by Various
Willow winced and closed her eyes. “Right, because they’re so good with killer shadow demons.”
Xander knelt in front of her and looked at her leg. “Is that what this is, Will? A shadow demon?”
“I dunno. Maybe.”
It looked to him more like a sheet of dark thick plastic that had been burned onto her. Where it had touched the skin of her ankle it had clung and seared itself right to her. Where it had touched pant leg, she’d had some protection, but it had still worked through in places and adhered to her. He tugged at the cuff of her jeans, trying to pull the substance or demon or whatever it was away from her. But he could feel it resist, pulling tighter against the pressure he was exerting.
“Xander! Stop that! It hurts!”
He pulled away and sat back on his heels. “I don’t know what this thing is, Will. I think it’s probably good that a lot of it’s just touching the fabric. But I don’t know how to fix it.”
“I do.”
He looked up at her, confused. Her eyes were open now, bright with pain but very focused. She continued, “We have to get back home.”
“But Giles isn’t here. And he said we’d need to know more so we could figure out what spell did this.”
“This thing is doing something inside me, like it’s put in little roots or something. It’s spreading and we don’t have time to do this Giles’s way.”
Xander blanched. Willow was making it sound like she was dying or something. “What other way is there?”
“My way. Can you . . . um . . . push me over to the table . . . or . . .”
Xander didn’t like the sound of trying to maneuver her across the room, not with her in such pain. He pushed the table to her. She continued talking as she paged through one of the books Giles had piled on the table. “A spell sent us here, right? What Giles wanted to do was find our what spell it was and then undo it. Like untying a knot. What I’m talking about is stronger. I want to cancel any hold that any magick has over us. It’s more like . . . like breaking a chain.”
“Is it harder?”
“It takes more force, yeah.”
“But, Will, you’re already weak, and we’ve seen that your magick isn’t exactly working its best here—”
“That’s why . . .” She paused, and Xander realized she was fighting constant pain. “That’s why you’ll have to help me.”
Xander shifted his weight from one foot to another. He was getting impatient, watching Willow read.
Something was killing Willow, and he had no idea where Giles and Buffy were.
* * *
Buffy watched Giles as he polished his glasses and thought. She’d missed him terribly since he’d returned to England, and she found herself absurdly grateful to have him here again. Even if she wasn’t going to like what he was going to say.
Finally he took a deep breath and put his glasses back on. “You’ve put me in a difficult position, Buffy. And the truth is that I can’t know for certain that the right answer is to send you back to your time. But I cannot help but feel that something is terribly—”
Buffy felt something hit her bare right arm. Something heavy and very, very painful. At first she thought she was being burned. Then it was worse than that. She screamed.
Giles leaped to his feet and ran to her. “Buffy! What is it? What is that thing?”
Buffy spared a fraction of a second to look at her arm. The thick dark film looked like it was grafted over her skin. And now . . . now it felt like something was burrowing in, digging its way into her flesh. She leaned heavily against the mantel again. The pain was making it hard to remain standing.
* * *
Willow felt terrible. The pain in her leg was fresh and sharp, and it was spreading. She had this mental image of tiny vines growing from a seed. The tiny vines were pain, and they were working their way up inside her leg. She found herself closing her eyes for longer and longer stretches of time, and it was getting harder and harder to pull herself back to the task at hand: getting home.
She was jolted back one more time when Xander plonked something onto the table in front of her: a small plastic bag full of herbs.
“I found this one in Giles’s desk too. Bottom drawer behind a bunch of other stuff.”
Willow forced herself to lean forward and examine the contents. The first bag Xander had brought to her had turned out to be Giles’s stash of English tea. Useless for performing spells. But with any luck . . .
“This is it,” she declared. The cured leaf of a rare tropical plant, it had one very valuable trait: whatever magick she and Xander might manage to conjure up, this herb would make it stronger. Now there was nothing left to do but try to give it something to act on.
Xander asked, “So what do we do with it? Burn it or . . .” Willow looked at him and managed a smile. Xander was doing great, especially at not asking constantly if she was okay. The dark thing had spread, was halfway up her thigh, but Xander was being very cool about it.
“Just scatter it around. Make a circle around us.”
So Xander pushed the table away again and scattered the chopped and wilted leaves around Willow’s chair in a circle. When he finished he knelt in front of her. “What now?”
“Hold my hands. That’ll focus my energy too.”
