Brother Lupo smiled. “Yes, listen to the woman, Ms. Rosenberg. She is wise. Though she will be dead if her daughter does not appear in Sunnydale soon to claim her.”
Willow stood straight, hefted the chair and stood as if to attack.
Joyce Summers dropped her voice. Her tone stern, she said, “Willow, listen to me. You can’t help Buffy if you’re dead.”
“Hmm, now that’s true,” said Brother Lupo.
He raised a hand, whispered a few words, and sickly blue energy crackled from his fingers and struck the metal chair. Willow shuddered as though she were being electrocuted, and then she and the chair were thrown back against the coffee counter.
“Oh, God, no,” Joyce Summers whispered.
Lupo left the Bronze. In moments, he knew the other acolytes would follow. But his mind was not on his men. He thought of one thing only: what II Maestro might say when he discovered that they did not have the Slayer.
Brother Lupo was afraid.
* * *
Cordelia slipped into the basement of the Bronze with a length of rusty metal chain in her hands. It was the only thing she could find in the alley outside that vaguely resembled a weapon.
“Hello, sweet one,” said a leering acolyte as he turned his attention from beating the crap out of Xander to this new intruder.
“Oh, please,” Cordelia sneered.
Then she whipped the rusty chain around and it slapped him hard in the face, breaking his jaw. The man screamed in pain.
The others looked up and stared at her wide-eyed. The guy with the broken jaw mumbled something unintelligible and pointed at Cordy.
“Xander!” she shouted. “The cavalry needs the cavalry!”
* * *
With a tremendous effort, Xander threw off one of the acolytes and got to his feet. He was bleeding from several cuts on his face, which was a mess. His clothes were tom. And he looked very pissed.
“Come on!” he yelled.
The acolytes turned to look at him again and started to laugh. Then they moved toward Cordelia. With a shriek, she swung the chain to keep them back. Xander leaped on the back of the acolyte nearest him and began to choke the man, who spun around and around trying to get him off.
Finally Xander was thrown, and he landed pain fully by Cordelia’s feet. He jumped up just as the three other acolytes were lunging at him. The fourth, with the broken jaw, stood a short distance away.
“Give me that!” Xander bellowed, grabbing the chain from Cordelia’s hands and then stepping in front of her and swinging the chain out to drive them back.
They moved back.
But only for a moment.
The closest acolyte charged Xander. The chain whipped out and wrapped around his neck, and while Xander was occupied with him, the other two moved in, surrounding the teen. They were fast. But not fast enough. He yanked the chain off the throat of the acolyte he’d been choking, and it tore skin off as well, its jagged rust ripping open veins.
“Come on!” he screamed again, and swung the chain.
The guy with the broken jaw mumbled something else. Then he reached inside his jacket and pulled out a gun.
“Whoa,” Xander said, even as he ducked a punch. “You guys are supposed to have swords and knives, right? Maybe some magick?”
The acolyte whose jaw Cordelia had broken leveled the gun at Xander and shot him in the chest.
* * *
Cordelia was shrieking at the top of her lungs as the four acolytes went up the stairs from the basement and disappeared. She crouched down by Xander, tears flowing freely, and tried to find something clean with which to staunch the wound in Xander’s chest.
A pool of blood was forming on the ground beneath his still form, and his eyes were glazed with shock.
She stopped screaming only when Giles and Willow came down into the basement, both in bad shape from whatever scrape they’d gotten into upstairs.
“They . . . they shot him,” Cordelia said, in a voice that sounded to her as though it were coming from somebody else.
Giles quickly knelt and examined the wound.
Cordelia stared up into Willow’s face and realized that the shock and the horror and the tears there, the mute despair, were just a mirror of her own face.
“There’s too much blood,” Giles said, breaking that connection.
Cordelia stared at him, but it was Willow who spoke.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
Giles glanced from one girl’s face to the other. When he spoke, his own voice sounded as hollow as theirs had.
“Xander’s going to die.”
