There wasn’t any more time. Oz leapt to the side and grabbed a thick coil of blue plastic pool hose lying amid a pile of pool poles and nets. Holding one end, he let the coil untangle itself, a good fifty feet long, as he pitched the other end of it to Buffy. The Slayer caught it reflexively.
“Wrap your end around the balance rail over there and hold on,” Oz told her. “Hurry!” As Buffy moved to the rail, Oz did the same. They could hear the dinosaur thundering down the hallway toward them, getting closer and closer. Beneath their feet, the floor vibrated. “When that thing hits the door,” he said urgently, “we’re going to pull this hose up tight and trip it. We have to get it into the pool, and once we do, we have to keep it there until it drowns.”
“Won’t it just swim?” Buffy demanded.
“No.” Oz’s voice rose to a shout as he tried to be heard above the noise of the approaching dinosaur. “I don’t think it can without forelegs!”
“I hope you’re right!” Buffy yelled as the T. Rex blasted through the doors. It hit them so hard that one slammed back and cracked against the wall. The other simply broke away from its hinges and fell inward with a crash. The creature’s own speed kept it going, and when Oz yelled “Now!”—Buffy yanked upward on the hose, catching the dinosaur above its knee joints and below belly level, toppling it forward. The T. Rex couldn’t keep its balance; it went down hard enough to ripple the water in the pool, then slid rapidly forward on its chin. A smear of blood stained the tiled floor beneath its jaw and its powerful back legs raked and clawed, finding even less traction on the tiles in here than in the hallways elsewhere. It reached the edge of the pool and went over, skidded into the water with a loud, unpleasant splash and a louder, water-filled roar of surprise.
“Keep it in the deep end of the water!” Oz yelled as he snagged a pool pole of his own. “Do whatever you have to, but don’t let it get to the shallow end or it’ll get out!”
Bellowing, the dinosaur lurched upward from the water and collided with the other edge of the swimming pool. Oz didn’t want to contemplate the power in back legs that could propel it that far above a surface that was a good five feet higher than its head. If they were lucky, it would never even know that such a thing as the “shallow end” existed.
Buffy grabbed a wall brush with a wide metal end and swung it like a baseball bat, letting it go at the last second. It sailed end over end and the tip of the brush thunked into one side of the dinosaur’s head; the creature went back under with a half squeal, half gargle. When it came up again a long few seconds later, there was considerably less height in its spring, and Oz was betting that it took a lot of energy to propel that much weight up and down. Although the claws on its short forelegs left heavy gouges in the ceramic edges of the pool, there wasn’t enough size in those tiny limbs to enable it to drag itself out. Sputtering and choking, its bellows were starting to sound weaker and clogged with liquid. Success was surely in sight, and Buffy snatched up something else—a cleaning net—as it churned toward her side of the pool. She darted forward and slammed it down on top of its head, making it instinctively yank away from the edge of the pool once more. Another splash and again it dropped beneath the surface of the water.
But when it propelled itself upward a third time, it was clear that its zigzag pattern was taking it toward the shallow part of the pool.
“No!” Oz barked. “Keep it out of that end!”
He and Buffy ran along the pool’s edges with it, one on either side of it. Only a few yards away floated the nylon rope that divided the two ends of the pool, held aloft by evenly spaced buoys. If it got much closer, the young dinosaur’s head would be above water again and it would be literally able to walk right out of the pool . . . and they’d be doomed.
“I don’t think the safety rope’s going to stop it!” Buffy shouted. Her face grim, Buffy swung at the T. Rex’s emerging head again, then was rewarded when the net at the end of her flexible pole looped over its snout and hooked neatly over one of its unnatural horns. The netting ripped and stuck wetly over the beast’s eyes, but the square metal frame dug solidly into the flesh of its face and embedded itself beneath its heavy jaw. Looking victorious, she threw her weight in the other direction and tried to drag it back toward the deeper water. “Gotcha, you big, ugly— aghhhh!”
It yanked Buffy into the pool.
“Buffy!” Oz yelled, as if she could actually hear him underwater.
