“Perhaps I’ll have some good news.”
“Yeah. That’d be . . . good.” She managed a smile.
Willow and Oz took Buffy to the hospital. She tiptoed into her mother’s room, remembering the many times Joyce, having waited up for her, would lift her head off the back of the couch and slur, “That you, Buffy?”
But her mother was still in the hospital. The normal pattern of their lives had been completely disrupted. The doctors were waiting for Joyce to get over her bronchitis or whatever it was, so she would be strong enough to endure the surgery to take out the thing in her lung. On doctor’s orders, Joyce got a sleeping pill every night. But Buffy often heard her stirring when she came into Room 401, no matter the hour. It bothered her to think that her mom couldn’t sleep until she knew her daughter was safe. It made her want to come in early, even when she had patrolling to do.
She’s here, Joyce thought gratefully, dozing against the thin hospital pillow. She’s safe.
Quickly, she closed her eyes. Buffy would be upset if she knew Joyce waited up for her every night, fighting the medication. She was on strict orders to get as much sleep as possible so she could have her operation.
Surgery. Her heart thudded in her chest. Her mouth was dry.
Dr. Coleman had come by and gently suggested they try another regimen of antibiotics and steroids to make Joyce better. The implication was that the specialist was getting worried about her patient.
“Mom?”
Buffy’s silhouette was framed by the light in the hall. Joyce said softly, “Hi, honey.”
“I know I didn’t wake you,” Buffy said accusingly. Then she hesitated. “Did I?”
“Guilty as charged, sweetheart.” She waved a hand and smiled weakly at her beautiful child. “Any luck?”
Buffy shrugged. “We’ll see.”
With a pang, Joyce hid her worry as well as she could. Giles had made it quite clear that there was something very big and very dangerous loose in Sunnydale and that he and Buffy were having a hell of a time tracking it down.
“But we’ll nab it,” he’d assured her, in all his British stiff-upper-lipness. “It’s only a matter of time.”
But Joyce had nearly run out of time. She was very sick. She knew it. She felt it.
“Mom?” Buffy’s face wrinkled with concern as she drew closer. “Mom, aren’t you feeling well?” Her voice was shaky and shrill with fear.
“Yes. I mean, I feel . . .” She took a deep breath. “I’m still sick,” she confessed.
“Well, nothing’s happening Slayerwise, so I can devote all my time to being with you.” Buffy swallowed hard. “Do you need anything? Some, um, juice or medicine?”
“It’s fine,” Joyce assured her. “Everything’s been taken care of.”
Buffy nodded. Joyce’s heart went out to her. So much rested on Buffy’s shoulders, and yet she wasn’t really all grown up yet. Joyce saw before her the little girl Buffy had once been, prancing around the room in a ballerina tutu and a pair of Joyce’s high heels. The dreams of childhood. Joyce felt bitter regret that she had not been able to spare Buffy from the nightmare her life seemed to have become.
“Honey, we have to be positive,” she said carefully. “If you need anything, your father is standing by. He was going to come out, but I told him to stay in Los Angeles until we . . . know.” Her voice was wistful, and she couldn’t help it. “You know he’s awfully busy.”
“Yeah.” Buffy crossed her arms over her chest. “Busy.”
“He wanted to come. He’ll be here as soon as I have my surgery.” Joyce cocked her head. “Come here, sweetheart.”
Buffy walked to her bedside. Joyce moved her hair away from her face, then pulled her hand away slightly. “Does it bother you, my touching you? Are you afraid I’ll make you sick, too?”
“Mom,” Buffy said, shocked. “How can you think such a thing?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot.” She stroked Buffy’s cheek. “I spoke to Mr. Giles, and he’s agreed —”
“I know. Guardian.” Buffy looked down. “You’re going to be fine.”
“Yes. I am.”
They looked at each other. Buffy leaned forward and kissed her mother’s cheek.
“I love you,” she whispered.
Joyce put her arms around her little girl and rocked her against her chest. “I love you, too. With all my heart.”
Buffy stayed with her mother until Joyce fell asleep. It didn’t take long.
Then, numbly, she made her way home, her face an expressionless mask. When she finally let herself into her house, the tears came hard and silent. She did not sleep for the rest of the night.
Angel watched from the shadows, his heart breaking for her. He was an unwilling witness to her pain, and yet he was glad he was there, if she could find comfort in his presence. The problem was, he wasn’t certain of that.
“Buffy,” he said softly, at the open window. “I’m here.”
She nodded. “I know. I knew when I came into my room. I just couldn’t . . .” She trailed off.
Then he was slipping into the room, surrounding her as she lay on her stomach, his body cupping hers, holding her. She turned over, and he slid his hands underneath her back; he rocked her as her mother had, and murmured, “Shhh, Buffy, my love. Don’t cry.”
But she was lost in pain, awash in it. She was terrified, and helpless, and he ached for her. This was what death brought. This was the iron mask it smothered your smile with. If he had not been cursed with remorse, then grief surely would have ensured his torment until the end of his existence.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” she insisted. “You have no idea —”
“I do.” He kissed her very gently. “Believe me, I do.”
