“You have to go to college,” Cordelia said simply, as if there were no place for an argument. “You’re Willow.”
Willow rolled her eyes. “See, that’s exactly the point. That’s . . . Have they been talking to you about this? I’m my own Willow, and nobody knows what I want except me. Okay, and maybe Oz.”
She blushed at that, and then grew angry again. “Plus, y’know, there’s Oz. They don’t approve of my going out with him, but he makes me all tingly inside and I don’t care if he’s on MTV or playing bar mitzvahs, he’s just . . .”
“Oz?” Cordelia asked.
Willow smiled, the thought of her boyfriend soothing her. “Yeah,” she said. “Oz.”
“Hmm. Who was it that said ‘love makes you do the wacky’?” Cordelia asked.
“I think that was me.”
“Imagine that,” Cordy said archly. “That may all be perfect for you, Willow. And, yes, though it makes me one of Earth’s lowest life forms to admit it, Xander has taken away every shred of pride and dignity that I’ve ever had by forcing me to admit that, okay, I’m kind of attracted to him . . .”
“Forcing you?” Willow asked, confounded.
Cordelia gave her a sidelong glare. “Work with me, Willow. We’re bonding.”
“Oh, okay.” Willow nodded.
“All I’m saying is, I don’t know what I’m going to do after graduation. What I do know is that I have goals. Xander, on the other hand, not so much. My parents aren’t exactly the inspiration I’m looking for in life, and when they bad-mouth my boyfriend, it makes it all the more important for me to disagree completely.”
Her face turned a little steely. “But they’re right about one thing. Xander and I are two separate people and that may mean we’ve got two separate lives to lead. I have my path . . . and if he doesn’t want to walk down it with me, he’s going to have some hard choices to make.”
Willow swallowed hard, her eyes wide, and looked at Cordelia. “Have you told him any of this yet?”
Cordelia kept her eyes on the road, her mouth set in a tight grimace. At length, she spoke without turning. “I don’t want to,” she confessed.
“You don’t want to hurt him?” Willow suggested.
With a small chuckle, Cordelia glanced quickly at Willow. “Have I ever been that tactful?” she asked. “All along, it’s been a struggle. He was in love with Buffy. He has this weird little fascination with you. Now I think it’s just the whole slaying thing, the whole hero thing, that’s got him.”
Her voice dropped to a whisper now, Cordelia said, “I guess I’m just afraid that when the time comes to choose . . . he won’t choose me.”
They rode in silence for a moment, and then Willow said, “What bothers me the most about graduating is that it’s such a sham. I mean, all my life my parents and teachers and everyone have told me that graduation and growing up means freedom. You can choose your future, what you want to do with your life, and all that.”
She frowned. “But at the same time, they’ve trapped you and I guess you’ve kind of trapped yourself with all these weird expectations of what you need to do with your life in order to succeed. Maybe that’s why I’m so into Oz. He seems so unaffected by anybody’s else’s ideas or expectations.”
“Yeah, that’s Oz,” Cordelia agreed.
Willow shrugged. “Graduation’s supposed to be all about choices. But I almost feel like so many people are telling me what I’m ‘supposed’ to do that all the choices are taken away.”
“You’re just living in the wrong generation, Willow,” Cordelia assured her. “If you’d been born a little earlier, you could have just taken a year off and followed the Grateful Dead around America.”
Willow brightened considerably. “Yeah. Maybe I could still do that.”
“It might be hard. That Cherry Garcia guy is dead.”
Depressed, Willow slumped back in her seat. The school wasn’t far now, and she thought of Xander.
“What about your boyfriend?” she asked. “What’s he going to be when he grows up?”
* * *
On the front lawn of Sunnydale High, Xander bounced on his heels, looking out into the darkness for spookables. Every once in a while, in order to feel a little bit more invincible while Sunnydale lacked a Slayer, he whispered to himself.
“I’m Batman.”
It didn’t really help, but it was fun.