Chapter 18
THERE WAS A LULL IN the fighting, for which Jean-Marc was most grateful. He crawled on his elbows to the Cauldron and fell in, immersing himself. He would have to stay here many hours to find a small measure of relief, and what would happen if the Sons of Entropy renewed their assault?
His agony was mental; his body was so old and aged now he could scarcely feel anything. He remembered as a young man how vigor had surged through him. The joy of living, the joy of moving. The joy of making love to his wife. But even then, he had begun to age. The Regniers married old. He did not understand why.
The joy of creating his son within her. The feeling of power that gave a man. Any man, but especially a sorcerer.
Gone now. He could barely create within himself the power to breathe, much less to procreate.
“Mother,” he whispered, his arms outstretched. “I’m so tired.”
“I know.” She leaned over the Cauldron and looked into his eyes. “Soon you will rest, my darling boy.”
“Soon, it won’t matter how long I rest in here,” he told her. “I’m losing more than I’m gaining. I can’t recapture a tenth of what I was. I could stay here for a month, and yet I’ll die within a fortnight. Sooner.”
“Death is not so terrible, my sweetling. I promise you that.”
He was exhausted from talking, and yet it was practically all he had left. “Defeat is, Mother. It is odious.”
“There are others. The Slayer, and her friends. The Watcher. Most capable. Very brave.”
“But what of my Jacques?” He coughed hard. “What of my son?”
Soon, darling. Soon all will come right.
Her tears fell into the Cauldron.
As she wept, she sang a lullaby.
It proved to be the most soothing balm of all.
* * *
For the first few moments after his daughter closed the breach behind her, Fulcanelli could not move or speak. His icy fury froze him in place.
Then, with no notion of the passage of time, he watched the scene around him as if he were not present in it, as if the rage had transported him to another plane of existence. He staggered and lost his breath, and then he whispered his daughter’s name: “Micaela.”
The flames from the burning villa flickered on the faces of his terrified acolytes as they ran like mindless bam animals through the crackling vineyards and fields. Smoke roiled like a fog above the roofs of the buildings, and as he stared up at it, he could plainly see the face of his old nemesis, Richard Regnier, father of the Regnier dynastic line of sorcerers, laughing at him.
“I killed your true love here, on this very spot,” Fulcanelli whispered to the smoke. “I made her suffer agonies you can scarcely imagine.”
But Regnier continued to laugh. The past was over. The dead were buried. He had an heir, and Fulcanelli did not. And not only had the Regniers an heir, but Fulcanelli’s chosen heiress had stolen the Slayer from beneath his very nose.
Fulcanelli swore then that when he found Micaela, he would kill her.
He was so enraged he could not breathe.
“Fulcanelli,” came the call inside his mind.
Fulcanelli roused. Belphegor was summoning him. The breach through which he communicated was in the subcellar, and the house was on fire. He didn’t think that would matter; breaches could be found underwater, and within stone. So this breac
h would survive fire.
“Fulcanelli,” the demon called again.
“I come,” Fulcanelli replied aloud.
He made signs and signals of protection in the air, then walked back toward the inferno. One of his acolytes, Brother Eric, ran right into him, grasped him, and gasped, “Master! Don’t go in there. It’s Hell itself.”
Fulcanelli stopped, bemused. “Oh?”
“The villa is burning, Maestro,” Eric said, sobbing. “It’s the end of everything!”
Fulcanelli’s wrath was unleashed.
“Bastardo,” he flung at the boy. He caught the idiot by the sleeve and dragged him along. “You have had no comprehension of the vastness of my power, and yet you have imagined yourself my follower.”
“Master, please,” the acolyte pleaded, his voice rising. The flames roared ten feet before them, walls of fire that skyrocketed into the night sky. “Please!”
Then Brother Eric did the unthinkable: he laid his hands on Fulcanelli’s arm and tried to make him let go.
Fulcanelli glared at him. “I, who began the Great Fire of London! I, who walked the streets of Chernobyl. You have the temerity to doubt me? You can insult me to my face?”