“No.” She shook her head. “You can’t keep feeling this kind of hurt and stay sane.”
“She’s got a fantastic doctor. One of the most compassionate people in the world,” Angel insisted.
Buffy peered at him. “And you believe this because?”
“I knew Leah Coleman. It’s been half a century, and yet I remember her.”
Buffy sat up, crossing her legs Indian-style. Angel leaned back against the headboard of her bed. He looked back through time and saw himself in that alley again, a wreck of a creature, when Leah came out again one night, smoking her cigarette.
Manhattan, 1944
“Okay, come out,” she’d called impatiently. “I know someone lives back here.”
Damn, he’d thought, and slid deeper into the shadows.
“Come on, I won’t bite,” she insisted.
Angel had almost laughed at that.
Then she surprised him. She darted forward exactly where he was sitting — behind a pile of orange crates — and grabbed his wrist.
“Got you!” she cried with satisfaction.
He made sure his face was human and allowed her to drag him into the light.
“Oh,” she said, startled.
For a moment, he thought he was wearing his true face — the demonic grin of the vampire — but a quick, furtive touch reassured him otherwise. His evil nature was concealed from this dark-haired vision.
She puffed on her cigarette and tamped it out with the toe of her clunky black shoe. Then she started leading him back toward the open door.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
She appraised him. “What’s wrong with you? Why do you live like Frankenstein out here?”
“Frankenstein was the doctor,” Angel said, a smile playing around his lips.
“What was the name of the monster?” she asked, obviously puzzled.
“The monster,” he replied simply.
“Hmm. I didn’t know that.”She gave his wrist a shake.“You have no idea what I’ve been imagining about you.” She laughed. “You were deaf. A blind mute. Crippled. But you’re a man. An able-bodied fellow with deepset eyes and in sore need of a little sun.”
“You’ve got that right,” he drawled.
“So I ask you, why on earth are you living like a beggar?”
He hesitated. “It’s a very long story.”
“I’m making doughnuts,” she informed him. “It takes forever. I’ll be awake for hours.”
At the door, he stopped. She hadn’t really invited him in, and he couldn’t enter unless she did.
“Are you sure you trust me?” he ventured.
“No. I’m sure I don’t.” She grinned at him. “But what’s life for, if not to take a little risk now and then? Come on in. I’ll make you some soup.”
“And she did,” Angel said to Buffy. “Back then, I’d lived off rats for so long I didn’t know if I could keep anything else down. I was afraid I’d get sick. Maybe die.”
“From soup?” Buffy asked incredulously.
“From soup.”
She rubbed her forehead. “My mom’s going in for the surgery tomorrow. With your old girlfriend as her doctor.”
“She was never my girlfriend.”
She regarded him askance. “Angel, more women lust after you than Captain Kirk on classic Trek. I can’t figure out if you’re just clueless or you’re trying not to flaunt your major sex appeal around me.”
He chuckled. “Maybe a little of both.”
“Accent on clueless,” she chided. Then she slumped, suddenly exhausted. She was completely drained. She felt as though she could sleep for a week.
Make that two.
Angel picked up her right leg, drew off her black leather boot, and put it carefully on the floor. Then he drew off her other boot and placed it beside its mate. He eased her up on the bed, lifting the coverlet. She took off her jacket, and he laid it over a chair.
Then he tucked the covers up around her chin.
“Just go to sleep now,” he murmured, kissing her forehead. “I’ll do the worrying for you.”
“I always said you were a gentleman.”
He turned off the light. She was terribly afraid he would go. But he sat on a chair in the darkness, the moon and the stars glowing on his chiseled profile. Then he silently said the Serenity Prayer for Buffy. It had hung over the doorway to Leah Coleman’s Shelter for the Destitute, and he had memorized the words:
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change;
the courage to change the things I can;
and the wisdom to know the difference.
“Amen,” he whispered.
Buffy was asleep.
Giles was exhausted.
He had stayed up all night working on the charred pages. Faxes and phone calls to researchers the world over had provided him with vital clues: this was not one but two books. The first was a portion of Peter Toscano’s journal. The second appeared to be another journal, but thus far he had no idea whose, or what it might contain. It was medieval French, and he needed some help in translating what was there.
For the moment, Toscano’s words were enough to concern him, however. His journal contained in its entirety the prophecy about the Three-Who-Are-One, otherwise known as the Triumvirate.
He’d been able to decipher approximately one-quarter of it last night, and now, armed with more knowledge about the Italian dialect in which Toscano wrote, he was nearly a third of the way through the manuscript.
What he had learned horrified him.
They shall come when the stars cry their tears across Orion’s Belt . . . the Maid of the Sky shall weep . . . the heavens shall tremble.
The Three-Who-Are-One shall be born into this world as Children of Hell, feeding upon the carrion and rot of the grave. Their handmaiden will serve them, and tend them like a loving mother. And when they become the One, they will bestow upon her greater blessings and gifts than ever vampire had known: true immortality. They shall enslave the race of man, make cattle of humanity entire, until, in the end, the handmaiden will drink the blood of the last man on Earth.