Not too many cars drove by on the road. Very little happened in this part of town at night. Now that he thought of it, Xander amended that thought. Very little happened anywhere in Sunnydale after dark. There wasn’t much of a town to speak of. And let’s face it, despite the influx of people any sleepy little Southern California coastal community was likely to get in a given year, the population never seemed to go up. Whoever did those surveys to figure out the highest death rates in America was obviously not digging too deep.
A town that sat on top of the Hellmouth needed a Slayer. And as good as Buffy was at her job, she often needed a helping hand to combat the forces of darkness. But Xander was quickly discovering that the Hellmouth without Buffy around was just no damn fun at all.
“I’m Batman,” he whispered to himself again, glancing around in the darkness at the front of the school, wondering what was keeping Cordy and Willow. “I’m Batman.”
A sudden groan behind him made Xander spin, whipping a stake he’d been carrying out from inside his coat. What he saw made his eyes go wide with surprise and fear. It was ghouls. Five grotesque, green, stooped-over, withered, nasty-looking, flesh-eating ghouls. And he’d seen these particular ghouls before, back at the Gatehouse. Behind them, a breach in reality shimmered in the air, and Xander realized they must have just passed through. Things must have been getting crazy at the Gatehouse again, and the Gatekeeper couldn’t contain them. The Hellmouth drew them along the ghost roads, right here to Sunnydale.
Right to Xander.
A white-haired ghoul began to shamble toward Xander. “I . . . remember you,” it croaked. “I remember the way you smell.”
“Okay! That’s the last time I buy Obsession for Ghouls,” Xander said nervously, waving the stake in front of him. “Stay back. I’m warning you. You don’t even know where you are, guys. This is Slayer country.”
The ghouls chuckled to themselves. The white-haired one moved toward Xander and the others started to circle around.
“We know the Slayer’s scent from the home of the Gatekeeper,” one of the others, a ghoul female, whispered at the back of the pack. “She is far from here.”
Xander tensed, glanced around, and realized that in hesitating, he’d allowed them to cut off his chance of an easy escape. If he ran now, they’d be on him in a second.
“Okay,” he said, holding up his hands. “Maybe you haven’t heard this, but . . . I’m Batman.”
He rushed at the ghoul ahead of him, stake ready to strike. The green-fleshed old man gnashed his teeth and reached for Xander’s face. With a yell of both fright and rage, Xander knocked his arm out of the way and slammed the stake into the ghoul’s chest.
Nothing happened. The ghoul grabbed Xander’s shoulder in an iron grip, and his other hand reached for Xander’s hair. Around them, the other monsters moved in.
“Okay, chalk that up to a failed experiment,” Xander muttered to himself. “Color me screwed.”
The ghoul dragged Xander’s face toward its open maw, where gleaming razor teeth lined a rotted throat. It was a view he hoped never to have again. If he survived.
Xander reached out and grabbed the ghoul in a similar hold, slammed his head forward and gave the hideous creature a massive headbutt that echoed with a resounding crack across the lawn. They both stumbled backward, away from their struggle. But Xander merely moved into the grasp of two other ghouls, and now more teeth were reaching for his flesh.
Xander began to panic. He was quite on the verge of screaming when a female voice called out something in what he assumed was Latin.
The ghouls a
ll froze in place, unblinking, unbreathing. If they ever did breathe, of which he was not at all certain. Magick. Someone had cast a spell to stop the monsters, at least for the moment. A huge wave of relief swept over him, and Xander turned toward the school, in the direction from which the voice had come.
“Willow, have I ever told you that you are the greatest . . .” he began, and then he froze.
It wasn’t Willow.
In front of the steps leading up to the school’s front doors stood an attractive blond girl with whom Xander and Buffy and friends had had several run-ins before. She was a friend, most of the time. She was also Wendy the Good Little Witch. Or she would have been, if her name had been Wendy. It wasn’t.
“Go on, Xander,” Amy Madison said brightly. “I may not be Willow, but you can still tell me how great I am.”
