by Nancy Holder
But she saw that the moment was over. He was determined to carry out his plan.
She headed around the balcony and started down the stairs.
“People, listen to me,” Buffy pleaded. “This is not the mothership, okay? This is ugly death come to play.”
Ford hit her, hard, with a crowbar. Buffy clattered down the stairs. She rose, turned, and tried to defend herself as Ford hit her again, sending her sliding.
* * *
Chantarelle had not expected violence, and it frightened her. This was not the way she thought it would happen. Yet the Lonely Ones were poised to enter, and so she prepared herself. Slowly she walked up the stairs.
The door swung open. A figure with a horrible face and a shock of white hair stepped in. Others trooped in behind him.
He snarled at her and ripped off her red choker. She was terrified of him.
The vampire said, “Take them all. Save the Slayer for me!”
As he buried his fangs in her neck, the other vampires charged down the steps and began grabbing Chantarelle’s friends. They savagely bit into their necks, feasting.
They were not exalted. This was not a sacred moment. It was a lie. A terrible lie …
* * *
Ford came around the couch with the crowbar. Coming to, Buffy grabbed the bar, wrenched it free, and slammed Ford headfirst into a pillar. He fell to the floor.
And then Buffy saw the girl.
Spike’s girl.
Angel’s girl.
Drusilla was standing on the balcony, looking dazed and hungry. Without hesitation, Buffy ran and, pushing off the sofa, jumped onto the balcony. She landed next to Drusilla and grabbed her, whipped out a stake, and placed it directly over the cold, mad girl’s heart.
“Spike!” Drusilla cried.
Spike froze. He looked genuinely frightened. He immediately released Chantarelle, who slumped and burst into tears.
“Everybody stop!” Spike yelled.
Everyone did.
“Good idea,” Buffy said, keeping the stake firmly pressed against Drusilla’s chest. “Now you let everybody out or your girlfriend fits in an ashtray.”
“Spike?” Drusilla called anxiously.
“It’s going to be all right, baby.” He said to his people, “Let them go.”
The True Believers flew out of the open door of the Sunset Club like bats out of hell. Cape Guy pushed his way to the front. The last of them stopped to help Chantarelle.
Buffy started toward the door keeping Drusilla close. At the last minute she hurled her down at Spike. Spike caught his baby as Buffy got to the door and stepped out, slamming it shut behind her.
Spike raced up to the closed door with his men. He looked at it and paused.
“Uh, where’s the doorknob?” he asked.
* * *
Buffy stepped out to find the True Believers escaping into the night. Xander, Willow, and Angel had converged just outside the Sunset Club.
Buffy said, “You guys got here just in time.”
Willow piped up. “Are there vampires—”
Buffy nodded. “They’re contained. They’ll get out eventually, though. We should clear out. We can come back when they’re gone.”
Xander said, “Come back for what?”
Buffy felt anger again, laid over with a deep, heavy sorrow. “For the body,” she answered.
* * *
He was still alive.
Ford stood up groggily and took in his surroundings. His head hurt terribly. He said, “What happened?”
Spike answered hotly, “We’re stuck in the basement.”
Ford looked around. “Buffy?”
The vampire retorted, “She’s not stuck in the basement.”
Ford gave him a shrug that said it all. You win some. You lose some. “Hey, well, I delivered. I handed her to you.”
“Yes, I suppose you did,” the vampire answered him.
Ford said, “So what about my reward?”
Spike and Drusilla stared at him.
Hungrily.
* * *
Buffy returned by daylight to the find the scene exactly as she had imagined it: the special door partially ripped off at its hinges.
On the stairs, Ford lay outstretched, his dead eyes staring.
EPILOGUE
In the graveyard, Giles stood by as Buffy placed roses on the fresh grave of Billy Fordham. Moonlight wafted wanly through the trees where so many dramas had played out in Buffy’s life. It was here that Angel and she had bickered about going on a date. In a nearby crypt, she had asked him, joking, if he knew what it was like to have a friend.
And now she was burying someone who had once been a friend.
She looked up at Giles. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to say.”
“You needn’t say anything,” he replied kindly.
“It’d be simpler if I could just hate him. I think he wanted me to. I think it made it easier for him to be the villain of the piece. Really, he was just scared.”
“Yes, I suppose he was,” Giles offered.
“Nothing’s ever simple anymore. I’m constantly trying to work it out. Who to love, or hate … who to trust. It’s just, like the more I know, the more confused I get.”
Giles’s smile was brief and sad. “I believe that’s called growing up.”
In a little voice, she answered, “I’d like to stop then, okay?”
“I know the feeling.” His smile spoke of memories he had not yet shared.
“Well, does it ever get easy?” she asked.
Suddenly Ford burst from his grave, not Ford at all, but a snarling vampire covered with graveyard dirt. Mindlessly, he lunged at them. With one swift strike, Buffy drove a stake into his chest and he exploded into dust. Immortality denied.
“You mean life?” Giles asked her.
“Yeah,” Buffy said. “Does it get easy?”
Giles looked puzzled. “What do you want me to say?”
She thought about it a moment. Then she pleaded gently, “Lie to me.”
Giles took on a bright, teacherly tone. “Yes. It’s terribly simple.”
They started out of the graveyard.
“The good guys are stalwart and true. The bad guys are easily distinguished by their pointy horns or black hats and we always defeat them and save the day. No one ever dies, and everybody lives happily ever after.”
And Buffy assessed the truth of what he said with one simple word: “Liar.”
THE CHRONICLES:
EPILOGUE
“Nobody ever dies, and everyone lives happily ever after.”
Angel watched from the shadows as Slayer and Watcher walked from the graveyard. Her friend, Ford, was dead. Drusilla still lived.
Both he and Buffy had died—she had drowned at the hands of the Master, and Xander had brought her back. And he, Angel, had died when he was made a vampire, and died again—inside—when his soul was restored and he regained the ability to feel remorse … as well as to love someone genuinely and utterly.
Now she and he together stumbled along, learning about each other, confessing, revealing, daring.
Would he and Buffy live happily ever after? He had no idea. He only knew that his truth was this: he loved her, and he was mortally sorry, to the depths of his being, that there was so much about him that was unlovable.
He stayed in the shadows as the moon glowed on Buffy’s golden hair.
He stayed there until minutes before the dawn.
Angel
The Slayer and her Slayerettes
“You’re the Mystery Guy who appears out of nowhere, but if you are hanging around me, I’d like to know why.”
—Buffy
“What did you think, Angel? That she would look at your true face and give you a kiss?”
—Darla
“There’s mention over two hundred years ago in Ireland of Angelus, the one with the angelic face.”
—Giles
“You still don’t understand your part i
n all of this, do you? You’re not the hunter . . . you’re the lamb.”
—The Master
David Boreanaz plays Angel, aka “Dead Boy.”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A four-time Bram Stoker Award winner, Nancy Holder has sold twenty-seven novels, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Halloween Rain, cowritten with Christopher Golden. Her other books include Highlander: Measure of a Man and Sabrina, the Teenage Witch: Spying Eyes. She has also written over two hundred short stories; game fiction, most notably for FTL Games’ DungeonMaster series; and TV commercials and comic books in Japan. Her books have been translated into two dozen languages.
She dropped out of high school to become a ballet dancer in Germany, and eventually went on to graduate from the University of California with a degree in communications. She also lived in Japan for three years.
She currently lives in San Diego, 120 miles south of the American Film Institute, with her husband, Wayne, and their daughter, Belle. In her spare time she works out at the gym and watches all the horror movies she can find.
Visit us at simonandschuster.com/teen
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Nancy-Holder
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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