But that is not the worst that awaits mankind beneath the shadow of the Three-Who-Are-One. Not by far.
It is a thing of damnation, a Hell beast like no other. Where its shadow falls over the faces of human beings, so those creatures become damned, never to see the light of heaven.
The Triumvirate will not bring Hell to Earth, but rather bring us all, saints and sinners, to Hell, one by one.
Chapter Twelve
Bloodlust.
It was painful.
Days had passed since he had tasted a single drop of blood. Konstantin didn’t know if the others were affected in exactly the same way, but he knew what it felt like to him. The demon inside, the beast within, raged just beneath the surface at all times now, and his features seemed to change to their more feral aspect with little or no prompting.
His gut and his veins felt as though they were made of the thinnest glass, and with every moment they cracked, splintered, and began to shatter.
Konstantin wanted blood.
Veronique had forbidden it, of course. They weren’t to leave the dusty, crumbling structure. In their bid for power, their play to free the most evil of creatures from Hell, they had made their stronghold into their prison. And all to avoid a conflict with the Slayer.
The Harbinger’s plan had seemed brilliant to him at first. While she went to face the Slayer, distracting her from any possibility of interfering, even to the point of sacrificing herself — with the knowledge, of course, that she would return to life again that very night — Konstantin and Catherine and the others attacked the Sun Cinema. They’d killed seven humans during the initial attack, and all of the bodies were brought back and stored for later to feed the hatchlings — which had grown so large now they could hardly be called hatchlings any longer.
Ten others they had taken alive, but not without brutality. The first night, Konstantin and Catherine and the others had each drained one of the survivors and shared blood with them, so they would rise again as vampires. The handful that remained were saved to feed the newborns when they arose.
And that had been that.
They’d all eaten well that night, but not a drop of blood had stained his teeth since. Some of the others didn’t seem to be as disturbed by the hunger. Perhaps they had a greater tolerance for it, or the hunger was not upon them so quickly as it had begun to haunt him.
But Konstantin was nearly shivering with his need. His head ached with it, and with the grating sound of the hatchlings stomping and sliding around on the piles of human bones within the nest. There were so many now that the hatchlings seemed to be existing within the pile, and bones slid over the edges of the nest from time to time as the demons shifted within.
He watched them now, in the darkness amid the bones and the refuse that made up their little home. Each had grown to at least four feet long, not including their considerable tails. Konstantin had expected them to speak, once they had grown so large. But they were incomplete creatures, separated like this, and little more than ravenous beasts without their union.
Still, there were times when they looked at him in such a way that he felt their intelligence, felt the flames of Hell licking at the back of his neck. During those times, he wondered what his reward would be, what the Triumvirate would do to repay his loyalty. And though he would never share such doubts, not even with Catherine, whom he was coming to admire greatly, Konstantin was not at all certain he wanted to know.
“They are terribly beautiful, aren’t they?”
Konstantin turned quickly, snarling as his fangs protruded, his face taking on the monstrous appearance of the vampire. But it was only Catherine, her soft beauty taking him off guard, as his features slid back toward human. Her eyes had widened when he rounded on her, but now she narrowed her gaze and studied him.
“You’re in pain, aren’t you?”
Konstantin nodded. “I’m sorry,” he growled low. “You startled me. The hunger is growing to be too much.”
“I understand,” she said, voice filled with regret and powerful desire.
He blinked. “Truly? I thought I was the only on
e who was feeling it so strongly. I know there are those who can go much longer, but I am obviously not one of them. It’s making me crazy, making me . . . lose control.”
Catherine nodded slowly and licked her lips slightly. For the first time, Konstantin really saw the hunger in her. She was as edgy in her way as he was.
“Her plan was to take enough from the theater to last until the ritual,” she said. “But there were too few people in that place. And now we starve because of it. I don’t know how much longer we can survive in here, with the world locked out, without blood.”
Konstantin was about to reply, but he froze as he saw Veronique appear just down the hall. Catherine turned to see what had caused this reaction in him, and they both stiffened slightly.
“Hello, Harbinger,” Catherine said.
Veronique moved toward them swiftly, almost irritably. Her new form was that of a tall woman, a warrior’s height, in her early thirties. When Veronique had confronted the Slayer in order to draw attention away from the attack on the movie theater, she had sacrificed the form of Damara Johnson.
And woke in the body of a man.
“It would suffice if I had no choice,” she had told them. “But I do have a choice.”
Veronique had sent Catherine out to find her a suitable form for what she believed would be her final shell, her host, her body for eternity. In life, the former owner of that body had been a martial arts instructor named Anita Barach. She had short-cropped black hair and a ring in her left nostril, as well as an intricate tattoo of a howling wolf beneath a full moon on her shoulder blade. But Anita Barach was no more.
That body now belonged to Veronique.
When she smiled, Konstantin could see the Harbinger in this new face. Her cruelty and her faith were there at the edges of the new mouth, in the glint of the new eyes.
“Have the stars shown you the way?” Catherine asked her. “Do we know when the alignment will occur?”
“Indeed they have,” she replied, the words rolling off her lips with an odd kind of accent, as if the mouth speaking them were not used to such work.
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