Xander looked away from Amy and glanced at each of the ghouls in turn. He shook his head in amazement, then nodded, mostly to himself. To Amy, he said, “Well, yeah. Pretty great. You get a big a thumbs-up for your timing, too.”
“Thanks,” Amy said casually, and walked toward him.
He looked at her, not exactly certain what to say. Amy’s mother had been a pretty wicked witch, until she ended up exiling herself to parts unknown. Then, last year, it turned out Amy had been studying up on witchcraft herself, and not doing too bad a job of it either. She knew Buffy was the Slayer, knew the whole deal. But she’d never really been part of their group. Just someone they nodded to in the hall or borrowed homework from, when Amy bothered to do her homework.
She wasn’t the type to police Sunnydale for creatures of darkness.
“So, Amy,” Xander said, as she made her way across the lawn toward him. “What brings you out tonight? Looking for a prince to turn into a frog? A little girl with ruby slippers? Maybe a—”
“Note to self,” Amy said wistfully. “Xander still thinks he’s funny. What, Harris, you didn’t notice that Sunnydale’s having a once-in-a-lifetime monster mash, and the Slayer’s conveniently out of town? I noticed. I’m not going to lose sleep over it, but if I see something not quite human trying to eat somebody I know . . . well, I figure I have to lend a hand.”
Amy came to a stop right in front of Xander, put a hand on her hip, and smiled broadly. “And by the way, you’re welcome.”
Flustered, Xander said, “Oh, right. Thanks. But what do you mean, ‘thinks he’s funny’?”
With a shake of her head, Amy pushed past Xander and kept walking straight out toward the road.
“They’ll be coming around in a few minutes,” Amy revealed. “You might not want to be around when that happens.”
Then she crossed the street, moved into a tall line of shrubbery, and was gone. Xander stared after her a moment. Maybe she wasn’t going to join the Scooby Gang, but he thought a lot of what she’d said was just talk. She was out tonight because there was enough insanity going on to endanger the people she cared about. Xander was glad. It was a bit easier to face the horrors now that he knew that—at least for tonight—he and his friends weren’t the only ones out there.
A few seconds later, as Xander was looking for something heavy enough or sharp enough to do serious damage to flesh-eating ghouls, Cordelia pulled up in front of the school with Willow in the passenger seat, staring wide-eyed at the odd display on the grounds.
The girls jumped out quickly and slammed the doors. They raced over, just as Xander was walking toward the paralyzed ghouls with a brick in his hand.
“Hey, guys,” he said, by way of greeting.
“Xander, what’s going on?” Cordelia demanded. “What are those things?”
“What things?” Xander asked innocently.
“Those things!” Willow said, pointing. “They’re ghouls, aren’t they? Why are they . . . how did you do that?”
Xander glanced over at the ghouls, then looked back at Cordelia and Willow. He smiled mischievously.
“Haven’t you heard?” he asked, his expression suddenly turning grim, his voice low and gravelly. “I’m Batman.”
Both girls sighed and rolled their eyes. They exchanged a glance that had him wondering, but not for long. It was time to take care of Sunnydale High’s new lawn ornaments before their stomachs started rumbling again.
* * *
The fog rolled into the harbor of the town of Sunnydale. Looking out to sea, Dallas Mayhew wondered if he would be cut from the team if he didn’t make morning practice. He was exhausted, and he’d been drinking beer since sundown. He had no idea what time it was, but he’d guzzled a whole six-pack. When he was younger—like last year, when he was just a junior—it wouldn’t even have fazed him. Now he was an old man.
And Sunnydale’s best running back. Coach would probably overlook another missed practice in his case.
Maybe what he’d do instead is go home and get some sleep.
Then he could come back here tomorrow night with some of the guys and do it all over again.
If he could find his way home in this fog.
* * *
In her father’s villa in Florence, Italy, Micaela Tomasi stood staring out the window of a room she had once loved but which she now could think of only as her prison cell. She was, indeed, a prisoner here. Her father, the man whose followers called him II Maestro, had taken her in when she was a young girl and trained her in the ways of chaos. But, as a part of his grand scheme, she had later been raised by a family of Watchers and become a part of the Watchers’ Council, only so that she might one day betray them.
