There the entry stopped, and Daniel was disappointed when the next pages were blank. Weirdness, but then it had been sixty years ago, at an isolated dig site and, as far as Daniel was concerned, it might as well have been ancient history. He knew nothing about Gibor Nuriel, of course, but still . . . he was surprised that a mature man of science would even waste his time on something like this. The last part of the journal was sturdier and not so badly damaged, and Daniel flipped idly through the blank pages. Really, what had Nuriel hoped to gain from—
“Hey, what’s this?” As he stopped at a page near the end of the journal with writing on it, the loudness of his voice startled him. He’d forgotten, again, that he was alone down here, had been for several hours. The light through the glass blocks had dimmed and the shadows in the dusty room had gone several shades darker despite the fluorescents; if he wasn’t careful, he’d lose track of time and end up locked in the museum for the night. While he wasn’t afraid of the dark, the notion of being stuck in here with everything from a life-size replica of a Ceratosaurus to the remains of an Incan mummy princess just didn’t rock his socks.
Daniel squinted at the journal in the growing darkness. More of Nuriel’s crude handwriting, but this was haphazard and blotched, scrawled at an angle across a random page as if the man had been in a terrific hurry to get it all down:
This was a terrible error in judgment—I should have NEVER said this incantation aloud. I thought it was a joke, but I am the one who is the fool, the puny man at whom the universe laughts laughs. A living, breathing hypsilophodont—my God, who could have ever imagined?? But it’s WRONG . . . how was I to know? The dinosaur creature is missing half its spine and two limbs, also part of its skull—yet still it thrashes and screeches—yes, it’s actually reanimated somehow ALIVE. I don’t know if it’s in pain or just . . . evil. I think that’s it, because it “speaks” to me inside my thoughts, demanding that I continue, bellowing commands into my mind that I must do more for it. God forgive me but I don’t think I can hold out—I’m not strong enough. What have I done? To save myself, to save everyone, I must dest
And that was it. Intrigued, Daniel sifted through the rest of the journal but the pages were blank. Finally, he checked out what little remained of Nuriel’s files, but hardly anything in there was legible, and there was certainly nothing to do with the far-fetched claims set down by Professor Nuriel in the notebook. What had caused them—too much heat? Texas in the summer could be brutal and there sure hadn’t been any a/c in the old man’s tent in 1939. Still, it seemed a bit detailed for a sun-induced fantasy. Could there be a touch of truth in there somewhere?
Daniel glanced at his watch, then stood. Time to wrap up the drudge work for the day, although he had to admit that it wasn’t as dull as he had anticipated; finding Nuriel’s journal had made things a bit more on the edge of interesting. In fact, he wouldn’t mind taking another, more thorough look at it in his spare time. Who would know, or even care, if he took it out of the museum? Hey, no one had thought about this stuff in fifty years or more, maybe since the day they’d packed up the old professor’s desk. The suits—that’s what he called the administration and the teachers and all the rest of the hard-nosed older people—didn’t think about the feelings of any of the people they ordered around. They just wanted the work that the little guys like him did so they could turn around and trade it for the almighty dollar.
Well, I’m not that dumb.
Sunnydale, he thought as he wiped his hands and carefully tucked the journal inside his backpack, was a pretty darned abnormal place. His first instinct had been that the dead professor should have dismissed his findings, but then he thought more about it. The incantation Gibor Nuriel had discovered might have seemed unbelievable to most people in 1939 Big Bend, Texas. But here? Not. There was something slightly . . . off about Sunnydale, and maybe it had been so even back then; after all, Nuriel had been from Sunnydale. Daniel hadn’t been here all his life like most of his friends, but as far as he could tell, not growing up here was a good thing. People—kids, teenagers, everyone— disappeared here with a regularity that as an outsider he’d noticed right away. He wasn’t sure what amazed him more— the downright weirdosity that oozed out of everything Sunnydale, or that the people of Sunnydale accepted this, and the disappearances, without so much as blinking.