Buffy’s head came out of the water and Oz motioned frantically at her with the pool brush he’d picked up. “Grab the other end of this! Watch out for its teeth!”
But the T. Rex was more concerned with survival than the splashing Slayer a few yards away. The net Buffy had looped over its mouth was still there, solidly stuck, and the metal frame had just enough leverage to hold the heavy jaws shut; now when the creature tried to leap up for air, it could no longer breathe through its mouth. The dinosaur’s attempt to take in air through its nose wasn’t enough; it sucked in chlorinated water instead, then went back under.
Still, it came up again, and this time Oz couldn’t believe the images his eyes were feeding his brain. Instead of swimming toward the pool brush he was pushing at her, Buffy inhaled deeply, lunged forward and wrapped her hands around the beast’s heavy horns, then hauled its head beneath the water.
The water churned wildly as the half-T. Rex, halfdemon rolled and twisted, all direction lost as it fought to breathe in an airless environment. It got its nostrils a few inches above the surface a final time and Oz caught a flash of wet blond hair as the Slayer pulled downward yet again, throwing everything she had into the effort.
Then it was over.
Abruptly all the waves went out of the water and for a long moment the surface of the swimming pool was almost calm, the perfect picture of what it should be. “Buffy?” Oz strained to see if anything moved below the murky, oblong shape floating a few feet underwater.
Nothing.
“Buffy!” He dropped the brush he was still holding and took a step toward the edge of the pool, then jumped back as his friend surged upward only a couple of feet away. Oz knelt and offered a hand to help her out of the pool, then they stood and stared at the water as it shimmered and finally went quiet. Five seconds passed, then ten, as the final ripples eased the creature’s corpse slowly toward the shallow end. Finally, head down and still, the tyrannosaur’s body stopped, a long, dark golden shape just below the surface.
Buffy stared hard at it. “I wonder if it’s playing dead.”
“I don’t think so,” Oz said. “But sometimes drowned people come back if they get pulled out in time. Maybe there’s an air pocket or something in their lungs that keeps them from totally giving up the ghost. If it comes back . . .” He didn’t need to finish.
Buffy nodded, and together they stood and watched the lethal thing drifting silently in the pool, wondering how Willow and Xander were doing with Giles in the library.
“I am not going to knock him out a third time,” Angel announced. “He could end up with a concussion or something else humanlike.”
Unfortunately, Willow knew this could very well be true. But what to do in the meantime? “Here,” she said suddenly. She hurried over to the computer and pulled the power cord from the back of the CPU, then unplugged it at the outlet. “Tie him up.”
“How is that going to keep him quiet?” Xander asked.
For a moment she was lost. Then she ran behind the library counter and started rummaging around. “Aha!” she exclaimed as she waved a roll of packing tape above her head. “This’ll do the trick!”
“I should’ve just taken him out of here,” she heard Angel mutter as he wound the heavy power cord around the still unconscious Giles’s wrists.
“Hello?” Xander cut in. “Big T. Rex out there running arou—”
Inside the weapons cage, the Timimus went absolutely berserk.
It slammed itself against the cage door with enough force to make all three of them jump. Its screeches f
illed the room and razored into Willow’s eardrums; beside her, Xander and Angel looked none too pleased about the noise assault on their ears, as well. Worse yet, the creature’s behavior was like a trigger in Giles. While Willow struggled to find the end of the tape on the roll in her hands, the librarian’s return to awareness this time was anything but gentle. His eyes opened wide and his back jerked upright; then the incantation they so had not wanted to hear started tumbling from his lips.
“Hear this call, spirits of Ladonithia,” he intoned. His words were full of clear, British snap. “Awaken and return from your abyss to this frozen host, first of four, to then combine, and grant to he who resurrects you—”
Willow finally found the end, yanked out a strip, and slapped it over his mouth.
Giles struggled mightily, bucking and twisting in Angel’s grip and throwing his head furiously from side to side, trying to rub his face against his jacket, against Angel’s hands, anything to get the tape off his mouth. With Angel holding him down, Willow finally had to wind the tape all the way around his head and overlap the ends, just to be sure the man couldn’t find a way to be free of it.
