Paleo

by Yvonne Navarro

  “Wait a minute,” Xander protested. “I saw the look on your face when bad boy here popped up, and I know this is the biggest one yet. What are you going to—”

  “Whatever we can,” Buffy said. “Trap it—maybe in the gym, or the auditorium.”

  Willow inhaled raggedly. “Just stay out of the way of its teeth!”

  “Gladly,” Oz replied.

  Buffy ran a hand across her mouth. “When we’re done, we’ll come back to the library and help you.”

  Xander and Willow exchanged glances. “Listen . . .” Xander began.

  But Oz’s eyes glittered as he stared at the T. Rex. “Don’t worry about us,” he interrupted. “We can handle it.”

  The low, wolflike tone of his voice made them glance sharply at him to make sure he wasn’t unexpectedly changing. But he was all right. “Okay,” Buffy said, because she had no choice. “Then . . . go!”

  All four of them moved at once, with Buffy and Oz staying on the right-hand side where they could veer away at the last second. They sounded like a pack of wild animals; surely nothing human or remotely intelligent had ever charged something this big and deadly, and screamed, hooted, whistled and flailed their arms at it to make it come after them. The predator instinct in the T. Rex prevailed and it charged without hesitation, the long, heavy claws of its back toes leaving deep furrows in the linoleum as it scrabbled for purchase.

  They were fortunate. While she and Oz would never make it to the hallway, between them and the dinosaur was the door to one of the classrooms. Buffy and Oz careened through it with barely enough space for safety between them and the creature’s heavy, snapping jaws as it followed. Only the fact that it was reaching already, its neck stretched to the limit of it being able to maintain balance and still stay upright, kept them out of range. Banking on the T. Rex’s attention being focused on her and Oz, Willow and Xander dropped and dove to the left, trying to make themselves as small as possible, a couple of nothing little specks along the floor that the beast would never notice. It worked, and for just an instant, as she and Oz fled, Buffy’s head and heart were simultaneously filled with elation that her plan had succeeded, and terror for what her friends might have to face in the library without her there to help them.

  Then Xander and Willow were up on their feet and headed toward the library to save the Watcher.

  There was something inside him, an interloper of some kind. And Giles desperately wanted it out.

  Was this, he wondered vaguely, what it felt like to be a vampire? What it felt like to be Angel? No, surely not; normal vampires reveled in their evilness, enjoyed it, spread it. Because of his circumstances, his unparalleled possession of a soul, Angel fought his own dark nature at every turn. But at least he had some measure of control over himself.

  Unlike Giles.

  He’d fought it, yes, and he was probably stronger than the hapless teenagers the demon had used and so carelessly disposed of. Older, wiser, stronger . . . b ut he was still only human, and the hammering and screaming inside his head was beating him down. He could no longer tell if the noise was inside his skull or out. Why had they not thought of this, realized that the Ladonithia demon would, of course, have to communicate somehow with a human in the physical realm to accomplish its goal? He knew what it wanted. Oh yes. Ten minutes ago, he’d picked up the Stegosaurus eggs for it, feeling like a paralyzed bystander watching dumbly as his own body moved jerkily down the hallway and retrieved the backpack that unfortunate boy had dropped right before his death.

  Then the demon had wanted him to do something with those eggs, but Giles was not a greedy man, less self-centered than the younger people, and the demon could find nothing with which to tempt him. So far Giles had resisted with every bit of strength he had, but he was losing the battle. The clamor inside his brain was hellish, a cacophony of sound never meant to be heard by human beings, consciously or subconsciously. It was like music stripped of all its beauty, a demonic orchestra hammering out sound using instruments too terrible to describe.

  Against his will, against everything that he was, Giles had watched his own traitorous hands remove the heavy, fossilized eggs from Kevin Sanderson’s backpack and line them up along the library’s counter.