“Master, I am only human,” Brother Eric pleaded, tugging, not able to stop. His skin was beginning to blister. “I will burn.”
Fulcanelli narrowed his eyes and smiled evilly. “Yes,” he said. “You will.”
Then he shook the acolyte off like a bothersome insect and flung him into the conflagration. The child’s screams were short, but sincere.
Fulcanelli stepped into the fire.
The flames did not touch him.
Around him, inside the lovely villa, the walls cracked. Statuary tumbled. Mirrors exploded. So much beauty. But like all things of this earth, fleeting. Better to lay one’s treasures up in the hereafter.
He stared, watching a man writhe on the floor. Watching him burn and bubble as he stepped over his body, unaffected.
It never ceased to amaze him that so many had clamored to follow him, yet so few had benefited from their proximity. Where were the ambitious, power-hungry lads who aspired to greatness? It certainly wasn’t like the days of the de’ Medici.
He shook his head, pulling a sad face as he listened to the shrieks of the barnyard animals. It occurred to him that a cat had recently adopted him, and he wondered briefly what had become of it.
But only briefly.
Then he was down in the subcellar, where the sulfur smell competed with the odor of roasted meat, and ah! he remembered that there had been a few captives down here besides the Slayer and the other two abominations. Just a few locals, to add spice to tonight’s aborted proceedings.
Remarkably—or perhaps, not remarkably, for he had expected it—the breach hovered in the smoke and contagion. He thought of the wonder that was to have occurred tonight, and tears of frustration welled at the corners of his eyes. Fulcanelli wiped them away. For Micaela, no tears. No mercy. For his own plight, only resolve. Strong men survived everything. Weak men perished at the first obstacle.
He knelt on the white-hot stone, gritting his teeth against the pain, and lowered his head.
“My Lord Belphegor,” he said, “I am here.”
“Your bastard child attempts to take them to the Gate.”
Fulcanelli closed his eyes, completely humiliated.
“We must stop them.”
“Is it possible?” Fulcanelli asked.
“How can it be that you have served me so long, and yet have not divined one small portion of that which is available to you as my follower?”
Fulcanelli flinched as his own words were hurled back at him. He murmured, “I have been remiss. It will not happen again.”
“Then cast your power with me against the ghost roads. The Gatekeeper cannot last much longer. His heir must not reach the Gatehouse.”
“So shall it be done,” Fulcanelli said.
Belphegor chuckled.
“Who writes your dialogue?”
* * *
“So, no Spear,” Spike finished as he helped Dru stack up the broken and bleeding bodies of the Sons of Entropy acolytes they’d taken out.
“Then take the lit’l bastard,” Dru said with a sneer at one of the two pretty blond girls. “He’s been nothing but trouble and proud of it, eh, you?”
She boxed the boy’s ears and he clamped down hard not to cry out. Jacques began to walk with great dignity toward the two blond girls, then ran for all he was worth and flung his arms around the nearest one. To his intense relief, she hugged him tightly.
He whispered to her, “She’s crazy.”
The girl whispered back, “I know.”
He decided to tell her everything. “She’s a vampire.”
She patted him. “No news there.”
She held him at arm’s length and smiled at him. “We haven’t been introduced, but my name’s Buffy. I’m kind of in your line of work. I’m the Slayer. And I know you’re the Gatekeeper’s heir.”
He took a deep breath and stared at the girl. He could see the fear in her eyes, and the sadness. He braced himself for the horrible news she was going to give him, bursting into heavy, wrenching sobs.
“My father,” he moaned.
“No, no,” she said. “He’s alive. We think,” she muttered. Then she patted him. “Alive, yeah. It’s okay, Jacques, we’re going to get you home.”
Spike ambled over to Jacques and gave him a mock punch. “Last chance, Jack the lad. You can stay with us. We’ll fix you right up with a big kiss and then you’ll run with us for the rest of time. What do you say?”
