Buffy The Vampire Slayer - The Lost Slayer - The King Of The Dead

by Christopher Golden (lit)

  The basement was dark save for the amber glow of emergency lights on the walls. It was practically a dungeon; not fit for a king. Clearly this was not Giles's lair. There were other corridors that led to this place, other doors on the other side of the vast cham­ber in the basement, but this was the main room. Once it had undoubtedly been a massive storage area of some kind.

  In some ways, it still was.

  Half a dozen Kakchiquel sentries, their eyes blazing orange in the darkened room, moved to attack them. But the sentries could not keep them from seeing what lay in the basement.

  Bats hung from the pipes that ran all across the ceil­ing. On the floor beneath them, shackled and chained to iron rungs sunk deep into the concrete, was the god of bats, the demon Camazotz. His green, pocked flesh was obscenely bloated, like a leech that had feasted until it was ready to explode. The demon-god's withered wings were barely visible underneath its grotesque bulk. There were sores on its flesh. Its wide eyes were milky white. Blind. Its tongue slithered over its needle teeth and dry, cracked lips.

  Yet Camazotz himself was not the thing that horrified Buffy the most. For around the swollen, distended demon, seven vampires were latched onto his putrid flesh, sucking at him like newborn kittens, crackling with the energy they siphoned from the captive demon's blood.

  Buffy shuddered, stomach convulsing at the sight.

  "Now that is really gross."

  At the sound of her voice, the suckling vampires glanced up, mouths smeared with demon blood. The sentries surrounded them. Camazotz began to cry out in a high, keening, lonely wail that sent a chill through her. The god of bats, she thought, has gone insane.

  And Giles was nowhere to be found.

  ... TO BE CONTINUED

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