  There were three of them, that magical number again. Perhaps this was the demon’s way of insuring a place for each of its spirits should the dinosaur that had killed Kevin perish at the hands of Buffy and her friends—if they themselves hadn’t already fallen under the ferocious onslaught of another beast at the museum. There was something else it wanted him to do, something worse, but so far, Giles wasn’t cooperating. He knew it had to do with revitalizing the eggs, but he wouldn’t stop fighting the thing inside his mind long enough to let it tell him. That was the only way he could, so far, prevent it from getting its message across.

  But he was tired, and he was weakening.

  The librarian gritted his teeth and pushed himself away from the counter, heard fragments of sentences jitter inside his mind as he did so—

  whatever you want

  obey me

  incantation

  free me

  He slapped his hands over his ears and spun, got a flicker of misplaced déjà vu as the recollection of Kevin doing the same thing twisted through him. “No!” he shouted, as much to resist as to hear something, any thing, besides the presence roaring in between his ears and the Timimus screeching hysterically from the cage a few feet away. “I will not do this!”

  The voice boomed then, and agony razored through everything he could feel: his head, his chest, his hands, surely his eardrums were just going to explode right now. Giles screamed and dropped to his knees, hoped he could still remember to breathe but thinking he might be better off if he didn’t. Horrified, he felt himself surrender and his mouth opened, ready to say the twisted words of the spell speeding through his thoughts: Hear this call, spirits of Ladonithia Awaken and return from your abyss to—

  “Giles?”

  Momentarily derailed, Giles felt the demon retreat in surprise. It would no doubt only be for a precious few seconds, but at least his mind was his own again, blissfully clear of everything but the throbbing memory of his previous agony.

  “Angel,” he gasped. “Thank God!”

  Scowling, the tall, youthful-looking vampire strode to where Giles was kneeling and pulled him to his feet. “I came by to see if Buffy was around,” he said. “Looks like it’s a good thing I did.” His sharp gaze took in everything at once: Giles’s trembling body, the fossilized eggs on the counter top, the frenzied Timimus inside the weapons cage and which was now slamming itself against the door, bigger since yesterday by at least seventy-five pounds. “I don’t think that’s going to hold it much longer,” he shouted above the dinosaur’s shrieks. “We should get out of here!”

  Obey me.

  “Arghgh!” Giles reached up and yanked on his own hair, as hard as he could, hoping the physical pain would give him just a tad more time. “Angel,” he screamed, “that creature, that demon . . . it’s inside my— It’s trying . . . to make me—”

  OBEY ME!

  Giles had no choice. It was as though his pain sensors had reached out and shut off the neural pathways that ran from his own brain to his mouth, rerouting everything into the demon’s control. He hated himself but still he heard the dreaded words start to come out as he turned his back to Angel and faced the waiting eggs:

  “Hear this call, spirits of Ladonithia,” he rasped. “Awaken and return from your abyss to—”

  A hand reached out and spun him, then the hard front of Angel’s knuckles connected with his jaw and everything went blissfully, quietly, black.

  “Angel?”

  He whirled, automatically feeling guilty although he knew he had done nothing wrong. There was something about Willow’s voice, especially when it sounded like it did now—half a question, half an I-don’t-believe-I-sawwhat-I-just-saw statement—that fired up the guilt factor of the human soul inside him to the t
enth power. Didn’t it just figure that she and Xander would arrive in time to see him punch Giles’s lights out?

  But he had no time for regrets, and he turned back and knelt next to Giles. “There’s something wrong with him,” he told them.

  “He’s unconscious?” Xander asked sarcastically.

  He gave Xander a sharp glance. “I hit him because he was delirious,” he said. “Trying to say some kind of incantation. I was afraid not to knock him out.”

  A mixture of fear and relief flashed across Willow’s features as she hurried forward. “So Oz was right. The demon will just use someone else.” She ran a hand across her forehead while Xander just stood there with a guarded expression on his face. “It’s a good thing you were here to stop him.”

  Angel checked Giles again—“sleeping” soundly— then stood. “What’s going on here? What’s that thing in the weapons cage? That doesn’t look like what we fought in the alley by the Bronze.”

  “It’s a Timimus,” Xander said, as if Angel was supposed to instantly know what he was talking about.

  “A what?” Several centuries old and he could still sound like an idiotic kid. How humiliating.