Xander held her hands. Willow closed her eyes and leaned her head back. She concentrated on bringing the power of the universe around her, to use it to pull her back into her real time. If it worked, she and Xander, and anyone else nearby who was in the wrong time, would all be returned to where they belong.
She felt the power. Felt it building. She visualized it like a tower, growing from the ground up within the circle of her and Xander’s arms. It grew, strong and bright. But the pain in her leg was strong too.
She opened her eyes. “Xander? I don’t think it’s gonna work.”
* * *
Buffy held her arm out away from her body. Whatever this thing was, she didn’t want it spreading to her torso through her own carelessness.
Giles was standing beside her now. Steadying her with one hand on her opposite shoulder, bending over the arm, examining it. Taking too long.
“Stop looking at it.” She gasped. “Get me a knife.”
Giles hesitated. Buffy locked eyes with him. She gave him a look that said, Don’t argue.
Giles hurried to the weapon’s chest and within a second he was handing her a wicked-looking hunting knife.
“What are you going to do, Buffy? Try to peel it away—”
Buffy plunged the knife through the clinging entity and into her inside arm, halfway between wrist and elbow.
Stunned and horrified, Giles jumped back.
The dark thing on Buffy’s arm had a three-inch slit right through its middle. It loosened its grip as Buffy’s blood coursed through and splattered on the floor, leaving fat red circles.
“Buffy! What have you done?!”
“I don’t know. I just . . . I needed to cut it. I thought maybe it would let go.”
“I don’t think it’s that kind of—”
“Wait. Look!”
The dark thing was moving, contracting and thickening on Buffy’s arm. Over the wound. Over the blood.
* * *
It tasted the blood. It was dirty—foreign blood from the future. It had to go. It all had to go. The person. The blood. But there was more blood. Blood got away. The foreign body was scattering. That couldn’t be allowed. Where was the blood?
On the floor.
The dark thing let itself gather, contract, and drop.
* * *
Buffy and Giles watched in amazement as the dark thing dropped to the floor. It flattened out to a shadowy skin and moved to the spots of blood. It moved over them, moved on. . . . Two spots gone. It moved on.
“Giles, look. It’s drinking the blood. What is it? Some kind of horizontal vampire?” Buffy was almost dizzy from the sudden lack of pain. Blood continued to run down her arm from the knife wound.
&nb
sp; Giles was staring with sudden realization. “It’s . . . cleaning. I think it’s getting rid of you.”
“What?”
“You don’t belong in this time line. This . . . thing . . . it’s cleaning up the time line by getting rid of you. All of you, including the spilled blood. I’ve read of such a thing, but I disregarded it.” He looked sharply at Buffy. “We’re not done. When it’s done with your blood it has to take you out.”
Buffy still held the knife. She fell to her knees by the shadowy creature. Stabbing it hadn’t worked, but years of being the Slayer had taught Buffy something very important: Almost nothing could survive being cut into a hundred tiny pieces. It was a remarkably consistent law.
She hacked at it. Making deep cuts one way, then the other. It was in five pieces, then eight, then a dozen. She kept going.
Finally she felt Giles’s hand on her shoulder. She looked up, a little dazed from what she’d been doing, and weak from loss of blood.
“You’re done, Buffy. It’s dead.”
She kept her eyes on his face. She knew she was pleading, but she hoped it didn’t sound that way. “If it’s dead, can I stay? Can I please stay here?”
* * *
Xander lifted Willow into his arms. She’d finally passed out from the pain, and he’d decided it was time for the hospital. Willow might not think it could help, but he had to do something.
He lifted a foot to step over the patchy ring of dried herb. His foot hit something that felt like . . . all he could think of was . . . an electric sponge. He stepped back. And, as he looked, a glowing cylinder formed around him.
“Man, I hope this is a good thing.”
The world seemed to fade around him. “Oh my God, we built a transporter. No, wait, I mean a time ma—” And before he finished the thought, he was gone.
* * *
As Giles looked into Buffy’s face, he was searching for a way to say yes to her, a way to tell her it was okay to stay here. Then she began to fade.
SUNNYDALE, 2001
Buffy, Willow, and Xander were in the Magic Box. It was one day after they all materialized back into their beds. Willow had no evidence of ever having been attacked. Buffy bore a thin silver scar from her own knife.
They hadn’t talked to Giles yet. Buffy thought he probably had ended up with no memory of their visit to the past. How could he possibly have known everything she’d told him and not let it show, all this time? Willow wasn’t so sure. Giles could be very strong.
