles realized, and the other was coming to life.

  Something else was happening too.

  It wasn’t natural light but a different kind of light that was emerging from the second lens. It didn’t follow a conventional radiance’s straight path, but it looped and curled. Like a serpent’s tongue or a demon’s tentacle, it writhed and undulated as it extended itself into the open area between Giles and Cagliostro. One end remained securely anchored to the projector lens, while the other did a delicate dance in the electricity-charged air, as if on a quest. Once, the latter end came ominously close to Giles’s eyes, and Cagliostro chucked softly.

  “How odd. The lens likes you,” he said. His tone was still distant and cool, as if he spoke from the depths of a dream. “It doesn’t like everyone. But it likes me more.”

  As if drawn by the tranquil voice, the glowing tendril shifted in midair. It had moved slowly before, but now, almost too swiftly for the eye to follow, it darted in Cagliostro’s direction. It darted, struck, and buried itself in his chest. The alchemist gave another gasp, a sound that could have been pleasure or pain. Almost instantly the tendril began to pulse and throb.

  “There. That’s much better,” the gunfighter said.

  He spoke with Cagliostro’s voice.

  Buffy was leading the others past one real behemoth of an SUV when the wolf-man dropped on her from above. She felt rather than saw or heard his presence, spinning just in time to see his dark form against the darker sky.

  “You again,” she said, and swung her machete. The wolf-man’s head went flying with gratifying speed, and his body disappeared, dissipating into the night air. Willow gave a squeal of surprise, and Buffy realized that she’d never seen the effect. She glanced in her friend’s direction and said, “See? Like a light turning off.”

  “Buffy, look out!” Angel shouted.

  It was happening again: same SUV, same varsity werewolf, like instant replay or a summer rerun. Buffy chopped at the doppelgänger quickly, but not fast enough. He had taken her unawares. Her slash went off course and the beast hit her. The impact sent her tumbling to the ground, with the monster crouched on top of her. She raised both weapons to defend herself, but like an expert wrestler the wolf-man’s clawing hands clamped down on her wrists, blocking both of her strikes. Forcing her arms apart to give himself easier access, the creature lowered his jaws to her throat.

  • • •

  “Mmmm,” Cordelia said, then broke the kiss and came up for air. “You’ve got your failings, mister, but you’re a good kisser.”

  “Yeah?” Xander said. He swallowed the last of the candy. “What’s that thing in English grammar?” he asked. “Nominative, comparative—”

  “Huh?” Cordelia asked. The non sequitur made no sense.

  “I don’t want to be good,” Xander said, but it wasn’t a complaint. He said with a smile, “I don’t want to be better, either. Let me show you that I’m the best.”

  He locked lips with her again, and pulled her even closer. They were still rolling around on the unassigned bed, but Cordelia didn’t intend to let things go any further.

  Some small corner of her mind was still filled with surprise with herself for the unscheduled make-out session. This was different from the other times, somehow richer and more textured. She knew that there was still danger afoot, but there was something more. There was Jonathan and there was Aura, and the mysterious malady they shared. The mysterious illness was what her English teacher termed “an intimation of mortality”—a reminder of how fleeting life could be, and Cordelia enjoyed life very much.

  Xander was coming in for another pass when something caught Cordelia’s eye. Over his shoulder she could see something moving.

  “Ooomp!” she said, pushing him back.

  “Ooomp?” he asked, baffled.

  “L-look,” she said, pointing. “Look at Jonathan!”

  That did it. He gave up trying and turned to look at his slumbering classmate. Jonathan was still asleep, still . . . still. He lay unmoving, as if frozen in time, but something was different.

  A glowing line of something had drifted in through the window. It traced a lazy,
meandering track to Jonathan’s chest and attached itself to him directly above the heart. In the room’s bright lights it was difficult to see clearly, but as Cordelia and Xander watched, that changed. The line thickened and resolved itself, until it looked solid and real. Then it began to pulse, with a rhythm that Cordelia found unnervingly familiar.

  It was like the beating of a human heart.

  Buffy felt the beast’s hot breath on the skin of her neck and tried to push him back and up to free herself. The effort was futile. He had leverage and she didn’t. The wolf-man’s bared fangs came closer and closer. Saliva dripped onto her face, hot and disgusting.

  There was a sound of impact. Something solid slammed into the wolf-man from behind. The varsity werewolf instantly blurred and faded, and then the thing was gone.

  “Take that, foul beast of darkness,” Willow said. She still held the edged weapon and seemed remarkably pleased with herself. Buffy didn’t blame her: It had been a good strike. Willow would have made a fine avenging fury, if avenging furies came in a Jewish pixie variety.

  Buffy glanced at Angel. He opened his hands and shrugged, as if to excuse himself for not coming to her aid first. “I’m faster, but she was closer,” he said.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Buffy said, catching her breath and leading them forward. “I—for gosh sakes. Will you look at that?”

  They’d rounded the SUV’s sheltering bulk now and could see the bowl-like parking area of the drive-in. The view was much like what they had seen before, with an awe-inducing difference. The cars and trucks and vans remained where they were, but now lines of pale fire emerged from half of them. Narrow and faint, the tracks the lines followed were fluid and undulating, like vines blowing in the wind.

  “Wow,” Willow said.

  “Yeah, wow,” Buffy said, struck by the mysterious tableau. It was strangely beautiful. The silvery tendrils branched and converged, bent and doubled and looped. In school, Buffy had seen documentary footage shot underwater, films of jelly-fish trailing tendrils in subsea splendor. What she saw now reminded her of those films. Each had one thing in common: One end led to a parked vehicle and the other led to the projection shack.