Daniel tidied up the stuff he’d uncrated and decided he’d finish cataloging the contents tomorrow. It was getting late, he was hungry, and he’d had a lot on his mind before finding the journal, which itself added a whole arena of potential to things. Walking through the nearly empty museum on his way out just reminded Daniel of how much of an uphill struggle it had been for him over the last two years. The museum was so full of politics—he hadn’t expected that. Everything was seniority and who you knew, who threw the best parties and had published umpteen papers full of boring, much-reprinted facts disguised as educational literature. Who wanted to sit in front of a computer and peck out hundreds of pages that no one would read anyway? Not him, that’s for sure.
Outside it was a beautiful spring night, the kind that reminded him that he ought to have a date with a real live girl instead of a bunch of textbooks. Better yet would be if he was making plans for the next dig the museum was sponsoring, the one in Dinosaur Cove, Australia, over the summer. Like they would ever include him. Fat chance. He knew his dinosaurs, he could sketch, he could write, and he could dig, but with the kind of back-slapping that went on here, he’d be as old as Nuriel before he even got to help clean one of the finds they brought back. To his supervisor and the rest of the suits, he was nothing but disposal sludge.
But maybe, with a little help from the incantation in Nuriel’s journal, he could change that. He’d only scanned it a time or two, but if he tried, he could just remember how that last line had read:
And grant to he who resurrects you
A single wish fulfilled.
That was certainly something to think about, wasn’t it?
Chapter 1
LET’S SEE, BUFFY SUMMERS THOUGHT. WHERE WOULD I rather be? Here in the dark, standing by a dirty and disgusting headstone—cracked on one side and covered with mold and something else I don’t even want to identify, or— A branch snapped behind her.
She did a neat, tight spin, ready to fight, with the fingers of one hand curled comfortably around a wooden stake, but there was no one there. Buffy scowled, yet didn’t drop her guard. It might be a bird or a raccoon, even someone’s pet cat; what it would definitely be the instant she slipped up was some ugly bloodsucker trying to make her into a midnight snack. There was something out there—she just knew it. It would be so much nicer if they’d just get it over with so she could go home. It was Sunday night, for crying out loud. All good people, children, and monsters, should be put away for the Sabbath . . . or something like that.
She heard another snap, not quite muffled by a line of waist-high bushes separating two sections of the cemetery. Friend or foe?
Foe!
Instinct made Buffy leap to the left. She twisted in midair and when she landed she was already facing the thing that had just pounced on the spot where she’d been sta nding only a split second before. It was a girl, no more than seven or eight years old and done up for a proper burial in a white lace dress adorned with ribbons and tiny, pink satin roses. Red hair divided into what should have been perfect braids, except now they, and the rest of her burial outfit, were full of dirt, leaves, and bits of sod. Damn—the grown-up ones were bad enough, but Buffy hated it when the night’s vamp turned out to be a child.
“Okay,” Buffy said in a reasonable tone of voice. Did vampire kidlets listen any better than real ones? “We can do this the easy way, or the hard way. Your choice.”
The little girl grinned at her, showing pointed white fangs beneath the classic twisted brow and glinting, yellow eyes. She took a step forward and Buffy tensed—
—then yelped in surprise as someone else grabbed her shoulders from beh
ind.
Fetid breath stung her nostrils—she hated that—and a second, older vampire tried to fasten its mouth on the right side of her neck. She scrunched up her shoulder and slammed her head sideways simultaneously; the creature howled and let go of her as it took the hit along its eyebrow. It stumbled back at the same time as the childish bloodsucker darted forward and tried to spring at her, but Buffy swatted the girl away as though she were nothing more than an annoying mosquito. The adult vamp growled and lunged, but Buffy slipped sideways under its outstretched arms and came up behind it, burying her stake deep into the center of its back. Her weapon found the heart-point inside the creature’s body and rewarded her with a midair explosion of black-brown dust.