Now she had. Not only the Council, but the current Watcher himself, Rupert Giles. Micaela was quite fond of Giles. She had been sent to investigate him, distract him, steal from him . . . but she had no idea that there had been others sent along as well. To kill him. Fortunately, Rupert still lived. But as far as Micaela’s father was concerned, his days were numbered.
Her father’s dreams for the world had been her primary instruction as a child; they had been the foundation on which the rest of her life had been built. But during her years with the Watchers’ Council, first as an apprentice and later as a full-fledged Watcher—preparing for the day when the girl she had been assigned to might be called to become the Slayer—Micaela had learned that the Watchers’ Council stood not merely for order, but for a just order. A planet of free people, cleansed of Hellish evil whenever and wherever possible.
Yet it wasn’t until she’d recently returned to her father’s home and witnessed, firsthand, precisely how savage and brutal he had become, that Micaela truly realized that her father was a part of the evil the Council so vigorously opposed. If she had kept to the path she had been on, she would have been irrevocably tainted. Now . . . it was a life she wanted nothing to do with.
But she couldn’t leave. Her father would never allow it. As much as she believed he did love her, despite his profound evil, Micaela knew that he would see her dead before he would see her siding with his enemies.
She was still staring out the window nearly an hour later, sipping a sweet wine made decades earlier from her father’s own vineyards, at the magical light cast upon the city, the Duomo lustrous and gleaming in the distance. There was a light knock on the door. Micaela turned and began to walk toward it, but already it was opening.
Suddenly frightened, she stopped in mid-step, uncertain what course of action to follow. None of her father’s acolytes would dare enter her private chamber, even after a discreet knock, without express permission. This man made no effort to hide himself. Though he was silhouetted in the doorway, Micaela recognized him immediately.
“Albert,” she said, surprise in her voice and in her eyes. “What are you doing here?”
The acolyte magician entered her room as though they had planned some lover’s tryst—a thought which did not entirely offend her. She had known and admired Albert for quite some time. But recently, everything had changed. For all of them. Micaela had seen things she never ought to have seen. She had witnessed her father’s physical cruelty
to others, on an almost inconceivable level, and knew now that, at the very least, despite his many claims, there was nothing holy or spiritual about his work. He was a monster, pure and simple. And the acolytes—the Sons of Entropy he had always called them—were his servants.
But perhaps not all of them. Albert smiled as he came to her and held her hand tightly in his.
“We don’t have much time,” he whispered. “Not tonight, but soon, I’m going to be leaving here. I’d like to do it with all my limbs intact and my brains still inside my skull.”
Micaela only stared, hope rising within her, hope she was afraid might be so easily crushed.
“I have seen your suffering, Micaela,” Albert said. “I have prayed that when I flee, you will be by my side. If II Maestro is an angel of the future, he is the angel of darkness. But you, Micaela. You are an angel. I believe . . . I believe I am falling in love with you.”
For that, Micaela could not think of a single cogent response. But when Albert came forward to wrap her in his arms, she consented easily, and felt, if nothing else, that she was no longer alone.
Chapter 4
THEY WERE BACK.
The silvery moonlight shining through her gossamer form, the spirit of Antoinette Regnier pulled back the curtains in the window of her son’s bedroom in the Gatehouse. Hooded figures swarmed over the lawn of the Gatehouse like vermin. So many, crackling with magick as they looked for a fissure in the protective barriers her son had cast around the Gatehouse. It cast a shudder of dread down her spine, a shudder that was echoed behind her by the rasping cough her son mustered from time to time.
He had crawled into the great Cauldron of Bran to replenish his strength and was lingering there. In his wrinkled, veined hands he limply held the Spear of Longinus, one of the most powerful weapons of all time. It was said that no warrior who held it could be defeated in battle.
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