Jacques looked at Spike, then at Dru, and then at Buffy Summers. He was ashamed to let her know, but he was a little tempted by Spike’s offer. Just a little. He didn’t want to be the Gatekeeper quite yet. He wanted to have some fun. To live, and have friends, and play. He was only eleven years old.
“Does it hurt?” he asked, and then Buffy was laughing uncertainly and giving him a little punch.
“You’re so funny. Ha ha ha,” she said, sounding very nervous and phony.
Then, almost before he realized it, he was outside the little cottage for the first time in what seemed like years. There were bodies everywhere out here. The battle had been horrible.
Jacques looked up at Buffy and said, “You didn’t tell them that my father has the Spear, did you?”
She raised her brows. “Are you kidding? No way.”
They walked on a little way with the other blond woman. No one had introduced him to her, but he knew that she was very troubled.
He drew back when he saw another vampire, this one carrying a dead werewolf over his shoulders.
“Friends,” Buffy said. “Trust me.”
And since Jacques had no one else to trust, he did.
* * *
Cordelia cradled Xander in her lap.
“Oh, God, Xander,” she whispered. “Xander, you can’t die. Because it would be so . . . stupid.” She reached out to Willow. “He’d do that, wouldn’t he? Die, because it would be so stupid and he’s so stupid oh God Willow can’t you do something?”
Willow looked down at Xander and felt her entire life draining away in the river of blood flowing out of his chest. His face was gray. His lips were white. She fought to pull herself together but she could feel pieces of herself floating off in a white haze of panic. She could vaguely hear Cordelia sobbing and babbling, and she wanted to tell her to be quiet but it didn’t matter if she was quiet. Maybe it would help. Maybe it would irritate Xander so much he would sit right up and tell Cordelia to shut up.
Giles leaned over Xander, taking off his jacket and laying it over Xander’s chest.
“Call 911!” Cordelia screamed, batting at Giles “Call an ambulance!”
Sirens wailed in the distance. Emergency vehicles coming to check on the nonexistent fire and the nonexistent live wire, Willow realized. An ambulance would come.
But Willow knew deep in her soul tha
t it would not help.
Finally she dug down deeply enough to find the focus to speak. She looked hard at Giles. “There must be something I can do. We can do.”
He pushed up his glasses. “You may be right. We must take him to the Gatekeeper.”
“Right!” Cordelia cried. “He can heal Xander!”
Willow held up a hand. “Giles, how can we go on the ghost roads? We aren’t touched by the supernatural. I mean, I’ve cast a few spells, but I’m a long way from witchdom.”
Giles hesitated, then said, “Before our raid tonight, I tried to read up on everything I could find about the Sons of Entropy and anything connected to our situation.”
He swallowed hard and looked at each of them in turn. “I found an incantation which may allow a human being access to the roads. There was no documentation about its effectiveness, which led me to conclude that we were better off not attempting it unless we had an emergency.”
“Which this is,” Cordelia said. “Come on, say it! Say it now!”
Willow looked directly at Giles and nodded. “Say it.”
Giles said, “It may fail. None of you may make it.”
“Say it,” Willow told him. “Damn it, Giles, say it!”
“The Cauldron,” he added. “Go straight to the Cauldron.”
“Giles!” Cordelia shrieked.
“I’ll go,” he said. “You two stay here and—”
“No, Giles,” Willow said. “You have to stay here.”
He blinked at her. “No, indeed. I—”
“You are the Watcher,” she said. “You have to stay here for Buffy. And get her mother back.”
He lowered his head and nodded.
“We’ll take him to the breach immediately,” he said. “I’ll do the incantation on the way.”
* * *
They stood in the darkness across the street from the high school. Giles was still uncertain how they had managed to slip past all the fire trucks and police cars, and how Xander had survived the short ride from the Bronze to the breach in Cordelia’s car. There was blood all over her backseat. Incredibly, she hadn’t complained.
But they were here now, and Giles finished the incantation in Latin as he helped Cordelia and Willow carry Xander out of the car:
Ghost Roads Page 28