Great, Buffy thought. One down, one-half to g—
“Hey!” she said in surprise. “Where’d you go?”
A quick scan and she saw the little girl crouching behind one of the larger tombstones about twenty feet away—even full of graveyard dirt, it was hard to camouflage that white dress in a cemetery near midnight. Buffy covered the distance in a heartbeat and hauled the snarling vampire-child out into the open, trying to get the little monster into a position where she could be staked. It was like fighting with a wildcat, the girl’s size and flexibility making her movements a lot more energetic than Buffy expected, but finally the Slayer managed to straddle her. Holding the vamp-kid down with her left hand, Buffy raised the stake in her right.
“Time to go to sleep,” she said as gently as she could.
“I don’t want to!” the girl wailed. “The boogeymonster is down there!”
Buffy started to retort that the girl was the boogeymonster, then decided against it. Bad enough the child was going to die for the second time. The girl bucked and nearly threw her off as she clawed at the ground and tried to sit up. “Be still and let’s just get this over with!” Buffy grunted.
“No!” the vamp screamed in a high-pitched voice. “I want to stay awake!”
Her voice cut off as Buffy slammed her down yet again. Enough of this. The stake was on its downward swing as she heard the small vampire’s next words, and Buffy couldn’t have pulled her strike if she’d tried.
“You’ll see!” the child shrieked. “It’s just about to wake up—”
Dust.
Buffy’s backside hit hard-packed soil as the minibloodsucker disintegrated beneath her. The air went out of her with a little whuff sound and she blinked and frowned at the breeze-blown pile of nothingness that a second before might have been telling her something she needed to know. “What’s going to wake up?” she demanded uselessly. Like dust particles could speak.
She stood and brushed herself off, automatically checking the shadows surrounding her. She brought the stake up defensively when one shadow amid the trees at the end of the walkway disengaged itself from the rest, then relaxed as Angel, his skin as pale as the moon, strode silently over to stand in front of her. Dark clothes, dark hair, dark eyes . . . he looked handsome enough to make her heart ache.
“Better late than never?” she said a little sourly. She hoped she didn’t have vamp dust in her hair.
His calm expression didn’t change. “You were holding your own.”
They stared at each other for a few seconds, then Buffy forced herself to look away from him. She needed to think about something else— anything else— besides how badly she wanted to be in his arms, so she grabbed for the most recent thing floating inside her brain. “Did you hear what that vamp kid said?” she asked. “Right before I skewered her? Something about a boogey-monster waking up.”
Angel shrugged. “She was a kid. She could’ve been talking about anything.”
But there was a catch in his tone that made Buffy look at him hard. “What?” she demanded. “You’re not telling me something.”
“Only because I don’t know,” he said as they began following the path that led out of the cemetery. “I’ve heard a few whispers, but nothing specific.”
“Whispers about what?”
“That’s the thing,” Angel told her. “For all I know it could be a new prophecy or some weird way the planets are aligning this week. Nobody will say. But there’s a kind of general . . . anxiety going around, like something big is coming.”
Buffy thought about this for a few moments as she walked next to him. “Like something big is coming,” she repeated softly. “Or . . .” She looked back to where the vampire child was now nothing more than a memory blown apart by the night wind.
“Or something’s waking up. . . .”
Chapter 2
THE WINDOWS IN THE EARTH SCIENCES DEPARTMENT of the ninety-year-old building were tall and stately,multi-paned and topped with wide, fan-shaped decorations. Dark, heavily varnished wood surrounded the glass, and the window sills were wide enough to display everything from plaster casts of bone to the real deal: segments of prehistoric dinosaur spines to a sampling of Jurassic teeth blackened by millions of years of aging. Sunlight spilled through the glass panes, warming the high-ceilinged room on what otherwise would have been a Monday morning too chilly for the old heating system, set to late spring temps, to combat. Dust motes spun lazily in the sunbeams, striping the desks and the long row of display cases along the back wall. The case to the far left, the one containing the meticulous paleontology display he’d set up, was his favorite. In it, he’d— “Mr. Sanderson, do you think you could give us the benefit of your attention anytime soon?”