Xander made a face at the hair twisted up and stuck beneath the packing tape. “Man,” he said above the screaming of the dinosaur, “that’s gonna hurt when he goes to take it off.”
A few feet away the Timimus rammed the door to the weapons cage, then charged it again. Willow winced as she saw the metal door shudder beneath the nonstop onslaught. “He’s never going to get the chance if we don’t kill that thing!”
“I thought you said we couldn’t,” Angel yelled.
“We only had to wait until the last of the spirits came back home to roost!” she shouted back. Even this close to Angel, and hollering, it was hard to be heard over the creature’s racket. “By the way it’s acting, I’d say Buffy and Oz went, saw, and conquered!”
“That,” Buffy said from the doorway, “is exactly what we did.”
Her friends whirled and gaped at her as she strode over to where Giles twisted on the floor, still fighting to escape his bonds. Water dripped from her hair and her clothes were plastered to her body, but none of that mattered. She wasn’t hurt, they weren’t hurt, but Giles . . . Seeing him like this made Buffy suddenly furious. She’d thought all these dino-battles had exhausted her, drained her strength all the way to the bone—not to mention ruined her clothes—but when she looked down at her Watcher, all her stubbornness and will and natural fight came back somehow, as if she were a battery plugged into a big recharger.
Buffy turned her head and glared at the beaked dinosaur raging inside the weapons cage. She couldn’t say she’d never felt such hate for anything since coming to Sunnydale, but boy . . . it was mighty, mighty close. Giles was in mental agony at her feet, out of control and taken over by that disgusting, birdbrained, hideous thing over there, a beast that didn’t even have the decency to look like any proper dinosaur she’d ever seen.
“So we’re planning to rip that thing apart with our bare hands or what?” Xander asked, forcing her thoughts back to their situation. “Being as how we have all these weapons at our disposal.”
Buffy’s scowl deepened. Good point there. The weapons cage had definitely been a poor choice of prisons for the Timimus, but then they hadn’t known the nasty beastie was going to grow like a weed and turn its crankometer up to killer disposition.
But five seconds later, on the heels of yet another attack on the door and the sound of a huge, metallic crash, Buffy and the others realized that the Timimus no longer stood between them and the cabinet where Giles kept all Buffy’s best demon- and vampire-slaying paraphernalia.
Because nothing at all stood between the Timimus and them anymore.
For one slow-motion moment, the dinosaur simply stood there and looked, well, stupid —like the oversize and mostly thoughtless animal it was supposed to be. Unfortunately, even predators with walnut-size brains had well-honed attack instincts, and this one now had all four parts of a single demonic entity raging inside it. The cage door had fallen knob down and now the dinosaur leaped forward and landed on it, wobbling there as if it were trying to understand the requirements for balancing on this strange surface. Then its eyes focused on Angel, who had dropped into a protective crouch in front of the utterly helpless Giles, and it started forward on legs that were long and slender, but incredibly powerful. Once it stepped off the cage door and realized that the entire floor didn’t bounce back and forth like the door had, Buffy saw the muscles in its legs tense for a leap. It was going to charge Angel, she realized, because as far as it was concerned, he was the one thing that stood between it and the only human within range who could complete the incantation it so desperately desired.
“HEY!” she screamed as loud as she could. She waved her arms frantically and was rewarded when the Timimus reflexively turned its thin face toward her and froze. Unarmed, she still took a couple of steps toward it, faking a challenge, to try to keep its attention. As Xander and Willow slowly backed away, she was thankful to see that at least this thing wasn’t as big as the Tyrannosaurus.
“Excuse me,” Xander said in a pseudo-whisper, “but what’s the deal with the, uh, moving bumps on its shoulders?”
Bumps? Oh yeah, there they were, three pulsing areas around its neck, rippling and swelling, growing with every passing second. The last T. Rex had sprouted demon horns. Maybe this one was trying to mutate, too?