Willow asked a question, though, that they should know, one that had been bothering Buffy. “So who did it?”
Xander looked confused. “I thought it was that shadow monster thing. Right?”
“No.” Buffy’d thought about it a lot. “They were just doing what they do—cleaning up. Something else actually sent us back there.”
“So who?” Xander asked. “I mean, who would do something that, like, weird?”
* * *
Warren looked at Jonathan and Andrew. “Wait. Say that again?”
Jonathan cleared his throat nervously. “It didn’t work.”
Andrew piped up. “Well, dude, not true exactly. It did work. Bam, time displacement. But then, Bam. They’re back.”
Warren nodded. “That’s okay. It’s a good start. And we’ve got lots of other surprises for ’em.”
* * *
Buffy sat alone in the training room and thought about what had happened. Willow and Xander’s spell had worked just in time. They’d done it again. She’d seen Giles’s face as she’d faded back into this world and faded out of the world in which her mother was alive. Go Xander. Go Willow. They’d pulled her out of heaven.
Again.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Scott Allie writes and edits comics and stories, primarily for Dark Horse Comics and Glimmer Train Press. His series The Devil’s Footprints, with Buffy cover artists Paul Lee and Brian Horton, debuts this March. He lives in Oregon with his wife, Melinda, and their phantom cat, Shadow.
Laura J. Burns and Melinda Metz are obsessed with Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, it was the chock-full-of-subtext writing on Buffy that inspired them to try their collective hand at television-writing. So far they have written two pilots and spent a season as staff writers on the late, great TV show Roswell. In the book world, they created the Roswell High series written by Melinda and edited by Laura. They have relished this opportunity to contribute to the world of Buffy.
Max Allan Collins and Matthew V. Clemens have collaborated on over a dozen published short stories, and the latter assists the former on CSI and Dark Angel tie-in novels. Max Collins is the author of the New York Times best-selling graphic novel Road to Perdition, from which the Tom Hanks/Sam Mendes movie derived; his Nathan Heller historical series is much honored, and he has written and directed three independent films. Matt Clemens is the co-author of the regional best-seller Dead Water, a true-crime account, and owns his own small publishing company.
Greg Cox is the New York Times best-selling author of numerous Star Trek novels, including The Eugenics Wars, The Q Continuum, Assignment: Eternity, and The Black Shore. He has also written for several other media franchises, including X-Men, Iron Man, Roswell, Xena, and Farscape, and recently completed the novelization of the movie Daredevil. A diehard Buffy fan, he can’t believe that nobody had done a pirate slayer yet. Then again, he is also perversely proud of having edited the novelization of Cutthroat Island.
Kara Dalkey, a recent transplant to the Pacific Northwest, has had fifteen fantasy novels and twelve short stories published. Among her recent works are Genpei, a historical fantasy novel set in Japan, and The Water Trilogy, which she describes as “Atlantis and Arthurian Myth in a blender.” Her hobbies include her two cats, Ultima Online, and playing electric bass guitar in an oldies rock ’n’ roll band.
Jane Espenson has been on the writing staff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer since the third season of the show. She is currently the show’s co-executive producer. She has also written a number of comic books and episodes of other programs, including Buffy’s brother-show, Angel.
Rebecca Rand Kirshner is a bon vivant. Ask anyone.
Todd A. McIntosh is a twenty-five-year veteran of the makeup industry. His credits include projects in television and film, as well as years spent instructing makeup students all around the globe. Todd’s home is in Los Angeles, but he often returns to his former residence, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada to instruct. Todd was Makeup Department Head on Buffy the Vampire Slayer for six years, from the presentation to the end of the sixth season. Once again freelance, Todd found the time to pen a fun little adventure for this book between film projects and cuddling the cats!
Michael Reaves is an Emmy award-winning television writer and a New York Times best-selling novelist.
Kristine Kathryn Rusch writes in several genres under many pen names. She has won major awards in science fiction, mystery, and romance, and has been nominated for major awards in fantasy and horror. Her latest science fiction novel is The Disappeared from Roc. Her latest mystery novel, published as Kris Nelscott, is Thin Walls from St. Martin’s Press. Her latest romance novel (which is really a fantasy novel) is Simply Irresistible written as Kristine Grayson and published by Kensington. She also writes novels in her favorite media universes, including Star Trek and Star Wars, and is happy to write a story in the Buffy universe.
Visit us at simonandschuster.com/teen
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