Wait . . . wrong classroom.
Kevin Sanderson swallowed and grimaced as everyone in the classroom turned to stare at him, then he nodded at his teacher, Mr. Regis. “Sorry.” He looked down at the earth sciences book on his desk and tried to focus on the words, but he was bored bored bored. He was way beyond the level of what was being taught here—the curriculum, the room itself, the school — none of it could compare to what he’d been involved in at Lane Tech back in Chicago. Plus, this place couldn’t come close to the spirit or the character of the classrooms at the University of Chicago, where he’d spent untold hours poring over paleontology texts and samples and taking pre-college courses for extra credit. The bright Spanish style of Sunnydale High School— arches, lots of palm trees, the breezy Quad—were really pretty but just didn’t do it for him.
Kevin sighed, then felt someone watching him. When he looked up, he saw it was the guy at the next desk, Oz. Kevin remembered him because his nickname was so cool, plus Oz had this way about him, like he was the King of Understatement. As if confirming this, the other teenager regarded him with calm green eyes from beneath a thick cut of spiked-out reddish hair, nodded, then looked away.
Kevin slouched over his textbook, wishing he could think of something to say that would get a conversation going. He could use a friend here, but Oz probably wasn’t interested. He’d seen the guy in the hallway with his friends, had even picked up on the group’s names—after all, paleontology was a lot like detective work and he trained himself to catch the details. Oz’s girlfriend was Willow, the redhead sitting on Oz’s other side and who had a sweet smile and simple beauty that Kevin really appreciated. The rest of Oz’s circle, at least what Kevin knew of it, included a fellow named Xander who had dark hair and whose humor had a sharp edge of desperation that made Kevin uncomfortable—too much like the way he himself had felt on a daily basis since arriving in Sunnydale. Now and then Cordelia Chase drifted in and out of the group, and everyone seemed to know her: high-class, high-money, and the elevated attitude to go with it. The last person in the main quartet was Buffy Summers, who looked to Kevin to be the embodiment of the California high school girl—blond, pretty, and totally fashionable. Oddly enough, everyone around here, including the jockjerks, seemed to have an unspoken respect for her, and there were rumors that she had an older boyfriend no one wanted to mess with. Maybe there was more to Buffy than just appearances.
Mr. Regis was droning on about something— marsupials and placental mammals—and Kevin glanced at the clock for the hundredth time since
this torturous period had started. Only fifteen minutes to the bell and freedom, but it felt like a lifetime. He couldn’t believe this was what his existence had turned into: grinding through the days, waiting for period one to be over, then period two, and three, ad infinitum. Had his parents even considered his future when they’d decided to move here from Chicago? Sure, he was as concerned about his father’s health as anyone, but couldn’t his dad have just retired from his position at the University of Chicago and then stayed put? Or, if he really couldn’t deal with Chicago’s harsh climate, made the move with Kevin’s mother but let Kevin stay behind in the care of his uncle? Only one more school year until I grad—
“Mr. Sanderson.”
Kevin blinked as Mr. Regis’s voice broke into his reverie, then realized that once more everyone in the class was staring at him. Drat—caught again. “I’m . . . sorry,” he had to admit. “I didn’t hear the question.”
“I said, perhaps you’d like to stand up and tell us about the evolution of mammals.”
Great.
He dragged himself to his feet, feeling the gazes of a couple dozen kids on him, their expressions ranging from interest to boredom to utter spaciness. Did anyone here really care, or was Regis just aggravated because he could see that Kevin thought the teacher’s middle name was Dull?
He cleared his throat. “Mammals came from early reptiles,” he said. “About two hundred million years ago during the Triassic.”
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