  “A Timi—another kind of dinosaur.”

  Angel grimaced and stared from the two teenagers to the squawking, frantic creature pacing around the cage. “Another one. So what do we do with it?” he asked instead.

  Xander shot the dinosaur an uneasy glance. “Since the tranquilizer gun is in there with him, I’d vote for using the tried and true caveman method of a club to the head, but for now . . . nothing. We have to wait until Oz and Buffy kill the T. Rex.”

  “Another one?”

  Willow nodded, her movements jerky. “It’s the demon,” she explained. “It took us a while to identify it, but we finally figured out that it has four spirits. They all have to be inside this one before—”

  At their feet, Giles groaned.

  “Good,” Angel said, relieved. “I really hated hitting him.”

  “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I think you have to hit him again,” Willow said.

  “What?”

  Giles groaned once more and his eyelids fluttered. Willow gestured at the Watcher urgently when the older man’s hands trembled against the floor, instinctively searching for something to hold as he tried to clear his head. “Don’t let him wake up, Angel. The demon’ll get inside his head again. It’s better if we don’t even give it the chance.”

  “Well, I’m out of its playing field, but why won’t it just take over you?” he protested. “Or Xander?”

  Willow’s eyes narrowed and she sent a hot glare toward the dinosaur. “It tried. It . . . touched me or something, inside my head, right when I was coming in.”

  “Was that what that was?” Xander asked. “I felt it, too—nasty. I thought I was having a brain freeze.”

  “Why didn’t it work?” Angel demanded.

  “I made protection charms for us this morning,” Willow answered, tugging on a cord around her neck. “Using hair, some herbs, a carnation and a little incantation.” Distressed, she glanced at the awakening librarian. “I guess I should’ve made one for Giles, too.”

  Before Angel could comment on this, the older man groaned again. “Ladonithia . . .” he said thickly from his spot on the floor. Giles’s eyes, Angel saw, were rolled so far back in their sockets that almost nothing but the whites showed, far too close to zombie-ized for comfort. “Eggs . . . must hatch them—” Suddenly the librarian tried to stand. Angel put out one hand to stop him and was nearly knocked off balance by a surprising show of strength.

  “Angel!” Willow cried. “Do something!”

  “Like what?” he yelled right back as Giles surged upright and tried to claw free.

  “I told you. Just—”

  Angel popped poor Giles in the nose. Again.

  “Dammit,” he said as he watched the librarian crumple into a silent heap on the floor. He scowled and turned back toward Willow and Xander. “I can’t just keep beating on him, you know. He’s only human.”

  “I know,” Willow said. “But we have to keep him down, otherwise he’ll make more dinosaurs and free the demon’s other spirits.”

  Angel threw up his hands. “Okay, I’m lost here. I’ve got the dinosaur part, and even the demon part, but I’m knocking Giles out because he can make dinosaurs?”

  “It’s too complicated to explain right now,” Xander said. “Can’t you just trust us?”

  A corner of Angel’s mouth turned up in a smirk. “Her . . . maybe. But you?”

  Willow exhaled in exasperation. “Would you two please stop sniping at each other like an old married couple? This is serious!”

  Good point. Abandoning the argument, Angel glared in the direction of the caged demon-dinosaur. The thing was big, like an oversize lizard with a weird parrot’s head and beak. He thought he’d seen it all until now. Boy, was it ugly. “Why don’t we just kill it?”

  Xander shook his head. “Believe me, there’s nothing I’d like better than to ice this reptile and go help the others. But we can’t, not until the fourth and final spirit is back in its body.”

  “So what you’re saying is that there’s three demon spirits in it now, but there’s more to come?”

  Willow nodded. “Another one in the T. Rex. And the instant it dies, this thing—” She pointed at the Timimus. “—is going to go even more ballistic than it already is.” Her eyes were wide and scared. “That’s why we don’t have any choice but to stay here, and also why we can’t just get rid of it.”