“Angel,” Buffy said quietly, never taking her gaze off the dinosaur, “we have to move fast before this thing grows more heads. Get Giles out of here.”
Angel didn’t argue, but when he bent to pick up the librarian, the Timimus’s head swung back in his direction and Buffy knew Angel didn’t have time. This creature simply wasn’t going to be bothered with her. It just wanted Giles.
With an ear-splitting screech, it headed toward the two men, muscular legs clambering among the chairs and stacks of books in its way. But Angel wasn’t slow. He’d known the attack was coming. He hooked one hand firmly under the collar of Giles’s jacket and yanked him around the side of the library counter, then practically threw him in back of it. When he turned back the Timimus was nearly on top of him, with Buffy right behind it.
The dinosaur lunged at Angel’s head, trying to snap at him like a giant parrot. Angel dodged out of the way, but Buffy knew he wouldn’t be able to keep it up. Vampire or not, this creature was designed for just this type of attack, with a body built like an oversized ostrich and all the heavy muscle that went with it. And if it actually managed to connect with that sharp snout . . . well, Angel was going to lose a lot of undead flesh.
Things started flying through the air at its head. Willow and Xander were frantically lobbing books at it. The Timimus ignored them and swooped at Angel again, then started to go for the third try. Before it could dart forward, Buffy blindsided it with one of the wooden library chairs.
The Timimus screeched, swung around and bit at her but missed, and in those few seconds she saw Angel drop below the library counter. There was the sound of books crashing to the floor, then he reappeared with a small, metal table held aloft like a gladiator’s shield. “I can hold it now!” he shouted. “Go!” He gestured at the cage. To make sure it didn’t track her progress, Angelgrabbed a pencil cup off the counter and threw it at the Timimus to regain its attention. The cup hit the thing just above its right shoulder with a noisy clatter and a couple of sharp pokes thanks to the letter opener and a pair of scissors. The beast squawked in surprise and swung back toward him, then got beaned by another book tossed by Xander on the right. Between the four of them, the creature must’ve felt like the bull’s-eye in a game of darts.
Buffy grabbed her chance, spun, and bolted for the weapons cage.
She was there in five running steps and she leaped neatly over the fallen door rather than stepping on it, afraid it would make noise and the Timimus would realize something was up. When she jerked open the cabinet door, she had a moment of indecis
ion that felt like forever. What would be the best tool to kill this beast? But her uncertainty was gone as quickly as it had come. If humans had lived at the same time as this rather small dinosaur, her ancestors might have used a club to take it down. She, however, was a modern woman, and had no time for such crude methods.
Buffy reached inside and snatched up the crossbow.
Angel, Xander, and Willow were shouting and the Timimus was shrieking, but Buffy suddenly felt a fine sense of calm spread through her body. This was her world, not the dinosaur’s. It didn’t belong here, but she did, and so did Angel, and Giles, and all the people she cared about. She would handle this dino-demon once and for all.
She stepped out of the cage and onto the door, not caring anymore if she made noise. A few yards away, Angel’s metal shield was pocked with dents and gouges, and the Timimus was wearing him down, not at all affected by the flying books.
“Pardon me, bird-face,” Buffy said. Her voice never rose above conversational level, but despite the barrage of noise in the room, the Timimus still heard her, still picked up something . . . different in her tone. It abandoned its attack on Angel and whirled, long tail dragging across the fronts of lower level shelves and sending books and papers sailing in every direction. Already seven or eight inches tall, the three incomplete growths around the base of its neck waved in the air like blind snakes, but its main head came up and stopped as it stared at her, perhaps trying to process what it was seeing.
“Angel,” Buffy said softly.
Her vampire boyfriend ducked below the counter—
—and Buffy fired her arrow.
The tip hit the Timimus at the front lower corner of its eye and kept going right on through its skull. When the arrow smashed into the wall behind the counter, it carried bits of dinosaur skin, bone and blood with it, leaving a gory pattern on the paint. For a second the Timimus just stood there, paralyzed, then it sank to the floor with a sort of slow-motion grace, like a gigantic, gently collapsing swan.
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