  The T. Rex—oh yeah. He’d gotten sidetracked. Oddly, the—what had Xander called it?—Timimus, that was it, despite its nerve-wracking screeching and constant movement, seemed alert and vaguely intelligent. It had to be the demons inside it, Angel decided. It was trying to comprehend what they were doing, trying to wait them out and get another crack at Giles. Or maybe it senses me. “So I can’t let Giles wake up or he’ll get possessed, and we can’t kill the thing that’s trying to do the possessing.” He scowled. “So what are we supposed to do with this thing in the meantime? Stand here and look at it?”

  “Have faith,” Willow said with false brightness. “Any second now, Buffy and Oz will send their share of dino-meat back into Extinct Land.”

  “And how will we know when this happens?”

  “This thing will get . . . meaner,” she said reluctantly.

  “Yeah,” Xander put in. “As in a lot more hyper and ticked off when the fourth spirit comes back to roost in Papa Dino.”

  Angel’s mouth twisted. “Buffy and Oz—you’re sure they can handle it?”

  “Positive,” Willow said.

  Even so, Angel felt his gut twist in silent fear, because Buffy’s two best friends looked anything but convinced.

  Chapter 15

  “IT’S GAINING ON US!” There was no hiding the apprehension in Buffy’s voice, and no reason to want to. Whether the dinosaur chasing them could sense fear or not wasn’t going to make them run any faster. There were at top limit now, careening through classrooms, down hallways, even blasting through stairways that they’d hoped— uselessly—would slow the creature down.

  No such luck.

  But Oz had a plan.

  Buffy’s legs were longer, so she’d been leading,constantly looking over her shoulder to make sure Oz hadn’t been turned into a dino-tidbit. But her choices were random and spontaneous, and she was hesitating at turns. No good. As capable and strong as Buffy was, this was a game of animal against animal rather than Slayer against vampire. A second here and there could end up getting one or both of them killed.

  Oz had no intention of letting that happen.

  The full moon was weeks away, but his werewolf instincts were still there, etched into every cell of his body. To a normal human, it might have seemed as though he’d been running for years, but not Oz. Like a wolf, he felt that he could lope for hours without stopping or tiring, until his prey either dropped at his feet f
rom exhaustion or was run into a trap.

  The young Tyrannosaurus Rex hunting them didn’t know it, but that’s exactly what Oz was going to do.

  Deep in his nose, floating below the remnants of industrial cleaning fluids, the leftover scents of a thousand kids and lockers filled with dirty athletic shoes and forgotten lunches, Oz smelled chemically treated water. He lengthened his stride, pulling ahead of Buffy. “Follow me,” he yelled.

  She didn’t protest as he angled around to the right and bolted into the gray-walled stairwell that led to the lower level. They clawed their way through the metal door, then Oz slammed it shut with all of his strength. It caught and latched just as Baby Dino’s snout hammered into it, and the dinosaur bellowed in anger. The door wouldn’t hold it for long, but it would stop the creature for the precious half-minute it would take the beast to break the steel hinges.

  “Okay, I’m open to suggestion,” Buffy said.

  “I’m on it,” Oz told her as he motioned for her to follow him down and around the landing, then they dashed out of the stairwell. One flight above them, metal groaned as the door caved in. “Come on! This way!”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t stop and fight?” Buffy yelled as she bolted after him, their sneakers squealing against the tiled floor of the long hallway now in front of them.

  “Not yet!” And ahead, finally, was exactly what Oz had been aiming for all along—

  The double doors that led to the swimming pool.

  The two of them burst through and the doors swung shut. They skidded to a stop with the deep end of the Olympic-size swimming pool glistening only a few yards away and the air saturated with the smell of chlorine.

  Oz spun to face Buffy. “The chemicals will make it hard for the dinosaur to catch our scent so it won’t be picking up that we’re actually behind it when it comes in,” he told her quickly. “At least not until it’s too late.” He chanced a quick glance out the wire-meshed windows of the doors and saw the T. Rex lumber awkwardly out of the stairwell, then hesitate. But even if the scent glands were messed up, there was nothing wrong with its eyesight this close. It spotted the movement of Oz’s head through the glass instantly and scrabbled for footing, working itself up into a full charge.